The Naked Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t you just confess? Save us both the bullshit of playing psychic. We can go grab a nice lunch, my treat, and you can tell me all about your life of crime. I promise not to judge.”
    “Oh, yeah, you’re the picture of forgiveness. If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with my psychic bullshit. Thanks.”
    “Suit yourself.” His eyes raked down her and he smiled wolfishly. “Nice shirt.”
    Ciara flushed and dropped down so the water covered her breasts, but that wasn’t much help in the modesty department. Her shirt was clinging to her like a second skin, outlining every curve in graphic detail—and rustling against her senses like crackling tissue paper.
    Whenever she touched an object, any object, there was a static hum, like a radio just out of tune, but when she engaged her gift, surrounded in the water that acted as an amplifier, the volume on that radio would be cranked up to a shattering decibel. Tracing the necklace with her clothes pressing against her skin was going to be flat-out painful, but she was too stubborn, and Agent Smith made her too nervously aware , to consider taking it off.
    She’d just push through the pain.
    Ciara dropped back and drew up her legs to float in the water. She closed her eyes and tried to let the peace of the water wash away the rest of the world, but each rub of denim and cotton against her skin was a static explosion inside her mind. She forced herself to focus on the necklace as Agent Smith had described it.
    A vision flashed behind her eyelids, but it was blurry and disjointed, like an old television set, improperly tuned. The more she tried to bring it into sharp focus, the worse the pictures got. Fuzzy and choppy, the images flashed in her mind: slot machines…a long, wide boardwalk beside a rough gray ocean…pedestrians in brightly colored shirts posing in front of a statue of an elephant.
    The dissonance from the fabric against her skin turned into a burn. She knew it was just in her mind— knew it—but that didn’t make it seem any less real. She was being painted in acid and each brushstroke made her stomach churn. I’m going to be sick.
    Ciara burst up out of the water, yanking the clinging shirt away from her skin and dragging in great gulps of oxygen. “Atlantic City,” she sputtered. “It’s in Atlantic City.”
    Agent Smith started toward her, then seemed to stop himself. He leaned against the wall and arched a brow, looking utterly unimpressed. The bastard. She’d just painted her skin in acid for him and he looked like he was a breath away from yawning in her face.
    “You got anything more specific than that? There are more than a couple places to hide a necklace in Atlantic City.”
    “No, I don’t got anything more specific than that,” Ciara snapped at the ungrateful prick. “Because someone wouldn’t leave me the hell alone long enough to get a better reading. I told you I can’t work with things on my skin.”
    “So strip.”
    “Leave and I will.”
    “Sorry, sweetheart. As soon as I leave, you’re gonna be on the phone to your jewelry-fence boyfriend, tipping him off that I’m on my way to Atlantic City.”
    “I don’t have a jewelry-fence boyfriend, you paranoid prick.”
    “No? How about a brother? Or some guy you went to school with? Or girl. I’m sure criminals are very into women’s lib.”
    “I am helping you,” Ciara grumbled, climbing out of the pool, “and you’re accusing me of criminal activity. If you would just leave me alone for five minutes , I could give you the exact location of the necklace. Exact .”
    He shook his head. “Not gonna happen, sweetheart. You’re stuck with me.”
    “Only until Monday,” Ciara muttered.
    His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What happens on Monday?”
    Ciara smiled sweetly up at him as she grabbed a fresh towel off the rack on the wall. “My boss calls your boss and you go away. Poof.”
    His face darkened. “Is that a threat? Are you threatening a