Présentation de l'éditeur
In this thrilling installment of the New York Times bestselling series, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell puts herself in the path of a hurricane to investigate a mysterious murder.
While the Coast Guard is preparing Pensacola Beach for a severe hurricane, they find an oversized fishing cooler filled with body parts tightly wrapped in plastic floating offshore. Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is sent to investigate, despite the fact that she is putting herself in the projected path of the hurricane. She’s able to trace the torso in the cooler back to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier after a hurricane hit the Atlantic coast of Florida. How did his body end up six hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico? Using her signature keen instincts and fearless investigating, O’Dell discovers Florida’s seedy underworld and the shady characters who inhabit it.
Damaged is Alex Kava’s most terrifying thriller yet.
Extrait
SATURDAY, August 22
Chapter 1
Pensacola Bay
Pensacola, Florida
Elizabeth Bailey didn't like what she saw. Even now,after their H-65 helicopter came down into a hover less than two hundred feetabove the rolling Gulf, the object in the water still looked like a containerand certainly not a capsized boat. There were no thrashing arms or legs. Nobobbing heads. No one needing to be rescued, as far as she could see. YetLieutenant Commander Wilson, their aircrew pilot, insisted they check it out.What he really meant was that Liz would check it out.
A Coast Guard veteran at only twenty-seven years old, AST3 Liz Bailey knew she had chalked up more rescues in two days over NewOrleans after Hurricane Katrina than Wilson had in his entire two-year career.Liz had dropped onto rickety apartment balconies, scraped her knees on wind-batteredroofs, and waded through debris-filled water that smelled of raw sewage.
She dared not mention any of this. It didn't matter how many search and rescues she'd performed, because at the moment she was thenewbie at Air Station Mobile, and she'd need to prove herself all over again.To add insult to injury, within her first week someone had decorated thewomen's locker room by plastering downloaded photos of her from a 2005 issue ofPeople magazine. Her superiors insisted that the feature article would be good PR for the Coast Guard, especially when other military and government agencieswere taking a beating over their response to Katrina. But in an organizationwhere attention to individual and ego could jeopardize team missions, herunwanted notoriety threatened to be the kiss of death for her career. Fouryears later, it still followed her around like a curse.
By comparison, what Wilson was asking probably seemedtame. So what if the floating container might be a fisherman's cooler washed overboard? What was the harm in checking it out? Except that rescue swimmers were trained to risk their lives in order to save otherlives, not to retrieve inanimate objects. In fact, there was an unwritten ruleabout it. After several swimmers who were asked to haul up bales of drugstested positive for drug use, apparently from their intimate contact in thewater, it was decided the risk to the rescue team was too great. Wilson musthave missed that memo.
Besides, rescue swimmers could also elect not to deploy.In other words, she could tell Lieutenant Commander less-than-a-thousand-flight-hoursWilson that "hell no," she wasn't jumping into the rough waters forsome fisherman's discarded catch of the day.
Wilson turned in his seat to look at her. From the tiltof his square chin he reminded her of a boxer daring a punch. The glint in hiseyes pinned her down, his helmet's visor slid up for greater impact. He didn'tneed to say out loud what his body language said for him: "So, Bailey, areyou a prima donna or are you a team player?"
Liz wasn't stupid. She knew that as one of less than adozen women rescue swimmers, she was a rare breed. She was used to having toconstantly prove
