Rising Darkness (7 page)

Alex disconnected the call a few minutes later and he looked right at Joe. He looked like he was about to pass out and Joe felt the sickness echoing inside of his own body right then.

“What? What happened?” Joe asked.

“Jess and Robin Lydell are both dead,” Alex said.

“What? How?”

“Someone stabbed them both to death in different rooms of their home.”

“Jesus, when?”

“Just a bit ago. The maid found them when she came back from doing some shopping. She was gone only an hour. Whoever did it knew their schedule very well and waited for the perfect time to strike.”

“This is getting serious. Why would someone kill them?” Joe asked.

“Maybe I was getting too close and they thought that the Lydell’s were loose ends,” Alex said. His voice was echoing in the air as a stiff monotone. It was unnatural for him.
Joe felt the fear trembling through him and it echoed his own concern.

“Like I said, man. This is getting too hot. You got to let this go, or any one of us might be next.”

“This is like some sort of a weird nightmare. It really is like a dream I can’t wake up from. I have to be thinking that I got those people killed. I jumped to conclusions and I somehow put them on the killer’s radar. This is all my fault,” Alex began.

“You had no way of knowing this was going to happen. You can’t blame yourself that way, man.”

Alex looked at him with emptiness in his eyes. He had lost it a little bit, and Joe knew it. He didn’t know what he could do for his friend, but just try to keep him level.

“Wait, you said that Jess swore that Robin was using again right? Maybe this thing is drug related after all?” Joe asked.

“What do you mean? Tracy never took any drugs; you said so yourself.”

“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t dating a drug dealer and it doesn’t mean that she wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. She might have been a message or she might have seen something that she was not supposed to see,” Joe said. The thoughts that were swirling around in his head about his wife were sickening. He wished to hell he had never even thought of these things but it was tough to take that sort of thing out of him. He had a naturally inquisitive mind.

“Who the hell was Tracy? It seems like she might have had a double life that no one knew about,” Alex asked.

Joe looked at him knowingly. There were a bunch of things in his head that were starting to break open about Tracy.

He had to find out more.

****

An hour later Joe was holed up in the bedroom he had shared with Tracy for so many years. He had known his wife was a private person and he had always been ok with that sine he himself was a private person. She had some of her own friends and they went off on the town a few times a month and he didn’t really know them or where she was going. He had been so wrapped up in his work and the fact that he trusted his wife probably more than he should have.

Now it was time to play catch up and find out what she was really doing. Joe started by going through all of her social media and emails. He knew that she kept her passwords for all of her stuff written down on a special program on her laptop. He opened the laptop and typed in the code he had seen her type in thousands of times. She was not paranoid about him looking at her laptop because she had it set up that she had to enter all of the passwords to any of her social media or email every time it happened.

He spent the better part of an hour going through her emails and pretty much any online presence she had at all before he found anything that might have been useful. She was friends on Facebook with someone named Heather Myers. Heather was not someone that Joe was familiar with. He would have remembered her because she was so strikingly beautiful. She had an element of danger about her and that combined with her raw sex appeal was a lethal combination.

Heather’s husband was a man named John. He was a diesel mechanic and Heather it looked like was a hanger on. She was the type of woman, judging by her profile that would find wealthy people and pretend to be one of them just so she could hang on and live the lifestyle for a bit.

The reason this friendship stuck out at Joe was because there were several lengthy conversations on the Facebook messenger between her and Tracy. He was wondering why they just did not text, but he found his answer in the first few Facebook messages. It stated that Heather’s husband did not let her have friends outside of the ones that he knew and approved of. It seems that Heather had found herself married at eighteen to a man who was almost thirty and was a bit of an abusive drunk.

Tracy it seems was sort of mentoring Heather on how to be a proper upper crust society lady. But it must have been happening at parties that Joe was never invited to or simply declined, which was most parties. He hated to mingle and he always felt guilty when he wasn’t working.

As he read through the exchanges between Heather and Tracy Joe became increasingly concerned. Heather’s messages and concerns about her husband were becoming more and more afraid. She claimed that he had hired someone to follow her around night and day to check on her whereabouts and to constantly report back to him about everything. She was starting to feel a bit like a prisoner in her own home and she was afraid to go anywhere or ever to so much as exchange a hello to anybody. He would find out about it and berate her incessantly.

Joe wondered if John was capable of murder. He sounded like the kind of man that was capable of just about anything. Joe had never dealt with someone who was this paranoid and scatterbrained before and it was frankly a little bit scary. People like that were not in possession of their full mental faculties.

He decided that he was going to have a little chat with John, but first he needed to find out a bit more. There was a lot more reading to go through. As he continued reading Heather’s messages to Tracy he started to get the picture that John’s behavior had become increasingly violent and that he was physically abusive to his wife. She had even considered leaving him, but she was terrified that he would track her down and that he would kill her.

Tracy had told her that she needed to just go and not look back. There had to be a better way than to put up with this abuse. Joe had to agree. Had Heather decided to leave John once and for all? Did John discover this and decide to punish Tracy for forcing his wife away?

Joe called up Alex to tell him what he discovered. The last few messages were very creepy and it didn’t even really sound like Heather the way they had been worded. The entire color and demeanor of the messages changed. Joe had a strong suspicion that it was John sending out those last few messages. He had discovered that Heather was communicating with Tracy and that she was thinking of leaving him. Then it was totally different. He wondered if Tracy could tell. Maybe she just thought that Heather was being beaten down to the point that she wasn’t even her anymore.

“Yea, that does sound pretty strange. I think you hit the nail on the head with that one,” Alex said. “I’ll look into him. Do you want to come on this one?”

“Yea, I’ll check him out with you. If the guy is that much of a psycho then you are gonna want some back up.”

****

An hour later they were at Heather and John’s house. It was a nice house in a wealthy section in the hills. Joe drove past this way several times a day on his way into the city and he had even done business with some of the residents of that neighborhood. It was one of those neighborhoods where the wealthy often lived alongside the working class, which had never made a lot of sense to him. There would be a very large, crazy expensive house and then a few houses down you would see a modest style house. John wondered who had decided to build houses and properties that way when the neighborhood was designed. He had nothing against anyone who made an honest living, whether they were wealthy or not, but it had been his experience that most wealthy people tended to live very isolated on huge estates or they lived in neighborhoods with other very wealthy individuals.

When Heather answered the door both Joe and Alex were stunned by how beautiful the woman was in person. They had seen the pictures of her social media, but she was stunning in person way beyond what a picture could capture. Joe could see Alex’s eyes bulging out of his head as he was instantly captivated by the woman’s beauty. Heather had this sweetness to her that instantly made you want to take care of her and keep her safe as well. She cast that sort of a vibe, but she did it without seeming like a victim somehow.

They followed Heather into her house and out by the pool area where she made them a few drinks by the mini bar. It was a nice setup and Joe found that he was fascinated by the view of the city from the pool, where it overlooked the huge cliff. He had thought about living in an area like this one, but when he had found his place in the valley he knew that nothing would ever beat that.

“Is your husband home?” Joe asked. He just had the feeling that he was being watched and kept replaying an image in his mind of being tackled by some crazy version of John.

“No, he is at work,” Heather said. Her voice was sultry and seductive and Joe wondered if that was something she had practiced to the point that it was virtually her own now or if she had been born that way.

“I understand that you and my wife Tracy were pretty close,” Joe said.

“Yes, we were. I was so sorry to hear about what happened to her. She was one of the best friends I’ve ever had,” Heather said breaking into tears. It was as if she had been holding them in the entire time and had decided that now was the best time to let it all out. “I wanted to come to the funeral, but John would never have let me.”

“Your husband is pretty controlling isn’t he?” Alex asked. He had a look of intensity on his face that Joe had never really seen before. He wondered if Alex was thinking about bashing John’s skull in right then.

“Yes, that would be the understatement of the year.”

“Why don’t you just leave? Call the cops and have a restraining order against him and divorce his ass.”

“It is not that easy. He would track me down and he would have me killed. I’m sure of it.”

“You think he is capable of murder?” Alex asked.

“I know that he is,” Heather replied quietly.

“Did he have anything to do with what happened to my wife?” Joe asked point blank. He was tired of dancing around the obvious questions with these people.

Heather looked at him strangely as if she didn’t understand the question that he was posing. She took a moment before answering and removed her sunglasses to look right at him. She had the most intense looking eyes he had ever seen. They were bright blue and bright. It was captivating beyond anything he had ever seen before and he almost forgot to pay attention to her response.

“He found out about me and Tracy being friends. Unbeknown to me he hijacked my Facebook account in an effort to keep better tabs on me and he saw that we were close friends and that she was trying to get me to leave him. He said that he would put a stop to that sort of thing and if I ever left then he would kill her and then when he tracked me down he would kill me too. I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times since the murder happened. I really don’t know if he did or not.”

Joe wanted to smash this guy to pieces so badly. He stood up and began to pace around slowly. His energy would not let him sit still any longer. It was like this ball of anxiety that was welling up inside of him and mixing with the anger.

“Easy, Joe,” Alex said.

“When will your husband be home? We would like to talk with him,” Joe said.

“I don’t think that is a good idea. He will be very angry if he finds out that I had anybody here, especially you guys. Please you have to go soon.”

“We are going to have to investigate his whereabouts during the time the murder occurred. He might have just become the new prime suspect,” Joe said.

“Heather you have to work with us. If you think at all that John might have had anything to do with this then we have to know. If he did then we can have him put away for life where he can never hurt you again. Don’t you understand that? If he goes free for this crime then Joe will be going to prison in his place. You don’t want that to happen,” Alex said. Joe admired the way Alex was appealing to her reasoning.

Heather tried to control the tears that were flowing out of her eyes, but they kept coming as she became more and more emotional. Joe wondered if she was too damaged and too much under John’s spell to let them get close enough to him to pull the noose tightly around his throat.

“I really don’t have any proof. It’s just a suspicion I have, that’s all. I know who John is and I know what he is capable of. When he found out about me and Tracy he flew into a rage and he beat me until I blacked out. When I came to he explained to me that if I didn’t sever all ties with Tracy then he would kill us both. Then he began to communicate with her through my Facebook pretending to be me. I wanted to go on there and warn her somehow, but he would have known and I couldn’t leave the house to warn her because I was being followed constantly by that Investigator. I think his name is Dyer… something. I haven’t seen him since Tracy’s death actually.”

“Wait, you said that Dyer is the one that was hired to follow you around?” Alex asked.

“Yea. Why, does that mean something to you guys?”

Alex played it off cool. “Maybe. He sounds familiar is all.”

As they left Heather’s house they were both thinking the same thing. The common thread they were starting to see was Dyer.

“Do you think Dyer saw something somewhere that might blow this case open?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure. If he was tailing Heather then he probably had no idea what the hell John was up to,” Alex said.

“But he was also supposed to be tailing Robin at the same time. I’m not sure how he could have done both jobs at the same time without having a little help. You think he outsources things to an assistant?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s possible, but something here isn’t adding up. I’ll need to talk with him and find out what he knows. It might be nothing, but right now we don’t have a lot else to go on.”