Cold Hearted (Cold Justice Book 6) Read Online Free PDF

His voice was gruff from holding in his reaction to her. He wasn’t here for this. He wasn’t here for her.
    He followed her through the house away from the murmur of other people working the crime scene. And as he trailed her up the stairs, he became aware of another undeniable truth that was neither professional nor appropriate. It was a God-given fact that some views had a way of distracting a man regardless of circumstance—Detective Donovan’s ass turned out to be one of them.
    He shook his head. He was working. Even if he wasn’t working, he did not sleep with married women. What if he met her husband during this case? The idea made a cold sweat break out on his back. Damn Erin Donovan for putting him in this position and for making the experience so goddamn unforgettable.
    He got to the top of the stairs and was plunged back into the here and now. In the room on the left, a female victim lay on the bed. The sight of her inert form snapped his focus back to the job.
    She was a young adult, eighteen to twenty. Dark hair loose around her face. Fully clothed in a ruby red sweater and blue jeans. Her socks had Santa hats on them. Darsh flinched. He knew without a doubt she’d gotten them for Christmas—the same way he’d received Christmas socks from one of his sisters every year for as long as he could remember. The thought stirred his anger, and that was something he couldn’t afford. He pulled himself into the zone where his family and feelings didn’t exist. A place where red-hot sex with Erin Donovan had never happened.
    During Operation Iraqi Freedom, getting in the zone had allowed him to stare through the scope of his M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle and neutralize threats to his fellow Marines without a shred of remorse. He’d pulled the trigger and smoke-checked a target, time after time, without hesitation. Ghosts might visit him occasionally in a deadly roll call, revealing their humanity and his, but he didn’t regret his actions. The lessons of dissociation had served him well in the past, and he drew on them now, trying to become the machine and leave the weakness and distraction of sentiment behind.
    “Mandy Wochikowski. Twenty years old in her junior year at Blackcombe. Majored in criminology,” Donovan informed him.
    “What about registered sex offenders in the area?”
    “I have an officer tracking down their movements. A lot of them moved away last year, when their addresses were posted on a student blog.” She looked uncomfortable.
    “Vigilantism?” he asked.
    “There were no official complaints, but name someone who wants to live next to a pedophile?”
    “Good point.”
    He looked back at Mandy Wochikowski. The young woman appeared to have been strangled, but there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. It would be impossible to know for sure until the Medical Examiner performed an autopsy, and even then it might not be conclusive. The girl stared up at the ceiling with vacant eyes dotted with petechiae—a clear sign she’d suffocated, and her nail beds showed definite signs of cyanosis. Her limbs had been carefully aligned, arms laid close to her sides, legs straight and parallel. Feet together. Neat. Tidy. Coffin-ready.
    He turned away and checked the pictures on the yellow-painted walls. There were some band posters: Nirvana. Cold Play. Fall Out Boy. A corkboard with her printed schedule mounted on it, surrounded by what he assumed were family photographs and a few photographs of friends. He recognized Drew Hawke in one of the pictures. The quarterback was a good-looking young man who’d had an NFL career waiting for him when college finished.
    Blown.
    Textbooks lay open on the desk. He recognized some from his own studies. A laptop sat there, the battery humming away loudly to itself. Older model. He tapped the touchpad with the tip of a latex-clad finger. Donovan began to make a sound of protest then stopped. Maybe she’d decided they were both on the same side. Or maybe