Wicked Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

murder? The cold, calculated snuffing out of a pretty girl’s life.
    Bile rose in his throat, the way it always did when he was dealing with the abuse or death of the young. Of the innocent. Though, from what he knew about Jessie Brentwood, she was older than her years and far from innocent…an intriguing underage woman who was as manipulating as she’d been alluring. One of those females who knew intrinsically all of her attributes, how to use those wide hazel eyes and turned-up smile to get what she wanted, even if it meant playing with fire.
    And he asked himself the question that everyone else seemed consumed with: Why was he so fascinated with this case? A simple missing persons case, they’d all said. Why did Mac care about this one so much?
    He still had no answer. Maybe he’d been a little in love, a little in lust, with the beautiful, mysterious girl he’d never met. He’d handled dozens of cases where kids disappeared, but this one was different. She was different. He’d followed all the leads he could, dreamed about her, even. Fantasized about her, for God’s sake, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. At the time his friends on the force thought he’d gone around the bend. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He was an up-and-coming hotshot detective who was obsessed by a ghost.
    In retrospect, maybe they hadn’t been that far off the mark.
    Now, twenty years later, a single father working homicide, Mac knew he’d definitely mellowed. He didn’t really want this case now. Old wounds. And problems.
    But those Preppy Pricks were still out there. He wondered how they felt, knowing Jessie’s body had been discovered. One, or several of them, must be sweating bullets now.
    Mac smiled thinly. Well, maybe this was the way it should be after all. Him, heading up a homicide case, a cold case that put all the smug bastards on the hot seat.
    It was sounding better by the minute.
     
    Becca set the newspaper on the coffee table and sank back on the couch, still staring at the folded pages as if they were Satan’s diary. She felt cold inside and out. What was this? What did it mean?
    Ringo circled her feet, tail down, a soft, nearly inaudible growl emanating from his throat.
    “Stop it, there’s nothing out there,” she said softly, as much to soothe her own jangled nerves as to calm the dog.
    Jessie Brentwood had disappeared twenty years earlier when she’d been sixteen and a student at St. Elizabeth’s, the private Catholic school that had gone co-ed only a few years before. Becca had attended St. Elizabeth’s, too, though she was a year behind Jessie, a freshman. But she’d been friends with Jessie’s crowd, and she remembered all too well how she’d secretly yearned for Jessie’s boyfriend, Hudson Walker, with his dark, longish hair, slow, easy smile, and cowboy drawl. He’d been different from the others, a boy who seemed a tad older somehow, one with a cynical sense of humor and a distance to him that had made him all the more interesting. It was as if he’d known everyone for what they were, had seen through their teenaged façades, and had been amused by all their foolish antics.
    Or maybe she’d just fantasized that he’d been more mature and intelligent and innately sexy than his peers. All she knew now was that she’d been crazy in love with him and had hidden it for years.
    But that changed, didn’t it? Once Jessie was gone…then you made your move. You, Becca, were as calculating as she was.
    Oh, God…
    Becca pressed her palm into her flushed cheek, embarrassed and guilty anew, aware that she’d used Jessie’s disappearance and Hudson’s confusion and grief to her own advantage. Sure, it had been much later, after Hudson and Becca were out of high school and Jessie had been missing for years, but Becca now knew her own motives had not been pure. She’d been in love with Hudson. And when the opportunity arose for her to have her shining moment with him, she’d grabbed it with