Morbid Curiosity: Erter & Dobbs Book 3
Page 1
MORBID CURIOSITY
Erter & Dobbs Book 3
Nick Keller
First published 2017
By NKBooks
DFW, TX, U.S.A.
All Rights Reserved
© Copyright 2017
www.NickKellerBooks.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author or authors, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition being imposed on the publisher or subsequent purchaser.
Created by NKBooks
Edited by www.FadingStreet.com
Cover Design By: Cormar Covers
www.cormarcovers.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
Books in the Erter & Dobbs Thriller series
1. Grave Situation
2. Oscar
3. New Recruit
4. Floppy
5. Dash
6. Kendra Oaks And The Panel
7. Mission
8. The Big Exit
9. Autopsy
10. On The Trail
11. Narrowing In
12. Residence
13. Floppy
14. Neiman Residence
15. William, Nutjob
16. Oscar
17. Mission Request
18. Jacky’s Living Conditions
19. Mission Received
20. Amanuensis
21. William on the take
22. Info
23. House
24. Dungeon
25. The Missing Man
26. Silence
27. Heller And Dobbs
28. Asphyxiation
29. Gamma Oscillations
30. Alive
31. Jacky Starts To Look
32. Toxicity
33. Gamma Oscillations
34. Bernie Dobbs, P.I
35. Heaven Talk
36. At Work
37. Plea
38. Iva
39. Blast Off
40. Electrocution
41. Gamma Oscillations
42. Hobar And Dobbs
43. O.D.
44. Gamma Oscillations
45. Bernie Investigates
46. Final Grave
47. Gamma Oscillations
48. Another Round
About the Author
It’s Review time!
Books in the Erter & Dobbs thriller series
Enjoy this opening excerpt to Compounding Interest: A Bernie Dobbs Novella
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Books in the Erter & Dobbs Thriller series
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MODUS OPERANDI—Coming Soon
COMPOUNDING INTEREST—A novella
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1
Grave Situation
The scalpel.
Oh, what a thing. The perfect utility. Beautiful to the eye. Serene and pure. A single-minded object, built for one purpose. As solid and unyielding as it was delicate, almost dainty in its wickedness. The sweetest thing of all.
This one had a twinkle in its crescent blade, as thin as a star’s light, as buoyant in the hand as a feather. Perfect. Ahhh, perfect.
He brought it slowly down white-knuckling its stainless stem, pointer finger pressed over the blade for stability, and began to slice, slowly and perfectly, down, down, down, drawing it ever deeper into a block of soft, yellow cheese. The slice peeled away, as thin as paper and came to rest on its plate. Cheddar flesh. It made him smile.
With delicate, nimble fingers he took the tiny slab of cheese and placed it perfectly onto the open face of his ham sandwich. He arranged it symmetrically over the pink meat next to the other thin fillet of cheese.
“Ah.”
Closing the sandwich with a slice of bread he pressed it down dripping lettuce and tomato juice off its edges. His other hand still pinched the scalpel between finger and thumb. He leaned across the table to place it gently with his other supplies—an assortment of other scalpels of varying make, a stainless steel bone saw, hemostats, and expanders, all arranged in perfect order, set in an intricate row—but he froze in midmotion. He brought the blade closer to his eyes staring at the tiny, perfect thing.
Cheese residue.
“Mmm.”
His tongue reached out and slathered lubricous spittle across his lips as they parted to receive the cutting end of the scalpel. Closing his mouth over it he swam in the cold, steely taste of its bladed end resting on his tongue. Slowly, with hardly any motion at all, he drew it away from its fleshy home feeling the microscopic blade’s edge painlessly open a split in his tongue, then lips. The taste of cheddar mingled with a hint of iron, and he swam inside the sensation again.
“Mmm.”
Smacking his jowls lightly, he inspected the blade. With great satisfaction, he’d cleansed the cheese fat off, leaving only a bright, chromatic surface glinting like a mirror under the light, the thinnest bit of spit making it sheen and glow anew. Then …
The tiny reflection he saw in its surface froze his blood cold. It was his own face. Only a mere pixel of the whole reflecting back at him, but it was enough. A reminder.
Hideous. A gruesome creature. Disgusting.
He heard himself sneer before his impulses could catch him, and he threw the scalpel to the floor, clicking it off concrete. Triggered by his sudden motion, a tiny sound issued from behind. It was muffled, all grunting and diffused. He turned around to see that she had awakened sometime in the past few minutes.
She.
His patient.
His face melted into a smile, eyes softened. He went to her bedside, approaching with the care of a physician, and stood over her, resting a soft, comforting palm down over her hand. The wrist restraint had squeezed her hand bloodless, and it was cool to the touch. “Welcome back, my dear. How was your rest?”
She said nothing, only stared up at him through wide eyes that glistened and sparkled. The sound of her breath issuing back and forth through her nostrils settled him. It was rhythmic, cadenced, slightly up-tempo, but deep and full. He tilted his head. Couldn’t tell if she was smiling under her gag. He could never tell. It seemed as though she wasn’t, certainly not. They never did. They never smiled.
“I’m glad you came back to m
e. They don’t always, you know.” His head dropped. Eyes blinked. Tears surfaced. “Eventually, they always leave me.” He snapped out of his trance, brought his head back up. “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it must be.” He looked at her with a paternal grin, warm and endearing, and said, “That’s the way it’ll be for me, too. Very soon. But …” He stood up. “Not soon enough, I suppose.”
He strolled over to a corner of his wide, concrete room where a tripod stood on small, rolling casters. An IV bag dangled from it, bloated out with some clear, syrupy fluid. A tube and syringe looped from a clamp, held in place. “The first time I lost someone,” he giggled in remembrance, a deep sense of nostalgia, “it was 1989. My residency. I was so young. There was no saving him. The impossible patient. But we—and that is to say, I—had to try. They say it was a valiant effort. All I saw was a failed attempt. I promised myself it would never happen again. Oh, the improprieties of youth, eh? I had all that time, from then until now. But like all sweet things …” He looked at her blinking a tear down one cheek. For a moment he marveled at her the way a father would marvel over a daughter, proud and understanding, yet just the tiniest bit hurt, realizing she would eventually leave him, like all daughters. “So sweet,” he whispered. “The sweetest of all things.”
He moved toward her rolling the stainless steel rack with him. She followed him with those scared, wet eyes. He stopped at her bed, staring down at her, and chanced putting his hand to her cheek. He stroked matted hair away from her forehead. “It won’t hurt,” he whispered. “I don’t like hurting people.” He shifted to her arm tying a rubber tourniquet. She squirmed, mumbled under her gag. The vein in her forearm began to swell. His eyes widened. The vein pulsed.
Yes. Life’s blood.
He took the syringe and placed it gently on her arm, its narrow needle resting on the vein. “You’ll feel just a tiny poke, okay? Nothing more.”
Her tiny voice rose … mmm, mff!
He stabbed it in, gently but quick, making her eyes roll up in her head.
“Shh. Just relax,” he said. “This isn’t so bad. It’s the sweetest thing.” The IV bag began its drip. The process would take a while, perhaps an hour. He had time, so he patted her gently on the shoulder and went back to his sandwich.
An hour later, just as Curly and Moe were exercising their frenzy of eye poking, face slapping and head rubbing on the little TV set, the EKG machine displayed a high-pitched squeal. Flatline. He spun around feeling his own pulse spike. She was going into cardiac arrest. She was dying. He was losing her.
He was at her side in a flash feeling for a pulse. Nothing.
“Oh, God no.”
He whipped the IV needle from her arm and kicked the tripod away. It clattered to the floor bursting the clear, plastic sack and its syrupy contents oozed across the floor. Mouth-to-mouth was first. Lips created an airtight seal. He huffed and puffed, then started chest compressions. He waited on the verge of tears, clawing for a pulse, waiting for the digital graph to show a spike, just one, please, any sign of life.
In the background, he heard “Why, I aughtta …”
Nothing.
“You aughtta what?”
“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
Shock was taking her away. The syrupy liquid had done its job well. Too well.
He crashed to a medical dresser throwing open the middle drawer. A collection of syringes rattled inside. He snagged one, looked at it desperately. Insulin, 50 Mg. He ripped it away from its plastic seal and was back at her side thumbing the inside of her arm for the vein. It was dormant, hard to locate. But he was seasoned. Found it.
“Come on, baby!”
He jabbed the syringe in and thumbed down the hammer, then started pounding on her chest. He pounded and pounded trying to infuse her vitals with activity, any activity.
Boop. Honk. Smack. Pow!
He stopped, looked at the EKG. No sign of life.
There was a last resort. He yanked the portable HeartStart defibrillator machine over, cranked the battery switch, heard the electrical hum emit and grow to a whine. The dial read full power. He threw the paddles over her torso, one high near the shoulder, the other low on her flanks and emitted the shock.
ZAP!
Her body jolted, then flopped back on the table. His eyes went to the EKG. No pulse. No reaction.
“Oh no, oh no!”
He fired the paddles again, emitted another shock. She jerked and went still. Flatline.
He slumped over the body, defeated. Another patient, gone.
His eyes wandered to her face studying her over, never blinking, growing wet, absorbing her every feature. This was life’s end. The shadow of death crept over her. Everything went peaceful, and he grinned.
“Hardy har har!”
2
Oscar
“A sperm corrupts an egg. It carries everything a man is, everything he came from, and everything he’s ever going to be,” William said, blank and lifeless.
Dr. Oaks watched him, more out of precaution than fascination. She sat straight up behind the visiting counselor’s desk, legs crossed at the ankles. Her hair was up in a tight brunette bun, and she wore her rimless glasses, eyes hardly blinking as she observed him like a cat on the prowl. Somehow, though, she knew he was still eyeballing that tiny pulse in her neck. She couldn’t hide that. She used to be comfortable around William. But that was the past.
William continued, “And my father—his seed poisoned me, made me a killer. Just like him. Is that what you think, Doctor Oaks?”
She nodded her head slowly and subtly, once. A definite yes.
“Well …” he leaned toward her. “I am not my father. How many times do I have to say it?” He stared at her. She showed no legible emotion. She was a statue. It infuriated him. “My father is a killer. He’s admitted it. The whole world knows it. Hell, even I know it. That’s why he’s on death row.” He leaned toward her. “But I haven’t killed. I’ve never killed.”
“Are you certain?” she said, cutting him.
He sank back into the chair feeling his blood boil with insult. He whispered, “I’m. Not. A. Monster.”
She dipped her chin. “No?”
He quivered. Had to breathe. Had to calm down. William knew to what she was referring: After the Starlet Killer case, an entire legal proceeding had been launched to obtain William’s involvement. A certain school of thought suspected William in Iva’s death. It even suspected him in Ruthi’s death, despite the FBI’s lies to cover up their own foul-up. Ruthi had thrown herself from her own eighteenth story balcony, plummeted through the night, landed pancake flat on the L.A. sidewalk, brain matter spreading across the walkway. It was a simple suicide, cut and dry. Or had William himself pushed her over the ledge? The, son of the most notorious serial killer in U.S. history was more responsible for those deaths than he was admitting. There were too many questions, too many holes. All eyes were on him.
He muttered miserably, “Everything I told the arbitration panel was true. I thought you of all people, Doctor Oaks, would be the first to trust your own system.”
She smiled, but it was dishonest. In truth, how could she trust the system anymore? For five years it blinded her to the killer under her care. He had operated so coolly, blending into society, earning a scholar’s reputation, a career, a home. And all the while he’d proudly displayed his old man’s bloodlust on his walls. Those portraits of death had not been mere reminders, or hard-earned morality tales. They were point-proven indicators of how serene and sick William’s mind was. And what’s worse—they were clear-cut renderings of William Erter’s intentions. It was just a matter of time. She just needed to prove it. Yes, he was mad, she was convinced of it, and he belonged here at the Napa State Institute for the Criminally Insane, just like all the other throat slitters residing within these walls.
Switching tactics, she said, “Are you angry with me, William?”
The question made his insides twist, start dancing dastardly
little jigs. Was he angry with her? Ha!
“No, I’m not angry with you, Doctor Oaks.” A bold-faced, bloody-screaming lie. Jesus, what had this woman done to him? To count: She had him admitted to the nuthouse on knowledge of psychiatric conspiracy. He lost his position at the college. She’d taken him out of the world and away from a calling. Destroyed any routine he’d fought for years to obtain. Taken his touch to the outside world away. She destroyed him. Ruined him. And now she had the bleeding, fucking gall to ask him if he was angry at her?
Just let me get my hands around that pulsating little neck.
He smiled at her. “Okay. Yes. I’m angry. But, is that so wrong?”
“Depends on how you deal with it,” she said. “What do you intend to do with all that anger?”
“I’m going to do what everyone else does with their anger, Doctor Oaks. I’m going to flip off the guy in the car next to me. I’m going to cuss out loud at the grocery store clerk. I’m going to smack my kid in the head. I’m going to be the same as everyone else, just as I always have. As I always will.”