by Dan Ames
More articles popped up about the same doctor, a medical researcher, and Mack breezed through the entries.
It fit.
Doug had always been fascinated by the biology of the brain. It made sense that he could have been involved in this man’s work.
One of the articles referenced a Washington, D.C. residence.
“Looks like he lives in D.C.?” Mack said, showing his phone to Nora.
“Doesn’t that ruin our theory?” she asked. “The murders are down here in Florida.”
Mack’s email chirped and he looked down at the one-word response Decker had sent him.
“It’s him,” Mack said.
He showed the note to Nora.
It consisted of one word.
Classified.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Doug stood outside the front door of William Dezzotel’s house and pondered his options.
He hadn’t spoken to his former boss in years, after the disaster that nearly derailed both of their careers.
Doug rang the doorbell, heard a chime inside.
He waited.
Rang the bell again.
When no one answered, he walked around to the side of the house, tried to tell if he could see any lights.
He couldn’t.
A car drove by and Doug turned to watch it. A white Volvo SUV, driven by a woman with two kids in the back seat.
Doug walked farther behind the house and saw the back door. Immediately, his anxiety proved itself correct.
The door was ajar.
Dr. William Dezzotel was a control freak. Insecure. Brilliant. Paranoid. Doug remembered the old man talking about his love of security.
There was no way in hell he would leave a door open.
Doug went to the back porch, climbed the steps.
The outer glass door was ajar, and the much heavier wooden door inside was wide open.
From a pocket inside his jacket he pulled out the gun he’d brought from home. He felt a little foolish carrying it. He hadn’t fired a gun in a decade.
Doug held the pistol in front of him, just in case there were neighbors watching and he quickly stepped inside.
He left the door open just in case he would need to escape in a hurry.
The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was old man smell, tinged with something else.
The first room was the kitchen. Neat and tidy. No signs of anything, not even recent meals.
Doug walked past it, into the formal dining room, through the living room, and into a hallway that led to a bathroom.
Just past the bathroom was a door.
It was closed.
Doug walked to it and put his ear against the dark wood. He couldn’t hear anything. Doug guessed it would be the library, as it was clearly a large space, and the only area on the first floor not accounted for. It was probably the old man’s favorite room, where he spent most of his time.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and opened the door.
Dr. William Dezzotel was on his back in the middle of the floor. His naked body was surrounded by medical books.
Doug felt like he’d been sucker punched, and the air left his lungs.
His eyes traveled up the old man’s body until he got to the head.
The old man’s brain had been cut out.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Flying to DC was the only option.
Luckily, the Palm Beach Airport had a flight for DC leaving in three hours. Mack bought a ticket online and prepared to leave Nora.
“My gosh, you don’t even have a toothbrush,” she said to him. “Are you sure I shouldn’t come with you?” she asked.
“No, it might be a wild goose chase. It would be better if you stayed here, in case Doug shows up.”
Both of them knew that probably wasn’t going to happen.
It was awkward as they hugged. Mack wanted to say something else, but he wasn’t quite sure how to do it.
Nora solved it for both of them.
She raised up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. Not a passionate kiss, but serious.
“Thank you for all of this,” she said. “I owe you like I’ve never owed anyone before.”
“I just want to find Doug and figure out what’s going on,” Mack said. “I hope there will be some answers in DC.”
He left, then, and drove to the Palm Beach Airport. He had an hour and a half to kill before the flight boarded so he bought a toothbrush and a travel size tube of toothpaste, along with a bottled water and some trail mix.
As he waited, he thought about the ramifications of what he’d learned. Advanced Biologies was classified information.
Doug was missing.
Three people were dead.
As people walked past him in various stages of urgency to their flights, Mack considered theories. He would come up with an angle, and then immediately discard it. He did this over and over again, until he grew tired of the process.
He needed information. He needed to talk to William Dezzotel and find out what the hell Advanced Biologies was about.
His cell phone rang in his hand and he stared at the information he was seeing.
It was a number he had just programmed in yesterday.
He hadn’t spoken to the man in years.
Doug Brooks.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Doug was frozen.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
This was a man he had known well, had worked long hours with, whose brilliance was unquestioned. And now he was looking at a corpse. The great brain that had once gone places and done things no one else could even conceive, was gone.
Doug probably would have stood there for much longer, if it hadn’t been for the gentle brush of fabric he heard behind him.
Startled, he turned, trying to bring the gun around but it was too late.
A woman was lunging toward him, a scalpel in her hand. She drove the knife into Doug’s midsection, above the gun and thrust the blade upward.
The gun exploded in Doug’s hand and the woman flew back, leaving the knife embedded in Doug’s chest.
The front of the woman’s shirt was bloody and as Doug watched, the bloodstain began to grow in size.
But the woman was laughing.
“Second time’s the charm,” she said.
“What–” Doug started to say, and then realized he didn’t know what he was going to ask.
“Oliver is going to get your wife, asshole,” she said, blood gushing from her mouth.
“Who are you?” Doug managed to gasp.
“Jennifer Coates,” she said. “Also known as Jenny. You probably knew me as Child Experiment #6 or something like that.”
The woman’s face was pale. The wound looked like it was near the heart. A lucky shot, Doug thought.
“We’re undoing your dirty work,” the woman said. “The other kids you experimented on? They’re all dead. We killed them. Oliver took the old man. You were my job.”
She gave a grisly smile, her teeth covered in blood.
With a shout, she tried to get up, but Doug shot her again and her body dropped back against the floor as more blood seeped out from beneath her.
Doug dropped to his knees, blood pouring from the gaping wound in the middle of his body. The gun slipped from his hand, fell to the floor and he struggled for his phone.
His left hand had only been sprayed with blood, and he was able to hit his missed calls where Wallace Mack’s number was. Doug pressed it with his thumb and slumped backward, sitting on his heels.
Doug fell to the side.
“Doug?” he heard Mack’s voice from the other end of the line.
“He’s going to kill Nora,” Doug said. He toppled over onto his side, his face hitting the body of the old man.
He could hear Mack’s voice on the phone, calling his name.
But he couldn’t answer.
“We tried to use their memory,” Doug said, h
is voice faint. “As weapons…”
Doug put his hand over his chest, only it didn’t feel like his body anymore. It was wet and warm and there were things he shouldn’t be touching.
He stared at the ceiling.
The dead girl’s face. It looked familiar. From a long time ago.
I remember, he thought.
Chapter Forty
Mack was glad he’d decided to pay the extra money for nearby parking. He raced from the terminal, out to his car, and jammed it down I-95, heading for Nora’s house.
His mind was reeling and he was calling Nora.
But she wasn’t answering.
Who was trying to kill her? He wished he could ask Doug, but he wasn’t answering, either.
And he hadn’t sounded good on the phone.
His phone finally rang but it wasn’t Nora, or Doug.
It was Joe Decker.
Mack debated about answering it, and then did.
“Joe, I can’t talk, but what do you have? Fast!”
“I’m calling from a burner phone so you can’t call me back,” he said. “I’ll deny I ever told you any of this. Advanced Biologies was CIA. They specialized in manipulating the brains of kids with photographic memories. The problem was, when they tried to make the kids more willing to kill, they became violent. End of story. The program was scrubbed. No one knows what happened to the kids.”
“Holy shit,” Mack said.
“That’s all I can tell you,” Decker said. “I’m dumping this phone into the sewer, and forgetting this conversation.”
“Okay, thank you, Joe. I owe you big time.”
Mack hung up.
Shit, he thought. I should have seen it.
Doug had always chided him about being in the FBI. Teasing him about the Bureau. Now he knew why.
It blew his mind that Nora hadn’t known. But of course she hadn’t. Wives were always kept in the dark about what their husbands really did in the CIA. It was a security issue. If they don’t know, they aren’t important to the enemy.
But the enemy was coming for Nora now.
Mack used the voice command on his phone to call Seever. The call went to voicemail but he left a message, saying he had good intelligence that someone was on their way to harm Nora Brooks and to meet him there.
Now, he set the phone down and pressed the gas even harder. He was doing nearly a hundred miles an hour in the carpool lane. Luckily, traffic was somewhat light; a rare occurrence for the area.
He flew down the freeway, exited, and nearly crashed into someone as he took the sharp turn into the Old Floresta neighborhood.
Mack blasted through multiple stop signs until he got to Nora’s street and then skidded to a stop in front of her house.
There was another car in the driveway.
Not Nora’s.
Chapter Forty-One
Mack had his revolver in his hand as he ran to the front door. It was unlocked and he threw it open, then raced inside.
He heard a scream, and darted into the kitchen.
It was empty.
Down the hallway, he saw an open door. Sunlight was streaming from the room out into the hall.
Mack went to the edge of the door with his gun ready, and ducked into the room.
Nora Brooks was standing, facing Mack, with a man behind her.
At her throat was a scalpel, glinting in the sunlight. It was already pressed into Nora’s throat, and a trickle of blood was making its way down her pale throat.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked.
He had an oddly high-pitched voice.
Mack gave him an easy smile. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m one of her husband’s guinea pigs,” he said.
“Well, she had nothing to do with it,” Mack said. “She didn’t even know what the hell they were doing at Advanced Biologies.”
“Boo fucking hoo,” the man said.
“Look, I’ll make you a deal,” Mack reasoned, keeping his voice calm and controlled. “Let her go, and I’ll let you go. I’m not even a cop. I couldn’t arrest you if I wanted to. Just let her go. I swear, that’ll be it.”
“Wallace Mack,” the man said. “That’s who you are.” He tapped his temple. “Good memory, remember?”
“Tell me your name,” Mack said, trying to ease the tension in the room.
“Oliver,” he said. “You were with the FBI, if I recall correctly – and I always do.”
“Yes, I was,” Mack said.
“Do you have any idea what happened to us after they did their experiments?” Oliver asked. “Some committed suicide. Others died of overdoses. They scrambled our brains!”
They all heard the squeal of tires out front.
Mack realized that Seever must have gotten his message.
“Those are the cops,” Mack said. “You have to let her go now. She’s innocent.”
“I was almost one of them. The suicides,” Oliver said. “So I decided I was going to kill Dezzotel and all of his failed experiments. I had seen a sheet of paper with all of our names and filed it away. So I went hunting, but I ended up finding Jenny and decided we’d make a great team.”
“Look, what they did was a crime,” Mack said. “In a court of law–”
Oliver cackled. “Oh yeah! A court of law! They’ll fry me again. It’ll be my second time!”
Mack started to say something, but he heard the front door bang open.
Suddenly, Oliver whispered into Nora’s ear. He then threw her to the side, and rushed Mack, the scalpel held out in front of him, driving forward.
Mack shot him twice in the chest.
He stepped back, and Oliver fell to the ground in front of him. Mack reached down, took the scalpel out of Oliver’s hand, and went to Nora.
“Are you okay?” Mack asked.
He looked at Nora’s neck. It was a surface cut, not deep and it had already stopped bleeding.
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. She sagged into Mack’s arms.
“What did he say to you just then?” Mack asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“He said it was time for suicide by cop,” Nora said. “And then he added, ‘I think he likes you.’”
Chapter Forty-Two
The house was dark when Mack arrived back home in Estero. Janice was in bed, and Adelia was at the kitchen table, playing solitaire.
Mack went to the fridge and grabbed a beer.
“Want one?” he asked Adelia.
“Sure.”
He brought her a beer and sat down across from her.
“You look wiped out,” she said.
“I am that.”
He took a long drink of the beer.
“Christ, that tastes good,” he said.
“You look tired, but you look kinda happy, too,” Adelia said, squinting her voluminous brown eyes at him.
He smiled back at her.
“Shit, I think I see a twinkle in there,” Adelia said. Her teeth were a brilliant white in the evening’s dim light.
“No,” Mack said. “I just met an old friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. Her husband passed away, unfortunately, but it was good to see her again.
Adelia raised an eyebrow. Her smile hinted she knew better.
“When will she be visiting us?” she asked.
Mack laughed.
“Soon,” he said. “Hopefully, soon.”
BULLET RIVER
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Also by Dan Ames
A HARD MAN TO FORGET (THE JACK REACHER CASES: AUTHORIZED BY LEE CHILD)
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EASY PREY (John Rockne Mystery #5)
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THE MURDER STORE (Wallace Mack Thriller #2)
FINDERS KILLERS (Wallace Mack Thriller #3)
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MURDER WITH SARCASTIC INTENT (Mary Cooper Mystery #2)
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THE RECRUITER
KILLING THE RAT
HEAD SHOT
THE BUTCHER
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THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR
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HANGING CURVE
SCALE OF JUSTICE
About the Author