Killer by Stephen Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page A

leave the car where I’m supposed to for the rental pickup, then take the shuttle to the terminal. More than enough time to make my flight. More than enough. I cling to my small carry-on as I get off the shuttle and get in the endless series of lines to find my gate, my plane, my escape.
    I don’t care how drunk or out of my mind with grief and pain… Never. Never.
    I get through the airport lines, avoiding the eyes of every cop and security officer I pass. There is a heart-stopping moment when the chrome alloy parts in my repaired wrist set off the metal detector, but they let me through and I take the escalator to the departure gates and find my gate and sit down in the closest chair near me. It feels like I haven’t breathed for hours. I sit back and place my small bag on the stained carpet at my feet and relax my grip. I force myself to breathe, letting the panic subside. And it does. After a few moments the racing thoughts drift into the background and I slowly become more aware of my surroundings.
    I look up at the gate. The sign above the empty desk reads Newark 11:58 – On Time.
    Thank God. I look at my watch. 9:10. Two hours until we board, then the flight, then connect to Burlington and then home...
    I just have to calm down. Stop my mind from running. Calm down.
    Never. I could never…
    I have to think clearly. There has to be an explanation. She was taken…kidnapped, but she wasn’t killed until after the book… Forensics is still breaking that down, Marsh had said.
    But how could I have known those things? The grave, the hair clip…
    I try to remember the details of the murder from the book but I can’t. Five years and three books later and the details are gone.
    I turn, looking for a newsstand, and I see one at the end of the terminal. I get up and hurry toward it—then slow down as I pass a security camera pointed at me. I duck my head and continue to the store.
    In the store I go to the back, toward the magazines— yes. A long row of shelves with paperbacks. I turn my head to read the authors’ names, going alphabetically to find…there, on the bottom shelf, I recognize the cover for the paperback edition of Killer.
    I grab the bookand thumb through it as I kneel on the floor. I haven’t looked at my first book in years and I am surprised at how little I recognize. I flip through it, trying to find a sequence describing the crime scene but I can’t find one.
    Frustrated, I get up and go to the cashier and buy the damned thing. I also buy a copy of the New York Times to wrap around it, hiding my photo. Then I walk back to my gate, past the security cameras, and I sit down and begin to read.

    CHAPTER SEVEN

    Katherine Kendall stood over the shallow grave. The crime scene unit’s banks of 2,000 watt floodlights filled the grave with a harsh, shadowless glare. Grace Beverly’s body had been removed by the coroner’s people hours ago, and already Katherine knew her boss was right to send her out here.
    It was Killer. Katherine was certain. Decapitation between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, amputation of the hands at the radiocarpal joint—all of it done with a rubber-handled knife at least 10” long with moderate serration. All of the cutting done premortem.
    FBI Behavioral Science called him Killer because they had nothing else to call him. He hadn’t murdered enough to be given a clever nickname—at least not that they knew of—and the news media hadn’t connected the murders. FBI kept the bit about the heads and the hands out of the news, to filter out the scores of nutcases and attention-seekers who routinely call to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
    After three murders in three different states they knew only the barest facts—the general profile of the victims, the cause of death, the weapon, the method of disposal, and little else. After the facts there was the reasoned speculation: he was a white male, 30’s or 40’s, average height and weight; he was strong,