Tattooed Read Online Free Page B

Halifax’s first serial killer. But Frances was right. Fear underlay her desperate fight with the Body Butcher. Fear of dying in the manner that had earned the killer his moniker.
“And your fame could help my cause, Kate.”
God . She gave a shaky laugh. “I’m not that famous, Frances.”
“You are a hero. You saved other girls from being killed. This disease is my killer, Kate. There is nothing—” Frances swallowed. “Nothing that will help me fight it. No pills, no surgery. It is incurable and omnipotent. So I will choose to die the way I want. Not the way it chooses for me.” She paused. “You still can choose. I can’t.”
And you can choose to help me. Frances didn’t need to say it—they both knew it.
Kate could not face the plea in those weary sky-blue eyes. She would be doing this woman a disservice by agreeing to her request.
And, she was afraid, she would be doing herself one, as well. After being plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder from her encounter with the Body Butcher, she didn’t want to revisit her experience in any way, shape or form.
“Frances, I am not qualified to be a lobbyist.” Kate eased around the wheelchair. “I will find someone who can help you. Someone who can be successful. I’ll call you as soon as I find someone.”
The disappointment in her client’s gaze sliced into Kate. Finally, Frances said, “If that is your decision.”
Kate forced a reassuring smile. “I’ll call you.”
Even to her ears, that promise sounded inadequate.
The elevator chimed and the doors slid open. Her client drove into the lift. “Goodbye,” she said. Her voice had a finality to it.
Every goodbye was probably uttered with that intention. She had no idea when death would claim her.
Kate returned to her office, her footprints smoothing the track left by Frances’ wheelchair in the plush nap of the carpet.
You can’t be everyone’s savior, Kate.
But it wasn’t everyone who was asking.
It was just one woman.
One very sick and helpless woman.
Kate sank into her chair and closed her eyes.

3
     
F lushed with triumph at finding sarracenia purpurea —
also known as the purple pitcher plant—Rebecca Chen crouched above the surprisingly clear and shallow water of the peat bog. Bag this last plant and then I’m outta here.
It was a pretty plant and yet, according to her notes from biology class, it was a predator, capturing its food in its petals. She plunged her hand into the muck, her fingers scrabbling down the plant’s stem, searching for the root ball. But the stem curved sideways under the dense thicket of hummock. She exhaled, her forehead prickling with sweat.
Farther up the slope and beyond the cliffs, lay the outer mouth of Halifax Harbour. Fog hung over the horizon, a ghostly waterfall hovering over the deep blue of the ocean, but the cooling breeze carrying its afterdamp did not reach her.
With a grunt, she pushed her hand deep into the underside of the hummock. Her fingers hit a rock. The stem appeared to be wrapped around it.
Frig . She sat back on her heels. The peat bogs stretched around her, serene blue pools dotting scrubby hummocks of low-lying shrubs. She had never even been out to Chebucto Head until her biology teacher assigned this lab, and she cursed him when she had missed the class trip and had to find her own way to the peat bogs. After a twenty-five-minute drive, she found the road to the headland. It was flanked by a protected nature reserve, but it eventually opened to a cove dotted with houses. They huddled, higgledy-piggledy, on the granite bedrock cliffs, as if holding their collective breath.
The peat bogs were a twenty-minute hike across the headlands. “Just find the old bunkers,” her teacher had told her. “There are two. The bogs are down the slope. You can’t miss them.”
True enough, after twenty minutes of following a scraggly, muddy path, she spotted the bunkers on a crest of the cliff. There were two: one facing the water, the other offset