The Bride Collector Read Free

the office,
     it was Kim. Her manner created an interesting but somehow fitting contrast with her well-known love for a smorgasbord of men.
    Nikki turned her attention back to the body. The skin was very pale, translucent, showing the blue veins beneath. She lay
     prone, looking like a dressmaker’s dummy, displaying perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and well-defined hips. Nikki
     found her rather bony, actually. While affixed to the wall, her flesh had settled over her bones and given her a less emaciated
     appearance. On her back, however, she looked quite gaunt.
    The eyes stared up at the ceiling, blue but lifeless. Her makeup was far more obvious under the bright halogen lights than
     it had been before the evidence team illuminated the shack. The eyeliner and eye shadow had been carefully applied, evidence
     of a steady, experienced hand. Was the killer a cosmetologist? Or a drag queen, even? Nikki could just see vertical streaks
     running down from the corners of her eyes and ruining the perfect surface, as if poor Caroline had cried before the final
     application.
    Nikki recalled a memory of her father holding her shoulders when she was twelve. He’d knelt and brushed a tear from her right
     cheek, where a dime-size birthmark had once darkened her skin. “You are beautiful, Nikki, and your birthmark makes you even
     more beautiful. You don’t need to cover it up. And if the boys don’t see that, it’s only because they’re foolish, prepubescent
     puppets of the system.” Then he’d kissed her on the cheek.
    The memory still brought a tightness to her throat, maybe because his noble ideals hadn’t really survived him. She’d had the
     brown mark surgically removed when she was eighteen.
    If she had it to do over again, would she remove it today?
    “… drugs in her system,” Kim was saying. “Benzodiazepine, the same psychoactive sedative he’s used on all four. More than
     enough to make her susceptible to suggestion.”
    “No sign of sexual contact?” Brad said.
    “None.”
    Nikki caught Brad’s sharp look. “That doesn’t mean this wasn’t a sexual act,” she interjected.
    He offered her a slight nod. Just that, a simple gesture of acknowledgment and appreciation for her input. Funny how he could
     lighten her mood without the slightest knowledge of his overall effect on her.
    The other women in the office insisted he was a dead ringer for a blond-headed George Clooney, ten years younger, perhaps.
     She could see the similarities. The dark, perpetually smiling eyes, probing deep. The short hair, the soft boyish face, slightly
     elongated. The quintessential look of a perfect gentleman reinforced by his often thoughtful and polite demeanor.
    But her closer working relationship had taught her that those qualities didn’t make Brad a soft or pliable man. If anything,
     his edges were rougher than they first appeared. Clean on the outside, giving great attention to detail, but confident enough
     to say what was on his mind whenever he saw fit.
    His unapologetic talent for drawing women with his boyish good looks and strong conviction was tempered only by his notorious
     refusal to commit. Which, in turn, made him a considerable mystery.
    To Nikki’s way of thinking, he carried all the markings of a man with a past so deeply scarred that he was compelled to build
     walls of self-preservation. Which was why she had resisted her own attraction to him for so long. Even if he was interested
     in her, as she suspected, she wasn’t sure
she
was interested in a man she couldn’t quite peg. As a psychologist, it was her job to analyze people down to their uttermost
     depths. The fact that she could not do so with Brad nagged her with an unshakable sense of wariness.
    His eyes were soft and kind, but what lay hidden behind those eyes gave her pause. The unknown. She’d misjudged a man once
     before and wasn’t eager to do it again. Her training in behavioral science hadn’t made her any more