The Dying Hour Read Online Free PDF

her fists against all sides of her tomb but couldn’t. She began to sob but it only made her choke and gasp.
    She forced herself to be calm.
    Oh God. What’s happening?
    Be calm. Be calm. Be calm.
    She had to stay calm and think. She had no sense of how long she’d been here. Or if it was real. Was it real? Or was it just some sort of joke? A sick college rite of passage? One of Luke’s stupid friends? Trying to scare her? It wasn’t funny.
    It wasn’t a joke.
    She turned to her left, blinking at the darkness. She started a prayer when her body bounced, shifting her slightly, piercing the blackness with a thread of light.
    Karen blinked.
    With some effort she repositioned herself to the left, drawing her face closer to the light. It was a seam no wider than the edge of a credit card, allowing her a narrow glimpse of the outside. Concentrating and pressing against it to widen it, she was able to see carpet.
    She held her breath.
    She was in an RV. Directly across from her was the veneer finish of the storage compartment that supported a twin bed. So she was under the twin bed at floor level. Under the storage area of one of the RV’s beds at the rear. Maybe she could break out?
    She forced her body against the wall to her right and pushed hard against the wall with the crack. Nothing. Like trying to push against stone.
    Karen collected herself, drew her face back to the crack, pressing against it, widening it a little, to see what else she could see. Her eyes traveled from the rear, over the files, papers, maps toward the front. It looked as if there’d been a terrible struggle.
    She saw the driver’s head. His neck. Karen tried to swallow.
    The reverend.
    Cutlery, or what she thought was cutlery, rattled as the RV rolled over a bump, jolting Karen.
    She heard a thud above her, saw something strobe across her shaft of light. When she focused, her scalp tingled.
    A woman’s arm hung over the edge of the bed above her.

9
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    S hortly after dawn the next day, a police helicopter hovered over State Route 539, a few hundred feet above Karen Harding’s Toyota.
    The yellow ribbon of tape marking the huge rectangle around her car quivered in the prop wash, lifting the pages on Hank Stralla’s clipboard. Sipping take-out coffee, the Sawridge County detective faced the clear morning light painting the spot where Karen Harding had vanished.
    Too early to tell exactly what the hell happened here.
    The chopper pivoted to make more passes south along the shoulder. It had gone about half a mile. The break in the thumping allowed him to think. Was this a young woman who had simply hitched a ride when her car broke down, or a crime? One thing was certain: the circumstances were suspicious.
    He looked up at the Cessna borrowed from Washington State Patrol. It made another pass, photographing the area and scouring the terrain for any signs of a body. Then he heard a yip from Sheeba, the Belgian shepherd emerging from the forest, snout to the ground, leading Chris Farmer, one of the state’s best K-9 officers.
    “The heavy rain won’t make it easy for her to pick up a scent,” Farmer had told Stralla at the outset.
    “I appreciate that. Just do what you can.”
    Stralla watched the crime scene investigators in their white moon suits working on the Toyota. They’d been at it since daybreak.
    “At this point, there’s no sign of violence,” said Cal Rosen, the lead criminalist, as he chugged a Coke. “No indication of a struggle or blood. No casings. Nothing. We got some partial latents, but the car’s pretty clean. Strange she would leave the keys.”
    “Strange. What about mechanically?”
    “We’ve got to get the car on a flatbed and over to the garage to process it further, give it a good goingover, and examine everything. At this point, it looks like she ran out of gas and got picked up, or walked away.”
    Stralla agreed, it was the most likely scenario. His attention went to her driver’s license picture on his