A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust

by Reagan Keeter

  It was a safe bet that this was where they would come in as well, Rick told himself. With a concession stand on the other side of the glass, he could continue to watch them from the line.

  After Rick had learned Alice was going to the concert, he’d bought one of the few remaining tickets. It was a floor seat and expensive. The ticket had been delivered in digital form. A woman working the door scanned it and the scanner flashed green. She held out a hand, letting Rick know his next stop was the metal detector. He passed through without a hitch.

  The line at the concession stand moved faster than he thought it would. He ordered nachos and took a seat on a bench. This was worse than sitting in the car.

  When Alice’s friends arrived, the group hugged and chatted for a few minutes before making their way inside. Rick watched them figure out which direction they needed to go and dropped his head when they walked past, using the cap’s bill to hide his face. He threw his remaining nachos into the trash can and wiped his hands on his jeans, glad to once again be on the move.

  This will all be over soon, he thought. It couldn’t happen fast enough.

  He followed the teenagers through a gate where an usher checked their tickets. This gate, however, was not Rick’s. The usher told him to go to D3. Rick apologized for the mistake and stepped out of line, keeping an eye on the teenagers as long as he could without arousing suspicion.

  He went to Gate D3 and, once beyond the final ticket check, began working his way through the crowd back to where he’d last seen Alice. With only a small portion of the arena to search, finding them wasn’t too hard. He ascended the stairs, going straight past them and then several rows higher. He found an empty seat at the end of an aisle.

  Rick watched Alice and her friends closely. They joked, laughed, took pictures together. He didn’t like being here. He didn’t like what Liam had turned him into. But he took some comfort in the knowledge that what would happen next—all of it—was Liam’s fault.

  Liam Parker

  A taxi dropped Liam off in front a squat brick building. A knee-high iron gate surrounded a patch of grass in front of it. To the side, a short flight of steps led down to a stone patio. Ava had said Rick lived in the basement unit. He asked the cab to wait for him, then took the steps down to the patio. The door to the unit was ajar, the window beside it smashed in. The second and only other window was also open.

  Apparently, Liam wasn’t the only one interested in finding Rick. He wondered if someone had beaten him to it. Still, he hadn’t come all this way for nothing. He glanced at the dead fern in the corner and gently pushed the door open farther. “Hello? Anyone here?”

  Silence.

  He stepped inside. The heater was working, but it wasn’t much warmer in here than it was outside. He zipped up his army jacket. The place was trashed. Every cabinet in the kitchen was open. Every drawer had been pulled out. The couch and TV stand were turned over. Broken dishes, takeout cartons, junk mail, and trash littered the floor. Someone was looking for something. Maybe that something had to do with why Elise was killed.

  Liam doubted he’d find anything the intruder hadn’t. But without Rick here to question, he might as well look. A stench—something like rotten meat—crept into his nose. It was enough to turn his stomach and he made a point of breathing through his mouth.

  He made quick work of searching the living room and kitchen, and checked out all the same drawers the intruder had. He looked under the toppled furniture and sifted through the takeout cartons, careful not to touch any of the food.

  When he came up empty, he went to the bedroom. The door, already opened far enough for him to squeeze through, wouldn’t open any farther. A dresser had been pushed up against it. Rick must have been here when the intruder arrived, Liam concluded. He’d run into the bedroom and pushed the dresser against the door to try to keep him out. Liam looked at the open window. He must have crawled through there to try to get away.

  Liam guessed Rick had escaped because the bedroom was also trashed. On the floor in front of the dresser he saw a dozen or so diamond rings. He turned on the light, kneeled to get a closer look. They all appeared to be the same.

  He wondered why Rick had them and why the intruder hadn’t taken them. But those questions, like so many others, were ones only Rick could answer. Since they weren’t what he was looking for, he moved on.

  Liam looked under the bed, inside the empty dresser drawers, through the stacks of clothes on the floor. At some point, he heard footsteps and he froze. He worried someone—Rick, the intruder, a cop—was coming. Thankfully the footsteps passed by the unit and faded away.

  If it had been Rick, he’d realized after the initial alarm, that would have been okay. Liam had come looking for him, after all. But with what had happened here, he was also the least likely of the three to show up.

  Liam needed to finish his search and get out of here. Scratch that. He just needed to get out of here. He didn’t know what he was looking for and his search so far had been fruitless.

  But as he crossed the bedroom, he saw the corner of a notepad sticking out from underneath a bedside table. Liam had seen that notepad before, or one like it. Rick had been carrying it around in his back pocket at Ava’s. He’d noticed the edge of it protruding from his pocket once in a while much like it was sticking out from underneath the dresser now.

  It was probably nothing, but why not be sure? He grabbed the notepad and left. He could examine its contents from the safety of his hotel room. Then, as he was mounting the last step that would take him from patio to sidewalk, his phone rang.

  It took Liam by surprise. There were only two people who had his number—Anita and Alice—and he had no reason to expect a call from either. He pulled out his phone and checked the caller ID. He recognized the ten digits as David’s. His number was one of the few he knew by heart.

  Liam wondered how David had gotten the number and whether he should answer. He hadn’t wanted to involve his friend in all this, but it seemed like perhaps his friend had involved himself. David wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to track him down if it wasn’t important.

  Liam answered.

  “Thank God I got ahold of you,” David said.

  “What’s going on? How did you get this number?”

  “Alice gave it to me. Don’t be mad at her. I’ve got information on your case. I need to see you immediately.”

  “What are you talking about? What information?” Liam asked, on the way back to the taxi.

  “It’s better I tell you in person. But it’s good news, I promise. It will clear your name. Can you meet me at The Crown in thirty minutes?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Richard Hawthorne

  Rick occasionally looked up at the stage, but he spent most of his time with his eyes on the teenagers four rows down. Three girls and one boy. Alice was on the end. After the opening band finished their set, the lights came up and roadies went to work breaking down equipment, preparing the stage for the headliner.

  Alice and the friend with the white Volvo broke off from the pack. They headed down the cement steps and out through the gate they came in through. Rick did the same, hoping the usher wouldn’t remember him.

  He followed them to the bathroom where they went in together, came out together, and returned to their gate together. Rick was annoyed. He needed Alice alone, even if for just one minute. He went back to his own gate, made his way across the arena to his seat four rows up from Alice, and continued to wait.

  Felix Winkler

  Felix packed up his leather briefcase and slipped into an overcoat that was too big for him. It had been a long day. The plumbing had backed up in the public bathroom on Heartland’s first floor for the second time in less than a month. A nurse had quit without notice, leaving his already shorthanded staff spread even thinner. And good old Roland Burris, who had no relationship to the former senator but often joked he was in fact the senator himself in disguise, went into cardiac arrest and had to be
taken to Northwestern, where he was in ICU.

  Days like this were hard. To unwind, he would go home, have a glass of brandy, and listen to Bach alone in his living room.

  Felix turned off the lights to his office, locked the door, and spun around to find himself face-to-face with Nurse Cox. His head jerked back before he realized who it was. “Jesus, you scared me.” Then he added, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s okay,” Cox said, looking down at her white shoes. Nurse Cox was soft spoken and agreeable, which made her one of Felix’s favorite employees. She was a religious woman, and had asked him not to take the Lord’s name in vain the first time he’d done it. Felix had tried to respect that request.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  She held out her right hand. “Someone found this on the floor. They brought it up to the nurses’ station. We weren’t sure what to do with it, so I brought it to you.”

  Felix took the ID. He recognized Rick immediately and didn’t bother to look at any more of it. Sometimes Nurse Cox came to him with stuff like this. It was a problem that wasn’t a problem. “Call Rick. Let him know he lost his ID.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “But, the name . . .”

  Felix looked at the ID again, and then he understood why Nurse Cox had come to him. The name on the ID was Christopher Bell. That was disconcerting. There weren’t a lot of good reasons, if any, for Rick to have an ID with someone else’s name on it.

  “Never mind. I’ll take it from here. Thanks for bringing this to me.”

  Nurse Cox did an odd little bow like she often did and scurried off. Felix put his briefcase down without taking his eyes off the ID, trying to decide what to do. He studied the license as if somewhere on it he would find an answer. Going to the police was the obvious choice, though not one he relished. Rick was the only family Ms. Hawthorne had. Felix didn’t care for Rick, but he liked Ms. Hawthorne. It was why he had downgraded her to a shared room instead of simply kicking her out two weeks ago. If Rick was arrested, there’d be nobody left to pay for her care. That would leave Ms. Hawthorne in a tough spot. Felix could keep her around for a while, especially if he didn’t move her back to her private room. But once her account started accruing debt again, even he could only keep her around for so long.

  Felix decided he was jumping to conclusions. Rick had a fake ID, and that looked bad, but how bad was it really? What if this was all a misunderstanding? Maybe he would have to go to the police eventually, but he wanted to get more information first.

  He took the elevator to the third floor and followed the hall to Ms. Hawthorne’s room. If she was lucid, a quick conversation with her might be all it would take to clear this up.

  He knocked on the door. Ms. Hawthorne was all smiles when she opened it, but Felix knew that meant nothing. She was happy to see people whether she recognized them or not.

  “Ms. Hawthorne?”

  “Yes?”

  Felix looked past the old woman and could see her roommate in the distance. “Could you come with me? I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  She followed him into the hall. “What is it?”

  Felix tried to come up with a good way to explain the reason for his visit. In the end, he simply handed her the ID and waited for a reaction.

  Liam Parker

  Once the taxi was moving, Liam pulled the notepad out of his pocket and flipped it open. On page after page, he found notes about his life, including his children’s names; their ages; his favorite song; his favorite color; the names of his elementary, middle, and high schools; the names of his ex-wife, his first pet, and childhood friends; the name of the restaurant where he and his ex-wife met; the year they divorced.

  It went on and on.

  Liam recognized some of the notes as things he had told Rick. The rest Rick might have been able to dig up online.

  By the time he finished going through the notepad, the other thing he noticed was that there was no information on the other players—Eric Ricci, the Grunter, Emily Stewart. Just him.

  Why was Rick keeping notes about his life? And what did Elise have to do with it?

  Hands shaking, he closed the notepad and slid it back into his jacket pocket. This was not where he had expected the murder investigation to take him. Once he had a chance to sift through these newest surprises, he would. But solving the murder had to be his number one priority.

  If David was right, though, he might not have to worry about that much longer. But what could he have? How could he have uncovered something so important that Liam had missed? The camera in Elise’s building was on the fritz, so there was no video footage. Elise’s lies only led to more lies, more secrets. David had never been to Ava’s or met Rick. The only witness Liam knew about was Elise’s neighbor, and that certainly hadn’t gotten him anywhere. So what could David have that would clear his name?

  Two blocks from The Crown, Liam said to the driver, “You know what? You can let me off here. This will be fine.” He wanted to get a look at the place before he got too close. Just in case . . . In case what? It was the paranoia getting to him. It had to be. If there was anybody Liam could trust, it was David. He knew that. Still, he got out of the cab two blocks early and made the remainder of the trip on foot.

  David hadn’t seen him since he’d dyed his hair or bought new clothes. He wouldn’t recognize Liam like this, not right away. It would give him plenty of time to assess the situation.

  As Liam got closer to The Crown, he examined every pedestrian who wasn’t on the move. There was a homeless woman sitting on a bench in front of the restaurant, a group of people waiting at a bus stop on the corner, a couple loitering in front of a Starbucks on the other side of the street.

  Liam also looked at the cars parked along the curb. Darkness had set in. He couldn’t see into them from a distance, so he made a point to check each car as he passed it.

  A bus came. All but two of those waiting for it got on.

  Liam froze in his tracks. At other bus stops, that wouldn’t be unusual. Many served more than one line. This one served only Line 82. There’d be no reason to pass up one bus for another, especially in this cold.

  Liam was suddenly sure he wasn’t being paranoid—he was being set up. David hadn’t uncovered any evidence. He was working with the police to bring Liam in.

  He turned around and started walking back the way he’d come.

  Stop thinking like that. David wouldn’t do that to you.

  No, he wouldn’t. Liam had to be making a mistake. If David had evidence that could exonerate him, Liam needed to see it. Then again, if David had evidence that could exonerate him, why hadn’t he taken it to the police?

  Liam ducked into the next shop. Collectables and Collections. It sold rare stamps, old comic books, ceramic figurines. A sign by the register said “Best price for your rarities.”

  The shopkeeper, a woman in a peplum dress with white hair pulled back in a ponytail, was leaning over a glass case looking at something another shopper had brought in. She glanced at Liam and said, “Let me know if I can help you.”

  “Thank you,” Liam said, “I’m just browsing.” He pulled out his cellphone and dialed David’s number.

  “You close?” David asked.

  “I’m not going to be able to make it,” Liam said, watching The Crown through the shop’s windows.

  “What? Why not? This is important.”

  “Can’t you just tell me what it’s about?”

  “It’s not something I can explain. You have to see it.”

  “Take it to the police, then. Ask for Detective Wyatt. If it’s something that will clear my name, you should give it to him.”

  “Liam—”

  “I have to go.” Liam hung up and continued to watch the restaurant. As he feared, David stepped outside and the two men loitering by the bus stop approached him. So did the couple with Starbucks cups. Then a car door opened and Bash got ou
t. He glanced over his shoulder, seemed to look right at Liam, and joined the others.

  For a second, Liam was sure he’d been made. He thanked his lucky stars he had listened to his instinct. Bash’s car was parked perhaps twenty feet from where he’d turned around. If he’d gone much farther, he might not have been able to slip away.

  He knew he couldn’t stay here and wait for the group to disperse. The shopkeeper was already looking at him funny. No wonder—even if she hadn’t heard him mention the police, his behavior had to seem strange. But he couldn’t go back out on the street either.

  “Do you have a back way out of here?” he asked the shopkeeper.

  She stammered through a series of “ums” like she was unsure what to say. As she did, the pudgy man in the sweater vest on the other side of the counter turned to look at Liam.

  “Never mind.” Liam charged through the shop, found a backdoor just beyond the one that separated Collectables and Collections private and public spaces. It dumped him into a dark alley. Turning right would lead him toward The Crown, so he turned left. He moved fast, past dumpsters and stacks of discarded boxes, hoping he wouldn’t encounter an undercover officer at the end of the alley.

  Richard Hawthorne

  Fresh Sync performed “Here and Now,” “I’m Back,” and “Forever You.” Strobes flashed in time with the music, while smoke machines puffed and massive digital displays projected an endless and nauseating stream of video.

  They’re like pack animals, Rick thought with disdain as he watched the teenagers four rows down dance with a carefree jubilation he had never known.

  He wondered if he’d missed an opportunity to separate Alice from her friends. But when would that have been? At the McDonald’s? At the mall? When she and Ms. Volvo had gone to the bathroom?

  Rick was starting to think that wasn’t going to happen when—God bless her—Alice tapped the shoulder of her friend, said something to her and, after all four briefly huddled, descended the cement stairs alone.