Cold Midnight by Joyce Lamb Read Free Book Online Page A

out like a cop was supposed to.
    “When I turned to run the other way,” she continued, voice still strong, “the second guy was behind me, blocking me. I ran off the path, into the woods, but it was muddy and slippery. Maybe if I’d stayed on the path, I could have outrun them. I probably could have gotten past the second guy. He was smaller than the first, weaker.”
    Amazing, Chase thought. Monday-morning quarterbacking her own attack.
    “They caught me easily. The one without the bat seemed reluctant, like he thought it was a joke at first. He kept saying, ‘I can’t.’ He sounded like he was crying, like he—” She stopped as her voice cracked for the first time.
    Chase curled his right hand into a tight fist. A crack in Kylie McKay’s voice was the equivalent of a screaming sob from any other woman. Instead of responding to it, he tried to nudge her along. “Did you recognize anything about their voices?”
    Shaking her head, she cleared her throat. “Just that they sounded like boys. The leader bullied the other one.”
    Chase’s steps faltered. This was new. “Bullied him how?”
    “He kept yelling at him, calling him names. Pussy and dickweed. He seemed kind of over the top with it, actually. Giddy one minute and mean the next, like he was high.”
    This also was new. He wrote “high” in his notebook and put two question marks next to it. “So the leader was aggressive toward his partner,” he said, more to prod her along than to clarify.
    She nodded. “He threatened to kick his ass if he didn’t hand him the bat.”
    “Wait, I thought the leader had the bat.”
    “He dropped it when he hit me.”
    “He hit you?” That sure as shit wasn’t in the case file, and he had to fight the swell of hot rage that started in his gut and blazed to the top of his head. The attack as he’d understood it from the report had been bad enough, and that had been without punches being thrown.
    “He was trying to subdue me, and I kicked him. In the shin, I think, and it made him angry. It was more of a slap than a punch.”
    She had the unemotional tone down to an art.
    “And after he slapped you?”
    “I started screaming my head off, so he put his hand over my mouth. It smelled like peanut butter and gasoline, like he’d put gas in his car before he had a sandwich.”
    Chase’s stomach turned, and it took all his cop training to stay on track. “And then?”
    “I bit him.”
    He almost smiled. He hoped she’d drawn blood.
    “Dumb move,” she said. “ Really dumb, actually. He hit me again, with his fist this time, and I almost blacked out.”
    Bastard. Fucking bastard. And why the hell wasn’t any of this in the file? Had the cops not questioned her closely? “Keep going,” he prodded, his tone as level as hers. Maintaining that tone, and his distance, was getting harder, though.
    “He yelled at the other one to hand him the bat. The weaker one gave it to him, and that’s when I saw it the most clearly. It had ‘killer’ written in big capital letters in black marker on the grip. The one guy was crying by then, and the leader called him a fucking moron and told him to snap out of it and help him.”
    Jesus . “And then?”
    She compressed her lips into a grim line, her jaw tight.
    “I need you to tell me what happened next, Ky.”
    She stopped walking and faced him, pulling her sunglasses off at the same time. Gray blue eyes that flashed with silvery light under the darkening clouds clashed with his. “The weaker one held me down for what seemed like minutes, but it was probably only a second or two before he let me go and ran away. I thought it was over, and just as I started to roll over to crawl away, the leader hit me with the bat. I heard the crunch before I felt the pain, and then it was like my leg had caught on fire. The second time he swung the bat, I lost consciousness.”
    Chase stared into her eyes, floored by the unwavering way she stared back. Sick didn’t begin to