Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (latest ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Focus, or she’s dead.

Petrosky ground his teeth together, but it didn’t stop the panic from swelling hot and frantic within him. After the arrest last week, this crime should have been fucking impossible.

He wished it were a copycat. He knew it wasn’t.

Anger knotted his chest as he examined the corpse that lay in the middle of the cavernous living room. Dominic Harwick’s intestines spilled onto the white marble floor as though someone had tried to run off with them. His eyes were wide, milky at the edges already, so it had been awhile since someone gutted his sorry ass and turned him into a rag doll in a three-thousand-dollar suit.

That rich prick should have been able to protect her.

Petrosky looked at the couch: luxurious, empty, cold. Last week Hannah had sat on that couch, staring at him with wide green eyes that made her seem older than her twenty-three years. She had been happy like Julie had been before she was stolen from him. He pictured Hannah as she might have been at eight years old, skirt twirling, dark hair flying, face flushed with sun, like one of the photos of Julie he kept tucked in his wallet.

They all started so innocent, so pure, so…vulnerable.

The idea that Hannah was the catalyst in the deaths of eight others, the cornerstone of some serial killer’s plan, had not occurred to him when they first met. But it had later. It did now.

Petrosky resisted the urge to kick the body and refocused on the couch. Crimson congealed along the white leather as if marking Hannah’s departure.

He wondered if the blood was hers.

The click of a doorknob caught Petrosky’s attention. He turned to see Bryant Graves, the lead FBI agent, entering the room from the garage door, followed by four other agents. Petrosky tried not to think about what might be in the garage. Instead, he watched the four men survey the living room from different angles, their movements practically choreographed.

“Damn, does everyone that girl knows get whacked?” one of the agents asked.

“Pretty much,” said another.

A plain-clothed agent stooped to inspect a chunk of scalp on the floor. Whitish-blond hair waved, tentacle-like, from the dead skin, beckoning Petrosky to touch it.

“You know this guy?” one of Graves’s cronies asked from the doorway.

“Dominic Harwick.” Petrosky nearly spat out the bastard’s name.

“No signs of forced entry, so one of them knew the killer,” Graves said.

“She knew the killer,” Petrosky said. “Obsession builds over time. This level of obsession indicates it was probably someone she knew well.”

But who?

Petrosky turned back to the floor in front of him, where words scrawled in blood had dried sickly brown in the morning light.