DEATH (The Justice Cycle Book 1) by J Kiefer (best classic books to read TXT) 📗

he thought. Sure, he loved helping people. Always had. His friends used to say he had a hero complex. But Jared also loved the perception of power the job gave him. He felt like he was somebody whenever he flashed that badge.

All of the usual thoughts flooded into his brain, and he heard his father’s voice again. You are somebody because Jesus died for you. He knew it in his head because he had heard the sermons a thousand times, but most of the time he didn’t feel it in his heart. He loved God and believed in Him, but sometimes it was just so hard to silence the thoughts and feelings that told him he was nothing more than a loser.

Jared sighed and shoved his thoughts back into the deep recesses of his heart and gave himself over to the music and to the speed. None of that mattered right now. All was well with the world and what wasn’t, he would deal with later.

The sun was slipping below the horizon in a dazzle of brilliant colors. It seemed as if the clouds were immense puffs of rainbow cotton candy that he could reach out and pluck. He drew in a breath and drank in the crisp air. As he continued to glory in the wonders of autumn in upstate New York, he failed to see the slowed traffic up ahead.

“Oh crap!” he exclaimed when he realized how close the cars ahead of him were.

Gritting his teeth and cursing his lack of attentiveness, he slammed the breaks. They loosed a blood-curdling screech, a sound was not unlike that of a cat being tortured, or his little sister singing, either analogy would do. Thankfully, the car came to a shuddering halt one millimeter from the small red hatchback stopped in front of him.

“That was close,” he said with a long sigh to no one in particular.

The line of cars stretched as far as the eye could see. It was five o’clock traffic, after all. Jared turned his radio down, which now just seemed like noise to him, and prepared himself for the long crawl ahead.

Well, I might as well check my cell while I wait here to die of starvation, he thought.

Pulling out his phone, he slid his finger across the screen and quickly checked his text messages. It was then that his world came crashing down around him in the form of one small message: You have three missed calls.

“Oh no—Jasmine!” he said grimly. “I forgot again.”

Jasmine was his girlfriend of two years. She was twenty-three, buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, and the former prom queen of Johnson City High School. She was everything Jared had ever wanted, or so he thought.

Six foot tall and ruggedly handsome with sharp blue eyes and dirty blond hair, Jared had high standards. All of the other women he’d dated seemed to fall short in some way. Jasmine was a bit conceited and high maintenance, but she was a Christian, and that made his parents happy.

He had to admit that he did love her, but who didn’t? She was the desire of every guy in her college and even some professors. Not a day went by where she wasn’t hit on or proposed to. It made him jealous, but Jared liked having something to be jealous about. He had all but given up hope that he would ever find the right girl, when out of nowhere, she dropped into his life like an angel from heaven. In fact, he had even contemplated asking her to marry him, but something inside always seemed to stop him before he could make that leap.

She was usually a kind person, but she was particularly annoyed by people who were always late. This was the third time this month that he’d forgotten about a dinner date and he was running out of excuses. He had used work as an excuse the other three times and doubted if she’d accept it again.

Jared pulled up her cell phone number but stopped short before hitting the send button. What would he say? He had no idea. The real reason he was late was because he had taken his partner, a woman, home after their shift was up. Jasmine hated Dana. No matter how Jared tried to explain their relationship to her, she never seemed to understand.

Dana was his best friend and his brother-, well, sister-in-arms. He put his life in her hands every day, and she did the same with him. Jasmine could never understand that; all she saw was a rival. She was unwilling, or unable, to understand that they were just friends. Because of this, every time he had tried to talk to her about it, the conversation ended up in a fight.

Jared closed his texts and put his phone back in his pocket. He was not in the mood to deal with this right now. His shift had been a hard one. Some beat cop had found a young girl’s body floating in the Chenango River last night. She’d been cut to pieces and dumped.

Murders happened all the time everywhere, even in small backwoods towns like Binghamton, but the murders in this area weren’t usually so gruesome. Most of the time they were just the usual shootings or the occasional stabbing, but nothing as disturbing as what he had encountered today. The most disquieting fact, however, was that this murder fit the MO of the New York City serial killer known as the Eastside Stalker.

It couldn’t be him of course, because up till now he had been linked to murders in the City and nowhere else. Still, it did fit his profile and that could not be ignored. His bosses had decided it was better not to speculate on the similarities for now. Besides, it was very unlikely the killer had expanded his hunting grounds this far north. Dana, however, had been quite shaken up about it and had asked if he would escort her home so they could