“Wait,” Gregor said. It was like standing under a waterfall. “Judy Cornish has been murdered, and her body is—where?”
Shelley Niederman blinked again. “I told you where the body is,” she said. “I told you first thing.”
“Maybe you told Officer Block or Officer Fordman, and I didn’t hear.”
“All right,” Shelley said. “It’s up there.”
“In the house?”
“Yes, of course in the house.”
“Where in the house?”
“In the dining room,” Shelley said. She put her head in her hands. “It’s right there, in the dining room, in the doorway to another room, I don’t know which, I wasn’t paying attention. Because she was just there, wasn’t she? She was dead and then I ran out here and I called on the cell phone and how far are we from the police station, anyway? It doesn’t take a minute but you people took forever and I was just standing out here and she was lying in there dead and—”
“How do you know she was dead?” Gregor asked patiently.
“What do I mean, how did I know? I’m not an idiot, am I? Anybody could see she was dead. There was blood everywhere—”
“Did you try to take a pulse? Or check for breathing?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, Hell,” Eddie Block said.
Then both he and Tom Fordman took off running.
Gregor and Shelley Niederman watched them go.
“Of course she’s dead,” Shelley Niederman said. “She couldn’t be alive with so much blood everywhere. Nobody could be alive like that.”
PART II
It is tempting to quarrel over Harris’s use of the term “unintelligent design.” But there is a more important problem with his statement, namely, that it ignores the true reason why so many people reject the position that life on earth has evolved entirely through a natural process. That reason, of course, is a lack of fossil evidence supporting the notion that evolution explains variations between, not just within, species.
Mike S. Adams, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice,
University of North Carolina at Wilmington,
“Second Letter to a Secular Nation,” Townhall.com 4 April 2007
6. There are no intermediate fossil forms.
This is a claim for which there is a monosyllabic definition: lie. Not error, which implies honest ignorance, but lie, because the people who make this claim are generally fully aware of the fossil record and simply choose to misrepresent it. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known fossil bird for a long time (some recent finds may be earlier) has a thoroughly reptilian skeleton with a bony tail, teeth, and four paws with jointed fingers (not merely the horny skin growths at the middle joint that a few modern birds have). And it has feathers. If that’s not an intermediate, what is? More recently, evidence is accumulating that some dinosaurs had hair and feathers. If we’d lived 100 million years ago, we might have put birds, mammals and reptiles in the same class or at least put the divisions very differently from today. Therapsids are the intermediates between reptiles and mammals, crossopterygians and ichthyostegids are the intermediates between fish and amphibians, and so on.
Steve Dutch, Professor of Natural and Applied Sciences,
University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, “Ten Myths About Evolution,”
The Steve Dutch Home Page, 21 January 2003
ONE
1
It was never possible to tell if the victim of a battery was really dead, not by just looking at him, but Gregor Demarkian was willing to bet that this was as close to certainty as he was ever going to get. The two officers had raced to the house and gotten there well before him. When he came in through the dark central hall, he could see Tom Fordman kneeling next to the body, bent over the head as if he were about to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A moment later he leaned back and then stood up, shaking his head. Gregor saw Eddie Block turn his away from the body and look at the walls, the ceiling, everywhere. There was a lot to look at. Even in the gloom—and gloom seemed to be practically the theme of this house—it was obvious there was blood everywhere.
“It’s like something out of a horror novel,” Eddie Block was saying as Gregor came in. “You ever been in this house before? You ever know it was this dark?”
“I’ve been in the parlor,” Tom Fordman said.
Gregor was just then passing the entry to the “parlor,” which he would have called a living room. It was dark, too, but the effect was less oppressive than it was in the hall, because the room had a big line of cross-hatch windows looking out on the front lawn. Still, the effect was heavy and funereal, and not just because there was a lack of natural light. Everything about the place was dark. The furniture was upholstered in dark colors where it was upholstered at all. Otherwise, it was made of dark woods. The woods were highly polished, but that only made them look darker. The walls were painted white where they were painted at all, but in other places there was dark wood paneling or ancient wallpaper in dark colors and closely figured. It was a house meant to express the sober thoughtfulness, the gravity of the person who owned it. Gregor was willing to bet it hadn’t been changed in fifty years.