by Kat Parrish
Bloodsport
Z Sisters: Book 1
Kat Parrish
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLOODSPORT: Z SISTERS, BOOK 1
Copyright © 2018 by Kat Parrish
Published by Dark Valentine Press
Cover design: Indie Author Services
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from the author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
About the Author
Also by Kat Parrish
“Secret government program. In the history of the world, nothing good has ever followed those words.”—Rose O’Reilly Zelnick
Chapter One
On a good day it takes me no more than half an hour to get from my apartment in Burbank to my dad’s place in Reseda. But of course, on the one day off I’d had in nearly two weeks, there was construction on the freeway which meant the surface streets were jammed so the trip had taken almost an hour.
By the time I arrived, I was not in any mood to be sociable.
For one thing I was exhausted. Everyone in the department was pulling overtime to work on a bizarre murder case, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend my Saturday afternoon eating charred meat and making chit-chat with my dad. I love him, but since he retired on disability, he’s been way too invested in what I’m doing and old friends of his on the force are always “checking up” on me in a way that’s meant to be friendly but feels…paternalistic.
I don’t need another father.
My mood got even fouler when I pulled up and saw the blue Hyundai Ioniq parked in the driveway. That meant my sister Kaz was here too—surprise—and probably her annoying boyfriend Lyle. Kaz had won the car in a mall raffle and dad had paid the taxes on it and was probably paying the car insurance too, so it annoyed me that she couldn’t even be bothered to have the thing washed every once in a while.
But let’s face it, almost everything about my little sister annoyed me these days.
I took a deep, cleansing breath and tried to will myself into a better frame of mind.
I found everyone in the backyard, charcoal on the grill already blazing, dad already two beers deep, which meant he was just about ready to hit the hard stuff.
I sighed. At least my dad was a happy drunk and he wouldn’t be driving.
“Kaz,” he called as he saw me. “Look who’s here!”
“Hey Rose,” she said, without bothering to take off her sunglasses or move from her position on the lounge chair where she and Lyle were sharing a beer.
“Burbank’s finest,” Lyle said, giving me a crooked smile he probably thought was charming.
Lyle was always saying something about me being a cop, as if I cared about the little grow house he had going on in the garage of the house he rented.
“Hi Lyle,” I said dutifully and went over to kiss my dad on the top of his balding head.
I thought he looked thinner than the last time I’d seen him and did the math in my head. That had been about two months ago.
I suppressed a twinge of guilt and opened a Diet Coke Dad had put on ice for me. The cold caffeinated chemicals burned an icy trail down my throat.
Apropos of nothing, Lyle suddenly turned to Kaz and said, “You ever think about coloring your hair red? It looks good on Rose.”
“Wouldn’t work with my coloring,” Kaz said, annoyed.
I didn’t blame her for being annoyed. One of the reasons I didn’t like Lyle was that he treated my sister like shit, always offering little passive/aggressive suggestions that came out like criticisms; criticisms that Kaz took to heart.
Which she shouldn’t have. Looks-wise, Kaz was way out of Lyle’s league and he should have been kissing her toes in gratitude that she even looked in his direction. A dark-haired goddess, she was a dead ringer for her mother, an actress who’d met our dad when he was hired to consult on a raunchy police comedy—Blue Balls—that had unexpectedly turned into a five-movie franchise for Warner Bros. Sarah had been killed in a car wreck when Kaz was ten and I was eighteen, and we’d bonded over being motherless children since my mother had died of breast cancer the year before Sarah.
Dad was just getting ready to put the burgers on the grill when Lyle walked through the kitchen and out the front door.
“Where’s Lyle going?” I asked, rooting around the fridge for some lettuce that wasn’t moldy. It was pretty clear my father was living on frozen dinners and takeout and that salads weren’t a priority for him.
“He’s getting our food out of the car.”
I looked around the door at my sister. “Our food? Seriously?”
She looked sheepish. “Lyle’s a vegan,” she said.
“Of course, he is.”
She frowned. “I don’t know why you don’t like Lyle.”
“Don’t like who?” Lyle asked as he entered the kitchen with a small cooler he set on the kitchen counter and began unpacking.
“”Bruno Mars,” Kaz said, flashing me a look that said, I know you don’t know who he is but roll with it.
“Bruno Mars is overrated,” Lyle said, because of course he thought so.
“I like Bruno Mars,” Kaz said.
“Didn’t he just win a bunch of Grammys?” I said because I may be eight years older than she is, but I know how to use the internet too.
“Thank you,” Kaz said, as if I’d validated her choice. But Lyle was determined to make an argument out of it.
“He’s no Denzel Curry,” Lyle said, and seemed to think that would settle the issue.
“Few of us are,” I said. I might have said something else snarky, but I’d gotten distracted by the containers of food Lyle was unpacking. There was a jar of what looked like watered down cranberry juice. “What’s that?” I asked, wondering if I really wanted to know.
“Beet kvass,” he said.
“Probiotics,” my sister said.
“Good for gut health,” Lyle added, with a significant look at my stomach.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask how many probiotics were in beer, but I didn’t want to be the second asshole in the room so what I said was “Yum.”
Lyle put on his frowny face. “I don’ t think we brought enough for you,” he said.
“I’ll share mine,” Kaz said, a little too hastily. I’ve never had beet kvass, but it rhymed with “ass” and I was pretty sure that’s what it was going to taste like too.
Later, when dad and I had polished off big slices of carrot cake I’d bought from Jerry’s Deli and Kaz and Lyle were enjoying their Tofutti Cuties, dad brought up the case that had, me and everyone else, working overtime. “Any leads?” he asked.
I forked up a last bite of cream cheese frosting and shook my head. Lyle’s ears pricked up.
“You’re working that case?” he asked.
He didn’t have to be specific. Burbank doesn’t have a lot of murders and the discovery of six headless bodies crammed inside an abandoned van had gotten
nationwide attention.
“Yeah,” I said, and stood up with my plate in hopes of deflecting any other questions.
No such luck. “is it true all the bodies were tattooed with a weird symbol?”
“Ongoing investigation, I can’t talk about it,” I said, wondering where he’d heard about the tattoo. As far as I knew, we hadn’t released that information to the press.
Kaz and Lyle left soon after, leaving me and my father to enjoy the sunset.
He kicked back with another beer while I put everything away and separated the recyclables. I noticed there were a lot of beer bottles in the bins.
He was drinking a lot these days. He was in pain all the time. The reason he had retired early was that he’d wrecked his knee jumping off the balcony of a no-tel motel in pursuit of a meth dealer. The dealer had made bail and walked away laughing. Dad would have to deal with the injury for the rest of his life. Then he got shingles, one of the rare cases that leaves lingering, sometimes crippling pain behind.
He was stoic, but I knew it was bad, bad enough I think he might have killed himself if it hadn’t been for me and Kaz. I don’t think he felt he could leave us until we were “settled down,” which in his worldview meant “married with children.”
He really wanted to be a granddad. “I know I made some mistakes with you girls,” he’d told me more than once, “but I think I’d be a good Pop-pop.”
That’s what he wanted to be called, “Pop-pop,” which struck me as hilarious. He’s fifty-five and looks like a hard-ass, ex-Marine high school football coach and the idea of a bunch of little kids calling him that ridiculous name made me smile.
I was just about to say I had to head out when dad put down his beer and said, “Tell me about the tattoos.”
The tattoos.
There were so many weird things about the multiple murder we were investigating that the tattoos were almost didn’t make it into the top five.
Somebody had blown the heads off six so-far-unidentified men and then left them in a van parked near a freeway entrance, where it would be noticed and towed. We had no forensic evidence, no leads, and at this point, no chance of solving the mystery. Our only hope of finding out who the victims were rested on a technique developed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department for scanning the unique patterns on feet. We hoped to find a match by accessing birth certificates nationwide, but in an era of widespread cutbacks, God knows how long that was going to take.
“Not tattoos,” I said, “burn scars where we think there used to be tattoos.”
“Lasered off?” he asked.
“Not so neat,” I said. “More like someone took a hot poker and seared something off.”
He winced. “That’s harsh.” He picked up his beer again and took a long swallow. “And the burn marks were all in the same place?”
“Armpits,” I said. “Like the SS blood group tattoos.”
Dad was a WWII buff and I grew up watching the History Channel with him. All World War II, all the time except when it was Rome.
“Some kind of gang?”
“We’re checking out that angle,” I said, “but the bodies were different races and ages, so I don’t think it’s likely.”
“Somebody sure wanted to send a message, though,” he said.
No shit.
“What does Emmet think?”
“You know Emmet,” I said, “he doesn’t like to theorize.”
“That sounds like him.”
Emmet Cooley, my partner, graduated from the Academy a year ahead of my dad. He’s old school, which means he’s sexist, racist, and homophobic and doesn’t really see the problem with it. He’s a dinosaur in the department and while I give him props for not just running out the clock until it’s time for him to retire, it does get tiresome sometimes having to put up with his bullshit.
And no sooner had I finished that thought then my phone buzzed with a text from him.
Call me.
I sighed. That was Emmet in a nutshell. He could have just called me directly and saved a step.
I showed the text to my dad. “Do you mind?”
He waved his permission and chugged down the rest of his beer as I dialed my partner.
“What’s up?” I said.
“We’ve got an ID on one of our victims.”
“Great,” I said, wondering why that information couldn’t have waited until I came into work on Monday.
“Name’s Ian Sydney,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Served with distinction in Afghanistan until 2012.”
“Great,” I said. “So maybe the Army can help us fill in some blanks.”
“Rose,” he said, “Ian Sydney was killed in Kandahar on July 21, 2012.”
Chapter Two
Absolutely no one wanted to talk about Ian Sydney on Monday.
Saturday night, his memorial page was still live on Facebook and the pictures and messages there had broken my heart. He was a good-looking black kid who’d run track for his college, owned a big scruffy dog he called Babydoll, and had a taste for craft-brewed beer. Suddenly on Monday morning, two days after his body had been identified, I checked the page and discovered it was no longer there.
It wasn’t the only thing that was no longer there.
All the hard copy files on the case had been removed and our computers wiped.
Which is not easy to do.
The mass-murder case had been the number one priority for the whole department for weeks but suddenly that Monday it was, “What dead bodies in a white van?”
No one professed to know how that happened and our captain told us that the case was closed, and we could all go back to our regular workload.
You don’t tell a room full of cops to just back off an investigation without getting some pushback and fielding some questions, but it was clear that “closed meant closed” so rather than draw the captain’s fire, I kept my mouth closed.
I kept my mouth closed when I saw the guys in black tactical gear removing items from personal lockers.
Including mine.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
The guy turned toward me. “I’m doing my job, detective.”
“And that involves searching my locker how?”
The guy gave an audible sigh, slammed the locker and looked at me directly.
He was tall, maybe six two, with the lean, hard body of someone who keeps fit because his life depends on it and not because he wants to look good naked.
Although he’d look pretty good naked, I thought before I pushed that thought away.
“Do you have a warrant?” I asked, knowing that guys in black tactical gear never had warrants and usually there wasn’t much you could do about it.”
“You should invest in a pair of odor eaters,” he said. “Your Nikes are stinking up the locker.”
And before I could frame a reply to that, he’d left the locker room.
What the hell?
By the time I got back to my desk, the military guys were clearing out, including the one I’d encountered.
Nobody said anything as they watched them leave.
But later, when Emmet and I were having lunch at Bob’s Big Boy, I told him I was getting a bad feeling.
The bad feeling had started when I saw the memorial page had been taken down. On a whim, I’d Googled Ian and came up empty. It was as if he’d never existed and it just did not seem plausible to me that a guy his age had left no digital footprint at all.
Unlike Emmet, I don’t have a lot of faith in paperwork. All kinds of mistakes get made when you’re filling out forms—names are misspelled, numbers are transposed, hard copies are misfiled, digital copies get overwritten. The idea that one of our victims might have the same name as a combat casualty didn’t seem all that implausible to me. I figured it was a mistake.
But erasing that same guy as if he’d never existed? That told me that it wasn’t a mistake we were dealing with here.
And having a bunch of Feds crawling all over the station—sterilizing it—was beyond scary.
And if it’s one thing I knew from driving around with Emmet for two years, it was that I wasn’t the only one adding up two and two and getting five.
“Yeah, there’s something going on for damn sure,” Emmet said as we sat in a Bob’s Big Boy eating lunch.
I was moving my veggie quesadilla around my plate as he chowed down on his bratwurst burger.
Nothing spoils his appetite.
“What do you think we stepped into with this case? I said.
“Something someone wants to keep buried, I’d say.”
“But why bury it now? Why didn’t they just shut it down before it got started? If the Feds had an interest, they could have just come in, thrown their weight around and poof, made everything go away. So why now?
“You’re asking the wrong question Rose.”
I slopped more sour cream on top of the quesadilla and topped it off with salsa, waiting for him to explain. Because really, there’s nothing I enjoy more than having my partner mansplain something to me.
“You’re asking ‘why?’ You should be asking ‘who?’”
“Enlighten me,” I said.
“No idea,” he said, taking a juicy bite of his brat/burger combo. “But I backed everything up Saturday night.”
“You backed everything up?” I said, because Emmet was the original cranky grampy when it came to using technology. He probably wouldn’t use a cell phone if he didn’t have to for work.
“What made you do that?” I asked.
“Because this case was a weird one,” he said. “You gotta watch out for the weird ones, he and this one is weird with a capital WE.”
Emmet would know. One of the big cases he’d worked before I’d been promoted to detective was a murder involving two guys who beat another guy to death and then buried his body in the Angeles National Forest. The instigator had claimed to be a California State Highway Patrolman and he’d threatened to kidnap his accomplice’s girlfriend if he didn’t carry out the murder. He was serving a life sentence; the other guy was about a tenth of the way through a thirty-year term. The case still haunted Emmet.