Bone Island 01 - Ghost Shadow Read Online Free PDF

was not welcome.
    There was more, she thought, so much more, to the museum. It was sad, really, that the story got so much attention.
    There was fun history. Sloppy Joe moving his entire bar across the street in the middle of the night, angry over a hike in his rent. Tennessee Williams, working away at La Concha Hotel, penning the words of his play A Streetcar Named Desire. Another war, soldiers and sailors, the roadblocks that caused Key West to secede and become, if only for hours, the Conch Republic.
    The rest of history paled beside the story of von Cosel and Elena. So it had always been.
    Morbid curiosity. Had he really slept with the corpse? Ooh, Lord, disgusting! How?
    Katie knew the story, of course. She’d heard it all her life. She’d retold it at college a dozen times, with friends denying the truth of it until they looked it up on the Internet. It was tragic, it was sad, it was sick, but it always drew people.
    As it had tonight. She put her hand out to draw back the curtain leading to the exhibit.
    “Don’t, Katie, don’t!” Bartholomew whispered.
    She closed her eyes for a moment.
    She was suddenly terrified that she would draw back the curtain-and stumble upon a corpse herself.
    And yet…
    She had to draw back the curtain.
    She did so, and screamed.

2
    David nearly jumped, he was so startled by the sudden scream.
    That irritated him. Greatly. He was thirty-two, a veteran of foreign action and a professional who trekked through the wilds and jungles of the world.
    He was not supposed to jump at the sound of a silly girl’s scream.
    Of course, it had been stupid to come here. He had thought that he’d come back just to sign whatever papers he needed to settle his grandfather’s estate. But he had come home. And no way out of it-the past had called to him. No matter how far he had gone, he had been haunted by that night. He’d had to come here.
    He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find.
    There were no fresh corpses in the old museum.
    Elena Milagro de Hoyos rested in robotic finery-as sadly as she had, years ago, at the real funeral parlor.
    But he could remember the night they had found Tanya. He could remember it as if it had been yesterday.
    She hadn’t been killed here, she had been brought here. She had been positioned for the shock value. It was something certain killers did. This fellow wanted to enjoy his sadistic exploits and wanted his handiwork to be discovered.
    The killer had never been caught. No clues, no profile had ever led anyone anywhere, even when the local police had pulled in the FBI. There hadn’t been a fiber, a speck of DNA, not a single skin cell to be analyzed. That meant that the killer had been organized. The Keys had even braced for a wave of such murders, because such killers usually kept killing. But it seemed that Tanya’s murder had been a lone incident. Despite the fact that he had been cleared, he had been the only person ever actually under suspicion, no matter how they worded it.
    The Keys hadn’t been crime-free by any means. Accidents occurred far too frequently because people overimbibed and still thought they’d be fine on the highway-often two-lane only-that led back to the mainland. Crosses along the way warned travelers of places where others had died, and the police could be fierce on speeders, but deaths still happened. Gangs were coming in, just as elsewhere, but they were seldom seen in the usual tourist mainstream on Duval Street. Domestic violence was always a problem, and now and then, as Liam seemed to believe, “outsiders” came into the state to commit their crimes.
    But there was nothing like the strangulation death and bizarre display of Tanya Barnard. Not in the decade since David had been gone.
    When it had happened, Craig Beckett had tried to hold his head high. He knew, of course, that his grandson was innocent because they had been together during the time it had happened-only a small window of opportunity. The museum had closed