The Broken Trail: A Chilling Serial Killer Thriller (Harriet Harper Thriller Book 3)

by Dominika Best

  Harri turned right onto her street and slammed on the brakes.

  The black SUV was parked right next to her driveway, waiting for her.

  She would not allow this.

  Harri put the cruiser in park, grabbed her cell phone and threw her car door open. She stormed toward the SUV, taking photos of the man behind the wheel along with the license plate number.

  Her move must have unnerved the driver because as she came within range of his car, he started up the motor and peeled away from her, racing down her street.

  “I’m coming for you,” she yelled at its disappearing taillights.

  She contemplated following him but decided against it. If he was so obvious with his intent, she doubted he rolled with stolen plates. She had his plates and face now. That should be enough to ID him.

  This stunt felt like intimidation to her. He wanted her to know he was following her, stalking her. Did he and whoever hired him really think she would be scared away because some asshole was staking out her home?

  Her body felt on fire as she opened the door and reset the alarm. She stamped down on her anger. Now wasn’t the time. She made a beeline for her personal laptop so she could remotely connect to her computer at work. She punched in the license plate of the SUV and the registration came up immediately. The SUV was registered to a private investigator by the name of Darren Westheimer.

  “Unbelievable,” she said.

  Her first call was to Tom. His phone went to voicemail. Where in the hell was he?

  “That black SUV belongs to a PI and he was sitting out in front of my house just now when I got home. He wanted me to see him. PI named Darren Westheimer. Call me back.”

  She hung up and checked the time. Her shift was officially over, but a girl was still missing. She did a general search for a George or Georgie Shipwell in Los Angeles but came up empty. She tried more variations of the name, but nothing showed up. Could the name George be a nickname? Or a middle name?

  Dammit! And here she thought she’d gotten lucky. She left her computer connected and went to the kitchen to get some water.

  How else could she find this woman? Having a famous father should have made it easy, but nothing about his biographies that she could find online mentioned a daughter, or even a son.

  Maybe Roxanne Miles knew her? She called Roxanne but also got voicemail.

  Irritated by not being able to reach anyone, Harri took a break and dug around the refrigerator for something to eat. She found some tortillas and cheese and made herself a quesadilla.

  She tried calling Roxanne Miles again. Harri left another message asking her to call back.

  She went back to her computer and did more general searches on different variation of George and Georgie, spelling them every way she could think of. After an hour, she gave up on that as well.

  Her thoughts returned to Debi and Addison. The two girls didn’t have anything in common outside of their ages and beauty. Janie was attractive and young, as well.

  She’d led the PI straight to their apartment. Whomever hired Westheimer might think Janie knew something for a cop to be seeing her so quickly after Debi’s disappearance. She should have more protection, Harri thought. A uniform sitting in front of her house for the night, at least. Should Harri call Janie and tell her to stay put? That would only scare her and for what purpose? Harri wasn’t sure of anything at this point.

  Harri made one last phone call to dispatch and asked for a car to sit on Janie’s address saying she’d been threatened by a private investigator and her witness might be intimidated. Dispatch sent a unit to Janie’s apartment and Harri breathed in relief.

  Lieutenant Richard Byrne would not be happy about her not getting permission, but she didn’t care. She believed Tom Bards would agree with her assessment. If she could’ve reached him, she would have asked. She’d have that fight with them tomorrow morning.

  As it stood, no one had called her back. Including Jake.

  Harri sat down at her desk and stared down at the lists of actresses she still needed to call. She placed the evidence bag of the photo of Debi between two smiling girls.

  Exhaustion washed over her. She closed her eyes.

  Just for a moment.

  Harri sprinted through the dark woods.

  Twigs crackled behind her.

  The heavy breathing was getting closer.

  RUN! Her mind screamed at her.

  She picked up her knees higher and pumped her legs as hard as she could.

  Why did it feel like she was running in place?

  Branches slapped her face and she caught the full moon behind the thick canopy above her.

  She was in Oregon. On the island. She was sure of it.

  The sounds of her pursuers grew more distant. She turned to see if she could make out anything in the darkness.

  Big mistake.

  Her foot caught on a tree root and she went flying into the air.

  She hit the soft earth with a small thud, her mouth open in a silent scream.

  She tasted something foul.

  Something familiar. She spit out whatever was in her mouth and gagged.

  Harri pushed hard into the softness underneath her to propel herself back to kneeling.

  She saw what she had tasted. It wasn’t earth.

  She was in a grave.

  Her sister’s grave, her desiccated body underneath her.

  Harri threw back her head and screamed.

  She startled awake, gasping for air. She’d fallen asleep on the list of women she needed to call; Debi’s evidence bag stuck to her cheek. She pulled it off gently with shaking fingers.

  She checked the time and saw it was close to midnight. No calls from anyone, either. Harri dragged herself to her feet and rubbed her tongue on her shirt sleeve trying to get the taste of death out of her mouth.

  The nightmare had disappeared in the last few weeks. It was back now. The missing girls must've triggered it again.

  Why did it always have to be girls? Why so many of them?

  She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and went straight to the bathroom. The familiar buzz of her toothbrush couldn’t shake the dream off. She still tasted death.

  Should she call Jake?

  It was late but she knew he would come if she asked him to. No. She would handle this alone, like she had for the last twenty-five years. This was her burden to bear. She was a cop and needed to pull it together. She would not be too late for those girls.

  They were alive somewhere in this city. They would find them. They had to. She had to.

  23

  Day 4

  Harri Harper woke up at four in the morning like she had all week and was back at her desk in the Cold Case unit by six. She liked the office at this hour. The quiet helped her get more work done.

  When she researched the PI, who’d been following her further, she found he was connected mainly to the movie studios and celebrities. He sounded like a fixer to her.

  This information, of course, helped pinpoint what case he was working, Harri thought dryly. She’d put in a request for camera footage from the nearest traffic lights to Janie and Debi’s apartment to see if she could find the town car that picked Debi up.

  With that done, and taking a cue from Tom, Harri had spent the rest of the morning checking the names of the girls the casting directors had given them against any open cases to make sure they were all accounted for.

  Nine o’clock rolled around and people began to filter into the office. Harri was about to start calling the actresses again when Tom’s head appeared around the wall of her cubicle.

  His mouth was set in a thin line and he did not look happy.

  “Thanks for calling me back last night,” she said.

  He didn’t respond except to nod toward the hallway.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Byrne wants to see the both of us,” he said. “At first, he wanted to see only me, but I want to make sure you’re there to witness this.”
>
  His tone made Harri frown. “Are you saying what I think your saying?”

  Tom nodded. “Grimley called me last night and left a message. By the way I got all your messages, too.”

  “I left a lot them. Sorry.” Harri said as she walked with him to Byrne’s office.

  “I should have mentioned I would be unavailable last night. I promised my son I’d take him to a baseball game, and he made me shut off my phone.”

  Harri nodded, understanding.

  “Is Grimley’s call the reason we’re being summoned?”

  “I think so. She’s ruling Sophie Lambert’s death a myocardial infarction due to ingestion of illegal substances.”

  “Heart attack,” Harri said as she followed Tom into the elevator.

  “It’s not murder.”

  “Which means not important enough for RHD.” Harri sighed.

  “Sophie’s case is going to Hollywood Division. I’m sure of it.”

  “What about the serial killer you’ve uncovered? Didn’t she have ligature marks on her neck, too? Didn’t Grimley notate that in her findings?”

  “I’ll bring that up. I doubt it will fly, though.”

  “What drugs did she ingest? Was it just the Fentanyl and heroin?” Harri asked as they headed to the elevator let them out.

  “Fentanyl and heroin. Grimley confirmed the dose itself didn’t kill her. It would've incapacitated her pretty darn good. Her undiagnosed heart condition was activated by the drugs and caused a heart attack.”

  “How’d she get into a wall? Does Byrne think she wrapped herself in plastic and crawled into a wall and then sealed herself up as she was experiencing a fatal heart attack?”

  “Byrne said yesterday a freaked-out dealer. He’s grasping at straws.” Tom scowled.

  “But why a wall? Why didn’t they drop her body on the street?” Harri asked.

  “That's exactly what I want to ask Byrne,” Tom said. “It won’t matter. He wants to use RHD resources for bigger crimes.”

  “What bigger crimes are there than a seventeen-year-old girl being fed drugs, raped repeatedly, and her dead body stuffed into a wall?”

  “You can ask him that question yourself,” he said.

  Harri sighed. This was going to be an ugly meeting.

  Tom strode into the RHD bullpen and went straight to the lieutenant's office with Harri in tow.

  Harri had managed to avoid seeing Richard Byrne in six months and that was the way she liked it. They tussled about twelve years ago and he’d never forgiven her supposed insubordination.

  Even now, he kept trying to derail her career however he could. He was a cheap-shot kind of guy.

  Byrne stared at them from above his reading glasses, his eyes narrowing when he saw Harri.

  His look of displeasure matched her own, she was sure of it. Harri shot a glance at Tom who had grown still, his eyes taking in everything. He was a formidable man in this moment, Harri thought.

  Could Tom have invited her to this meeting as a distraction? A way to throw Richard Byrne off his game enough to get what Tom wanted out of him? She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “You wanted to see us, Richard?” Tom asked.

  “I wanted to see you. You insisted on bringing her,” he said with a sneer.

  “This case is both of ours. We've done a lot of leg work on it. If anything changes, Harri should be included in that information.”

  “I need you to close this case and hand it off to whoever's working drugs in the Hollywood division. We don’t have RHD resources for a case like this.”

  “Don't you think the death of a seventeen-year-old girl and two current missing girls should warrant RHD resources?”

  “As I'm sure you are aware, RHD only takes on specific cases. This crime, while terrible, is not in our purview and the detectives at Hollywood should have no problem investigating it and bringing the drug dealer to justice.”

  “There's another young girl still missing. From what I understand, her father knows a lot of people,” Harri reminded him.

  “You are in Cold Case and Lieutenant Violet Howard deals with you. If she's okay with you still looking at the Addison James case, that has nothing to do with me. As of right now, Tom, I am ordering you back to work on the bank robbery task force.”

  “I’ve uncovered twelve girls with supposed overdoses over the last five years with the same combo of fentanyl and heroin in their system. Each victim had light ligature marks on her neck, but asphyxiation was not what killed them. That’s a signature,” Tom said, keeping his voice cool and even. “Last I knew, RHD took all the serial killer cases in LA County.”

  Richard sat back and now Harri understood what Tom was doing. He inferred they had another serial killer on their hands. One that had gone undetected for the last five years and whose last victim was Sophie Lambert.

  “That could be a coincidence,” Richard said, sounding unsure now.

  “Whose idea was it to close this case down?” Tom asked.

  “Came from Chief Atkins. Straight from the top,” Richard said. “My hands are clean on this one. He demanded we put all resources to the spate of bank robberies in the valley. We created a task force yesterday. He wants all hands-on deck.”

  “And if there is a serial killer preying on young teenage actresses?” Tom asked.

  “That’s a different case for now. I can say you’re off the Sophie Lambert case for the time being. You connect these girls and find a way to prove it’s the same guy, and I’ll bring the case back.”

  “I can still work the case then?” Tom asked.

  “You're working the potential serial killer case that you just brought to my attention,” Richard said testily.

  “Got it. Thank you, Lieutenant,” Tom stood up and walked out of the office with Harri close behind.

  “Did I keep him on edge enough?” she asked Tom.

  Tom laughed out loud. “Yes. You did great. I figured you’d see the play. Richard Byrne doesn’t do well when he’s off balance. Forgets his political maneuvers. On my own, he would have steam rolled through my request. You’re his kryptonite. It’s amazing how much he hates you.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Harri said. “And good to know in case we butt heads again.”

  “I’m still being followed, by the way. I noticed a black SUV following me after I dropped off my son at his mother’s house. We’ve rattled some important man’s cage and he’s coming at us with what he’s got.”

  “Getting to the Chief of Police is something big,” Harri observed.

  “It takes chutzpah to follow LAPD, too. They didn’t do their research though, did they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Intimidation only works when you have something to lose. You worry about your family, your career.”

  “We don’t have much to lose, do we?” Harri finished.

  “My kids are grown. I’m divorced and live alone. Don’t even have a dog.”

  “You have a career?” Harri asked.

  “I could retire tomorrow with my full pension. Got no aspirations for more. What about you, Harri?”

  “I want the truth at whatever cost,” Harri said.

  “That’s what I mean. They didn’t do their proper research on us.”

  “Or they’re desperate which never bodes well,” Harri said thinking of Debi and Addison. It was going on four weeks that Addison had been missing.

  “We need to go talk to that journalist of yours. Think we can set up a meeting with him like right now?”

  “Instead of calling, let’s just go there. I don’t think he leaves his place much. You can play the bad cop and we can pressure him to give up what he knows,” she said.

  “I like the way you think,” Tom said.

  Harri smiled as she went to grab her things.

  24

  Day 4

  Debi awoke to fuzzy light streaming out of one barred window. She had no idea how she got here, but she hurt bad. Inside. She’d been a virgin before
this and had a feeling she no longer was. A sob escaped from deep within her.

  She squeezed her legs tight against each other and felt tears roll down her cheeks. Her head hurt so badly, and her mouth tasted dry and scratchy. Swallowing was hard. She needed water.

  How did she get here? Where was here?

  Whose clothes was she wearing?

  Where were her bra and underwear? Her good dress?

  Her body ached so bad and the scratchy material of the red shirt chafed against her skin. The black boxers were loose around her waist and falling off from the worn elastic band.

  The dress she’d been wearing, her bra, and underwear were gone. When she looked at her arms, she saw bruises around her wrists. Debi lifted herself to a sitting position and her vision swam.

  Oh my God, her head hurt so bad. The last thing she remembered was drinking the champagne with Georgie. Could she have roofied her?

  The thought confused her.

  Georgie had been so kind to her. Her gut roiled with vomit and she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Debi curled up into a fetal position and waited for the nausea to go away.

  She must have fallen asleep again because when she came to, she was up against the wall in the narrow bed. Debi knew she had to get out of this room.

  She sat up again and attempted to take a step. Her leg felt like jelly and crumpled beneath her.

  Sobs reverberated around the room in an echo. It took a moment for Debi to realize she was the one making those harsh guttural sounds.

  Get up.

  GET UP! Her mind shouted at her body. Using the bed as a crutch, she placed both feet on the ground and used every ounce of willpower she had to get to standing.

  Bile rose into her throat and she swallowed it down.