by Osborne, Jon
Dana stretched her neck to the left. The kink that had settled in on the plane ride out to Washington still hadn’t gone away yet, and at this rate she highly doubted it would any time soon. “Bill Krugman wants you two to take over this part of the investigation out on the West Coast,” she said. “You’ll report directly back to Agent Blankenship and me if and when you find out anything additional. It’s the beginnings of a task force, boys. Might be getting some more help soon, too. Krugman said he’ll get back to me about that.”
Olokawandi frowned. “Where are you guys going?”
“Yeah,” Blankenship cut in. “Where are we going?”
Dana blew out a slow breath. “Sacramento. Murder of another pregnant black woman out there.”
“Jesus Christ,” Olokawandi said.
Dana looked over at him. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Jesus Christ is right.”
CHAPTER 48
Angel was in a corner booth at Dunkin’ Donuts twenty minutes later, sipping on a large coffee and studying the ledger sheet that she’d taken from Hathaway’s office at Elite Escorts of Cleveland.
Sasha Diggs had been a busy girl over the past couple months, that much seemed clear. Her appointment sheet had been filled two-thirds of the way down the page with all of the “dates” she’d gone out on recently.
As she scanned the entries, Angel felt foolish for her earlier naiveté. She should’ve known better than to think the girl had been making enough money working nights at a downtown Denny’s to pay her own way through college. Angel felt saddened to come to this realization, of course, but in a way she also couldn’t blame the girl. It was a rough world out there and sometimes a girl just had to do what a girl had to do.
Like one of the characters had said in Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, “Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has got to hang onto.”
Angel knew that it was all she had to hang onto sometimes.
Sasha Diggs had been on five overnight visits since May, pocketing a cool seventy-five hundred dollars in the process. More than Angel made in two months. All five slumber parties listed the exact same address, with the last appointment dated just a night before her grandmother had said she’d gone missing.
The name penciled in next to the address of the overnights was located in one of the ritziest sections of east Cleveland. When Angel finally connected the name to the handsome face that she saw on television nearly every single day, her jaw almost hit the table.
Randall Jonathan McMichael.
CHAPTER 49
Bane snored peacefully at his feet and the exquisite sounds of Mozart’s La Finta Giradinera poured forth from the antique record player over in the corner of his fine den as the Race Master inquired about the young girl in Cleveland. “What’s the story with our lovely little Rhodes scholar, Richard?” he asked.
Richard Patton cleared his throat nervously, reluctant to make his report. The Race Master had never been the kind of man to suffer bad news lightly – Josef Sullivan had been proof positive of that much. Not to mention poor Christopher Johansen.
Patton shuddered, remembering the way his employer’s vicious dog had torn open Johansen’s throat in nauseating pink sprays. If nothing else, he knew the nightmarish image would remain seared into his memory forever. “No word from Trebblehorn yet, sir,” he said.
The Race Master frowned darkly. “And Marjorie Trimble out in California? What of her?”
Patton shifted in his chair, hoping this bit of good news might offset the bad. “That one’s taken care of, sir.”
“And purification of the body?”
“To your specifications, sir.”
The Race Master nodded. “Send some men after Trebblehorn in Cleveland, Richard. Perhaps he’s fallen prey to the same lust that cost our dear friend Johansen his life.”
Patton nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll go do that right away.”
Patton rose to his feet and turned on his heel before heading quickly for the door, anxious to leave the room with his life. But the Race Master held up one large hand to stop him.
“One moment there, Richard. I’m not done with you quite yet.”
Patton froze in his tracks, his heartbeat thundering so loudly in his ears that it threatened to deafen him permanently. The great man’s great impatience with failure had been demonstrated quite clearly already, and Patton didn’t relish the prospect of finding himself on the receiving end of the Race Master’s displeasure. “Yes, sir?” he asked, turning to his employer.
The Race Master rose to his own feet and handed Patton a sealed letter across the massive desk. “Have our people deliver this to the local newspaper once job is done. The time has finally come for us to step from the shadows.”
Patton’s heart shifted from his ears to his throat as he tucked the file beneath his left arm and finally exited the room; thanking God almighty in heaven above that he was still alive.
At least for now.
It certainly marked a hell of a lot more than he could say for his predecessors at the moment – may the poor men’s eternal souls rest in peace forever.
CHAPTER 50
On the plane ride out to Sacramento an hour later, Dana dozed while Blankenship researched the Brotherhood’s origins.
Bad idea. Because sleep invited into her brain the recurring nightmare that she’d been having almost every single night since she’d been four years old.
Lately, with one notable, horrifying alteration.
***
Fast asleep now, the overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, then finally a blinding flash of vibrant colors that hurt her brain so badly that it threatened to bring on a seizure.
Dana squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt in her entire life. Nothing made sense to her. Nothing had ever made sense to her. Nothing would ever make sense to her again.
As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart. Shocked, she watched as the colors in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered as though the footage was being played on an antique film projector set to the wrong speed.
Dana sucked in a sharp breath that sent a vicious stab of pain slicing hard through her lungs. A man had just walked right through her. A small silver pistol peeked out from the rear waistband of his dirty jeans. The man’s walk was confident, completely sure of itself, almost a swagger.
She blinked rapidly and tried desperately to make sense of the mind-bending scene in front of her. No use. Suddenly, though, her brain almost collapsed on itself when she realized exactly what this was, exactly where she was.
The home of her childhood. 3330 Eastlawn Street; West Park-section of Cleveland. The place where her parents had been brutally murdered thirty-five years earlier. The place where she’d barely escaped bloody murder at the hands of the same deranged madman when she’d been just four years old – saved only by a concerned neighbor who’d heard screaming in the night.
Dana’s breath hitched in her throat. Her heart stopped beating dead in her chest. A cold shiver skittered down the entire length of her spine, as though some unseen ghost were using its bony fingers to lovingly trace a feathery path along the vertebrae.
Dana shook her head in bewilderment and again tried to process the baffling imagery before her. No good. Didn’t work. But then a second, more powerful wave of shivers wracked her body as the next chilling realization dawned on her. Since she now understood exactly where she was, it could mean only one thing. She also knew the identity of the man who’d just passed through her in the darkened hallway, knew his lifeless eyes as well as she knew her own.
And now he was headed for her bedroom.
Dana willed her legs to move but it wasn’t easy. Her limbs felt like cast-iron weights chained to her body right now. Marshalling all of her strength, she str
uggled forward to the doorway of her bedroom and peered in to witness a horror movie she didn’t want to see. Not again.
A Superman nightlight illuminated a child’s sleeping face in the darkness. Nathan Stiedowe – a name Dana would one day learn had been nothing more than a twisted anagram of her own – loomed over the child’s bed. A huge butcher’s knife dangled casually from the long fingers of his enormous right hand.
Beams of moonlight streamed in through the window next to the bed and bounced off the razor-sharp blade. Dana almost threw up when the child shifted in his sleep and afforded her a clear view of his unlined face.
It was Bradley, the little boy from the plane who’d promised to marry her one day and who she was now trying to adopt.
Stunned stupid, she watched in horror as Nathan Stiedowe lifted the gleaming knife over his head, ready to plunge the unforgiving steel deep into the boy’s tender throat. She tried to scream out a warning but no sound would emerge. Shifting her gaze to the mirror above the bureau in her childhood bedroom, she abruptly caught sight of her own face. Her mouth had been sewn shut. Tight stitches fastened her lips together, rendered her mute.
Dana tried to hurtle herself into the room to stop the monster before he could kill the little boy, but she looked down in horror to see that her feet had been nailed to the floor by six-inch railroad spikes bleeding rust. All she could do was look on helplessly while Nathan Stiedowe brought down the sharp knife in a blinding flash of silver that would soon be joined by a sickening explosion of red as the boy’s jugular vein severed cleanly and he bled out in a nauseating wet rush all over the matching Superman sheets.
But the knife never came down. Instead, Nathan Stiedowe simply lowered the glimmering blade to his side and reached down to softly stroke the boy’s silky blonde hair. “I’ll be back for you in just a minute, little boy,” he whispered. “That much you can count on.”
Bradley only mumbled dreamily in response.
Turning on his hell, Nathan Stiedowe then exited the room, passing through Dana’s body again. In a flash of jumbled images, her mind sped through the police reports of the devastating night in 1976 that she knew by heart. Her father, James Whitestone, would be the first to die, gunned down by his wife’s illegitimate child – the product of a brutal rape over a church altar when Sara Whitestone had been just sixteen years old. As he relieved himself in the bathroom following a tender lovemaking session with his beloved wife, a .22-caliber slug would shatter his skull from behind, sending chunks of his destroyed brain matter sliding down the tiled wall above the toilet in a disgusting rainbow of gray and white and red.
Dana strained her eyes through the darkness and watched Nathan Stiedowe enter the bathroom. The soft scratch of plastic shower rings sliding across a steel rod filled her ears as her half-brother concealed himself inside the tub. Right on cue, her father emerged from the master bedroom and closed the bathroom door behind him.
The gunshot that rang out ten seconds later was loud enough to rattle all of the pictures hanging on the wall, followed almost at once by the muted thump of a heavy weight collapsing to the floor.
Horrified tears streaked down Dana’s face and blurred her vision. Through the veil of blinding tears, she watched numbly as her mother emerged quickly from the master bedroom, alerted by the commotion in the bathroom. Dana’s heart shattered into a million tiny pieces inside her chest when she got her first glimpse of the beautiful face that she hadn’t seen for more than thirty-five years. Same short blonde hair as her own. Same pale blue eyes. Same diminutive figure.
Sara Whitestone knocked lightly on the bathroom door, a pattern of worry lines etching a series of deep wrinkles into her smooth forehead. “James, honey? Are you OK? What was that noise?”
The monster cleared his throat inside the bathroom. “I’m fine,” he coughed. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”
Sadly, Sara Whitestone was completely fooled by the mimicry, just as she’d been on the devastating night of July 4th, 1976. Without knowing it, Dana’s mother had just made the same horrible mistake that would lead to her same horrible death. The same horrible death that Dana couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop. Once again – just as had been the case when she’d been four years old – she found herself completely powerless to wake up from this awful nightmare.
“Jesus Christ,” Sara Whitestone breathed, laughing nervously. “You scared the shit out of me, babe. I thought you broke your neck in there or something. Hurry up and come back to bed already, would you?”
With that, Sara Whitestone turned on her heel and walked back to the master bedroom with her satin night robe flowing behind her in the narrow hallway like the embroidered train of an elaborate wedding dress. Fifteen seconds later, the monster followed Dana’s mother out into the darkness and loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, just another seemingly harmless shadow in the night.
Without warning, Dana’s body suddenly vaulted down the hallway at great speed; moved by an unseen force that positioned her just as easily as a chess player positions a pawn. In the blink of an eye, Dana found herself standing directly behind the monster, close enough to reach out and touch him had she been able to control her arms. From this distance, she could actually smell the murdering bastard. Smell the pure evil wafting off his body. A sickening combination of vinegar and battery acid and rotting meat that turned her stomach inside-out.
Inside the bedroom, Sara Whitestone lay on her side in the king-sized bed, dressed in only a flimsy off-white negligee, the night robe she’d been wearing a moment earlier now dripping from the doorknob of the closet like strands of shimmering silver garland dripping down from the branches of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. Her pretty head was propped up coquettishly on one small hand.
Sara smiled at the monster through the darkness. “You just gonna stay out there all night, or are you gonna come keep me company in this big old bed, lover boy?”
When the monster crossed the threshold of the master bedroom, Sara Whitestone bolted upright in abject horror as she suddenly realized he wasn’t her husband. Not even close. A tiny squeak escaped her lips, but she was much too stunned to immediately scream.
Taking in a deep breath through her mouth that expanded her birdlike chest nearly to the point of bursting, Sara finally let out a loud, earsplitting wail that caused the monster to race across the room and clamp a large, gloved hand over her mouth. “Shut the fuck up, bitch,” he hissed, spraying hot saliva all over Sara’s smooth cheek. “One more sound and I’ll chop up your precious goddamn son into so many pieces they won’t be able to put him back together again for the funeral.”
Sara Whitestone squirmed in the monster’s strong grasp, an impotent field mouse struggling to escape the eagle’s powerful talons. The monster smiled and leaned down into her face, his teeth sparkling brightly in the darkness and emitting an eerie, almost phosphorescent light. “Tell me something,” he sneered. “Do you even know who I am?”
A brief look of confusion colored in Sara Whitestone’s beautiful face, followed at once by a horrified jolt of recognition that Dana could feel inside her own chest. “Jeremiah,” Sara whispered.
The monster reared back and slapped Dana’s mother so hard across the face that Dana could hear Sara Whitestone’s teeth rattle in her mouth. “That’s not my name anymore, slut,” the monster spat. “You made good and goddamn sure of that a long time ago and now I’m going to kill you for it. For your information, my name’s Nathan Stiedowe now – not that you give a flying fuck. Stupid little cunts like you never give a fuck who you hurt, do you? Only worried about yourselves and your precious goddamn families. But before I kill you, tell me something first, Mom. How could you do it, anyway?
“How could you give away your own fucking baby?”
CHAPTER 51
Randy McMichael – “R-Mac” to his many legions of fans – was a Cleveland boy all the way, born and bred right there in The Renaissance City. He’d die there too, Angel felt certain. One of the most – i
f not the most – popular guys in town.
Randy McMichael had honed his considerable baseball skills on the sandlots all around Cleveland – east, west, north and south – breaking just about every notable record that existed for a high school player to break during his time at St. Ignatius High School in Lakewood, where he’d somehow also found the time to star on the football field and basketball court, as well.
Six-five and devastatingly handsome, every Division I college in the nation had drooled over McMichael when he’d graduated from high school in 1990. Wooed him, bribed him, did whatever the hell it took to entice the blonde-haired, blue-eyed phenom to their respective schools. But Randy McMichael had turned them all down flat, instead choosing the relatively obscure Cleveland State University as the place where he’d be breaking records for the next four years of his life.
And break records he did. Most home runs. Most hits. Most runs batted in. Highest batting average. National Collegiate Player of the Year as both a junior and senior. A slick-fielding shortstop who moonlighted every five days as the most-dominant pitcher on the staff. A fastball that topped out in the upper-nineties and a curveball that broke from twelve to six smoother than the second hand on a Rolex watch.
Just as he’d done at St. Ignatius, Randy McMichael quickly got down to the business of making the CSU record book his bitch, as well.
After college, it had been more of the same from all of the Major League teams, each of them beating a path to his door like a pack of lovesick teenagers hell-bent upon landing the prettiest girl in town for themselves.
Taken by the New York Yankees with the No. 1 overall pick in the 1994 amateur draft, Randy McMichael had endeared himself to Cleveland fans for all time when he’d told Yankees’ owner and fellow Cleveland boy George Steinbrenner to go fuck himself, that he’d never play for his shitbird team in a million years. Instead, McMichael had sat out the entire season so that his beloved Indians could select him with the first pick the following spring.