Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (27 page)

When she was tied, he sat back on his heels and looked down at her. “Now will you lie still?”

She was a compressed bundle of hate; she threw back her head and spat at him. Blood and spittle sprayed from her mouth, leaked down her chin. Her face crumpled, she began sobbing. Dan took her head in his lap and stroked
her forehead, looking up at Liza. “She’ll calm down now. See what you can do about the sheriff.”

Elizabeth stood up in the darkness outside the cave and looked out over the valley. Portable spotlights beamed in on the little cabin. She saw the spinning red lights of the sheriff’s car, saw the beams of the search party flicking through the trees on both sides of the valley.

It seemed a long walk down the hill. She felt tired, used-up, washed-out. Dry weeds gouged her angles. Her knee ached and the wound in her throat throbbed with each pulse beat. The blood had dried on her scalp—it had only been a rock splinter. She wiped it off with her sleeve, pulled her torn tunic together.

Suddenly a beam speared out. She squinted in the light and ducked her head. A voice shouted:

“Don’t shoot! It’s a woman!”

More beams swung up and impaled her in a cone of light. She stopped and waited, finger-combing the gravel out of her tangled hair.

Sheriff Logan pounded up, his thick bulk silhouetted in the lights. “Bodac! Thank God! I thought he’d taken you hostage.”

Liza realized she had no taste for argument, not even with the sheriff. “He didn’t take me because he isn’t the killer. His sister is.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“While we’re waiting, would you call Doctor Kossuth? Have him bring the emergency van. We may need restraints, too, and a strong sedative …”

The sheriff seemed to be swaying from side to side. There was something wrong with her eyes, too, or else they were turning down the lights. She saw the sheriff step forward, felt his hand grip her elbow as her knees buckled under her.
Oh crap
, she thought,
how utterly feminine…
.

This edition published by

Prologue Books

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

4700 East Galbraith Road

Cincinnati, Ohio 45236

www.fwcrime.com

Copyright © 1977 by Charles W. Runyon

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-3979-0

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3979-4