Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) Read Online Free PDF

the kitchen and poured the first cup of coffee for the day and chased it with a handful of ibuprofen. Probably best to go by the office first and then see Jean later in the hospital after the docs had finished with her.
    He stepped out his front door and locked the dead bolt behind him. When he turned to the parking lot, he unleashed a torrent of profanity as he saw the damage that had been done to his LeBaron convertible by the parrots. Thank God he hadn’t been completely hammered last night when he came in. He made the mistake of leaving his top down one night after a few rounds of drinks with friends and spent the entire next day cleaning up bird shit while suffering from a wicked hangover. Rivera dropped heavily into the well-worn driver’s seat with its saggy springs, pushed a old CD of Stevie Ray Vaughan in the stereo, cranked it loud and let it wail. Twenty minutes later, he was fighting the traffic and cursing the maniac machismo of the Miami drivers as he drove into parking lot for the headquarters of the Miami Beach Police Department.
    The twin banks of elevators in the main lobby were always crowded this time of morning with stragglers who had been tied up in traffic. Rivera squeezed into the last remaining place in the first car and pushed the glowing button for the fourth floor. “Manny, how you doin’ this morning!” The booming voice belonged to none other than the South District Captain, Steve Causey who was wedged uncomfortably into the back corner of the elevator.
    “Not bad Cap,” replied Rivera as they strode off the elevator together. “How’s your day looking?”
    “Damn busy late last night on the south end. Couple of our local bad boys damn near beat to death by some guy off Fifth between Ocean and Collins,” shrugged Causey. “They probably had it coming-these guys had a long list of priors over the past few years. Word on the street is that they’re the ones who’ve been jackin’ tourists in the past few months. They’ll be drawing unemployment for a while-got a busted jaw on one and a leg flopping like a fish on the other one.”
    “I wish my world was that friggin’ simple,” muttered Rivera as he walked out of the elevator and over to his desk. The Police Department had moved to its gleaming new offices near the convention center only a couple of years before. It was a beautiful building with air conditioning and plumbing that actually worked most days, unlike the old offices where they used to collect a jar of the palmetto bugs that infested the building and bet on bug races held in the squad room-Rivera had damn near lost an entire paycheck on more than a couple of occasions. Rivera had never felt comfortable in the new building. He leaned back and surveyed the contemporary low fabric dividers separating the cubicles that some dumbass thought would encourage collaboration and the flow of ideas. “What horse shit,” he muttered thinking how much he preferred the old precinct with the nicotine stained bullpen and his old oak desk scarred by generations of coffee spills and cigarette burns.
    No time for reminiscing . As soon as he logged in to his workstation, he began reviewing the reports from the scenes of mayhem at the hospital the night before. It was amazing how many reports had appeared on the system in just the last eight hours. He started scanning through the volume of reports from the Crime Scene Squad that had been processed and saw four more appear in the queue while he was reading. You could tell this was going to be a high profile case-everyone wanted to put his or her own personal stamp on it. He grudgingly admitted there were some advantages to the new offices-he had almost real time access to information instead of waiting days for crucial evidence to come back from the lab.
    Thank God for AFIS he thought as he checked the reports on fingerprints that had been gathered from the scene the night before. The prints had already been scanned, processed, uploaded and