Free The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul Page A

wanting to spare her from false hope if it turned out he was wrong. But the look on Mary’s face told him it was already too late, and the words she spoke confirmed it.
    “What is it, Keith?” Mary asked. “Why are you asking her about the tattoo?”
    Keith hesitated, then told her: “I’m almost certain the body I saw this morning didn’t have a tattoo.”
    “You mean it might not be Jeff?” Mary asked, immediately grasping what he was saying.
    “I don’t know,” Keith said, still trying to protect both Mary and Heather, in case he was wrong.
    “I want to see,” Mary said. “I want to see for myself.”

    A little more than two hours later, Keith stood once more in the morgue, facing the drawer in which lay the body he had seen that morning. This time, though, Mary stood on one side of him and Heather Randall on the other.
    “I have to see,” Heather had told them when they’d found her waiting just inside the front door. As he had with Mary, Keith tried to dissuade her, and like Mary, Heather had insisted.
    Now, as the drawer was pulled open, her fingers dug into the muscle of his left arm. The orderly—a different one than had been on duty that morning—pulled the sheet back, and Mary uttered a strangled sound of horror. She turned away, steadying herself against her husband as she struggled to fight back the wave of nausea that had risen inside her.
    The orderly glanced questioningly at Keith. His own stomach knotted as he looked down again at the charred remains that had been pulled from the burning wreckage that morning.
    His eyes fixed on the spot where there should have been a tattoo.
    And all he saw was charred flesh.

CHAPTER 8
    H e wasn’t crazy.
    No matter what anyone said, Francis Jagger knew he wasn’t crazy.
    He’d had to kill the girl. He’d even tried to warn her. When they first met her, he warned her about Jimmy, how she needed to stay away from Jimmy.
    But she hadn’t.
    Instead, she started acting real friendly toward Jimmy.
    He’d warned Jimmy about her, too. Told him she was just like his mother.
    Jimmy had just smiled at him, the way he always did. “Come on, Jag—you don’t even remember your mother.”
    But he did remember his mother. He remembered how, when he was a little boy—before he even went to school—she started hanging around with someone. Ted, that was his name. And right from the first time he met Ted, he’d known what was going to happen.
    “Don’t worry, Francie,” his mother kept telling him. “He’s not going to take me away from you.”
    “Don’t call me that! That’s a girl’s name!”
    “No it’s not. And even if it was, so what?” She’d picked him up and swung him in the air. “Aren’t you pretty enough to be my little girl?”
    The boy next door had heard her say that, and started calling him Francie, too. And then Francine.
    He’d hated that.
    And he would have stopped that boy from doing it, too, except that before he could decide exactly what to do, he’d come home one day and his mother was gone.
    His mother, and Ted, and all their stuff.
    He waited for her to come back, and tried not to cry, and ate the food he found in the refrigerator, and sat up all night so he’d be awake when she came back for him.
    He waited all the next day, and the next night, too, but his mother hadn’t come home.
    Finally, a stranger had come and taken him away from his house and sent him to live with someone else.
    There had been a lot of people he’d lived with, moving from one house to another, never staying in any of them long enough to feel like he belonged. By now, all the people who had taken him in for a few weeks—but never more than a few months—had run together in his mind. Even if someone had asked, he wouldn’t have been able to put their faces together with their names.
    The only person he really remembered—even wanted to remember—was Jimmy.
    He’d met Jimmy three years ago, and right away he knew they were going to be