The Queen of Hearts (Mountain Springs Mysteries, #1)

by J. E. Mann

  He nodded. I let go of his hair.

  “Good. Now Rico, you know what kind of situation you find yourself in. I don’t make false promises. Marcus guessed wrong and I untied him. So I don’t lie. Not with him and now not with you.”

  “Please… Please just let…let me go.” His voice was shaky and scared. I shook my head.

  “No Rico, sorry. No lies here. I’m not going to give you false hope, tell you what if you answer my questions I’ll let you go.” I spread my hands out. “Take a good look Rico. This is the room you are going to die in.”

  He began to shake, almost crying. “I won’t tell anybody!”

  “Even if I believed you, even if I knew for certain you wouldn’t, it doesn’t change anything. You are not leaving this room alive.”

  The tears were coming fast now. I leaned back and let him cry it out. When the sobbing stopped, I caught his eye.

  “But that doesn’t mean you are powerless Rico. Far from it. You still have one choice to make. The final choice. I won’t force you to make it, it’s all in your hands.”

  He sniffed and looked at me. I held out my hands.

  “Easy or hard. That’s the choice you have.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The easy choice is if you tell me the truth. No lies and no tricks. You tell me what I need to know, I verify it, and you get a needle. The medicine in that needle is white, looks like milk. I’ll put it right here.”

  I tapped my wrist.

  “Right in your veins Rico. You will become very sleepy. It’s almost immediate. The drug will slow your heart and breathing. Slow them until they stop. You won’t feel a thing. It’s painless and a very nice way to go.”

  I held up my right hand. Rico watched me intently.

  “The hard choice is if you lie to me, refuse to answer, or try and trick me. It might seem like a manly thing to do, but there’s no one to impress here. It comes with a lot of pain. You’ve seen the gun and the knife, but on that table behind you and in the cabinets of this very room are other instruments. Some break bones, some burn skin, and some cut tissue and muscle. There’s medicine too, but this kind will make you feel as if you are being turned inside out.”

  Rico shivered. I nodded.

  “Bad images Rico. For a moment, however, lets push all that aside and focus on this. I have a deep understanding of both surgery and trauma. I’ve got a huge first aid kit with bandages and medical supplies. I can heal you if even you are mangled or close to death. I can even bring you back to life if I get too excited. My point in telling you this is that you will die when I decide. Might be hours, days, or even weeks.”

  Rico stared at me. I put my hands down; my offers were on the table.

  “There you have it Rico. One final thing though. Easy can become hard, but hard can never become easy.”

  I leaned forward, my eyes fixed on his.

  “Now, make your choice.”

  RACHEL

  “So I’m ruling out a pro. I’m not a hundred percent certain but I can’t seem to find any trace of one.”

  Jake sat on the window sill with his hands in his pockets. He had gotten back a few hours before and I wanted to know everything. I couldn’t forget to tell him what I knew too.

  “Jake is it possible we aren’t thinking far enough out? Like, could there be someone new here in town that could have done the killing?” Jake shook his head with a simple no.

  “There were these two new guys. Rico and Marcus, they accepted a hit on one of the local gang leaders. They sprayed his house full of bullets but only managed to hit him in the arm and one of his legs. Steve would have been too sophisticated for these two morons to pull off.”

  “Where did that come from Jake? What does this have to do with Steve and how do you know all of this information?”

  “Just the normal process of trying to gather information Rach. Abby put me on their trail. Once I found out what they did I knew they weren’t our guys.”

  “Well did you at least turn them in to the police?” Leave it to me to try and be the responsible one.

  Jake took a sip of his water and paused, “No they’re gone.” Was all he had to say about it? He stood starting to pace around the office with nowhere in particular to go, “So what about this Lisa woman?” Suddenly it was my turn to give up my information.

  “Well, I did some more digging after she left earlier and all I could find is that she’s an upstanding citizen. No legal problems, never been arrested for anything, not even a late payment on her bills. She seems clean to me.” I had been trying to find everything on this woman for the past six hours and still came up short.

  “So how did she end up in all of this? Why start sleeping around?” Jake had stopped pacing to look at me, he put his hands on my desk stretching or just looking me in the face, I couldn’t really tell.

  “I couldn’t find much Jake, I have no idea even if she was married or not. There’s not even so much as a vet record for any animals she probably doesn’t have.” My frustrations were coming to the surface again.

  A loud siren stirred outside our office on our busy local street. Jake noticed and looked up at me exhausted and still curious.

  “Let’s forget the suspects for a minute. What keeps rolling around in my head is how did they get Steve in to the restaurant? I feel if we knew that then the killer would come out and introduce themselves.”

  “Jake do we have to go over this again?” Another siren has started past our office and the noise was getting louder. “If finding the killer was that easy then we wouldn’t have a job.”

  He coughed out a laugh, he was really exhausted from his late-night adventures.

  “I’ll file for unemployment right behind you pretty lady.” We both smiled.

  Jake was shaking his hands wildly around and I assumed he was using his motions to try and keep himself awake. “Ok let’s go through the list.” He huffed.

  He went to a large whiteboard we had placed on an interior wall that held no other purpose. He uncapped a marker and began to scribble with haste. The marker squeaked in rebellion and I thought it was going to drive me crazy.

  “Here’s…what…we have…so far.” He had finished writing and it looked like he had put on display a large allegorical English game.

  “Gloria married to Steve, cheating.” The second column said unknown. Jake wrote the words no access to the restaurant.

  “Joshua had access to the restaurant. No motive for killing Steve.” Putting this all together was hard without the pen in my hand. I studied the board some more, “Gloria had the motive but Joshua had the opportunity, could it be that Joshua and Gloria were involved?”

  Jake stopped and turned to me, “Aren’t we forgetting somebody here?” I shrugged, I was sure we had everyone we knew of tied to the case.

  After turning around again, Jake took his marker and wrote another name on the board, James. I was upset that I had forgotten him but I didn’t deliberately leave him out. I didn’t know James that well and probably should have been more prepared to put him further in to our case. Jake continued to write in his columns, had access to the restaurant: had motive. I still needed to tell Jake about the accident James and I had on the street, a conversation I was terrified to have with him.

  James had a motive? The night we went out he had little emotion about his father’s restaurant being shut down. Could it have been possible that his motive was to shut down the family business? In the unknown column was a heart Jake had written with the words ‘Rachel loves James’. “Not funny Jake! Stop being an ass and get back to work.” I had snapped it was none of his business what I thought or felt toward James.

  “This is some great satire right here!” Jake laughed and pointed to the weak whiteboard markered heart.

  “You wouldn’t know satire if it bit you on the…” and my voice was gone. The air had filled again with another siren passing our office. Jake put his marker away on the tray and went to the window to investigate.
“What the hell is going on out there?” He questioned.

  “Can you see anything over there?” I was just as curious now and I wanted the noise to stop distracting us. He leaned further out of the window, “I see about three police cars and some type of smoke, fire maybe?” His words were muffled around the window pane. “No buildings appear to be on fire Rach but,” He sniffed the air and so did I. I covered my mouth quickly, I knew that smell and it was horrendous. Jake and I had stopped to stare at each other, we were having a telepathic conversation in that moment when suddenly my phone rang and vibrated across the desk.

  JAKE

  “Well, at least I can tell you this. It’s a woman. Somebody thought she was still alive and grabbed a fire extinguisher. After the fire was out, they saw the bullet wounds. Burns are over 60 percent of her body. Some accelerant was used, probably gasoline. You can smell traces of it.”

  Karen paused in her report. Rach was listening intently. I was looking at where the body now lay covered. Yellow tape kept the curious away from the crime scene. I still saw some talking on phones and taking pictures. Another person dead and all everyone else was concerned with was updating their social network statuses.

  “After that, same as our first victim. Large cut in the center of the chest, removal of heart.”

  “Was she killed somewhere else?” Rach asked. Karen nodded.

  “Absolutely. Lit on fire here, probably doused in gasoline too. If they were covered in gasoline and then tried to get the body here to light it, they would have been overcome with fumes.”

  “We could only hope,” I grumbled.

  “Any identification?”

  “Nope, sorry hun. Rodriguez and the others are still processing the crime scene. Maybe they’ll find a wallet or I.D. badge.”

  Karen walked back to her team. I started looking at the rooftops.

  “What are you looking for?” Rach asked.

  “Cameras. I thought I read somewhere that the city council had decided to put cameras all over downtown. Help cut down on crime or something.”

  “They did. Then somebody sued the city. Said the cameras were a violation of civil liberties. The cameras can’t be used until the court sorts it all out.”

  “They never got turned on?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, that’s great. I suppose no one saw anything?”

  “Just the flames,” Rach said.

  “What’s the pattern here Rach? First body was a guy, now this woman. Steve found in a closed restaurant, Jane Doe here set up in the middle of the afternoon. Do serial killers change their victim selection that quick?”

  “I’ve never seen it. The fire, gun, and the hearts are the pattern.”

  I turned and faced her.

  “You told me about hearts, tell me about fire.”

  She looked at the body as she spoke.

  “Fire was feared and worshiped. It could keep people alive and wipe out whole cites. There is a belief that fire cleanses. It makes things pure.”

  “So someone is taking out hearts and purifying the bodies they were removed from. Sounds religious to me. All we need is some twisted bible verse scrawled in blood on the wall somewhere.”

  “Not religious,” she said this with such conviction I jumped a little.

  “Explain.”

  “A religious fanatic is dangerous. Just look at September eleventh. But they want you to know why they did it. They want to crow on a hill top and explain why they are right and you are wrong. This person has a mission, but they want to go back to their home and other life. They don’t want to get caught.”

  Someone crazy I thought but also smart and deliberate. One of the most dangerous kind of killers and they were lose in our city. Behind Rach, I saw one of the patrol men heading our way, holding something in a plastic bag.

  “Excuse me miss, Detective Rodriguez found this behind one of the dumpsters and wanted you to have a look at it.”

  Rach took it, thanked the officer and brought it to her eyes.

  “Sarah Timmons,” she stated.

  She handed the driver’s license to me and I studied it. A young woman smiled back at me from the picture. She was pretty, and the license gave her age as 28. She looked younger, and too young to be dead. I lowered the card and was about to ask my boss a question when she snatched the card from my hands.

  “Hey, you could have asked to see it again?” I said.

  Rach didn’t answer. She was looking for something. When she found it, she looked up toward the sky and her mouth moved slightly. I had seen this before, she was crunching numbers. After a few seconds her eyes came back to me and she smiled.

  “She was married.”

  “How the hell do you know that? It doesn’t say on there.”

  She held up the card and pointed at the expiration date. “See this? You get your driver’s license when you turn sixteen; it expires when you turn eighteen. After that, it expires again when you turn twenty-one. After that, every ten years you have to renew it. Her license should expire in three years, instead it expires in 6.”

  “What if she just lost her card and had to get another one?”

  Rach shook her head. “Doesn’t work like that. If you get a replacement card, it’s still on the original expiration timeline. The only time it changes, and only for women, is when they have to get a new license with their married name.”

  Understanding finally dawned on me. “Married, just like Steve. The common factors are married victims, shot, cut open, and then burned. Patterns.”

  “I wish I had more good news. This doesn’t rule out Gloria because maybe Sarah was one of Steve’s girls. It might rule out Joshua and James because no motive here concerning the restaurant. Or there is and we can’t see it.”

  I turned and looked at the crowd. “How do we clear our eyes?”

  Rach sighed heavily. “A ton of research. We find everything about Sarah and then try and cross reference that with Steve. It’s going to take hours.”

  I was staring at a young black teenager. He was typing on his phone and seemed to do so with lighting speed. His girlfriend held out her phone to him and after a few minutes, he handed it back. The girl was happy, everything ok. Sometimes, you had to just ask for help. I turned back to Rach.

  “What if I could offer a shortcut?”

  RACHEL

  The case had all of the indications as the first, long hours, same style of death and no leads to help us catch the killer. Jake and I sat in my living room waiting for Alonzo. Jake said he knew him and he would help us with this “shortcut.”

  I had no idea who this person was and what made it worse, all in the same week I had not only gone on a blind date and been forced in to a second crime scene investigation but also was taking work home with me, the last place I wanted anything to happen. Jake had assured me that Alonzo was safe and that he would be more comfortable coming to my home instead of our office.

  “You could have given me a little more forewarning Jake, now I have to clean everything to make my house presentable!” I chirped at Jake as I ran around dusting and tidying anything I could reach.

  Jake sat void of any reaction to my statement and kept reading a professional wrestling magazine. I was running circles around the coffee table and stopped short in front of Jake’s legs, “You know that stuff is fake right?”

  He looked up from the edge of the magazine, “So is Shakespeare but everyone goes to see that,” and he returned to reading.

  “Are you honestly sitting there comparing professional wrestling to William Shakespeare?”

  “Good versus evil, the underdog fighting against a corrupt king, a witty catch phrase or two. They even have singing.”

  “Singing?” I had no recollection of anything like that before.

  Jake hummed a tune from low in his throat, “What’s up!” he said “What’s up!” and continued to hum not taking his eyes off the magazine. It was a tune I had never heard before.

  “Are you talking to m
e right now?” Jake put the magazine down without answering me. I continued to straighten things throughout the house.

  “Come on Rach get out of the library, what do you do for fun? Besides of course, taking handsome psychiatrists out to dinner.” He had a sinister sneer on his face even though he was joking.

  “I Google myself sometimes.” I stood stationary next to the couch pondering the answer. I didn’t really have “fun.”

  Jake gasped and smacked the side of his jaw, “Miss Paige! I do believe I’m getting the vapors!”

  We laughed in sync, “No! I just check to see if anyone has beaten my old math scores… among other accomplishments. And what exactly do you do for fun tough guy?”

  “Oh I Google you too.” What a smartass I thought.

  The floor beneath me started to bounce a little. There was a curious vibration running throughout my hardwood floors.

  “Do you feel that? What the hell is that Jake?”

  “Baton down the refrigerator, here he comes.” That was all Jake had to say on the matter. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

  A knock at the door sent me fleeing across the room. Alonzo must have been here. Upon opening the door I saw a massive gentleman with labored breathing and sweat glistening on his forehead.

  “Hello, you must be Alonzo! Please, come inside.”

  Alonzo stepped inside, “You guys really need an elevator,” he said in between pants.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Water maybe?” Alonzo looked absolutely exhausted once he entered in to the house.

  “Water would be good… thank you miss.”

  “No problem, you can call me Rachel.” I turned for the kitchen and Jake had appeared from behind me with one in hand. I directed Alonzo to the sofa to sit.

  Once everyone was seated Jake began, “Alright, we’ve got two people who were killed in exactly the same way. On the surface these two have nothing in common. We need you to check everything on the web to see if these people have ever crossed paths.”

  “Is one of these people the same guy you already had me check out before?” Alonzo asked between sips of his water.