Jack Ryder Mystery Series: Vol 1-3

by Willow Rose

  April 2009

  James West was so happy. He had all of his daughters over for a visit for the entire weekend. He had missed them all so much, ever since he left the house and his family.

  And, this time, Elizabeth had come with them. She had come for the entire weekend for the first time, and James had been so thrilled to see her. Even his new girlfriend, Nicole, had liked her. At least she had pretended to, until Elizabeth threw her first fit and sat down on the floor screaming for food. That was when Nicole had told James he’d better take care of this before the guests arrived.

  They were having a party. Nicole was the one who had invited people over, even though James was having the kids for the weekend. She didn’t care much; she was only twenty-five and didn’t understand what it meant to have kids. James was so in love he didn’t care. He let her do whatever she wanted to…as long as she was happy. After all, it wasn’t an easy task to have to endure another woman’s four children, especially not when one of them was completely out of control like Elizabeth.

  James knelt in front of her and tried to comfort her, but Elizabeth still screamed at the top of her lungs.

  “I’m HUNGRYYYYY!”

  Not knowing what else to do, James slapped her across her face. “Stop that, Elizabeth. You’ve got to stop that.”

  Elizabeth cried even louder, acting like a two year-old, hammering her fists into the floor while screaming and yelling that she was so hungry. James slapped her again, thinking this was what his own dad would have done, and it had worked on him as a child. Children shouldn’t be in control; they shouldn’t be the ones in charge, and Elizabeth had been given way too much liberty to act however she wished. He felt this was his chance to finally make things right with her. This was what should have been done a long time ago. So, he slapped her again.

  The girl screamed and the doorbell rang. Nicole sprang for it and opened it for the caterers. When Elizabeth saw the trays of food being carried in, her eyes lit up.

  “Food!” she shrieked.

  “No!” Nicole yelled and looked at James. “She’s not getting anywhere near this food. You hear me? This is for the guests. This is nice food. Expensive food.”

  James nodded and looked at Elizabeth, who was about to explode in excitement. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t call Dottie, because she would never let him have Elizabeth over again. He couldn’t let Elizabeth run around the house on her own. She would only eat the food and Nicole would kill him.

  James sighed. It wasn’t easy making everyone happy. The three older girls were all getting dressed and were excited about the party that their cool new stepmom was throwing. They wouldn’t be anywhere near their younger sister if they could avoid it. He couldn’t do that to them. They were finally so happy to be at his place.

  “Elizabeth?” he asked.

  She looked at him through her tears, but never listened to what he had to say before she stormed into the kitchen and threw herself at the food.

  “Noooo!” James yelled and ran after her. He grabbed her by the shoulder, but couldn’t pull her almost three hundred pounds off the food.

  Meanwhile, Nicole was screaming. “Stop her! James, get her away from the food.”

  James was yelling at her, hitting her back, trying to get her away, but nothing helped. She was stuffing her face with food.

  “Elizabeth, stop! Stop!”

  He looked at Nicole’s terrified face, while his daughter gulped down the mushroom polenta and shrimps like she was eating popcorn at a movie theater.

  “Do something, James!”

  So, James had an idea. He knew it wasn’t a good one right away, but at least it was something. He lured Elizabeth down to the basement, holding a bucket of ice cream in front of her face, and by promising her she would get it if she followed him. He gave her the bucket and a spoon and let her dig in, while he snuck up the stairs, closed the door, and locked it. He didn’t feel good about it, but at least she was happy, now that she had her ice cream, and he would have the entire day with her tomorrow before she went back to her mother’s.

  “Is she under control?” Nicole asked, when he came back into the kitchen.

  James nodded. “Everything is under control.” It was hard for him to hide his embarrassment.

  Nicole straightened her dress and made sure her hair was perfect. She sighed with relief. “Good. The guests will be here shortly.”

  James forced a smile. “Great. That’s really great.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  March 2015

  “Where is your sister?”

  I looked at Sarah Millman in front of me in the interrogation room at the Cocoa Beach Police Department. Sarah Millman looked like answering my questions was beneath her.

  “Which one? I have three,” she said.

  “You know which one I’m looking for. Natalie. The one who shoots people and force-feeds her victims in her house across the street from yours. Or maybe that was you? I’m beginning to think it was you who killed your husband, after all. What about the others? Roy Miller? James West? Why did they have to die? And, what about Stanley Bradley?”

  Sarah Millman laughed. “You don’t know anything. You have no idea what you’re talking about. And you never will.”

  “Then tell me, Goddammit. Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I couldn’t betray my sisters like that.”

  “Your sisters? So, now you’re saying that they’re all in on it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m thinking. Here’s how I think it went down. Your sister Natalie worked as a psychologist at the schools. She found the victims. They all had one thing in common. Their children were seeing Natalie on a regular basis because they had trouble at home. They all came from parents who were abusive or neglecting them somehow. It is the same for Don Foster and Brad Schmidt, who were among the four killed in Boca Raton, and it goes for the last two who died here as well. Phillip Hagerty had two children in Roosevelt, who both saw Natalie, and spoke to her about how their dad would come to their bedroom at night and ask them to get undressed. It was her latest case. The case should have been turned over to Social Services so it could be investigated, but it never was. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you and your sisters had a better way of dealing with these things, right?”

  “Social Services never gets the work done. They have so many cases, they drown in them. They don’t have the time to handle all of them,” Sarah snorted. “The bastard deserved both of those bullets, and you know it.”

  I leaned back in the chair. Sarah Millman was finally talking. “When did it start?” I asked. “Who was your first victim?”

  I threw a file on the table in front of her that Richard had pulled right before I left the office. I opened the folder. The picture of a man appeared. Sarah Millman looked away.

  “He was your father, right? They found him in the canal in Boca Raton fifteen years ago. Stabbed twenty-six times. The killer was never found. Weird, huh? What did he do? Did he beat you up? Was that why you started this vendetta against parents beating up their kids?”

  “Any injustice against a defenseless child should be punished,” she said.

  “I feel the same way, believe me, but you and I are not judges in a court of law. It’s not our job to make that decision, and a smart girl like you knows that very well. So, tell me, what did your father do to you girls to make you believe he needed to suffer this fate?”

  “He got one of us pregnant,” she almost whispered. I could hear the bitterness and anger in her voice.

  I sighed. “He raped one of you?”

  “Not one. All of us,” she said. “Over and over again. Through all of our teenage years. We came from a rich family and lived in an expensive neighborhood, where people had as many boats as they had cars. There is a perception out there, Detective, that child sexual abuse doesn’t happen in those neighborhoods to those kids. But, what people need to realize is that child ab
use, whether sexual or not, can happen and does happen to any child in any neighborhood. It cuts across all socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural and religious.”

  “Who was pregnant?”

  “That is a secret between the four of us. We swore to never tell anyone. Not even our own mother knew. We never told her anything.”

  “How did you manage to hide it?” I asked.

  “Big dresses, staying out of her sight. She was drunk most of the time anyway. She never knew. When the time came, right before she was about to deliver, we told her we were all going away to France for a couple of weeks over Christmas break to study the language and the art. It wasn’t uncommon among our friends. We all left and went to a clinic that took the child and gave it to someone who wished to adopt it. When we found out one of us was pregnant, we made a pact…a blood pact, where we promised we would never look upon any abuse of children without acting on it. See, we believed our mother, the teachers at the school, and most people knew, but chose to turn a blind eye, thinking it was none of their business. Our father was influential. No one dared to touch him.”

  “Except you and your sisters. You finished him off. And got away with it,” I said.

  Sarah Millman was smart enough to not answer me. She knew not to say too much. She knew I would never find proof enough to nail her for the death of her father this many years later.

  “So, why did your husband have to die?” I asked. “You have a son together. Did he touch him? Did he abuse Christopher?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he did. I think you found out and sent the kid away to boarding school before you arranged to have your husband punished. Your one sister, Natalie, had already bought the house across the street and she was ready to help as soon as you asked her to. Maybe it was even her twisted idea to force-feed him till his stomach burst. It’s quite a painful death. Serves good as a punishment, doesn’t it?”

  “Sounds like you know more about that sort of thing than I do,” she said, careful again to not say too much. But I could tell I was right. I could see it in her eyes. I guessed she had started to take the benzos we found in her house after the discovery of what her husband had done to their son, to calm herself down, and that had left her emotionless when they planned his death. It took a calm and cool mind to plan a death like this.

  There was a knock on the door and Richard peeked inside. I stepped out.

  “You were right, Ryder,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “I just got off the phone with Stanley Bradley’s wife. He had beaten his son too. The boy was transgender, and apparently, Stanley had a hard time figuring out how to react to that. So, he beat him up. The boy went to Cocoa Beach High. Graduated two years ago.”

  “Let me guess. The two schools share the same school psychologist?”

  “It’s a city thing. It’s run from City Hall. She covers both schools in town.”

  “So, Stanley and Daniel were also punished for abusing their children. I’m guessing Roy was too. It looks like a pattern. Anything else?”

  “Two things. First, I think I finally figured out the signature. The AM. It’s all explained here,” he said and handed me a printout from Wikipedia. “Second, you asked me to look into James West, who was killed in 2009 in Boca Raton by the same manner as Daniel Millman and Roy Miller.”

  “Yes, you found something?”

  “I don’t know if it is anything important, but apparently, he was once married and had four children.”

  “Okay?”

  “One of them died in April, 2009.”

  “Died? How?”

  “She burst her stomach.”

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  April 2009

  James West was crying. For the first time since he was a child, he was crying. He was at his daughter’s funeral. A week ago, she had been alive. But now, she wasn’t here anymore.

  And it was all his fault.

  He should have listened to Dottie. He should have taken her word for it when she told him Elizabeth was sick and that she really couldn’t control herself, no matter how much she tried.

  Why? Why hadn’t he listened?

  Because he was a fool, that’s why. He was a damned fool, and now he had to live with the fact that he had killed his own daughter.

  Elizabeth hadn’t stayed in the basement. Of course she hadn’t. He hadn’t been able to hear her because of the music, but at some point during the night, she burst through the door to the basement and broke it into pieces by her forceful weight. James had been drunk at the time. He hadn’t thought about her for even a second, he was ashamed to admit. He had completely forgotten she was down there, and as the night progressed, she became more and more desperate. She was screaming for food and finally managed to break through and find her way to the kitchen.

  They didn’t find her until the next morning, when Nicole screamed from the kitchen and James woke with a start.

  “Elizabeth.”

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

  He ran downstairs and into the kitchen where Nicole was standing, frozen, holding a hand to her chest. On the tiles lay Elizabeth in a pile of hors d’oeuvres and Spanish Ham with olives and oranges. She had foie grass smeared over her entire face and piles of empty trays next to her. James gasped and knelt next to her. He couldn’t believe it. There had been so much food left…big piles of food, and now it was all gone.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, grabbing her hand. He leaned over her. He could hear her breath and catch her pulse. She was still alive.

  He had taken her to the hospital and told them what had happened. They had examined her and told him Elizabeth’s stomach had been distended and she was in severe pain. At the emergency room, doctors pumped her stomach, but her condition worsened. A day passed before surgeons discovered that her stomach had been distended long enough to lose blood flow and become septic, and now it had ruptured. Elizabeth died that night in her hospital bed, and now she was lying in her coffin, and he would never see her again. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Nicole had left him, and Dottie told him she was going to make sure he never saw any of his children again.

  James had pleaded with her, trying to explain to her that it was an accident…that he had tried his best, but he knew it was a lie. He hadn’t done his best. He hadn’t listened to his ex-wife; he hadn’t taken the time to get to really know his daughter and figure out what was wrong with her. He had taken her for being this monster, this person who lacked self-discipline because her mother smothered her.

  But it was all too late to change now.

  As the funeral was over, James West drove home to his empty house, where his daughter had eaten herself to death in his kitchen, and continued to cry. He cried his heart out, thinking about how stupid he had been, when the doorbell suddenly rang. Outside stood four young women in their twenties. They looked alike, and he guessed they had to be sisters. At first, he thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and he told them he wasn’t interested, when one of them put her high-heeled shoe in the door as he tried to close it on them.

  “Oh, but we are interested,” one of them said.

  “We’re very interested in you, James West,” another said.

  “Especially interested in what happened to your daughter,” a third said.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “We’re the Angel Makers,” the fourth said. “I sure hope you’re hungry.”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  March 2015

  “Tell me about the child,” I said, as I returned to Sarah Millman.

  “What child?” she asked.

  “The child you and your sister adopted away to another family.”

  “What’s there to tell?”

  I sighed and looked at her. I was getting a little fed up with her tough-girl approach to everything. It was getting old.

  “She died, didn’t she? How did you find out?” I asked, cutting to the chase.

  “It was in the paper,�
� she said. “The story of the girl who ate herself to death. We recognized the name and our daughter in the picture.”

  “Our daughter? So she was yours?” I asked.

  “She was all of ours. We all acted like we were pregnant; we all loved her like she was ours, but none of us could keep her, since we were too young. We thought we were giving her away to a family that would take good care of her, better than what we could. But they didn’t. They let her eat herself to death.”

  “So, you killed James West. You force-fed him till his stomach ruptured, just like had happened to your daughter.”

  “I never said that I did,” she said.

  “Was it Natalie who shot those people in the theater? That was her deal, right? She liked to shoot. She learned about the parents through the students at her school, then planned their execution. I’m guessing she’s the dramatic one of you, right? After the shooting and the killing of James West, you knew you couldn’t stay in Boca. It was too dangerous. So, you all moved up here, to Cocoa Beach, where Natalie got a new job and you got married to Daniel, right? You were pregnant and expecting Christopher at this time.”

  “I had just given birth,” she said. “And we were already married when we moved here.”

  “Okay, so did you all move up here, or was it just you and Natalie?”

  “It was just me and Natalie. She bought the house across the street from me with her money from our inheritance after our mother died.”

  “And the two others?”

  “Angelina and Kelly stayed in Boca. They came up here a year ago.”

  “Right when they heard you were in trouble, huh?”

  “My marriage wasn’t doing well, no. That’s no secret. They came to help me. There is nothing wrong with that. Besides, Angelina had been laid off from her job and needed a place to stay. Daniel was never home anyway, so she moved in here with me. She never married and never had any children. Kelly married, but was divorced after three years. She never had any children either.”

  “Tell me about the Angel Makers,” I said.