by David Archer
Books 5-8
The Kill List
Drifter: Part I
Drifter: Part II
Drifter: Part III
David Archer
www.davidarcherbooks.com
Sam Prichard Boxed Set: 5-8 Copyright © 2015 by David Archer.
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BOOK V
Prologue
Friday night had finally come; Sam was on stage, and loving it! It was the band's first performance as a country act, and he'd been nervous about how they'd be accepted. They'd done incredibly well as a rock band with Barry Wallace, before his untimely death, and he'd worried that their rock reputation would turn country audiences against them before they even heard the new sound. Sam had invited his mom and Indie's, and then added Harry Winslow and Carl Morris, the man Sam had only days before proven innocent of murdering his own family, because he had been programmed to do it and could not possibly have prevented it.
He shouldn't have let it bother him. If the reaction at the Casino Lounge had been any indication, SBO was going to be even more popular on the country circuit than they ever were on the rock. Sam debuted seven new songs in the show, and they did a few of the most popular current country hits as well, just to keep everyone happy.
It was a fantastic show, and when it was over, Chris slapped him on the arm and said, “Tomorrow night will be even better, you'll see! These people will be telling everyone about us, and the house'll be packed fuller than it was tonight!”
The band spent an hour talking to the crowd, shaking hands and hearing how well they'd done, and they all had to sign autographs as if they were already big stars. Sam admitted to himself that he was enjoying it, even if he didn't think he'd want to do it full time.
Everything finally died down as the bar sounded the Last Call at a little after one. Sam flopped into a chair beside Indie and ordered a cold soft drink. When the barmaid brought it back, she handed him an envelope and said, “There's a guy out back who gave this to one of the bouncers and asked to see that it got to you.”
Sam took it and looked at it, then opened it up. Inside were three photographs and a sheet of paper. When he took them out, he saw that the photos were of three different people, two women and one man, whose faces had been obscured. He unfolded the sheet of paper and saw that it was typed, seemingly from a cheap, throwaway printer. He read through it once, then passed it to Indie.
Mr. Prichard, it read, the people you see in the photos will be killed within the next forty-eight hours, unless you stop me. I have been following your exploits closely, and I think that you are the one I need to make sure I stop doing this. I've been trying for more than fifteen years to kick this habit, but I can't.
Normally, I don't strike so many times so close together, but in order to get you interested, I'm going to up the odds. I need you to do only two things: discover who each of my victims is, and then do all you can to stop me before I can kill each one. The first one will die exactly twenty-four hours after you receive this note; the second will die twelve hours after that, and the third twelve hours later. If you cannot stop me before I can kill the third one, then no one can. Then there will be a fourth victim, but you’ll get no clues for that one.
Indie read it two times and then passed it to Harry. “Sam?” she said. “Any idea who sent it to you?”
Sam shook his head. “Not even a clue.”
Harry read it quickly before passing it back to Sam. “What do you plan to do, Son?” he asked.
Sam shrugged. “I guess I'm gonna find a killer. Indie and I will get started as soon as we get home.”
1
Sam and Indie were in his office, going over the note and the photographs. They'd talked to the bouncer who'd received it, but he hadn't gotten a good look at whoever gave it to him in the darkness—all he knew was that the guy was very tall—and then they'd spent half the night with the police, letting them scan the items for fingerprints and DNA. None were found. Karen Parks, the homicide detective, had taken hi-resolution color copies and then returned the originals to Sam.
“I'm giving these back because it may be important to the killer for you to have them,” she said, “but don't think for a second that you're gonna play lone wolf on this one. I'm in your pocket, Buddy; everything you get, you give me too, right?”
Sam nodded. “No problem. We got any idea on who this guy's past victims might have been? He said he's been at it for fifteen years, so there must be something in the unsolved cases that would be his.”
Karen snorted. “Our unsolved homicides number over fourteen hundred, and probably half of those are from the past fifteen years. God knows how many of them might be his.”
Sam nodded. “It was worth a shot. Believe me, Karen, I want all the help on this one I can get. I don't know why I got singled out for this honor, but I wish like mad I could dump it onto you and walk away.”
She shrugged. “I'll take it if you want, but that'd piss our guy off. We know he's threatening three, maybe four people; if he thinks you're not playing, he may up the game.”
“Yeah, that's why I said, 'I wish,' and didn't try to leave you stuck with it. Just wish I hadn't gotten so much good press lately.” Especially since only about half of it was true, he thought. The rest was still classified and hadn't been released to the press.
Sam Prichard had blundered into private detective work after recovering from the gunshot wound that ended his career as a police detective. A neighbor had come to him asking for help to find her missing granddaughter, and Sam had agreed to try. When he stumbled into a National Security situation, he'd been enlisted to help stop a deadly chemical warfare agent from falling into the wrong hands, and he'd accomplished it.
Being a PI beat being bored; Sam went and got his license, and set up shop with his new helper, gray-hat computer hacker Indiana Perkins. Between her mad computer skills and his own instincts, he'd busted a murderer and freed a man who was framed for the crime in his first case, and the press had been all over him. That case had led to his spot as lead singer for a rock band, but after hearing some of the songs Sam had written, the band voted unanimously to go country, and the show the night before had been their country debut, and a rousing success.
A few more small cases had worked to bui
ld a reputation, and he was enjoying life again—especially since he and Indie had fallen in love and were married. Trouble was, Sam was a magnet for trouble, and even on his honeymoon, it found him. He'd seen something suspicious as they were preparing for their flight to Hawaii, and then again when they arrived. Both things stuck in his mind, and when the Feds announced the next morning that terrorists had planted suitcase nukes in twelve American cities, including Honolulu, where Sam and Indie were trying to enjoy their first days of married life, he'd been drawn back into National Security work. That time, he'd stopped a lone, rogue terrorist from destroying a quarter of the country, though the press was only told that he'd thwarted a plan to do some damage to Hoover Dam.
He'd been badly wounded again in that one, and it had taken time to recover, followed by another honeymoon. When he and Indie had gotten home, there were clients lined up, and he'd taken on three seemingly unrelated cases simultaneously, but somehow, they all led back to one person—a dentist who was using hypnotic anesthesia, and who had developed a method of actually programming people to do things they'd never do on their own, and then forget they'd even done them. He'd started out using it to seduce women he wanted from among his patients, but then he'd graduated to arranging “accidents” for people who gave him or his friends trouble, and then to a form of “murder for hire.”
All three of Sam's cases were connected to the dentist. First, his wife was divorcing him and wanted Sam to find out where he'd hidden his assets; second, a man whose wife disappeared had asked Sam to find her, which led to the discovery that she'd been one of his patients; and third, another man had hired Sam to find out why and how he had gotten up in the middle of the night and murdered his own family. That man had seen the dentist only that morning, and when all the threads were unraveled, Sam was able to prove that he was not the killer—he'd only been the weapon that the dentist had aimed and set off half-cocked. He'd not been told to kill his family, but to kill the dentist's wife. Unfortunately, a command not to let anyone know he was leaving the house had blown up, and when the man's son had seen him trying to go out the door, his programmed brain had interpreted the command to mean that a witness could not be allowed to live. The son's screams had brought his mother and sister to try to help him, but they also died in the attempt.
The press had gone insane over the case, and Sam was hailed as a hero. That was undoubtedly why he'd been chosen for this madman's game of cat and mouse, but Sam wasn't one who could turn down a challenge, especially when lives were at stake.
“The cops scanned for prints on all of the items,” Indie was saying, and Sam snapped out of his reverie to listen to her, “and tested it for any sign of DNA, but didn't find either. What they didn't do is scan it for any type of microscopic residue on the paper or photos, so I'm gonna try that, now.”
“Microscopic residue?” Sam asked. “You've got a microscope hidden away somewhere?”
Indie grinned. “Yeah, an electronic one. My scanner is capable of resolutions at almost twenty thousand dots per inch, which makes it a pretty good electron microscope. If we can find any environmental residues, it might give us a clue about where the note and photos were put into the envelope.”
Sam nodded. “Like, if there's a piece of a pine needle on it somewhere, then the guy might live in the woods, right?”
“Yeah,” Indie said. “I'm hoping to spot something that might be more exclusive to an area than that, but you get the idea.” She carefully placed the first of the photos on the scanner and closed the cover on it. “Let's see what we find.”
The scanner began to hum, and a moment later, the screen on Indie's computer began to form an image. Sam realized it was one of the photos, of one of the two women. The image was so large that all he could see was the upper left corner, which showed only a bit of her hair. This one was a blonde; the other woman had dark hair.
The faces on all of the photos had been blurred out, so all they had to go on was hair and general build. The photos had stock blue backgrounds, as well, nothing to give any idea of where they had been taken. Indie moved the photo around on the screen, looking at every spot and imperfection on it, trying to identify each one and get a sense of where it might have come from.
“Most of these are just specks of dust, most likely,” she said. “Here's one that might be a moisture stain, probably a drop of water that got on it somehow. Could have happened last night at the Casino, when you opened it, or anywhere else. This one is bright red, when we get it big enough to see, might be a tiny shard of something plastic. It's embedded into the photo, so it's something hard.” She kept moving the picture around, looking at it intently. “Bingo!” she said suddenly. “Here's your first clue, Sherlock!” She pointed to a spot at the very edge of the woman's left arm, where a tiny line of green was visible.
Sam looked and nodded. “Aha!” he said. “The clue! Now the only question is, what is this clue?”
Indie grinned. “That, my dear Watson, is a residual group of pixels from before the background was inserted by whatever program the killer used to edit these pictures. That's not a green screen; the color is too dark. That is part of whatever was in the original background.”
“And so, this tells us exactly what?”
“Well, it tells us that this woman posed for this picture in front of something that had that shade of green on it. That could be a car, a building, maybe even a sign, but it's definitely an object that was actually in the picture.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Is there any way to peel away the blue stuff?”
She shook her head. “If I had access to the original digital file, I could, but not from one that's been printed. The layers have been erased, so all that's printed out is the top layers you see on the screen.” She scrolled the image to the blurred-out face. “Now, there is a very slim possibility that Herman can figure out what distortion was applied to this part and undo it, so we can see the face. Let me put him on it, and then we can get a couple hours of sleep.”
Sam nodded. “That sounds like a good idea to me. I'm beat, but even a couple of hours will get me in better shape to deal with this.” He waited until she stopped typing, then took his wife's hand and led her to their bedroom. Sam set an alarm on his phone for eight AM, and they were both asleep within minutes.
The sun was getting high by the time the alarm went off, and Sam woke to find Indie already up and in the shower. He went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, and had just finished when she came out. He grabbed clean clothes and went for his own morning ablutions.
When he had finished, Sam went back to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Indie was already at the table with her own, and she smiled as he sat down.
“Would you like some breakfast?” she asked. “I can whip up some scrambled eggs and sausage.”
He nodded. “Fuel for the investigative engines,” Sam said, and Indie grinned. “Sounds good, Babe.”
She stood and leaned down for a kiss as she walked past him to the refrigerator, and Sam took the chance to pinch her bottom. “Ouch!” she squealed, and slapped his hand, but the smile on her face told him that she liked his attentions.
Sam grinned as he watched her moving about the kitchen. Indie had beautified his life, he often told himself, and watching her was one of his favorite pastimes. She blushed a lot when she caught him just looking at her, but that was because she'd never had a man look at her so lovingly, and she knew it. A beautiful woman is watched a lot, even stared at and ogled, but it won't be until she finds the man who looks past her beauty that she'll know the look that only comes through love-colored glasses. Indie enjoyed knowing that Sam thought looking at her was a great way to spend time or take a break from work.
Sam was in love, and so was Indie. It meant that they could trust each other and depend on each other, and they'd proven themselves over and over.
The sound of sausage sizzling in the skillet was almost musical to Sam, and when Indie slid a plate of eggs and sausa
ge links in front of him, he inhaled deeply of their aroma and moaned in delight. “Baby, you make something as simple as this smell and taste like a hundred-dollar plate at a fancy restaurant. I'm so glad I was smart enough to marry you!”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “Who else would get you out of trouble the way I do?”
Sam grinned, but dug in to eat, and Indie did the same. When Kenzie was gone to stay with her little friends down the street, they didn't need so many words to communicate their feelings to each other; the look in Sam's eyes when he glanced at her, the glow in her own when he happened to look up and find her watching him—words couldn't express those things well enough.
They finished breakfast, Sam loaded the dishwasher, and they went out to the office. Indie sat down at her desk, while Sam took the chair he'd put beside her in the early morning hours. She turned to the computer. “Okay, Herman, show me what you got!”
The screen lit up when she touched the mouse, and there were several links on the page. Indie looked at the data beside each one and pointed at the first. “Herman did several versions, trying different formulas to undo the scrambling that was done to the faces. Each link is one of the results. Ready?”
Sam nodded, and she clicked the first link. An image came up that was almost the same photograph, but with a slightly distorted face visible. Indie looked at it, then glanced at Sam. “Look familiar at all?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “I can't make out eyes or lips,” he said, “and they're the two most recognizable features. Of course, we probably don't know the people in the pictures, anyway.”
“True, but I'm betting that these people are not just your average citizens,” Indie said. “My gut instinct is that they're going to be at least a little bit well known, so there's a chance we might have seen them on TV or something.”
Sam shrugged. “I hope you're right.”