Читать книгу Small Town Monsters - Craig Nybo - Страница 60

Craig Nybo

6

protect their type and blood.

“What are you reading?” Clay’s voice startled Kurt. He looked as if Clay had caught him in the act of something incriminating—or at least embarrassing. He pushed his moon-shaped reading glasses down to the tip of his nose and glanced up at his deputy.

Clay held a brown folder in one hand.

“Is that the Danny Slade file?” Kurt asked, ignoring Clay’s smugness.

“What there is of it. There isn’t much information here. It took me forever to dig it up. I’m not in the habit of blowing the dust off 50-year-old murder cases.” Clay tossed the folder onto Kurt’s desk.

Kurt pushed his reading glasses up and opened the aged envelope. He poured a pile of papers and bagged evidence out onto his desk. Among the items was a plastic bag of what looked like matted hair, a sheaf of grizzly, black and white pictures of body parts that had been exhumed from the Slade property, a smaller envelope containing photographs of Danny Slade himself.

Kurt picked out one of the Slade photographs. The silver photo-paper, yellowed with age, felt fragile in his fingers. In rich sepia, the photo framed a 19-year old Danny Slade. Danny, shirtless, stood against a plain wall, perhaps in the old police station, long-since converted into Abigail’s Diner. Danny’s face donned a wry expression; his oversized pupils and sneer could have, by themselves, won him a conviction. Danny had many of his father’s, Artemus’s, characteristics—the same hookish nose, the same barrel-chest, the same thick, sinewy neck. There was real strength in the boy’s features. Like Artemus, Danny’s body bore an exorbitant amount of hair, not only on the face, but everywhere. His almost pelted skin indeed gave him a wolf-like appearance. A thick beard started just below Danny’s eyes and, in tendrils, wove downward into a bushy mane that hung half way down his chest. Danny had the same low hairline as his father, starting just above his brambly brows