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What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

Titel: What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: C.S. Harris
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thighs. And it hadn’t even clicked.
    Sebastian let his hands fall to his side. “So he—what? Struggles with her, bruising her arms and wrists, maybe backhanding her across the face when she scratches him. He pulls a sword from his walking stick, slashes her throat, over and over again, killing her. And then he rapes her?”
    Gibson nodded. “And picture this: the way he had hacked at her throat, she would have been wet with blood. They both would have been.”
    Sebastian breathed a harsh sigh. “My God. What manner of man does such a thing?”
    “A very dangerous one.” Gibson set aside the basin with a clatter that rang loudly in the cold room. “There’s a name for this particular form of depravity. It’s called necrophilia.”
    Sebastian brought his gaze back to the savaged, naked body of the woman before them. He’d heard of it, of course. There were places in London that specialized in catering to every sort of vile perversion a man could imagine—sodomy, sadomasochism, pederasty. And this.
    “So he killed her in order to rape her?” Sebastian said. And he thought, What if Kat was right? What if Rachel York was killed by someone who didn’t even know her? What if her death had nothing at all to do with who she was, with the men who had moved through her life, or even with the mysterious rendezvous she had scheduled that night with the Earl of Hendon? How could Sebastian hope to find her killer, then?
    “Perhaps,” said Paul Gibson. “Then again, some men are sexually stimulated by the act of killing.” His soft gray eyes grew troubled with the shadow of old, ugly memories, his voice dropping to a pained, torn whisper. “As we both know.”
    Sebastian nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was something they’d both seen too many times during the war, the brutal lust of soldiers, stillbloody from battle and turned loose on the hapless women and children of a conquered city, or a farm that simply happened to have the misfortune to lie in the army’s path. There was something about the act of killing that could bring out everything primitive and not quite human within a man. Or was that kind of thinking a misconception, Sebastian wondered, born of human arrogance? Because this particular brand of selfishly cruel destructiveness was all too peculiarly human. Many beasts in the wild killed for food, for survival, but there were none who killed for the sadistic, sexual pleasure of it.
    “So he could have killed her for some other reason entirely, and found the whole experience so exciting that he felt compelled to ease his lust on her dead body.”
    The doctor nodded. “The inner abrasions are slight. He must have already been very excited when he entered her.” He hesitated, then said, “There is one other thing, which may or may not be pertinent. Did you notice the scars on her wrists?”
    Sebastian leaned forward to study the blurred, faded outline of old scars encircling each of her wrists like bracelets. Sebastian had scars like that himself, from his days in Portugal: a legacy of twelve painful, bloody hours spent twisting his wrists against the tight bite of a binding rope.
    “And look at this.” Reaching beneath one shoulder, Gibson rolled the body so that Sebastian could see the faint lines of white scars crisscrossing her slim, beautiful back. “Someone took a whip to her.”
    “How long ago, would you say?”
    “I’m not sure.” Gibson eased the body back down. “At least several years ago, I’d say.” He was moving around the room now, assembling instruments on a tray. “I might have more to tell you in a day or two, when I’ve had a chance to do the actual autopsy.”
    Sebastian nodded, his gaze caught by the still, beautiful features of the woman before him. Her skin had been pale, even in life; now in the cold morning light she looked nearly blue, her full lips a surprisingly dark purple. “I want to rebury her when you’re finished,” he said.
    Gibson came to stand beside him. He had stopped clattering his surgical tools. “All right.”
    Sebastian kept his gaze on all that was left of Rachel York. Less thana week ago, she had been nothing to him—a name on a playbill, a pretty face only. Even after he’d been accused of her killing, his thoughts had all been for his own survival, his desire to find her killer driven by his own needs, not hers.
    But at some point in the last few days, he realized, that had changed. Rachel York had been less than nineteen years

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