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

by Osborne, Jon

  World spinning, Angel stared blankly out the grimy window as the cop pulled away from Progressive Field and swung a left-hand turn onto Carnegie Avenue before easing his vehicle over to the side of the road. Sliding out from his position behind the steering wheel, the man left the cruiser’s engine running and pulled open Angel’s door in back. “Get out,” he barked.

  Angel did as she was instructed.

  “Now lean your body forward against the car.”

  Again, Angel did as she’d been instructed. A moment later, a small click! sounded in her ears as the locking mechanism on her handcuffs disengaged.

  “Now turn around.”

  Angel turned around. Lieutenant Dan Yarborough – the very first partner she’d ever had during her days on the Cleveland police force – lifted his bushy eyebrows and shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Angel. Getting into a drunken fight at a baseball game? Don’t you have anything better to do with yourself on a Wednesday afternoon these days?”

  Angel rubbed at her wrists where her silver bracelets had been snapped into place just a moment earlier. “Nope, Dan. Not a goddamn thing.”

  Yarborough wrinkled up his nose. “For Christ’s sake, you smell like a fucking brewery. C’mon, get in the front seat and I’ll give you a ride home so you can sleep this shit off.”

  Angel took an unsteady step toward the passenger side of the cruiser. Looking over the hood at her former partner a moment later, she asked, “Can we stop at a store first?”

  “For what?”

  “So I can buy some more beer. I don’t want to lose my buzz.”

  Yarborough exhaled forcefully through his nostrils. “Just get in the fucking car, Angel.”

  CHAPTER 71

  Inside his fine den while Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique played on the antique phonograph over in the corner, the Race Master adjusted the picture on a flat-screen television monitor that was sitting on his massive desk, then sat back in his leather chair in front of a towering bookshelf upon which sat scores of history books, sagging the wooden shelves beneath their heavy weight.

  Furrowing his brow in concentration, he watched the FBI special agents watching him in return.

  On video, of course.

  The Race Master pursed his thin lips. Just as he’d suspected, Bruce Blankenship had followed the trail of wires tucked inside the walls of Marjorie Trimble’s mansion down to the basement. And why wouldn’t he? Why should the man keep searching for something he’d already found?

  Still, the FBI agent had thought himself too clever by half. Hadn’t noticed the pinhole camera that was staring him and his new partner directly in the face right now. The same pinhole camera that was currently transmitting images of the feds back into the Race Master’s impeccably appointed den.

  The female agent’s face blanched, then turned an alarming shade of purple while she watched the Sacramento operative butchering Marjorie Trimble like the black pig she’d been. Cringing in horror, the woman looked as though she might throw up the contents of her stomach as the sharp knife dug deep into the banker’s slightly distended belly, ripping open her flesh in mesmerizing splashes of red and purple before spilling her guts onto the marble-tiled floor in a disgusting wet rush.

  The Race Master leaned forward in his office chair and studied his operative’s work more closely. Not half-bad work. He’d need to remember to reward the man with a hefty monetary bonus for the exemplary performance. And why not? After all, you got what you paid for, now didn’t you?

  Most of the time, at least.

  The Race Master shook his head in irritation and forced his thoughts away from O’Reilly and Collins back in Cleveland. He’d deal with those two sticky-fingered thieves soon enough, in much the same manner he’d dealt with Christopher Johansen. Right now, though, he had bigger fish to fry. Because judging by the way Whitestone and Blankenship were examining the security footage of Trimble’s grisly murder, it was a fair bet that they wouldn’t give up on their task any time soon and just walk away. They had a job to do, for Christ’s sake.

  Still, so did the Race Master.

  The Race Master cut his gaze over to the antique phone on the corner of his desk. One call – perhaps two – would bring the whole thing to an exceedingly abrupt end, but he didn’t exactly relish the prospect of the hell-storm that would no doubt come raining down over his head should he dare take the bold step of ordering the cold-blooded murders of two federal agents. So for now he’d simply watch them.

  Watch them and wait.

  Shaking away that thought, he slid open a drawer on the left-hand side of his substantial desk and extracted a thin file on Dana Whitestone, flipping through the pages for a moment or two before tossing it onto the cluttered surface of his desk next to the Walther. He’d already memorized the information contained within:

  Parents murdered when she’d been just four years old. Best friend also cut down by the masterful hand of Nathan Stiedowe – who’d also somehow found the time to take out Whitestone’s former partner and mentor, Crawford Bell, while he’d been at it. Bad as that had been, though, even those four particularly bloody murders hadn’t marked the end of it for the woman. Because then there’d also been the vicious – not to mention exceedingly clever – murder of Whitestone’s last partner, Jeremy Brown.

  The Race Master reached into his desk again and extracted a file on the federal agent whose windpipe had been severed eighteen months earlier in the ritzy Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan.

  Lighting up a cigar and blowing out a huge cloud of smoke, he tapped a line of ash into the ivory ashtray before leaning back in his chair again and flipping through Brown’s file. After first learning of the man’s spectacular demise sometime earlier, the Race Master had immediately gone to work establishing a secret correspondence with the interesting young murderer who’d pulled off the impressive deed. An interesting young murderer who now resided in an upstate New York mental institution for youthful criminal offenders.

  The Race Master smiled. Jack Yuntz had picked up on the simple-but-effective coded communication almost at once – no small feat to accomplish considering the boy’s tender years. From there, all of the necessary arrangements had been made. So even if the Race Master’s ambitious plan to spring his brother from his cold prison cell in Germany should ultimately fail, Dana Whitestone wouldn’t be off the hook for her meddling. Instead, the celebrated FBI agent whose picture had so recently graced the cover of Newsweek would pay for her irritating habit of always getting in the way of grown men’s work. And she’d pay for it in blood.

  Though it wouldn’t be her own.

  The Race Master stubbed out his cigar in a small shower of orange embers and cautioned himself to slow down. No point in thinking along those lines at this juncture. No point in getting ahead of himself here. Because he had absolutely zero plans to fail in his mission. Couldn’t fail in his mission, really. Because his older brother was still sitting in a cold prison cell somewhere deep inside the heart of the Fatherland right now, counting on him. And blood was thicker than water, wasn’t it?

  Sure as hell was. Just ask poor Marjorie Trimble about that much.

  Not that the butchered woman would be likely to answer you any time soon, of course.

  CHAPTER 72

  Two agents from the Sacramento field office – both women and noted specialists in video analysis – joined Dana and Blankenship in Marjorie Trimble’s basement forty minutes later.

  “It’s your basic setup,” said Jessica Kingfisher, spooling through the yards of multi-colored wires that were coming in through the wall directly in front of the bank of television monitors. “Hardwired to the house with no outside access that I can see from here. Pretty much useless as a home-defense system unless the only thing you were worried about was catching the help stealing silverware.”

  Blankenship dug an elbow lightly into Dana’s ribs. “See? I told you.”

  Kingfisher, a striking redhead with sparkling gree
n eyes and a flawless porcelain complexion, glanced up at Blankenship. “Well, you were right about that much, Agent Blankenship,” she said. “But did you happen to find anything else interesting in the surveillance footage? Other than Marjorie Trimble’s gruesome murder and the hooded guy’s message?”

  Blankenship lifted his eyebrows at her. “What do you mean by that? Anything interesting like what?”

  Kingfisher smirked. “Like any badly made amateur porn?”

  Blankenship’s cheeks flushed. “Of course not,” he said, weakly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Kingfisher deepened her smirk, then turned to her partner, who was seated in front of the bank of television monitors. “What do you have, Bethany?”

  Special Agent Bethany Quartz, a forty-two-year-old African-American mother of four and a woman who just so happened to moonlight as one of the Bureau’s top linguists, fiddled with some buttons on the control panel in front of her. “Here,” Quartz said, pointing to the screen where a bookshelf could be seen behind the hooded man’s head. “We’ve got some handwriting on the cover of a book on the third shelf.”

  All four agents leaned in as Quartz sharpened the image on the screen. “It’s Mein Kampf,” the agent said after a moment or two, narrowing her pretty brown eyes. “Adolf Hitler’s ‘how-to’ guide on cleansing the world of undesirables. Anyway, from the look of it, I’d say it’s very old and printed in its original German. Quite the find for the right collector. Could be a first edition. Probably worth a small fortune if it is.”

  Dana frowned. “What does the handwriting on the cover say?” she asked.

  Quartz zoomed in some more. Neat penmanship covered a clean white space on the cover of the book. To Dana’s eyes, the handwriting just as well might have been hieroglyphics. Luckily for them, though, Quartz was a master at deciphering such things.

  “It’s an inscription,” Quartz said, zooming in on the book some more while putting her language skills on display. “Also written in German.”

  “What’s it say?” Blankenship asked.

  Quartz ran her stare over the writing, moving her lips silently. Finally, she leaned back in her chair and said, “‘To Jared, follow these teachings and your path will always be true, Father.’”

  Dana’s heartbeat thumped against her ribs. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “We’ve got a name.”

  Blankenship pursed his lips. “Yeah, but only a first name. We’re gonna need something more than that before we go around patting each other on the backs here.”

  Just then, Jessica Kingfisher leaned forward and stared at the wall facing them. “What the fuck’s that?” she asked, reaching a hand toward the wall.

  Dana’s gaze followed Kingfisher’s hand to the wall. When her eyes caught sight of the same thing her fellow G-woman’s had, her thumping heartbeat shifted from her ribcage to her throat.

  “That,” Dana said, “just might be the something more we need to go on.”

  CHAPTER 73

  Angel spent most of the next day in bed, recovering.

  Her skull throbbed; the four aspirin she’d taken upon first waking up might as well have been Flintstones vitamins for all the headache-reducing good they’d done. Her stomach bubbled over with nausea, necessitating several frantic trips to the toilet in order to avoid throwing up all over herself. Even after downing half a dozen sixteen-ounce bottles of water, her body still felt completely dehydrated.

  Served her right.

  Old black-and-white movies kept her company in bed for most of the day. Ernest Borgnine in Marty, for which the famously gap-toothed thespian had won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1955. Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, a film in which Hudson’s character had ironically feigned gayness in a clumsy effort to get closer to the beautiful and bubbly blonde-haired object of his desire. 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda, in which a dissenting juror attempted to change eleven other minds in a murder trial that might not be as clear-cut as it first seemed. Not as black and white as it first seemed.

  Angel shook her head, only exacerbating the excruciating pain inside her skull. The third movie’s title seemed especially appropriate to her. Because as it had played across the television set sitting on her oaken bureau fifteen feet away, one very angry woman joined the twelve angry men in that deliberation room.

  A very angry black woman.

  Angel winced again at the incessant headache cracking away at her temples. Black-and-white movies of the 1950s, meet the black-and-white reality of today.

  She sighed. The troubled relationship between the races went a lot deeper than just identifying the skin-color difference between those scalping tickets outside Progressive Field and those headed inside the stadium to watch the Indians get their butts kicked again by those goddamn Yankees for themselves, she knew. The black and white races seemed so different at times, yet so undeniably inseparable. Still, were they really so different?

  Lately, she’d begun to think so.

  Lynchings. Lunch counters. Colored water fountains. “Back of the bus, nigger” statements – spoken out loud in the 1950s and still silently spoken today through way too many white people’s eyeballs. As far as Angel was concerned, white didn’t make right – it only made trouble. And maybe the time had come to give some of that trouble right back to old whitey. Give him a bitter taste of his own hateful medicine.

  Finally dragging herself out of bed with a pained groan, she glanced over at the small digital alarm clock on her bedside table. 11:49 p.m. Late hour or not, though, she had something she needed to do. Now.

  No, check that.

  Something she wanted to do.

  CHAPTER 74

  The Race Master leaned back in his comfortable leather executive’s chair and watched Jessica Kingfisher’s puzzled stare find his hidden pinhole camera in Marjorie Trimble’s basement, the pretty FBI agent’s hand moving forward to block out the picture in a blur of manicured fingertips.

  Leaning forward again in his chair, the Race Master flipped off the connection and shrugged. Nothing to be concerned about here. Not really, anyway. He’d already considered the possibility they’d find his camera, had prepared for it, as a matter of fact. Still, it was highly unlikely the feds could trace the satellite signal coming from Sacramento all the way back to his Massachusetts den. And even if that did turn out to be the case, who the hell cared? It would take the FBI weeks – if not months – to do all the paperwork required to obtain the subscription details. Then they’d need to subpoena the subscription lists from Verizon Wireless before combing through them in a desperate effort to narrow down the gigantic pool of suspects. And even then, the Race Master certainly hadn’t been stupid enough to register the account under his own name. So, all things considered, he considered himself safe as a house.

  Besides, he didn’t need months – or even weeks – here. He needed just a few more days.

  Ninety minutes later, the Race Master led a collared Bane onto the chartered Cessna that was waiting for them on the narrow tarmac of a private airport in Worcester –about half-hour’s drive north of Southbridge. Settling down into his seat, he looked around the sumptuous interior of the plane and nodded approvingly. The Cessna had been outfitted with all the creature comforts a discerning traveler could possibly desire: comfortable captain’s chairs upholstered in the finest leather available on the market; a fully stocked bar; a large, flat-screen television set with built-in DVD player; Internet and telephone access even when the plane had lifted off and was zipping along like a sharp silver knife through the endless blue skies six miles above the ground.

  Ten minutes later, the pilot – a man who’d long been sympathetic to the Brotherhood’s cause – pulled back on his joystick in the cockpit and pointed the Cessna’s nose skyward.

  The Race Master took a deep breath through his nostrils as the plane lifted off and let it out again in a slow rush over his teeth. This was it. Do or die time. No turning back now.

  When they were cruising along at an a
ltitude of thirty thousand feet, the Race Master reached into the caddy attached to his chair and flipped on the television set with the remote control.

  A Nazi documentary in its original German sprang to life on the screen, and his heart twinged in his chest at the sight of his beloved homeland. Thousands of excited people lined the downtown Berlin streets, waving tiny Nazi flags in ecstasy while offering up bold Nazi salutes to the Fuhrer as the great man passed by in a heavily guarded motorcade.

  Sighing, the Race Master leaned down and unsnapped the briefcase at his feet, extracting a folder before going over his correspondence with young master Yuntz – the exceedingly interesting boy who’d cut down FBI Special Agent Jeremy Brown in the ritzy Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel in downtown Manhattan eighteen months earlier. A year and a half into his sentence already, the sixteen-year-old chess prodigy still had another nine years to go yet on his thoroughly unjust sentence.

  Technically speaking, of course.

  Flipping open the folder and taking out the thick sheaf of papers that he and Jack Yuntz had been sending back and forth to one another over the past several months, the Race Master began to read, starting with the first note he’d ever sent the boy:

  QUEEN-ROOK-KNIGHT-BISHOP-PAWN3. PAWN. QUEEN-BISHOP-PAWN2. BISHOP2-ROOK2-PAWN4. PAWN4-ROOK2-BISHOP2. QUEEN-ROOK-PAWN. PAWN2-QUEEN-ROOK. QUEEN-BISHOP. PAWN. QUEEN-ROOK2-BISHOP2. PAWN. KNIGHT2-PAWN. PAWN. BISHOP2-KNIGHT2-PAWN. PAWN5?

  The boy’s answer had come three short days later:

  QUEEN-ROOK2-BISHOP2!

  The Race Master smiled; pleased again with how easily Jack Yuntz had picked up on the code. Though he’d initially feared things might turn out more complicated than that – that his meaning wouldn’t be read between the lines – that hadn’t turned out to be the case at all.