Justice Served: A Barkley and Parker Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

have
trouble breathing. As if on cue, the nurse raced in. She put an
oxygen mask over Lucie’s damaged face, and then snarled at Ray and
Nina.
    “I think you’ve asked enough for now! I want
you to leave. She has to get her rest.”
    “Whatever you say,” snorted Ray. “But we may
need to see Ms. Garcia again.”
    “Not until she’s physically up to it,”
countered the nurse. “Which could be quite some time.”
    Nina looked at the patient, having little
doubt that a long recovery, both physically and mentally, would be
needed.
    Out in the corridor Ray asked Nina: “So what
do you think?”
    “I think she loved the creep and would have
jumped into the ocean if he’d asked her to.” Nina drew her thin,
arched brows together. “Whoever murdered Martinez was not acting with Lucie Garcia’s consent,” she said with near
certainty.
    “Maybe not,” he allowed. “But the killer sure
as hell was acting on her behalf. Same as the other battered women
who found their problem with being knocked around solved with the
death of their alleged abusers.”
    Nina sighed. “We’ve really got our work cut
out for us. This woman vigilante—if it is a woman—is obviously not
going to lay out on the walkway for us to nab like a drug-addicted
hooker. She’s in no hurry to get caught. Not when she feels she can
rid the streets of Portland of guys like Roberto Martinez.”
    “That’s where it starts to get scary,” Ray
bristled. “There are too many damned potential targets this person
can go after. And we have no idea what triggers the attacks, per
se. Yet.”
    “We know at least one thing that does,” said
Nina ominously. “Domestic violence. Hitting a woman, or any female,
is not smart. Especially these days. She just might strike you back
tenfold!”
    Nina considered the implications of her words
on the local community. She wondered how many others had to die
before they started to get the message and the killer was
stopped.
    I don’t even want to speculate. But
that didn’t stop her from doing so anyway, with frightening
possibilities.
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    The sun shone brightly over Portland, its
heat bringing the temperatures in the city to near ninety degrees.
Inside the medical examiner’s office, air conditioning did little
to block the effects of the warmth or the smell of dead, rotting
bodies. Ray and Nina did their best to ignore both as they entered
the examination room that held Roberto Martinez’s remains.
    Standing precariously above him was the
medical examiner, Doctor Clark Terris. In his late fifties, he
looked like the perfect Santa Claus, only with dark red hair and
matching beard. Wearing a stained white jacket and plastic gloves,
he greeted the detectives like houseguests.
    “Glad you could make it.”
    Ray frowned. “Not like we had much choice,
Doc.” As it was, they already had a pretty damned good idea what
killed Roberto Martinez, if not who. But they had to make it
official.
    Terris removed the gloves and set them beside
the covered corpse. “Simply put, he died from massive blunt trauma
to the head,” he said. “Just as the other two victims did. His
skull was crushed like an eggshell; right jaw fractured in a dozen
places. There were other fractures as well, including multiple ones
to his vertebrae, but most came after he was already dead.” He
clawed at his bushy beard. “It’s all in the report.”
    “Tell me, Doc,” asked Ray for the record, “do
you think a woman is capable of inflicting such damage?”
    Terris studied Nina beneath thick brows, as
if using her to consider the matter. “Of course,” he said.
“Especially if she was mad enough—and I don’t mean crazy, though
that also can’t be ruled out. It helps her cause if she’s using an
object like a bat that can make almost anyone seem like
Hercules.”
    “You find anything on the victim that we can
use to nail the killer to the wall?” asked Nina.
    She suspected that, similar to the earlier
victims,