Her Last Chance Read Online Free PDF

lowered her to the stair,
held her securely while she regained her balance and jerked her sweater back
into place. Fury and pride demanded she hurt the bastard, but when she turned
to face him, he showed an impressive display of psychic ability, and took a
step away.
    Tears swam in her eyes. She bit her
lip. How did he know about the scars? Despite his badge, she’d never doubted
his almost overbearing sense of honor.
    Now she wasn’t so sure.
    “Let’s go.” Special Agent Dickwad
grabbed her arm like he’d solved the case and hustled her toward the door.
    Jerking out of the idiot’s painful
grip, she glared over her shoulder about to curse Marshall Hayes with every
foul word she’d ever learned, but her anger evaporated as quickly as it had
come. Something about his haunted expression tore at her. He looked like she
felt—as if he’d been in a fight for his life and had barely escaped alive.
     
    ***
     
    His toes tingled
painfully with cold. Transferring his weight from one foot to the other helped,
but if the cops didn’t give a statement soon, he was leaving. Job or no
freaking job.
    A cup of Starbucks helped ward off
the chill. He sipped the creamy sweet brew and noted it too was beginning to
cool. He was too old for this crap. Twenty years on the job and the crime-beat
still sucked.
    Nelson Landry glanced around the
crowd, noticed small huddled groups whose breath rose as a cloud of steam
through the sodium vapor of the streetlights. They reckoned serial killers got
off watching the action from the sidelines. He peered closer. Were any of these
guys the Blade Hunter? His gaze ran over the figures but no one stood out as a
sadistic psycho and he grew bored looking at those young eager faces.
    The guy to his right looked
respectable enough, but who knew what that overcoat hid or what the guy’s
fingers were jangling deep in his pockets. Nelson huffed out a laugh at the
image he’d conjured. God help him, he’d been doing this way too long.
    Cops and feds began pouring out of
the building like ants on a mission. Stretching his five-foot-five frame to the
limit, Nelson peered past an NBC cameraman’s shoulder. Cops were loading up
cars and trucks with evidence bags and equipment. The body was long gone.
    One of the feds was coming across
the street to give a statement. Heaving a sigh of relief, Nelson took the
digital recorder out of his pocket, shifted his weight, thankful he’d soon be
in the comfort of his own bed. The G-man moved like he had a poker shoved up
his ass, almost on tiptoes. Out of the corner of his eye, Nelson spotted a
blonde being escorted to a black Lincoln sedan.
    Who the hell is that? A real
looker. A model or film star he wouldn’t wonder.
    “Check out the list of residents,”
he spoke into his voice recorder and raised his Nikon with his other hand,
reeling off a few shots of the fed. Then he turned the camera toward the
blonde, and centered the shot through the viewfinder. One of the men walking
beside the woman made his lips draw back over his teeth.
    SAC Marshall Hayes.
    The man who’d gotten him busted
back down to the crime-beat only a couple of years from retirement, because
he’d written an article about a cover up over the death of some curator from
the Museum of Modern Art.
    Asshole .
    The guy worked art fraud, so what
the hell was he doing at a murder scene? On autopilot, Nelson thrust his
recorder toward the guy giving the official statement and watched the man who’d
wrecked his life lean up-close and personal to the blonde before climbing into
a Beemer parked further along the street and speeding away.
    Marshall Hayes hated the press.
Loved making their lives as difficult as possible. The world clicked into place
in a serendipitous moment and Nelson grinned. He was about to return the favor.

 
     
    Chapter Three
    ________________
     
     
     
    B ack at the FBI New York
field office, Marsh watched the interview through the one-way mirror. Josephine
flashed an