Mann 01 - Where Angels Rest Read Online Free PDF

her eyes, which were open, showed broken blood vessels.
    Choked?
    Nick’s head cleared a fraction and he dialed Dispatch. Asked for Anson Bell, the Carroll County sheriff. While he waited, he spotted the girl’s car and climbed down into the ditch to look at it. It was an older-model Camry, dark, with Cuyahoga plates, and the driver’s side door stood open. Nick peered inside. Her purse was open and her cell phone half out. There were no food wrappers or half-eaten snacks.
    He circled the car. The front bumper barely kissed a tree and Nick’s hackles lifted: The slant of the embankment should have caused more impact than that. He looked up to where the girl lay, choked but with no food in sight, and a knot of dread tightened in his chest.
    “Anson,” he said, when Bell came on the line. Let it go. This one wouldn’t belong to him. “This is Nick Mann. I just ran over a dead woman on 219.”
    “What?”
    “Her car’s in the ditch. I’m looking at the body.”
    “What?”
    “Eighteen, maybe twenty years old. Jesus, I thought I’d killed her, but she’s been dead a while. Probably been out here all night.”
    “Aw, man.” Nick could picture him pushing away hisbacon and eggs, running a hand over his head and mentally forfeiting whatever weekend activities he’d had planned. “You got anyone coming?”
    Nick could just make out the sign for the Carroll County line through the mist behind him. The knot of dread loosened just a touch. “Hell, no. This is
your
county.”
    Bell and three deputies pulled up within minutes.
    “I could’ve lived a long time without another one of these talks with parents,” Bell said. He’d been sheriff for thirty years. Had seen more than one young driver in a heap on the road.
    Maybe never one that wasn’t an accident, though. Nick closed his eyes. Stop it. She’d probably gagged on a piece of chewing gum, pulled off the road, and clambered up the embankment in a panic. An autopsy would find a lump of hard candy or gum in her throat; a search of the car would find the wrapper. Case closed.
    One of Bell’s deputies produced a driver’s license from the purse in the Camry. “Carrie Sitton,” he read, “born ten-twelve-ninety-three. From Cleveland.” He pushed a button on her cell phone and shook his head. “No calls last night.”
    Bell walked to the front of the car and looked at the bumper just grazing the tree. His gaze followed a trodden path from there to where Carrie’s body now lay. “You hit her right there?” he asked Nick.
    “She was out further in the road, facedown, I’d say, from the way the rain washed off the back of her clothes. My wheels must’ve bumped her over.”
    “Looks like she dragged herself up here. But that car couldn’t’ve been going more than five or ten miles an hour when it hit the tree. Why didn’t she walk?” Bell stoppedat the body. He reached down and fingered her collar back from her throat. Nothing. He tugged a little further to expose the back of her neck.
    Bruises.
    Nick’s gut tightened. He cursed and walked away, putting space between himself and the dead girl. Not his problem. Nick didn’t chase murderers anymore; he chased possums.
    Bell took a few more minutes with the scene then walked over to Nick. He took off his hat. “We don’t have murders in Carroll County.”
    “We don’t have murders in Hopewell County, either,” Nick said. Time to go. Guns and tequila waiting.
    “Whoa. All those years as a bigwig in L.A.,” Bell said. “You’ve worked more murder cases than anyone in this state.”
    “Past tense. This one’s yours, Anson. Are you finished with me?”
    “What’s your hurry?”
    “No hurry, just on my way to my cabin.”
    Bell hiked his brows, then looked at Nick’s truck, where a deputy had been shooting pictures, checking the undercarriage. There was no reason to doubt Nick’s story, but there was no reason not to, either. Taking pictures was the right thing to do.
    Bell said, “That