BOOKER Box Set #2 (A Private Investigator Thriller Series of Crime and Suspense): Volumes 4-6

by John W. Mefford

  But I knew I couldn’t just kick back and blow off the investigation. I replayed Kenneth’s blood-soaked face uttering the phrase, “Long live the Avengers.” How that connected with the ominous message left in blood in the church desk—AKA or die trying—I wasn’t sure. But something told me Kenneth had not acted alone.

  The back door burst open again.

  “Hey, everyone.” Justin clamored in, towing a cage with a towel over it.

  I pointed a finger. “Don’t tell me you brought—”

  “Damn straight, I did,” he said with a big smile.

  “Justin, don’t cuss,” Eva snapped.

  “Oh, sorry. You look like you’ve seen better days.”

  Eva sneered at him, and he slinked past her and set the cage on the far counter.

  He turned to me. “You asked me to find something for Samantha to play with.”

  “Hola,” Bolt walked through the door, his normally Bieber-like hair sticking up in the back.

  “Bolt!” Samantha slid from my arms, ran over, and hugged him. Then she took him by the hand and led him to the cage. “Come over here, big brother. We can talk to Big Al while all the adults talk about adult stuff.”

  Justin shrugged his shoulders. I didn’t have the time to bring up everything wrong with this scene. But I also knew that Samantha needed a distraction. There was no way she was going to sleep through this craziness.

  A couple of thoughts pinged my brain.

  “Henry, what do you know about Kenneth?” I watched Alisa sit back down, starting to resume her review of electronic files. Damn, I admired her tenacity. And a whole lot more.

  “Not a ton. He’s known for being a sarcastic little shit, basically. But he’s young, immature, so we hoped he’d eventually get it together. When he actually did work, he was pretty detail-oriented, and that’s really what you need from a paralegal.”

  The swiveling door popped open again, and two guys in suits walked in, didn’t say anything. Thom pulled himself from Eva’s grasp. “Can I help you guys?”

  “Any way we can get a few waters for the team? We’re going to be here all night and—”

  “I’ll take care of it, no problem. Appreciate the fact the FBI is on the scene.”

  Thom moved toward the fridge, then stopped, picked up a chair, and brought it over to Eva. “Your stubborn streak won’t allow you to go and relax, not with all of this going on. The least I can do for you is get you off your feet.”

  “Thank you,” she said, as she gingerly sat down.

  “Can I get you something to drink, dear?”

  Dear? It sounded surreal to hear someone speak to Eva that way. Thom was a decent guy, I supposed. He’d recently been promoted to sergeant and at times had shown a propensity to use the enhanced power to its fullest potential. I just wanted him to treat Eva and my little girl with respect, as long as he was around. And he seemed to be holding his own thus far.

  He asked if Alisa and I wanted anything to drink as he opened the fridge.

  Just then, Detective Bobby Sturm stormed into the kitchen, immediately putting his hands behind his back.

  “Find anything of note?” Henry asked.

  The FBI suits shuffled a step closer.

  Bobby’s boots clapped against the linoleum as he stayed in the same position, shuffling his feet. “Nope.” He tried to press his lips against his teeth, but I could see the bump of chew under his lower lip.

  “Thanks, Thom,” the taller FBI suit said, taking the bottled waters, then he turned his gaze to Bobby. “And Detective, in continuing our collaborative effort, if you or your team find anything at all, I’m assuming we’ll be the first to know?”

  Bobby flexed his jaw, his days of beard growth more apparent. It seemed like he was about to let loose a shot of chew, but realized he was in a house. “Will do.”

  The suits left the room, and the rest of us traded looks. Finally the silence was broken by my obnoxious blue macaw. “Asswipe in the house. Asswipe in the house.”

  Everyone broke out in laughter, although Samantha’s giggle was the most infectious. Even Eva’s lips cracked a smile, though a scowl quickly washed it away. “Booker, we have a six-year-old. Can you shut your nasty bird up, please?”

  I glanced at Justin, who gave me that who me? look.

  “It’s okay, Mom. Big Al is just messing around. He’s our family pet,” Samantha said, mixed in with another little-girl chuckle.

  Thom left the room, saying something about making sure the FBI agents were comfortable. Sounded more like kissing their asses to me, but given the nature of our covert investigation, I was glad not to have to pull out my special-assistant-to-the-chief badge.

  “How did the FBI suddenly take an interest in all of this?” I held up my arms, talking to anyone who’d listen.

  “It had to be Newsome,” Henry said. “Second person from his office dies, and Kenneth is…was a killer. The DA wants answers. Or at least he wants the public to see that he’s pushing the right buttons to find out who’s behind this craziness. By tomorrow morning, we know that stuff is going to hit the fan.” He looked at Eva, apparently letting her know he’d avoided cussing in front of Samantha.

  “Election day,” Eva said from across the room.

  “I just heard a Ligon political ad on the radio on my way over here.”

  “Already?” Alisa said, raising her head for a moment. “It’s like he had the ad in the can, just waiting for the mayor pro tem to step down and endorse him. Shady.”

  Pinching the bridge of my nose, I took in a breath, letting more data seep to the front of my brain, but it was all a jumbled hairball. One I couldn’t begin to untangle until we’d found the last of the Avengers, as Kenneth had called them.

  Bobby walked over to me and Henry, brought his hand around, and waggled a cell phone just in front of his face. “This is Kenneth’s cell.”

  I traded a stare with Henry, then locked eyes with Bobby.

  “I’m not naïve. I know you fellas have been working on something big. Bigger than each of these murders. I don’t know why Booker’s involved, but I’m not going to ask. I think I know the answer.”

  He twisted his head, shifting his eyes between Henry and me, as if he hoped we’d open up.

  I gave him a simple, tight-mouthed nod.

  “Okay, I get it. You can’t tell me anything.” He handed me the phone, but kept his grip on it for an extra second. “It’s yours until daylight hits, then I gotta give it to the bureaucrats in the next room.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You owe me a beer.”

  “I’ll get Henry to pay,” I said while opening the phone.

  “By the way, I had a gadget techie from the CSI team hack through the security code. Anything to stop this killing. Unless you think that, with Kenneth doing the Caesar, we’ve seen the last of it?”

  “That’s what we have to find out. Quick.”

  “Will let you know if we find any other relevant evidence.” Bobby gave me the two-finger salute and scooted out the back door. I thumbed through Kenneth’s phone, first opening the recent calls.

  “You notice anything strange?” I shot a look at Henry, who peered over my shoulder. Alisa tapped fingernails across the keyboard just in front of me.

  “Nothing I can see. Maybe we should call each of them.”

  I looked around me, searching for help.

  Eva held up both hands. “I want to stay employed by the DPD. You guys can break all the rules you want.”

  Justin’s smile caught my eye. He was rocking back and forth in his sneakers. “How may I be of assistance, gentlemen?”

  “Not sure I have any choice,” I said to Henry and Alisa, who’d glanced up for a second.

  “Oh brother,” she said, then buried her head in her laptop again.

  I gave Justin instructions to call each number in Kenneth’s contact list and recent calls from his own cell, to act like he was with a survey company polling people on their preferences in organic foods.
When his face scrunched up like a dried prune, I whispered into his ear, “Bullshit them. Can you do that? Just need to find out who they are, what they do for a living, where they live.”

  He opened the pantry, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

  “What’s Uncle J doing, Daddy?”

  “Just getting some food ideas from your mother’s pantry.”

  Samantha shrugged her shoulders, then went back to talking quietly with Bolt. Thankfully, Big Al had grown weary of the light and was trying to sleep.

  Henry had taken the cell phone from me and was pouring through Kenneth’s text messages. “This guy was a texting machine. Might need a computer program to sift through all of this to try to identify anything relevant to the other murders.”

  “We could always ask our friends with the FBI in the other room?”

  “That’s okay. Don’t have four weeks to wait on results.”

  I heard a gasp, then turned and found Alisa with two hands pressed to her lips.

  “Guys, I think I found something. I know I found something.”

  “About which one?”

  “Paco.” Her amber eyes glanced right at me.

  I could feel my pulse tapping the side of my neck. I put a hand on the back of her chair and leaned to look at her screen.

  “I did a search on every item that had Paco’s name in it. It came back with two hundred twenty-three results.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then I reviewed all of his commendations and tied the dates of the commendations to relevant documents from the files Henry dumped into a DropNet folder.”

  I held my gaze for a second.

  “Long and short of it is, about four months ago, a truck driver stopped in the middle of the night just south of downtown. They weren’t sure if he stopped to go to the bathroom, get a bite to eat, or try to sleep. But officials found him dead six blocks from his rig, beaten to death behind a strip joint with an old golf club found next to his body.”

  I gestured with my hand, waiting for the next chapter.

  “Police found prints on it belonging to a Manuel Mendoza.”

  “Where does Paco come into play?”

  “Mendoza was a homeless guy working the streets down off Corinth and Lamar. His prints were on the club.”

  “Sounds like a cut-and-dried case. What happened?”

  “Paco had apparently used Mendoza as a snitch a few times. Felt like he owed him one. So he looked into Mendoza’s version of the story.”

  “Which was?”

  “Mendoza’s sister had come into town and driven him to Fort Worth, where he went to dinner and stayed in her hotel. Paco spoke to numerous employees at both places to verify he had an alibi.”

  “What about the prints?”

  “Investigators forgot to mention they’d found other prints on the club as well,” Alisa said.

  “So he received a commendation for exonerating an innocent man, essentially.”

  Alisa nodded.

  “Henry, we’ve found a scenario with Paco that is similar to one that led to the vigilante killing of Judge Fischer and Eva’s attack.”

  Henry’s lips moved as if he were reading something. But he was staring into space.

  I turned back to Alisa. “With Kenneth working in the DA’s office, he could access just about any case that came in the door. Wonder if we can tie him to this case.”

  “I don’t see his name on any documentation,” Alisa said. “I do have the name of the dead truck driver, though. A Mark Dawson out of Abilene, Texas.”

  “Dawson.” Henry shifted toward us, holding up the phone. “I’ve got some shit to share.”

  “Henry!” Eva said from across the room.

  “Sorry,” he said without turning to face the woman who sounded like an elementary school principal.

  “Do you know a Dawson?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Darrisha. Works in our paralegal department.”

  The three of us traded stares.

  I recalled the image of the letters in the drawer etched in blood. “Is she friends with Kenneth?”

  “Uh…” Henry glanced to the corner while still holding up the phone. “Actually, they hate each other. Constantly cutting each other down. Kind of like brother and sister.”

  I tapped Alisa on the shoulder. “I’m already heading down that path. Give me two more seconds...and…I got it.”

  “Darrisha’s hometown or father’s name?”

  “Both. Father’s name is Richard Mark Dawson the third. Darrisha was born in Clyde, a small town just east of Abilene.”

  “There’s the connection, Henry. Darrisha must have killed Paco. I know we need more evidence.”

  He held up a finger next to the phone. “I might have the smoking gun right here. I just found some strange text messages between Kenneth and two others.” He scrolled down the screen. “Listen to this,” he said and then read the text messages to them.

  Black Widow: Thirty-seven times I drove that ice pick into his body. I counted every single one. Each thrust of my arm wedged it deeper and deeper. Shut up IM…dont u go there

  Ironman: U know me too well.

  Captain America: No wounds on you?

  Black Widow: Not a scratch. Of course, I had to take a shower to rinse all the blood off me.

  Captain America: Evidence?

  Black Widow: Taken care of. Burned my clothes, disposed of weapon. Im clean.

  Captain America: That means we’re clean.

  Black Widow: I owe you…a lot CA. U showed me the light. All I did was follow it.

  I said, “The Avengers. She did it. She killed my partner.” I could feel a searing heat invade my neck.

  I pulled my Sig out of the shoulder holster and checked the ammo. “Alisa, I need an address on Darrisha Dawson.”

  I put both hands on the table, waiting, as Henry started pacing.

  “Give me a second,” Alisa said.

  Justin came out of the pantry, wiping his shining forehead. “Whew, it’s hot in there.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “Not really. But I did get cussed out once. Some guy was really uptight. Asswipe,” he said under his breath. “Actually, I’m assuming I was cussed out. He was yelling at me in Chinese, best I could tell.”

  Henry’s eyes suddenly got wide. “I feel like I just stuck my finger in an electric socket.”

  “Speak to me, Henry.”

  “We know that the Black Widow is Darrisha. And we can see from how the text was sent that Kenneth enjoyed playing this Ironman character.”

  “That leaves Captain America. The so-called leader of this little triumvirate,” I said. “You have that look in your eye.”

  “I think it’s another assistant DA, Booker. A Chinese-American named Steven Lee.”

  The back door opened, and Bobby stuck his head in. “We’re wrapping up out—”

  “Bobby, we need you as backup,” I said moving toward the door. “Alisa—”

  “I’m texting you Darrisha Dawson’s address right now.”

  “Cool, then look into the first two officers who were murdered, Miller and Conley. Try to find a connection to one of the three—Darrisha, Kenneth, or Steven Lee.”

  Sturm held open the door as we raced into the thick of the night.

  20

  His phone buzzed midway through his three-hundredth pushup, and he froze. Hopping to his feet, perspiration drained off his body as he walked to the pass-through kitchen counter and looked at the mini screen. His already rapid pulse nearly exploded through the roof of his Uptown apartment.

  He was expecting a communication, but not this late and not from the contact he saw lighting up the screen. He tapped the green button.

  “You’re not supposed to call. It’s not our protocol.”

  “They know.” His colleague, Darrisha Dawson, enunciated the words slowly, her deep tone making her sound like she was on the other end of a 1-900 call.

  He dropped his elbow to the count
er; his breath stuck in his throat.

  “Steven, did you hear me? They. Know.” Her intensity jacked up a couple of notches.

  He felt a prick at the side of his head, and his mind swirled as if he were being injected with some type of mind-altering drug.

  Just then, he heard a roaring sound. “Is that water?”

  “Yes. I must cleanse myself from the sins I’ve committed. You should do the same.”

  Steven couldn’t understand how everything had turned so quickly. She was the Black Widow, one of his faithful followers, dedicated to ridding the city of those who had betrayed their oaths to help the people they supposedly served.

  “Black Widow, why—”

  “My name is Darrisha. My father’s name is Mark. He was murdered. And in response to that, I have killed two people. Were they innocent? That’s not for me to judge. I took it too far. You took it too far. And now we’re going to pay.”

  Confusion quickly churned into a boiling pot of rage. There had to be a way out, a series of actions that he could take that would enable their cause to continue.

  “Why are you saying this? How do you think they know?” He could hear the rushing water even more clearly.

  “I’ve been blind, Steven, blinded by my bitterness.”

  “But how do you know?” He could hear his voice grow stronger.

  “I set it up for the major search engines to send me an email when my name or my father’s name have been pinged. I got the message a few hours ago. I’m surprised you haven’t done the same, given the risks we’ve been taking.”

  He’d thought she’d been fully trained, so immersed in carrying out their rightful redemption that she would ignore possible threats to their group.

  “Ignore the email. It’s just someone who’s curious.”

  “I called a friend of mine, a cop. A good cop who has similar beliefs. He’s on the scene. Kenneth is dead.”

  Steven felt his legs go wobbly. He took in a deep breath and let the hate fill his bloodstream.

  “How?”

  “Henry’s friend, Booker. Just before Kenneth was about to kill the officer, Eva.”

  “That mother—”

  “Don’t get upset. It’s too late. The only thing we can do is atone for our sins…and…”