In a Heartbeat Read Online Free PDF Page A

She gripped the sheets with clammy hands, searching the darkness. The curtain fluttered in the sultry breeze from the window. The scent of honeysuckle drifted through the opening. The smell of grass followed, and heat lightning flashed across the sky.
    Had she left the window open?
    She normally locked everything securely at night.
    Panicked, she threw her legs over the side of the bed and listened for an intruder.
    The wind whistled. A tree limb scraped the glass pane. Shadows hung outside like bony hands, clawing at her in the pre-dawn light.
    She flipped on the light, but it flickered and went off. Her breath rattled out, tense in the night. Had she lost power, or had someone disconnected the electricity?
    She searched for the baseball bat she kept under the bed. Wished she’d gotten up enough nerve to buy a gun.
    A squeaking sound splintered the quiet, and her breath rushed out. She clenched the wooden bat and tiptoed toward the bedroom door. From the doorway, she could see the small bath, den and galley-style kitchen. She’d purposely chosen the open plan because there was no place for an intruder to hide. She hesitated at the door, peered through the black emptiness. The light she kept burning in the den had been extinguished, too.
    A shadow floated across the window.
    Someone was outside.
    BY 8:00 A.M., Brad stood in the midst of the stifling hot task force room the FBI had designated for the Grave Digger #2 case, and drew a line across the whiteboard to indicate the time the second victim, Mindy Faulkner, had been reported missing. So far, the task force consisted of himself and Ethan, two local Atlanta detectives, Anderson and Bentley, Captain Rosberg, and two Buford cops, Officers Gunther and Surges, who’d been on the scene when they’d found the first victim. They were expecting a profiler from Quantico at some point, but she hadn’t yet arrived.
    Outside, horns honked from the heavy morning traffic, sirens wailed as the ambulances rushed to Crawford Long and Grady Hospitals and a construction crew from a neighboring building cluttered the background with noise. Rush hour was in full swing, the commuters slogging through the downtown maze from the interstates, while locals hit Atlanta’s subway system, MARTA, and Georgia Tech and Georgia State students dragged themselves from coffee houses to their first class.
    The temperature was already soaring in the high nineties. Warnings to parents not to leave their children or pets in a car alone, along with talk of heatstroke among the elderly, filled the news, the drought another reminder that Mindy wouldn’t last long if they didn’t find her soon.
    Brad gestured toward a roll-away map and pierced it with different colored push pins indicating where the first victim, thirty-one-year-old Joann Worthy, had disappeared, then where her body had been found.
    “Okay, what do we have so far?” he asked.
    Officer Gunther raised a thumb, the sweat stains beneath his armpits growing. The city air-conditioning must be on overload because the system in the building wasn’t working, and they were all melting in the sweltering temperatures, suit jackets tossed aside and sleeves rolled up for relief, although none seemed forthcoming. “We canvassed the lake area, interviewed the neighbors within a five-mile radius of where the body was found. No one saw or heard anything suspicious.”
    Brad grimaced. Just like the first time. “Do we have the M.E.’s report or word from forensics yet?”
    “Nothing definite from forensics,” Ethan said. “Preliminary autopsy shows multiple contusions to the body, lacerations on hands, wrists, blunt force trauma to the head, signs that the perp attempted to sexually assault the woman, although he didn’t rape her.”
    “He’s varying from White then,” Brad said. “But if he failed at rape, he may be impotent, as White was.”
    “It probably adds to his agitation,” Ethan added.
    A chorus of mumblings rushed out in