Shadows of Deceit (A Series of Shadows)

Copyright © 2014 by Mell Corcoran

Mill City Press, Inc.

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Cover Design by Alan Pranke

eBook Design by Nicole Jennings

ISBN:
978-1-62652-647-1

For those I love,

have loved

and have loved me back.

Thank you for the privilege.

Business is business. Any successful person will tell you that. There
are dozens of quips and clichés that are used to help soften the blow of ruthlessness often employed under the guise of ambition. Breaking eggs to make an omelet, for example, is the cleanest and most precise truth of all. It is an age old fact that in the rise to power someone always gets hurt. Even in circumstances where the goal is for the betterment of humankind, someone has to be the lab rat. Emotion simply cannot factor in to the equation if you truly want to survive the steep and jagged climb to the top. Some of those names on the Forbes top ten list may be singing “Kumbaya” to the cameras now, but they sure as hell didn’t hug their way to billionaire status. Peel the layers back and you will undoubtedly find a pile of pink slips that were handed out in the name of the all mighty buck. Lives that were destroyed in the name of progress. Families that were torn apart and left in ruins by an executive decision. It’s just how it is. Business is business.

In this day and age of the twenty-four hour news cycle and holier than thou political correctness, the worst offenders are often paraded before the masses and shamed for their abhorrent business practices. We are a kinder, gentler civilized society after all. Let’s be perfectly honest here, all this has done is set the imperative for more discretion, more deception, and the absolute need for not leaving any evidence of wrong-doing behind. Lab-rats have become patsies, the fall-guys fall harder and hush money is doled out in the guise of generous severance packages. If we are really talking truth here, all this treachery has just lead to the birth of an entirely new industry. The need to deal with clean up and cover ups, off-color security issues and threats to quarterly reports has become a highly lucrative line of work. Enter Blackwater and their ilk. While they, and many others, have legitimately sprung up out of the increasing need for non-governmental private sector security in an increasingly insecure world, a few have come to being out of far more nefarious reasons. Someone has to do the dirty work so why not create an industry out of it? A whole new job market. The ultimate dream job for the amoral and the sociopathic. Pure genius.

On the most extreme end of the spectrum, especially when your particular line of business is carefully hidden beneath the guise of legitimacy, out-sourcing security still will not do and in-house management is often the only option. In these types of budding empires job security is not a matter of keeping a paycheck coming in so you can make your bills each month, it’s about keeping all your digits in tact and your pulse going. Drug cartels, arms smugglers, terrorist organizations, even street gangs employ this particular business model with a significantly large margin of success. These multimillion dollar outfits employ a policy that is clear and succinct. Screw up and you don’t simply lose your job, you’re dead.

History is littered with tales of corruption, power and greed. From biblical times through the evolution of modern civilization, even the purest of intentions can be corrupted and perverted if you dangle a big enough carrot. It’s human nature. Slave and master, employee, employer, all semantics when you get down to it. It’s the political correctness of modern society that has lengthened the leash and added benefits packages to the mix, nothing more. Running a tight ship is no different than ruling with an iron fist. If you want to make that Forbes list, you better be willing to tighten that fist around a few throats and not get caught doing it. This is the simple, unspoken truth in the business world. The dirty little secret that basically everyone knows but no one will ever admit to unless they have an iron clad, sovereign immunity agreement first. It is what it is. Those individuals that make more money in a single hour than most make in a lifetime know how to crack some eggs and never bat an eyelash doing it. You bet your ass they have no problem bleeding the “little guy” dry to get whatever they want.

Bleeding the little guy dry.

He couldn’t help but chuckle to himself mulling over the irony in that little nugget. He wondered for a moment how many old sayings and clichés would apply literally to his life as he watched unaffected through the spotless glass of the observation window. As the last few drops of life were sucked from the nameless, clinically brain-dead man’s body, it occurred to him that he should feel something for this unknown person. Some sense of gratitude at least? He pondered as the medical staff unhooked the body from the life support system and pulled the sheet over his face. No. There was no gratitude. No appreciation. No guilt. Business was business.

The call had come in at 5:22 a.m. Sunday morning. Deputies Lopez
and Gearhard drove their cruiser through the first set of massive gates into the ultra-posh Oakridge Estates where they were responding to what is known as a code 2115, a silent alarm triggered at one of the multimillion dollar mansions. By the time the deputies pulled through the last gate and were making the turn to the top of the ridge, Gearhard had relayed all the salient information about the residence to her partner. The owner of record was listed as the Bloomberg Family Trust but the property was being leased by a man named Casius Arcano. According to the data, Mr. Arcano was halfway through his one-year lease and there was no prior history of alarms or calls to the address in that time. Being their regular beat, Lopez and Gearhard were very familiar with the area. They knew first hand that the residents took their security and privacy very seriously. It was not uncommon, however, for an alarm to be triggered by a raccoon wandering in through a doggie door. It was also not unheard of for a high-profile resident to hit their panic button because some sleazy paparazzo had somehow managed to hike through miles of back canyon and up the ridge that separated the community from basically everything else. Most of the residents that backed up to the ridge had their own on-site security teams to watch out for paparazzi which also helped to deter the would-be burglar as well. The property in question gave no information that there was security staff on site and the alarm company had relayed to dispatch that the camera feed to their monitoring facilities were blacked out and not functioning. While this little tid-bit made Gearhard excited, it made Lopez nervous.

The phrase “darkest before the dawn” didn’t quite seem to cut it for how black as pitch the morning was. Even with the cruiser’s high beams on, Lopez nearly missed the last turn. When they finally pulled up into the long driveway of the estate, they couldn’t help but notice how the pitch-black theme continued. Not one glimmer of light could be seen coming from the house or the property. The hair on the back of Lopez’s neck stood up and he immediately called in for additional support. Something was definitely not right here. Gearhard flipped on the cruiser’s prowl light and slowly scanned over the grounds from left to right. Absolutely nothing. No car in the drive, no light anywhere, not even a breeze to shift the trees. It was eerie, still and quiet. Lopez tapped his radio for an ETA on their back-up and the stoic voice on the other end relayed that the nearest unit to them was still twenty minutes out. Too long.

“It’s probably a stupid possum or raccoon.” The eager Gearhard reassured her partner. “Or by the look of it, a power glitch. That would explain no cameras up.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Lopez was not convinced. “Stay sharp just the same.”

Lopez popped the trunk of the cruiser then exited the vehicle. Gearhard tried to stifle her excitement at her partner’s silent decision to move in before support arrived. Lopez retrieved a shotgun from the trunk and fastened his flashlight to the barrel.

“We do a sweep around the perimeter then we knock.” Lopez looked out into the darkness, letting his eyes adjust a bit better. “No sense in scaring the crap out of the resident if he’s just asleep and clueless to the alarm.”

Gearhard snorted. “Kinda like that guy that got home blasted drunk last month? Thought he was closing the garage door but was hitting his panic button then passed out on the kitchen floor?”

“Kinda.” Lopez smirked at his partner then took the lead as they headed to the left side of the property.

They did a clockwise sweep of the mansion. Slowly and methodically they checked doors and windows, scanning their flashlights inside the home and across the landscape but seeing nothing. The wrong kind of nothing. The house appeared to be vacant. Not a stick of furniture could be seen inside as they worked their way back around to the entry doors. Lopez called in on his radio to update their status and inform dispatch they were going to enter the premises.

“Someone is supposed to be living here, right?” Lopez asked, looking at his partner with a furrowed brow.

“That’s what the security company said.” Gearhard confirmed with a shrug, her enthusiasm waning fast. “The watch commander at the first security gate would have said otherwise.”

The entry doors to the home were massive. Two arched slabs of wood that stood at least ten feet high and were secured by seriously solid but beautiful iron hardware. At the center of each door, about eye-level were speakeasy doors with decorative iron grills fastened over the openings. Lopez expected that the doors were meant to be regal and elegant but he appreciated the functional aspect a hell of a lot more. It would take a solid ram to get through them. Gearhard took a chance and tried the latch and to both their surprise the door was unlocked. They postured themselves at the ready and nodded to each other before Gearhard swung the door open cautiously. Lopez went high, fanning his shotgun from left to right while Gearhard went low and panned right to left with her 9mm Beretta. They only took a single step inside before the odor hit them like a slap in the face.

“Holy Mother...” Gearhard gasped. “...what the hell?”

Lopez continued to scan the huge entry hall but was not seeing anything save for bare walls and the refracting light from the massive chandelier that hung low in the center of the room. He took a deep breath and held it, then listened carefully for a moment. He panned the beam of his flashlight towards a buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from about ten feet in front of him. There in the middle of the foyer floor they saw them. Three bodies laying shoulder to shoulder, neatly arranged on the ground, headless and rotting.

They sidestepped carefully to the left, avoiding the large pool of black that spread out from the bodies and was most certainly congealed blood. Silently Lopez gave Gearhard hand signals, instructing her that they were heading deeper into the house to do the requisite sweep. Just as they had done outside, they worked their way through the bottom floor in a clockwise manner, finding nothing but empty, hollow rooms. They came back around from the right into the foyer, worked their way up the grand staircase and continued through the upper level. Empty. Not one shred of anything to indicate the place had ever been inhabited. Lopez called in on his radio updating their status and they headed back downstairs just in time to meet their back-up walking in the doorway with guns at the ready.

“It’s secure. We just finished the sweep.” Lopez announced to the deputies that were now joining them and seeing the macabre scene splayed out on the foyer floor.

“Holy shit!” The uniformed officer that Lopez knew as Nichols covered his mouth as if that would prevent the stench from permeating his lungs. “We’ll set up a perimeter and tape everything off, OK?”

“Yeah, OK. Homicide is on route.” Gearhard skirted her way back to the entry doors, careful not to disturb the scene anymore then they already had. “Getting some air while I get my notes started.”

“Right.” Lopez nodded to her, acknowledging her need to catch her breath. “We are going to need to wake up the neighbors. Start a canvas. May as well get on that while we wait for the troops.” Lopez knew that even though the sun had barely lit the horizon, it was going to be a very long day.

Detective Tallulah Louelle
Donovan was sick of sleep. Lou felt like all she had been doing for weeks was sleep. She was well aware that it was barely over a month ago that she nearly died at the hands of a psychopathic serial killer but she was restless just the same. Every time she looked at herself in the mirror she was painfully reminded of how her injuries were nearly fatal. It often made her wish that she could put the bandages back on so she didn’t have to see it so often. The thick red scar swathed across her body like the sash of a beauty pageant contestant. She felt like the furthest thing from a beauty. She felt hideous. As she examined the wound closely in the mirror she could see the indentations in her skin where the staples had been. It was raw still, both physically and mentally, no matter how much everyone tried to distract her. The ultimate cliché was her blaming herself for being taken the way she was. Sloppy. Only a naive civilian would have allowed their guard to be so let down that they would have fallen into such a predictable trap. Lou was not a civilian and she was not sloppy. Clumsy, she would concede to, but even that was confined to mornings, when she first woke up. Her Sleep Inertia often left her disoriented and out of sorts but she knew this, as did her family and her partner. They accounted for it and factored that in when they worked. It was part of what made her and Vinny such a good team. That, Lou accepted. What chapped her hide was having been abducted from such a huge, high-profile gathering, been drugged, stripped naked to face certain death with absolutely no way out. It was humiliating to her. That was something she was not going to put behind her for some time. Lou didn’t do “victim” well.

She pulled her fluffy orange robe closed tight and grabbed her mug of coffee from the dressing table. As she headed for the terrace she tried to go through everything in her head again, make sense of it all. Her life had forever been altered on so many levels, even without factoring in the abduction. She knew, logically, that it was natural to be a bit off her game but she didn’t have to like it. When she thought about everything that had transpired, she knew it was actually a good thing for her to be out on medical leave. While recovering from her injuries she had time to wrap her head around everything else.

Just over a month ago it had been business as usual. She was a hard-assed homicide detective for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and was in love with her job. That basically hadn’t changed. It was the foundation of everything that had been pulled out from under her and it all began when she started investigating the gruesome murder of an underage drug addict and prostitute named Angela Talbott. The case from the get-go was off and wasn’t really even her and her partner’s to investigate. Technically it had been LAPD’s jurisdiction but something about it stuck with Lou and she pursued it, despite her Captain’s orders to the contrary. If she knew then what she knew now, Lou really wouldn’t have changed anything. She was glad to be where she was. It was just going to take some getting used to.

Lou walked out into the chilly pre-dawn spring air and thought that perhaps she should have tried to sleep a little longer. The darkness consumed the landscape with the shock of navy blue sky making everything in the distance look like black cutouts. She settled in to her large papasan chair, tucking her legs in tight. Cupping her mug with both hands she savored the warmth of the ceramic against her palms. The quiet was almost as soothing as the mug of coffee. The croaking frogs and the first chirps from morning birds intermittently broke the silence but overall the quiet was as thick and cozy to her as her bathrobe. It was a truly welcomed change. Even though Lou had been recovering, the past several weeks had been a whirlwind of activity. Learning everything she possibly could about her new world, her new life, and the critical role she played in it. Looking out into the darkness she thought back again. Back to that chance encounter with a stranger in the hall of the County Morgue. Thinking about it even now made her knees weak, just as it had the moment she first set eyes on him when she passed him in that hall. It was a serious case of love/hate that he had that effect on her. She loved the butterflies, the breathlessness, the pure euphoric sensation she got even simply thinking about him. However, Lou hated how much she wanted the man. She needed to breathe the same air as him. It challenged the very core of her being, her fierce independence. Who knew that this stranger would turn her life upside down in so many ways. Maximilian Augustus Julian.

She looked out into the distance trying peer past the darkness to see the construction site of Max’s home. As promised, they had kept the structure well off in the distance and only partially visible from her vantage point. It was too black to see anything really, but Lou noticed the absolute quiet and that meant they were not working. Strange. Max’s people had gotten special permitting and dispensation from the County as well as the Homeowner’s Association to work at all hours and had been true to their word being very considerate of noise. Usually Lou could hear something. A hum or a buzz of some sort from that direction but there was nothing. The framing looked complete the day before and it was an ongoing joke with Lou and her mother, asking each other every day if the house was finished yet. Maybe they were waiting for some inspection or something. Maybe she would sneak over and take a look at it later, if no one was around. Maybe it was important for her to see where the man that had defrosted her heart would be living. What rooms he would sit and read in. Where he would cook his meals, take his showers, lay and dream. Maybe of her.

The security light below her terrace popped on and snapped Lou back from her musings. She turned her attention just in time to catch sight of a family of raccoons trotting across the lawn. Lou smiled to herself as two babies stopped to wrestle in the dew soaked grass, chortling and grunting. Mom and dad raccoon finally intervened and lead the babes back up into the trees. Lou loved this land.