Stalked by Brian Freeman Read Free Book Online Page B

later, he found an article in the Montgomery newspaper that reported the story. The squad car had been found wrapped around a tree ten miles from the farmhouse, and Deet’s headless body had turned up another five miles away in a different direction. All three people in the car were presumed dead, victims of the storm.
    He was a nonperson. No identity. No past.
    He could have gone anywhere, but he first had to deal with the fist of rage that beat its way through his chest. Payback for ten lost years.
    “You feel me, don’t you?” he whispered. “You know I’m here.”
    He had been laying his plans for Serena ever since he arrived in Duluth. Watching her. Stalking her. He could have taken her anytime, but he wanted the experience to linger. Every hunter knew—you don’t break the neck of the captured animal right away. Once it’s yours, you play with it for a while.
    In the meantime, he had other prey. People like Dan. Mitch. Tanjy. And the alpha girls. People with dirty secrets they were desperate to conceal.
    He remembered what the little queer in Holman had told him about the art of blackmail. If you know what someone is hiding, you can do anything you want to them, and they’ll never breathe a word. The danger in poking a hive, though, was getting stung. He could have let the games go on even longer, but something unexpected had popped up like a fish out of the water and made him speed up his plans.
    Murder. That changed everything.
    So now it was finally Serena’s turn. Time to tighten the noose around her neck.
    Through the binoculars, he watched her shrug and continue down the steps of the government plaza toward her car. He knew what was in her brain. She was telling herself that the fear scraping its fingernails along her spine was all in her imagination. She was wrong. Before he was done, she would be begging him to kill her.
     
     
     

Chapter 7
     
     
    City Hall was an old, drafty building, with high ceilings where the heat gathered. The floors were cold, hard marble. The chill radiated through the window in Stride’s office and left frost crystals on the glass. He leaned against the window frame and stared vacantly at the traffic on First Street below him. His arms were crossed. The creases in his forehead deepened like canyons, and he felt tightness throughout his muscles.
    He was wearing a suit and tie because reporters and politicians would be swarming the office as word got out about Maggie. Usually he dressed for the street, which was where he liked to spend his time. He couldn’t handle a job that left him permanently chained to a desk, and he did his paperwork in odd hours when the rest of the office was dark. He preferred to be out at crime scenes, doing the real work, which was mostly hard and bitter.
    He had been idealistic in his early days, which were too long ago to think about. He was like Maggie—determined to solve every crime, put away every criminal. It hadn’t taken long for him to realize that there were always victims like the Enger Park Girl, with no one to speak for them and no answers to give. The burden was all his. Every murder in this city gouged a piece out of his soul, and even when they solved the case and he watched a jury bring down a guilty verdict, there was still a scar that never went away.
    That was one of the reasons he lived by the lake. He didn’t tell many people about that part of his soul; it had taken months for him even to share it with Serena. Stride was a hardheaded realist who had no time for anything mystical, but the lake was different. When he stood by the water at night, he sometimes felt as if he were surrounded by the dead, as if the lake were where they went to become part of the mist and vapor. He could feel his father there, who had died in the lake, and he felt communion with all of the city’s dead.
    There was a knock on his office door, and he saw a silhouette behind the frosted glass.
    “Come in,” he called without leaving the