TWIN KILLER MYSTERY THRILLER BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

  “Well, your mama’s absolutely right. You’re the handsomest little guy I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Bradley widened his smile ear-to-ear, showing off world-class dimples in both of his cheeks. If he could be any more adorable, Dana couldn’t possibly imagine how.

  “Well, we can get married someday if you want,” he said. “When I get bigger than I am right now.”

  Dana lifted her eyebrows on her forehead. If she were to be perfectly honest about the whole thing, she’d have to admit that it was the first reasonable marriage proposal she’d ever received. Jeremy hadn’t quite gotten the opportunity to pop the question before he’d died…

  She chased away the gut-punch thought with a quick shake of her head, cursing her brain’s remarkable ability to always undermine her mental stability at the worst possible time. Everything that had happened with Jeremy was just still too fresh for her to handle, much too painful, much too hard to sort out right now. Probably would be for a very long time to come – if not forever.

  “Hmmn,” Dana said, clamping her stomach muscles together again against the heartache she doubted would ever go away. “We can get married someday, huh?”

  Bradley nodded. “Yep. And after we get married we can live in a castle on the beach and ride horses and pick flowers all day long and go swimming whenever we want to.”

  Though she’d never been one for uninvited physical contact with her fellow human beings – especially not with one she’d just met – Dana shocked herself by reaching out a hand and touching the boy’s smooth cheek. Thankfully, he didn’t pull away.

  “OK, handsome. You’re on. Consider it a date.”

  From there, the conversation drifted amiably from Bradley telling her the difference between fledglings and real vampires (fledglings hadn’t yet tasted human blood) to the main reason he didn’t especially care for broccoli.

  “Cuz it tastes gross,” was his concise explanation. “Sometimes I feed it to our dog underneath the table when my mama’s not looking, though. Don’t tell her, OK?”

  Dana shook her head. “Absolutely not. Your secret is safe with me.”

  Bradley held her gaze. From the look in his eye, she could tell he was deadly serious about this. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  Dana nodded. “And stick a needle in my eye.”

  The little boy nodded back, apparently satisfied by her eye-sticking promise. After all, only a complete lunatic would ever agree to such a horrible thing if they weren’t one hundred percent reliable. “Good,” he said. “And since we’ve got a secret now that makes us best friends forever, right?”

  Dana reached out and touched the boy’s smooth cheek again. This time the physical contact didn’t seem so difficult for her to initiate.

  Didn’t seem so difficult, at all.

  “You bet it does, handsome.”

  Chapter 9

  From there, the five minutes alone with Bradley seemed to pass in the blink of an eye for Dana. As the little boy continued talking about everything under the sun (including his slow-but-steady progress on learning how to tie his own shoes), she idly wondered how long an entire lifetime with him would take. Probably two eye-blinks; max. If that.

  He was in the middle of describing to her what he wanted for his next birthday (a DVD of Aladdin, an oversized beanbag and a new puppy dog would do for starters – just so long as the new dog also enjoyed the taste of broccoli) when his mother finally returned from her hasty trip to the bathroom.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the woman breathed, wiping away an imaginary layer of sweat from her brow as she slid back into her row. “A million times thank you. I can’t tell you how much I needed that. He talk your ear off while I was gone?”

  Dana smiled – a real smile this time. She was happy to find that she still retained the ability. She’d begun having her doubts lately.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but in a good way. That’s quite the little conversationalist you’ve got there.”

  The other woman shook her head in bemusement and reached down to tousle her son’s hair again. Obviously, hair-tousling marked one of her favorite ways of showing affection to her son, and despite Dana’s very best efforts to cut off the ugly emotion at the pass, she couldn’t help feeling a stab of jealousy. She wondered briefly if her pale blue eyes had turned green in their sockets yet. If they had, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

  “And such a hopeless flirt, too,” the other woman said, still smiling down at her boy as only a mother could smile down at her son. “Always has been and always will be.”

  The woman paused and let out a slow breath, sending the minty smell of Certs floating into Dana’s nostrils. “Oh well, at least he always picks the pretty ones. Say whatever else you want about him, but the boy’s got great taste in women.”

  Dana widened her smile as Bradley and his mother settled back down into their seats then and fell into a lengthy discussion about what the Tooth Fairy did with all the teeth she took and why the heck she needed so many of them in the first place. Ten minutes passed before the flight attendants took their positions at various sections of the plane and ran everyone through the standard preflight instructions. Exaggerated arm movements pantomimed the placing of oxygen masks over faces while a prerecorded message droned on in the background, imploring everyone onboard to secure their own masks before attempting to assist their fellow passengers.

  Ten minutes after that, the plane finally streaked down the runway and lifted off, shooting sharp little thrills of excitement through Dana’s stomach and eliciting a delighted whoop of glee from little Bradley in the seat in front of her.

  Dana sighed heavily and looked out her window again, watching Los Angeles disappear behind them in a swirling fog of gray-and-white jet exhaust. Like it or not – and she still wasn’t sure which one it was for her yet – it was time to get back home to Cleveland, back to her old life in Ohio after six solid months of traipsing around the country chasing deranged serial killers.

  She sighed again, even deeper this time, slumping her shoulders in resignation. At least, what was still left of her old life. Because not counting Oreo – her beloved black-and-white cat who she’d left under the care of her kindly old landlords at a price and security level she never would’ve been able to find at a kennel – there wasn’t much left of her old life back in Cleveland to speak of.

  Wasn’t much left to speak of, at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dana awoke with a start four hours later to the sound of the pilot’s deep voice coming over the intercom.

  She stretched her arms high over her head and let out a loud yawn, being careful to not elbow the elderly scarf-knitter to her right directly in the mouth. Not the sort of favor you wanted to pay forward.

  Dana yawned again. Blissfully, she’d managed to fall asleep somewhere over Nevada, which had made the long plane ride back home a bit more bearable – not that dreaming about the night your parents had been brutally murdered in cold blood right in front of your shocked and disbelieving four-year-old eyes could ever be considered restful.

  Shaking the remaining cobwebs from the attic of her brain, she concentrated on the pilot’s words as they crackled over the intercom. Even though the man was speaking in the same coma-inducing monotone all pilots used, the words he was saying didn’t sound normal to her at all.

  “… and since we’re experiencing a minor technical problem with the landing gear at the moment we’ll be bypassing Hopkins International and touching down at Burke Lakefront Airport instead. As the holding pattern over Hopkins is already full anyway, this will give us just a little more time to iron out the kinks. Nothing to worry about, folks, I assure you, but I wanted to keep you in the loop. More in a bit.”

  Dana sat up straighter in her seat and looked around the cabin at her fellow passengers. Like most Americans, anything out of the norm on a plane immediately slammed her mind back to the horrifying events of September 11, 2001, when Islamic extre
mists had slaughtered more than three thousand of her fellow citizens by plowing hijacked commercial airliners into well-known landmarks stretching along the eastern seaboard of the United States from New York City all the way down to Washington, DC.

  She tightened her grip on the armrests at her sides and glanced across the aisle. The rumpled businessman who’d elbowed her in the back of her head a few hours earlier was tilting back his head to finish off the last of his latest drink, a glossy sheen sparkling in his badly bloodshot eyes. From the seat in front of her, little Bradley asked his mother, “Are we almost home yet, mama?”

  The woman’s voice sounded every bit as frightened as Dana felt inside. Still, to her great credit, she tried to play it off at first. “We sure are, honey. Shouldn’t be too much longer now at all.”

  The little boy nodded. “But I can’t see my daddy when we get there because he got dead, right?”

  Through the crack in the seats, Dana watched a sad look flash across the woman’s face, and she empathized with her at once. And why not? She’d seen the exact same look in her own bathroom mirror each and every morning for the past thirty-five years now, ever since the horrible night that she’d watched her parents viciously murdered by a deranged madman who still haunted her dreams to this day.

  “That’s right, baby doll,” Bradley’s mother answered softly. “Your daddy died, but he’s always looking down on you from heaven, so always need to remember to be a good boy, even when you don’t think anyone’s watching you.”

  Bradley sighed audibly, further bruising Dana’s hopelessly bruised heart.

  “What does my daddy do in heaven, anyway?” the little boy asked. “Is he still a baseball player like when he was with us?”

  The woman nodded and tousled her son’s hair. “Yep, he sure is, slugger. And he’s one of the best baseball players in all of heaven. Even better than Babe Ruth, some say. Your daddy and Babe Ruth play on the same team now.”

  The little boy frowned. “What team do Babe Ruth and my daddy play for? Does my daddy still play for the Cleveland Indians?”

  The woman smiled gently. “Nope. Not anymore, buddy. Your daddy was traded to the Angels, so that’s the team he’ll play on for the rest of forever now.”

  Heartbreaking as the conversation was for her to listen to, Dana felt infinitely thankful for the mental break it provided, however brief. Looking out her window, she saw perhaps a dozen airliners circling the bright-blue skies above Hopkins ten miles to the east, each taking its position in the mile-high queue and waiting its turn to land.

  She glanced down at her watch. Burke Lakefront was fifteen miles west of Hopkins. The DC-10 in which they were flying had a maximum speed of six hundred and ten miles an hour, though she guessed they were only doing about five hundred miles an hour right now. That should give them approximately one minute until they made it to Burke Lakefront, a small commuter airport usually reserved for personal aircraft and corporate jets.

  The pilot’s voice came crackling over the intercom again just as what Dana assumed to be a military jet came roaring up along their left side, spinning her heart in her chest like a gyroscope.

  High-pitched shrieks immediately sounded from all around the cabin. Pure pandemonium followed after that.

  From the signage on the sleek gray fuselage, Dana identified the military aircraft as an F-16 fighter. Probably scrambled from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out in Dayton. Nothing to worry about, her ass. There was plenty to worry about here, obviously. And then some. And that would have been putting things extremely mildly.

  A rounded bulletproof canopy couldn’t obscure the helmeted pilot inside the F-16, dark sunglasses and all.

  The DC-10 pilot’s voice didn’t sound quite so calm this time. “Flight attendants, please ensure that everyone onboard is buckled up, then take your own seats and prepare for an emergency landing. Passengers onboard Flight 942, this is not a drill. Please do everything your flight attendants instruct you to do. We’re unable to operate the landing gear properly and an in-flight refueling can’t be performed at this late juncture. Therefore, we’ll be touching down in a water-landing on Lake Erie. When we hit the water, use your seat cushions as flotation devices. Slide the straps over your shoulders and activate the light beacon located on the left-hand side. Please secure your own flotation devices before attempting to help out children or fellow passengers. Exits are clearly marked and located at the front, middle and back of the plane. Please try to stay as calm as you possibly can. The Coast Guard is standing by.”

  The man’s deep voice cracked with his final words.

  “May God have mercy on our souls.”

  Chapter 11

  The intercom clicked off and Dana’s breath hitched in her throat.

  She looked out her window again and felt her heartbeat notch up another fifty levels in her chest. In the distance, two Coast Guard cutters were steaming full-speed ahead toward an undetermined rendezvous point out on the menacing, great gray-blue expanse of Lake Erie, the choppy waters throwing around the massive cutters like tiny toy boats bobbing up and down in the bathtub wake of a giggling, squirming child.

  A massive adrenaline dump flooded through her veins, electrifying her arms and legs as a panic-stricken flight attendant in her mid-twenties charged down the aisle checking seatbelts; glancing first to her right and then to her left with a look of absolute terror etched onto her pretty face.

  Thirty seconds later, the plane angled sharply downward and began its stomach-turning descent.

  Dana’s heart rolled across her ribcage as they went down and an oxygen mask dropped down from a hidden compartment in the ceiling above her, dangling before her eyes.

  She reached out with shaking hands and fastened the plastic cup over her mouth and nose as her mind flashed back to the story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger – the former Air Force fighter pilot who’d been hailed as a hero for crash-landing his plane in the Hudson River in 2009 without incurring any fatalities or major injuries to the one hundred fifty-five souls aboard US Airways Flight 1549, Charlotte to New York City. Dana only prayed that the passengers onboard Continental Flight 942, nonstop LA to Cleveland, would prove every bit as fortunate.

  They didn’t.

  When the plane slammed down into the water fifty seconds later, it did so with enough force to rearrange her insides as they’d been crammed them into a gigantic blender turned up full speed. A sickening rollercoaster feeling stabbed her deep in the gut while unearthly sounds filled her ears: the screams of her fellow passengers; the rumble of an unimaginably powerful earthquake; the unbearable screech of twisting metal as the interior walls of the plane bowed and moaned and sagged.

  Dana gripped her armrests with all her might, digging her fingernails into the plastic hard enough to draw blood. A sliding, disorienting sense of movement wracked her body as the plane plowed even deeper into the murky water.

  The last thing she remembered hearing was little Bradley’s terrified yelp of fear in front of her.

  And that was when everything around her went dead silent and as pitch-black as the inside of a coffee can. There were no more screams in her ears. No more rumbling in her belly. No more screeching of metal as the plane came apart at the seams.

  Just an unfamiliar sense of weightlessness in her limbs and head and torso as she floated away softly on a black cloud into a dark place she’d never before visited – and damn sure never wanted to visit again.

  PART II

  LADIES FIRST

  “Naming hurricanes is a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Natives of the West Indies named storms after the particular saint’s day on which they occurred. In 1953, the National Weather Service began using female first names for hurricanes, but it wasn’t until 1978 that men’s names were included too.” – Laura Wiener, Hurricane History: Fascinating Facts

  CHAPTER 12

  My mother performed her rudimentary version of a castration on me the day I turned thirteen – the same da
y she started giving me testosterone shots to ensure my continued physical development. After all, she wouldn’t want to arouse anybody’s suspicions about what she was up to, now would she? Wouldn’t want anyone to suspect that the devil’s soul lurked just beneath the façade of that gorgeous angel’s face of hers.

  And apparently she’d grown weary of arousing other things, as well – especially on me.

  Unholy things.

  Even though we weren’t Jewish – we were Catholic – I received a horrifying bris when other boys my age who actually were Jewish were busy celebrating their bar mitzvahs with family and friends. Not that we Catholics had anything to puff out our chests and crow about when it came to the ghastly practice, of course.

  In medieval times in Europe – back in the days when women weren’t permitted to perform in choirs during religious services due to their lowly social standing – the Roman Catholic Church often castrated boys to prevent their voices from breaking at puberty, allowing the lads to develop especially high vocal ranges. Italian church records dating all the way back to the 1550s mentioned castrati, and it wasn’t until the late-1880s that the church finally condemned the practice officially.

  A hundred years later when Catholic priests would fill in their time by molesting untold numbers of altar boys behind locked vestibule doors, the church would turn the same blind eye to the sickening abuse, led by none other than cover-up master Pope Benedict the Sixteenth himself.

  Early-onset puberty had allowed my mother to dismiss any concerns of my voice not developing properly. My adult voice was already there. Even at thirteen years old, I possessed a deep baritone that people often mistook for an adult’s whenever I spoke with them on the phone, often leading them to think that my cadence and pitch belonged to my deceased father.

  “You sound exactly like him,” they’d say with amazement in their own voices. “It’s uncanny.”