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

by Osborne, Jon

  Hands firmly wrapped around the van’s steering wheel again, D’Arbinville tightened his grip on the hard rubber cover and breathed in slowly through his nostrils, itching right down to the core of his innermost being to finally exact his long-awaited revenge. His need for payback burned within him the same way his need for sex had once burned within him during his teenage years. Maybe even more urgently. Zachary Paulson’s money wouldn’t be the only thing that D’Arbinville’s small group would be taking from the software king, however. Not by a long shot. Not after the unforgivable insult that Paulson had so carelessly foisted upon the D’Arbinville family name.

  D’Arbinville clamped down his teeth at the infuriating memory of the man’s bold-faced affront, denting the soft end of his Gitane in the process. Zachary Paulson had plenty of money, so that wouldn’t be enough to teach the smug bastard his much-needed lesson. No, it needed to be something much more valuable to Paulson than just simple currency. Hell, with Paulson’s seemingly unlimited wealth, the multimillionaire most likely wouldn’t miss even the exorbitant sum they’d pry from his vast bank accounts. So it needed to be something much more important to him than just a little bit of cold hard cash.

  Something, say, more along the lines of a warm and squirming newborn baby.

  D’Arbinville glanced up into the rearview mirror at the car seat stationed in the back of the van. The low hum of the tires against the highway blacktop had finally lulled the little guy to sleep. Thank God for small mercies. Because the thoroughly annoying brat hadn’t shut up for more than ten minutes straight ever since they’d first whisked him away from Fairview General earlier in the day. The sheer amount of crying to which D’Arbinville had been subjected over the past ten hours had threatened to make his brain explode, bringing on an instant, temple-pounding headache that had been playing the bass drums in his ears all day long. Unfortunately for him, however, Louise hadn’t proved to be much of a foster parent, either – not that he’d expected her to be, of course. His dear cousin had always cared for just one person in this entire world: herself.

  Still, that supremely selfish quality is what made her so particularly effective at doing the unthinkable things she did.

  D’Arbinville rolled down his window and flicked out his tooth-dented cigarette, glancing into the side-view mirror this time and watching the glowing cherry explode in a small shower of bright orange embers as it hit the pavement behind him. Turning his attention back to the road that was unfolding like a huge black sheet in front of him, he took a deep breath of fresh air. He’d provide the feds with more than just a little bit of strategic misdirection here and there, of course, but if all went well for him and his group the FBI would think they’d actually left the country with the boy. No way in hell he’d ever be stupid enough to actually try something like that, though. They’d scoop him up in ten minutes flat if he even sniffed an airport, and he knew it. He wouldn’t even get past the parking lot. Four previous kidnappings for ransom in the past had taught him very well indeed what needed to be done here, and what was it that his mother had always told him?

  Oh yeah: practice makes perfect.

  Finally coming to the off-ramp for Elyria ten minutes later, D’Arbinville followed the GPS directions coming from the cellphone nestled in his lap all the way to St. Mary’s Cemetery on the south side of town. And what better place than this hotel for the dead to convince Zachary Paulson and the FBI agents who’d be attempting to track him down that he meant business?

  Easing the van into a space in front of the wrought-iron gates in the deserted parking lot, D’Arbinville shut off the van’s engine and killed the headlights. Then he closed his eyes and prepared himself mentally for the next step. After all, artificial illumination wouldn’t be the only sort of death he’d be dealing with here tonight. Not even close. So he needed to be completely ready to execute this next bloody step without leaving behind any sort of damning physical evidence. He certainly didn’t want to get caught at this relatively early stage of the game, now did he? Of course he didn’t.

  Not on this little boy’s life.

  Opening his eyes again, D’Arbinville breathed out slowly through his nostrils and exited the vehicle before going around to the other side of the van and sliding open the back door. Extracting a sturdy shovel and a hand-held pair of pruning shears, he tucked the shears into the front pocket of his coveralls and balanced the shovel underneath his left arm before reaching back inside the van for the still-sleeping baby.

  Taking another deep breath that expanded his chest against his coveralls, D’Arbinville luxuriated in the cool night air that danced across his face like a corpse’s faint whisper. Once again, it seemed, the time had come for him to get back to work. And he’d be damned if he didn’t absolutely love his work, however brutal it might prove at times.

  He chuckled out loud despite his especially dreary surroundings at the moment. He just couldn’t help himself.

  Hell, after the heartless thing he was about to do here tonight, he knew that he’d probably be damned, anyway.

  CHAPTER 19

  Standing with various other officials on the wide concrete steps located outside the FBI field office on Lakeshore Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Bill Krugman gazed out upon the sea of reporters that was staring right back at him from the icy street thirty feet away

  Krugman stifled a frustrated sigh in his throat and pulled his heavy gray overcoat even tighter around his shivering body, seeking some sort of protection against the frigid nighttime blasts of air that were whipping in hard off of Lake Erie and turning the back of his neck into a lump of frozen flesh.

  Krugman closed his eyes briefly, allowing the freezing wind to tap-dance across his eyelids with its tiny icicle feet. Unfortunately for him, though, the shitty northeast Ohio weather wasn’t even the most annoying problem he found himself faced with here tonight. Krugman absolutely hated press events, always had ever since he’d conducted his very first press conference sometime back in the early 1960s. They’d always made him feel like he was guest-starring on an episode of CSI or Law & Order or NCIS and not doing what he should have been doing: getting out there on the streets and tracking down whatever maniac needed tracking down at the time. Still, however aggravating these things might be (and they were supremely fucking aggravating – no debating that simple fact), he knew that they marked an integral part of the job. As a public servant who earned his daily bread directly at the pleasure of the taxpayers (never an especially easy group to please under even the best of circumstances), it was his duty to put the panicked citizenry at ease, whether or not he might feel at ease himself. And, as he’d noted earlier, he wasn’t the freshest daisy in the bunch anymore. Not even close. So active fieldwork simply didn’t represent a realistic option for him at this advanced stage in his life and career, no matter how badly he might miss the thrill of the chase sometimes. Because seventy-one-year-olds with arthritic knees didn’t often come out on the winning ends of heart-pounding footraces with fleet-footed suspects forty years their junior, no matter how many miles those knees might dutifully put in on the treadmill each week.

  Krugman stamped his feet several times against the wide cement steps in an effort to get the blood in his toes circulating again but it didn’t work. Not even a little bit. They were just as frozen as the back of his neck. Maybe even more frozen. A hot bath in his hotel room tonight wouldn’t mark just a luxury; it would be an absolute necessity. He felt like a Thanksgiving turkey in a deep-freezer right now, just waiting to be thawed out and consumed by the ravenous press who’d gathered ’round to devour the headline-grabbing spectacle at hand.

  Krugman glanced to his left and right as a sound guy fiddled with a tangle of wires a few feet away, putting the finishing touches on the technical requirements for the press conference. The mayor was here, as was the Cleveland police chief. Other local big shots included a state senator from Lakewood and Chief Mike Billingham from the Rocky River PD. Several agents under Krugman’s command were h
ere, too, including Bruce Blankenship – one of Krugman’s most trusted lieutenants even if Krugman had come this close to strangling the breath out of the inexplicably mute man just six hours earlier for the unacceptable delay in passing along critical information regarding the movie-theater shooting while the two men had stood together outside St. Christopher’s Catholic Church after having so recently and so rudely interrupted Dana’s funeral.

  Krugman pressed his lips into a tight line and breathed out slowly through his nostrils. Even this relatively minor exhalation proved visible in the cold night air. He let out a soft sigh, producing still more vapors.

  Dana. He missed her with all his heart and soul already. And that would have been putting things extremely mildly. Truth be told, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her for more than five minutes straight ever since he’d first received Bruce Blankenship’s panicked phone call Friday night. And Krugman didn’t just miss Dana in the personal sense, either – though there was certainly plenty of that to go around, too. If nothing else, she would’ve been his go-to gal for the kidnapping of the Paulson baby, though he most likely would’ve considered her far too closely involved with the movie-theater shooting to investigate that one after the sickening thing that had gone down a few weeks earlier among her, Jack Yuntz and the little boy she’d been preparing to adopt. Krugman knew that he could’ve counted on Dana to do whatever he’d have asked her to do, though. He’d always felt that way about her, ever since he’d first met her at the Academy fifteen years earlier.

  And now he could never count on Dana for anything ever again. Neither could anyone else.

  When the soundman finally finished up doing what he needed to do, he glanced up at Krugman and nodded once. Krugman nodded back before stepping to the microphone tucked into the top of a narrow metal stand. Adjusting the microphone in front of his mouth, he cleared his throat forcefully and began. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is William Krugman, director of the FBI. At approximately three p.m. today, a single gunman concealing a Sterling 7.62mm light machinegun beneath his trench coat purchased a ticket to a showing of the film Fun Time at the Westwood Movie Cinema in Rocky River. The gunman then proceeded to open fire inside the theater half an hour into the film, killing forty-two people so far, including four children. The FBI has identified a suspect…”

  Excited shouting sounded at once from the street, causing Krugman to pause mid-sentence. One male voice rose above the rest. “Who is it, sir? Who killed those people? Who killed those poor kids?”

  The harsh glare of the lights of the television cameras in front of him blinded Krugman, making it impossible for him to identify the question-asker. Someone in the back. Didn’t matter who’d asked the question, though. The answer would have been the same no matter who’d shouted it out.

  Krugman held up his hands and waited patiently for a break in the din. When it finally came twenty seconds later, he went on. “Our suspect’s name is Jack Yuntz,” he said. “He’s a sixteen-year-old boy originally from New York City. A multi-agency task force is in the process of being assembled to hunt him down. State and local police; with the FBI taking the lead. Jack Yuntz escaped from the Squires Boys’ Home in upstate New York several months ago after having…”

  More excited shouting sounded from the street, even louder this time, again cutting off Krugman before he could get all the words out of his mouth. He resisted the urge to throw up his hands in frustration and just walk away. A pretty female reporter standing in the front next to a hulking cameraman who was wearing a backward-facing baseball cap was the next to get a question through. “What was he in for, sir? What did Jack Yuntz do?”

  Krugman fought back another skeleton-rattling shiver; feeling chilled all the way down to his bone marrow now. And not just from the inclement Cleveland weather, either. “For killing an FBI agent named Jeremy Brown in Manhattan at the conclusion of the Chessboard Killer investigation,” he said, wincing internally at the gruesome memory of Brown’s horrible death in the Presidential Suite of the Fontainebleau Hotel. Jesus Christ. Had it really been more than a year now? Where the hell had the time gone?

  Predictably, the horde of reporters on hand for the event went into an absolute frenzy upon hearing this latest bit of information, sharp-toothed piranha schooling around a wounded jungle creature with its hooves inextricably stuck in the deep muck of an Amazon riverbed. Question after question slammed into Krugman from every conceivable direction, nearly pushing him back physically. Still, he wasn’t surprised by the press’s reaction to the information. Why the hell would he be? The connection between this case and a pair of infamous serial killers that had captured the entire world’s attention for more than half a year would no doubt boost ratings and circulation ten-fold. The media’s equivalent of lining up three 7s on a Las Vegas slot machine and hitting the swollen jackpot in the process.

  The press conference descended into pure madness from there as even more questions hit Krugman’s ears, slicing hard into his brain and bleeding into one another in a raucous jumble of words that seemed nearly indecipherable at times:

  “Where is Jack Yuntz now, sir?”

  “How does the FBI plan to stop this kid?”

  “How did Yuntz escape from the boys’ home in the first place?”

  “Dana Whitestone worked on the Chessboard Killer investigation, didn’t she, sir? Is that why she killed herself last Friday night?”

  “Why did Agent Whitestone kill herself, sir?”

  Krugman winced again – visibly this time, he felt sure. The mention of Dana’s name and the reference to her self-inflicted death nearly buckled his knees. Earlier today – not in the least bit to his surprise – he’d found out that Dana had been thinking about others right up until the very end. A handwritten will that the cleanup crew had found on the kitchen counter of her apartment had set aside ten thousand dollars for the care and keeping of her cat. The remaining one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars in her bank account was to be used to fund a four-year scholarship for a criminal justice major at Cleveland State University in Crawford Bell’s name.

  Krugman curled up his frozen toes inside his dress shoes and forced his attention back to the media, much as he’d have loved to have it somewhere else at the moment. Anywhere else. The press conference had deteriorated quickly into an unpleasant trip down nightmare lane for him, only reminding him of the recent and unfathomable deaths of two of the best agents under his command. Not the most pleasant way to pass the time, to put it mildly. He waited as patiently as he could for another break to come in the shouting but it never did.

  Krugman seethed as he stood on the steps, trying his best to withstand the audio onslaught. Wasn’t easy. He ground his teeth back and forth in the rear of his mouth at the pure un-professionalism of the three-ring circus taking place in front of him. Still, he tried to avoid tensing up his jaw as he did so. If nothing else, he didn’t want his anger to show up on his face. The last thing in the world he needed right now was to look like some sort of unraveled rage-addict on the eleven o’clock news: a terribly inefficient way to calm the frightened hordes, as he’d found out the hard way during the Ted Bundy case back in the 1980s.

  Krugman sighed again, feeling completely defeated now. He’d planned to address the abduction of the Paulson child during this news conference as well, but clearly the hopped-up reporters weren’t going to allow that to happen. So they’d just need to make due with the news release that the FBI press officer would be handing out at the conclusion of this dog-and-pony show. After all, you couldn’t have any sort of decent conversation with people who wouldn’t quiet down long enough to listen to what you had to say in return, now could you?

  Turning away from the madness after another forty-five seconds of incessant shouting coming from the reporters, Krugman pulled open the glass door to the FBI field office building and made his way back inside. Bruce Blankenship approached him in the marble-tiled lobby a moment later. “I want to work the Yuntz
case,” Blankenship said, setting his jaw into a tight line. “I want to bring down that bastard myself.”

  Krugman shook his head, feeling absolutely exhausted from the mind-numbing events of the day. Things had been tough enough on him today already with Dana’s funeral. Now he had a mass shooting and a high-profile kidnapping that he needed to deal with, too. Still, no great surprise there. Bad news always came in threes, didn’t it? “Not an option, Agent Blankenship,” Krugman said, shaking his head firmly. “You were Dana’s partner, however brief that partnership might have been. So you’re much too close to the case to be as effective as you’d need to be. I’m very sorry.”

  Blankenship closed his eyes briefly in frustration, and Krugman empathized with him, but the display of emotion didn’t sway him in the least little bit. He understood the man’s frustration – he really did – but much like seventy-one-year-olds with bad knees, frustration didn’t catch killers. Usually had the opposite effect, as a matter of fact.

  “So, what do you want me to do then?” Blankenship asked, opening his eyes again and blowing out a slow breath of resignation.

  Krugman thought he saw tears welled in the other man’s eyes, but as badly as he felt for Blankenship right now, tears didn’t catch killers, either. “You’ll be working the Paulson baby abduction,” Krugman said. “Fairview Park PD already has the Fairview General Hospital nurse in custody. Go over there tomorrow morning and see what you can find out from her.”

  Blankenship nodded. “OK, sir. If that’s what you want. But who’s going to take the lead on the movie-theater shooting?”