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Back Minutes to Kill Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Chapter One
  6. Chapter Two
  7. Chapter Three
  8. Chapter Four
  9. Chapter Five
  10. Chapter Six
  11. Chapter Seven
  12. Chapter Eight
  13. Chapter Nine
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Chapter Fourteen
  19. Chapter Fifteen
  20. Chapter Sixteen
  21. Chapter Seventeen
  22. Chapter Eighteen
  23. Chapter Nineteen
  24. Chapter Twenty
  25. Chapter Twenty-One
  26. Chapter Twenty-Two
  27. Chapter Twenty-Three
  28. Chapter Twenty-Four
  29. Chapter Twenty-Five
  30. Chapter Twenty-Six
  31. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  32. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  33. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  34. Chapter Thirty
  35. Chapter Thirty-One
  36. Chapter Thirty-Two
  37. Chapter Thirty-Three
  38. Chapter Thirty-Four
  39. Chapter Thirty-Five
  40. Chapter Thirty-Six
  41. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  42. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  43. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  44. Acknowledgments
  45. About the Author

Brody and Ripton walked to the rear of another car, a battered old Corolla. The trunk stood open. Inside, the nude body of a young woman lay on its side. Brody gasped, and his pulse stuttered a beat. For a second he’d thought it was Hannah. But a second glance told him that other than the short blond hair, there was little resemblance. This girl was younger. Her eyes were brown instead of blue. She was a head shorter and curvier. Plus, he’d just left Hannah alive and well.

The hair must be a coincidence, but the similarity left him with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his belly. He would not breathe easily until they caught Joleen’s killer.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Brody spent the early morning hours on Thursday walking through the rest of the scene with the lead crime scene tech. The shooting of a police officer and the sheer brutality of Joleen’s killing eliminated the normal gallows humor of a death scene.

The second woman had been identified as Chrissi Tyler. A few phone calls determined that she’d had a fight with her boyfriend Tuesday night at The Scarlet Lounge. The security tapes showed a man following her out the door, a man who knew how to keep his face away from the surveillance cameras. Both Chrissi and the man had disappeared from the range of the parking lot cameras. Chrissi’s hair had been long in the tape, and a few snipped strands had been found in the mobile home bedroom. The killer had given her a haircut that looked just like Hannah’s. How the hell could that be a coincidence?

Brody drove toward the station but somehow ended up sitting in front of the Barrett farmhouse. Through the windshield, dawn brightened the tops of the trees. For a minute, he leaned on the headrest and closed his eyes. The things human beings did to one another never ceased to appall him. That was probably a good thing. The day he could shrug off a man beating a woman to death with a baseball bat was the day he should hand in his badge.

He checked the time on his phone. Six thirty. Would Hannah be awake? Probably. She had an early morning meeting with the prosecutor. His morning, maybe his whole day, would be consumed with Joleen’s murder case and assisting the task force formed to find her killer. Good luck to him in trying to make sense of a total cluster of a night. What he needed was twelve hours of solid sleep. But how would he get the image of that girl out of his head? Sure, there were plenty of women with short blond hair, and the other victim had been a brunette, but Brody was still uncomfortable.

He dialed Hannah’s number.