No Escape Read Online Free Page A

after he’d found it.
    Cautiously, he pushed the door inward and followed it inside the room. The hinges squeaked just a little, but he liked that. Besides the thunk of the lock, he also had the squeak as an early warning system.
    A quick sweep of the room revealed that no one was waiting for him. The hair trapped between the second drawer down and the frame of the chest of drawers told him no one had searched the room.
    He locked the door behind him, holstered the pistol, and got down to business. He took off his jacket and threw it on the unmade bed. If maid service was available in the hotel on a daily basis, the sign on the door would keep them out. Maybe. He didn’t like leaving anything to chance.
    His shin still ached from where Lauren Cooper had scraped him with her boot heel. He cursed softly at the discomfort, but he didn’t hold the action against her. He’d deserved everything he’d gotten and probably more.
    In the bathroom, he raised his pant leg and surveyed the long, bruised and bloody scrape down his leg. Lauren hadn’t been messing around. She’d known exactly what she was doing. Good for her.
    He returned to his unpacked suitcases and took out a small medical kit. Methodically, he cared for the scrape. On the island, with all the heat and the potential for disease in some of the areas he was traveling in, there was a good chance of infection.
    He returned the medical kit to his suitcase and took out a small wireless printer. After plugging the unit in to the wall, he took out his phone and brought up the images of Lauren Cooper he’d taken while she’d been grieving over her dead sister.
    At the time he’d taken the pictures, he’d felt like a heel. Now, looking at the woman’s grief-stricken face, he felt even worse. As a police detective, he’d seen more than his share of devastated people, physically and emotionally. He’d been told that in his job as a homicide investigator, he was always meeting people on the worst day of their lives.
    Heath sent the pictures over to the printer and took them as soon as they’d come through the unit. The Lauren Cooper he saw in these shots didn’t mesh with the wildcat who had met him full-on there on the stairs. He tried to think of how many women he knew who would have tried something like that. There weren’t many.
    Janet would have. She’d fought her killer. But in the end it hadn’t done her any good. He’d killed her just the same. In fact, Gibson had probably enjoyed the struggle.
    Realizing the black anger was about to consume him again, Heath pushed it away. He couldn’t let that happen. The anger was raw and vicious, worse than any drug an addict could crave. When the anger was in bloom within him, there wasn’t room for anything more.
    He’d learned that as a kid at Fort Benning, Georgia. His father had been a drill instructor for the army, stationed at the post. Heath had had to take a lot of grief as a teenager, and he hadn’t always chosen wisely. For him, the world was black-and-white. That view of things had led him into the military and into the police department later. He loved being a detective, balancing the scales a little every time he broke a case. He’d learned to put away the anger, but since Janet’s death, it was back with a vengeance.
    He went to the small closet and reached up for the ceiling. Gently, he pushed and popped out the section he’d cut the first night he’d stayed in the room. In the darkness that filled the closet, the cut he’d made couldn’t be seen.
    Reaching up, he took down the roll of canvas he’d bought from an art store on his way to the hotel. Walking over to the wall near the small desk, he unrolled the canvas and tacked it to the irregular surface. The canvas was three feet wide and eight feet long. The dimensions weren’t those of the whiteboard he generally used in the detective bullpen, but the canvas gave him plenty of room to work.
    Photographs from crime scenes and printouts from