Dead and Gone (A Thriller)

by William Casey Moreton

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  ALSO BY WILLIAM CASEY MORETON

  DEAD and GONE

  A THRILLER

  William Casey Moreton

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Edition: April 2013

  CHAPTER 1

  If you wake up and there is a dead body in your bedroom, you suddenly have some big decisions to make, and you’d better make them quickly. The instant your eyes open and you become aware of the situation, the clock starts ticking. There is not a minute to waste.

  That might sound like a crazy, far-fetched scenario, but it surely has to happen somewhere in the world everyday, and probably more times than you might think possible. Well, apparently, it was my turn.

  I awoke with an all-time world champ of a headache. I felt it pounding through my skull even before I’d opened my eyes. It was the first sure sign that today would suck. For a few seconds I entertained the notion that perhaps the headache was part of a dream, and that maybe if I could shake myself awake I might snap out of it and the pounding would go away. No such luck. I pried my eyes open, one painful effort at a time, morning light pouring through the window blinds, searing my retinas.

  My body was slow to react to the signals coming from my brain. I was making every effort to lift an arm or a leg, but for the moment those parts of my anatomy weren’t cooperating. So I just laid there and tried to make sense of things, but I couldn’t. I blinked, squinting against the light. Flares of pain ricocheted through my skull. I couldn’t remember a thing — how I’d gotten home, how I’d gotten to bed, where I might’ve spent the previous day or evening, or who I might’ve been with. My memory was a clean slate.

  Clearly I was hungover. At least I guessed that to be true, because I had no memory of any previous hangover. In fact, I had no memory of anything.

  I closed my eyes and remained still. I was sprawled in a bed with one arm wrapped around a pillow, my face pressed into the mattress, my legs twisted up in the sheets. The sunlight was warm on my face. My mouth was dry and it took effort to swallow, like maybe my throat had constricted. I think I drifted off again, and it felt like I slept for a month, but when I opened my eyes and stared at the clock on the bedside table it was clear I’d dozed for only about two minutes. It was seven in the morning. I groaned and tried to move again. I raised my forearm to shield my eyes from the light coming through the blinds.

  Seven o’clock.

  How long had I been asleep?

  I twisted around in bed and sat up. Put my face in my hands. Rubbed my eyes with both fists and then pushed my fingers through my hair. I looked down at myself and saw I’d gone to bed fully dressed, except that the fly on my pants was unzipped and wide open. Nice. I zipped up and glanced around the bedroom but didn’t recognize a single thing. It was like waking up on the surface of Mars.

  Then I saw the woman’s body on the floor.

  Talk about a moment that stops your heart.

  I stared for a long moment without blinking. She lay on her back with both eyes locked open, long blonde hair tangled and tossed over her face, lips parted slightly, arms outstretched above her head and bound together at the wrists with a plastic zip tie. She appeared very attractive and very dead.

  Did I know her? At that moment I literally couldn’t remember my own name, so the dead woman’s name certainly wasn’t ringing any bells. I stood at the bed and stared for another minute. It was time to start making some of those big decisions I mentioned earlier, but I was frozen in place. I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare down at that lovely face, her empty eyes staring up at the ceiling as if gazing into outer space.

  “Hello?” I said, and immediately felt like a dork. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t respond. Wow, major shocker.

  I eased around to the foot of the bed, never taking my eyes off her. How could I know if she was really dead? Surely, I needed to check for a pulse or something. I approached her as if cautiously sneaking up on a coiled snake. The zip tie around her wrists had cut off blood flow, turning her hands a deep shade of purple. She was dressed in a tight skirt and a man’s dress shirt. The shirt was unbuttoned down the front, partially exposing her breasts.

  I got down on one knee and touched a hand to her neck. There was no pulse. I brushed the hair away from her face to get a better look. Still didn’t recognize her. There was no blood on the floor, or on her body, nothing to indicate that she might have been shot or stabbed. Then I saw the leather collar around her throat and knew instantly that she had choked to death. I was getting a very bad feeling about what might have happened here. The woman on the floor looked like she might have died as a result of some kind of very kinky game gone wrong. The open shirt, the dog collar, the zip tie, and my open fly.

  I wanted to close my eyes, go back to sleep and start over.

  It wasn’t that simple. Something bad had gone down sometime last night here in this room, and I had to get seriously busy making the most important decisions of my life.

  I went to the window and pulled up the blinds. There was a view of a busy street. I was probably six or seven floors up. My memory was still an empty vessel but I was guessing this was New York City. I turned back to the room, still feeling like I was in foreign territory. The bed was a mess. I avoided the body. There was a sport coat and a purse piled in a leather chair in one corner of the room. I found her ID and a cell phone in her purse. Her name was Veronica Wagner and she was twenty-three years old. I looked past the photo ID to the corpse on the other side of the room and decided it was a solid match.

  “I don’t know what exactly happened here last night, Veronica,” I said, “but I’m sorry things turned out this way.” It seemed like a decent sentiment.

  Then I went for the pockets of the sport coat and dug out a wallet and an iPhone. I saw my face staring back from the photo ID in the wallet. My name was Nick Cortland. I stared at the name, birthdate, height and weight. Apparently, I was an organ donor. Good for me. None of it meant a thing at this moment, because I presently had no recollection of Nick Cortland’s life. All I could do was shrug. I shoved the wallet into my back pocket and scrolled through the contacts list on the iPhone. It was filled with names and numbers — each of them a stranger.
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br />   There was a mirror on the wall and I paused to study my own face.

  “Good morning, Nick,” I said. “Welcome to your sucky life.”

  There were photos on shelves of a guy with my face smiling with other people, so my first guess was that this was my place. So I momentarily accepted this as fact.

  The bedroom door was closed. I stepped around Veronica Wagner’s body and opened the door. The hallway was dark. I left the lights off and went down the hall to a kitchen and spotted a yellow Labrador asleep on a sofa in front of a flat screen television. I smelled coffee and was pleased to see that a coffee maker on the kitchen counter had been preset and there was already a full cup right there waiting for me. Funny thing, I didn’t realize I was into coffee.

  I took the coffee cup back into the bedroom with me to assess what kind of nightmare I had awakened to. Veronica hadn’t moved an inch. Not surprisingly, she was still dead. I turned on the light in the bathroom and set the coffee on the counter, ran water in the sink and splashed my face. There was a towel on the hook behind me.

  I went back out to the bedroom and for the first time noticed the empty beer cans and wine bottles on the floor. Very bad sign. Something twisted in my stomach. Suddenly, the hangover made sense. I still couldn’t remember any of the festivities.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. It was very weird being me at the moment. It was bad enough waking up to find a dead stranger in the room with me, but I had no knowledge of myself other than a name I didn’t recognize.

  “Nick Cortland,” I said aloud, as if claiming ownership.

  My first instinct was to call the police, but there were simply too many variables I didn’t know. There was a dead woman in my home and I had no idea what my involvement had been in her demise. Calling the cops might be the most responsible action to take, but I really needed to take a moment to collect my thoughts and try to get my head on straight and put a few pieces of the puzzle together before I went ahead and stepped into an even bigger big fat mess.

  I leaned against the bathroom door and took a long sip of coffee. Turns out I loved the stuff. Then I scrolled through the most recent calls on the iPhone. The names and numbers didn’t mean anything to me, but I figured some of them might very soon. The last incoming call was at 3 o’clock in the morning from someone named Terry Burgess. It went unanswered, likely because I was already deep in a coma. My last outgoing call was placed shortly before midnight. There was no name attached to the number.

  I looked through my contacts for Terry Burgess. Apparently, I worked with him. I had numbers for his cell, home, and work phones, plus his home and email addresses. There was no photo of him, just a business logo. Suddenly, I was fascinated by what it was that I did for a living. My life was one big mystery.

  I considered redialing my last outgoing call, but hesitated. I scrolled through all calls from the past week and the mystery number was the only one without an ID attached. There was no other record in the cell of any previous call to or from that number. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Could I have simply misdialed? Maybe. At the moment it seemed like just about anything was possible.

  Morning light moved slowly across the bedroom floor. I stood in the doorway and again ran my hands through my hair. Every minute that passed with Veronica Wagner’s body on the floor was another minute of me sinking deeper into the muck. It suddenly occurred to me that someone might be missing her and could already be looking for her, and if the trail led to my door, well, I’d be screwed.

  I had to make a move, and if that meant taking a chance and dialing the mystery number on my cell, so be it, even though I wasn’t thrilled about what I might discover on the other end of the line. I took another sip of coffee and then pushed the cup away. I grabbed the cell and stared at the ten digits. It had a 212 area code, so it belonged to someone within the city. I took a deep breath and hit redial, then leaned my head against the wall as the line began to ring.

  Then I heard something. A sound coming from the bedroom. It was an electronic trill. I leaned away from the wall and stepped out of the bathroom.

  The sound was coming from the leather chair. I crossed the room and tossed aside my sport coat. The sound was coming from Veronica’s purse. There was a sudden twist of panic in my gut. I picked up her purse and dumped the contents onto the bed. Her cell phone was ringing. I picked it up and saw my name on the caller ID window.

  Veronica Wagner came here because I had called her. Now she was dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  I covered her body with a sheet. I didn’t touch or move her in any way, just simply pulled a sheet from the bed and draped it over her. Then I closed the window blinds and shut the curtain. The room was suddenly dark so I hit the lights. It seemed reasonable to assume that at some point in the future the police would become involved in the narrative, so I didn’t want to do anything that might be viewed as tampering with evidence or a crime scene. At the same time, I didn’t want to leave them any more to work with than necessary.

  I went to the bathroom and started the shower running, then stripped down and dropped what I’d been wearing into a pile on the floor. I showered quickly, then grabbed a fresh change of clothes from the closet. Apparently, I was big into suits because I owned a ton of them. I dressed in something bordering on casual, put on a tie and jacket, and stuffed the old clothes into a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen.

  The apartment was sparsely decorated. There didn’t appear to be much of a woman’s touch, which caused me to wonder for the first time since waking about the possibility that I was married. There was no ring on my finger, so I assumed I wasn’t. Could Veronica Wagner have been my girlfriend? Not likely considering my cell only showed evidence of one call between us and her name had been excluded from the contacts list. Had last night been a first date? Again, it seemed unlikely given that the call had been placed at midnight.

  Her purse contained very little. The cell, a tube of lipstick, some makeup, and a small pocket book with about two hundred dollars in cash. The pocket book also contained a few credit cards and a metro pass but no other form of identification. I thumbed through the credit cards, then replaced them where I’d found them.

  I killed the light and shut the bedroom door behind me. I needed to get out of there and clear my head.

  The rest of the apartment was still dark. The dog spotted me and raised her head, yawning and stretching from her comfy spot on the sofa. There was a bag of food in a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink.

  “Hey, girl,” I said, filling her bowl. Then I patted her head before taking a quick tour of the apartment. It was unsettling knowing there was a corpse down the hall. I went from room to room, wanting to learn as much about myself as possible, hoping that at any second the fog would lift and the answers to all my questions would drop into place and the riddles would be solved.

  I found an office with a laptop open on a desk. The laptop required a password to log in. I tried a few but nothing worked. I went through desk drawers and thumbed through some paper work and a few files. Much of it was covered in the corporate logo I had seen in the contact info for Terry Burgess on my iPhone. It appeared that Terry and I were in advertising and both worked at a firm called Burgess, Levine, and Holt. Perhaps Terry Burgess was my boss.

  The dog was still in the kitchen working on breakfast. I squatted down and lavished her with a little attention. She licked playfully at my face.

  “What’s your name, girl?” I asked, hoping to find a name tag attached to her collar, but she didn’t have a collar, though I did notice that a narrow band of fur around her neck was worn smooth. I touched a hand to the flattened ring of fur. Clearly, she normally wore a collar but was not wearing one now. I frowned. Interesting.

  I remembered the dog collar around Veronica Wagner’s throat. It struck me as an unpleasing coincidence.

  I elbowed the dog away and took the bag of clothes with me to the front door of the apartment. It occurred to me that I’d need a key to get back in. I w
ent to the kitchen but found nothing in a bowl or on a hook. So I returned to the bedroom stepped around Veronica and found a keyring on the floor next to the bedside table. The keyring had four keys. I tested them one at a time until I found the one that fit the lock in the front door.

  Then I took the elevator to the lobby and went out to the street.

  I didn’t know where I was going or how I intended to unravel this mess because there currently wasn’t any kind of concrete plan. It was 7:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. I walked a block and stood with a cluster of pedestrians at an intersection waiting for the light to change. We were on Park Avenue. I glanced back toward my building, hoping something would click sooner rather than later.

  My iPhone, Veronica’s cell, and my wallet were stuffed in my jacket pocket. For some unknown reason I had called her at midnight and she had ended up with a dog collar around her neck in my bedroom, and that’s the way her life had ended. I wanted to vomit. Was I responsible for her death? Could I really be guilty of choking the life from her? I felt ill.

  I crossed at the light and spotted a sign for a coffee shop. Maybe I should grab a cup and hide at a table in the back. I needed something strong enough to clear the cobwebs from my brain. Before I could take three steps toward Starbucks, I heard someone call my name.

  “Yo, Nick!”

  I froze mid-step and turned to see a short, thin man of about fifty jogging toward me. He had a graying goatee and few remaining wisps of dark hair on top of an otherwise bald head. Sunglasses were pushed up on his forehead and a backpack was slung over one shoulder. He was grinning.

  He quickly caught up to me. I didn’t know him from Adam.

  “What the hell happened to you this morning?” he asked, slightly winded and sucking air. He gave me a clap on the back with one hand and twisted his mouth in a way that made the gray in his beard look more pronounced.

  My heart was frozen in my chest. “What do you mean?” I asked.