Blood Stained Read Online Free PDF

he seldom used. "Sit down and listen to your mother. She knows how much soccer means to you, but your safety comes first."
    "Can't we move to a hotel or something?" Megan asked in a calmer voice, hands folded together, mirroring her father's posture. "And you could give me a bodyguard. How about Taylor? He's cool. No one would ever think he's with the FBI."
    "Hope you never tell him that," Walden said with a smile. 
    Taylor prided himself on being a "G-man" and dressing the part. No matter it made him look more like a junior advertising exec than a federal agent.
    "This isn't like the movies, Megan," Lucy protested. 
    "Wait. She has a point. We could move out of the house. My office has plenty of space."
    Lucy stared at her husband. He often accused her of falling into the psychological trap of denial, but now who wasn't facing facts? Thankfully Walden took this one.
    "That might be problematic. It's the first place anyone would look for you."
    Nick straightened, his posture rigid. "I'm not abandoning my patients."
    "Nick—"
    "Not negotiable, Lucy. This family has sacrificed a lot for your job. Moving, changing schools, even—" His Adam's apple bobbed as he glanced in Megan's direction. 
    Lucy reached across the table for his hand, knowing he was remembering September. 
    He slid free of her grasp, grabbing his napkin instead and wadding it into a tight rock. "Even missing time with you because of your devotion to your victims and their cases. You can't ask me to be any less devoted to my patients. They're counting on me to be there for them and I'm not letting them down."
    There was nothing she could say to that except guilty on all charges. She had uprooted them time and again because of her job. When she took the promotion here in Pittsburgh, she promised them she would be home on time and take less risks—exactly what the FBI wanted of her as well. Yet here she was, putting their lives on the line. Again.
    She couldn't ask more of them. And, as much as she'd like to, she couldn't keep them locked up forever. The best she could do was find the bastard behind this, whether it was someone inside the Bureau gunning for her job or some psycho-nut out on the streets taking potshots at her.
    "Okay," she surrendered. For now. She'd figure out some way to keep them under surveillance.
    Nick jerked his chin up, eyes narrowed in suspicion. Megan hopped up from the table and leapt to Lucy's side and hugged her.
    Walden caught her eye as he calculated how to free up manpower to form an unofficial protection unit, and took another chomp out of his pizza. "We'll make it work," he said after he swallowed.
    Lucy pushed away her half-eaten slice, no longer hungry.
     
     

Chapter 4
     
     
    Once he left the road and entered the shelter of the Stolfultz's cornfields, Adam's fear eased. No one could hurt him, not once he made it to his special spot, his thinking cave. 
    He was only ten when he first found it, running away from a pair of bullies who chased him on their bikes from the school playground on the other side of the farm. Using the terrain to his advantage, he ducked over and under fences, letting the July-high corn cover his tracks, and finally escaped into the woods.
    New Hope lay in the narrow end of the valley, sandwiched between two forks of Warrior Ridge. Limestone caverns riddled the ridge, some of them extending for miles beneath the surface. Grownups warned kids all the time not to go into the caves. There were terrible campfire stories about kids who wandered inside the mountain, never to return. 
    Like the two teens who broke into Echo Cavern on a dare, climbing over the wrought iron padlocked gate that guarded its entrance. Adam had only been eight at the time but he still remembered the look of stricken grief on the faces of the adults when they brought out one kid on a stretcher, his leg bent at a horrible angle, crying for his friend who'd fallen down a crevasse. 
    They never found the second boy's