Skye Cree 02: The Bones Will Tell

by Vickie McKeehan

  “Interesting. What did you mean earlier, Leo? When you said Frank was gainfully employed at the time his parents were murdered? Why is that important?” Skye stressed.

  “I think what Leo was getting at is that Frank didn’t do it for the money,” Josh stated. “He didn’t kill his parents for their fortune. If you’re thinking that for motive, Leo checked. Frank’s never had money problems. He doesn’t have an ugly addiction to crack. He doesn’t have a gambling problem. In fact, his personal net worth, without his parents around, is probably in excess of eight million dollars in liquid assets. His part of the De Palo family money he got from his grandfather. I’d say his parents didn’t have a cash-on-hand problem either. Since their net worth totals just under twenty million. Think about it, Frank was their sole heir and yet, he never reported them missing or dead. There was never a probate hearing. Shooting mom and dad wasn’t about an inheritance.”

  “You want to fill us in on what else you found?” Skye said. “Because I know you’ve got something you haven’t shared.”

  “How do you guys keep doing that?” Leo asked. “How do you seem to pick up on things?”

  Skye just grinned. “It’s a knack. Or Josh calls it our own mind meld trick,” she said with a wink.

  Josh took out the crumpled piece of paper he’d found in the De Palos’ burial chamber from his pocket. “This is a commitment order—from a judge. His parents were about to have their very sicko son committed to a private mental hospital in San Diego.”

  Skye’s mouth fell open. “They knew and were about to lock him up. They knew their son was a sick bastard all these years ago.”

  “Seems they did. Like Harry said probably as far back as childhood. Their first clue had to be when animals in the neighborhood began to go missing. More than likely after that, they discovered their son’s private stash of trophies and remains. There are jars lined up on a shelf down in one room of the basement. Since the display is right there in plain sight, the parents had to know about Frank’s penchant for dismemberment,” Josh reasoned.

  “Geez, if we don’t stop this guy his body count could work its way up to the Green River killer.”

  Josh walked over to give the commitment paper to Hogue before turning back to Skye and Leo. “It may be a personal goal to outdo Ridgway,” Josh suggested. “And that’s why we’re going to find a way to stop him.”

  Skye and Josh and Leo had to hang around San Caruso another couple of days to answer any other questions from the sheriff’s department. In the meantime, crime scene investigators descended upon the house out in the middle of nowhere and literally tore the place apart looking for any more victims. They found none except the three bodies in the bunker. It would take some time to positively identify the remains but speculation said it was Frank’s parents and the missing lawyer.

  Skye communicated with Harry and kept him in the loop on a daily basis. But as soon as it became apparent that they were no longer needed in San Caruso, they packed up and flew back to Seattle. All the while wondering what the rest of autumn would bring in the way of more victims.

  They knew one thing for certain, Frank De Palo would not stop killing on his own. Whether he remained in Washington State or had moved on had yet to be determined. Because of that, it put everyone on edge.

  Frank had not left the country.

  In fact, he hadn’t even left Washington State but he had scurried off the mainland. He had been forced to go underground since the revelation two days earlier that he was the prime suspect in the murders of his parents and their longtime attorney, George Sidwell.

  Eight years back dedicated George had made the mistake of leaving his San Francisco home early one Saturday morning to check on the De Palos. Because George hadn’t heard from the couple in months, curiosity got the better of him. He’d driven down to San Caruso to find out why the couple had not returned his phone calls.

  The thirty-seven-year-old single lawyer had disappeared that weekend. Even though George’s girlfriend had filed a missing person’s report at the time, the authorities had never been able to locate him or his car. No one had ever heard from George Sidwell again after his trip south to San Caruso.

  Frank hadn’t concerned himself much with his father’s loyal attorney until the nosy bastard had showed up on the very Saturday Frank had been tidying the place up. Sidwell had even had the audacity to crawl in through a window.

  As Frank saw it, Sidwell hadn’t given him much of a choice. He’d taken care of the tax lawyer in the same manner he’d used to get rid of his parents.

  It had been a betrayal, pure and simple, when Frank had learned his parents had already gone to a judge to get a commitment order. Frank still couldn’t figure out how his parents had discovered he’d killed Meaghan Riddick, his bitch of a co-worker back in Portland.

  But somehow they had. And on his visit back to California, they’d confronted him with the details which meant they’d probably hired someone to follow him around Portland for months. And not for the first time, Frank realized. They were always sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. They hadn’t asked him about the mental hospital. They’d told him. There was no way Frank would agree to be locked up ever again. The first time he’d been sixteen, too young to know the ramifications, although at the time it had been better than prison. That time he’d let them put him away inside a mental ward to study him for four months. But he’d learned then and there how to work the system, how to play the game, what answers to give that would appease the doctors for early release. Eight years ago, he had no intentions of letting his damn mother do it to him again. When his mother had said she wanted to put him away for an indeterminate amount of time, Frank had lost it. That night, after they’d gone to sleep, he’d crept into their bedroom armed with his father’s own Mossberg, auto-loading, hunting rifle, and put an end to their scheming once and for all.

  No one could possibly have blamed him for it.

  So for the last two days, Frank had been holed up at the cabin on San Juan Island, the one he’d bought five years earlier for just this purpose, the one on Friday Harbor, using the name James Silver. Since the place wasn’t connected to the mainland by bridge, he’d boarded his sixty-foot yacht and motored over in the middle of the night.

  At dawn, he’d packed up what he could haul on his back and trekked some five miles over rough terrain to the cabin. Because of that, he didn’t really believe for one minute they’d ever catch him. But like any skilled tactician, Frank always had a plan B to cover “what if” scenarios. Now was no exception. If need be, he could get out of the country using the small plane he kept at the Friday Harbor Airport registered to Marco Silva, another one of his aliases. So if that time ever presented itself, if he ever thought law enforcement was closing in, he had his escape hatch at the ready.

  The knowledge that the woman and her companion had invaded his family’s home back in San Caruso and found out his most personal secrets, discovered his trophies from childhood infuriated him. No woman would ever be part of beating him at his own game.

  That meant he’d have to do something about Skye Cree along with that slow-witted, snotty-nosed geek she hung around with.

  How the two had ever connected the dots back to his hometown, he didn’t know. But he must’ve missed a step somewhere. It had to have something to do with his entering the Ander loft. The minute the asshole had discovered the cameras he’d left behind, from there, things had gone downhill.

  His perfect world had almost come crashing down because of them. Not fifteen hours earlier, he’d been positively identified by every local news channel from Vancouver to Portland as the “person of interest” in the string of Seattle homicide cases.

  With one newscast, his life at MMA had burned to black toast. He was losing everything that meant anything to him, everything he’d painstakingly put together, built since he’d left that crappy biotech job in Portland.

  For chrissakes, Frank De Palo had fans, a following who adored h
im in the octagon. He owned two cars, a BMW and when he went out for “death night” a no-frills black pickup he drove.

  And if he lost everything, it was the fault of that meddling bitch and her fuck-buddy.

  He’d wanted a showdown with Skye Cree and Josh Ander, hadn’t he? He would give them one they wouldn’t forget. He could take them both. He was certain of it. No way would he let a computer geek or a female win. Not only that, but Frank had no intentions of being locked up in a cell for the rest of his life. He’d die before he let that happen.

  So, he’d bide his time. He’d settle the score with Ander and the Cree woman and then head to Canada using the aliases he’d manufactured for himself. Once there, he’d lie low until he could make his way to the Persian Gulf, specifically Dubai, known around the world as the Las Vegas of the Middle East. With a long list of trendy nightclubs, modern buildings that glistened in the sun—and a string of private islands at his disposal—it would be like being on holiday twenty-four-seven.

  He couldn’t wait to get there.

  But first, he would take care of the Cree bitch.

  And one thing Frank knew how to do well was track his prey. Once he got a victim in his sights, they rarely got away. Okay, maybe once in all these years, he’d slipped and let it happen. But that had been a fluke. He didn’t intend to repeat the mistake.

  After all, he’d been trailing Skye Cree for weeks. He knew she went out every night. That might be the perfect venue to exact his revenge. Wait in some dark alleyway for her to walk down and surprise her. But it wasn’t the setting he preferred. No, when he took down Skye Cree it would be the place of his choosing, a place where he could control the environment—and the woman.

  There was no reason to panic, none at all.

  Frank knew how to win. Because of that, he left nothing to chance. And he knew how to make that chance count.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The police may have thought their killer had left the area but Skye and Josh knew better.

  Despite Leo, Winston, and Reggie digging into Frank’s history as far back as high school, they couldn’t pinpoint a financial footprint. They had been unable to track any credit and debit card use. There had been zero activity using any of his million dollar bank balances. It meant that Frank had likely gone covert using one or more aliases he’d created years before, along with having a string of IDs and other accounts that had no connection to Frank De Palo whatsoever.

  “I hate to say this, Josh, but I think we might’ve hit a dead end here,” Reggie admitted one afternoon inside the conference room at Ander All Games where the trio had set up shop. As the twenty-two-year old graduate of Cal Poly pounded on his Mac’s keys, he added, “The three of us have crawled up this guy’s ass every which way we can financially and found no activity for the past week. None.”

  “That isn’t to say we won’t keep tabs on his accounts. But it appears he’s shrewd enough not to leave a trail. He knows we’re watching him online, and he’s using nothing we can trace,” Leo added.

  “But remember,” nineteen year-old Winston reminded Josh, as he caught the bug in a line of code and zapped it. “If he gets anywhere within a hundred feet of our dummy Wi-Fi network, and his cell phone is set up to search, we’ll be able to track his digital signature without him ever knowing it.”

  “But what’s the likelihood of that really happening?” Josh asked Winston, who’d been coding since he was fourteen. “Let’s face it. It’s a one in a million shot. I’d hate to hang everything we have on whether or not he searches for a local Wi-Fi network.”

  “It’s a safety net, Josh,” Leo countered. “In the event he gets close. It might just be the very thing that captures his location. You never know.”

  But it was nothing more than a longshot and Josh knew it.

  For that reason, he and Skye doubled their efforts to come up with a plan of their own. In order to lure the serial killer out of his lair, they figured you had to give him a good enough reason to crawl out of the hole.

  They bounced ideas off each other by brainstorming about it.

  “We could do what one of the FBI profilers suggested doing, insult his intelligence.”

  “Might take too long. What about playing to his vanity?”

  “Okay. So we plant a couple of stories on the Internet about how he’s too clever for law enforcement and everyone else involved. We’ll tell him how much better he is than Bundy or Ridgway. How long do you think that would take? First, he’d have to see it.”

  “Are you kidding? I bet the guy’s spending practically all his waking hours online monitoring every news article and post. But if you don’t like that idea, it only leaves one option.”

  “We challenge the bastard.”

  “Exactly.”

  Over the next several days they set up a training area in one of the spare bedrooms of the loft. They replaced all the bedroom furniture with a line of state-of-the-art gym equipment. They protected the hardwood flooring by adding platform mats guaranteed to cushion knockdowns as they went through their workouts.

  Once they settled on an approach they could both agree on, they revised their angle, and then went over it again and again trying to perfect every facet—until it seemed they were getting on each other’s last nerve.

  Landing hard on her butt during a particularly difficult maneuver, Skye came up swinging. “You did that on purpose.”

  “Your timing is all wrong,” Josh shot back.

  “If you’d stick to what we rehearsed instead of improvising every time I turn around we might make some progress,” Skye grumbled. “In spite of all your fancy gadgets, you still can’t fight worth a damn.”

  “Who is it that’s sitting on her ass? Maybe if you’d stop criticizing everything I do for longer than ten damn minutes we could get this show on the road,” Josh snapped.

  “Oh really? So you’re saying I’m the reason this stupid idea isn’t taking off?”

  “An hour ago you didn’t think it was that stupid.”

  “Well, now I do. Besides, if I’m such a nag, then maybe I should pack up my stuff and head back to my own apartment.”

  “You’ve been looking for an excuse to do that for months now.”

  “I have not.”

  “Yes. You have. You’ve been dragging your feet for weeks now about making a commitment with me. I asked you to marry me and what did you do? You stood there staring back at me—like a deer that wanted to take off running at the first opportunity.”

  “You surprised me. That’s all.”

  “Oh I could tell that by the stricken look on your face. It’s exactly what every guy wants to see in the eyes of the woman he loves.”

  “As proposals go, it wasn’t the best setting. Plus, your timing wasn’t that great.”

  “I see. So you wanted candlelight, a nice dinner out, a ring maybe? Is that what you’re saying? Oh wait, because a guy usually does that when he’s at least ninety percent sure he’ll get a positive response. Besides, that’s a whole lot disingenuous on your part.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know damn well what it means. I’d suggested marriage before and couldn’t get you to talk about it then either. As I recall, the last time I brought it up, you couldn’t roll off me fast enough before taking that literal step away.”

  “I’m so glad to know this is how you really feel. I’ll just get my stuff and go.”

  “So who’s stopping you? Don’t expect me to run after you this time because you certainly don’t want to be here with me. Go back to that little dump you call an apartment.”

  “Fine. At least I’m not a pretentious asshole who has to order all this gear instead of just heading down to Travis’s place to work out like any normal person would do.”

  “You call landing on concrete normal? I’m thinking of you since you spend so much time down there on the mat these days.”

  “Kiss my ass!” And with that, she stormed off to gather up her thin
gs, at least what she could carry. She couldn’t wait to get out of the man’s house.

  There were advantages to being back in her own space, having her familiar things around her. She cooked dinner in her little galley kitchen, making a vegetarian rice dish with ingredients she already had on hand.

  After eating, she stretched out on her little sofa to read a book she’d picked up two months earlier at the used book store over on Fairfax near her mother’s old ceramics shop.

  But she couldn’t settle.

  After four chapters, she put the book aside and reached for the remote. Surfing the cable, she had trouble finding anything to watch. When she got desperate, she left it one of those DIY channels. The show about gardening, reminded her she needed to take care of her plants. She watered, fertilized, and snipped dead leaves as she went.

  But that didn’t take long and soon she started rearranging her cabinets.

  It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet when she decided to clean out and organize her one and only closet. By nine, she decided she might as well get ready to go out on her rounds.

  An hour later, for the first time in weeks, she walked alone with only Kiya for company. Heading down a seedy section of alleyway between the harbor to her left and Western on her right, she skimmed the vacant lot she passed.

  When she thought she heard something coming from one of the ancient manufacturing buildings, she paused long enough to glance down at the wolf. Kiya gave no indication the sound was anything more than rats scurrying around in the night.

  Okay, false alarm, Skye thought as she continued to roam, moving from shadow to shadow, gauging her surroundings, listening for anything out of the ordinary.

  But the streets seemed strangely quiet tonight.

  That all changed around midnight when she spotted two homeless men arguing over a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck. Hoping she could pass by without being spotted, she sighed when one of them screamed at her back, “You. Skye. Stop. You got any money?”