Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  Bones broke and blood spurted from my nose. Pain shot through me, and I staggered backward until my knees impacted with my desk chair.

  Thurn grinned and started to step forward. Then he froze and jolted and staggered. I heard a quiet, crackling sound.

  Taser, my mind supplied. Clark had deployed her taser.

  The noise ended. Bodies streamed forward from behind Thurn. But he didn’t go down. He remained on his feet, staggering, confused.

  I put my foot in his testicles hard and fast, via a jump kick. I was pretty sure something ruptured. It seemed the helpful thing to do as a concerned citizen, in the circumstances.

  He went down.

  Cops and FBI agents swarmed in with their guns drawn. They secured him in cuffs. They got me out of cuffs.

  They searched him and found the G43, a knife and a note in his pockets. The note explained the knife. It read:

  Awake, arise, pull out your eyes,

  And hear what time of day;

  And when you have done, pull out your tongue,

  And see what you can say.

  They got me an ambulance, again. I protested that I didn’t need it, again. And they ignored me. Again.

  A different efficacious doctor saw me, and declared that I would still live, though I might look a little worse for my trouble. The blow had broken the bone over the bridge of my nose. He put a splint around my nose, which hurt like hell, and told me to take Tylenol for the pain.

  He explained that I could expect an impact to my sense of taste and smell during the early part of the healing process, but there would be no permanent damage.

  He warned me about complications and told me what things I should look out for. Mostly, I was in trouble if I started leaking fluids: clear fluids, or more blood, or if my nasal passages started to feel blocked.

  Then he discharged me. Jason was waiting. I didn’t know how, since I hadn’t phoned or texted. But he jumped to his feet and hustled over. He eyed my face with unmasked curiosity, and poorly masked concern.

  But he grinned and said, “You look rough, dude.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m your ride. Clark called. She told me some of what happened.” He threw a glance around the room, and lowered his voice. Then he stepped forward and whispered, “Did you really catch the Nursery Rhyme Killer?”

  “Why did Clark call you?”

  He shrugged. “I donno. She knows we hang out, I guess.”

  We didn’t hang out. I didn’t hang out with anyone, and I was going to remind Jason of the fact. But he went on talking before I got the chance. “Is it true, though? You helped get the killer?”

  I nodded vaguely, and then regretted it. My nose hurt like hell. “I need to get Tylenol,” I said.

  “You got it, man. I’m supposed to take you to your new room once you’re ready. Clark said the department has you a room at a hotel. She texted me the address. I guess you can’t go home yet because your place is still a crime scene?”

  I murmured a disappointed agreement. It would be. They’d be looking for every piece of evidence they could find, to make sure they had an airtight against Thurn. Which meant I might be stuck at a hotel for a while.

  “And, if you need anything stronger than Tylenol…well, I’ve got some of that, too. Legal, or not quite. Although, in your case, you should probably stick to the legal, since you’re working with the cops.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I declined his offer, and Jason drove me to the nearest all night drugstore. I got the strongest Tylenol available, and headed to the hotel.

  Jason peppered me with questions the whole way. He insisted on following me to the room, and kept up the questions while there. I didn’t tell him much at first, but the longer he talked and the more my nose ached, the weaker my resistance got.

  In the end, I spilled the beans. I figured it probably wouldn’t matter. It’d be all over the news in a day or two. And Jason swore six ways to Sunday he’d keep his mouth shut.

  Not that I really believed that. He was a ball of excitement, convinced I was some kind of hero. I didn’t figure he’d be able to contain that too long.

  Then, around four in the morning, Clark messaged me. You awake?

  How could I be anything else, I wondered sourly, after she sicced Jason on me? But I responded only, Yup.

  You up to talking?

  Yup.

  So she promised to be over shortly. And she and Morris were, within half an hour. They had good news, and lots of it. Thurn was never going to see the light of day. Between his car and his house, they had enough evidence for a dozen life sentences.

  That was the expected part. The unexpected part, though, was that none of this was a surprise to her. They’d already identified Thurn before he stepped foot in my house.

  “The Thurn case was before my time,” Clark explained. “Long before. But it was a big deal. All the new recruits learn about it. Dorn was a model of self-policing, and accountability to the community. We all learn about it.

  “So it didn’t take long for people to connect the sketch with Bernard Thurn.”

  Which of course begged the question why no one had bothered to mention that to me, or release the name publicly.

  Here, Clark squirmed, and Morris took over the dealing. “That was Bureau advice,” he admitted. “To hold off for a few hours. Our behavioral psychologists predicted he’d make an attempt imminently.”

  “An attempt on me, you mean?”

  Morris nodded, not the least bit embarrassed about admitting to using me as live bait. “You disrupted his plans and got a description of him. We figured he would come after Clark or you, but probably you first.”

  “Why me?”

  “The Three Blind Mice killing, mostly. Charlene Fleming. He’d killed her almost immediately after someone copycatted him. He was protective of his brand, of his image.

  “He thought someone was plagiarizing him, and not doing a good job at it. There was no danger to him, no reason for him to get involved. Hell, having us looking at a dead end could have helped him.”

  He shook his head. “But no: he had to set the record straight. Like it was a personal affront, a challenge almost. He needed to prove himself to the world.”

  “An ego thing,” Clark said. “He invested so much ego into the NRK persona, he couldn’t stand to see anyone harm it.”

  “And I harmed it,” I concluded.

  “Damned right you did. You interrupted a killing. You broke his nose. You got a description of his face out for the whole world to see.”

  “So you figured he’d come for me?”

  “With upwards of ninety percent certainty. Upwards of fifty that it’d be the first night.”

  “You could have given me a heads up,” I said. “Before you laid a trap with me as the damned bait.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clark said.

  “Too risky,” Morris said. “If you knew, you would have acted differently. He might have picked up on the changes. And it wasn’t a trap. You were just doing your own thing. Like you would have been no matter what.”

  “Not if I knew there was a killer.”

  “Exactly why we couldn’t tell you.”

  “I could have at least kept my gun with me.”

  “And now you’d be dead, or he’d be dead.” Morris shook his head. “No. Now we’ve got him, and he’s going away forever. And you’re just a little banged up for the trouble.”

  They told me about the house and the evidence, too. Thurn had been sentenced to prison for three years, on a variety of charges stemming from his misconduct and abuse of the badge. Shelby Dandridge had been the prosecuting attorney. David Dorn was the arresting officer.

  Thurn had got out early due to a combination of good behavior and prison overcrowding, with only half his sentence served. He’d met a woman called Joan Allister and got married. He’d taken her name, leaving behind his tarnished one.

  They moved to Chicago, where Allister wo
rked for a big insurance firm. Then, five years ago, her father died. Her mother had already died decades earlier. Joan was an only child. She inherited everything.

  Including her father’s now defunct horse farm about twenty miles out of Kennington. There were no more horses. But there were barns and outbuildings aplenty. And hay and horse leaders.

  The Allisters seemed to have hit a rough patch sometime after that. They’d separated. She’d stayed in Chicago, in their multimillion-dollar home. He’d moved out, to the multimillion-dollar property she’d inherited.

  The ‘d’ word was mentioned. He’d get the horse farm and part of her retirement funds. She’d keep the property in Illinois and the rest of the funds. Not a bad deal, for an ex-con who had come to the marriage with nothing and hadn’t worked a day since.

  But not good enough for him, apparently. He decided he needed revenge – not just against Joan, but against everyone who had ever wronged him.

  “It’s all laid out in his manifesto,” Clark explained. “Apparently, he was planning for all contingencies. He had a whole manifesto all typed up in a locked drawer in his private office desk. Just in case he died during one of his hits.”

  “He didn’t intend to be taken alive if we did catch up to him,” Morris said. “He was explicit about that in the manifesto.”

  “Did he say why he killed who he killed?”

  She nodded and handed me a stack of copy paper. “We thought, all things considered, you deserved a chance to read this. It’ll be public soon enough, but…”

  “We’ll need it back once you’re done,” Morris said, quickly but firmly. The idea hadn’t been his, clearly. “It’s not the original, obviously, but we don’t want copies circulating.”

  I read then reread the document. It was ten pages long: for the most part, a lengthy, self-aggrandizing screed. Thurn, or Allister, or NRK, or whoever the hell he was, told his entire life story, through a lens of such narcissistic self-pity that I could imagine psychologists would get years’ worth of study out of it.

  He grew up in a middleclass household, with no major traumas or disruptions in his life. But his father was overly strict, and his mother pushed him to pursue a career in law enforcement. It was he who set the first seeds of rebellion in his son’s head, who triggered the need to struggle against unjust authority. It was she who pushed him into a ruinous career, who was ultimately responsible for his humiliation.

  They didn’t understand him. They’d never understood him. They didn’t appreciate him. They were the first strike against him, when they should have been his first and best support system. They had died of natural causes – and that was the only part he regretted about their deaths, that he had not been able to orchestrate them.

  Then he joined the police force. It should have been different. He saw the big picture. He understood the mission. But his fellow officers were weak. Pathetic. They had the power, and the right, to rule a city as corrupt as Kennington. And yet they let weak and cowardly civilians order them about. Question them. Put them on trial.

  They turned against him, when they should have stood by him – when they should have joined him. They betrayed him. Pigs: all of them. They deserved to die.

  Prison was different. In prison, hierarchies were respected. The best men rose to the top. The weak got what the weak had coming to them.

  Then there was Joan. Joan, who had pretended to understand him. Who had pretended to care for him. Joan, who was as two-faced as all of them. A small, grasping woman, with her small, grasping concerns. And she wanted to divorce him? She dared to suggest that he was unwell?

  She would die too, last of all. Screaming.

  There would be others who had to die to make it happen. A necessary evil. He was sorry about it, but not personally sorry. He had no choice. No, the blame lay with those who had to die, who had put him in this position.

  And anyway, they’d been fools, all of them. The Martinez girl had ignored her own instincts. He’d seen her think better of getting in the car. But then the rain had started. She’d thrown her fool life away for a little convenience.

  Anderson had been even worse. A disgrace of a human being, weak and pathetic, willing to do anything for his next fix. He’d written the note without a question. The Martinez girl at least understood what was coming when it got to that point. Anderson had accepted his claim that it was some kind of practical joke without a question.

  As for the old crone with the pet store, Thurn declared he’d done a service where she was concerned. She was a sad old bag, no use to herself or anyone else. He’d put her out of her misery, and made her useful in death.

  The preacher, too. Andy. “I knew he’d be my third the instant I laid eyes on him. Some men are made to be marks. He was one. All it took was a random conversation in line at the lunch counter. I had him after that.

  “It was easy. I had only to portray myself as a lapsed believer, questioning my faith. And he was on a mission to save my soul. We debated theology for weeks over lunch. I’d let him think he persuaded me on some points. I held out on others.

  “He thought he was going to save my soul. So when I asked him to talk to my wife, he smiled when he accepted.

  “The fly, thinking he’d trapped the spider.”

  He detailed Andy’s fight, once he realized what was going on. But it was too late by then. Andy lost, and Thurn cut his throat. He let him bleed out, and then he wrapped his body in a tarp, and dumped it by the dumpsters at the park.

  He mentioned killing Travis too, and how he’d used a different weapon so as not to link it to the NRK killings. Travis had messed up, and he had to die for it.

  Thurn described his own work in glowing terms, the way someone might on a self-appraisal form when angling for a big promotion. Except he was describing how well he responded to the high stakes of killing people, and how efficiently he executed his murder streak.

  The last sheet was a list of names, his killings in order. He highlighted the names of his targets, and put a date stamp next to those he’d already murdered.

  The first name was Mason Anderson’s, from December of the year before. Then came Angela Martinez and Andrew Welch. Next, highlighted, were the Dandridge kids, with Shelby’s name stubbed in too. Then came Charlene Fleming, with the night of her murder noted, and the three cops. David Dorn’s name was highlighted, and a date noted.

  Next was Andrea Clark, and another retiree: the Union rep who had failed to defend Thurn with the vigor he’d expected.

  There were more highlighted names – former neighbors who had offended him, the guy who mowed his lawn back in Chicago, and another guy he’d almost gone into business with. Finally, he listed Joan.

  There was more collateral damage, too – targets he’d picked out and stalked to keep things random, and to keep anyone from looking too closely at him.

  My name wasn’t on the list. Apparently, Thurn hadn’t had time to update his manifesto before he came for me.

  Which was alright. Morris and Clark were already threatening that my name would be everywhere. I was going to be some kind of hero, for the part I’d played in the case. The media would want to talk to me, and so on. So the fewer places my name showed up, the better.

  I gave the documents back. I thanked the detective for her work, and for saving my ass. And because I was in a generally good mood, I thanked Morris too. Even though he’d used me for bait. I thanked Jason, even though he’d talked my ear off for hours.

  He threatened to call later that day. So did Clark and Morris. I waved them all away and shut the door after them. I locked it and turned the bolt. Then I took another pain killer and made a cup of hotel coffee.

  I added dried creamer from a packet, and stirred it with a plastic stirrer. Three full stirs. Then I discarded the straw and took a long sip.

  Not good coffee, but not the worst I’d ever had. And scorching hot. The way I liked it.

  I thought about the next week, and the next month. A long week. A long month. Maybe
a long year, or even a long few years. I had relationships to build, and relationships to maintain.

  More relationships than I was used to, that was for damned sure.

  I’d get through it though. I had to. Because Andy was dead and buried. His killer had been found. The mission was over. That mission was over.

  But life went on. There’d be more missions. And plenty of coffee. Better coffee than this.

  Note from the author

  Thank you for reading Without Sin. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider leaving a review to let others know what you thought!

  Rachel

  More Owen Day Thrillers

  Vengeance is Mine

  It's only personal when they make it personal.

  Former Army intelligence analyst Owen Day is in pursuit of the Midwest Interstate Killer: a serial killer no one else sees. But Owen sees him in his handiwork.

  To the rest of the world, the deaths are just unconnected accidents and unsolved murders. But patterns speak to Owen, and he hears one in the killings. Loud and clear.

  But in unearthing one killer, he's about to step into a quagmire deeper and darker than he ever imagined.

  And it's about to get personal.

  Eye for an Eye

  First mistake: they kidnapped his niece and nephew.

  Second mistake: they didn't kill him when they had the chance.

  Now, they're going to rue the day they were born.

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  But sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight. When Owen crosses paths with a band of dangerous fugitives posing as tourists, his family becomes a target.

  And there's only one way to ensure their safety: find the fugitives, and eliminate them. Every last one.