Snowblind Justice. Cindi Myers

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter Two

      Brodie drove through a world so blindingly white it hurt even with sunglasses shading his eyes. Only the scarred trunks of aspen and the bottle-brush silhouettes of pine trees broke the expanse of glittering porcelain. If not for the walls of plowed snow on either side of the road, it would be difficult in places to distinguish the road from the surrounding fields. After five hours of similar landscape between here and Denver, Emily, in her crazy ruffled pink dress, had stood out like a bird of paradise, a welcome shock to the senses.

      Shocking also was how much Travis’s little sister had matured. She’d been pretty before—or maybe cute was the better word—vivacious and sweet and attractive in a lithe, youthful way. She had filled out since then, her curves more pronounced, her features sharpened into real beauty.

      She seemed more serious, but then so was he. Life—and especially a life spent working in law enforcement—did that to people. He’d seen a dark side to people he couldn’t forget. It was the kind of thing that left a mark. He couldn’t say what had marked Emily, but he saw a new depth and gravity in her expression that hadn’t been there before.

      He had been such a rascal when they were together five years ago. He had thought Emily was just another fling. He had felt a little guilty about seducing one of his best friend’s sisters, but she had been more than willing. And then he had fallen for her—hard. He hadn’t been able to imagine a future without her, so he had laid his heart on the line and asked her to spend the rest of her life with him. And she had stomped his heart flat. The memory still hurt. He had offered her everything he had, but that hadn’t been enough.

      So yeah, that was in the past. He wasn’t here to rehash any of it, though he hoped he was man enough to treat her with the respect and kindness she deserved. He owed that to her because she was Travis’s sister, and because she had given him some good memories, even if things hadn’t worked out.

      And now there was this case—a serial killer in Eagle Mountain, of all places. Remote tourist towns weren’t the usual hunting grounds for serial killers. They tended to favor big cities, where it was easy to hide and they had a wide choice of prey, or else they moved around a lot, making it tougher for law enforcement to find them. Yet this guy—this Ice Cold Killer—had targeted women in a limited population, during a time when the weather kept him trapped in a small geographic area.

      Then again, maybe the killer had taken advantage of the road reopening today and was even now headed out of town.

      Brodie steered his Toyota Tundra around an S-curve in the road and had to hit the brakes to avoid rear-ending a vehicle that was half-buried in the plowed snowbank on the right-hand side of the county road. Skid marks on the snow-packed surface of the road told the tale of the driver losing control while rounding the curve and sliding into the drift.

      Brodie set his emergency brake, turned on his flashers and hurried out of his vehicle. The car in the snow was a white Jeep Wrangler with Colorado plates. Brodie couldn’t see a driver from this angle. Maybe whoever this was had already flagged down another driver and was on the way into town. Boots crunching in the snow, Brodie climbed over a churned-up pile of ice and peered down into the driver’s seat.

      The woman didn’t look like a woman anymore, sprawled across the seat, arms pinned beneath her, blood from the wound at her throat staining the front of her white fur coat. Brodie was reminded of going trapping with an uncle when he was a teenager. They’d come upon a trapped weasel in the snow, its winter-white coat splashed with crimson. Brodie hadn’t had the stomach for trapping after that, and he hadn’t thought of that moment in twenty years.

      Taking a deep, steadying breath, he stepped away from the vehicle and marshaled his composure, then called Travis. “I’m on County Road Seven,” he said. “On the way from the ranch into town. I pulled over to check on a car in a ditch. The driver is a woman, her throat’s cut. I think we’ve got another victim.”