HEART AND SOUL by JUDY COLELLA (e novels to read .txt) 📕

Xavion reached home without interruption, made himself a satisfying meal of steak, rice, spinach, and salad, then finished the coffee he’d made earlier and took out the file again. Everything he read confirmed his notion that the murders had been committed somewhere other than the place where the bodies had been found. A number of other conclusions to which the police had also come were noted in the reports. He was sitting at the small table in what he’d made into an open kitchen, the papers spread out on its wooden surface.

“I ought to make a few notes of my own,” he muttered, getting up. In another section of the loft was an antique rolltop desk. From this he took a legal pad and a fountain pen, and returned to the table. “Okay. What do we have here?” He began making a list. “All victims – male. That’s first. All homeless. Okay. All from…huh. All from the same part of town.” He frowned. Every one of them had lived on the streets in a six-square-block area not far from his factory. He began to wonder if this was mere coincidence, although he wouldn’t have said why he thought so even if he did tell the police about that particular suspicion.

He shook his head, dismissing the idea for the time being. Too many other things to pull together first. Like how a doctor could do something like this without getting caught. Because if he was, in fact, using laser technology to “operate” on his victims, he’d have to do it without anyone realizing he’d been operating that equipment. Xavion knew for certain that expensive machines like that were carefully monitored and under security surveillance.

He also wrote down that the murderer was most likely male, if for no other reason than the logistics of lifting and transporting the dead weight of the derelicts, none of whom had been small men by any means. No doubt there were some women strong enough, but none that he knew of who were heart surgeons. And Xavion was all too familiar with the medical staff of Winter City General Hospital.

Before he could write anything else, a crash sounded from somewhere in the guts of the building. He dropped the pen and stood, scowling. “Better be a damned cat,” he growled. The last thing he felt like dealing with was an intruder – or a group of them.

After turning off all but one light, he slipped silently out the door. This opened on a long metal staircase that zig-zagged down the twelve floors between a series of catwalks. Made of good quality steel, these had remained intact despite the years of neglect between the place being abandoned and Xavion’s purchase of it.

From the top floor, he could make out little of what was at the bottom, despite an unusual ability to see clearly in near-darkness. As he went down the first set of stairs, he peered around, looking for the cause of the crash. From inside the loft it had been impossible to tell the direction from which the sound had come. What he needed was for it to be repeated.

By the time he was halfway down, he still hadn’t seen anything suspicious. Crepe soles made his progress silent, the darkness giving him invisibility, masking his presence from who or whatever had made the noise.

Almost at the end of the final staircase, he paused, doing a 360-degree scan of the vast floor space. Silence. No movement. He took the last few steps to the bottom. Stopped, listening…there. Something was breathing. Like he, she or it had been panting, and was regaining control. He began walking, cautious and slow, toward the pile of debris from behind which the controlled gasping came.

Wedged between metal containers and some splintered crates, a figure huddled, knees drawn up, head down, unaware of Xavion’s presence. A person, not a cat.

Damn. “Are you all right?”

The person began rocking back and forth, huddling even tighter. “Don’t hurt me.”

A girl. “Why would I hurt you? What are you doing here?”

She shuddered but wouldn’t look up. “Please leave me alone.”

“I can’t. You’re on my property.”

“Let me stay here?”

“Can you look at me, at least?”

“Why? I won’t be able to see you.”

“No, but I can see you.”

She stopped rocking, unclenching her arms from around her shins and sitting straighter. She didn’t raise her head very far, but he could see she was looking at the floor and containers closest to her. “How? I – you don’t have a flashlight or anything.”

“No, I don’t. I have extremely good eyesight.”

“Oh. What are you going to do to me?” Her voice trembled a bit on the last three words.

“Nothing. Help you, maybe. But I can’t do a damn thing if you stay all scrunched up like that.”

She nodded and took a long, deep, and very shaky breath. “Promise you won’t hurt me?”

“I promise.” Why is she so convinced that people want to hurt her?

“Okay.” Her movements somewhat stiff, she got to her feet and straightened.

“Huh. You’re, uh, very tall for a girl.”

“Six-foot-two. I wanted to be a gymnast, but, well, yeah. I didn’t stop growing in time.” She gave a bitter-sounding laugh and raised her head. “Geez, how tall are you?”

“Six-foot-seven.” My god, she’s gorgeous!

“Not many people make me feel short. Congratulations.” She gave a small grin.

“So what are you doing here?”

The grin went away. “Hiding. In case my being ‘all scrunched up’ behind a bunch of garbage wasn’t enough to make that obvious. And before you ask, some guys were chasing me. I noticed one of the windows was open, and I climbed through. I thought for sure they’d follow me in here, but I guess I was wrong.”

“No one comes in here. Everyone knows better who lives in this area. So where are you from?”

“The upper West side. I’m a model. We were doing a shoot and the location got changed. Stupid me got the address mixed up somehow and when the taxi dropped me off a few blocks from here, I made the mistake of asking these guys if the studio I was looking for was in the building they were…anyway, they said they’d never heard of it, but would be glad to give me something else to do instead. Then they got really graphic about what that involved, one of them tried to grab me, and I ran.” She looked away, terror surfacing in her eyes and expression for a moment.

“I’m sorry that happened to you. Why didn’t you call the police?”

“When? While I was running? Or maybe while I was hauling myself through that window? Or perhaps while I was hiding, trying to not make noise that would alert the bastards to where I was?” Remembered terror had turned to angry sarcasm.

“Well, you did crash into something, which is how I knew someone was here. What did you knock over?”

She waved a hand toward something behind him. “A metal barrel thing, I think. It cut my ankle.”

He looked down and saw what he’d missed before, perhaps because he wasn’t looking for an injury. In addition to a short, fleece-lined denim jacket over a coral-colored tight crew-neck sweater, she was wearing light-colored denim leggings that ended at her ankles, one of which was releasing a slow stream of blood that had already begun to form a puddle under her shoe. “Hell. Look, at the risk of scaring you again, I’d like to suggest that you come upstairs to my apartment and let me bandage that for you. Then you can make whatever phone calls you need to. Would that be okay?”

She put her head to one side, staring up at him, uncertain. “I wish I could see your eyes.”

“You would trust what you saw there?”

“No, but at least I’d have a better idea about your intentions.”

He laughed. “You know, if I’d wanted to do anything nasty to you, I would have already done it. I sure as heck wouldn’t bother to help you up twelve flights of stairs first.”

“Twelve – where is your apartment?”

He pointed toward the ceiling, which was too far up to see. “There. I have a loft on the twelfth floor. Most of this is open from top to bottom, but along the sides there were some kind of rooms – offices, maybe. Twelve stories of them. My loft, however, covers the entire top floor.”

She gaped, taking in the massive square footage of the factory. “Why would you need that much space? Do you give dance lessons or something?”

“Er, no. But I do practice martial arts, and it’s nice to have plenty of room to move around in. Of course, a lot of the space is taken up with boxes, furniture, and wardrobes full of stuff.” He shrugged. “It’s all from a house I used to live in.” Why am I telling her all this?

“Why don’t you live there now?”

A pause. “I sold it.” His tone had gone suddenly cold.

She took another deep breath, this one steady. “Okay. How do we get up there?”

“We walk. Can you do that with your ankle messed up?”

“I think so. It doesn’t seem to hurt very much.”

It will – the shock is wearing off. “All right. Let’s go – you must be cold.”

“Huh. I hadn’t noticed, but now that you mention it…crap.”

“Sorry. This way.”

Guiding her toward the stairs, he wondered how long it would take for her to be in too much pain to walk. To his surprise, she made it all the way to the fifth floor before almost collapsing against the rail of the catwalk there.

“Ow! Oh, hell! Damn!” She sucked in air between her teeth, grasping the top rail of the narrow walkway.

“Don’t freak out on me, please.”

“Why – oh!”

He had lifted her easily in his arms, not a little surprised at how light she was, and then headed up the next set of steps. “No way are you going to make it all the way to the top on your own. Hope you don’t mind.”

“I’ll let you know later.” Her voice sounded tight.

“Hurts a lot, I expect.”

“You could say that.”

He decided to distract her as much as possible by asking her about herself – her name, where she was born, a number of other things – as he got her safely to his apartment. To his relief, it seemed to work.

Her name, she told him, was Emma Grant. She was born in California, but had come east several years earlier for a photo shoot, and had decided to stay. Winter City was, in her opinion, much less stressful than San Francisco – at least until earlier that day when everything had gone sour over a mistaken address. At twenty-four, she was a bit old for the kind of modeling she did, she explained, but because she could still pass for a teenager, work had continued to be steady.

As a