The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4)

by T Patrick Phelps

  He walked up close to her, sat down and carefully brushed the dirt, leaves and twigs from her hair. When he was younger, maybe when he was two or three, his mother used to sing an old song to him when he was feeling down. The song always made him sadder, but somehow still managed to leave him with a smile. As he brushed her hair, hoping to bring back a bit of the radiance and life to the curls, he sang what he could remember of the song to her. He hoped that hearing it might make her smile, wherever she was now.

  “How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? And if I ever lost you, how much would I cry?”

  He stayed by her side, picking nearly every speck of dirt from her hair for each second of the fifteen minutes before others showed up. He knew the others would find it strange if they saw him sitting beside the dead girl, singing to her and preening her as if getting her ready for her first communion pictures. He stood up when the voices of his friends and the threats of the two men his friends had dragged off the golf course (“You little shits better not be lying to us!”) grew in volume. He brushed himself off, making sure none of the dirt brushed from his jeans fell onto her, then rubbed his eyes hard, turning them red and a bit swollen.

  The girl turned out to be a four-year old from Middletown, New York, who had been reported missing eleven days earlier. He didn’t learn the cause of her death till many years later as his parents and adults in Ravenswood thought the truth of Rebecca Angela Miller’s death was too severe for young minds like his to know about.

  Rebecca was kidnapped, raped repeatedly, then strangled and left in the wooded area of the public park in Ravenswood, New York. The coroner determined that Rebecca Angela Miller had been dead and lying in the woods for four days, meaning her kidnapper—who had never been identified— held her captive for seven days before killing her and leaving her for him to find.

  For years, there was speculation about who the murderer could be and debates were spawned and circulated over whether the killer was from Ravenswood. The town was not an easy exit off the New York State Thruway, nor was Ravenswood close to Route 81, which cut through cities and towns as it stretched over hundreds of miles. Ravenswood was, and always will be, a medium sized, out of the way town. A hidden gem of upstate New York. It’s presumed exclusivity and its lack of familiarity gave those who believed the killer was from Ravenswood, a powerful and horrifying advantage in the debate over where the child murderer called home. State Police and even the FBI spent weeks canvassing Ravenswood, interviewing hundreds of people and chasing thousands of leads before pulling up stakes and sending the case file for Rebecca Angela Miller to the cold case dungeons.

  But he never pulled up his stakes and he never stopped visiting the small flat stretch of land crammed between towering pines and broad speckled alders. Slipped, as if by the hand of God, inside a circle of bearberry bushes, he would sit near the small mound of dirt where her head once rested, and would promise that he would never leave her alone. He fashioned a crude cross of pine branches and stuck it deep into the ground, marking her resting spot and reminding him that many believed there was something more to death than simply decay.

  He never forgot the feeling that he had recognized her and while some part of his mind resisted his attempts to discover how, when and where he had seen her face, he was resolute to never stop searching until his mind released its imprisoned memories. He and she were bound together by a force no one could ever understand. And each time he visited the shaded flat of land where she had died, he felt a calmness grow in his spirit and a resolution to solve the mystery of why he had recognized Rebecca, grow stronger.

  He sat, his head splitting with pain, and thought about her again. He, sitting in the comfort of his palatial home and she, still lying in the woods across the expanse of his rear yard and the stretch of the seventeenth fairway, were still connected. They were still two kindred souls, sharing a bond no one could ever break.

  The gentle vibration of the cell phone on the desk behind him called him back from the woods. He answered, listened for a full minute, then asked one question before ending the call.

  “When will the rest of the crops be harvested and destroyed?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Weekends were reserved for Leonard La Salle to conduct his experiments. The two days that made up weekends, were his days. The hours were his hours. And he liked to use those hours to follow his passions, his interests and to chase down the memories that had haunted him for decades. But this weekend, the very weekend he was certain that his formula and compound would deliver the exact experience he needed, was being ripped away from him. Torn away by fools and by those less progressed in their evolution.

  La Salle stared out his window, his anger growing as a golfer, who apparently had chosen to not heed the advice of the golf pro and had sent his tee-shot slicing into the woods, was trampling through the woods, too near the spot he had found Rebecca. His spine stiffened and his muscles flexed as he prepared himself to defend the sacred spot against defilement. He grabbed his Swarovski range binoculars, dialed the lenses into focus and trained his sights onto the blasphemous golfer. A few summers ago, he was keeping watch, sitting in the same chair he now sat in, and watched through his binoculars as a middle-aged golfer, who was obviously more interested in drinking beer than in improving his golf swing, whipped out his penis and pissed all over her resting spot.

  Had the distance between him and the woods been any less, he would have raced across his backyard, dashed the width of the fairway, bounded into the woods, and slashed that fucker’s penis off.

  But that was last year, before he perfected his formula and was still prone to rage and fits of uncontrolled anger. Today, he knew that while his anger might erupt, the only actions or responses taken would be done so through the lenses of clear thought.

  His discovery—which was much more of a correction of his previous discoveries—came to him quite accidentally one day nearly a year ago. On that day (a Saturday, he believed it was), during his time visiting Rebecca’s spot in the woods, as he approached her spot, flashlight in one hand to fight back the shadows the yet-to-rise sun would soon send scurrying, he felt his anger rise up within him. Like lava called from the hidden depths of a volcano, his choler screamed, demanding release. There, right beside where her head had lied, still as a frozen pond, a weed had taken root and promised to spread if not dealt with immediately. He ripped the weed from the ground and tossed it as far from her spot as his arm’s throw allowed.

  While Leonard infrequently visited her area during the cold winter months, four to five visits per week were the norm during spring, summer and fall months. And when he returned to her spot in the woods two days after ripping the foul weed from the earth, three more had sprung. At first, he was consumed with fury and was intent on ripping the intruders out, but then a thought struck him;

  “What if these weeds are a sign from Rebecca?”

  He did pull the weeds, but, that time, he did so carefully. Ensuring that if they possessed any message from Rebecca in their roots, leaves or budding flowers, that all were undisturbed. He carried them back to his lab, careful to make sure that not even the faintest of her whispers fell to the earth. He brought them back to his private lab, studied them and discovered their hidden secret.

  His first several attempts proved useless in removing the dark, sound-absorbing stillness of Rebecca’s voice and were so utterly unsuccessful that Leonard almost lost faith. He questioned Rebecca’s ability to send him messages, despite having received so many whispers in altering forms to that point.

  But the weed did have properties and had been used for hundreds of years by those seeking a spiritual awakening. Leonard knew the dangers use of the weed possessed and he also knew (believed) it wouldn’t have taken root where it had if it had not been directed to do so by a higher force.

  He pressed on with his experiments, creating compound after compound. Each drawing him closer but all falling
short.

  He stood and walked away from his view, out of his office and into his private lab in the basement of his home. Once in his lab, he compounded a bafflingly simple mixture of opiates, jimsonweed and cannabis oils, dried the ivory colored oily substance to a crushable solid, then pulverized it into a powder so fine it would absorb nearly instantly when introduced to mucus. This was catalogued as FORMULA 131.

  He prepared his sensory deprivation chamber, adjusting the water’s temperature to ninety-nine degrees (two degrees higher than last week’s experiment), breathed a small amount his newest creation into his nose, then waited. The effects that followed were glorious. He had been close to achieving this degree of utter utopia numerous times before, but the introduction of jimsonweed was a stroke of absolute genius. Jimsonweed and it’s properties were certainly not foreign to him, nor was the wild growing plant foreign to his body. But Leonard was always cautious of the weed. Its use needed to be well controlled, governed and measured. In one of his previous experiments with the weed, he had suffered a near-psychotic break, and needed to administer a counter-acting compound (another of his creations) for several days before his mind was once again fully his.

  The problem, he had discovered, was uncontrollable nature itself, which was either unable or unwilling to control the levels of tropane alkaloids each individual plant of the jimsonweed possessed. This randomness could make one weed toxic and deadly while the weed growing right beside it, practically impotent. During one of his private lab sessions, Leonard discovered a way to strip the tropane alkaloids away from its bindings, and then extract it in its purest form. That day, he blended the dried and crushed powder in with two grams of nearly pure cocaine. The results that formula produced would have coke heads running from a thousand miles for another snort, but, for him, the formula was useless.

  His business partner, TJ Harris had also tried Leonard’s jimsonweed and cocaine formula, and saw the tremendous value it promised. TJ didn’t care about Leonard’s spiritual quest, but he did care about a quest more germane to “real life.”

  “Leo,” he said the day after first trying the formula, “that shit you made is the key to all our worries. You created a gold mine!”

  “What I created,” Leonard replied, “was illegal and useless. A waste of time, energy and resources.”

  “What you created, what you think is useless, can earn us so much money that you never have to beg a pharma company again for their business. Let me run with this. You just tell me how the hell you made this and I’ll handle the rest. But trust me, you want to play with yourself in your private lab full-time? The money this, as you call it, ‘waste of time’ will bring in will make that happen.”

  Leonard snorted a heavy line of his one hundred and thirty-first formula, entered the deprivation chamber and floated atop the mixture of water and epsom salt; his scuba mouthpiece providing both fresh oxygen and the calming assurance that he wouldn’t drown if his spiritual journey took him too far. He closed the top hatch and waited for Rebecca’s whispers to morph into words.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Nikkie sat, exhausted, on the end of the king-sized bed in her hotel room. Her eyes were still red and swollen, partly from exhaustion and partly because she had cried during most of the drive from the hospital to the hotel. Though Crown was far from someone she considered a close friend, she was important to her. Nikkie loved the strength Crown had and how she had the courage to say what was on her mind. She was the person who hired her to work for Derek and she seemed to have the ability to read her thoughts. Nothing psychic, more like an ability to pick up on things others never noticed.

  It was Crown who shot sideways glances at her during the team meetings and after she and Derek finished a joint interview or a one-on-one meeting. Crown was the one person who made sly comments, asking her if she and Derek had given up “lying to themselves” and had “jumped each other’s bones” yet. Crown knew, despite Nikkie’s best attempts, that Nikkie’s attraction to Derek had been expanding since their first meeting.

  Nikkie was a professional. A damn good private investigator, one that displayed incredible focus, dedication and excellence to clients and co-workers. As she sat, still crying, on the end of the bed, her thoughts were so twisted she couldn’t keep a train of thought rolling long enough to build any momentum. She jumped from thoughts of Crown to thoughts of the Bo Randall case. Her mind flip-flopped between Derek, her career, and back to Derek, before landing again on Crown.

  She flopped her spinning head and exhausted body backwards onto the bed, her legs hanging off the foot of the bed. As she lay there, she was able to settle her mind and decide on two things. One, she admitted she was lonely. Despite doing well financially, her relentless pursuit of success had come at the cost of her personal life. She had no work-life balance and, if she didn’t find balance soon, she would fall so deeply to one side that recovery may come much too late for her to ever find fulfillment. Two, she owed Crown, Derek and Bo Randall her undivided attention and knew she had to eliminate mental obstacles before she could devote her full focus to the case.

  She needed to speak with Derek and she needed to speak with him soon.

  Derek didn’t arrive back in his hotel room in Ravenswood till around two in the morning. He was exhausted but charged with an energy which had many sources of fuel feeding it. He was angry at himself at how quickly he forgot that Crown had been attacked and was now fighting to stay alive. Angry at Bo Randall and his seemingly cavalier attitude concerning the immense amount of legal issues he was facing. Angry and curious about Louis Randall and how quickly he seemed to prefer a plea bargain over mounting an informed defense for his son. Derek was also intensely curious about how apparent it seemed that the recently departed Gene Witten knew Louis Randall. The way Witten’s face had flashed an immediate reaction of worry at the mention of Randall’s name and how certain he was that it hadn’t been Louis Randall that had contacted and hired him for his message-sending job had made it obvious.

  As he flipped on the lamp beside his king-sized bed, Derek let out a heavy sigh. His thoughts raced to John Mather and why he had never arrived at the cinema. He wondered if Witten had also been instructed to deliver a message to Mather and how severe that message was.

  As he sat on the side of the bed, he inspected the bullet hole in the leg of his jeans.

  “Through and through,” he said. Then a thought came to him in a flash of realization. “Why was the sniper aiming for my leg and not for center mass? The dude obviously has some skills on the far side of a rifle to be able to take Witten out with a single shot between the eyes. Why aim for my leg and not the center of my back?”

  His musings were interrupted by soft knocking at his door. Derek pulled out his 638 from inside his waistband holster and moved towards the door. A quick peek through the peephole let him know there was no need for a firearm.

  “What are you doing up?” he asked Nikkie, who was standing outside his door.

  “Just got back here twenty minutes ago,” Nikkie replied. “Where, may I ask, have you been?”

  Derek invited her in, offered her a heavily-poured glass of scotch, which she refused, then proceeded to fill her in on the events of his night.

  “And you’re thinking the sniper didn’t want to take you down but just injure you?” she asked after Derek had completed his story and had shared his beliefs of the event.

  “I can’t say for sure, but it sure seems that way.”

  Derek refreshed his drink, then, with a look of embarrassment across his face, asked about Crown. “I feel like an ass not asking this first, but, how is Crown doing?”

  Nikkie explained, as best she could, what the doctors had told her. That heart failure was a result of respiratory distress which, in turn, was the byproduct of Crown’s brain stem damage.

  “The good news, if there is any, is that the doctors believe the swelling in her brain is going down and while they’re keeping a close eye on her, they do think she�
��s out of the woods. Not far out of the woods, but, she’s making progress.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Derek said, but paused before adding more scotch to his drink. “Actually, I won’t drink to that. I need to be sharp in a few hours. It’s Saturday already, meaning we have the balance of today, tomorrow and a couple of hours Monday morning to figure this mess out.”

  “It seems to me,” Nikkie said, “that you’re not just investigating Bo’s possible role in the arson anymore.”

  “I think Bo is just one player in something much, much bigger that’s happening in Ravenswood.” Derek paused. “Speaking of Bo, where is he?”

  “His dad came to the hospital a few hours ago and picked him up. I assume he took Bo home.”

  “Did Mr. Wonderful have anything interesting to say?” Derek asked.

  “He didn’t say a word to me, he just looked me in the eye, then started tapping his watch. Guess he was telling me our time is drawing to an end soon.”

  “Such a pleasant fellow,” Derek quipped. “Listen, you and I have both had pretty shitty days. I plan on getting back out on the streets by seven, so, maybe we should call it a night?”

  Nikkie stood, fumbled with her hands which she held across her stomach, then sat back down next to Derek on the side of the bed. “Don’t think poorly of me,” she began, “but, is it too late to accept that drink you offered?”

  Derek looked into Nikkie’s eyes for several seconds. Behind her deep, brown, soulful eyes, he saw a glint of a promise. A promise of feelings he no longer believed existed. She held his gaze in the confident, self-assured manner he had come to expect of her. But as their shared gaze extended, Nikkie’s confidence seemed to wane. She shot her eyes away, darting them from the carpet, to the window, then to her clasped hands lying on her lap.