Read Last to Die for Free Online

lashes cast shadows on his powder-white cheeks. “He won’t find you.”
    “He’ll come back.” Teddy hugged himself, turning inward to some distant, safe place where no one could reach him. “He always does.”
    “Teddy, the only way we can catch him, stop him, is if you help us. If you tell me what happened last night.”
    She saw his thin chest expand, and the sigh that followed sounded far too weary and defeated for someone so young. “I was in my room,” he whispered. “I was reading one of Bernard’s books.”
    “And then what happened?” Jane prompted.
    Teddy focused his haunted eyes on her. “And then it started.”
    By the time Jane returned to the Ackerman residence, the last of the bodies was being wheeled out—one of the children. Jane paused in the foyer as the stretcher rolled past her, wheels squeaking across the gleaming parquet floor, and she could not block out the sudden image of her own daughter, Regina, lying beneath the shroud. With a shudder she turned, and saw Moore coming down the stairs.
    “Did the boy talk to you?”
    “Enough to tell me he didn’t see anything that will help us.”
    “Then you got a lot farther with him than I did. I had a feeling you’d be able to reach him.”
    “It’s not as if I’m all that warm and fuzzy.”
    “But he did talk to you. Crowe wants you to be the boy’s primary contact.”
    “I’m now the official kid wrangler?”
    He gave an apologetic shrug. “Crowe’s the lead.”
    She looked up the stairs toward the upper floors, which now seemed strangely quiet. “What’s going on here? Where is everyone?”
    “They’re following up on a tip about the housekeeper, Maria Salazar. She has the keys and the password to the security system.”
    “You’d expect a housekeeper to have those.”
    “It turns out she also has a boyfriend with a few issues.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Undocumented alien named Andres Zapata. He has a rap sheet in Colombia. Burglary. Drug smuggling.”
    “History of violence?”
    “Not that we’re aware of. But still.”
    Jane focused on the antique clock hanging on the wall, an item that no self-respecting burglar would have passed up. And she remembered what she’d heard earlier, that Cecilia’s purse and Bernard’s wallet were both found in the bedroom, and the jewelry box had been untouched.
    “If this was a burglary,” she said, “what did he take?”
    “A house this size, with so many valuables to choose from?” Moore shook his head. “The only person who might be able to tell us what’s missing is the housekeeper.”
    Who now sounded like a suspect.
    “I’m going up to see Teddy’s room,” she said and started up the stairs.
    Moore did not follow her. When she reached the third floor, she found herself alone; even the CSU team had already departed. Earlier she had merely glanced at the doorway; now she stepped inside and slowly surveyed Teddy’s neatly kept room. On the desk facing the window was a stack of books, many of them old and clearly well loved. She scanned the titles:
Ancient Techniques of Warfare. An Introduction to Ethnobotany. The Cryptozoology Handbook. Alexander in Egypt
. Not the sort of reading she’d expect of a fourteen-year-old, but Teddy Clock was unlike any boy she’d ever come across. She saw no TV, but a laptop computer sat open beside the books. She tapped on a key and the screen came alive, to the last website Teddy had viewed. It was a Google search page, and he had typed in:
Was Alexander the Great murdered?
    Judging by the orderly desk, the squared-off stack of books, the boy was addicted to neatness. The pencils in his drawer were all sharpened like spears ready for battle, the paper clips and stapler each in their own slots. Only fourteen and already hopelessly obsessive-compulsive. Here is where he’d been sitting at midnight last night, he’d told her, when he’d heard the faint pops, then Kimmie’s screams as she’d run up the stairs. His penchant for