Gone Cold Read Online Free PDF

photographs depicted a particularly gory scene, more blood than you’d think the human body could hold.
    From the images it appeared that the victim was a Caucasian male, between thirty-five and forty-five years old, the blood spilled from a deep cut to the left side of his throat, probably an opened carotid artery.
    “The vic is another ghost,” Colleen said. “Had false identification on him. A driver’s license issued in a suburb of Detroit. His prints aren’t in our system either. The fake name he used was Ramsey Little. But what we have right now is a John Doe.”
    I flipped through the grisly photographs. The murder weapon was a broken beer bottle. No question of the brand.
    “My goodness, my Guinness,” Colleen said as I studied the photo of the shattered black longneck. “At least we know the girl had good taste.”
    Ashdown checked my face for a reaction, but of course Detective Inspector Colleen MacAuliffe had no clue what my role was in all of this. Hell, even I wasn’t so sure anymore. I felt severely in over my head, just as I had two years earlier in Paris. We knew nearly nothing about the killer or her victim, let alone a possible motive. And, bottom line, I’d never been embroiled in a murder investigation before. My duty as a U.S. Marshal was to hunt fugitives; my job since was to locate missing children abroad. This was the first time in my life I was starting with a dead body. The bodies usually came later, after I’d become involved.
    “Do we know where John Doe lived?” I said.
    Colleen shook her head. “Just where he was staying.”
    “A hotel?”
    “The Radisson Blu St. Helen’s Hotel just outside of Dublin.”
    “You found a key on him?”
    “No, he made us work for it. We showed his picture round the entire city. He was registered at the Radisson under the name William Perry.”
    “Like the defensive lineman,” I said almost to myself.
    Ashdown appeared puzzled. “Sorry?”
    “William Perry,” I said. “They called him the Refrigerator. Played for the Chicago Bears back in the eighties.”
    Ashdown shrugged. “It’s a rather common name where I come from.”
    He was right. The Fridge notwithstanding, the name was distinctly British. As was the vic’s alternate alias, Ramsey Little.
    “What type of identification did he provide the Radisson?”
    “An older U.S. passport,” Colleen said, “issued in Philadelphia, birthplace listed as the State of New Jersey. The passport itself was real, but the name and date of birth were altered. And the man the passport number originally belonged to is dead.”
    “We know anything about his death?”
    “Only that it was likely of old age. The date of birth on the original passport was thirteen March 1927.”
    The files Kati had sent me suddenly clouded my mind.
    “Where’s the camera that captured the girl’s image?” I asked.
    “Just outside the pub.”
    “May I view the footage?”
    “I have the digital file,” Ashdown interjected. “I’ll show it to you once we’re in front of a computer.”
    Nothing since that first sip of Irish coffee at Terry’s seemed real to me. The past eleven months, they fit well in the context of my twelve-year nightmare. But this, the e-mail from Kati, the conversation with Ashdown, the flight to Ireland, the tour of the Stalemate provided by D.I. MacAuliffe, this felt like nothing more than a figment of my imagination. This entire scene seemed like a mirage, like a drug-induced hallucination, one that filled my lungs with the cancer of hope, a high from which I would inevitably have to come down, and come down hard .
    Breaking an interminable silence, Ashdown asked, “We about done here, Simon?”
    I stared down at the marble tiles, intensely, as though they could speak to me, as though they could tell me whether my daughter, Hailey, had been here just forty-eight hours ago, whether she’d really killed John Doe, why she’d broken a beer bottle and gone for a man’s throat, and where