Regenesis (Book 1): Impact Read Online Free PDF Page A

walked away from the accident without a scratch. A day later, Bryce is
killed at his apartment after he was released with a minor concussion and a
broken wrist.”
    The
Chief intervened there, “Qing dies five days after Bryce right?”
    Sage
nodded, “But he found and returned the missing cat of our fifth victim, Ana,
before then.”
    “How
did you find that out anyway?” asked Felton.
    “I
ran a search for both of their names and found that a lost cat notice was
revoked, with Qing as the one who returned it.”
    “Anyway,”
Felton continued, “Ana, the fifth victim, meets Tony Allen at a train station;
Tony’s our sixth. Ana dies in Tony’s bed eight days later. Tony’s accused of
murder and meets the attorney he’s given, Rachel Schmitt, who’s our seventh
victim. She watched Tony die two days after Ana in one of our holding cells.”
Detective Sage made sure the chief understood and repeated where it happened.
“Rachel gave her testimony of the incident to Brett Foster; she died a day
after Tony.”
    “And
Brett’s killed nine days later.” Johnson finished. “Every victim is in some way
connected to the next person before they died…”
    “Which
means someone Brett met within the past nine days is going to die,” Felton
muttered.
    “So
it seems. Who do you think he met within that time frame?”
    Detective
Sage told him it could be anyone. “Brett set the record for the marathon last
Sunday, so between all the runners he met, the press, and any other random
person he could have ran into there’s a wide area of possible targets…”
    “Well
who do you think is still in Baltimore?”
    “Who
knows? It could even be someone he met when he bought groceries, or when he
brought someone into the station,” Felton answered.
    Sage
flipped open the file and browsed through it. Brett Foster was an officer at
nineteen, was very athletic, despite his asthma, and regularly attended the
Bahá'í Faith church. On the fifth of August he set the world record for the
marathon at an hour and forty minutes, and after numerous drug screenings, he
was awarded the world record as well as the first place prize for the marathon
in which he raced. He was found dead in his apartment by a neighbor four days
later, dead at the age of twenty-five.
    The
detective tossed the file on the desk and rubbed his eyes, “There are too many
people…” he mumbled, “We don’t have a good lead.”
    “Can
you at least make a guess?”
    “It
could be anyone,” Felton told him, “Someone he met at the marathon, or a
movie…anybody.”
    Chief
Johnson nodded, “Then there’s nothing we can do until the next stiff turns up.”
    Sage
looked cross, “We can’t just ignore this. We’ve got a duty to these people and
if we don’t do our damn job this son of a bitch is going to slaughter too many
people before he draws enough attention to himself to force our hand. It’d be
better if we tried to stop him early rather than–”
    “And
how are we going to do that?” the chief inquired. “We seem to lack any suspects
and we don’t know who this alleged killer is going to target, and we can’t
guard the entire city all at once, so unfortunately I say we need to wait for
more evidence Sage.” Chief Johnson returned the file to Detective Sage with an
apology. “We’ve got plenty on our hands as it is. You two did hear about the
botanical gardens in the Druid Hill Park that the Delta attacked, right?”
    Felton
nodded. “We did…How are things?”
    “Burnt
it right to the ground long before any firemen could arrive,” he told them. “We
were just lucky that Sergeant Murdock and Officer Maguire happened to catch
three of them in the act and managed to arrest them. Caught them with jugs of
gasoline, Molotov cocktails, and handguns. The city will have to decide on
whether rebuilding the gardens is a realistic endeavor, but I’d like to know
why they decided to burn down a botanical garden of all things.”
    The
Delta was a