Famished, Meghan O'Flynn [free ebooks romance novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Meghan O'Flynn
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“Or I can just go with the raccoon look. Quick, punch me in the other eye.” My voice cracked.
Noelle gave me another one-armed hug.
I visualized angry bears again, and somehow that comforted me.
Noelle looked like she wanted to maul Jake.
We met the guys at The Mill and ordered two pizzas topped with pepperoni, onions, and extra cheese. I hadn’t eaten all day, but I was still surprised when my stomach grumbled.
Jim raised his eyebrows at me. “So, are you totally single now?”
Noelle stiffened beside me.
I froze, a pizza crust halfway to my lips.
“It’s just that I thought I remembered Noelle telling us you were involved with someone. It’s none of my business, really—”
“We…broke up.” The words felt foreign on my tongue, and I realized I had never had to utter them before. I took a deep breath. The pizza in my stomach lurched around like it was alive and angry at being trapped.
“Sorry to hear that,” Jim said, but the twinkle in his eyes said he was anything but.
Placid. Think about the lake. Or Botox. Maybe I should get that. I’d look chill all the time. “These things happen,” I said over the thumping of my heart. I grabbed my root beer, glanced at my yellow blouse, and wondered if this restaurant had better hand dryers than the club we’d gone to. I set my glass down again.
“If you ever need someone to help take your mind off it, I would be happy to oblige,” Jim said.
I shot a panicked look at Noelle. She rolled her eyes.
I turned back to Jim and cleared my throat. “I might need a little time, you know?”
He inclined his head, but slowly. “Of course.”
“So how many artists will be at the show tonight?” Noelle said.
The men took turns answering her questions, while I sagged against the plastic booth. I wanted to kiss her for changing the subject. Still, she had been right; this was preferable to sitting at home on my kitchen floor, trying to forget my own worthlessness while listening for the creak of the floorboards in the hallway.
Robert liked the way her mouth moved as she spoke, the minute quiver of her lips that she probably hoped no one else noticed. The faraway look in her glorious green eyes. She was sad, perhaps conflicted, but not a single tear. That was admirable. He had underestimated her strength the first night they met.
Her sadness would surely escalate in the days to come as she worked through her loss. And he would be there to pick up the pieces, to analyze her desires and become them, making her ache for him, driving her to the brink of insanity and back again before she collapsed desperately into his arms.
But slowly, he cautioned himself. He couldn’t push her. She wasn’t like ordinary women; wonton and shameless. She was better. She was pure.
He smiled.
What could he do to repay her for the wonderful thing she was going to do for him? What gift was there for the salvation of his soul?
He turned to Noelle. Her hair fanned as she tossed it over her shoulder, her sweater struggling to restrain her creamy breasts as she moved. He smiled more broadly.
Noelle smiled back.
What a whore.
Petrosky threw the newspaper down hard enough to spill his coffee. This media bullshit wasn’t going to help him any.
In the last week, he’d spun his wheels questioning everyone who knew either of the murdered women, but he’d gotten nothing more than a few vague details he could have figured out on his own. They had both suffered some pretty violent beatings at some point in the weeks before they had died, but that was commonplace with prostitution. There were no leads on common acquaintances, dealers, or johns.
He dropped his eyes to the paper. Front-page. Two days old already.
In an update on a recent story, the killer responsible for two murders in the Ash Park area may have used even more horrific methods than first speculated. According to an anonymous source, the victims were surgically opened while still alive, enduring the dissection of intestinal walls, and possibly the stomach, before perishing. Police have no strong leads. If you have any information, please contact the Ash Park Police Department.
Now they needed someone to cover the false confessions from the crazies. Fuck it; he’d have Morrison get one of his buddies to do it. Or he’d just give the crazies the number to the goddamn newspaper office.
Petrosky slammed his fist against his desk. “Hookers are killed every day, and they pick my case to publicize? Why do they care all of a sudden?”
But he already knew. If it bleeds, it leads.
Morrison looked up from his desk across the aisle and shrugged as his phone rang.
Petrosky righted his upended coffee cup. “I swear to God if I find out who the hell—”
“Petrosky!”
He startled at the strain in Morrison’s voice.
Morrison was already out of his chair and pulling on his coat. “We’ve got another body.”
“This doesn’t fit, Boss.”
The building was a skeleton of a factory. In some places, towering pillars of cement and steel reached toward the sky; in others, there were only piles of rubble. Petrosky grimaced at the steel ribs as he passed underneath, wondering how much jostling it would take to make them fall.
The basement seemed sturdy enough, at least for now, with steel support poles like the kind found in an underground garage. The concrete roof was cracked in places, but intact, blocking the elements and protecting anyone inside from the falling debris of the upper stories. Off the main area, smaller rooms with cement walls offered even more privacy—probably why their killer had chosen it, along with the building’s distance from the more populated areas of the city. It was dumb luck that some homeless man had snuck down here during last night’s snowstorm and found the body.
Petrosky followed the murmur of voices to a back room. In the center, a man lay on a bloodied plastic tarp on top of more cinderblocks, his eyes closed, his mouth open in a silent scream. At each of the four corners of the makeshift table, bolted-in metal cuffs secured the man’s wrists and ankles. A straight cut ran down the center of the body. The man’s intestines were piled on his scrawny bird chest in filmy coils.
Crime techs bustled around the concrete blocks, dusting the restraints with fingerprint powder.
“Got an ID?” Petrosky said.
A dark-haired, darker-skinned tech stood from where he’d been crouching behind the concrete block. “Jacob Campbell. Wallet was in his pants pocket.”
“He’s not wearing pants, tech.”
“They were in the corner, Detective.”
Petrosky glowered at the tech until he crouched behind the cement wall again. “Any sign of a poem? Lettering?”
Another tech, who was working on something on the floor, shook her head without looking his way.
Petrosky peered at the ceiling. “Too far away for anyone to hear much. But to know the basement was down here…he knows the area. Gotta be a local.”
Morrison nodded stiffly.
All of this was shit they knew already. What they didn’t know was why they had a new victim who didn’t fit the original pattern. Looked like McCallum was wrong about their killer having a type. What else had he been wrong about?
The medical examiner arrived with a stretcher and acknowledged Petrosky with a twitch of his bristly jaw.
“Wait a second,” Morrison said it so softly that it took Petrosky a minute to figure out who had spoken. Morrison rifled through his notebook, brows furrowed, until he tapped a sheet with his index finger. “Got it, Boss. His address is the same one I pulled the other day from the domestic violence shelter file.”
“Why was his address in the files for a women’s shelter?”
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