Broken

by Vanessa Skye

  Broken

  The Edge of Darkness Series

  Book Two

  By

  Vanessa Skye

  First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2014

  Copyright © Vanessa Skye, 2014

  The right of Vanessa Skye to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters and events in this book—even those sharing the same name as (or based upon) real people—are entirely fictional. No person, brand or corporation mentioned in this book should be taken to have endorsed this book nor should the events surrounding them be considered in any way factual.

  This book is a work of fiction and should be read as such.

  The Writer’s Coffee Shop

  (Australia) PO Box 447 Cherrybrook NSW 2126

  (USA) PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168

  Paperback ISBN- 978-1-61213-212-9

  E-book ISBN- 978-1-61213-213-6

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.

  Cover image by Matthew Lewis.

  Cover illustration and design by Thaigher Lillie.

  www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/vskye

  For Princess Raven. I hope one day I inspire you as much as you inspire me.

  Prologue

  The assassin lay concealed in the dark shadow cast by the huge, silent air conditioning stack on the flat roof of the old high school. The blistering summer sun had been baking the dark roof all day, and even early in the evening, the asphalt was still hot and slightly sticky to the touch. It gave off a nauseating tarry smell that she could taste in the back of her throat.

  Sweat formed on her upper lip and even more rolled down between her shoulder blades to wet her black sleeveless tee.

  The nine-pound, bolt-action hunting rifle felt cold and smooth in her hands. She rested her flushed cheek against the Teflon-coated stainless steel of the barrel for a moment.

  The magazine had a five-round capacity but she had only inserted two. Her initial plan had been to use accelerator cartridges, but identification no longer mattered—getting out alive was not the aim.

  Her fingers trembled and she took a few deep breaths to calm her hammering heart and steady her hands.

  It didn’t work. If anything her shaking seemed to worsen and the intake of air made her chest ache. More sweat beaded across her forehead and on the backs of her hands under her black leather gloves.

  What’s wrong with me?

  She looked at her watch. The target would be visible in the next five minutes, like clockwork.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to calm herself. Her head was pounding. Every time she moved, the motion surged through her skull, pain spiked in her belly, and she felt dizzy.

  Sweat was pouring down her face now, stinging her eyes.

  Any moment now . . .

  Just as she’d expected, the target jogged into view at the end of the street. She gripped the rifle firmly, nestled the black synthetic stock into the crook of her shoulder, and rested her finger lightly on the trigger—waiting . . . willing her heart rate to slow.

  Now!

  But her trigger finger didn’t obey.

  The cops will be here soon. Take her out! You’re gonna miss the shot!

  Her head throbbed incessantly as she argued with herself—the pain almost unbearable. The pounding in her skull was so loud. It seemed to be coming from outside her body, near the jammed stairwell door.

  She felt unconsciousness coming as the edges of her vision went black.

  No! You have to save the baby!

  One thought played over and over as she sank into nothingness:

  Don’t take another child from him!

  Chapter One

  You’re just like time.

  Except you can still feel the shame.

  All hands on deck now.

  The sea is getting rough again.

  –The Black Keys, “All You Ever Wanted”

  Detective Alicia Raymond, better known as Berg, looked down into the glassy, staring eyes of the dead woman lying in front of her on the cool, unforgiving concrete.

  She was crumpled like a paper doll on the downtown Chicago parking garage floor, shot in the back of the head, execution-style, in broad daylight.

  Berg noticed the woman’s eyes were brown, similar to her own, in fact. She tried to shake off the strange realization, but she couldn’t stop staring into the glassy chocolate gaze of the poor woman in front of her.

  There was an unspoken bond between them now, and she wouldn’t rest until this woman’s killer had been brought to justice.

  It was her promise to all of the victims whose cases she worked on.

  She looked one last time into the woman’s eyes. Soon, they would cloud over with a milky film, the pretty irises existing only in photographs and in the memories of her friends and family.

  Berg flicked a glance down to the woman’s impressive engagement and wedding rings.

  Yeah, there’s definitely a family involved.

  “What do you think?” Detective Marco Arena asked. “No one saw anything; she can’t have been offed in public in the middle of the day. She must’ve been killed overnight.”

  “No. Her eyes are open and clear. If she had been dead for more than a few hours, they’d be cloudy by now.”

  “Shit, you’re right,” Arena replied.

  Berg refrained from stating the obvious to her new partner: she was almost always right.

  “Carjacking?” he asked, running a hand though his thick, black hair in a move Berg had come to realize over the last two months was a sign of exhaustion and frustration.

  Lately, it seemed the number of murders in Chicago was out of control. Thanks to growing gang crime, their city was nearing the top of the murder capital list. Neither of them had had a full night’s rest for weeks. For Berg, it was standard operating procedure—even on a good night she never caught more than four solid hours—but Arena was fraying around the edges. Sad part? This latest murder of what appeared to be an innocent shopper didn’t even reach the top of the list of the macabre and violent deaths they had seen in the last two weeks alone.

  “Car’s still here,” Berg muttered as she stooped to get a better look at the body, blowing away a loose strand of long, dark brown hair that had somehow escaped her tight ponytail. It was getting so long and thick as to be unruly, and it was getting on her nerves, but she resisted the urge to yank out the disobedient strand by the root and concentrated on the victim in front of her.

  The top of the dead woman’s head was a matted mess of blood and gray matter—the bullet had passed straight through the back of her head and out through her shattered upper forehead. Berg moved the caked, dyed blond hair aside as best she could with her gloved hands—there were contact burns on the scalp. The gun had been pressed hard against the back of her head when she was killed. She looked to be in her midfifties, and was lying on her side in a pool of blood, facing the rear tires of a very expensive, custom built, black SUV.

  Definitely not something straight off the lot.

  “The killer probably didn’t want it seeing it’s splattered in goo,” Arena replied.

  The vehicle’s cavernous trunk, which was open, had borne all the blood, bone, and brain from the killing. The bullet was likely lodged in there somewhere as well, and Berg had tasked the forensics team with finding it.

  “Possibly.” She moved the woman’s head slightly—it still moved
easily. She fingered the red streaks on ether side of the neck. “Looks like a necklace was ripped off here,” she said. “But the wedding ring is still there.”

  Arena crouched down next to Berg and tried to wiggle the woman’s wedding rings off with his latex-gloved fingers. After several seconds of maneuvering, they came free. “He might not have wanted to wait around to get them off,” he said.

  Berg frowned but didn’t answer as she looked away from the victim and took in more of the scene.

  Groceries were scattered in a four-foot radius around the woman’s body, the brown paper bags spewing their contents on the cold, hard concrete like a college student at their first pledge. The woman’s purse lay where it had fallen, seemingly untouched. Her nearby shopping cart was still half-filled with bags.

  Something’s off.

  “Looks like she was transferring her bags from the shopping cart to the trunk of the car when she was ambushed from behind, killed with a single shot to the back of the head, execution style. My guess is a handgun, possibly a nine-millimeter. We’ll need to find the bullet to be sure. Blood and gray matter sprayed the car, she dropped the groceries, and fell to the ground,” Berg said.

  “No witnesses have come forward.” Arena double-checked his notebook. “Which is strange since the gunshot would have echoed through the parking deck. You think it would have gotten someone’s attention, but no. A fellow shopper found her like this an hour ago and called 911.”

  Berg watched the forensics team from her Harrison Street precinct, the 12th, as they combed the scene, photographing, and then bagging and tagging anything in the vicinity.

  She frowned again.

  “Oh no.” Arena sighed. “I know that look. Please, don’t sa—”

  “This whole thing stinks,” she said. “It makes no sense.”

  “In what way?” he asked, his dark eyes—darker than hers by several shades—flashing with both annoyance and curiosity.

  “If it was a carjacking, why is the car still here? Along with her purse and jewelry. And what’s this ring? At least five carats?”

  “Don’t ask me. You ladies are better at the bling,” he replied before blanching.

  Berg glowered at him. She hated when he spoke in clichés, and he knew it. “I care as much about diamonds as I do about dresses and makeup, you Neanderthal.”

  “I know, I know. Sorry.” He ran his hand through his short hair again. “I haven’t slept in several centuries.”

  He hadn’t been able to stop the glance at Berg’s simple pantsuit at the mention of her wearing a dress. She caught him leering just like she did so many of the other officers she worked with, and shot him a look that left no doubt just where he could stick his leer.

  “This looks more like an execution, not a carjacking.” She turned from the body to the surrounding area. “And, if no one heard the shot in this busy parking garage in the middle of the day, then the killer may have used a silencer. What carjacker does that? For that matter, what carjacker kills a woman, renders the car unsellable, then takes off without stealing everything else he can get his hands on?”

  Arena shrugged.

  “There is more to this,” Berg muttered.

  “You think there is more to everything.” Arena said and wandered toward the car grumbling.

  Berg wasn’t sure what to do, which was an annoying proposition for a woman who liked to have everything planned out to the nth degree.

  Every night before she went to bed, she already knew what she would be wearing the next morning. Her spotless apartment was cleaned, the dishes washed, and put away. She was showered, her hair washed and plaited in a braid to keep it out of the way. Jesse was walked and fed, his food set out on the counter so either she or her elderly neighbor and co-dog-owner Vi could feed him. Her clothes were ironed, her guns cleaned and locked away, and her purse organized. That way, there were no nasty surprises when she awoke in the morning or got called to a late-night crime scene.

  Of course, she had a lot more time in the evenings to carry out her methodical cleaning, tidying, and organizing now that she wasn’t running off to scratch her destructive itch at the sex clubs every spare second.

  Realistically, all the extra time simply meant more time staring at her plain white bedroom ceiling as she attempted to sleep. Or counted sheep. Or systematically contracted and relaxed every muscle within every limb of her body. Or played and replayed the meditation CD her therapist had helpfully but naïvely supplied.

  She’d spent so many hours staring at that damn ceiling she had started to wonder if she should stick some cue cards up there.

  Maybe I can learn a second language or something.

  She was distracted and that wasn’t a good thing for a cop to be at any time, let alone while she was working no less than five active investigations, countless cold cases, and breaking in a new partner to boot. The lack of control she was experiencing was unfamiliar and unwelcome.

  The trigger to that lack of control was sitting approximately twenty feet from her, bent over paperwork in his new glass-walled office and tangling the fingers of his left hand in his thick, wavy medium-brown hair and scribbling with his right.

  Of course she knew where he was. She always knew precisely where Captain Jay O’Loughlin was. It was as if every nucleus of every cell in her entire body gravitated toward her former partner’s general direction twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If he took a bathroom break, she knew. If he had a meeting, she knew. If he walked toward her desk . . . forget about it!

  Fucking infuriating.

  Their new captain had had a lot of meetings recently. Not surprising, really, considering the ride the previous occupant of the glass office had taken them all on.

  Captain Louise Leigh, one of the few females to ever make it in the upper echelons of the Chicago Police Department—and a woman Berg had thought of as a respected colleague and someone to look up to—had turned out to be a deranged psycho, turned cop to carry out macabre revenge on four truckers who had gang-raped her and left her for dead thirty years prior.

  Berg had always been good at recognizing the psychos. She was renowned for it in both this precinct and others throughout Chicago, so she still felt ashamed that Leigh had slipped under her radar, but Berg had identified with her drive for revenge.

  Leigh had used officers, CPD money, and resources and left a lot of screwed-up convictions thanks to database tampering, not to mention the thirteen dead bodies they knew about. Five of the bodies were innocent young women who probably died doubting their own sanity after Leigh was finished with them.

  Berg forced herself to look away from the office and back down at her own desk. It didn’t help.

  It had been two months since Berg had shot Leigh dead and rescued a captive Jay, and one month since Jay had recovered enough from the emotional and physical torture to return to work in his new position in the glass office.

  It had been six weeks since Jay had said that he loved her and that he would wait until she was far enough into recovery from her sex addiction to be ready for them to be together. Irritatingly, that had been the last thing she had heard from Jay about them being together, whatsoever.

  Now Berg didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if she should just go in there, interrupt him, and lay her cards on the table, or just assume he had moved on and do so herself—the latter was the more likely prospect, with Jay being the skirt-chasing, pussy-seeking bloodhound that he was.

  Besides, she didn’t know if she was ready, or even capable, of any kind of sane, normal relationship. Previous efforts in that area had failed dismally and therapy was not helping.

  She had never been what most might call normal.

  Moving on was easier said than done, however, because she was in love with him—the first time she had ever felt any such feelings for anyone.

  She sighed.

  Yet another issue to work through with Dr. Thompson.

  The issues list seemed to be getting longer rather t
han shorter during her nightly therapy sessions, and she was losing motivation. She hadn’t realized working through her problems would involve so many uncomfortable feelings; feelings that she felt increasingly ill-equipped to deal with.

  “Hey partner.” Arena shrugged off his dark wool pea coat and hung it on the back of his chair. Twisting his heavily muscled shoulders, he unwrapped his scarf and threw it on the desk. Dark eyes flashing with humor, he sat down on the swivel chair at his desk—the desk that had belonged to Jay for two years.

  “Did you find anything on the husband yet?” she asked, referring to the execution in the parking garage the day prior.

  “Shockingly, not since the last time you asked . . . a whole hour ago. It still looks like an attempted jacking to me,” Arena replied, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms. He flexed, consciously or not, and his biceps bulged through his turtleneck sweater.

  Looking away, she frowned at his response. “It’s not. The husband did it, or paid someone to do it. Trust me.”

  “And you’re basing that assumption on what? All men are bastards?”

  Berg tried not to roll her eyes. “No. I’m basing it on the fact that very few murders are completely random. Also on the particularly obvious fact that the supposed thief didn’t steal the brand new SUV or her purse or her jewelry . . . nothing except for the necklace.”

  “The custom SUV was too conspicuous. Plus, he never would have been able to get the blood or the smell out,” Arena replied and Berg had to wonder if he felt as ridiculous as that lame reasoning sounded.

  “Then why go after it in the first place? The SUV wasn’t important because it was a planned hit made to look like a carjacking.” She slid a folder toward Arena’s desk. “Preliminary autopsy report. It’s just like I said. She was killed execution style with a single shot to the back of the head. She likely never knew her attacker was approaching until she felt the gun press into her scalp. Then it was over.”