Pretty Little Liars #14 Read Online Free PDF Page A

eager to head home and take a long, hot shower.
    She passed the cafeteria and staggered out into the bright morning. The street swarmed with people, including a bunch of ragtag protesters holding signs on the corner. ROSEWOOD , some of the signs read. SERIAL KILLER was written on another in big red letters. “Keep our children safe!” the protesters bellowed. One of them wore a Rosewood Day sweatshirt.
    Spencer watched them for a while, feeling ambivalent. It was strange to have people care so passionately about something she was so directly and intimately caught up in.
    Then she noticed a news van parked across the street, with a female reporter sitting in the passenger seat. Spencer ducked her head and strode quickly to her car, afraid that in seconds, the reporter would recognize her.
    â€œSpencer?”
    She gritted her teeth and whirled around—but it was Chase, a new sort-of friend. He was standing under the hospital awning wearing a black nylon coat and a gray baseball cap.
    Spencer reluctantly crossed to Chase and pulled him into a more secluded nook near a service entrance. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.
    Chase tugged at his mangled ear, a wound from a stalker in boarding school. “Weren’t we supposed to meet today? I looked all over for you. Your mom finally told me where you were.”
    â€œDid she tell you why I was here?”
    Chase shook his head.
    â€œOkay,” Spencer said, and told him everything. She knew she could trust Chase. He ran an unsolved-crime blog, and they’d met up when she was trying to track down Ali. There had been some identity confusion at first—Chase was trying to pass his brother Curtis off as himself because he was self-conscious about his ear, and for a while Spencer had even worried he was A. But he’d eventually come clean.
    When Spencer finally finished telling him about Noel and the storage shed, Chase narrowed his green eyes. “So . . . Noel isn’t Ali’s boyfriend?”
    Spencer sighed. “Nope. We’re back to square one.”
    â€œWell then, we’d better get going,” Chase said, linking his arm around Spencer’s elbow.
    Spencer planted her feet. “Where?”
    Chase blinked. “We’re going to stake out that town house on the surveillance video.”
    When Chase visited her yesterday, he’d shown her a grainy surveillance video of the outside of a town house in Rosewood. A girl who looked a lot like Ali was visible in a few frames. They’d made plans to investigate it today, but after everything that had happened with Noel, Spencer had forgotten.
    A city bus whooshed by, spewing out exhaust. “Someone’s boyfriend ended up in a storage shed because of us,” Spencer said nervously. “Ali knows we’re on to her. I can’t let anyone else get hurt.”
    â€œBut what if this is where she lives ?” Chase asked. “If we could find proof that she’s still alive, we could turn it in to the cops and put an end to this, once and for all. And then no one else would get hurt.”
    Spencer twisted her mouth. A shadow flickered across the window of a car parked across the street, for a moment looking like a person.
    Chase did have a point. What if they found something at the apartment? What if they could end this whole nightmare today?
    She looked up at Chase and nodded ever so slightly. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
    Twenty minutes later, as low clouds rolled across the sky, Spencer and Chase steered into a housing complex in West Rosewood, the low-rent part of town. Of course, low-rent was relative: A big FOR SALE sign in the development entrance boasted hardwood floors and marble countertops in every unit. A brand-new community swimming pool glistened in the distance. And the local grocery store was Fresh Fields, where you couldn’t buy a quart of milk for less than five bucks.
    â€œThere it is,” Chase said,