Free The Cold Moon by Jeffery Deaver Page A

town to kill other people too. Among them were some women. As long as Vincent was careful and didn't spend more than twenty or thirty minutes, he could have their bodies after they were dead — to do what he wished. In exchange, Vincent would help him — as a guide to the city and its roads and transportation system, and to stand guard and sometimes drive the getaway car.
    "So. You interested?"
    "I guess," Vincent said, though his private response was a lot more enthusiastic than that.
    And Vincent was now hard at work on this job, following the third victim: Joanne Harper, their flower girl, Clever Vincent had dubbed her. He watched her take out a key and disappear through the service door to her workshop. He eased to a stop, ate a candy bar and leaned against a lamp pole, looking through the shop's grimy window.
    His hand touched the bulge at his waistband, where the Buck knife rested. Staring at the vague form of Joanne, turning on lights, taking her coat off, moving around the workshop. She was alone.
    Gripping the knife.
    He wondered if she had freckles, he wondered what her perfume smelled like. He wondered if she whimpered when she was in pain. Did she —
    But, no, he shouldn't think like this! He was here only to get information. He couldn't break the rules, couldn't disappoint Gerald Duncan. Vincent inhaled the painfully cold air. He should wait.
    But then Joanne walked near the window. He got a good look at her. Oh, she's pretty...
    Vincent's palms began to sweat. Of course, he could simply take her now and leave her tied up for Duncan to kill later. That would be something that a friend would understand. They'd both get what they wanted.
    After all, sometimes you just can't wait.
    The hunger does that to you...
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    Next time, pack warm. What were you thinking?
    Riding in a pungent cab, thirty-something Kathryn Dance held her hands out in front of a backseat heater exhaling air that wasn't hot, wasn't even warm; at best, she decided, it was uncold. She rubbed together her fingers, tipped in dark red nails, and then gave her black-stockinged knees a chance at the air.
    Dance came from a locale where the temperature was seventy-five, give or take, all year-round and you had to drive up Carmel Valley Road a long, long way to find enough sledding snow to keep your son and daughter happy. In her last-minute packing for the seminar here in New York, somehow she'd forgotten that the Northeast plus December equals the Himalayas.
    She was reflecting: Here I can't drop the last five pounds of what I gained in Mexico last month (where she'd done nothing but sit in a smoky room, interrogating a suspected kidnapper). If I can't lose it, at least the extra weight ought to do its duty as insulation. Ain't fair... She pulled her thin coat more tightly around her.
    Kathryn Dance was a special agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, based in Monterey. She was one of the nation's preeminent experts in interrogation and kinesics — the science of observing and analyzing the body language and verbal behavior of witnesses and suspects. She'd been in New York for the past three days presenting her kinesics seminar to local law enforcement agencies.
    Kinesics is a rare specialty in police work, but to Kathryn Dance there was nothing like it. She was a people addict. They fascinated her, they electrified her. Confounded and challenged her too. These billions of odd creatures moving through the world, saying the strangest and most wonderful and terrible things... She felt what they felt, she feared what scared them, she got pleasure from their joy.
    Dance had been a reporter after college: journalism, that profession tailor-made for the aimless with insatiable curiosities. She ended up on the crime beat and spent hours in courtrooms, observing lawyers and suspects and jurors. She realized something about herself: She could look at a witness, listen to his words and get an immediate sense of when he was telling the truth and