Ruthless Read Online Free PDF

case. The Man in the Moon hadn’t suddenly reemerged for no reason. He had an agenda. It was the prospect of where that agenda went from here that scared her to death.
    A few more boxes made their way to the stack on thefloor before Lori asked the question Jess had been expecting for the past two days.
    “Do you think Spears is here?”
    That was another million-dollar question. Despite having considered that scenario at length, thinking about it now had knots twisting in her belly. “I can’t say for sure.” She settled another box on the floor. “What I can say with absolute certainty is that he has someone watching me and the people closest to me.” She held Lori’s gaze as she reached for the next box. “Don’t let your guard down, Lori. Not for a minute.”
    “Don’t worry,” she promised. “I have no intention of letting that bastard or one of his followers get close to me again. Once was more than enough.”
    With the final box on the floor, Lori climbed down the ladder. Jess surveyed the stack. “We need Cook and Harper and a hand truck to get these over to SPU.”
    Lori slid her phone from her pocket. “I’ll tell them to grab any warm bodies they can find and get over here.”
    Jess searched for the boxes containing the most recent files. The perp had started with the last case. She lifted the lid from the Dorie Myers investigation.
    “The guys are heading this way.”
    “Great. Thanks.” Jess thumbed through the reports. The Bureau had provided a profile on the unknown subject. That should be interesting. The official BPD reports were signed off on by Deputy Chief Black. Some were completed by…
Buddy Corlew
, former BPD detective.
    “Well, well,” Jess noted, mostly to herself. “My old friend Corlew was involved in this case.” The guy who tried to use her to get back at Dan back then and who had just recently stuck his nose into the Five case. Thesame old friend who, since his fall from grace with the Birmingham Police Department, appeared determined to make the BPD look bad. Or maybe he just wanted to annoy Dan now that Jess was back in town.
    “That should make things interesting,” Lori noted.
    Just last week Corlew had insisted BPD had fallen down on the job twelve years ago when investigating the death of a young man named Lenny Porter. The idea that the truth Jess uncovered had lent some credibility to Corlew’s charges had done nothing but inflate his already oversized ego.
    If he got wind of the reopening of this case, and he would, he’d be right back on that anti-BPD bandwagon again.
    “Let’s just hope no one has to die before he cooperates with us this time.”
    9911 Conroy Road, 11:05 p.m.
    Two boxes emptied of their contents sat on the floor in front of the sofa. A few feet away piles of timeworn folders surrounded Jess. Her legs ached from sitting cross-legged for better than two hours, and she was far from finished.
    She hadn’t brought all the files from the Man in the Moon investigation home, just the meat from the most recent cases. Interviews with family and friends. Forensic reports. Photos of the children and their bedrooms, which was the last place each little girl was seen the night they disappeared. Exterior photos of the bedroom windows and other access points for each family home.
    If one perpetrator was indeed responsible for the twenty abductions attributed to the Man in the Moon, he hadn’t screwed up even once, it seemed. Each child was taken in the middle of the night. For those who had them, family dogs never sounded an alarm. Neighbors hadn’t witnessed a single thing. No sign of forced entry.
    “Just like Peter Pan.” The visitor came, and the children appeared to have left with him of their own free will. Just unlocked the window and flew off with the Man in the Moon. The way she and Lil as kids had dreamed of escaping.
    Only those sweet little girls hadn’t escaped… they had been taken by an evil not a soul had seen coming.
    She needed