Athena Force 8: Contact Read Online Free PDF

forehead. She loved New Orleans. She’d been just as glad to leave Kansas City, where she and her mom had lived for two years before coming south. New Orleans had a dark side, yes. But the flaws of this old, magical, slow-moving city were what made it feel like home. It made her own flaws—or her eccentricities, anyway—more acceptable somehow. More normal, even.
    Faith had longed to be normal her whole life. Living amidst the quirks of the Big Easy was as close as she’d come to it, especially once she’d found the psychic community. The older she got, the more aware Faith became of how guilty her mother felt. About something. Tamara wouldn’t say and Faith couldn’t—wouldn’t—sense it off of her. It was one thing to stumble across a jumble of half-clear impressions about someone. It would be another thing entirely to drag out someone’s hard-kept secrets. That would be invasive. A violation. Damn it.
    But whatever it was, Tamara shouldn’t also feel guilty about moving them here.
    The phone rang again and Faith took a deep breath before answering it. “I’m fine, ” she repeated.
    “Glad to know it,” said a much deeper voice than the one she’d expected. “That’s exactly the word I would have used.”
    His energy actually seemed to pulsate out of the phone. Or was that just the man’s inability to moderate his voice?
    “Detective Chopin,” greeted Faith, sitting up. Like he could see her. At least he’d called, and not his partner. Faith had been on the phone with Butch Jefferson as an anonymous contact too often to risk letting him recognize her disembodied voice. “Do you want to talk to one of the technicians, or maybe Mr. Boulanger?”
    “If I’d wanted to talk to them, I would’ve called them,” he said. “I figured…that is, I thought I’d ask…”
    Faith waited, feeling as handicapped as if she’d been blindfolded. All she could hear over the line in this busy office was that Chopin sounded frustrated. If he were here, she could have read his body language and his scent and even his temperature as if he were holding up cue cards with personal insights. On the phone…
    Maybe that’s why she and cell phones had such a bad history. She resented their limitations.
    “You are Faith Corbett, right?” asked the cop, managing a slightly quieter voice after all.
    “Yes, Detective. What can I do for you?”
    “I just wanted…” Chopin swore, and his voice went normal again. Which meant, pushy. “Evidence. On the Tanner case. We’re past the 24/24, and I need a damned progress report.”
    The 24/24 stood for the day before and the day after a murder, the time from which the most valid clues came. Soon, people’s recall would fade. Undiscovered physical evidence might vanish. That’s why the majority of murders were solved within the first forty-eight hours.
    Krystal had been dead thirty-seven hours and counting.
    “I’m not supposed to involve myself with the Tanner evidence, Detective Chopin.”
    “Which wouldn’t keep you from looking from a safe distance, right? So what’s the status? And call me Roy.”
    He had her there—she had looked, on the computer network. She just hadn’t modified any files. “We’re still waiting on the M.E. for the autopsy results, and so far Officer Hinze hasn’t found concrete matches on any of the fingerprints from the scene. Considering that there were over fifty prints and partials, that’s still going to take some processing. The footprints will be even more tricky—for some reason, there was a lot of spilled salt on the floor. You know this one went to the night shift, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, I know. So, is the body still there? Did it—” Then he said, “Aw, f—” He bit off the swear word. “I’m sorry. Hell. I almost forgot it was your friend. I mean…uh… she. ”
    “You were right the first time,” Faith assured him. The evidence in the morgue was no longer Krystal. “I hope you’ve got some leads on the bastard