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

by Osborne, Jon

  The Race Master pulled off his rubber gloves carefully and deposited them into a waiting plastic bag, being very careful to not burn his own skin. He knew that Bane didn’t need any sort of artificial advantage here, of course, but he also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the other dog would be similarly equipped. Standard operating procedure in the highly illegal world of underground dog fighting. If you weren’t cheating, it simply meant you weren’t trying hard enough.

  The Race Master patted Bane’s muscular chest again and leaned down to peer directly into his beloved pet’s coal-black eyes. The dog stared back at him, steely and unblinking, leaving no doubt at all that the powerful canine stood ready and willing to do what he’d been born and raised to do.

  Kill.

  CHAPTER 81

  Dana and Blankenship had just left Angel Monroe’s office on Prospect Avenue when Dana’s cellphone sounded inside her purse.

  She dug it out just as she and Blankenship reached her Protégé in the underground parking lot of the Caxton Building. Glancing down at the caller ID, she frowned, not recognizing the number.

  She flipped open the phone and placed it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Special Agent Whitestone, it’s Shelley Margolis. How are you doing today?”

  Dana’s heart immediately leapt up into her throat and began taking vicious potshots at her carotid artery. She took in a deep breath to steady herself. “I’m fine Dr. Margolis,” she said, surprising herself by just how calm her voice sounded. “And you?”

  “I’m great, Agent Whitestone, thanks so much for asking. Anyway, are you terribly busy at the moment?”

  Dana cut her stare over to Blankenship, who lifted up his eyebrows on his forehead and gave her the “thumbs-up” sign over the hood of the Protégé in a show of encouragement, having heard Dana address the child-care advocate by name.

  “No,” Dana said, checking her watch. And it was the truth. According to Bill Krugman, Dana and Blankenship were to take off the rest of day after they’d obtained the case file on Sasha Diggs from the Cleveland-based private investigator – no ifs, ands or buts about it. After all, even the good guys needed a little time off to rest up every now and then.

  “Great,” Margolis said. “I’m so happy to hear that. Anyway, I really hate to spring this on you at the last minute like this, but is there any way you could meet me at the Chuck E. Cheese over in Parma in about an hour or so?”

  Dana pressed her lips together, confused. Chuck E. Cheese? Why the hell would Margolis want to meet her at a children’s restaurant featuring six-foot-tall animatronic mice, ridiculously flat soda and pizza that tasted even worse than the greasy circles of cardboard upon which it arrived?

  Then it hit her. Hard.

  “Of course,” Dana breathed, feeling her knees buckle beneath her. She paused and took another deep breath, forcing herself to choose her next words carefully. She didn’t want to fuck this up. “Will we be meeting alone, Dr. Margolis?”

  Margolis laughed. “I knew the mention of Chuck E. Cheese would lift your antennae. Anyway, no, we won’t be meeting alone. Bradley will be joining us for lunch, if that’s OK with you. I’d really like to see the two of you in action together before the final adoption decision is made.”

  Dana leaned her trembling body against the Protégé for support. Ten feet away, Blankenship shot her a sympathetic look before pretending to check his own cellphone, attempting to give her the illusion of privacy. “Of course it’s OK with me,” Dana said. “As a matter of fact, I’d like nothing else better in the entire world.”

  “Fantastic. The restaurant is on West Ridgewood Road, in case you didn’t already know. You could probably find it with your GPS, if you needed to. Anyway, so I’ll see you in Parma around two-thirty?”

  Dana checked her watch again. One twenty-two p.m. now, which made it T-minus sixty-eight minutes and counting. After that, who knew what her world would look like? If nothing else, though, for better or worse, she knew it would never look the same again.

  Only one way to find out.

  “That sounds great, Dr. Margolis. I’ll see you then.”

  She flipped off her phone and stared at Blankenship across the hood of the Protégé. “Wow,” she said, widening her pale blue eyes in astonishment while her reeling brain tried desperately to process all the details of the stunning phone call. “Just, wow.”

  Blankenship smiled at her and slipped his cellphone back into his blazer, finally ending the pretense of not having listened in to the entire call. “Good news?” he asked.

  Dana closed her eyes. “I sure as hell hope so, Bruce. I guess I’ll know for sure in about an hour and a half.”

  Even though Blankenship was standing just feet away, his voice sounded as though he were calling her long-distance from another country – static-y connection and all. “You’ll knock ‘em dead, Dana,” her partner said. “Don’t you worry about that. I’m not.”

  Dana opened her eyes again. “Just so long as they don’t knock me dead first, right?”

  ***

  After dropping off Blankenship at his temporary home of the Wyndham Hotel on Euclid Avenue twenty minutes later, Dana raced over to the east side of Cleveland at ninety miles an hour, pressing down the gas pedal all the way to the floorboard and not giving a damn about the possibility of receiving any speeding tickets. If need be, she’d pull rank so fast on any state trooper foolish enough to pull her over right now that she’d make his or her goddamn head spin right off their shoulders. No way in hell she was going to be late for this. Not today. Not when there was this much at stake.

  Not when she could be on her way to meet her kid.

  She pulled into the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese in Parma just as the digital clock on the Protégé’s dashboard flipped over to two p.m. Selecting a parking spot about forty yards away from the restaurant’s entrance, she leaned over and extracted a pair of binoculars from the glove box.

  Then she waited.

  The seconds passed by slowly, finally stretching into minutes that seemed to take hours. Each successive tick of the clock made her feel like she was serving a fifty-year prison sentence with all the heartless murderers she’d put away over the course of her career. Nathan Stiedowe. Jack Yuntz. Timothy Preston. Dozens of others.

  Two-oh-three p.m. Two-oh-seven. Two-nineteen. Finally, at two twenty-seven p.m., she lifted the binoculars to her face and brought into sharp focus the image of Margolis holding little Bradley’s hand as they made their way inside the busy restaurant.

  Dana’s heart stopped beating dead in her chest. Nausea swirled in her gut. This was it. Do or die time. No turning back now.

  She exited the Protégé and crossed the parking lot on rubbery legs. Pulling open the door several moments later, she stepped inside.

  Ten feet away and wearing a clean white “Sponge Bob” T-shirt to go along with his adorable little khaki shorts, Bradley turned around in the waiting area of the restaurant and smiled up at her shyly. Then he looked down at the floor for a moment before lifting his stare again. “There you are,” he said quietly. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

  Ice-cold goose flesh danced across Dana’s skin. Finally, she smiled back at the little boy. Her son? “I’ve been waiting a long time for you, too, Bradley,” she croaked, her unsteady voice wavering so badly in her throat she feared it would shatter away into a million tiny pieces. Hot tears flooded into her eyes, blurring her vision before slipping down her cheeks.

  Bradley paused uncertainly. Then, suddenly, he rushed over to her and threw his tiny arms around her legs. Looking up at her with his enormous blue eyes, he asked, “Are you going to be my new mommy?”

  Dana cut her stinging gaze over to Margolis. The child psychologist nodded. “Just as soon as I can receive the final approval from my superiors, Agent Whitestone, I plan on recommending that you and little Bradley here become a family.”

  Dana’s heart snapped clean in two inside her chest – for the first time in
her life in a good way. Wrapping her arms around the little boy’s – her son’s – frail body, she held on tight, knowing that she’d never, ever let him go.

  She swallowed back painful sobs. “Yes, Bradley,” she choked out, feeling another powerful wave of goose flesh ripple across her freezing skin. “I’m going to be your new mommy.”

  CHAPTER 82

  Half an hour after Dana Whitestone and Bruce Blankenship had left her office in downtown Cleveland, Angel made her way down to the underground parking lot of The Caxton Building and started up the Cabriolet.

  Now that the feds were working the case, she’d have to work a bit more surreptitiously, of course, but there was no way in hell she was just going to step to the side on this one. Not even for someone as nice as Dana Whitestone.

  Twenty minutes later, she was back on Jelani Diggs’s front porch in Westlake. The sky overhead still featured the same menacing gray cast as it had earlier in the day – the gusting, lake-effect wind clearly noticeable even here, ten miles inland.

  Jelani Diggs looked as though she’d aged twenty years since just the previous afternoon. Wearing a thick, hand-knit sweater, the brisk wind swept hard through her brittle silver hair as she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. “Angel,” she said in a flat voice, more a statement than anything else.

  Angel pressed her lips into a tight line and fought back the sudden urge to cry. She needed to stay strong here, though, she knew that. If not for her own sake, then for the old woman’s. “May I come in, ma’am?” she asked quietly.

  Jelani Diggs nodded slowly. She still seemed in a daze, still shocked into submission by the mind-bendingly brutal murder of her beloved granddaughter. And who the hell could blame her for that? Much as had been the case for Angel when Granny Bernice had died, the best parts of Jelani Diggs had probably died right along with Sasha and her unborn great-grandchild. “Of course, Angel,” the woman said in her dead monotone. “Please come in.”

  Angel followed Jelani Diggs into the house and through the living room, past a loudly ticking grandfather clock, before they entered the small kitchen. Other than the incessant ticking of the clock, however, the house featured an almost deafening silence, the air in every room stale and unmoving. To Angel’s nostrils, the house smelled like a place that never entertained any children; as though someone had come in with a gigantic vacuum cleaner and simply sucked all the life clean out.

  The picture of Jesus stared down from the wall over the kitchen table, His soft brown eyes moist and sad. Just like Jelani Diggs’s eyes.

  “You want some coffee?” the old woman asked.

  Angel shook her head and took a deep breath before bringing Jelani Diggs up to speed on the FBI’s abrupt appearance in the case, leaving out the part about Dana Whitestone’s promise that additional details would be available in tomorrow morning’s edition of the newspaper. Angel just didn’t feel like making the situation any harder on the woman than it already was. The poor thing still needed time to mourn.

  “I’d like to have another look in Sasha’s room,” Angel said while she and the old woman stood just feet away from one another other in the kitchen, though they might as well have been standing on entirely different planets at the moment. “I’d like to try to get into that computer of hers.”

  The old woman waved a hand lazily in front of her face, barely able to summon the energy to do even that much. “What does it matter now?” Jelani Diggs said. “My baby, my great-grandbaby, both dead.”

  The old woman paused and held Angel’s stare. “What did my great-grandbaby look like, Angel? What color eyes did she have? What color hair?”

  When Angel didn’t immediately answer, Jelani Diggs lowered her gaze to the floor. After a moment or two, her bony shoulders began to shake.

  Angel went to her and put a comforting arm around her skeletal shoulders. The old woman felt so tiny, so frail, so weak – as fragile as a newborn kitten. Her chest heaved up and down, but no tears came from her wounded eyes. Not any more, and maybe never again. Jelani Diggs was all cried out now, all dried up from the inside out.

  After several long moments, the shaking finally subsided.

  Looking up into Angel’s eyes again, Jelani Diggs’s own tired brown eyes showed the same kind of hurt that Angel recognized all too well from her own bathroom mirror. A defeat so complete that it was difficult to comprehend. A cold, hard wind had blown through her life and completely stripped away her soul, until it had become utterly bare. Bare all the way down to the fucking wood.

  “Take the computer with you,” the old woman said, waving her hand in the air again. “Take anything out of that room that Jesus wouldn’t approve of. I don’t want nothin’ to remind me of what my baby was doin’, Angel. I just want to remember her the way I want to remember her.”

  Angel took a large black garbage bag with her up to Sasha’s bedroom before emptying the drawer of sex-toys into it. Then she did the same with the lingerie drawer. Wrapping the power cord around the computer monitor, she placed it on top. The CPU went in last.

  Carrying the bag from the bottom, Angel descended the creaking stairs again, the bag’s weight heavy in her arms but surely nothing compared to the enormous weight pressing down on Jelani Diggs’s soul.

  Reaching the bottom of the steps, she found the old woman still standing in the living room, not having moved an inch since Angel had gone upstairs. Jelani Diggs had her bony arms wrapped tightly around her frail little body, as though she just couldn’t get warm for the life of her, no matter how many heavy sweaters she wore. She didn’t say a word as Angel left the house.

  Outside in the cold light of day, Angel let out a deep sigh and finally let the tears come streaming down her cheeks. She supposed there just wasn’t anything left to say anymore.

  Not for Jelani Diggs, and maybe not for her, either.

  CHAPTER 83

  Richard Patton’s static-y voice filled the Race Master’s left ear as the chartered Cessna streaked like a silver bullet toward Virginia across the rapidly darkening skies.

  “The female FBI agent – Dana Whitestone – is likely to be approved in her efforts to adopt the little boy, sir,” Patton said. “I just received the briefing from our man in the state records office.”

  The Race Master didn’t know whether to smile or frown. He’d need more information to decide. “Do you have a timeframe for this possibility, Richard?”

  Patton cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, I do. It’s likely to happen in the next week or so.”

  The Race Master paused. A week or so left him with more than enough time to complete his mission, and having Dana Whitestone’s mind occupied with unrelated matters certainly seemed an advantageous turn of events. Still, the woman’s FBI jacket told the story of just how tenacious she could be, even in the face of enormous pressure, so he’d need to be extremely careful with her, no matter what route he chose. But not too careful. Equal measures of offense and defence usually proved the best approach. “Very well, Richard,” the Race Master said. “Keep me apprised of any additional details as they become available.”

  “Yes, sir. I certainly will.”

  Switching off with Patton, the Race Master placed the telephone back into its cradle and stretched his muscular neck while the titillating idea wormed its way even deeper into his brain. As the wunderkind chess prodigy Jack Yuntz had so recently told him in the course of their cleverly coded correspondence, the real power in chess didn’t lay with the queens, as most people thought it did.

  The real power in chess lay with the pawns.

  CHAPTER 84

  Sitting across from each other at a glass-topped table in the Wyndham Hotel’s beautiful lobby restaurant the next morning, Dana and Blankenship enjoyed a late brunch.

  “So?” Blankenship asked, lifting his eyebrows as he spread cream cheese carefully across his toasted onion bagel with a silver butter knife. “What happened after the initial meeting then? Everything else at Chuck E. Cheese go smoothly from there
?”

  Dana took a long swallow of her orange juice, still feeling positively giddy from the events of the previous day. “Yep,” she said, trying to ignore the intense sensation of butterflies swarming in her stomach. She just couldn’t help herself, though. She was psyched. And why the hell not? She was going to be a mother. “Everything went smooth as silk.”

  Dana sat up straighter in her chair and enjoyed the feeling of pure energy flooding through her veins. She hadn’t felt this good this since she’d been four years old. And it was all because of little Bradley. The words tumbled out of her mouth like those of an excited sixteen-year-old girl describing her brand-new prom dress. “We ate our pizza – Bradley likes pepperoni and extra cheese on his – and then we played all the games at the restaurant. We played Skee-ball, air hockey, about fifty different arcade games, then we took our picture together in one of those silly little booths, then we…”

  Blankenship lifted a hand to cut her off. “Hold on, there, Dana. Just hold on one cotton-pickin’ second. Let’s see it.”

  Dana frowned. “See what?”

  Blankenship rolled his eyes. “The picture. I know you’ve got it with you in your purse right now. Don’t pretend you don’t. So, c’mon. Cough it up already.”

  Dana widened the smile that had been frozen to her face for the past twenty-two hours now. Damn straight she had the picture in her purse. She also had a copy next to her bed, one in her bathroom, one in the living room, one clipped to the sun visor above the driver’s seat in the Protégé, one on the refrigerator…