Read Online Pitch Black by Leslie A. Kelly - Free Book Online Page A

devastated by his death. Which said either that the man had very good intuition, or that Sam was very bad at disguising her feelings.
    “Are you all right?” he asked from behind her.
    Sam nodded, saying nothing as she grabbed a paper towel and dried her face. The cold water had snapped her out of her moment of shock, though she didn’t turn around right away. She wanted one more moment, a second to pretend she had merely imagined a nice young kid she knew had been murdered.
    Then she remembered something. “Wilmington.” She spun around. “I saw a story blurb online about missing Delaware teens found in a frozen pond.”
    He nodded once, confirming the suspicion.
    She shuddered. What a horrible way to die. “How can you be so sure he didn’t fall through the ice? How do you know he was murdered?”
    “Trust me.”
    Two words she never wanted to hear coming out of a man’s mouth again. “I don’t even know you.”
    “I mean, trust me when I say there is no way it was an accident.” His jaw flexing, he bit out a reluctant explanation. “They were bound.”
    She closed her eyes briefly as her stomach churned and her throat tightened.
    “They,” she mumbled, acknowledging the rest of it. “Were they random victims? Or was the other boy someone Ryan knew?”
    “His best friend.”
    Two teenage boys. This was more awful by the moment. “His friend—not the friend he was writing to ask me about? Not the one who was being taken in by an e-mail scheme?”
    Agent Lambert nodded, his sympathy still evident. And suddenly she realized why he was here. Why he was asking these questions. Why he had come to her. It was more than the fact that they’d exchanged a few e-mails. Much more.
    “My God. Were they killed by whoever was trying to scam him?”
    He didn’t answer her question, countering with several of his own. “Is there anything else you can remember about your interactions with Ryan Smith? Did he mention even in passing where he might be headed that night or who he was meeting?”
    “That night?” she asked, gulping as she realized the hits hadn’t stopped coming. “The night he IM’d me?”
    “Yes.”
    She shuffled to her chair and sank onto it. Like most people, Sam read the news; she was aware awful things happened to people every single day. She’d been touched by tragedy herself, with the accidental death of her father when she’d been only eleven.
    But these were just kids. Nice, friendly kids whose only crimes had been gullibility and loyalty. Kids who’d ended up on the bottom of a frozen lake, never to go to their senior prom or set off for college or meet the right girl and get married. All that possibility—gone.
    And if she hadn’t gone out for a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and some damned ice cream, and had been home to answer Ryan Smith’s instant message, they might be alive today.
    “There’s nothing you could have done,” Lambert said. He moved behind her, but she didn’t turn around, not even when he dropped a hand onto her shoulder and gently squeezed.
    It was the first intimate touch she had received from a man in almost a year.
    Even Uncle Nate—her late father’s partner in the force, whom her mother leaned on for everything except romance—did nothing more than shake her hand when they saw each other. As if he recognized the mental barricade she had erected between herself and any man.
    This man hadn’t seen that barricade. And Sam found herself going very still, trying to decide how she felt about it.
    When she’d pictured being touched again by a male of the species, she’d had typical divorcée daydreams. Running into her ex and his skank-ho with Josh Duhamel on one arm and Johnny Depp on the other. That would be good. Not this. Not comfort from a complete stranger.
    But then, never in her darkest dreams had she envisioned getting caught up in a double murder investigation, or that her heart would feel on the verge of breaking over a sweet teenager she