Read Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons for Free Online

had come full circle. Another media murder star was made when the co-writer of that song Manson found so inspirational was murdered in New York.
    Harry felt just a little bit sick. If he hadn’t known so much about death already, he would have been surprised that such a peaceful, handsome city could have been a part of such hate and waste. It was sad and frightening at the same time, Harry decided as he neared the edge of the $100,000,000 Plaza.
    There was a multitiered fountain and an apartment house to his right. There was the Town Hall behind him. There was a shopping center and an office building across the street. To his left was a coffeehouse with a big, steaming teakettle hanging above the door.
    Harry remembered Linda’s directions. He went past the coffeehouse and up Tremont Street. He passed a few restaurants, a hotel, and a cheese shop. He passed a movie theater, a recruiting center, and a cemetery. All were crammed into one short, curving block. He stepped out onto the northeast corner of the Boston Common.
    Stretched out in front of him was a huge patch of wooded grassland, a park that covered the area of two square city blocks, framed by Tremont and Beacon streets with Charles Street passing through the middle.
    “Take a right and walk up to the Gold Dome,” Linda had said. The Gold Dome was the top of the Massachusetts Statehouse, Harry remembered. Right next to it was the Unitarian Headquarters—where Shanna was supposed to be.
    Harry watched the many people going home from work and from school across the huge tree-covered plain in the evening gloom. He saw businessmen in three piece suits. He saw teenagers in jeans and sweaters. He saw old women feeding the pigeons and young women walking their dogs. There were some kids playing baseball in the fenced-off lot near the corner of Tremont and Charles Streets. He saw lovers walking, holding hands. He saw old men reading newspapers on the benches around the old-fashioned gazebo in the middle of the park.
    Anyone else could’ve surveyed this sunset-dappled scene and thought about the grace, nobility, and great variety of the human species. All Harry could think about was murder. He saw the passersby and knew murder could come to or from any one of them. And for no reason. He remembered the Perry Mason TV show. He remembered the actor Raymond Burr cross-examining the suspect until he or she broke down and admitted to the killing. More importantly, they admitted why they killed.
    That was the end of an era. Like it or not, television and movies influenced people. Most of the people Harry hauled in usually confessed to their inspirations: “She cheated on me . . .” “He tried to ruin me . . .”
    More recently, Harry remembered a premiere episode of Charlie’s Angels his associate and sometime partner Frank DiGeorgio had made him watch one night. The actor Jack Albertson had played a crazy man who took photos of models until he thought he knew enough about them to kill them. When the girls finally ran him to ground—because of a coincidence, not detective work—he told him his motive.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
    That was the primary cause of violent death today, Harry thought sardonically. More and more he was capturing killers who couldn’t care less why they killed. “I didn’t like his face . . .” “I felt like it . . .”
    The words of the girl who had opened up with a rifle on a grammar school playground came back to him. “I don’t like Mondays.” Terrific. Harry knew some people who didn’t like any day of the week.
    Harry looked away from the Common and concentrated on the steep incline of the wide sidewalk he was traversing. He felt the comforting weight of his Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44-caliber Magnum in its shoulder holster, and he was glad he had it. He couldn’t remember where he heard it, but he still felt the line had the solid basis of truth. “An armed society is a polite society.”
    The San