MYSTERY THRILLER DOUBLE PLAY BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

Blankenship nodded.

  “Worse than the Laura Settle footage?”

  Blankenship knitted his eyebrows thoughtfully. “Well, I’d say it’s just as bad. Hard to rank things like that. Anyway, it’s Marjorie Trimble’s murder on video, interspersed with a personal message from our new friend here in the black hood.”

  Dana felt a tickle of hope flutter in her chest. Whenever a killer made personal contact, it meant they’d most likely left open a window somewhere. Now all she and Blankenship needed to do was find it.

  Still, a task much easier said than done.

  “If the murder’s on video, that’s got to be a good thing for us, right?” she asked. “Maybe Criminal Justice Information Services can run the asshole’s facial features and match them up with a set of fingerprints already on file. This could be just the major break we’ve been waiting for.”

  Blankenship let out a slow breath. “Well, I wouldn’t pin my hopes on that if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You absolutely sure you’re OK to watch this?’

  Dana nodded. “Yeah. Let’s just get it over with it already. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  Blankenship leaned forward in his seat and tapped the large black button again. “OK, Dana, but this is why you shouldn’t pin your hopes to it.”

  Dana slid her stare back over to the television monitor as it sprang to life two feet away. The grainy, black-and-white video began with an outside camera taping Marjorie Trimble’s return home as she pulled her brand-new Mercedes into her long, winding driveway, then switched at once to an inside camera when Trimble stepped inside the marble-tile foyer.

  Dana watched the banker toss her car keys onto a small table shoved up against the north wall near the staircase, pausing for a moment to study her reflection in the expensive-looking mirror hanging above. The woman tried to smile at herself, but it didn’t work. Dana empathized with her at once. She knew the feeling all too well for herself. After all, smiling at yourself was a pretty hard task to accomplish when you didn’t think you deserved it.

  Two seconds later, she gasped out loud as a blurred-out figure suddenly stepped into the picture from the right-hand side of the screen and slammed a long knife deep into Marjorie Trimble’s slightly distended belly, just as the woman turned away from the mirror.

  The sharp steel sliced effortlessly through skin and fat and muscle in nauseating sprays of red. Then the glittering blade wrenched upward violently, spilling Marjorie Trimble’s entrails all over the marble-tiled floor at her feet in a wet rush of unfurling innards. Dana gagged hard and almost projectile-vomited all over the surveillance equipment.

  She lurched forward and hit the large black button to put a stop to the bloody massacre going on in the video. “Oh my God,” she breathed. Hot tears sprang into her pale blue eyes and streaked down her cheeks. Her voice trembled. “Oh my fucking God.”

  Blankenship rose quickly to his feet and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Fuck,” he hissed though clenched teeth, shaking his head and closing his eyes briefly before opening them up again. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you watch it, Dana. I’m such a goddamn idiot. I’m sorry. Here, sit down.”

  Dana let Blankenship lower her into the chair he’d just vacated. She swallowed hard, trying to keep the powerful storm brewing inside her gut from exploding through her mouth in a sickening mixture of stomach acid and undigested food.

  “You want some water?” Blankenship asked. A look of concern colored in his soft brown eyes. “I can run upstairs real quick and grab you a glass. Not a problem at all.”

  Dana shook her head and winced against the foul rush of bile in her mouth. She was thirsty – parched, as a matter of fact – but she didn’t want Blankenship to leave her alone in the basement. Not right now, anyway. Not after what she’d just witnessed. “No, thanks,” she said unsteadily, still trying to calm her shaking hands. Didn’t work. Not even a little bit. “What else is on the tape?”

  “Just the message from the jerk in the hood. He says…”

  “I want to see it, Bruce.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s a very good…”

  “I said I want to see the fucking thing, Blankenship,” she snapped. “Just play the goddamn video already.”

  Blankenship twisted up his face in offense. “Fine, Dana. Relax. You don’t have to bite my head off about it. I was just looking out for you, for Christ’s sake.”

  Dana’s cheeks flushed hot. She tried to apologize to him with her eyes, but when that didn’t work, she forced herself to say the words out loud. “I’m sorry, Bruce. I appreciate your concern, I really do, but I want to see the rest of the video for myself. Need to see the rest of it for myself.”

  Blankenship shook his head in irritation and leaned forward to press the black button again, obviously not wanting to continue the argument any further. He depressed the black button for several seconds, fast-forwarding the video through the blurred-out man’s exit from Trimble’s house after the sadistic asshole had finished butchering the pregnant woman. Finally, after a jumpy edit, the man in the black hood stared directly out from the television monitor.

  His ice-blue eyes leapt from the screen like a rapist in the night. His voice came over the speakers deep and slow, computer-altered by a speech-masking device.

  “For unclean coons, killing them has energized faithful Brotherhood intentions. Forgotten under cloaks, kindred thoughts honor every fanciful break in failed undertakings, constantly keeping their hatred enveloped for Black interlopers foisted upon Christian Klansmen.”

  The video jumped forward shakily, then began anew from the start. “For unclean coons, killing them has energized faithful Brotherhood intentions. Forgotten under cloaks, kindred thoughts honor…”

  Dana watched and listened to the loop three times through before leaning forward and putting a stop to the video with another press of the black button. She glanced up at Blankenship. “Same stupid code?” she asked.

  Blankenship nodded.

  “What does it say this time?”

  A dark look flashed across his handsome features. “It says: “Fuck the FBI.”

  CHAPTER 70

  Angel left the cemetery after her maybe/maybe-not encounter with Granny Bernice and drove downtown before parking the Cabriolet in a public lot.

  Twenty bucks, which really pissed her off, but what could she do about it? Barter? This wasn’t a Middle Eastern bazaar here, where you haggled down prices. This was Cleveland. And in Cleveland you did what all Clevelanders did – you shot the parking-lot attendant a passive-aggressive glare and then you paid whatever the hell the handwritten sign posted outside the guard gate said you paid.

  In this case: twenty bucks.

  Angel slid the Cabriolet into an empty space between a dust-covered minivan and a huge pickup truck sitting on monster tires before exiting her car and stepping out onto the blacktopped pavement, tucking her keys into her purse as she did so.

  She closed her eyes and lifted up her face to warm her skin in the bright sunlight that was streaming down from the again-cloudless sky before embarking upon what Paul Hogan in the movie Crocodile Dundee might have called a “walkabout”.

  Angel stretched her neck in preparation for her journey. She’d come downtown today in an effort to repair her troubled relationship with the city of Cleveland, to make peace with the much-maligned “Armpit of America” – a place that had proved almost as influential in shaping her life as Granny Bernice had. And to heal her troubled relationship with the city, Angel knew that she’d need to get close to it again. Walk its streets. Take in its sights. Smell its familiar smells. To press her ear against the very chest of Cleveland and listen to its heartbeat. To get lost in the city’s grime-covered streets in a way that only someone who’d actually been born there could ever get lost in them.

  Angel relaxed her mind while she listened to the dissonant yet somehow beautiful chorus of the city. Seagulls squawked noisily high in the air abov
e Lake Erie, floating effortlessly on the soft breeze and looking like the simple squiggles in a child’s crayon drawing. A hundred yards to her right, the rattle of rusted-out carburetors filled her ears while the mid-day traffic zipped incessantly down I-90. From the far corner of the parking lot came the hushed voices of a couple quietly fighting.

  This was it. This was Cleveland. Her home.

  Angel opened up her eyes again and took a deep breath through her nostrils, catching the sharp scent of sulfuric smoke from the LTV steel plant half a mile away – an intimidating, almost gothic structure that stood watch over the city in much the same way the Eiffel Tower stood watch over Paris.

  Despite the undeniably unpleasantness of the odor, Angel breathed it in again, somehow comforted by what most people probably would have considered an offending smell. Like it or not, this was Cleveland. Her Cleveland. Warts and all. And as much as she never wanted to compare herself to a baby-murdering piece of shit like Randy McMichael, she was a Clevelander all the way, too. Always had been and always would be. Felt pride in the city even though most people around the country probably thought Cleveland didn’t have a single damn thing to feel proud about.

  Still, Angel knew better than that, knew for a certainty that Cleveland possessed a resilient soul hidden beneath it ugly gray exterior, a soul unlike the soul of any other big city in the entire world. Getting kicked around by the rest of the country for so long had allowed the residents of The Renaissance City to band together and fight back, their fists balled up and steely looks of determination glinting in their narrowed eyes – though they’d certainly lost far more battles than they’d ever won. Still, it didn’t matter if you got your nose bloodied up and your lip busted and your eyes blackened. What mattered was that you didn’t back down from the fight the bully offered. Because even when you got your collective ass kicked as often and badly as Cleveland did, there lay a certain sort of bittersweet moral victory in the knowledge that you hadn’t just laid down for your more-powerful attacker. Angel supposed that if you hadn’t grown up in Cleveland you simply wouldn’t have been able to understand it.

  But she understood.

  Finally setting off on foot down Marginal Road, she took a right onto East 9th Street a few minutes later and came to a stop in front of the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame & Museum. Taking off her dark sunglasses, she stared up at the crown jewel of the city – a quirky twist of angled metal and glass that had been designed by world-renowned architect I.M. Pei, the same man who’d designed the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and the first foreign-born architect to ever work on the Louvre in France.

  The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame marked the unquestioned focal point of downtown, finally putting the city on the map in a good way for once in Cleveland’s history – though even that much hadn’t come easy for them. Soon after Cleveland had been awarded the museum, Rock Hall co-founder Jann Wenner – a former editor of Rolling Stone magazine – actually had the gall to say, “One of the small, sad things is we didn’t do it New York in the first place.”

  Hey, fuck you, too, Jann Wenner.

  Finally turning away from Cleveland’s glittering crown jewel, Angel bought a foot-long hot dog from a street vendor on the corner and slathered it with mustard and onions before heading in the general direction of her modest office on the fourth floor of the Caxton Building over on Prospect Avenue. While she was downtown, she might as well get a little work done today. At least that way her day couldn’t be considered a complete waste.

  Reaching the intersection of Ontario Street and Carnegie Avenue ten minutes later, on a whim, she decided against going into work at all that day and instead joined the waves of Indians fans rolling toward the baseball stadium. And why not? The Yankees were still in town for another day and maybe – just maybe – this would be the day the Tribe finally beat the bullies. Bloodied up their noses. Busted their lips. Blackened their eyes. Stranger things had certainly happened in the history of the world – though admittedly not many.

  A scalper thirty feet to Angel’s right caught her attention. “Tickets!” he shouted, holding her stare while he waved around the tickets in front of his face like a geisha’s fan. “I’ve got tickets here!”

  Angel approached him, still going with the feeling of impulsiveness that had overtaken her. She’d never bought a ticket from a scalper before, but whatever. Beat the hell out of standing in line at the walk-up window. “How much?” she asked.

  The scalper, a black man, of course, gave Angel the once-over. “How many you need, sweetheart?”

  “Just one.”

  The scalper looked her over more intently, lingering at her breasts this time. “Well, for a fine sister like you, I’ll cut you a deal. Thirty bucks.”

  “Where’s the seat?”

  The scalper looked down at the tickets in his hand. “Section 567.”

  Angel screwed up her face. “You think I’m from out of town or something? That’s in the nosebleeds. I’ll give you ten bucks for it.”

  “Twenty-five,” the scalper countered. “They’re playing the Yankees.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Sold.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Angel settled into her seat in the uppermost reaches of the stadium. In the top of the first inning – when the Yankees had already jumped out to a seven-to-nothing lead – she purchased and downed her first beer in short order.

  Her fifth beer came in the third inning, by which time the Bronx Bombers had tacked on an additional seven runs, extending their lead to fourteen to zip. As the innings flew by and the Yankees piled up even more runs, Angel drank even more beers, doing her best to keep the dizzying pace with every pinstriped run that crossed the plate. Wasn’t easy. The more the Indians got plastered, the more she got plastered herself. And why not, right? Misery loved company. Always had and always would.

  Especially when you lived in a city like Cleveland.

  In the seventh inning – the cutoff for alcohol sales and with the Indians now down twenty-four to one – Angel ordered her tenth and final beer of the day before focusing her blurry vision on the loudmouthed Yankees’ fan sitting ten rows down.

  Angel narrowed her eyes. The portly man had outfitted himself head-to-toe in New York attire, and he’d screamed out his healthy lungs in ecstasy each and every time his beloved Yankees had scored another run, as though his stupid team had just discovered the cure for cancer or something.

  When the Yankees scored their twenty-fifth run in the top of the ninth inning, the obnoxious jerk wearing his authentic-looking Derek Jeter jersey let out yet another tooth-grating “Woooo-hooo!”, and Angel finally unleashed her own alcohol-lubricated tongue. Honestly, she’d surprised herself by keeping it in check for this long.

  “Hey!” she slurred as loudly as she could manage. “You there in the Jeter jersey.”

  The Yankees fan turned around to face her. “You talkin’ to me, sweetheart?”

  Angel nodded, feeling like she was talking to Robert DeNiro’s “Travis Bickle” character in Taxi Driver. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  Angel narrowed her bloodshot eyes some more as several nearby fans turned to watch the brewing spectacle. “I want you to shut the fuck up already, that’s what the fuck I want.’

  The Yankees’ fan pulled back his head in mock offence and twisted his face into a smirk. Obviously, this didn’t mark his first rodeo. Not even close. Still, was the big surprise in that? Who in the world had ever been more combative and confrontational than New Yorkers?

  Nobody, that’s who.

  “Yo, don’t be such a hater, sweetheart,” the man said, egged on by his buddy standing next to him in an Alex Rodriguez jersey. “Twenty-seven world championships and counting, baby.”

  Angel hiccupped. Beer bubbled up from her stomach and foamed in her esophagus. She swallowed it down. “What did you just call me?” she snapped. “You better watch your mouth, cuz I ain�
��t your baby or your sweetheart.”

  The remaining fans in Section 567 who weren’t already watching them turned their attention from the game in order to better take in the clever verbal exchange for themselves. Obviously feeding on this increased public awareness, the Yankees fan said, “Well, you can be my baby and my sweetheart, if you want, doll face. What’s your number, baby?”

  Angel looked down at the fresh beer in her hand, then refocused her blurry vision on her adversary. “Watch your step, asshole,” she said, swaying back and forth in her aisle on rubbery legs. “Just watch your fuckin’ step right now.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll come down there and kick your goddamn ass, that’s what.”

  The Yankees fan rolled his eyes. He spread his arms wide in front of his body. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’d sure as hell like to see that, baby.”

  Just then, as though possessed of a mind of its own, the beer in Angel’s right hand suddenly took flight. Unbelievably – despite her world-class drunkenness – she somehow scored a direct hit on the obnoxious jerk even from ten rows up, drenching the New York fan in a cold shower of nine-dollar suds.

  That was when security finally came rushing up to the scene to “help” Angel out of the stadium.

  As two men in matching blue-and-white uniforms held her tightly by her arms on either side of her body and hustled her down the stairs, the huge Jumbotron behind the center field wall followed all the action going on in Section 567. The chorus that rose up from the forty thousand spectators in attendance didn’t surprise Angel in the least. After all, it was the same song they always sang whenever a fan got ejected from a game.

  “Na, na, na, na! Na, na, na, na! Hey, hey, hey – gooodbyee!”

  Angel burped up some more beer while her security escort dragged her past the now-soaked Yankees fan. The Derek Jeter fan smiled happily at her. “See ya later, sweetheart. Have fun in jail, baby!”

  Five minutes later, stadium security handed her off to a uniformed Cleveland cop, who read Angel her Miranda rights before handcuffing her wrists behind her back and stuffing her inside the back of a police vehicle.