Read Little Deadly Things for Free Online

for her sister’s killer, relentless as a dingo. Her developing computer skills allowed her to glide through police files. She swallowed the coroner’s documents, straining data, clinical observations and conjecture. The lurid crime scene photographs and the stilted clinical language of police reports were a grisly counterpoint to Eva’s memories of the sister who had cared for her, who had offered tenderness when there was none from Mama and Papa.
    Within the morbid affidavits, Eva found sketchy information about the fat man called Doran. For days, Eva saw his leering face and watched, again and again, as he strangled Gergana. His grunts echoed in her ears. She spent sleepless nights hunting and took on Mama’s haunted look. Unlike Mama, Eva moved with purpose. She pursued her quarry with a vigor that would shame a detective on his first case. She sought prostitutes sporting bruises. She asked about Doran at every bar, café, and store in Sofia. One of these was Coombs’s antique shop.
    “Welcome back, Eva.” Coombs was bareheaded today. He wore a concerned look. “How are you holding up?”
    “You know?”
    “It was in the news. You’re a very brave young woman.”
    “I’m going to get him.”
    “I’m sure you will. But Eva, whatever you do, please—come back and see me.”
    Three weeks later, Doran’s body was found in the Vladaya River, under the Lion’s Bridge. The skin on his face had a curious blistering, a unimportant detail to the detectives who were happy to close out three investigations—the rape and murder of Gergana Rozen, the assault of Eva Rozen, and the murder of Alexsandar Yorkuv—Bare Chest. They hung this crime on Doran as well. Who else in that apartment could have killed a grown man?

     
    Eva treated Mama and Papa with silent hostility. She broke her silence to indict, try, and convict them as accessories in Gergana’s death. “You must pay,” she ruled.
    “We lose our daughter and you threaten us? What do you want?” Mama asked.
    “Send me to America. I want to be away from you.”
    “Impossible. We have no money. We spent everything for your sister’s funeral.”
    Eva stared at her mother and then handed her a brochure for a foreign studies program organized by the Hidden Scholar Foundation. The charity sought brilliant children from the most troubled neighborhoods around the world. These they gathered at magnet schools in the United States. Her school’s principal had suggested the program.
    “I will go here. You will submit my application.”
    Eva’s stellar academic record bolstered the application as did an embarrassing wealth of recommendations from educators who dreaded her return. Fate smiled. The Hidden Scholar Foundation accepted Eva and provided a stipend for all of her expenses. She would enter a high school in America, in East Los Angeles.
    Before she left Sofia, Eva kept a promise and returned to see to Coombs. Today he wore a round flat cap, its small brim snapped shut, and pulled low over one eye. Despite his girth and floral necktie, he looked mysterious, as if his hidden eye held a secret.
    “You’re leaving?” Coombs asked.
    “How did you know?”
    Coombs did not answer but beckoned Eva follow him, and the two walked back into his kitchen area. “Tea?”
    She nodded and he directed her to a small three-legged stool near one of his bookshelves. There was a newly-framed composition on the wall facing the Pollock grouping. A woman looked out at the viewer. Midway down the work, the woman blended into another, upside down.
    “This reminds me of a playing card,” said Eva, “but the upside-down woman is different.”
    “How so?” asked Coombs.
    “Well, either the artist isn’t very good or he’s trying to paint two different people. The one on the bottom has big arms and her face is, I don’t know, sort of the same, sort of different.”
    “Could it be the same person, but two different ways of showing something about her?”
    “I don’t