Faces of Evil [2] Impulse Read Online Free PDF Page B

stirred again.
    He had dreamed of touching her for weeks now.
    Soon, he promised himself as his erection strained against the fly of his jeans.
    Very soon.

4
    Birmingham Police Department, 2:50 p.m.
    Dan Burnett braced against the counter in the men’s restroom and stared at the face in the mirror. That man was a stranger to him. The outright fear in his eyes was not the norm. That same emotion twisting in his gut was way out of character.
    He was the chief of police. Protecting the citizens of Birmingham was his job.
    And he’d failed. He hadn’t even protected one of his own.
    Now Detective Wells would pay the price. Not one victim was known to have survived this twisted son of a bitch.
    He was sick about it, worried. . . and damned scared.
    There were steps he should have taken as soon as he recognized that a suspected killer was believed to be in his jurisdiction. Now God only knew how many would suffer for his lack of foresight.
    Jess was the expert on the Player, but Dan knew plenty and one thing was guaranteed, he wouldn’t stop with just one victim.
    In the conference room, the deputy chiefs of every division in the department, Special Agent Todd Manning from the Birmingham Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jess, Harper, and the mayor, for Christ’s sake, all waited for him to lead the task force toward resolving this situation.
    Waited for him to point the way to finding Detective Wells and capturing a demonically clever repeat killer that no law enforcement agency had been able to irrefutably identify much less nail.
    Twenty years of police work, four as the chief of police, and he had never felt this unsure of himself.
    Hell, he hadn’t caught his breath after finding Andrea and the other girls who’d been abducted by a far less capable evil. For three weeks the whole city and the surrounding communities had lived in terror while those five young women had been missing. There hadn’t been a single lead, not a scrap of evidence.
    Truth was, he hadn’t found them. Jess had. Every cop working that case had been stumped until she kicked them all in the ass, grabbed them by the noses and led the task force in the right direction.
    All five, including his former step-daughter, had been found alive because of Jess’s unrelenting determination and innate skill at looking beyond the routine.
    He shook his head, kicked himself again for taking the easy way out. Andrea was still his step-daughter. Their relationship hadn’t changed just because the marriage to her mother had ended. On some level he had convinced himself that the connection to a victim was part of the reason he’d needed Jess’s help on that case. Or maybe somewhere deep inside he’d recognized that Jess had always been better at everything than him.
    Instead of offering her the position of deputy chief over a new unit, he should have stepped aside and urged the powers that be to offer her his position.
    Dan scrubbed a hand over his face and blew out a breath wrought with frustration and mounting uncertainty.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Wells needed him and he was hiding in the men’s room feeling sorry for himself. Anger, mostly at himself, howled with the need to make this right. To rescue Wells and stop the Player when no else had been able to.
    Squaring his shoulders, he straightened his tie. Time to stop wallowing in guilt and to do his job.
    The Bureau had backed off to some degree until, they insisted, there was evidence this was, in fact, the Player – the deviant Jess felt certain was Eric Spears. As a courtesy an agent was on duty, along with a BPD uniform, with Jess’s sister. Manning was here for the strategy briefing or, more likely, to keep tabs on Jess’s involvement. That was the extent of the Bureau’s commitment for now.
    Dan suspected the underlying motive behind their position was Jess. She was the Bureau’s scapegoat in the whole Player/Spears debacle that was still playing out in the media. And, frankly, with