Darkest Day (StrikeForce #3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

movement after being squished in the car. We walked into the restaurant, and, once we were settled in at a table in one of the back corners of the restaurant, we sat and drank, ordered, and bided our time until we knew we could talk a little more freely.
    “Okay,” Jenson said quietly, leaning forward a little. “We’ve been grasping at straws trying to find something. Caine told me what you found out from that guy you brought in earlier, and it confirms what we were thinking was going on. I feel better knowing that we were on the right track,” she said, and I nodded. “We kept running into walls. And then we thought, well, what if we can get DNA samples from the people we think are associated with Killjoy somehow? Run them through the system, see if we can find a match and go from there.”
    “Did we collect samples when we had them?” I asked.
    Jenson shook her head. “Not exactly.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Well. Remember when you beat the hell out of Daemon trying to figure out where to find Death?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I kept one of the swabs they cleaned him up with afterward.”
    My jaw dropped, and she shrugged.
    “What in the hell made you think to do that?”
    “I wondered if it would ever come in handy. If we could trace it somehow, or work on some kind of antidote to his powers so we’d be taking less of a risk when we faced him. I forgot I had it with everything going on, but then David and I were getting frustrated, and I remembered it. And we went from there.”
    I stared at her. “Okay. And?”
    She smiled. “We found some things.”
    “Such as?”
    “A name. Which in and of itself wasn’t exceptionally useful because he seems to live his entire life without leaving much of a trail. Fortunately for us, whoever is or was helping him hide his tracks tends to get a little sloppy with the details. Name led to more names. Aliases,” she added, and I nodded.
    “Long story short, in addition to lots of stocks and partial shares in tech based companies and other smart stuff like that, Daemon has a house here in Detroit.”
    I watched her.
    “I wonder what we’d find if we were to go to his house,” I said quietly, and she grinned.
    “Exactly what I was wondering,” she said.
    “Could be nothing,” David said. “A guy who’s that careful about covering his tracks isn’t likely to leave anything lying around that’s going to help us. He’d be smart enough to figure that the odds were that we’d track him down at some point.”
    “Unless he was getting cocky,” I said. “And yeah, you’re right. This might do nothing. But we might actually find something useful. I mean, I doubt he’s writing his deeds and Killjoy’s plans down anywhere.”
    “Dear Diary, tomorrow we are planning to blow up a hockey stadium,” David said, pantomiming scribbling, and we laughed.
    “Yeah, I don’t think we’ll be that lucky. But people get stupid. Especially if they’re sentimental about something,” I said, my mind immediately going to Mama. “Maybe a quick visit will give us an idea or two about where to find what he cares about, other than being a villain and destroying shit.”
    “What good is that going to do us, though?” Dani asked.
    “You find what someone cares about, you find their Achilles heel,” I said softly. “If you know what cut will make them bleed out fastest there’s a good chance of getting them to spill their secrets before you go for the final cut.”
    Dani swallowed, then nodded. “Like they did with you.”
    “In a way.” I wondered, sometimes when my brain just wouldn’t shut the hell up, if they’d outright threatened Mama, would I have just given them what they wanted? It would have saved her but he never asked, and I’d spent way too much time thinking about why Killjoy had done it that way. “They might have gotten what they wanted if they’d used her against me before rather than after.”
    “Yeah. But Killjoy had his little extra crazy belief