All The Pretty Dead Girls. John Manning
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THE NEXT DEAD GIRL
All Tish Lewis knew was that it was dark.
And cold.
How long had she been in this place? And where exactly was she?
She had long since stopped screaming. No one had come in response to her screams.
Why? Why was she being held?
Ransom? That’s what she thought at first. Someone had kidnapped her and was demanding money from her father. But that was before she began to hear the chanting through the door. The terrible singing.
That was before she heard the scream.
It was a girl’s scream. She knew that. And she thought she knew who the girl was, too.
Her roommate, Joelle.
Tish began to cry again. She was starting to lose hope that she’d ever get out of this room alive. What worried her most now was how her death would come, not if. They had taken her for a reason—they’d taken Joelle, too, and Tish was certain it was Joelle’s scream of death that she had heard. They’d taken both girls to kill them.
But who “they” were and why they wanted to kill them was unknown. And it was the unknown that Tish feared most…
ALL THE PRETTY DEAD GIRLS
JOHN MANNING
PINNACLE BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Three Months Earlier
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
1
The white Lexus was doing exactly one mile over the speed limit when it crossed the Louisiana state line.
It had started to rain just outside of Jackson, Mississippi—a steady downpour the wipers simply couldn’t keep up with. Visibility was impaired enough to force Sue to slow down to a crawl as she passed through the city.
Sue’s shoulders tensed as she watched the red taillights of the Jeep Cherokee in front of her. She had been driving almost nonstop for nearly two days now. The other girls on campus had been thinking about their exams, about what they’d do on their upcoming holiday breaks. But Sue’s mind had been on one thing and one thing only. Getting away. There had been no other choice.
She snapped on the radio, trying to relieve the tedium of the drive and the steady, pounding rain. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” a voice sang from the radio. “Let your heart be light…”
Christmas. It was almost Christmas. It didn’t feel that way to Sue, with the warm, muggy rain.
“From now on, our troubles will be out of sight…”
She was crying. She switched off the radio. She preferred the silence.
Sue glanced back in her rearview mirror. She wasn’t really sure who—or what—she was looking for. In the rain, she couldn’t see anything but headlights anyway. But somehow it made her feel better to look back every now and then. Her nerves, already shot, began to fray a little as she kept taking her foot off the gas pedal to avoid slamming into the car in front of her.
“Come on, come on,” Sue muttered under her breath, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. The wind and rain whipped against the side of the car with a long, screeching howl.
It seemed to take hours to get through Jackson, but once she