Free FADE TO BLACK - Thrilling Romantic Suspense - Book 1 of the BLACK CATS Series by Leslie A. Kelly Page A

belly.
    Now there was only this. The sounds emerging from the fully enabled speakers grew louder, filling the room, filling his ears, filling his brain.
    Filling his soul.
    He relaxed in his chair, one world falling away, another spreading out before him, full of unexplored places and exciting opportunities.
    No hateful voices greeted him, and none followed. Just friends speaking their cyber chatter. Some people would listen and hear only gibberish. But he understood it perfectly, even without reading the flood of text messages that appeared the moment he arrived in the playground. Welcome, where have you been? Come see my latest project. Take me. Choose me. Hurt me.
    We’ve missed you.
    His friends were all here, waiting for him in the only world he wanted to inhabit. Here he was somebody. Here he was never called useless or ugly. Here they respected him, were in awe of him. Feared him.
    Because here, everyone knew who he really was. And what he was capable of.
    When? someone asked. More took up the cry. When will you show us more?
    He checked the date—nearly five weeks since his last premiere. And then he considered his finances—very low. How he’d managed only one auction every couple of months at the start was beyond him.
    It was time. He had things he wanted to buy, places he wanted to visit, and he didn’t have the means to do it.
    Besides, his palms were beginning to itch. Right hand meant money coming in, left meant money going out, according to the old saying. But to the Reaper, both meant only one thing.
    Time to kill someone.
    Dean wanted to get right to work on the search for the murder site. Though they suspected it had been a long time since Lisa had died, and the odds of their finding anything were minimal, this was the first real break they’d had in the case. All the other bodies had been found in dump sites, the original location of the killings unknown.
    That the lead came courtesy of the sharp eyes of a small-town sheriff with a great ass did not escape him.
    “Enough of that,” he muttered, not even wanting to go there in his head when it came to Stacey Rhodes. No matter how attractive she was—physically and mentally.
    “What?”
    “Nothing,” he told Wyatt. “Just wishing we could get right on the search.”
    But they couldn’t. They’d spent the past two hours with the sheriff, laying out a search grid and making plans to start first thing tomorrow. Not only because it was late in the day, but also because they lacked the manpower. Even with the help of the sheriff and her deputies, there weren’t enough of them to search hundreds of acres of woods.
    Besides, neither he nor Wyatt knew a thing about the deputies on her staff. For all they knew, the guys who worked for her could be small-town old-timers who’d been in their jobs for decades. Given the emptiness of the sheriff’s office, and the casual, laid-back atmosphere inside, they weren’t expecting a top-notch crew.
    Stacey Rhodes was top-notch enough all on her own.
    “Rather a remarkable woman, Sheriff Rhodes, wouldn’t you say?” Wyatt asked as he drove them down the main street, in search of the town’s only hotel.
    Dean flinched, wondering if he’d been wearing an I’m-thinking-of-a-hot-female expression. Then again, any man with an ounce of blood below the waist and a brain cell in his head would be thinking about the woman whose office they’d just left. “Oh, yeah.”
    “Good of her to arrange for us to get a block of rooms on such short notice.”
    The sheriff had called the owner of the inn, getting him to offer government rates on their rooms. Dean and Wyatt were alone now, but Mulrooney and Stokes would show up tonight, Fletcher and Cole in the morning. With all of them, as well as Stacey and the deputies she vouched for, they could begin the search for the scene of the crime tomorrow. Jackie Stokes was bringing all her forensics gear, and they’d have the state police on standby with a cadaver-sniffing