Matt stayed in the same bedroom he had once shared with his brother. His older siblings—all of whom had moved a minimum of five hundred miles away from Ravenswood—agreed to sell their share of their parent’s house to Matt for twenty thousand dollars each.
“You’re getting a steal. You know that?” Matt’s brother Dan had told him on the day of the closing. “This house is worth at least two hundred thousand dollars and will only appreciate in value. You’re walking into a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of equity on day one. I hope you appreciate what we’ve done for you.”
Dan McCormick owned a residential disaster cleaning operation in Charlotte, North Carolina. He earned a healthy income and never missed the opportunity to remind his siblings that he fulfilled his dad’s wishes that at least one of his kids earn more than he did.
“I know what I’m getting,” Matt had said back. “And, like I said, I ain’t planning on selling the house anytime soon.”
“But if you do,” Dan had said while waving his index finger entirely too close to Matt’s face, “the agreement we gifted you clearly states you share all profits, equally with all of us.”
“I ain’t selling the house.”
Nineteen years later, Matt held true to his word and still was listed as the only owner on the deed to the home at Three Hundred Twenty Three Cedar Street, Ravenswood, New York. He had received several offers to sell and had recently turned down a solid offer for seven hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars from a doctor who wanted to open his private practice in Ravenswood and wanted to live on the best street in town. Turning down that offer had felt especially good for Matt. He knew his brother Dan’s business had fallen on hard times and he was facing some serious financial challenges. Had Matt decided to sell the house—which he owned free and clear—Dan would be looking at close to two hundred grand in much needed profit.
“Why the hell did you turn down the offer?” Dan snapped. “That’s more than the house is worth. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Matt waited until he had turned down the doctor’s offer (as well as the doctor’s counter offer of eight hundred thousand dollars) before telling his siblings about his decision. He wanted to make sure they all knew that he, little Matty, held a lot more power over their lives than they ever thought he would.
“It didn’t feel right, Dan,” Matt said through the phone line. “I mean, Dad and Mom designed this house themselves, raised the four of us kids and probably would still be living here, if not for the accident. When I started thinking about accepting the offer, I just felt like I was slapping Dad across the face. It didn’t feel right.”
“You could have bought a house free and clear with that money and helped out me and your sisters. Instead, you decided to sit on that house we practically fucking gave you, and for what? Because you feel like selling the house would have insulted Mom and Dad? We should have never trusted that you would do the right thing with that house. You know that, Matt? We should have never trusted you.”
But they had trusted him and knowing that his siblings—especially his brother—would always regret giving him the power to make all decisions about their childhood home was worth more than a couple hundred thousand dollars to Matt.
Matt left his job in Syracuse two years ago when the Information Technology Manger position opened up at the La Salle Compounding Facility in Ravenswood. For the past two years, Matt had a fifteen minute commute to work and watched as the compounding lab grew from sixteen employees to nearly seventy-five. As the number of employees grew, so, too, did the number of peripheral devices on the network he managed.
Things were going much better than expected for Matthew McCormick. Though the owners of the La Salle Compounding Facility didn’t agree with Matt’s request for a pay increase once the devices he managed topped one hundred, his salary was good enough. Sixty five thousand dollars per year, three weeks paid vacation, six sick days, eight paid holidays, a decent 401(k) retirement plan, profit sharing and the flexibility to set his own work hours. Yeah, things were going much better than expected for Matthew McCormick.
Matt was still coming off his high of telling his brother how much he almost sold the house for as he snorted a third line of cocaine. Matt loved his mom and dad and still wished his dad hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel and slammed his Cadillac head first, going sixty miles per hour, into that oak tree off of Route 69. But his dad did fall asleep and the Caddy had slammed into that oak tree and both his mom and dad did die on the way to the hospital. The Ravenswood paramedics did what they could but the damage was much too severe. But as much as he missed and respected his parents, Matt stole a strange thrill using his mom’s old cutting board and his dad’s four-inch pocket knife to prep and snort his coke. He was far from an addict, he believed; just an enjoyer of good quality cocaine. And the stuff he was currently blowing his nasal passages out with was damn good. He knew it was cut with something, for the buzzing he started feeling was certainly different. But, damn, it was a good buzz bouncing around in his head.
After finishing the third, long-cut line, Matt grabbed a Molson tall-neck from the fridge and sat on the adirondack chair on the front porch. The evening promised to be a fantastic one.
“Temps in the high sixties and no chance for precipitation,” the big breasted weather woman announced during the six o’clock news. “Perfect weather for sitting on front porches or around a backyard fire pit.”
“That’s right,” Matt said as he sat. “Perfect night for front porch sitting.”
And it would have been perfect if not for the smells and the music oozing from his neighbors house.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Matt said, as his nose, numb as it was, caught the stench carried by the soft, early summer breeze. “Those fucking Indians.”
Dr. Dev Patel had moved in next door to Matt six months ago, bringing his Indian wife, Indian kids and Indian fucking food. To Matt, the Patel house stunk with curry, sweat and a few other nose-rotting odors Matt couldn’t identify. He sat, head buzzing, anger rising and beer slamming into his gut, till something snapped.
He didn’t hear anything or feel anything, but something inside snapped. Something important that shouldn’t snap.
He charged back into his home, grabbed his father’s four-inch blade and headed out through the back door. He was going to put an end to the gut-twisting stink coming from good ole Dr. Patel’s house once and for all. He didn’t care that the full moon made concealment nearly impossible as he scrambled over the six-foot-high stockade fence. Nor was he all that concerned about making too much noise since whatever the fuck the good doctor was listening to—a combination of high pitched droning stings, coupled with what he supposed to be the Indian replacement of drums—was practically vibrating the ground beneath him. He stole a few glances through the back window before deeming it safe enough to creep up to the sliding glass doors which led from the imitation-wood back into the Patel’s home.
Fortunately for Matt, the sliding door gave him a clean view into the kitchen, where Patel was busy dancing his little fucked up Indian dance and cooking. That’s when something else snapped in Matt’s brain. That’s when he saw what Patel was cooking up in his curry-stinking kitchen.
It was well known around Ravenswood that Dev Patel was an obstetrician and that he also was the on-call doctor for Women’s Care; the clinic devoted exclusively for the medial treatment of women. Woman’s Care was tucked inside an office building on Main Street and was, due to Women’s Care’s less than secret practice of performing abortions, often the target of the Right to Life organization’s attacks. Matt didn’t care much about abortion, he figured that since he wasn’t a woman, he had no right to tell women what they should or shouldn’t do with their bodies.
Matt watched as the steam poured up in frequent bursts from the stove Patel was standing in front of. He watched as the steam and smoke morphed into figures of small children, changed from vibrant colors into deep maroons, blacks and death gray. Matt watc
hed as the music ripping out from the Bose speaker in the corner of the kitchen pulsed out waves of blood red colors and began dripping foul looking gray matter onto the granite counter then spilling onto the porcelain tiled floor. But when he got a clear view at what Patel was cooking, Matt couldn’t take any more.
At first glance, Matt mistook the fetus’s arm the doctor was slicing thin strands off and dropping into the frying pan for a thin chicken leg. The color looked the same as did the shape, so he forgave himself of the error. But the closer he looked, the more he was certain of what the doctor was slicing.
“Son of a bitch,” Matt whispered, then felt his stomach lurching in realization of the horror he was witness to. “Fucking baby arms.”
As they fell into the curry-laden boiling oil, Matt could see, and then could hear, them spitting out their anger. He was certain he heard the final screams of the babies but the damn Indian music was pouring out too loudly. Their screams—as best as Matt could tell—were not words, but desolate, soul-wrenching mourns of sorrow. Of lives lost having never begun.
He couldn’t take it any longer. He wouldn’t. He was a defender of life, after all. That knowledge had come to him as he was standing outside the sliding glass door, and as a defender of life, he needed to take action.
He tested the sliding door and found it unlocked. He inched into the rear of the expansive kitchen, behind Patel who must have exhausted his supply of fetus arms and switched to his meatier supply of fetus legs. Just the thighs, from what Matt could tell, but still…
He raised the knife above his head, prepared himself to charge the doctor, but then another idea snapped to the forefront of his brain. He lowered the knife and crept a foot or two behind the still dancing and fetus-cooking doctor. He watched as thousands of tiny, black-winged insects erupted from the doctor’s mouth, pouring out in perfect, syncopated rhythm to the doctor’s singing.
The tiny creatures danced in the air along with the pulsating, thin beats of the music, keeping time with their swift, coordinated movements. As if on queue and directed by an intelligence outside of themselves, the insects paused in mid-flight, seeming to have taken notice of the stranger standing with malicious intent behind their host. As a single minded hoard, they rushed at Matt. He closed his mouth as tightly as his muscles would allow and squinted his eyes till they were nothing but slits carved between his forehead and cheeks.
He had to act now. The swarm would find a pathway inside of him, infecting him with whatever depraved sickness Patel was certainly afflicted with. With a single and powerful thrust, he slammed the doctor’s face into the boiling oil, jamming his nose right beside a slab of browning fetus bicep. Patel tried to scream but his attempt to do so only drew the boiling oil into his mouth and lungs. He started convulsing while Matt dragged the blade across his throat, cutting deeply through the doctor’s tendons, windpipe, arteries and veins.
Patel dropped to the tiled floor in a heap of death. Matt saw how the smoke filtering off the skillet had almost instantly turned from the horrible color of death and sadness into a glowing ivory color of redemption. The insects, sensing their host was dying, dropped to the floor, creating a pattern that reminded Matt of spilled black pepper all around the felled baby butcher. He couldn’t save the innocent babies but at least he avenged their deaths.
He had done well.
He wiped the blood off the blade and went in search of the butcher’s family.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Investigator Mark Mullins appreciated Derek’s call and, somewhat reluctantly, agreed not to detain Bo for questioning.
“He’s still a bit inebriated but not so much that people will notice.”
“I’m trusting you on this, Cole. I will make a call or two to verify that Bo was at that bar,” Mullins had said. “But, considering you have nothing to gain by lying to me, I promise you Bo will be allowed to visit his mother and to leave on his own accord.”
Derek and Bo arrived at Saint Mercy Hospital at four thirty. Bo immediately was escorted through the double doors leading into the ICU ward by a nurse, while Derek joined Nikkie and Mark Mullins in the otherwise empty ICU waiting room.
“I have to tell you two,” Mullins said, “that while I won’t be arresting Bo under suspicion of assault, I don’t think he’ll be out of prison much longer.”
“Why do you say that?” Nikkie asked.
“From what I’m hearing, Bo’s father is meeting with the district attorney at eleven Monday morning. Sounds like a plea is being ironed out.”
“So if we’re going to find anything to exonerate Bo,” Derek said, “we better do so quickly.”
“If he takes a plea and admits his guilt in the arson and manslaughter, no judge in the world will accept any contrary evidence in the case. Like I’ve told you both, I’m as sure as shit that Bo started that fire, but I also don’t like how Louis Randall is charging forward with this whole plea bargain. What I’m saying is that I’ll keep an open mind till that meeting between Louis and the DA is over and Bo is taken into custody and starts serving whatever prison time his plea sentences him to.”
“If he takes the plea—Bo that is—and we find something that proves his innocence, wouldn’t you reopen the case?”
“If and when a plea is reached,” Mullins said, “the judge in the case will call the case into court, accept Bo’s plea and sentence him right then and there. The details will all be arranged and worked out. Once the judge delivers the sentence, the case will be closed and can’t be reopened without the appellate courts finding probable cause to have the case retried.”
“And that could take a year or two, I imagine,” Nikkie said.
“The appellate court of New York State is so damn backlogged with appeals, it would be more like three to five years before they would even hear the appeal.”
“So we have until eleven Monday morning to figure this case out.” Derek said. “That doesn’t leave us much time at all.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Mullins said, “you probably have till three or four Monday afternoon. The judge hearing the case, Harold Fletcher, is up for reelection this year and he has a lunch with supporters on his docket tomorrow. He, the DA and Louis Randall will finish up their plea bargain business around noon, Judge Fletcher will then schedule the sentencing for the afternoon, after he has time to kiss some ass at his lunch.”
Mullins’ phone vibrated angrily in his pocket. He pulled it out, raised a finger towards Derek and Nikkie, then walked out of the waiting room and answered his call. When he returned less than a minute later, his face was taut with obvious worry. “Listen,” he said, “something’s happened in Ravenswood and I have to get back right away.” He raised his thick index finger and pointed it at Derek’s face. “I’m not going to tell you what happened but you’ll hear about it soon enough. But listen to me and listen good.” Mullins moved closer to Derek, “There’s something going on in Ravenswood, you know it and, trust me, I know it, too. State police and the sheriff’s department are racking our brains, trying to figure this out, but, honestly, we aren’t getting far. Everyone we talk with in town either has no idea or isn’t saying shit.” He inched closer to Derek, his meaty finger no more than an inch from his face. “You got a lot going on, Cole. I get that. But, this case of yours may involve more people than just Bo. You figuring out what Bo did or didn’t do may help us figure everything else out. But I’ll say this: Watch your ass. Something bad is going on in Ravenswood, something I can’t figure out. If what I’m feeling is right, you asking questions, talking to people and sticking your nose into places won’t make certain people happy and they may just do anything to keep you quiet.” He handed Derek his business card. “Call me, anytime, day or night. I have a feeling I won’t be getting any sleep tonight so you won’t be bothering me.”
Derek took the card and stuffed it into the pages of his Moleskine notebook. “Think it’s okay to leave Bo here with his mother?”
Mullins smiled as he backed
away towards the hallway. “Worst case,” he said as he walked towards the bank of elevators, “he leaves his mother’s side and walks across the street to the Recovery Bar, gets hammered and passes out in the parking lot. Yeah, it’s fine to leave him here.”
Mark Mullins put his phone to his ear as the elevator doors closed.
“He certainly left in hurry,” Nikkie said.
“He had a strange look in his eyes after he answered that call.”
“What look is that?”
“The look a cop wears when the shit is hitting the fan and spraying all over the cop’s territory.”
Nikkie shook her head and breathed deeply. “You really are a wordsmith, aren’t you, Derek?”
Derek turned to Nikkie, his face instantly void of anything suggesting humor. “When I called you, you told me to hurry. What happened?”
Nikkie’s eyes grew heavy with captured tears. “I was probably reading into it more than I should have, but Crown’s nurse came to me and asked if any of Crown’s family were in the hospital or were on their way. She’s probably an excellent nurse, but she had her own ‘look’ in her eye. Like she had seen some change in Crown or heard some imaginary death clock ticking down. You called just when she left.”
“I would have reacted the same way,” Derek said. “And besides the nurse, has anyone else has told you anything? No doctor stopped in the waiting room?”
“No one.” Nikkie paused. She softly rubbed Derek’s upper left arm. “You should go back there and see her. I know I’m probably crazy but I have a feeling she’s waiting for you.”
“Plus, if I don’t go see her, she’ll be pissed as hell when she wakes up.”
Derek waited till the secured doors to the ICU wing were opened, then strolled down the too-quiet hallway.
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The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) Page 14