Twisted Hunger Read Online Free PDF

he earned his PhD, he liked the area enough to accept a position as Associate Professor to teach English literature at the Charlotte campus.
    He gradually overcame his fear and believed he had permanently blocked out the horrifying experience. Then suddenly, seven years ago, two more mutilation killings in Atlanta topped the television news for several days, and Luke’s night terrors began anew.
    He still had all the newspaper articles in an envelope on the top shelf of his closet. Hundreds of times he had tried to throw them away, but he never succeeded. The articles had become a symbol of the one challenge he had run from—his personal Moby Dick.
    For a long time he had stuck to the straight and narrow, right through choosing a career. In his mind, teaching fell into the no-risk category and gave him the opportunity to feel as though he were doing something to pay back society for the misdeeds of his early teen years. The pay wasn’t the greatest, but there was always the benefit of extended vacation times.
    And those were the times when he made up for the fact that he was usually bored out of his mind with taking the safe road. During those breaks, he worked extremely hard to burn off his need to live on the wild side. He tried mountain climbing, skydiving, parasailing, even bungee-jumping. If it was legal, had an element of danger and risked no one’s life but his own, he was game for it. Afterward, he was usually ready to go back to being Mr. Madigan, a feet-on-the-ground, head-in-the-books English teacher.
    He had made reservations to go white-water rafting down the Colorado River this summer, but now he doubted that even that crazy ride would erase the memory of the whore’s face or block out the sound of the voice in his head that kept calling him a coward.
    Luke splashed cold water on his face in an attempt to wash away leftover images from the nightmare. The dark blue eyes that stared back at him from the bathroom mirror were still glazed with a combination of sleepiness and fear. Worse than that, they were framed by a face that was maturing at a much faster rate than he was ready for.
    Dammit, he was only thirty-six. What were all those little lines doing around his eyes? And when had his thick head of light brown hair gotten so much darker? At least if it had stayed light, the gray hair that had suddenly sprouted by his temple wouldn’t be so noticeable.
    He turned away from the stranger in the mirror and stepped into the shower. The hot water washed away the sleepiness and awakened the analytical part of his brain.
    It seemed illogical that the same woman was still around, still performing an occasional mutilation after twenty-one years, and yet he couldn’t dismiss it as a coincidence either.
    The main reason he had gotten control of his nightmares again after the Atlanta murders was that he had logically deduced that they could not have been connected to those in California fourteen years before. The other reason was because it was reported that the FBI had taken over the cases and, when no further information was released, he was able to convince himself that they had the situation under control. After reading the article in yesterday’s paper, he didn’t think he could fool himself into believing that again.
    It was well past time for him to find a way to put an end to his nightmares once and for all. It was time to stop being a coward and do what he should have done twenty-one years ago.
    After he got out of the shower, he looked up Terrell’s home phone number in Glendale, California. When he got the answering machine, he left a message then called his friend’s office.
    A female voice answered. “Homicide.”
    “Detective Harris, please.”
    “He’s on another line. Can someone else help you?”
    “No, it’s personal. Do me a favor and put a note under his nose that says, Hornets sting Lakers’ balls.”
    The woman chuckled then put him on hold.
    Terrell had never admitted that he’d gone