Famished, Meghan O'Flynn [free ebooks romance novels .txt] 📗

Petrosky dumped coffee grounds into the filter, his gut heavy with old hurt and yesterday’s donuts. Julie’s night-light glowed over the sink.

Fix this. Save someone else’s girl. It’s the least you can fucking do.

He ran over the cases in his head. The women had been young, urban prostitutes who used their hard-won funds to feed drug addictions. Jacob Campbell had been a white boy living in the suburbs with a pretty girlfriend and an absentee kid who was taken care of elsewhere. It didn’t fit. But that wasn’t the problem.

The killer was methodical, intelligent. Maybe angry.

He has a plan. So why wouldn’t he leave a message at Campbell’s scene?

Petrosky punched the countertop, relishing the ache in his knuckles.

The clamps. The nails. The dissections. There was a reason for everything. Had to be.

The scene had been scoured by crime scene techs and FBI agents alike, and each board and piece of trash had been examined. They had printed and moved and touched and tagged. Yet they’d found nothing.

Did he run out before he could finish the note?

Petrosky shook his head at the thought. They would have found another body if someone had interrupted him.

Look deeper.

Fuck. He yanked the night-light off the wall and hurled it in the sink next to six empty beer bottles. The coffee pot percolated like a lazy asshole. Petrosky walked back to the bedroom and jerked on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.

Halfway to the car, he stopped in the driveway and stared at the ground, then returned to the kitchen and retrieved the night-light. He wiped it on his shirt and plugged it back in.

Sorry, honey.

He shot the half-full coffee pot one final glare and kicked the front door shut behind him.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Morrison stared at the cinderblock mass in the center of the underground room where they had found Campbell’s body. Small chunks of cement had been chipped away, probably by their forensics team.

Petrosky knelt at the back corner of the room and ran his fingers along the line where wall met floor. “Not sure. Anything different.” He hated the strain in his own voice.

“Different like what, Boss?”

“Different like…” Petrosky stood and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “Shit, I don’t even know anymore.”

Morrison prodded the side of a cement block with his thumb. “It’s crazy that there was a body on here. It doesn’t have blood on it or anything.”

Anything different…

“There was a tarp here, right?” Petrosky pictured the blood-stained table in the westside basement and the cemetery concrete that would forever smell like copper. This guy had never used plastic before. There had to be a reason now.

He knelt and laid his head against the floor, exploring the bottom of the structure with his fingers, then heaved himself upright and sat back on his heels. “There’s no way. A cement mass this size has to weigh, what? A thousand pounds?”

“I doubt it,” Morrison’s voice echoed against the concrete. “I worked construction in college. Cinderblocks are usually hollow.”

Petrosky stared at the table. “Hollow, but still pretty heavy.”

Morrison bent down beside him. “Yeah. He’d have to be strong to shove it even a short distance. Or he has a partner.”

“No, no partner for our guy.” Petrosky stood, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. How did he do it?

Wait. The treads. Of course. “He had a dolly. And he didn’t shove it. He needed a way to lay it down without marring the words.” If there were words. There had to be words.

“There’s no way he lifted this whole thing with a dolly alone.”

Petrosky squinted at the rows of cinderblock that made up the top. “Could you hold those top pieces up with something besides other blocks?”

“Metal supports, secured internally and run from one side to the other, could do it.” Morrison stared at the concrete. “Do you think the killer put it together himself?”

“In this whole place, there isn’t a single other intact structure. I can’t believe we missed that.”

Morrison frowned. “But if he painted words in Campbell’s blood under there, he couldn’t have done it before he killed Campbell. And he couldn’t have built the structure underneath the body afterward—the blood splatter on the tarp and the surrounding ground was consistent with Campbell being killed where we found him.”

Petrosky walked around the cement table, probing the mortar between blocks. “All this was dry when we were here, right?”

“It was. I talked to the techs, and they pulled samples from the blocks, side and top. Someone would have noticed wet cement in the crevices.”

Petrosky’s chest was tight. He kicked at the base of the block in front of him. Solid. He took a step to the right and kicked again. No give.

Morrison lowered his eyes and followed suit. Kick, pause. Kick, step. Kick. “Boss?” Morrison disappeared below the side of the structure.

Petrosky stepped around the blocks. Morrison was pressing on one of the lower bricks with the beefy part of his palm. “There’s a little give. Not much, but the bottom should be the most solid, and there’s definitely some wiggle here.”

Petrosky knelt on Morrison’s right, pulled his Swiss Army knife from his back pocket, and scraped at the mortar, where a hairline crack was already widening. A chunk of mortar fell, revealing dead space between the bricks. Were they all like that? Mortared thinly on one side to save dry time? No. That tricky fucker had left himself a way to get in, then patched the outside to make it look solid. You don’t do that for no reason.

Petrosky shimmied the knife into the mortar over the brick to the left, but the mortar there was thicker. Morrison pushed at the first brick. A crack appeared down the left side. Petrosky followed suit on his side until the block was free of the rest of the structure, but there was still no room to get his fingers around it.

“How would he get in there to write?” Morrison said. “The space is too small to even see what you’re doing.”

Petrosky shoved his knife into the space between the bricks and pried, heart hammering in his ears. It shifted, but nowhere near enough to free it. Shit. They were so fucking close. If only he had a sledgehammer.

Morrison stood and positioned one bull shoulder against the table and gripped the top with the other hand.

“What are you—” Petrosky began, but Morrison’s face was already reddening, his fingers white against the structure as he heaved his weight against the top row of bricks. Petrosky followed suit, shoving the side with his shoulder until the mass lifted, just enough for Petrosky to get his fingers around the brick and slide it out with a grating sound like an angry rattlesnake.

Morrison grunted and lowered the table.

“Looks like all those gym visits were good for something, Surfer Boy. We didn’t even need the dolly.”

Morrison sat beside Petrosky and pulled his phone from his pocket, wiping his brow on his sleeve.

“Who you calling now?”

“Flashlight, Boss.” He tapped a few buttons and handed Petrosky the phone, which now glowed from the top with a single beam of LED light.

Petrosky set it next to the opening to illuminate the inside and lay on the floor, his belly fat crushing his organs. The concrete dug into his cheek and cooled his fiery forehead. He scooted closer and pressed his face into the opening, the sound of his labored breath raspy in the tiny, hollow space. Above him, the metal rods Morrison described held up the tabletop bricks. Their guy had built himself a structure after all. And he’d left his card behind: a single sheet of paper, reflecting the brilliant white light.

Petrosky jerked a glove from his back pocket, lifted himself onto his elbow, and pulled the paper out, disgusted by how much his hand was shaking. The poem was printed in the same block script as the others, the words the deep carmine color of dried blood.