Contact. Evelyn Vaughn
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Someone who didn’t belong here. In fact…
She didn’t know those boots. So why did they concern her?
She concentrated, straining to catch this particular heartbeat. It pulsed more rapidly than the heart of someone who was simply taking care of tasks at work. It sounded more like someone doing something they shouldn’t. And in this otherwise lifeless room, surrounded only by hearts that never would beat again, she recognized it.
The killer was coming.
Time to leave, thought Faith—but her feet didn’t move. It wasn’t from courage. Some instinct more powerful than her desire to see the killer’s face was holding her transfixed, listening to those footsteps, listening to that heartbeat. What was different about it? A murmur? A rhythmic anomaly? Could she even be sure it was the killer, and not her imagination?
Her head couldn’t. But her instincts weren’t letting her go out there, all the same.
The problem was, he was coming in here. She didn’t have to be psychic to guess that. This room was at the end of a hallway. He was coming in here, and either she stood here and waited for him, or she left by forcing herself to walk right by him—
Her feet weren’t cooperating.
He was barely ten feet from the door, if that much. She could hear it. Nine feet. Eight….
Faith wanted to stand her ground. But she’d been raised on paranoia for too long. Almost in defeat, she spun, tugged open one of the steel drawers at her feet—
A man’s ashen face stared back up at her. One of the dead gangbangers. Being a crime victim, he didn’t look happy, even in death.
The footsteps were only six feet from the doorway. Five….
She kicked that drawer smoothly closed and yanked the handle of another. It glided open, empty. She swung in, feet-first.
Three feet from the doorway…
Planting either hand on the disinfected, death-scented linoleum beneath the drawer, Faith pushed backward, sliding herself into the dark, steel confines of a drawer that normally held dead bodies.
Chapter 3
I t was cold. Cold and dark, and so very, very close.
Not that the former residents of this drawer had needed to see or stay warm.
On her stomach, Faith tucked her arms beneath herself, both for warmth and to lever her face farther from the steel slab that had held countless corpses. She shivered. Even her extra-keen eyes could see nothing. She could hear nothing. Was this thing actually soundproof? If so, was it so the dead could sleep peacefully…or so that the living wouldn’t hear them?
Stupid, thought Faith of her own fancies. Stupid, stupid. Now that she’d committed to this foolish course of action, she felt frustrated with her own cowardice. That, and its impetus.
A person couldn’t really have such distinct hearing that she could recognize a specific heartbeat, from down the hallway. Could she? Not even a freak like her. It had to be her imagination. Or maybe she was mentally deficient. Her mother had never wanted to consult a doctor about Faith’s “condition.”
Even if she wasn’t crazy, and the visitor to the morgue was the killer, why hide? She’d had a chance to see the man’s face, to finally know who had done this horrible thing to her friend…
But even now, when she considered pushing out of this body locker, she couldn’t quite summon the courage. She’d been in shock when she’d gone after the killer at the bar. Now, in daylight, facing him down seemed even more foolish than hiding from him.
Even in here.
She could feel her muscles stiffen, her breath strain in this cold, solid tomb of sensory deprivation. If she raised her head, she bumped it on steel.
Something felt sticky under one elbow—don’t think about it!—and she shivered harder.
Minutes passed.
Desperate, she harnessed her thoughts back to logic. Okay, suppose the intruder really was the killer from the bar. What the hell would he be doing here? How could he have gotten past security? Why would anyone take such a risk?
The last question echoed through her skull as surely as her own heartbeat and chattering teeth echoed blindly, deafening, back at her in this closed metal drawer. Why?
Roy Chopin had almost asked if anything had been taken from Krystal’s body. Faith felt sure of that. But shouldn’t he be asking about Krystal’s personal possessions rather than her corpse? What could be—
Taken from a corpse?
Oh, God. A trophy.
When the bodies on the slabs had merely been things, the empty remains of crime victims, hiding made sense. But when Faith thought of them being further victimized—here, where they should at least be safe—she couldn’t stand it.
She might already be too late. Safety be damned. Planting her hands on the sides of the drawer, wincing to imagine whatever else might have touched the same spot, she pushed forward—
And bumped her head on steel.
No.
She was locked in?
No! Barely swallowing back an embarrassing whimper, she fumbled at the front of the drawer. Oh, God, no. She couldn’t have made such a horrible mistake. What if she suffocated in here? What if nobody found her for days? She would never have a chance to make up with her mother. She would die a virgin. It would be like being buried alive!
When her hands encountered a latch, her relief was dizzying. Her reaction to the snick of that latch, to the rush of air that now smelled fresh in comparison to where she’d been, was heaven itself. But she didn’t have time to savor it as she threw open the door to the body drawer. She pushed the tray that held her forward, rolled stiffly off it, braced herself for an attack from—
From nobody.
Faith crouched there beside the open drawer, her heart pounding, her hands fisted, and faced an empty examination room. She spun one direction. Turned the other. Nothing.
Had she imagined it?
But no. She wasn’t imagining the scent that lingered beneath this smell of antiseptics and death. It didn’t matter if most normal people wouldn’t be able to smell it; many smokers couldn’t discern scents like baking bread or cheap perfume either, but that didn’t mean the smells weren’t there. This smell was here, too. Part musk, part heat. Power. Dominance. Evil.
If Faith needed further proof of intrusion, Krystal’s corpse now stared blankly at the ceiling.
Someone had moved the sheet from her blue-lipped face.
Still catching her shuddering breath, skin crawling from her momentary entombment, Faith took a hesitant step closer to her friend’s remains. The bruised horror that had once been Krystal’s slim, smooth neck seemed all the more blasphemous. Her eyes were open, blank. Her pale blond hair…
Was something different about her hair?
Faith bent closer, peering at it. There was definitely a blunt wedge where a chunk of hair by Krystal’s temple had been inexpertly sliced away. Someone had taken—
A knock at the open doorway startled her so badly, Faith sprang back from the corpse with a cry. Then she stared at her boss, confused. How had Greg gotten so close without her hearing him?
Just how upset was she?
Still, now that she did notice him, his heartbeat sounded comfortingly, familiarly like Greg. He wore Nikes, not boots. He, at least, wasn’t the killer.
“This is your version of keeping distance from the case?” he asked, pale eyes frowning behind his glasses.
Faith flushed. “I came looking