Free Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller) by Theo Cage

nerves from the old man’s cheeks. Chapertah dropped the head on the table in a careless gesture. Kam heard Kaufmann’s nose crunch on the desktop. Chapertah then bent down and plucked one of the eyes from an exam paper it had landed on. He held it up close to the camera with his bloody hands.
    Kam leapt back from his iPhone screen, dropping the phone on the tile floor, knocking the ornate hotel lamp over that sat on the table next to him. As he reeled back, a sharp pain filled his head, and he blacked out.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    I get up every morning and go to work just like you.
    Most days I hate what I do – despise the politics and the bullshit and the endless paperwork that goes with it. And if I have to listen to one more drunk at two in the morning – in some crowded bar, lipping off to me about his excuse for a good life wasted – I swear I will happily make him eat the working end of my service revolver.
    But I haven’t yet because the paperwork would kill me. So just let me dream.
    Then there are those other days. Days when I feel like I’ve accomplished something bordering on important. Well, maybe that’s going too far. It feels important to me anyway. Like finally catching that arrogant pimp Rodriguez dead to rights, the asshole who made four of his girls disappear over the past year, smiling at me with his missing teeth. Or putting the cuffs on some rich asshole from Georgetown whose wife of twenty-five years went on a permanent vacation and has never been seen again. These small successes keep me going for another few days. That’s what I live for.
    I work for the Washington D.C. Homicide Bureau if you haven’t already guessed – for far too long. Over twenty years. Half of my partners have retired or croaked or died in the line of duty. That should tell you something – that I’m lucky or blessed – or maybe not trying hard enough.
    Being around this long and still in one piece, gives me the luxury of working a special unit – a unit we unofficially call the Lost Hope Division. Cold cases and sometimes, special cases. Cases the Captain doesn’t really know what to do with and doesn’t want some rookie mishandling and making more work for him. The watch-your-ass cases loaded with ugly political potential. So I get them. Gregory Hyde at your service.
    This is such as case; a professor at Georgetown University, who went missing a week ago and was found yesterday in his four car garage lying dead on the concrete floor. The diagnosis was carbon monoxide poisoning. We’ve had a dozen of these cases this year alone. A pretty common way to go actually. Painless. Neat.
    But then why get me involved? Because the professor’s wife, who has a lot of connections in the community, made a big commotion and called the Captain personally. Her husband wasn’t suicidal and never had been she said.
    That wasn’t what caught our attention. A number of his peers had coincidentally died in the past few weeks as well. A Cosmologist he knew threw himself off a balcony yesterday in Toronto. An Engineering Ph.D. at Columbia had been accidentally cooked in a radiation chamber, a few days earlier.
    Was it open season on professors?
    I visited the wife of the prof from Georgetown U on my own. I’m told it’s budget cuts. I had lost a partner the year before, and there still wasn’t a replacement. That or no one wanted to work with a detective who had lost as many partners as I had. After all, cops for good reason are superstitious.
    I was surprised how young the professor’s wife was. Then I learned that her husband had been some kind of whiz kid. University education at fifteen. PhD at eighteen. Professor at twenty-two. He was an expert on antiquities. And a very successful writer and entrepreneur – who also taught history.
    Turns out he was younger than many of his students and his wife looked like the homecoming queen.
    She invited me into her freshly painted Georgetown mini-mansion, and we sat in front of the