HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) Read Online Free PDF Page A

skin.
                  “Hunter! That’s not your job anymore,” he repeated.
                  Her brow furrowed and her pupils sharpened, retracting.
                  “It’s not?” she asked as though drifting through a fog, unsure which way was out and which way was deeper into the sea of lost thoughts.
                  “No, it’s not,” he said. “Come back to me, Hunter.”
                  “I can’t go back into the barn,” she said in a whisper, pressing the knife deeper in.
                  Ash felt a hot trickle of blood roll down his neck. If he didn’t get through to her soon, she was going to carry out the memory. She was going to kill him.
    *              *              *
                  The air was stagnant, thick with heat and humidity despite the late hour. The temperature usually cooled this late at night. It hadn’t tonight.
                  The rank stench from the canal hung in the air, competing with the horrid smell of decomposing flesh. Detective Sarah Voss found it revolting to both breathe and examine the body.
                  She had been out here for hours; having been called here due to some kind shooting that resulted from a raid on the sugar factory. Cops had discovered a body, shot, they had said, point blank straight to the chest. All she had been told over the phone was that it hadn’t been a kid and didn’t appear to be gang related, which put the case at a cut above the rest. Most street crimes went unsolved, lost in a sea of kids trying to cover for each other until the cat’s cradle of misinformation and half truths sank the trail into unreachable depths, otherwise known as the unsolved murders shelf at the back of the evidence room. This one would be different. It was an adult who had been killed, and he was from out of state.
                  The lights that were shining down, angled directly over the body, were blindingly bright, but Sarah was more interested in illuminating the canal. The lights over the water there weren’t so bright or helpful. They seemed to reflect against the water’s surface, making it impossible to see into the depths. If the unis couldn’t spot something, like the murder weapon, she would request a diver. She had only been holding off on the request because her partner had been against her hunch that the gun was in the canal. He reasoned that since there were no prints on the railing there was no indication the murderer had thrown the weapon into the water. Sarah thought otherwise.
                  “There are a mountain of cigarette butts over there by the doors, and not one at the railing here over the canal, none floating in the water,” she argued. “If kids were hanging out at the railing there would be butts scattered there, syringes, evidence of why a person would be standing there. There’s nothing. There aren’t multiple sets of prints, overlapping from months of various hands grasping hold. There are no prints.”
                  “Because no one was standing there.”
                  “We knew that they were based on how the body fell. Would you touch a railing if you’d just tossed a gun into the water? Would you forget to wipe your prints if you had?”
                  “Every inch of this place has one set of prints, here and there, Voss,” said her partner, irritated mostly because he had been fast asleep when they got the call, but also because irritation was his primary mode of functioning. Detective Charlie Linden had built his entire career on being irritable, mostly as a ploy to get people to leave him alone, and Sarah was starting to resent it. Recently he’d only been getting in her way.
                  “Call in the request,” she barked at the closest uni. “I need a diver down there. We haven’t got all