Sympathy For The Devil by Asha King Read Free Book Online Page A

him. But the cop said nothing, just watched him storm out the door.
    Stupid goddamn small town . Everyone in the station stared at him as he stormed back down the hall, winding around the tiny building without direction as he recalled it all so well. They’d hauled him in a dozen times for questioning, he could navigate it with his eyes closed.
    He thrust open the front door when he got there, stepping out into the summer heat. The sun above seemed to set his black T-shirt on fire. He’d left his hat and shades in the truck, and he squinted against the bright light as he jogged down the steps.
    A man stepped in front of him, camera raised.
    Son of a— Devin clenched his hands into fists but didn’t strike, instead stepping sharply around the guy. Punching some idiot outside of the police station was the last thing he needed to do.
    “In town less than a week and another body shows up—care to comment, Mr. Archer?”
    The reporter followed and Devin knew that voice—the same guy who hounded him when Chelsea died. He’d made dozens of promises, all about ‘Telling His Story’ and it turned into a tabloid tale.
    Still, he practiced restraint, avoided Ingram, and strode straight for his truck. The reporter trailed him, berating him with questions, but Devin tuned him out, focused on getting the hell away from the station and the downtown.
    But still, images of the dead woman plagued him and he knew he wouldn’t be shaking the pictures from his mind any time soon.

 
     
     
    Chapter Six
     
     
    Natasha sat in her car, a penlight pinched between her teeth and casting a thin beam of light over the pages she’d photocopied from Harry Ingram. Dusk had fallen an hour ago—it was now after ten at night and she’d seen no movement from Archer.
    She’d missed him leaving the police station but had the address of the old house and caught up with him there. The red truck sat in the dirt driveway for hours; when dusk crept up, the lights came on inside, but she wasn’t willing to go up to the house to see in detail. Instead, she saw him passing back and forth, just a shadow in the light. Periodically he came out, carting boxes and packing up the bed of his truck.
    She actually stopped reading at those points when she caught sight of him, pausing to watch. Nowhere could she find precisely what restaurant he’d worked for in the city, but if he was still paying the mortgage on this place—and had for five years without renting it out—as well as rented wherever else he was staying, he had to be well paid. A nice restaurant. But despite being a professional cook for a living, he was built like he was used to physical labor.
    And each time that entered her head, she looked sharply away. True, there was no law that said murderers—or even serial killers—couldn’t be attractive, but it made her feel like a horrible person each time that thought entered her head.
    While he was inside, her time had been spent reading—and Harry had a hell of a lot of information there about Chelsea’s murder. To fill in the blanks, she’d need to see police evidence, of course, but in the meantime she had the start of a picture painted.
    Chelsea Cooper-Archer had left her husband a month before her murder—kicked him out, actually, of the house they shared which was the very same one she sat down the road from now. He moved into a hotel in town, drank frequently, and rumors swirled around him constantly. That he’d been controlling, supposedly violent. What was true and what wasn’t, she couldn’t say—Harry had a knack for embellishing. There were bits and pieces from an interview with Archer but not the whole thing—that might’ve been on the disc or somewhere else.
    As for the crime itself, all the gruesome details were there except for actual autopsy photos. She’d been in the water roughly two days and a lot of evidence was lost, but the physical trauma was apparent. There were still rope marks on her body, contusions and