Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) Read Free

competitor to be aware of. He learned tae kwan do and karate, and learned them well. He went beyond the normal investigative skills of a police detective, venturing into areas as diverse as wilderness tracking and the use of sophisticated bugging devices.
    His colleagues admired his skills and feared his obsessive dedication to his cases. When he was on a kidnap, he routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch and slept three. He could have risen in the department to a captaincy, but he prevailed on Eddie to leave him a lieutenant so that he wouldn’t get sucked up into administration.
    As the years wore on, he gradually turned his den into what became known on the force as the Abby Room.
    Even though the FBI had abandoned the investigation before it was three days old, Eddie did not abandon it. Far from it, he hid Flynn’s case time for him, allowing him to continue looking for his wife for two more years.
    Finally, he quietly and sadly eased it into the cold case file. This meant that nobody could be assigned to it without his personal approval.
    Still, though, Flynn’s investigation continued. He became the most knowledgeable expert on kidnap in the State of Texas. Every force in Texas consulted him. The Texas Rangers consulted him. He solved case after case after case. But the Abby Room only grew more full of clippings, of clues, of false leads. He slid his unending search for her ever deeper into his caseload, accepting Eddie’s silent compliance with equally silent gratitude.
    Their bond of friendship deepened. Eddie had loved Abby, too. He had sat on the summer porches of youth with her, also. He had never married. Instead, his love affair with her had continued down its own lonely path, and he had watched with pain and joy as she and Flynn made their life together. When he went to their house for cop nights, he’d watch her out of hooded eyes. She’d had a dancing heart, had Abby Carroll, and looks and ways that no man could ever forget.
    Not often—maybe once or twice a year—Flynn ran into a case similar to Abby’s, an apparent walkout that seemed to him to be something else. Time and again, the FBI abandoned these cases after a few days.
    Flynn did not abandon them.
    Somebody was out there taking people, he knew it, somebody very clever and very skilled.
    Somebody was out there.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    The Night had come and gone, November 16, as always, the worst night of Flynn’s year.
    As he always did on the anniversary of Abby’s disappearance, he had spent it in the Abby Room, pouring over files, seeking some new lead hidden in some record he hadn’t considered before.
    As always, he’d found nothing. Her case was dead cold. Still, though, she lived on within him. His side of the conversation of life continued.
    Sarah Robinson’s little girl Taylor was in grade school now. He had never asked her if Abby, also, had been pregnant, but every time he saw Taylor, a question came into the edge of his mind: were there bones somewhere of the woman he had loved, and tiny bones tangled within them?
    He’d never remarried, never even considered it. After seven years it would have been legal, but he would never do it, not until he knew for certain that she was no more.
    Eddie came out of his office and headed his way. His gut was rolling, his dark glasses bouncing in his breast pocket. He was coming fast, his scowl as deep as a grave.
    Flynn was hoping that he was headed anywhere else, but he did just what it looked like he was going to do, and dropped down into the old chair beside his desk.
    He said, “Special Agent Diana Glass wants to talk to you regarding an investigation you’ve been pursuing.”
    “The Mercedes case? The meth lab on Fourteenth Street?”
    “The Carroll Case. Abby.”
    Flynn said nothing.
    “She even knows about the Abby Room,” Eddie continued. “She knows you were interviewing Charlie Boyne again yesterday.”
    The Boyne case was one of the other disappearances that were mirror