The Coldest Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

You can never go home again. But it’s wrong. He did come home. And now the fun was just beginning.

C HAPTER S IX
    The weatherman had predicted a warm and sunny day, but Louise Brigham looked up at the darkening sky and recognized the makings of a thunderstorm. The clothes she had washed in the sink that morning still lay in the laundry basket waiting to be hung on the makeshift clothesline she had strung between her apartment and the one behind her.
    Project housing allowed for very little in the way of a yard, so the closeness of the buildings was used for other things, such as hanging wash and giving the children a safe place to play under the constant eye of one neighbor or another.
    Louise brought the clothes basket back into the kitchen and let out a sigh. The nearest Laundromat was twelve blocks away, and through some of the worst neighborhoods in Evansville. Even the police seemed to avoid those areas unless they were in groups. But from what she had heard on Channel Six news on television this morning, there were other parts of the city that were just as dangerous. Some type of murder investigation was going on at that big hotel out by the airport.
    She hadn’t always lived like this. At one time she had been married to a good man and had a high-paying job. Back then she still had a good figure and nice features and the world had looked bright and promising. She would never have dreamed it would end up like this a mere five years later.
    She looked down at the basket of wet clothes. They won’t dry themselves, she thought.
    She went to the closet to get her Windbreaker—the only jacket that she owned. When she pulled the door open she noticed something wasn’t quite right. Then she heard a noise behind her.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    They now had a name for the victim at the Marriott. Cordelia Morse. It said so on her Illinois driver’s license and on a library card for the Gallatin County Public Library. The address on the driver’s license was for a post-office box in Shawneetown, Illinois. Jack had heard of the town, and the things he’d heard weren’t flattering.
    Her purse was found in the hotel room’s closet along with a lightweight jacket. The jacket pockets contained the usual items—a travel pack of Kleenex, some change, and a small scrap of paper with nothing on it. The purse, however, was a gold mine.
    Crime scene would be at the Marriott for the rest of the day, but by eight o’clock that morning, Jack and Liddell decided to split up to follow up on the scant information they had extracted from the scene. This case promised to be challenging. Not only because the victim was from another state, but because the amount of violence done to the body indicated so many things.
    The killing could be a domestic homicide, a husband or boyfriend thing where he catches her in Evansville seeing someone else and snaps. But she had registered at the Marriott for a week, and there had been no calls to or from her room, so that kind of eliminated the domestic issues.
    Of course, the lack of calls could mean that she had used a cell phone, although no cell phone was found at the scene. But why would the killer take the phone and nothing else? The killer did take something, Jack reminded himself. He took her face and her eyes and her hand. The tongue was another matter. What did that mean?
    One of the crime scene techs had also found a set of keys on the floor under the bed—an electronic key that was probably a car key, and two or three well-worn keys. Maybe dropped by the victim and ended up under the bed during the struggle, Jack thought. The keys were attached to a faux-diamond-studded letter C. C for Cordelia, the name on the driver’s license?
    Jack stepped out of the back foyer of the hotel and into the parking lot. Black clouds moved to the north and thunder rumbled in the distance. It was unusual to have thunderstorms this late in October. He hoped the rain would hold