The Killer Inside Read Online Free Page B

The Killer Inside
Book: The Killer Inside Read Online Free
Author: Will Carver
Pages:
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life, walking to her death.
    She has forgotten my name.
    It is time that you remembered, Detective.
    Today, it all starts.
    This is my pledge .

Read on for a sneak preview of Will Carver’s new novel,
Dead Set
.
Coming November 2013.

The Truth

    IN NOVEMBER 2006 , Dorothy Penn consented to have sex with the man who would take her life. She was discovered standing naked, tied to her bed, which had been flipped upright, and shot through the mouth at close range .
    She was the first .
    She was Girl 1 .
    Over the next two years, this man continued to kill. Each victim chosen for their name, each from a different London borough, each killed with increasing theatricality, taking inspiration from the world’s greatest magic tricks, mutating them into scenes of morbidity. The press called him ‘The Zone Two Killer’ .
    His real name is Eames .
    The night before Dorothy Penn died, Detective Inspector January David saw something. In his sleep. A dream, a vision, an intuition of a giant, dark figure occupying an empty black space in his mind, feeding him clues about the woman who would die within the next twenty-four hours .
    This apparition would visit him the day before each victim would be taken, delivering his message through a perpetual grin, giving the detective enough time to stop the murder. January David called him ‘The Smiling Man’. He disappeared the night that Eames was captured .
    Five innocents died at the hand of Eames. One survived .
    Girl 4 .
    Audrey David .
    The detective’s wife .
    This was not through luck or a mistake; she planned it this way. She planned everything. Manipulating the mind of a serial killer to do her sinister bidding in a warped attempt to be noticed by her husband, to be loved. Loved more than the sister who has been missing from his life for over twenty years .
    She failed .
    And now she is gone. Left without a word. January David does not know of his wife’s involvement, he knows not where she is, only that she is not alone. The baby will be eighteen months old by now. Her baby. Eames’ baby. She naively believes that this is all behind her. That January David no longer cares .
    She wants him to care .
    But The Smiling Man has returned; another girl will die in the next twenty-four hours .
    For now, Eames remains incarcerated in a high-security psychiatric hospital .
    With four more tricks on his list .

Prologue

    WHEN A PERFECTLY coiffed reporter perches himself inside a cell and throws a question across a flimsy wooden table, believing he already knows the entertainment value of the answer, that’s not me he’s trying to bait. If it were, his adrenalin would lose its battle with fear.
    When this journalist’s adversary claims not to remember murdering anybody, when they eventually cave, stating that killing is like a drug , that we all go a little mad sometimes , that occasionally I feel like a vampire , that is not reality. That is not something I would say.
    I am not a sound bite.
    I don’t want notoriety.
    Just leave me to do my job.
    I’d rather disappear.
    In the beginning, when I gave myself up, when Detective Inspector January David took the glory of capturing me, when he thought it was the end, everyone wanted an interview: they needed the exclusive conversation; they had an idea for a true-crime story or a novel; they were making a documentary.
    Think how lucky the filthy reporter will feel that I didn’t jump across the table and strangle him, the relief he’ll experience as the door is locked behind his back onexit; when he gets to go home and tell his wife that she is safe, I am still locked away.
    Think how protected this hack convinces himself he is with the camera pointed directly at my face, and how naive he truly is to believe that I care.
    I’ve been in this place for nearly two years now. You can’t call it an asylum. We are no longer known as lunatics. Political correctness. Or the rather weaker reason that there has been an evolution in the attitude
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