Free Mann 01 - Where Angels Rest by Kate Brady

opening the hood. Something was wrong.
    Random attack.
That’s what they said about Carrie. Police were still looking, but the paper had said authorities thought it was some impulsive act by a stranger passing through. Not someone from Hopewell, stuck on the road with the hood up.
    Still, she couldn’t seem to settle her heart to a normal beat, and even as her car drifted closer to the stalled truck, the fingers of one hand curled around her phone. For a split second, she had the insane impulse to call home and let her mother know where she was, but she shook it off. She was nineteen—a grown woman. Bad enough that she’d flunked out of college and had nowhere to go but Hopewell. But if her mom found out she’d been with Ace Holmes tonight—and tripping—she’d be a prisoner. She and Ace would never have the chance to get away.
    Rebecca took a deep breath and pulled closer to the truck. Don’t be a baby, she told herself. For God’s sake, this was Hopewell.
    Nick threw two logs on the fire then moved an old radio off the table and adjusted the lantern so he could read. Sims looked around.
    “It’s not much for creature comforts, but that blanket is clean,” he said, nodding to the mattress on the floor.
    She went to it, looking a little less confident than just moments before. She was in a cold, empty house in the middle of nowhere, alone at night with a stranger who was half drunk, outweighed her by at least eighty pounds, and wielded a bad temper and a pistol. Nick could see each and every one of those realizations coming to light in her mind.
    “I’ve never attacked a woman before,” he assured her.
    “But you could make an exception for me?”
    He lifted a brow. “You’re throwing around some pretty heavy accusations, in a place where you don’t know the players.”
    “I know Jack Calloway.”
    Nick held her eyes. “So do I.”
    An impasse. She acknowledged it with a tilt of her head and lowered herself to the mattress so carefully that Nick pulled out the Starke County Sheriff’s accident report first: Dr. Sims had suffered a bout of unconsciousness, a couple of bruised ribs, abrasions and contusions. He could see it as she tried to get comfortable—the careful movements, the wince. He made a mental note to call Starke County first thing in the morning.
    “I could tell you in a nutshell,” she offered, but Nick didn’t want the emotional-sister version. He wanted the facts.
    “I’d rather read it in detail,” he said.
    She leaned back against the wall to wait, crossing her arms over her ribcage. Nick knew about bruised ribs. They hurt like a son of a bitch.
    Read.
    Lauren McAllister: She’d been a promising art studentwith a love for cocaine, and the only child of a two-term senator who had, according to some, won his third term on a sympathy vote. Lauren’s body had been found when early morning bird-watchers saw something floating in the Everglades. Authorities got to her before the alligators and determined that she’d been dead since the night before, though she hadn’t been in the water very long. The bullet that killed her, point blank into the heart, was a .38 from Justin Sims’s handgun, which turned up in the swamp. She’d been tripping: cocaine in her blood.
    Interesting, but not unusual. Pretty run-of-the-mill, as murders go. There was evidence that pointed straight to Justin Sims, with nothing to distinguish this case from a hundred other murd—
    Nick blinked, and the hairs on his arms stood up. He re-read a passage:
traces of paint thinner on face.
    He glanced up and caught Sims looking at him.
    Paint thinner?
Jack Calloway was a skilled carpenter. Paint thinner would be a staple in his workshop. And Nick had seen Margaret, a sculptor, use it to clean up clay.
    He blew out a breath. Sims was a shrink, and he could see it coming. “I imagine you have a theory about the paint thinner?” he asked. “Some psychological profile you’ve concocted and applied to Jack