The Darker Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

those muscular arms to good use as he cuts through her rib cage. Even through the window, the sound is unsettling, like someone stepping on a series of Styrofoam cups. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but his lips are moving as he dictates his findings into the microphone that hangs above the table.
    “How did it go with Mrs. Reid?” AD Jones asks me.
    “Fine. Terrible.”
    I fill him in.
    “You were right. About why she asked for you.”
    “Yep.”
    Johnston is leaning forward to peer into Lisa. Looking inside her. I’ve seen much worse, but for some reason this makes me queasy.
    “What’s your take on this so far, Smoky?”
    I know what he’s asking me, what he wants. He wants me to do what I’m best at. To exercise my gift.
    I do what I do because I have an ability to understand the men I hunt. It’s not immediate, and it’s not clairvoyant, but give me enough data and a picture will form. It will have three dimensions. It will have emotions and thought processes. Above all, it will have hungers . Hungers I can almost taste inside my own mouth, dark flavors so tangible I can almost swallow them.
    I have worked with talented men, AD Jones among them, who helped me to hone this gift. I came to understand that the crux of it is my ability to do the most unnatural thing; I look closer when normal people would turn away.
    It’s like diving into oil; you can’t see through the murk while immersed, but you can feel its slickness covering you. Sometimes, I dive too deep. Sometimes, this scars me on the inside, and gives me secrets all my own.
    Five years ago I was hunting a man who murdered only young, beautiful brunette women. None of them were over twenty-five, and all of them were striking. Even in death, and even to me, as a woman, they were lush and beautiful. Made to cloud men’s minds.
    The man killing them felt the same way. He raped them and then he killed them with his fists. He beat them to death slowly, methodically with focused dedication. It’s an intimate, personal way to kill another human being.
    I stood over one of those victims and I looked . I looked and I saw him . The killer. I kept looking until I felt him. He was a man in a frenzy, an overwhelming mix of sexual desire and anger. In the end, I realized, he wanted his sex with them to shake the moon loose from the sky.
    I’d stood up, dazed, and had found to my horror that I was a little bit wet between the legs. I had dived too deeply, felt what he felt too strongly.
    I found the nearest bathroom and puked my guts out.
    Bad as that was, it helped. I knew we were looking for a man who was organized and smart, but who couldn’t control himself if the right trigger occurred.
    We caught our man, we had DNA, but because of my deep dive, we got a confession as well. Stacy Hobbs was a new agent in the LA office, and she was exactly what I needed. Twenty-four, brunette, a distraction to all the men in a thousand-foot radius.
    I had her dress as the women he killed had dressed, had her make herself up. I told her how to stand in the corner, how to stare at him, how to cock her hip and smile seductively. I told her she wasn’t to say a word.
    His name was Jasper St. James, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. I watched his fists clench. Watched as his mouth fell open, just a little. His lips actually plumped up before my eyes, like the lips of a vampire. He began to sweat and he muttered under his breath.
    “Bitch. Bitch.” Over and over.
    In prior interviews, he’d been cool as a cucumber.
    I crossed my legs, a signal to Stacy. She did what I’d told her to do: she looked right into Jasper’s eyes and licked her lips, long and slow, smacking and obscene and wet-sounding. Then she turned, abrupt, and left without a word.
    Jasper actually screamed with frustration when that happened. It was just a single screech, a high-pitched keen, as if someone had squeezed his balls with a pair of pliers. I leaned forward over the interrogation