Edge of Black. J.T. Ellison

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ gifts to milk the world of its incredible beauty. Under his fingers, the piano could render 8400 chords, each of which, when combined with another, told a story with infinite possibilities. Bullets did the same thing, if used properly.

      He ended up in infantry on purpose. He could have been a pilot, he just didn’t feel like dealing with all the extra training. It was more enjoyable to be on the ground than in the air, anyway. More chance for a little one-on-one action, instead of floating above it all. He’d actually started the Apache training once, but pulled out to go to sniper school when a candidate had to drop and a slot unexpectedly opened. He was nineteen at the time with a raging hard-on for the Army. Anything they wanted to teach him, he wanted to learn.

      Age tempered his enthusiasm a bit, but only just. Ranger School, Airborne, Sniper, Demolition—anything they could throw at him, he jumped at the chance. It was so different from the world he grew up in, so structured, so formal. There were regulations that he was expected to follow, and he thrived in the environment. Of course, he was a rising star, which meant he was getting respect and extra attention along the way, and that helped things a great deal. If he’d been a grunt and been treated like a grunt, dismissed out of hand by his superiors, he may have felt differently. He recognized that, tried to keep his star from burning too brightly so he could at least maintain some friendships along the way. If he hadn’t been an enlisted man, he could have gone pretty damn far.

      But he mustered out at First Sergeant and was happy as hell to go. The Army had changed in the years he’d been suckling at her teat, marveling at his toys. A war that he felt was mismanaged, an officer he respected committing the ultimate sin, the constant day-to-day grind that became his life in the desert, fighting for every little thing he could gather up for his men—it turned him sour on the whole enterprise. After the shooting of his friend Perry Fisher, who they’d jokingly called King, it was all over for him. He knew the military would never again have that shine, the excitement that it first held, so he took his gear and his medals and his still-living ass and hurried on home.

      Part of him was ashamed, and the other part knew it was for the best. The Army was an ever-evolving beast, and in the intervening years, as he grew from boy to man to warrior under their direction, it had become a different place, a political football. He didn’t feel his skills were being put to proper use, nor those of any of his brethren.

      Of course, they were all dead now, too. He was the only one left from his tight-knit unit, and he felt the absence of his comrades keenly. When he mustered out, he found a quiet place in the mountains, away from everyone, his family, his friends. He led a monastic life on the land—something his parents could finally get behind.

      The Savage River forest was kind to him. He fished and hunted when he needed meat. He brought vegetables and herbs from the ground when he needed flavors. He picked fruit from the trees when he needed something sweet. He watched the breeze wind sinuously through the trees when he needed a distraction, and used the sun and the moon as his guide when he needed to establish time. He was happy alone, felt safer that way. Since he’d been trained to kill, to be able to take a life without a second thought, he felt the need to repent.

      The joke among his brethren, what do you feel when you kill a terrorist? Recoil.

      And not the kind that meant your stomach was turned.

      Repent wasn’t the right word. Recalibrate was more like it. He was a dangerous man, and he knew it. His mind needed to adjust back to the world where threats didn’t linger in the shadows, where he could sleep without his hand on the trigger.

      He wasn’t quite there yet.

      And then Samantha paraded into his life, and turned his world on its ear.

      Samantha was more than his lover; she was his savior. He hated the circumstances that brought them together, but he’d fallen in love with her almost immediately, though he hadn’t shared that information with her. He hadn’t needed to—she’d felt the same pull. A connection, however faint, however strong, had been made in their first meeting. Pheromones, maybe, or their beings acknowledging kindred spirits. Regardless, something about her made his soul sing. He’d had other women—not many, sex was still a sacred act for him, another anomaly he’d developed in spite of his exceptionally liberal upbringing, where sex and nudity were as natural as the sun rising in the east—but enough to know the difference between lust and love. But Sam, beautiful, smart, good Sam, was different. He finally understood how his father could abandon his entire life and legacy for a woman.

      And with that understanding came another—he’d been on the path to becoming an empty soul, devoid of feeling, of being unable to find the splendor in the world anymore. Sam was more than just the aesthetics. She’d brought him back from the near-dead. He would do anything for her.

      Which was the reason, while watching the top of the hourly news update and waiting for Sam to confirm why she’d been rushed away by Fletcher, he felt compelled to reach out to a group of people he was familiar with.

      The answers were out there.

      And Xander might be able to help find them.

      Chapter 7

      Washington, D.C.

      Dr. Samantha Owens

      Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”

      Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”

      She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.

      “Good luck with that.”

      “Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”

      “I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”

      With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.

      Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.

      So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.

      What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and СКАЧАТЬ