The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) (9 page)

Nikkie said, “Crown, don’t jump to any conclusions. We’ll figure this out, one way or another. We will get to the bottom of this mess.”

“He isn’t afraid of needles,” Crown said sullenly. “He’s afraid of what the blood test might tell us. He’s afraid that he might actually spend the rest of his life in jail. Nikkie, I think he ran and he’s not coming back unless he comes in the backseat of a cop car.”

“Listen, if he’s on foot, which he must be unless he arranged for someone to pick him up, he couldn’t have gotten far. I’m going to drive around this area for a while, see if I can find him. I’ll call you when I either find him or can’t locate him.” Nikkie paused, took a deep breath, then said, “Stay calm, Crown. There’s a lot we don’t know about this case. But we will figure it out. Trust Derek and me. We’re good at this shit.”

Crown ended the call without anything else said. Nikkie walked around the building after surveying the immediate area for any sign of Bo. Seeing nothing, she got into her rental car and pulled out into the street. She assumed that Bo had a twenty minute jump on her, and though Bo was in excellent physical condition, she didn’t think he would risk drawing any attention to himself by running to wherever he was headed.
 

“Twenty minutes at three and a half miles per hour means I have an area of just over four square miles to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. Wonderful,
” she thought to herself. Knowing that Ravenswood was south of her location, Nikkie headed that direction first. She kept on the main road till she drove just under two miles, then made a U-Turn, and headed north for four miles. Seeing no sign of Bo, she returned to the lab’s office, then headed west. She thought she caught sight of Bo sitting in a coffee shop but after spending the time to park her car and walk back to the coffee shop, she realized the only thing she had accomplished was giving Bo an additional five minutes to disappear.
 

Nikkie drove around town for close to an hour before deciding her chances of finding Bo were probably just as good if she was sitting in his kitchen as they were if she drove every street in town. She called Crown. Her call, after five rings, went to voicemail.

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Crown stayed back at Bo’s house and was planning to remain there until Nikkie and Bo returned from the doctor’s office. When the two returned, she had decided, she would make a call to Louis Randall and demand a meeting. She thought it strange, after setting her mind to her agenda, that any time spent with her ex-husband was better referred to as a “meeting” as opposed to anything connoting less of a business endeavor. Better and safer to have a “meeting” than a “get-together” or to “spend some time together.” But that tone, that format was comfortable for both her and Louis. A meeting, and the expectations a meeting implied, would lessen the chances of any emotions, either fresh or old, from spilling out.
 

Louis and Victoria were married two days after she celebrated her twenty-second birthday. He was her only love to that point, and if pressed (and persuaded with enough alcohol), probably the only love of her life. Their marriage lasted just less than five years and while Victoria did remarry, she did so purely to fend off boredom, loneliness and debt collectors.

Louis was building his law firm, having made the decision to open his own firm after realizing the real money comes when your name appears first on the business cards. Louis had the drive and determination to start his own firm and Victoria was certain he would, someday, be successful. But while Louis had the emotional and mental traits needed for success, he lacked clients. One year after Louis quit his position as associate partner with a law firm in Cleveland, Ohio, answering their home phone became a stressful event, as debt collectors, angry bankers and collection agencies seemed to have their number on speed dial. Louis’s law firm took almost exactly two years before the incoming revenue exceeded the outgoing expenses. And once things turned in their favor, they really began to turn.
 

By the time the couple celebrated their third anniversary, they had moved from their one bedroom apartment to a palatial, three thousand five hundred square-foot house in the suburbs of Cleveland. Victoria was able to stop serving as the firm’s receptionist and spent her time in their home, preparing for the birth of their baby.
 

When Boregard Louis Randall was born, Louis’s firm had added two partners, opened new offices in Albany and Newburgh, and exceeded five million dollars in earned revenues.

Things were going better than expected for the couple. Louis’s firm continued to expand and the outside investments he’d made all seemed to have been made by a master investor or someone with inside information. Money poured into their accounts from sources Victoria never knew about and, after a short while, never cared about. She was content to have Louis building a secure future while she stayed at home and raised their son.

It wasn’t much after Bo’s birth that Crown began to suspect Louis was spending his time outside the home doing things besides growing his businesses. By the time Bo turned three, Crown had hired a private investigator to follow her husband and was soon after presented with glossy eight-by-ten-inch photos of Louis and another woman in compromising positions.

She kicked Louis out of the house when, after confronting him with the evidence, he only responded by pointing to the woman in the pictures, saying, “Those pictures can destroy her life.” She later found out that the woman was a US Senator’s wife, a discovery that happened well after the divorce papers were signed, filed and processed.

Though Louis fought for and was awarded partial custody, it was Crown who raised Bo. Louis spent his time growing his law firm, venturing into new ways to earn money and establishing his reputation and position with people of influence, both in the world of business and in politics. Crown was quick to give Louis credit for following through on two commitments he had made to her: Paying alimony and child support and paying an additional monthly sum in cash to Crown in exchange for her silence about his affair with the Senators’ wife.

After Bo went away to college and moved to Ravenswood, his and Crown’s relationship became strained. He was eager to get out from beneath Crown’s controlling ways and she was intent on doing whatever she could to keep her only child safe in a world filled with danger and tragedy. Despite the strain, Crown and Bo kept in contact and made a point of getting together a few times each year. But he was becoming his own person and, as painful as it was for Crown to accept, didn’t need Crown to watch over him as much and as severely as she wanted to.
 

As Nikkie and Bo left for the lab, Crown set her mind to cleaning Bo’s house. Maybe running out to the grocery store and filling Bo’s cupboards and fridge with food as well. She assumed that her cleaning and shopping would anger Bo, after all, he had been living on his own for several years and was doing just fine without his mommy taking care of him. But he’d get over his anger, Crown thought. His house was a mess and his refrigerator contained four times as much beer as food. Yes, she was going to clean his house, run out to the grocery store and buy some healthy, nutritious food for her son.
 

That was her intention.
 

She even looked for cleaning supplies and jotted down a few grocery items she knew Bo needed.

But her intention was interrupted; prevented from being realized.

The shuffling thuds he heard coming from behind her—that she at first assumed was a distant delivery truck rumbling down Bo’s street— proceeded the intense, sharp, cracking pain in the back of her head. She collapsed to the floor as the pain in her head erupted, sending disturbing sensations that reminded her of electric shocks racing through her entire body. She fell straight down, legs folded beneath her, arms splayed to her sides. She felt herself falling forward and knew she should at least try to brace her fall. It was her face, after all, that would otherwise be rudely introduced to the cool, hard tile floor of Bo’s kitchen.
 

But her arms refused to respond to her urgent request and as her nose met the floor, flattening and spilling blood across the same floor she had just swept and mopped clean, and Crown began to slip into unconsciousness. She heard a strange humming sound and was unable to decide if the sound had its origins inside her skull or from some outer source. When the humming grew louder, it lost its monotone, vibrating characteristics, and morphed into something driven and birthed by intelligence. They were words she was hearing. Deep, scowling sounding words, repeated over and over. Perhaps the speaker needed to ensure she received the message before she completed the full slip into unconsciousness. Or maybe, the speaker suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and felt compelled to repeat statements over and over again. She decided it didn’t matter once she understood the words. She didn’t have time to consider what the words, strung together into a phrase, meant and she certainly lacked enough interest in trying to understand what message the speaker was trying to convey or what personal demons he was battling with that would incite him to formulate the phrase.
 

It was just the words themselves she heard and, somehow, knew she needed to be able to recall when she returned to the waking world. If, of course, she did come back.

“Don’t go digging where you ain’t s’pose to dig.”

The town of Ravenswood was a sprawling suburb. Though the 2010 census put the population of Ravenswood at sixteen thousand three hundred and fifty, the town covered as many acres as would a city two or three times its size. There were several farms scattered about the northern ends of the town; most of their fields being filled with corn or hay. Closer to the town’s center, fields of strawberries, blueberries and apple trees added their dashes of color to the upstate New York town. Ravenswood’s main street, appropriately and wholly unimaginatively named “Main Street,” had nearly completed its transformation from being lined with small shops, diners, locally owned restaurants and gift shops to brightly lighted chain restaurants, strip malls—anchored by major retail chains—big box electronic and home improvement stores, twenty-first century-style cinemas and a splattering of locally owned speciality shops which were somehow able to survive despite the constant need to reinvent themselves.

He drove around the town, trying to get a feel of it and to familiarize himself with specific locations he felt might be important in the case. He drove up Morris Road, past the cordoned off, burned-to-the-ground home of Brian Mack. He drove past Bo Randall’s home, taking notice of Nikkie’s rental car parked in the driveway. He then back to Main Street, and followed it south for a few miles till he saw a sign reading “Thanks for Visiting Ravenswood. Come Back Again, Soon.” He turned east, followed a sinuous, tree-lined road until he came upon an area of several new housing developments. Having no familiarity with the Town of Ravenswood, Derek, judging by the large homes with elaborate roofing designs, that there was plenty of money in the bank accounts of several Ravenswood residents.

He continued driving east till the houses—even larger and possessing greater curb appeal—thinned out. Soon, there were no more houses, only a large, old growth forest surrounding the road on each side. Up ahead, about one hundred yards from where the forest grew dense and dark, Derek saw a small parking area off to the right hand side of the road. He noticed two men tossing large, black, bulging garbage bags into the bed of the sole truck parked in the area. He slowed, wondering what the two men could have in the bags, and noticed that there were at least five other bags, each stuffed and bulging with the unknown contents, sitting in the bed of the truck. Upon seeing Derek slowly drive by, the two men glanced at each other, quickly tossed the final bags into the back of the truck, hopped in the cab and were soon speeding off in the opposite direction Derek was headed.

Curiosity having the tremendous pull that it had on him, Derek stopped his car, put it into reverse and backed into the spot the truck had just vacated. He stepped out and walked around, looking to see if any of the bag’s contents might have fallen to the ground. The ease at which the two men were tossing the stuffed bags around, suggested to Derek that either the two were ridiculously strong, or, whatever was stuffed into the black garbage bags, was light. More volume than mass.

Besides several small rocks, a cache of spent cigarette butts and a few discarded bottle tops, Derek found nothing of interest. But just before he turned to get back into his car, he caught sight of a single, green, leafy weed laying on the ground. He bent over and picked it up. To him, it looked like a normal weed, one that might drive the homeowners in the area mad as hell at their lawn care service provider. Holding the broad leafed weed in his hands, Derek made another pass around the area. He ventured off into an area of the woods where the vegetation seemed to have been recently trampled. He followed what he believed to be the path of the two men he had seen hoisting the garbage bags into the woods for fifty feet, paying attention to the forest’s floor. As the forest’s floor started to lose its green underbrush and became what Derek expected a forest’s floor to look like—brown dirt covered with decaying leaves and scatters of felled branches, twigs and pine needles—he noticed several more droppings of the green weed. He gathered up ten or more of the weeds, shoved them into his back pocket, then headed back to his car. He was far from being a botanist and, far all he knew, the weeds stuffed into his back pocket were nothing more than a unique breed of dandelion.
 

It hit him as he reached for the door handle.

“Shit balls,” he said out loud. He quickly pulled out a couple of the weeds from his back pocket and inspected them more closely. Though he had only smoked pot one time in his life—during a particularly interesting leave when in the Army—the weeds being pot and the two men he saw carrying the bulging garbage bags being pot dealers made total sense. He pulled out his iPhone from his pocket, was glad to see that despite his location, he had three solid bars of coverage, and launched a Google image search for marijuana. A few seconds later, images appeared on his screen of a long, green-leafed plant. The weed he held in his hands had leaves that looked more like an elongated oak tree’s leaves and not the ragged edged, long, thin leaves of the marijuana plant.