BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) by M.A Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

pounds. Shot six times in the chest, all in a circle, like the shooter was using him for target practice. We know the shooter has to be an expert. That might or might not help us much.”
                  “Why is that? Surely not many people on a sleepy campus like this one know how to fire a gun with that much accuracy.”
                  “Hey, you'd be surprised. Some teachers, they got black belts. You'd never even know it. Some teachers, old war vets, keep up with their practice on weekends with their buddies in the woods. Sometimes students, too. This campus wasn't so sleepy yesterday.”
                  Metzger waited for a moment, then continued, “A girl died in her dorm room yesterday morning, around 7 a.m. The roof collapsed from heavy snow. Well, apparently that was the last straw for the students here. A group of them went to complain to the bigwigs at Old Main—that's the administration building. One of them, a young girl named Shannon Moore, got a dislocated shoulder, four cracked ribs, and a face full of pepper spray for her trouble.”
                  “What did she do?”
                  “Shouted swear words at the university president, it seems. Some of the other students threw snowballs. This cop here, the dead guy on the ground, took Miss Moore down. Then he turns up dead the next morning.”
                  “So, what? Are we thinking this girl Moore is the primary suspect? With a dislocated shoulder and who knows what side effects from the pepper spray? Was she taken to the hospital? Does she have an alibi?”
                  “I haven't dug down that far yet. There's no one here but us and one member of the library staff. All the administrators are gone home for the weekend. It's going to be the devil itself to get them back here. Fortunately, that's your job, not mine. Your primary task will be to track all these people down by Monday. Most of them have profiles up on the university's website.”
                  Michael thought of a picture of himself and Billy on the Cumberland County Sheriff Office's website. The website did not list any names of its officers other than a few support staff who agreed to have their name posted. Michael had opted not to do that. He had a made a point of keeping himself off the Internet as much as possible. He had once seen a young girl doing Internet searches on his name while he questioned the girl's parents. She had done it on an old desktop computer with a large hard drive and larger screen. Ever since then, he tried to avoid the press, giving interviews, posting blogs, or writing articles. As long as he remained a detective, he wanted nothing to do with the Internet.
                  He said, “All right, work the phones. I got it. I'll keep watch over the scene until Billy arrives.”
                  As soon as he said that, Michael saw the bulky form of William McGee striding down the long pathway that led from university's playhouse to the library. When he arrived, he huffed out steamy breaths. He said, “Good, Michael, you're already here.” He nodded his head towards Metzger. “Chief.”
                  Chief Metzger put his hands in his jacket pockets, then said, “Well, I'll leave you two gentlemen to it. Try not to get in a pissing match with the officers on campus here, would you?”
     
    3
     
                  Though there wasn't much for the evidence technicians to do, they recorded with great care every fact that they could about the murder scene. They recorded that the temperature in the morning was twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, that no shell casings had been found at the scene, that no bullets had passed through the decedent's body, that he had been left lying in a pool of frozen blood. They recorded that the man had been in uniform when he died. Though he had been carrying pepper spray, a