A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes) Read Online Free PDF Page A

rasped.
    Beth took a step back and half turned her face away from the stream of breath that misted the air and reeked of cheap liquor.  The man gave her a lopsided, toothless smile and scratched at his grey beard with nicotine-coated fingers as she fought to regain her composure.
    “Hey, Harry, get the hell outta here,” the burly uniformed commissionaire shouted, leaving his post by the hotel door and advancing on the vagrant who had accosted Beth.
    “ God bless you,” the old guy said to Beth in the way he would have said ‘get cancer and die’ to a cop who was throwing him in a drunk tank, or moving him off a bench in Central Park.
    “ Thank you,” Beth said to the doorman as ‘Harry’ lurched away along the sidewalk and into the nearest alley, to be absorbed by the blackness that filled the narrow gaps between Manhattan’s towering buildings.
    “ You’re welcome, lady.  You want I should get you a cab?”
    She nodded, and with only a slight motion of his white-gloved hand, one of the glut of Yellow cabs peeled off, angled across to the kerb and stopped.
    It was only a few blocks to the Wellington Hotel, which was located across the street from Carnegie Hall in Midtown.  She paid the cabby and hurried into what she perceived to be the safety of the hotel, collected her key from the front desk and made her way to the lifts.  Up in her room on the fifth floor, with the door securely locked, she collapsed on the bed and let the tears fall.  It was an amalgamation of pent-up emotions and suppressed fear that was now demanding to be acknowledged; to be confronted and dealt with.
    “ Fuck it!”  Beth said to the empty room.  Got up, snatched a handful of tissues from the box on the bedside table and blew her nose.  She was acting like a victim who could not get past the tribulations she had faced and survived.  Instead of being strengthened by triumph over adversity, she was letting the accumulation of recent events jaundice her outlook and modify her thoughts in a morbid and unacceptable way.  For Christ’s sake, she was a psychologist who dealt with criminally insane patients on a daily basis. She should be better equipped to come to terms with the acts they committed than most.  But she had come to learn – the hard way – that interviewing and assessing sociopaths and the like was not the same as being targeted and victimised by them. Being on the consult list with New Scotland Yard had given her the opportunity to test out her skills of recognising personality disorders, develop profiles with critical offender characteristics, and offer up investigative suggestions to the police.  She had excelled at being able to get into the minds of monsters, and as a result had got too close to the evil.  She still bore the scars, courtesy of working alongside Matt and being reluctantly sucked into a world of horror and violence.
    Beth looked at the phone next to the box of Kleenex.  No.  This week in New York was a hiatus; a period that she needed to use, to stand back and reflect on and assess just where the hell in life she was headed, and whether she wanted to go there.  Loving Matt was not the issue.  But she did not have his ability to crusade against that which he thought had to be faced and overcome.  Maybe he fed off violence and death, and being a part of it was a drug that he was powerless to wean himself off.  It sucked.  Damn the man!  Why didn’t he ring her?  He knew where she was staying, and that she would now be back from The Roosevelt, where the seminar had been held in a conference room on the first floor…or second, as the Yanks would have it.
    The phone did ring.  Startled her.  She picked up.
    “Matt?”
    “ No, ma’am, this is the switchboard.  I have a Mr...er, Dr. Alec Hoffman wanting to speak to you.  You want to take the call?”
    “ Uh, yes, please, put him through,” Beth said.
    Why would Alec be calling?  It was only forty minutes since she had said