Plain Jane Read Online Free

dull steel and rough concrete. Artistically as dead as the denizens inside. Meat packing plants had more character than this place.
    At some point, someone must have realized that this building was a place where friends and family came to claim the bodies of their loved ones.
    That “someone” had planted enough foliage to create an arboretum, not realizing that greenery alone could not shake the building’s despair. No matter the flowering shrubs, no happiness could come of this place.
    But Kent was not here to criticize.
    He was here to claim his own dead.
    Perhaps everyone else could wait until Dr. McGregor rolled his ass out of bed at seven, but the profiler could not wait those four hours. He needed to know now .
    Unlike metropolitan centers such as LA or New York, with their round-the-clock medical examiners and nearly instantaneous answers, the remainder of the country still had to make do with good-ol’-boy docs.
    Doctors who turned off their pagers at midnight. If you planned on dying after the witching hour, you didn’t count on an autopsy until after McGregor had his breakfast.
    Clearly the good doctor did not understand that the killer’s timetable depended on his success or defeat this night. If Plain Jane had his trophy, Kent and the police might have another four or five days, maybe a week, to stop the lunatic before he struck again. If the killer left the crime scene empty-handed, Plain Jane would be out again, maybe even tonight.
    If that were the case, Kent needed to know. He needed to be on the prowl again. Trolling the city for short, quiet, and unassuming brunettes.
    No one else, not even Nicole, seemed ready to act upon his urgency. Glick had made it perfectly clear when Kent came on the case that his role was solely that of an advisor. He had a better chance of bossing the janitors around than he did of ordering anyone in the department to do his bidding.
    Glick had tied his hands. If he hadn’t, Kent would have awakened the medical examiner himself. This idiotic following of bureaucratic protocol could get another woman killed.
    A growing fury reduced his vision to a pinpoint.
    They were to blame. Glick, Torres, Nicole.
    Well…
    Kent gulped, remembering his own tragic decision. Nicole had been right. When he lost track of Joann in the Rocky Horror crowd, he should have called for backup. However, Kent knew if all those cops descended on Joann to protect her, the killer would have evaporated.
    Worse, had Kent shown his hand that boldly, Plain Jane might have been able to make him. How safe would the women of this city be if the killer knew the face of the man who hunted him?
    And they were running out of time. If Kent were correct in his calculations, Plain Jane would only make one more kill in this city before pulling up roots, replanting months from now, miles from here.
    Plain Jane had already changed MOs three times in three different cities. He was getting bolder, no longer hiding his true aim. The killings would never lessen, only grow.
    Sighing, Kent knew those were all the logical reasons he had not called for backup. However, crouched behind a bush in the pouring rain, Kent could admit the real reason he had not called for help. The sole reason, which he could never share with anyone, not even Nicole, was his delusional belief that he, and only he, could keep Joann safe. He had slipped so deeply into the killer’s mind-set that his reality had warped. Tunnel vision could not even describe it.
    There were he and Joann. No others. The rest of the world was but a blur, meaning nothing and contributing nothing. Joann was his and his alone. The backup police force felt so insignificant that they did not even register on Kent’s radar. Joann was his only concern.
    And now he sat here in the mud, waiting for her body. Maybe breathing in her Obsession one last time might give him a sense of peace.
    Refocusing, Kent stared at the morgue. It was the one and only building he needed to get into