Level Five Read Online Free PDF Page A

She’d never really gotten the hang of them.
    “She was taken from her home, wasn’t she?” 
    Edie nodded.  “Actually it was an apartment.  She never heard him enter, and initially didn’t see his face.  She was asleep and woke up when she felt a sharp sting in her arm.  He had on a ski mask and clamped his hands over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. Whatever he injected her with caused her to lose consciousness. When she came to she was alone in a basement with concrete block walls and no windows.  That’s pretty much as far as we got today.”
    He paused with a bite of cashew chicken neatly held between his chopsticks.  His intelligent eyes held her gaze. “Are you all right?”
    She gave a dry laugh.  “Sometimes it scares the hell out of me how well you know me.”  She leaned back in her chair and frowned thoughtfully.  “I’m okay, but she gets to me like none of my other subjects ever have.  Maybe it’s the scars, physical evidence that are a reminder that even though the crime is over, it really isn’t ever over for her.”
    “Just like Francine’s crime was never really over for you.  The bad guy was caught but it destroyed your parent’s marriage. You no longer speak to your mother and your father is dead.”
    “What are you, suddenly my therapist?” Edie broke eye contact with him and gazed out the window.  “I need to cut the grass,” she said in a clumsy effort to change the topic. As the years had gone by she’d become less and less inclined to talk about or even think about Francine’s murder and its devastating aftermath.
    She definitely didn’t want to think about the fact that her mother had remarried and effectively erased her past, including Edie.  She couldn’t go there. That place held pain too intense to bear.
    She definitely didn’t want to think about her father. The past was past and nothing could ever change it.  When Edie had written her book about Francine she’d stamped closure on that trauma from her youth.
    She turned to look at Jake, her chin lifted slightly as if to dare him to continue talking about anything but the lawn.
    “I’ll try to get to it before bedtime tonight,” he replied.
    “Thanks, I appreciate it.”  She felt guilty, knew that she’d shut down. But there were still some things she considered taboo in their relationship. Rehashing Francine’s death and all the debris left behind was definitely one of them.
    “What’s going on with you?” she asked in an effort to return to the easy relationship she expected between them.
    “I got assigned a missing persons case today.”
    “Oh really?   Who’s missing?”
    “Her name is Kelly Paulson.  Actually she’s been missing for the last six weeks, but the case has gone cold. They thought maybe some fresh eyes could see something that had been missed.”
    “I always knew you had fresh eyes,” she said with a forced grin.  He returned her smile although she thought she saw an edge of frustration in his eyes.  “So, tell me about Kelly Paulson.”
    “She’s twenty-five years old, worked as a dental assistant and on April 23 rd didn’t make it home from work.  Her car was still parked in the lot behind the dental office but nobody has seen her since.”
    “She married?  Have a boyfriend?”
    He nodded, his dark hair curling charmingly across his forehead. “Boyfriend, but he has a solid alibi for the time of the disappearance. He’s a sous chef at The Lamplight Restaurant downtown. He was on duty that day until seven in the evening when he got home and she wasn’t there.”  Jake shoved his plate away and frowned.
    “She was an attractive young woman,” he continued, “in fact she kind of reminded me of you.  She had long dark hair and blue eyes.”
    “You know when Colette went missing her boyfriend never gave up trying to find her.  He spent three years waiting for her to be returned.  Would you wait that long for me, Jake?”
    He looked at her impatiently.