Fallout (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

sir,” Cook replied solemnly, slipping his gloves on.
    When they walked up onto the porch, Joshua took out his kerchief and held it to his face, covering his nose. He told Cook to walk around back and check the back door just in case it was unlocked. He did not want to bust the doorframe unless he had to.
    Cook came straight back and told him the back door was slightly ajar.
    Joshua held to the pry bar, walked around back, and entered through the kitchen door. The last time he saw Jesse was Saturday morning a week past when he had gone to the barbershop for a haircut. It was the same day the Blackwell boy out of Biloxi broadsided him as he left the barbershop.
    Lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of dried blood was Jesse’s wife, Ola. A bloody butcher knife lay on the kitchen table. Joshua held up his hand and told Cook to go to his patrol car and radio for them to send the coroner and Metcalf’s Crime Scene Investigation team. When he did not hear Cook move immediately, he turned toward him. Cook was just standing there, mouth agape and bug-eyed, staring at Ola Vice’s body. If alive, the poor woman would be mortified. Her nightgown was hiked up around her waist.
    “Cook!” Joshua shouted, “Get a move on, damn it,” he spat as he removed an apron from a hook by the back door and draped it over Ola’s lower body. He then eased from room to room until he found Jesse Vice. Jesse was still in bed. It appeared he had been bludgeoned to death. His head lay on a blood soaked pillow. A steel bar was on the floor atop of Jesse’s overalls. The pockets of the overalls were turned inside out; a wallet lay nearby. Damn’it to hell, thought Joshua as he walked back toward the kitchen.
    Ola must have gone to the kitchen to make coffee and the killer caught her off guard and killed her before she could alert Jesse. Many folks in the country never locked their doors; they never needed to, until now.
    He hoped they could get some prints off the wallet, the knife, or the steel bar. Many of the cabinet doors were standing open as was several drawers. It was as if someone was searching through them for something.
    Joshua saw a smeared, bloody handprint on the sink. Lying next to the sink on its side was an empty coffee tin; the top was off. He walked over and saw that the can contained half of a dollar bill and a few pennies. There was blood residue in the basin. Whoever done this must have washed up afterward then searched through the cabinets. They stole what they could find and then left. When John Metcalf and his team arrived, Metcalf looked around and immediately pulled Joshua to the side.
    “This perpetrator’s Modus Operandi looks like that of the Train Track Killer.”
    “The what -”
    “Mo-”
    “No, Damn it! I know what an M-O is. What the hell is the Train Track Killer?”
    “Sheriff, I know you’ve been busy and haven’t been downtown in a while so you might not be up to par on this case,-”
    “No, I’m not up to par on shit, John. Hell, I don’t remember the last time I even went to the office, so I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “There’s been a man riding the rails, hopping off in different towns, attacking women in their homes. He rapes, robs, and murders them. If the husband happens to be home he murders them too.”
    “Damn, when did all this shit start?”
    “About a mouth ago - up around Albany, New York, He has killed eight people already, six women and two men, across about as many states. When they got an idea of where he was headed by the locations of the murders, they contacted us here in Alabama. They think he is working his way south to Texas. The last known murder was in Georgia, near Atlanta. He stayed in Atlanta the longest. He left one survivor during his spree so far, and that was in Atlanta too. He beat the woman in the head with a tire iron, and raped her, repeatedly from what I heard. She was lucky to survive. The woman described him as a non-English