Read Online Where Angels Rest by Kate Brady - Free Book Online Page B

the middle of nowhere, alone at night with a stranger who was half drunk, outweighed her by at least eighty pounds, and wielded a bad temper and a pistol. Nick could see each and every one of those realizations coming to light in her mind.
    “I’ve never attacked a woman before,” he assured her.
    “But you could make an exception for me?”
    He lifted a brow. “You’re throwing around some pretty heavy accusations, in a place where you don’t know the players.”
    “I know Jack Calloway.”
    Nick held her eyes. “So do I.”
    An impasse. She acknowledged it with a tilt of her head and lowered herself to the mattress so carefully that Nick pulled out the Starke County Sheriff’s accident report first: Dr. Sims had suffered a bout of unconsciousness, a couple of bruised ribs, abrasions and contusions. He could see it as she tried to get comfortable—the careful movements, the wince. He made a mental note to call Starke County first thing in the morning.
    “I could tell you in a nutshell,” she offered, but Nick didn’t want the emotional-sister version. He wanted the facts.
    “I’d rather read it in detail,” he said.
    She leaned back against the wall to wait, crossing her arms over her ribcage. Nick knew about bruised ribs. They hurt like a son of a bitch.
    Read.
    Lauren McAllister: She’d been a promising art studentwith a love for cocaine, and the only child of a two-term senator who had, according to some, won his third term on a sympathy vote. Lauren’s body had been found when early morning bird-watchers saw something floating in the Everglades. Authorities got to her before the alligators and determined that she’d been dead since the night before, though she hadn’t been in the water very long. The bullet that killed her, point blank into the heart, was a .38 from Justin Sims’s handgun, which turned up in the swamp. She’d been tripping: cocaine in her blood.
    Interesting, but not unusual. Pretty run-of-the-mill, as murders go. There was evidence that pointed straight to Justin Sims, with nothing to distinguish this case from a hundred other murd—
    Nick blinked, and the hairs on his arms stood up. He re-read a passage:
traces of paint thinner on face.
    He glanced up and caught Sims looking at him.
    Paint thinner?
Jack Calloway was a skilled carpenter. Paint thinner would be a staple in his workshop. And Nick had seen Margaret, a sculptor, use it to clean up clay.
    He blew out a breath. Sims was a shrink, and he could see it coming. “I imagine you have a theory about the paint thinner?” he asked. “Some psychological profile you’ve concocted and applied to Jack Calloway. Let’s see… His wife is drop-dead gorgeous without makeup so he can’t bear to have it on his lovers?”
    “A little cliché, don’t you think?”
    “His mother used to scrub his face with paint thinner and lye, until he bled.”
    “Better,” she said. “It’s always about the mother, after all, isn’t it?”
    Fucking shrinks. They were the reason Bertrand Yost wasn’t in a real jail serving real time. The reason Nick’scareer had gone to hell. “No,” he said. “It’s usually about money or sex or vengeance, and hardly ever about psychological mumbo jumbo. Jails need bars, not couches.”
    “Look, I’ll be the first to say I don’t know why Lauren’s murderer cleaned off her face with paint thinner, but I do know there’s a reason. Something that would explain his actions.” She squared her shoulders. “Why don’t you ask Calloway what it is?”
    Nick suppressed a scowl. He tried to paint Jack Calloway with the brush of a psycho-murderer—someone with some weird compulsion to shoot a woman and leave her fresh-faced, then dump her for gators. It wouldn’t work. Aside from the simple weirdness of it, Jack was a good man, successful, and devoutly religious. He was married to one of the most attractive women Nick had ever laid eyes on; even now, at nearly fifty, Margaret’s features were put