The Restorer Read Online Free PDF

now he seemed to tower over me.
    “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.
    “I guess I’m still a little jumpy from earlier. And now this.” I nodded toward the body on the ground, but I kept my gaze trained on Devlin. I didn’t want to stare at the corpse. I didn’t want to put a face with a restless, covetous ghost that I might one day see wandering through the veil.
    “I lead a dull life,” I said without irony. “I don’t think I’m cut out for crime scenes.”
    “There are a lot of things in this world to be afraid of, but a dead body isn’t one of them.”
    Spoken like a man who knew things, I thought with a shiver. His voice was the kind that made one think of dark places. The kind that made the skin ripple along the backbone.
    “I’m sure you’re right,” I murmured, searching the mist behind him, wondering if his ghosts might have slipped through the gates after all. That would explain the unnatural static that seemed to surround him and the sense of foreboding I felt at his nearness.
    But no. There was nothing behind him in the dark.
    It’s this place.
    I could feel the negative energy clutching at me like the ivy roots that burrowed into the cracks and crevices of the mausoleums, the kudzu that wound tightly around the tree trunks, slowly strangling the magnificent old live oaks for which the cemetery had been named. I wondered if Devlin felt it, too.
    He tilted his head and moonlight washed across his face, softening his gaunt features and giving me yet another teasing glimpse of the man he’d once been. I could see the gleam of mist in his hair and on the tips of his eyelashes. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his thick eyebrows perfectly symmetrical and a fine complement to the strong curve of his nose. His eyes were dark, but I’d not seen them in enough light to tell their true color.
    He was handsome, charismatic and intensely focused, and he intrigued me almost as much as he disturbed me. I couldn’t stare at him for long without hearing the echo of my father’s third rule inside my head:
    Keep your distance from those who are haunted.
    I drew a breath of moist air and tried to shake off his strange spell. “Have you found out anything about the victim?”
    Even to my own ears, my voice sounded tentative and I wondered if he would pick up on my unease. He was probably used to a certain amount of discomfort in his presence. He was a cop, after all. A cop with a very complicated past, I was beginning to suspect.
    “We don’t know who she is yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    So the victim was female. “Do you know how she died?”
    He paused, his gaze sliding away before he answered. “We won’t know conclusively until after the autopsy.”
    It wasn’t so much what he said as what he didn’t say. And the way he hadn’t been able to meet my eyes. What was he hiding from me? What terrible things had been done to that poor woman?
    And then I thought of all the hours I’d spent working alone in this cemetery. What if the killer had happened along at one of those times?
    As if reading my mind, Devlin said, “I can tell you this much. She wasn’t killed here. Her body was brought to the cemetery for disposal.”
    Was that meant to comfort me?
    “Why here, I wonder?”
    He shrugged. “It’s a likely spot. This place has been abandoned for years and the ground over the old graves is soft. Makes for easy digging. Cover it up with a few dead leaves and some debris and a casual observer would never even notice the soil had been disturbed.”
    “But then the rain set in.”
    His gaze returned to me. “The rain set in and you came along. Even if the dirt hadn’t washed away, odds are you would have noticed the fresh digging when you cleaned up the grave.”
    Call me a coward, but I was glad it hadn’t gone down that way. “Who found the body?”
    “A couple of students climbed over the wall for a little private party. They spotted the exposed head and torso and