Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

me in the living room. I was used to coming home to the odor of curry, or barbecue, or the horrific soapy scent of cilantro. But this was something different; something stark and gritty. I couldn’t place it.
    “Grace?”
    No reply. Instead of my wife, our cat came tumbling down the stairs, meowing at the top of her lungs and giving me the evil eye. She was a quiet cat and only expressed such a loud affectation whenever we took off for a weekend trip. The humans were not allowed to have fun without her.
    I walked into the kitchen and found her food bowl. The wet bowl was empty, as was the dry one. Why hadn’t Grace been feeding the cat?
    “Grace?” I said as I opened the cupboard and took down the cat food.
    Still no reply. I dumped some dry food into the bowl, which Kitty started to eat before I’d even finished pouring.
    Now there was quiet, so I listened. Not sure for what, but I shut my eyes and focused on my breathing. Where could my wife have gone with her car still in the driveway?
    On an impulse, I checked her Facebook account and saw she hadn’t posted any updates all week long. Now that was certainly strange.
    There was no note on the fridge, or the kitchen table, or in any of the usual places we communicated. I searched the living room, the garage, and even the basement. Nothing but an empty house looked back at me.
    As I gazed up the staircase to our bedroom, something came over me. A cold, spreading sense that I should not go up there. How I came to that feeling, I had no idea. But just as I had known there was something odd about supposedly-magical Kareem and creepy Darren, I knew that I didn’t want to discover whatever was upstairs.
    I put a foot on the bottom step. Placed my hand on the banister.
    I took each step one by one, noticing that awful gritty smell getting stronger. Kind of like rust or something metallic. I gagged a bit as it threatened to overwhelm me.
    At the top of the stairs, I peeked into the bedroom. Empty. Checked the guest/baby bedroom, also empty. Only one place left to look, so I put a hand on the knob of the bathroom.
    Twisted the knob. Inside, I saw blood. Dark like burgundy, pooled on the tile floor of my bathroom, running in the cracks between the tiles.
    My first thought, as I stared at the body sitting on my toilet, was that’s not Grace . Thank God, it’s not Grace. Definitely not a pregnant woman. The body was that of a man, tall, with his wrists and neck slashed. Blood splattered everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, the shower curtain.
    But if that wasn’t Grace, where was she?
    I felt an urge either to run to the body or run away from it, but I forced myself to stay still. Breathe in, then out, gathering my thoughts and preparing a plan for what to do next.
    I’d never come face to face with a dead person before. Seen plenty of movies and TV shows with carnage much worse than what was staring back at me from the spot where I brushed my teeth every morning.
    But this was my first real dead body. And it was in my house, in my bathroom, on my toilet.
    He was dressed in slacks and a button down shirt. He was wearing a tie, something maybe once light but was now darkened with his blood. The tie caught my eye. Something familiar about it. Did I own one like it? How creepy would that be to discover I shared a tie preference with a dead man?
    The dead man’s head was slumped forward, so I kneeled to get a better look. A voice inside my head told me not to do it, to call the police immediately, but the tie hooked me. I had to know who this was in my bathroom.
    I lowered myself to a crouch, then craned my neck and turned my face up so I could get a good look at the man’s head.
    The world collapsed to a pinhole. The dead man on my toilet was Paul, my trainee and recent MBA grad who was ready to kick some ass in the corporate world.
    I’d seen him only ten hours ago, in a different state. Literally. Alive in Texas, and now dead in Colorado.
    When I’d shaken his hand