Her Last Breath: A Thomas Cade Thriller by Jay Nadal

Author:Jay Nadal [Nadal, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

37

Perez didn’t realize how long it had been since she last moved until she tried to stand. A spasm of pain gripped her lower back. She stretched one hand to the trouble spot. Around her, the department bustled. She hadn’t registered that for a while either. Anderson was in his office, the door closed and blinds drawn. Which meant he pretended to be on a call but was probably asleep. The other detectives were at their desks, sweating, or out on cases or at the coffee machine. Papers were strewn across her desk, marked, highlighted, stapled, and clipped together in various configurations.

There was a list of van makes and models that fitted the image in the security camera. A list of businesses in the area that used such vehicles, everything from A/C repair to dry-cleaning collections. Underneath that were stolen vans and van sales. She figured if she was going to make best use of her time, the mass of information was better handed over to Cade and his girlfriend. Let them slog it out, keep the PI out of her way.

Except, their conversation in the bar had made her consider she shouldn’t be wasting the resource he represented. He didn’t give much away but she could spot a guy with good cop instincts when she saw one. It went against the grain to involve a civilian, but what could she do? She wasn’t about to let politics interfere with solving this case. Maybe Cade’s girlfriend, or partner or whatever she was, could do the donkey work. Cade could come into the manhunt side of things.

She began gathering the paperwork on the vehicle together, putting it into folders and stacking them to one side of the desk. When Anderson left, she would slip the files into her bag and leave. That just left the other work she had been doing for the last couple of hours, looking into similar cases in the past. The very recent past. And finding them. She decided to take a walk to the parking lot for a smoke and was halfway down the fire stairs, not feeling sociable enough to take the elevator, when her phone rang. Cade’s number came up.

“Perez,” she said, stopping on a landing and opening a window there. She put a cigarette to her lips and lit up, blowing smoke out of the window and resting her cigarette hand on the concrete sill.

“I got something for you. A lead,” Cade said without preamble.

“Yeah? Tell.”

“A previous case, six years ago. Involving the abduction and murder of a prostitute named Alison Powell. Aged twenty-six. Blonde, curly hair, blue eyes, slender, attractive. Prostitute. Abducted. A finger was removed from the body, which was found tied up in the Bayou. Autopsy showed she had been either beaten to death or asphyxiated. Severe cranial trauma. Sound familiar?”

Perez swore, blew out a jet of blue smoke. The name had come up in her trawl of previous cases. She would have got to it if she hadn’t spent so much damned time on the van.

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