Broken
Book 3 of The Owned Series
Derek Masters
Copyright © 2019 by Derek Masters
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, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To all of my readers, who have been so patient waiting for this book to come out. I hope you find the wait was worth it!
Contents
1. Hannah
2. Reed
3. Reed
4. Hannah
5. Reed
6. Reed
7. Hannah
8. Hannah
9. Reed
10. Reed
11. Hannah
Epilogue
Derek’s Dark Desires
Derek’s Dirty Subs
About the Author
Also by Derek Masters
1
Hannah
I couldn’t breathe as I woke myself from the horrible dream I’d been having. I managed to let out a scream as I escaped my slumber, but there were no breaths available after that. It felt like there was a huge weight against my chest, crushing down in an attempt to suffocate me.
“Hannah, what is it?” Reed asked, sitting straight up from a deep slumber. “Are you okay?”
I wanted to reply, but the words wouldn’t come. I was sucking for air as though my life depended on it, but I might as well have been drowning.
There were a million thoughts running through my head. Was the dream just a nightmare or was there more to it? What if what I saw really happened? What if they were memories I’d buried deep in my subconscious to protect myself? What if they were fighting to come out so the truth could be known?
My dad would have never touched me inappropriately, would he? I racked my brain, but I couldn’t think of a single time when he’d done it. Surely, I would remember something like that. It’s not like I was so young that I wouldn’t be able to remember.
How could I explain to Reed what was taking place in my mind? How could I put into words what my dream was about when I couldn’t make sense of it myself? Every time I opened my mouth and tried to speak, the right words were never found and I just made myself more and more confused than I already was.
“Hannah!” Reed yelled in his Dom voice, freezing me in place and snapping me back to reality. “You have to get it together if we’re going to try to figure any of this shit out!”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that the dream didn’t seem like the type of dream I’d normally have. They seemed like I was actually there. They felt more like memories than anything else.”
Reed moved in close to me, wrapping his arms around me in a tight hug. It took everything I had not to break down into a sobbing mess right there in the bed.
“I can tell you’re upset. Take a deep breath and try to calm down. Let’s figure this out together.”
I had no idea how he was able to do it, but when he switched from his Dom voice to his calm, soothing voice, he was able to calm my nerves and put me at ease.
“I’m not even sure where to start. I’ve had dreams like these before, but they’ve never been this vivid. Usually, it’s just a series of still pictures of fractured scenes, but not this time. It was as if someone had recorded something and was playing it back on a television, only I was watching everything unfold through my own eyes.”
“Let’s try something. Close your eyes and focus as hard as you can. Try to remember the first thing you saw when you fell asleep. Do that and see if you can describe it to me.”
I inhaled deeply, allowing the oxygen to fill my lungs before exhaling slowly, trying to take as much time as I could. The scenes I dreamt were frightening enough as it was, so I was buying as much time as possible before I had to relive them.
“My father was in my room when my mom appeared in my doorway. She stormed in and was screaming at the top of her lungs. She was yelling at him, telling him he was a disgusting monster for what he was doing. He told her to shut up and that she wasn’t seeing what she thought she was seeing.”
I began to shake. Reed noticed this immediately and put his arm around me and kissed me on the forehead.
“It’s okay, babe. Just take your time. I’m here to listen for as long as you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
“My mother wasn’t ever the type to get mad. As far as I could remember, she rarely raised her voice for any reason, so for her to be screaming in anger, something had to be seriously wrong. Her face was red and her hands were balled into tight fists!”
“What in the hell is wrong with you?” she yelled at him. “What kind of a sick fuck does what you were doing to a little girl?”
“I wasn’t doing anything for fuck’s sake. That’s your imagination running wild,” my father responded.
“Bullshit! Can you just be honest for once in your fucking life? I’ve let so much that you’ve done to me go in this marriage, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you damage my little girl. I promise you right now that I will never, ever let you touch her again.”
“What do you think you’re going to do? Are you going to run to the cops? Are you going to try to have me arrested? Nobody is going to believe you. You know that, right? You’re just going to make yourself look crazy.”
“Hearing him say that people were going to think she was crazy infuriated my mom. She was lashing out at him and daddy was grabbing at her. My mom and I had matching lockets and he grabbed hers and used it to pull her into him so that they were face to face. He looked like he might say something to her, but instead, he put his hand on her face and pushed her away, nearly knocking her to the ground.
I’m sure the fight only lasted for a couple of minutes, but I swear it seemed to go on for hours. Eventually, they made their way out of my room and down the hall. I followed, wishing for it all to stop. The fight continued. I saw mommy fall down the stairs, her body lifeless once it hit the bottom and then daddy grabbed my hand, leading me out of the house. We left as if nothing had happened.”
2
Reed
I wanted to pull Hannah close to me and tell her that everything was going to be all right. As much as I wanted to tell her that it was a bad dream, I couldn’t bring myself to do it because the last thing she needed was for someone to look her in the eyes and lie to her.
The truth was, I knew exactly what was going on with her, but not to the extent that she was experiencing. I was no stranger to long nights of my brain replaying the worst experiences of my life over and over again in the form of nightmares. While Hannah seemed to be going through the same thing, her situation was far different.
All of my nightmares pulled from memories that changed my life, but that’s exactly what they were. They were things that I already knew about before I went to sleep. Hannah’s night terrors seemed to be coming from the deepest, darkest recesses of her mind.
The situation was something that I’d never experienced firsthand, but it was a phenomenon that I was incredibly familiar with.
It’s rare that I have any downtime, but in the little bit that I do get, I spend it soaking up any knowledge that I can. I am particularly fascinated by other people and what their lives are like, especially those who live in unique circumstances. I read forums about over the road truck drivers, message boards that are dedicated to people going to prison and the people on the outside who love them, and everything in between.
Out of everything I read about, psychologists were some of the most fascinating to me. I don’t know what it is, but there i
s just something about the way the human mind works. It is something that I find incredibly interesting. These professionals were able to listen to some of the most disturbing, horrifying stories that their patients lived through all while remaining completely calm, helped them cope with them and begin the road to recovery. It’s certainly not something I’d be able to do.
Thanks to my curiosities, I was well aware of the concept of repressed memories. It is actually considered to be one of the most haunting concepts in the profession, and for good reason.
Repressed memories typically occur when something particularly heinous or shocking happens to someone. Whatever happened is so difficult to deal with that the person’s mind will actually take the memory and push it out. The problem is that the memory is never truly gone. Instead, it is just pushed to the corner of the consciousness where it had remained, completely inaccessible.
Unfortunately, these horrible memories don’t often stay repressed forever. A number of things can happen that will cause the memories to emerge, often through the form of dreams or visions. Things like seeing a face from the past, smelling a familiar scent, or going through another traumatic experience.
This was what I believed Hannah was going through. She had these horrible memories of something happening between her mom and dad and had repressed them long ago. She had told me what a good person her father was, but these memories seemed to be contradicting that.
I knew I shouldn’t get involved because I have a habit of making things worse when I stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong. At the same time, I couldn’t sit idly by and do nothing when I knew I could help.
The FBI wasn’t going to be able to help me with this one. As a matter of fact, I was positive that contacting them would lead to more questions than answers. Instead, I called up my old friend Curtis Driscoll at Vegas PD.
“Driscoll, this is Reed. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“Sure thing, buddy. What do you need?”
“Well, before I tell you, I need to know that this favor is off the record. I need to keep this as low profile as I possibly can, at least for now.”
“Ah, that kind of favor. I’ll see what I can do. What’s up?”
“I need you to pull the release report in the 1995 death of Alice Sullivan.”
“All right, I can do that easily enough. What do you need me to do with it?”
“Can you meet me with it?”
“Yeah, I can be anywhere in about an hour. Where do you want to meet?”
“Meet me at Floyd Lamb Park off of Tule Springs Road. I’ll be in the shelter on the right.”
“All right bud, I’ll see you there.”
* * *
It was close to two hours after Curtis told me he’d meet me in an hour and I was still sitting in the park waiting for him. If he were anyone else, I would have been worried that someone had caught onto what I was doing and was preventing him from meeting me, but I knew him too well. If he was ever on time for something, it was only because someone had given him a time to show up that was far later than the actual time.
Just as I was about to get annoyed to the point of being pissed off, he came driving up in his clunker of a vehicle. He was still driving the same 1998 Toyota Camry that I always gave him shit for.
“You’re still driving that hunk of junk?” I asked, as the engine rattled several seconds after he turned off the ignition.
“It gets me from point A to point B. Why would I buy anything else?”
“Other than the fact that it sounds like it’ll leave you stranded at the side of the road any second, no reason I guess. Let me ask you, how hard to do you pray that it’ll start when you put the key in? Every time?”
“Shut up, how about that?” He exclaimed, laughing as he pulled a large yellow envelope out of the bag he was carrying. “I’ve got the police report you were looking for. Wasn’t quite as easy to get as I thought it would be.”
“What do you mean? Don’t you just have to pull it up and print it out?”
“Usually, but this one had a special handling code in the computer system. Said I had to get special permission to access the file. It required a password that only the higher ups have.”
“Shit!” I yelled. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid. I don’t need any scrutiny on this until I’m ready. What reason did you give them for needing access to the report?”
“You need to relax, Reed. You told me you needed this quietly, so the last thing I would do is bring attention to it. I went down into the file room and fished around until I found the hard copies. I made a copy of it and put it back before anyone knew a thing. That’s what took me so long to get here.”
“Damn, you actually used that head of yours for some good,” I joked. “Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it. Stay available because I might need you again soon.”
“You got it,” he said as he walked back towards his car.
I got a good laugh as he got into his old, tattered car and it didn’t want to start. I looked up to see him giving an exaggerated praying motion before trying again, this time the engine roaring to life. He drove off with a wave.
3
Reed
Once Curtis had driven away, I grabbed the large envelope he had brought me and took it to my car so I could review it in private. Looking at reports in an enclosed space such as a vehicle or closed room is one of my quirks. It didn’t matter to me that there was nobody else in the park with me, I still needed to be somewhere enclosed.
The first thing that jumped out at me when I scanned the report was the fact that the death of Hannah’s mother was ruled a homicide, especially because she always told me that the death had been ruled to be accidental. It made me wonder if this was simply something her father had told her over the years. If that were the case, she wouldn’t have ever had a reason to question him.
The police report was completed by responding officer James Berry, who was the first on the scene along with his partner, Tyler Sims.
* * *
Officer Sims and I were finishing up a domestic disturbance call at the Downtowner Motel when dispatch radioed a call about an unresponsive female at 2812 Coastline Court.
When we arrived at 2812 Coastline Court, we were met outside by an adult male and juvenile female. The adult male was Dr. Robert Sullivan and the juvenile female was Hannah Sullivan, both of the residents are the spouse and daughter of the victim.
Dr. Sullivan was frantic and announced that he and his daughter has just returned home to find his front door standing wide open and his wife lying at the bottom of the stairs. He described her as blue, cold, and lifeless, indicating that she had been there for quite some time.
Officer Sims placed both Dr. Sullivan and Hannah Sullivan in his vehicle and transported them to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Station at 400 South Martin Luther King Blvd. while I began my investigation.
As I entered the residence, I witnessed the body of Alice Sullivan lying at the bottom of the stairs. As I entered, paramedics arrived on the scene to attempt live-saving measures. Once inside, the paramedics noted that the body had purple discoloration where the blood sank and collected in the body. They also noted that rigor mortis had already began to set in, indicating that the she had been deceased for at least several hours. Because of the combination of these two factors, it was determined that cardiopulmonary resuscitation would be fruitless and pronounced her as deceased, pending an autopsy.
I radioed into dispatch that we had a deceased female and needed a Clark County Coroner to retrieve her and take her to the medical examiner’s office located at 1704 Pinto Lane.
There was no apparent sign of forced entry and nothing appeared to be out of place on the lower level of the home.
I ascended the stairs where I witnessed clear and obvious signs of a struggle both at the top of the stairs as well as in the hallway. A vase and ornamental angels were shattered on the floor and a small table was turned onto its side.
Since Mr. Sullivan stated that the door was found to be open when he arrived home, it was possible that the perpetrator either knew the victim or simply attempted to open the door and found it to be unlocked, which I believe to be the more likely scenario at this point.
In the past six weeks, there have been a number of robberies reported in this neighborhood as well as the surrounding neighborhoods. All of the robberies occurred during the daytime hours when people are typically at work. All of these cases are still open and unsolved.
At this point, it appears that one or more subjects may have entered the property with the intention of robbing the residence. Mrs. Sullivan may have come out of an upstairs room to investigate and encountered the subject or subjects, leading to a struggle and a fall down the stairs. Since nothing appears to be missing, it is possible that the subject or subjects fled the scene.
The cause of death appears to be an accidental fall but the signs of struggle upstairs has me leaning more towards homicide, which is my official finding. No subjects have been taken into custody. Mr. Sullivan and his daughter will be questioned at headquarters, but his alibi seems solid at this time.
Broken: Book 3 of The Owned Series Page 1