The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2 Read Online Free PDF

an iron bitch, but she knew her shit and if she said there were problems, that only meant one thing.
    Problems .
    Cullen slid her a look and said, “You could have just not answered the phone.”
    It hadn’t really been much of an option, though. Her gut had told her that.
    They’d been driving back from a weekend away in Memphis when she’d received the call and just seeing Elise Oswald’s name on the caller ID had filled her with dread. On the way in, she’d used the time to research the little town of Hell, Georgia. Aptly named. Missing or dead kids, what she suspected were cover-ups for sexual assaults, several suicides, a missing hunter. Fun stuff.
    Some bad shit going on.
    The former sheriff, now vilified by the town. There were claims that he’d used his family name, his family’s money, to throw his weight around. She’d come across that type growing up and she knew it wasn’t unheard of. Rich white boys, used to having everything they wanted. But then she’d met and married her own rich white boy. Evil didn’t lie in the money or the skin.
    It lay in the heart.
    Her skin didn’t crawl when she looked at the images of the man who was searching for his missing daughter. She saw a man grieving.
    She also saw all sorts of darkness hovering around him.
    She had work ahead of her. The tug was strong here. The nebulous force that always led her to the cases she worked, either on her own or for the Bureau. She called it the gray, and it hovered at the edges of her subconscious despite the layers of shielding she’d slammed up.
    When she went under for this, she’d come up broken and bloody. Bad shit had happened here.
    She was in the thick of it now too.
    With a morose sigh, she dropped down onto a hard-ass chair and stared at the deputy sitting behind his desk. Like a lot of small towns, the sheriff’s department and the police station utilized the same space. She’d bet they had maybe two or three full-time cops, and maybe one or two part-time officers. The sheriff’s department would run a little bit larger since this was the county seat and they covered a bigger area, the whole fucking armpit that made it Aldritch County. And it was an armpit. Or maybe a cesspool.
    This town in particular seemed to be stuck in the fifties, or worse. It was entirely possible they were still a century behind the times. She’d been given the side eye the entire time she was in there. Taige was used to that. A biracial woman living in the South didn’t always get a fair shake.
    But she sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for it now, and as the deputy shot her another dark look, she stretched out her legs. She wore a pair of sandals that Cullen had insisted on buying for her—they’d cost more than a county boy would make in two months and she made sure to display them at maximum advantage as she adjusted the ID around her neck.
    Instead of being at home, kissing her daughter goodnight, she was in this forsaken hole in the ground, dealing with a racist bastard who kept thinking about how many men she’d fucked to land a job with the Feds—the deputy had a mind wide-open like a book.
    Because she couldn’t keep listening to him without her temper ratcheting up, she shut him out and looked over at her husband. “Your dad knows we’re going to be delayed, right?” she asked, pitching her voice low.
    He slid her a look from under his lashes and then went back to idly studying the deputy. Like he wanted to rearrange the deputy’s face. She should have known Cullen would pick up on the guy glaring at her. “Yeah, I texted him when we stopped for gas.”
    Cullen had no psychic ability—he was practically a psychic null, something she completely adored. But he read people pretty well. He didn’t like what he was reading on that deputy’s face.
    She reached over and laid a hand on his arm. The tension inside him was sky-high.
    He looked over at her. She smiled, hoping to distract him.
    It didn’t work.
    “Any chance