Blue Steele Box Sets 2

by Remington Kane

  “It sounds like she loves her mother a great deal.”

  “She does, Blue, and it broke Shannon’s heart when her mother failed to come home.”

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  “I do, and she’s been a big help. She’s not just a family member of our missing person, she’s also a private detective. She’s done about as much as she can do on her own and now she’s asked us to reopen the case.”

  “Those cadaver dogs you’ve got coming here could solve the case tomorrow. The most likely scenario is that Donna Weaver was wounded in the shootout while running off into the woods, to later die of her wounds.”

  Carol nodded in agreement.

  “That’s what I think too, but I hope we’re wrong. I would love to see a miracle here and have Shannon reunited with her mother.”

  “What was her mother doing hanging around a drug dealer anyway?”

  “The same old story. A good girl falls in love with a bad boy. It was love at first sight from what I hear, and it may have cost Donna Weaver her life.”

  I grabbed the file that held the photos of the shootout in them. Most were just graphic shots of the eight corpses, men who had died over a drug deal gone bad. A few photos showed the money and drugs that had been at the heart of the deadly dispute. When I read an accompanying list of items found on the scene, I saw that Donna Weaver’s purse was listed. However, the amounts of the drugs and the money caught my eye.

  “This was all over two thousand dollars and a few ounces of marijuana?”

  “Yep, stupid hmm? And Frankie Frugazy, the drug dealer, he and his brother, Tommy were high volume cocaine and pot dealers. The investigating officers concluded that this must have been a first meeting that went wrong, otherwise the Frugazy’s would have been dealing more product.”

  “I see,” I said, as I picked up yet another file. This one contained newspaper clippings about Frankie Frugazy, and yes, he had been an up and comer in the drug world. He had also been a suspect in the murder of a reporter that was investigating him. However, Frugazy and his associates had provided airtight alibis for his whereabouts at the time the reporter was shot to death. The cops could never prove that Frugazy hired someone to commit the murder.

  As I stared at the newspaper clippings, Frugazy’s face stared back at me in photo after photo. Even though the pictures were faded, grainy, and in black & white, it was plain to see that Frankie Frugazy had been a handsome man. Donna Weaver must have been charmed by the outer package, while not realizing that an ugly drug dealing murderer lived behind the male beauty.

  Detective Olson, Carol, walked me out to my rental as I was leaving to go check in to my hotel. We had just reached my car when Carol smiled and pointed at an SUV that had entered the parking lot. The driver of the vehicle I recognized as being Shannon Reed, but there was a girl who was about ten seated beside her.

  The girl turned out to be Shannon’s daughter, Holly Reed. Carol told me that Shannon’s husband had died two years earlier in a serious car accident. Young Holly was cute with dark hair and her mother’s big blue eyes. She jumped from the car and ran over to give Carol a big hug. I could see that the two had bonded. After we were introduced, Holly endeared herself to me as well when she asked me a question.

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  I answered yes with a huge grin but wondered how she could tell since I wasn’t showing yet.

  Shannon kissed her daughter on the cheek.

  “My Holly has a gift for spotting pregnancy. There have been a few women who answered no and later found out that they were carrying a baby.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked.

  Holly gave a little shrug. “I just know.”

  We talked about the case for a few minutes and I understood that Shannon was really hoping that the cadaver dogs would locate her mother and end the mystery.

  “I stopped believing that she could be alive somewhere years ago. If she were alive she would have come back for me. I just can’t stand not knowing what happened to her.”

  “Maybe you’ll be able to end the mystery tomorrow,” I said, and when I said it, I expected to be on the scene along with Shannon and Detective Carol. Instead, Prophet’s legacy would rear its ugly head. I’d be forced to leave and tackle another case, one that was far deadlier than searching for a missing woman.

  Chapter 28

  ODESSA, IDAHO, 5:47 a.m.

  Bobby Walker peddled his bike faster.

  The twelve-year-old took his job of paperboy seriously and prided himself on having them all delivered by six-thirty a.m. every morning, come rain or shine.

  He wasn’t required to finish his route until seven, but Bobby liked getting done early and took satisfaction from being great at his job. The fact that he often received compliments from customers, along with generous tips, only made him more eager. He was determined to be the best paperboy that ever delivered for The Odessa Daily, the local paper.

  Bobby was making good time as he guided his bike through the quiet streets on a hazy Sunday morning. Sunday was the toughest day, because the paper was heavier, and it took longer to assemble the different sections. To compensate, Bobby rose earlier on Sundays.

  As he neared the several blocks of homes over by the college, which were at the end of his route, Bobby had to swerve around something that was lying in the road.

  While it was getting close to sunrise, it was still dark out and it had been a moonless night. Bobby barely avoided hitting the object in the street, as fog was drifting in from off the nearby lake and hugging the ground.

  Whatever he had passed in the street was of a good size and Bobby slowed his bike and stared back at it. He could no longer see it well. The swirling fog tended to block his view while causing the object to look indistinct, but it appeared to be a loose sack of grain or something.

  Bobby thought about that. If he couldn’t see it very well from just yards away, then any car coming along would be certain to run over the sack. He really didn’t know if it was a sack or not, but that was how he’d begun to think of it. Whatever was lying back there, it was large enough to do damage to the undercarriage of a car if one ran over it.

  Bobby pressed a button on his watch and the face of it illuminated with a green glow. He saw that he had only a short time left if he hoped to finish his deliveries early.

  He would be cutting it close if he paused to drag whatever that was back there out of the street. The delay might make him break his perfect on-time delivery record. The fact that he was the only one who cared if the papers were delivered before six-thirty a.m. didn’t matter. He had a plan and he was going to follow it through and keep to his schedule.

  Bobby’s father was an engineer, while his mother was a pharmacist. Precision and accuracy were in his blood.

  He hesitated only an instant longer, then pedaled back the way he’d come. He could hear his mom’s voice in his head. It was telling him that he knew what the right thing to do was and that he sure as heck better do it.

  Bobby rode his bike over to the curb, got off, and put down the kickstand. He planned to drag the sack out of the middle of the street as quickly as he could and then be on his way again. That plan altered when he heard a moan come from the spot where the sack was. There was also movement. The sack was alive.

  Bobby crept closer to the strange object in the street as the hairs on his neck stood on end. The fog did its swirling dance atop the ground, but either a gust of wind or a lessening of the fog’s density caused the mist to part and reveal what the sack actually was.

  It was a girl. A naked girl.

  “Oh shit,” Bobby whispered.

  The girl had been lying on her stomach, but had shifted so that one firm breast was visible. Her hands were bound behind her back and there were dark streaks of dried blood on the flesh between her legs. Her ankles were tied together as well, and despite the bruising and blood, Bobby found her nakedness enrapturing.

  When another moan issued forth
from the girl, Bobby broke from his trance and rushed over to her.

  “Hey… are you okay?”

  The girl’s head shifted position until she was looking up at Bobby with one good eye. The other one was swollen shut and there were cigarette burns all over that side of her face. She was nineteen, had dark hair, and the one eye that Bobby could see was a startling blue.

  “Help me…” the girl said in a raspy voice, and then she passed out again.

  For a moment, Bobby just stood there not knowing what to do, but then he remembered the phone. His Mother insisted that he carry a cell phone as he made his deliveries, although she’d never let him have one any other time.

  She had stressed that it was to be used only if his bike broke down or if there was an emergency of some kind. There was an emergency all right and Bobby took out the phone and powered it on.

  His first thought was to call his dad, but then he realized that he needed to alert the police. The girl at his feet needed more help than his dad could give her, she needed a doctor.

  Headlights came around the corner up ahead and moved toward the spot where Bobby stood. He stuck the phone back in his pocket and reached down to pull the girl out of the street. Her flesh was chilled and moistened from the fog. Bobby was having trouble finding a place to grip her. She wasn’t a large girl, but she was grown and outweighed Bobby by twenty pounds, he made little progress before the car was bearing down on them.

  Realizing that he’d never get her out of the way in time, Bobby ran toward the car while shouting and waving his hands in the air. The vehicle came to a hard stop, but because of the slickness of the road caused by the fog, the car slid a little as it braked.

  Bobby had shut his eyes tight to brace for the impact of the vehicle, but it stopped just shy of an inch from hitting him. Still, the car was so close that he could feel the heat of the headlights on his skin.

  A car door flew open and an angry old man emerged to yell at Bobby.

  “What the hell were you doing, boy? I almost killed you.”

  Bobby recognized the man. His name was Mr. Harper. His son ran the movie theater. Bobby was unable to find his voice and so he just pointed behind him at the girl.

  After Mr. Harper’s eyes followed the boy’s finger, he let out a cry of shock.

  “Dear God,” Mr. Harper said. He grabbed an old blanket off the rear seat of his car and went to the girl. Within seconds, Mr. Harper had the police on the line and was telling them about the horrible scene he had stumbled across.

  The lone girl in the street had been stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen and had spent hours crawling to the spot where Bobby found her. She was the fortunate one. Eighteen of her roommates were found dead inside their sorority house, along with their house mother. All of the girls had been raped and tortured before they died.

  Bobby’s perfect record at delivering newspapers ended that day, but by the following morning, his face was on every mayor paper in the country. He was being touted as the hero boy who saved the sole survivor of a massacre.

  A woman calling herself Prophet was being blamed as having orchestrated the attack, as she had ordered other attacks in recent days, in a bid to extort money from state governments. However, unknown to the media and the public, Prophet had been arrested days before the attack in Odessa took place.

  The true perpetrators of the crime were three serial killers known as Blackwood, Alejandro, and Mitchell. They had to be stopped. To that end, a task force was being formed, a unique team of men and women with special gifts.

  Dr. Jessica White and her husband would lead the team, which was named, PREDATOR.

  Thomas Lawson hoped to enlist Tanner onto the team as well, not an easy task given the assassin’s innate lone wolf nature. Lawson would find a way to convince Tanner to help, he was certain of it.

  But first, Lawson needed to gain the cooperation of someone else, a madwoman named Prophet.

  Chapter 29

  Sigrid Talbot looked down at her cuffed wrists and swallowed the bitter pill that she would be spending the rest of her life inside a prison.

  The forty-two-year-old German expatriate had made her living as a con artist before hatching what she believed would be the greatest act of extortion ever committed.

  Sigrid thought up her plan after having met and bedded a young woman who had a unique gift. The young woman, Viola Poe, could distinguish human predators from the rest of humanity the way others could tell a feral cat from a domesticated one.

  Most of the predators she came across were serial killers or murderers of some stripe and Viola told Sigrid of her gift, and of the burden it was.

  Sigrid didn’t see it as a burden, but as an asset, one that she could exploit to gain massive riches. Knowing that Viola had fallen in love with her, Sigrid used the naïve girl to find, contact, and blackmail serial killers.

  Many of the killers were living life hidden among the general population, with some having much to lose by exposure. Even the ones who were barely clinging to their humanity feared incarceration and gave in to being under Sigrid’s control.

  None of the men ever saw Sigrid, only Viola, while Sigrid had taken up the identity of someone named Prophet. Using disguises, poor lighting, and electronic voice manipulation, Sigrid spoke to her new charges over the internet as she organized them into her own personal army of killers.

  After months of planning, setbacks, and delays, Prophet launched her criminal campaign. She sent out proclamations to all the major news outlets and to state capitols. Her demands were simple. She was to be paid to call off her army of killers or else they would strike randomly and bring chaos and death wherever they went.

  At first, Prophet was believed to be a hoax, an idle threat, or some sort of publicity stunt. Prophet had expected that reaction and had planned to give a demonstration of her power.

  The small town of Greenview, Ohio was the first of Prophet’s targets. Her army of serial killers wrought violence and emotional devastation on the town.

  After that, Prophet was no longer laughed at and authorities across the country knew that they were facing a unique threat.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Jessica White and her husband had recently discovered that Viola and her twin sister Violet were the daughters of Mr. White. White had been seduced by the girls’ mother while only fifteen and had just learned that the affair had spawned children.

  While they had reunited with Violet Poe, they had yet to connect with Viola, and they feared for her safety when Prophet no longer needed her.

  When that day came, Mr. White was there to save Viola from certain death while making a new enemy. The man’s name was Blackwood, and along with two other serial killers, Blackwood had sought to kill Prophet.

  In the end, both Mr. White and Blackwood barely escaped with their lives after stepping into one of Prophet’s traps.

  With Viola’s help, the authorities stopped the army of serial killers and had finally captured Prophet.

  Now it was time to go after Blackwood and his men. To that end, a special task force was being formed.

  That task force’s codename would be PREDATOR. It would consist of Dr. Jessica White and her husband, Jake Caliber, Blue Steele, and, if he could be brought on board, a man named Tanner, the world’s best assassin.

  Before that could happen, the man forming the PREDATOR task force needed information only Prophet had to give.

  Thomas Lawson entered the small windowless room inside the Metropolitan Detention Center. After pulling out a scarred wooden chair, Lawson took a seat across from Sigrid Talbot, the woman known as Prophet.

  Following the discovery of the massacre at the sorority house. Lawson had ordered that Prophet’s arrest remain a secret. He suspected that Blackwood and his men had picked up Prophet’s playbook and run with it. If that were true, then Prophet might know where they would be striking next.

  That knowledge would give PREDATOR the upper hand and Blackwood and his men could be stopped before they caused any more harm
.

  Lawson slid a copy of the morning paper across to Prophet and watched her reaction. The bold headline stated that Prophet’s army had struck once again. Prophet had been held in a cell that was secluded and could know nothing about the attack. The paper Lawson placed in front of her had certain text covered by black magic marker so that the town’s name wouldn’t be visible.

  Prophet couldn’t hide her shock at the headline, but a moment later, she was smiling.

  “You need something from me,” she said.

  “My name is Thomas Lawson, Miss Talbot, and you may be useful, yes.”

  Prophet gave the situation more thought and nodded knowingly.

  “It’s Blackwood. He has a copy of my plans and now he’s seeking to gain the wealth I couldn’t.”

  “How would he have gotten a copy of your plans? You two aren’t friendly. We know from Viola Poe that you tried to kill Blackwood.”

  “I was careless,” Prophet said. “I left information on a laptop and I’m certain Blackwood found it. Where did that attack take place?”

  Lawson shook his head.

  “You tell me where it took place. If Blackwood is using your information to plan, then you would know where he struck.”

  “I do know. It could only have been one of four locations. I only had four sites of attack left. They were in different sections of the country, although two of them are in neighboring states.”

  “Last night’s attack took place in the northwest.”

  Prophet smiled. “Blackwood and his men attacked the town of Odessa, Idaho. You’ll find that they hid out in an abandoned barn near the college campus.”

  Lawson removed a notepad and pen from his pocket.

  “I need the other three locations where they might attack.”

  Prophet leaned back in her seat and smiled at Lawson.

  “Let’s make a deal, shall we?”

  Lawson gritted his teeth and fought the urge to smash Prophet in the face. He then began negotiations for the information. Blackwood had to be stopped.