Thief of Souls Read Online Free PDF

Jessup. That’s all. And the patterns of Sergeant Weller—each action, every word—betrayed to Dillon who this man had been, who he was, and who he was destined to be. It was not a pretty picture.
    â€œDon’t you talk, son?” Weller asked. “Or are you one of them idiot savants?”
    Weller chuckled at his own words. Dillon paid particular attention to the methodical but nervous way Weller rubbed the fingers of his right hand, then clasped the hand into a fist. To Dillon, this man’s life was easier to read than a street sign.
    â€œYour wife wishes you would stop smoking,” Dillon told him. “She wishes you would stop drinking, too.”
    Catching Dillon’s intrusive gaze in the rearview mirror,Weller’s cold demeanor took a turn toward winter. “Watch yourself, son,” he said. “You make up stories about people, you may find people making up stories about you.”
    For the first time, the trooper riding shotgun turned around. His name tag read LARABY . He was younger than Weller and to Dillon didn’t seem nearly as unpleasant. He did, however, seem troubled. “People are saying you bring back the dead,” Officer Laraby said. “You got anything to say about that?”
    â€œIt’s all a bunch of voodoo talk,” Weller sneered. “Mass hysteria—these people all think they got over ‘the virus,’ but I say some of their marbles are still lost in the drain pipe.”
    Officer Laraby turned to him. “So how do you explain all those people who turned up alive?”
    Weller brushed a weathered hand over his butch and threw a warning glance at his young partner. “It’s all hearsay. That’s how a hoax works—hearsay held together by spit and tissue paper, isn’t that right, son?”
    Dillon smiled, all the while thinking how much he hated the way this man called him “son.” “I suppose so.”
    The grin made Weller more irritable. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? What did you do—take money from folks who didn’t know any better, then bring back people who weren’t even dead? That’s the way you worked it, wasn’t it, son?”
    Dillon let the grin slip from his face. “You hit your wife one more time, and she’s gonna leave you, you know?”
    Panic flashed in Weller’s eyes. His jaw twitched uncomfortably. Laraby watched the two of them, his head going back and forth like it was a game of Ping-Pong, to see who would speak next.
    Weller hid his uneasiness behind an outburst of laughter. “Oh, you’re good,” he told Dillon. “You put on one heck ofa show—but the truth is you don’t know a thing about me.”
    Dillon found himself grinning again—the way he did in the days when the wrecking hunger had consumed him. “I know what I know,” he said.
    Dillon sensed the younger cop’s growing discomfort, his confusion and uncertainty. Dillon also noticed the particular shade of the rings beneath Laraby’s eyes, the faint smell of mild perfumed soap, and a handful of bitten fingernails. Dillon, his skill at deciphering patterns as acute as ever, understood Laraby’s situation completely.
    â€œSorry your baby’s sick,” Dillon told Officer Laraby.
    The man went pale. Dillon noted the exact way his chest seemed to cave in.
    â€œHeart problem?” asked Dillon. “Or is it his lungs?”
    â€œHeart,” Laraby said in a weak sort of wonder.
    â€œDon’t talk to him!” Weller ordered Laraby. “It’s tricks, that’s all.”
    â€œYeah,” said Laraby, unconvinced. “Yeah, I guess . . . .”
    In front of them, the car that carried Carter had pulled out far ahead of them. If Dillon’s plan was to work, he knew he would have to strike now, with lethal precision. He leaned forward, and whispered into Sergeant