Hunting Fear Read Online Free PDF

Metcalf’s voice approaching. He sounded a bit like a bear somebody was poking with a sharp and annoying stick.
    “I don’t know why the hell you’ve got the nerve to be surprised I’d want to talk to you again. You came to me last week, remember?”
    “For all the good it did.” The woman’s voice wasn’t exactly bitter, but it had an edge to it.
    Lindsay happened to be looking at Lucas Jordan’s face, and as the unseen woman spoke, she saw it change. He seemed almost to flinch, a momentary surprise and something much stronger tightening his features. And then he was utterly expressionless.
    Interested, Lindsay turned her gaze to the door in time to see Sheriff Metcalf come in, followed by a slender woman of medium height with extremely dark eyes and black hair in a short, no-fuss hairstyle.
    She stopped in the doorway, her unreadable dark gaze going immediately to Jordan. As though, Lindsay thought, she was not only not surprised, as he had been, but had fully expected him to be there.
    He, however, got in the first jab.
    “I see the circus is in town,” he drawled, leaning back in his chair as he looked across the room at her.
    Perhaps oddly, she smiled, and her voice was dry when she said, “It’s a carnival, as you well know. Hey, Luke. Long time no see.”
    “Samantha.”
    Metcalf was the one who was surprised. “You two know each other?”
    “Once upon a time,” she replied, her gaze still locked with Jordan’s. “Obviously, he was . . . slumming . . . when we met.”
    Jordan was the first to look away, his mouth twisting slightly.
    It was his partner who said casually, “Hey, Samantha.”
    “Jay.”
    “You been in town long?”
    “Couple weeks. We’re at the fairgrounds for another two.” Her dark gaze fixed on Lindsay, and she inclined her head politely. “Detective Graham.”
    Lindsay nodded but remained silent. She had been with the sheriff when Samantha Burke had shown up here at the station early last week, and her disbelief—like Metcalf’s—had been just this side of hostile. She felt her face heating up now as she remembered that scorn.
    Misplaced scorn, as it turned out.
    Because the carnival “mystic” had tried to warn them, and they hadn’t listened.
    And Mitchell Callahan had died.

 
2
    Metcalf was frowning as he looked from the federal agent to the carnival fortune-teller, and he didn’t try to hide his unhappiness, uncertainty, and frustration with the situation.
    She didn’t let it show, but Samantha could sympathize.
    To Jordan, his tone not quite questioning, Metcalf said, “She came to us last week and said a man was going to be kidnapped. Didn’t know his name, but gave us a damned good physical description of Mitchell Callahan.”
    “Naturally,” Samantha said, “they didn’t believe me. Until his wife called in to report it late Saturday. Then they came straight back to me, of course. Filled with questions and suspicions.”
    The sheriff’s frown deepened to a scowl as he stared at her. “And I would have had your ass behind bars if so many of your fellow carnies—who also all had alibis—hadn’t sworn by all they supposedly hold dear that you’d been there and in full view virtually all day on Thursday when Callahan disappeared.”
    “Miles away and with my car being worked on here in town by your own mechanic,” Samantha reminded him. “I think somebody might have noticed if I’d ridden one of the ponies down Main Street, don’t you think?”
    “You’re not the only one of that bunch with a car.”
    “Nobody else loaned me a car or found theirs missing,” she reminded him coolly. “I was at the carnival every day until after midnight, from Tuesday afternoon after I left here until you guys showed up there on Saturday to . . . talk . . . to me.”
    Obviously trying to be fair and impartial—at least now—Lindsay said, “Golden isn’t a regular stop for the carnival, and we couldn’t find a single connection between any of them and