A Deadly Compulsion Read Online Free PDF Page A

It’s important.  Please call me.  Bye.”
    “Laura,” Jim whispered, now looking at the phone as if it was a work of art; a rendering that might have been fashioned by Da Vinci.
    Ten minutes later, with a freshly brewed mug of coffee to hand, Jim was next to the phone, replaying the message for a fourth time.  Laura’s voice was tense, with a raw edge cutting through the controlled cadence.  Its rhythm and intonation was slightly clipped, guarded, and holding a note of desperation and urgency that was either measured for effect, or an unconscious but nonetheless compelling ploy to get his attention.  She had implied nothing and yet everything, and he knew that when, not if he called her back, he would regret it.  The icy tendrils that snaked through his mind and tightened around his brain were a warning that contacting her might lead him into a place he did not want to go.  He reached for the phone, rested his hand on it, then pulled back, to stand up again and walk barefoot across to the open door and out once more onto the balcony.  The warm breeze caught the bottom of the silk dressing gown he wore, flapping it up against his muscular thighs.  And the sun’s heat on the concrete was now almost too hot on the soles of his feet.  He squinted across at the castellated rim of the tower, sipping absently at the coffee, running through his options.
    Laura’s call was business.  And it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know what that business was.  There had been speculation in the media of a serial killer on the rampage up in Yorkshire, but he had avoided the details, hit the remote and switched channels if it was mentioned on the news.  He had no intention of allowing his profiler’s thought processes to kick in and begin to overwhelm him again.  Goddammit to hell! There were no options to mull over.  Laura was going to ask him to help, and he couldn’t...wouldn’t.  She had no right to expect anything of him.  Anger swept through him briefly like a bush fire, but was almost instantly smothered as Laura’s face – with winsome smile and magnetic brown eyes – materialised in his mind.  He stared into his cooling coffee and recalled the nearness of her; the sweet smell of her hair, and the alluring scent of the perfume she wore.
    “I’ll put you through, sir,” a slightly bored sounding female voice said.  He waited, ten, then twenty seconds, his stomach in freefall mode.
    “Hi, Jim,” Laura’s voice said, breaking through a background thrum of static.  “Thanks for calling.  I thought you might not.”
    He absorbed each syllable greedily, one at a time.  Their texture was crushed velvet, and he realised just how much he missed Laura Scott.
    “It’s been too long,” he replied.  “How’re you keeping, Laura?”
    “I’m fine.  You?”
    “I was okay.  Why the call?”
    He heard the intake of breath and knew that her mind was racing, searching for the right words to broach what she knew would be a taboo subject.
    “This isn’t easy, Jim,” she began.  “But I need your help, advice...anything you can give me.”
    So there it was, as he had expected.  This had been what had stopped their relationship from blossoming into more than just a six month fling.  Jim had loved her, and maybe he still did.  But the police work came between them, chafing his still raw nerves.  He had recoiled from the sordid side of life that he had run away from; the side that Laura still embraced and was seemingly so passionately involved with.
    “I know what you want, Laura.  You have a big problem up there.  But it’s your problem.  It goes with the patch.”
    “I know that, Jim.  I haven’t forgotten how you feel, believe me.  But I want to save lives.  If I don’t get a handle on this killer...well, we’ll be up to our ears in dead teenage girls, and you know it.”
    “Don’t try sending me on a guilt trip, Laura.  You have good people of your own.  Why don’t you go through