The 3rd Victim Read Online Free PDF Page B

her hand jerked back. It was connected to a tube, the tube to a bag of clear, unidentified fluid.
    She shuddered, her blue eyes stretching wide as every last detail gushed violently through her brain. She could see her – Eliza, her beautiful baby girl – the rise of her cheek, the extraordinary length of her eyelashes, the soft blonde wisps of her hair. But then her vision started to shrink, inwards, from the sides, as a thick sea of red oozed into the corners of her memory and obliterated her daughter from her mind's eye.
    Eliza was gone, she knew, and she wondered at the finality of it all as the confusion gave way to grief and the grief to utter despair and the despair to resolve to keep the inevitable anger at bay.
    Half of her wanted the fury to come, but the other half knew that the rage inside her would be her only weapon against what inevitably lay ahead. He would be here, she thought. Not here in this room, but close by, always close by.
    Sienna shut her eyes again and allowed the fog to swallow her. Choose your battles, she told herself, repeating the advice her father had given her so many times in her youth. Accept the consequences of your actions, his mantra continued. She knew that no amount of grieving would bring her daughter back. What is done is done, the third of his quartet of truisms now slipping its way past the shadows, and finally: prepare in haste for what is to come, for clocks only move in one direction, once they have been set.

7
    F orty minutes had passed and David was on his third coffee by the time Joe had finished. He had checked on Lauren twice, the second time finding her curled up under a blanket on a bean bag in the room just beyond Mick's kitchen. Mick had her in eyeshot and was fawning over her like a muscle-bound mother hen, shooing David away every time he came to ask if watching her was any trouble.
    ‘Wow,’ said David as he sat back in his seat. ‘I can see why this whole thing feels strange, Joe. I mean, besides the coincidence of Daniel Hunt's involvement, there's the murder of the kid so close to the recent death of the father.’
    ‘That's exactly what I was thinking,’ said Joe, obviously relieved that his attorney friend didn't dismiss his concerns outright.
    ‘But on the other hand,’ continued David, sensing it was also his ‘job’ to help Joe find the logic in the happenstance, ‘when you think about it, all those coincidences can be explained. As big of an egotist as Daniel Hunt appears to be, what he says makes sense. He could well be feeling a sense of responsibility after the husband's death. And tragedies have been known to happen in sequence – thank god not often, but every now and again.’
    Joe did not answer, perhaps pondering David's reasoning, and so David went on.
    ‘Did you look into the circumstances surrounding the husband's accident?’
    ‘Yeah – and they check out,’ conceded Joe. ‘Jim Walker was on the road. He had some meetings in New York and more in the morning somewhere further south. It was late, he was tired, so he fell asleep at the wheel. He swerved across to the other side of the road and crashed head on into an eighteen-wheeler.’
    David shook his head. ‘It's sad, but it happens, Joe. You said you ran a background check on the Walkers and it came up clean.’
    Joe nodded. ‘I'm still digging, but the initial story is just like Hunt told it – the Walkers are both only children and both of their parents are deceased. The husband got his law degree with a Masters in Business from Princeton and the wife was born in the UK, where she went to Oxford and got her graduate degree in the history of art and architecture. She met Walker while on a sabbatical to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and they were married a few months later.’
    The Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of Boston's and America's most respected art galleries. ‘Sounds like a whirlwind Ivy League match made in heaven,’ said David.
    ‘By all accounts it