Unhallowed Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

months, and if there’s anything more, no one will know until the coroner’s finished his report. A fine day’s work, even if there’s no connection,” Adam said.
    “Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you any closer to what you’re looking for. Have you discovered anything from talking to the locals?”
    Caleb smiled, glad that Adam couldn’t see him.“Adam, I’ve only been here twenty-four hours. But I’m out there, meeting people. I’ll do everything in my power to chase down the girl who just went missing and see if we can discover some connection between her case and Jennie’s. Frankly, I’m hoping this girl just ran off with some guy. I’d just as soon not find her corpse.” He was afraid he was going to find her dead, though there was always hope. As for Jennie, her own mother sensed that she was gone.
    “Have you gotten a feel for anything?” Adam asked.
    Caleb hesitated. A feel for anything. That could mean just about anything when you worked for Adam. Harrison Investigations specialized in the bizarre. The unexplained. The things that went bump in the night. Caleb didn’t think they were going to find anything bizarre connected to this case, though. At any given time, hundreds of serial killers were on the prowl around the world. Most murders resulted from a moment’s fury and were relatively easily solved. The husband who suddenly stabbed his wife with the carving knife over a burned meal usually wasn’t smart enough to hide the prints or other trace evidence that would lead police straight to him.
    But serial killers…they were hard to catch. All the DNA in the world couldn’t help if the killer wasn’t in the system. Ditto fingerprints. And they went after strangers, so linking their victims was a challenge, because the pattern connecting them wasn’t obvious. And that was just when the bodies were found. At Quantico he’d once attended a lecture on the number of serial victims who went undiscovered. Swamps werea great place to dispose of bodies. Soft tissue decayed quickly; animals and insects destroyed evidence.
    Complicating things further, serial killers were frequently mobile. They attacked when and where the moment—and the victim—was right; they might kill in one location and dispose of the body in another. The killer might move from Florida to Georgia…or Oregon—wherever life took him, killing all the while and counting on geography and competing bureaucracies to keep his victims from being connected into one ongoing case.
    Caleb was afraid that Jennie Lawson might have been the victim of just such a killer, and because of that, her mother might never have the peace of burying her precious daughter’s body.
    But did any of that add up to a feel for anything?
    “No gut intuition, not yet,” he told Adam. It was barely a white lie. He genuinely wasn’t sure he’d had a feeling for anything. Admittedly, he’d been interested in that house, the beautiful old colonial that was undergoing a lot of renovation work, as soon as he’d seen it. But had he actually been drawn to it? Beckoned?
    And was it coincidental that it was owned by the gorgeous brunette from the historical museum? He was forced to admit that it probably was. The woman obviously had a passion for history, so there was nothing odd about her owning a piece of it. But was it odd that he had felt drawn to both?
    Who wouldn’t be drawn to such a beautiful woman, with her flashing green eyes, the sense of fun touched with a bit of wickedness that had come out as shehandled those kids, her obvious intelligence, and the lithe, sleek body that had been obvious even hidden under the dowdy clothing of a long-ago day.
    “Caleb—you there?”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’m here. I’m sorry. Like I said, nothing yet. Trust me, I’ll be doing everything in my power to find Jennie Lawson. If she’s here anywhere, I will find her.”
    “Of course. Don’t forget, follow up on everything. No matter how off-the-wall you may think