Heart of the Hunter Read Online Free PDF

a false security, thinking the target of his surveillance was too quiet and peaceful to be at risk and in no danger.
    When too quiet really meant danger was already present.
    â€œDanger.” The word, a constant in Jeb’s life, the measure of it, was harsh on his tongue. If the telephone had been in his hand, he would have crushed it. Was Nicole in danger?
    In all the hours he’d spent arguing with Simon—resisting this assignment until the absolute end; throughout the exhaustive brainstorming and planning with Mitch and Matthew; in the final stages of pouring over Nicole’s dossier—he hadn’t wanted to consider that she might become a threat to her brother and, thus, to herself.
    Jeb Tanner admitted he’d tried her in his mind long ago and convicted her of one of two crimes. Complicity, or innocent naiveté. He’d nearly convinced himself there were no other choices, and if it came down to it, the lesser crime would protect her. But then he hadn’t seen her again. Hadn’t discovered the woman the child had become.
    Nicole Callison might be guilty as sin, but that sin wouldn’t be naiveté.
    If Tony came to her with the taint of death clinging to him; if he asked for help, an avenue of escape, a smuggler’s ticket out of the country; if she refused him, would he harm her?
    Once Tony had loved her too much to let anyone or anything touch her. But that was before.
    Before his sociopathic mind lost its last touch with humanity. Before the collegiate bad boy evolved into a conscienceless killer of men and women and, finally, children. Before the killing became a sadistic ritual, the bounty less important than the pleasure.
    Before he became a stalking mad dog, who walked as a man.
    If she got in his way, it wouldn’t matter who she was, or what she’d been to him. “He would kill her,” Jeb muttered, the horror of it, the waste, turning him sick.
    Tony would kill her like all the rest.
    The image that scorched Jeb’s mind sent a shudder down his back. He’d studied the forensic reports and seen the snapshots of what Tony did to his growing list of victims. Each a signature killing, and each worse than the last, until a gruesome pattern of a serial killer began emerging.
    â€œBut no more.” Jeb’s voice was the guttural voice of a stranger, as cold as his eyes. It was the threat of a serial killer with the honed skills of murder for hire that had brought Simon McKinzie and The Black Watch into the pursuit. The same threat had tipped the scales, destroying Jeb’s resistance to Simon’s plan to trade on his past—renewing one acquaintance to catch another.
    With the gruesome facts laid before him, Jeb saw, not the man who had been his rival and his best friend in college, but a monster, potentially more destructive than any the world had ever known. If he were not stopped.
    But he would be. And Jeb Tanner would do it.
    â€œBefore Nicole’s name is on any damn bloody list.” If he wasn’t already too late.
    Dread like cold lead in his belly, Jeb took the stairs in a deliberate pace that ate up the distance more surely than frantic rushing. In the bedroom that occupied the top floor, he slid into jeans, a light shirt and moccasins. A holster was strapped to his ankle and a compact, but powerful, pistol was snapped in it before he gathered up the keys to the roadster. Then he was running down the stairs again, taking them two at a time.
    The door slammed behind him on the echo of a single word.
    â€œPlease.”
    * * *
    The air was humid and fragrant. Shrubs crowded the walled garden walk and the courtyard, their heavy blooms and waxen leaves shimmering like old velvet. In the murky half-light the narrow corridor that bordered Nicole Callison’s Charleston home was a magical place of drifting mists and deepening shade, of muted bird song and quiet footsteps.
    As she walked through the mist, Nicole reveled in these