The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) (23 page)

“Cole, you in there?”

“Coming out,” Derek replied, once he realized Mullins was standing, cell phone to ear, over the body of Gene Witten.

The second Mullins saw Derek emerging from the cover of the woods, he waved a hurried hand at Derek. He ended the call he was on, then said to Derek, “You okay?”

“Fine,” Derek said. “I don’t think our friend here has to worry about going to prison any longer.” Derek shoved his pistol back into his concealed holster. “You get hurt? It looked like you were limping.”

“Old gift from an old friend,” Mullins remarked. “Took a .40 caliber to my thigh six years back. Still barks at me when I try to do something quicker than a guy built like me was designed to do.” Mullins paused and using a small, LED flashlight, proceeded to look over Derek from head to toe. “Whoever that was doing the shooting, I think he was aiming more for you. You sure you didn’t get hit?”

Derek showed Mullins the hole a bullet created in his jeans. “This is extent of my injuries.”

“When my associates get here,” Mullins said, satisfied that Derek was unharmed, “tell them exactly what happened in the theater. Tell them you called me instead of dialing nine-one-one because you felt more comfortable doing so. Tell them exactly what happened and don’t try to make up any shit story.”

“You mean to tell them the truth, nothing but the truth?” Derek questioned. “It sounds like I may be taking some heat over this thing.”

“Not at all,” Mullins said. “But I might be.”

The sirens were screaming louder and Derek could see the angry red lights dancing off the windshields of the few cars in the parking lot.

“I should have told you to call nine-one-one right away, and you know I should have,” Mullins continued. “I don’t want you to try to make up some stupid ass story to try to cover for me.”

“How much heat you think you’ll have to deal with?”

“After the scene I just left in Ravenswood and what happened here, not too much. But just tell the damn truth. Got it?” Mullins request was much more like a barking command.

Derek agreed, just as the first of many New York State trooper cruisers screeched to a halt and began to form a perimeter around him and Mullins. As troopers and plain-clothed officers moved towards them, Derek whispered to Mullins, “You gonna share what the crime scene in Ravenswood was all about?”

“If I think it is tied in with the Bo Randall case, yes. But obviously not here or now.”

“I think everything that’s going on in Ravenswood is all tied together. Just need to figure out how.”

He was mixed with both relief and anger. Relief that Witten had been silenced and anger than the Private Investigator hired by Louis Randall had not been silenced. A white-hot anger burned in him, causing yet another one of his migraine headaches to start beating its nauseating rhythm against the vessels in his brain. He fumbled through his desk drawers, trying to recall which drawer he had thrown the most recent prescription his doctor had written into. When he found the amber colored pill bottle, with its seal still unbroken, he cracked it open, shook out two or three large ovular shaped ivory pills and washed them down with a long draw from his bottle of water.

His schedule for the upcoming week was packed as usual. As he rested his head back against the soft brown leather office chair his ex-wife had purchased for his home office five years ago, he began to plan out which meetings and appointments he could cancel for Monday, Tuesday, and, if things were still not resolved, Wednesday.
“Hell,”
he thought.
“If I don’t get this shit cleaned up, I may as well cancel the whole fucking week.”

Cole and his team had arrived in Ravenswood on Thursday evening, started with a meeting with Louis Randall that same evening. He knew what Cole had done since his arrival and went through all of Cole’s steps in his mind, desperate to find a reason for his worry.

“Arrived Thursday evening. Met with Louis Randall at The Chairman’s Club for drinks. Friday morning, went to fire department, spoke with John Mather. Heard about Bo’s mother getting silenced. Coffee with Investigator Mullins. Drinks with Lance Mahoney at that shit-hole Mahoney calls a restaurant. Visits Bo’s mother in the hospital. Drives to cinema. Doesn’t get silenced.”

His mind worked best when following a linear pattern. A timeline of events, one after another. Step by step. He found he often realized something he missed when running his mental gymnastics. Something small and easily overlooked by someone not as invested in the details as he was. But, as best as he could ascertain, and unless Witten had lied and ended up telling Cole shit he was paid not to tell, he couldn’t find a way Cole could be any closer to figuring things out than he was when he first arrived in Ravenswood.

Sensing that Cole and his black bitch of an associate were most probably still chasing their tails, only gave him a brief moment of mental respite. There were still way too many things that could explode in his face. Too many loose ends that needed some attention paid and entirely too many people with their noses where they should never have been.

He spun his chair on its coated and silent ball bearings, opened his eyes slowly and peered out at the view the floor to ceiling window behind his desk afforded him. When he had his house designed and built, he insisted that his home office have a view of the Ravenswood Public Park and Golf Course. He had bought four lots when the developers began accepting bids for land, ensuring no one could build beside his home and, most importantly, no one would be able to build so much as a storage shed that might block the view of the woods, green of the course and six scattered ponds from his office window.

The view had a calming effect on him, always had. When he was a boy, living less than two miles from where he had built his four thousand square-foot house, he and his friends spent more time fishing in one of those six scattered ponds, traipsing through the woods or learning how to hit a seven iron off the well-maintained fairways of the golf course, than they did sitting in front of a TV like most boys their age. He and his friends had found countless numbers of errantly hit golf balls in the woods, sold them back to the golf shop pro, earning enough to pay their green’s fees for most of their summers. They had discovered where the old kids, those in their junior or senior years of high school, held their beer parties, smoked pot and explored the wonderful world of premarital sex. He remembered the time (he must have been no older than seven, eight at the most), when his friend Bobby Grace found the bodies of four deer some asshole hunter had shot for fun, and how he, Bobby and a few other friends would make a point of visiting the dead deer every day during that September to see how quickly the bodies would decompose.

Bobby had insisted the bodies would last well into the next spring while Jacob Connor believed the deer would be nothing but fur and bones within three days. He remembered it was on the sixth day when the smell of the decaying bodies was especially foul, that he spotted the dingy white scarf off to the right of the smallest deer body. He wandered off towards the scarf, partly to see why someone would have been wearing a white scarf in the woods during September, and partly to put more distance between his nose and the rotting deer carcass.
 

He was no further away than ten feet when he realized it wasn’t just a dirty, white scarf someone had discarded, but there was a body as well. A young girl, her face blackened and partially eaten away by forest creatures and insects, laying on her back. She was naked, as near as he could tell, and only had a white scarf tied tightly around her throat. He could still vividly picture the matted locks of the dead girl’s blond hair in his mind. Still could remind himself of the way he felt when he walked closer, and saw how her legs and one arm were hastily covered with fallen leaves, twigs and several handfuls of tossed dirt. He remembered he didn’t scream and only called his friends over after he had stood over her for several minutes. He wasn’t expecting her to move, to cry out for help or to do anything a dead girl laying in the woods shouldn’t have done. He just wanted to be alone with her for as long as he could. An errant thought crossed his mind as he stood, peering down at her, that he recognized her, but with her face the way it was, he couldn’t be sure. Something began nagging at him from the far reaches of his mind, that this poor girl, this innocent child lying still and cold in the woods near the seventeenth green, was someone he had seen before.

He pushed the thought back to from wherever it had arisen, not trusting his occasionally sporadic memories. There would be time, he thought, to figure out why she looked so familiar, but the time was not then. That day, he just wanted to be with her and somehow, help her to feel not so utterly alone.

When his friends had finally stumbled over to see what he was so interested in that he was ignoring that Bobby had jabbed a branch right up the deers ass, their reactions were more of terror than the curiosity the discovery raised in his mind. They bolted away, out of the woods, screaming for help. But he stayed behind at her side. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her, of that he was sure, and she didn’t deserve to be left alone another second. He owed that to her.

He walked up close to her, sat down and carefully brushed the dirt, leaves and twigs from her hair. When he was younger, maybe when he was two or three, his mother used to sing an old song to him when he was feeling down. The song always made him sadder, but somehow still managed to leave him with a smile. As he brushed her hair, hoping to bring back a bit of the radiance and life to the curls, he sang what he could remember of the song to her. He hoped that hearing it might make her smile, wherever she was now.

“How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? And if I ever lost you, how much would I cry?”

He stayed by her side, picking nearly every speck of dirt from her hair for each second of the fifteen minutes before others showed up. He knew the others would find it strange if they saw him sitting beside the dead girl, singing to her and preening her as if getting her ready for her first communion pictures. He stood up when the voices of his friends and the threats of the two men his friends had dragged off the golf course (“
You little shits better not be lying to us!”
) grew in volume. He brushed himself off, making sure none of the dirt brushed from his jeans fell onto her, then rubbed his eyes hard, turning them red and a bit swollen.

The girl turned out to be a four-year old from Middletown, New York, who had been reported missing eleven days earlier. He didn’t learn the cause of her death till many years later as his parents and adults in Ravenswood thought the truth of Rebecca Angela Miller’s death was too severe for young minds like his to know about.
 

Rebecca was kidnapped, raped repeatedly, then strangled and left in the wooded area of the public park in Ravenswood, New York. The coroner determined that Rebecca Angela Miller had been dead and lying in the woods for four days, meaning her kidnapper—who had never been identified— held her captive for seven days before killing her and leaving her for him to find.

For years, there was speculation about who the murderer could be and debates were spawned and circulated over whether the killer was from Ravenswood. The town was not an easy exit off the New York State Thruway, nor was Ravenswood close to Route 81, which cut through cities and towns as it stretched over hundreds of miles. Ravenswood was, and always will be, a medium sized, out of the way town. A hidden gem of upstate New York. It’s presumed exclusivity and its lack of familiarity gave those who believed the killer was from Ravenswood, a powerful and horrifying advantage in the debate over where the child murderer called home. State Police and even the FBI spent weeks canvassing Ravenswood, interviewing hundreds of people and chasing thousands of leads before pulling up stakes and sending the case file for Rebecca Angela Miller to the cold case dungeons.

But he never pulled up his stakes and he never stopped visiting the small flat stretch of land crammed between towering pines and broad speckled alders. Slipped, as if by the hand of God, inside a circle of bearberry bushes, he would sit near the small mound of dirt where her head once rested, and would promise that he would never leave her alone. He fashioned a crude cross of pine branches and stuck it deep into the ground, marking her resting spot and reminding him that many believed there was something more to death than simply decay.

He never forgot the feeling that he had recognized her and while some part of his mind resisted his attempts to discover how, when and where he had seen her face, he was resolute to never stop searching until his mind released its imprisoned memories. He and she were bound together by a force no one could ever understand. And each time he visited the shaded flat of land where she had died, he felt a calmness grow in his spirit and a resolution to solve the mystery of why he had recognized Rebecca, grow stronger.

He sat, his head splitting with pain, and thought about her again. He, sitting in the comfort of his palatial home and she, still lying in the woods across the expanse of his rear yard and the stretch of the seventeenth fairway, were still connected. They were still two kindred souls, sharing a bond no one could ever break.

The gentle vibration of the cell phone on the desk behind him called him back from the woods. He answered, listened for a full minute, then asked one question before ending the call.

“When will the rest of the crops be harvested and destroyed?”

Weekends were reserved for Leonard La Salle to conduct his experiments. The two days that made up weekends, were his days. The hours were his hours. And he liked to use those hours to follow his passions, his interests and to chase down the memories that had haunted him for decades. But this weekend, the very weekend he was certain that his formula and compound would deliver the exact experience he needed, was being ripped away from him. Torn away by fools and by those less progressed in their evolution.