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

by Osborne, Jon

  The bullhorn cuts through the cacophony of the pounding rain once more. “That’s it, ladies and gentlemen! Keep up the good work and keep those sandbags coming! Don’t give up now! We’ve worked way too damn long and way too damn hard to just stop now! We’ve almost got it shored up! Just a couple hundred more sandbags to go!”

  I run my stare over the washed-out landscape in front of me while I continue to work away with every last ounce of energy left in my exhausted body, which isn’t much by this point. In a nearby field that’s serving as a makeshift parking lot, the flashing lights of dozens of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances light up the night sky like a giant pinball arcade. It seems to me as though every last resident of Tichnor, Arkansas, has showed up to lend a helping hand.

  Every last resident, that is, save for one.

  I shake my head in disgust as yet another heavy sandbag slams into my arms. Twisting at my hips, I hand it off to the man on my right before immediately twisting at my hips again to receive the next load. The most prolific storm in Arkansas’ history – a storm of apocalyptic proportions – doesn’t appear likely to abate anytime soon and if nothing else, Amber Knightly should have been out here helping us in our attempt to avert certain disaster. If she doesn’t want to participate in the grunt work, maybe she could do something else. Pour some coffee for the exhausted workers. Pass out dry clothing. Offer a little bit of encouragement. Something. Anything.

  She should be out here suffering with us.

  I take another sandbag in my bruised and battered arms and hand it off. No doubt the famous pop singer who’d put the tiny town of Tichnor on the map for all of the wrong reasons thinks she’s above this sort of menial work. But while the rest of us are out here trying desperately to save her backwater-ass town, the head-shaving, lesbian-kissing, out-of-wedlock-baby-having slut who’d made headlines every bit as much for her train wreck of a personal life as she had for her singing talent (which wasn’t much, to my ears) – was nowhere to be seen. What did she care? She was rich. She wasn’t one of hapless commoners who’d lose everything she owned should the dam happen to break.

  She was on high ground. She was untouchable.

  Or so she probably thought.

  A tap on my right shoulder pulls me out of the wonderful fantasy where I’m using my sharp knife to pluck out Amber Knightly’s vocal cords, strand by bloody strand.

  It’s the man with the bullhorn.

  “Go on home and get rested up for a bit,” he shouts, squinting hard against the unceasing rain. “You’ve been out here longer than anybody else already. We’re going on four-hour shifts and you’ve already been here for six. That’s enough for now.”

  I take another sandbag and hand it off. “Are you sure?” I yell back. “I can probably go another hour or two if you need me.”

  The man with the bullhorn shakes his head. “Go!” he orders. “We don’t need you collapsing on us out here. We need all the emergency responders we have to help with the sandbagging. And if they have to stop working to take care of you, that means they’re not available to me. Come back after you’ve warmed up a little and gotten some sleep.”

  The man casts his stare up to the stormy heavens above. “I’m sure we’ll still be out here.”

  I nod and breathe out a grateful sigh of relief as I finally step out of the relay line. Behind me, the line immediately tightens up to compensate for my absence. It’s a work of art, really. A well-oiled machine that does whatever it takes to get the job done. “OK,” I say as my mind continues to perform the endless twist, handoff, twist routine even though my aching muscles have now stopped the maddening repetition, “but only if you’re absolutely positive you don’t need me.”

  The man points to the makeshift parking lot a hundred yards away. What looks to be about four hundred muddy cars and pickup trucks join the emergency vehicles dotting the drenched landscape. “Go,” Mr. Bullhorn says again. “Get the hell out of here before I change my mind and put you back to work.”

  I nod again and unstick my boots from the mud that has formed around my feet while we’ve been talking, begin trudging through the primordial muck toward my rental car in the makeshift parking lot. I pause and take one final look behind me at all of the dedicated workers in the relay line. Seems like every last resident in Tichnor, Arkansas, has shown up here tonight to lend a helping hand.

  Every last resident, that is, save for one.

  CHAPTER 42

  Half an hour later, I slip undetected into Amber Knightly’s house on Sweetbriar Lane about three miles away from the dam; helped along in no small part by the fact that the clinically lazy slut’s home-alarm system has been disabled by the sweeping power outage brought about by the apocalyptic storm still raging on in the heavens outside.

  Making my way quietly upstairs to her bedroom even though stealth isn’t something I need to worry about very seriously at this point, I pause on the stairs and ready myself for the next act in my mother’s wonderfully written script. Another murder. Another step closer to finally fulfilling her deliciously diabolical plan for me.

  Thankfully, the god-awful rainstorm drowns out every other possible sound in the universe as I go, masking each muddy step I take up the thickly carpeted staircase. Brilliant flashes of intermittent lightning illuminate my way. Once again, just as had been the case back in Dinah Leach’s Buckhead mansion and in Penelope Hargrave’s fancy black limousine in New York City, all of nature is my friend tonight.

  The only friend I’ve got in the entire world, to be sure, but also the only friend I need.

  With everybody in town – including law-enforcement – doing their damndest to keep the overworked dam from bursting just a few short miles away, Amber Knightly is all alone tonight. Just as I’d known she’d be from the very start.

  I stop just outside the doorway of her bedroom and simply watch her for a little while. The pop singer is seated in front of an elaborate vanity mirror with her eyes closed, dreamily running a silver-handled brush through her long blonde hair. A gas-powered lantern in the corner of the room casts an eerie yellow glow over both her pretty face and the rest of the sumptuous space around her.

  Smiling, I come up behind her and rest my hands lightly on her shoulders.

  Her pretty blue eyes fly open in shock as she’s abruptly jerked out of whatever reverie she’d been lost in and my reflection stares back at both of us from her spotless mirror. Try as she might, though, she can’t produce even one horrified scream before I jab the sleep-drug deep into her neck and depress the plunger.

  I stretch my own neck as her body slips off the chair and down onto the floor.

  Then I smile again.

  Time for me to get back to work. And I have all the time in the world here, don’t I? Of course I do. No need to worry about anyone interrupting us as we make our beautiful music together.

  Removing from my waistband the same knife that I’d used to slice off Dinah Leach’s breasts and labia in her glamorous Atlanta home, I proceed to turn my wonderful fantasy back at the dam into a mind-bending reality. One by one, I begin to pluck at the selfish pop singer’s million-dollar vocal cords like so many insignificant strings on an out-of-tune harp.

  Strand by bloody strand.

  CHAPTER 43

  Thirty-six short hours after removing Amber Knightly from the ranks of the living and sparing the world from any more of her nerve-grating voice, I finally have my long-awaited showdown with my mother back home in Chicago.

  I take a deep breath. This is it. The day I’ve been waiting for all these years, ever since the day that she’d brutally murdered my little brother in cold blood right in front of my shocked and disbelieving eyes. The day I’ve been waiting for ever since the sadistic bitch had forced me to breathe in my own waste and to taste my own sin.

  A day I’d dreamed about.

  A day I’d never truly thought would ever arrive.

  My mother is seated at the kitchen table in our shared home on 969 Turning Oaks Drive
and idly flipping through the glossy pages of a gossip magazine. She doesn’t even bother glancing up from the magazine’s pages to acknowledge my presence when I enter the room behind her.

  “How’d it go out in Arkansas?” she asks as she wets a manicured fingertip with her small pink tongue and flips another page.

  My heart pounds in my chest. My hands tremble. My armpits flood with sweat.

  She finally turns around when I don’t immediately answer her. Her emerald eyes lock onto mine and freeze me like an ice-sculpture in her paralyzing cobra stare. “I asked you a question, son,” she says harshly. “I said, how’d it go out in Arkansas?”

  I try to speak but no words will come out. My tongue is too swollen right now; my vocal cords too tight, the crashing in my brain too loud.

  My mother studies the sheen of fear that’s coating my eyes and rises to her feet. The belt on her white satin robe falls open at the waist to reveal her beautiful body. A silver Tiffany heart necklace sits cushioned between her ample breasts. A lacy black bra supports perfect white globes. A small brown mole winks out at me from the left side of her chest.

  She takes a languid step in my direction. “You want this, don’t you, son?” she coos, pursing her painted lips and running her delicate fingers through her long, ink-black hair. The strands of her hair cascade over her shoulders in a glorious display of seduction. “You want to take your mother to bed and show her what a big, strong man you are, don’t you?”

  She slides a finger teasingly along the elastic waistband of her white satin panties. “Are you ready for me, Nicholas?” she asks. “Finally ready to do something with all of those strange feelings you’ve got swirling around inside you?”

  When I again fail to answer her, my mother laughs. “I know that you and your little brother like me,” she says, taking another step forward. “Don’t pretend you don’t. I’ve seen the way you two boys have been looking at me lately. Disgusting, foul little creatures. You do know that little boys aren’t supposed to look at their mothers that way, don’t you? It’s unholy.”

  I take a step back and hold up my hands in front of my body in a futile effort to keep her away. I should have known better than to come here tonight. There is no escaping the power she holds over me. Never has been and never will be.

  She owns me.

  I struggle to work the muscles around my mouth. When my voice finally emerges from my badly constricted throat, it shakes uncontrollably, reducing me to sounding like the same confused, pre-pubescent boy who didn’t understand the feelings he’d felt.

  “No,” I say, taking another step backward and feeling the wall next to the refrigerator press into the small of my back. “This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be doing this to me. You shouldn’t have done a lot of things you did to me.”

  My mother cocks her head quizzically to one side and takes another step forward. “Like what, son?” she asks. “Tell me exactly what you’re talking about here.”

  My eyes fill with tears, blurring my vision. “You shouldn’t have…”

  Annabeth Preston takes another step forward and cups a hand to her right ear. She’s no more than three feet away from me now. “Yes, son?” she says. “Go on. I shouldn’t have done what to you?”

  My heart breaks into a million tiny pieces inside my badly constricted chest. “You shouldn’t have… molested me,’ I breathe, my voice shattering in my throat like a fumbled dinner plate. “I was just a little boy. You were supposed to protect me.”

  Throwing back her head on her shoulders, Annabeth Preston barks out a short, ugly laugh. Her bright green eyes flash like heated emeralds in their sockets. “Molest you?” she asks incredulously, shaking her head in disbelief with the words. “Are you fucking kidding me right now? I never laid a finger on you, boy. You were a freak, but I still took care of you. I fed you. I bathed you.”

  She shakes her head again and exhales a long, disgusted breath through her mouth, producing a hard pfft sound with her beautiful lips. “Molested you. Give me a fucking break. You can just go to hell, for all I care, you ungrateful little sissy.”

  The pure venom in her voice finally causes the sturdy wall that I’ve built up inside of me to break. Taking one quick step forward, I punch her square in the mouth with all of my might, releasing all the pent-up ferocity I’ve kept stored behind that wall ever since I’d been eight years old.

  She crashes down hard to floor in front of me. “I am going to hell, Mother,” I snarl, leaning down and wrapping a thick handful of her silken black hair in my right fist before yanking her up hard to her feet. “And I’m taking you with me.”

  Dragging my mother by her hair down the long hallway, I mock the way she’s always spoken to me. “You do know what this means, don’t you, you filthy little creature?” I ask, kicking open the front door to the house and pulling her down the sidewalk. I open the back door to our massive Lincoln Continental and toss her inside. “It means a trip to the butcher’s shop, you sadistic bitch,” I go on. “And if you think that what I did to those other women was bad, Mommie Dearest, believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Leaning my body into the car, I hold my mother’s panicked stare. For the first time in my life, the fear and uncertainty and confusion that has always ruled my movements is gone. In its place, a confidence like none I’ve ever known before flows through my veins and gives me the strength for what I know I’ll need to do next.

  Annabeth Preston trembles like a frightened child in the backseat of the car – just like I used to tremble. A sickening gush of blood rushes from her broken nose, streaming down her gorgeous face and staining her satin night robe a beautiful crimson.

  “I’m gonna hurt you, Annabeth,” I tell her, wanting her to understand just how deadly serious I am about this. “As a matter of fact, I’m gonna hurt you real bad.”

  Slamming shut the back door, I go around to the driver’s side and slide behind the steering wheel of the Continental before cranking the ancient engine into life with a quick twist of my right wrist. Turning in my seat, I then spit directly into my mother’s gorgeous face.

  “I’m gonna hurt you real bad, bitch,” I repeat. “That much I promise you.

  “Just like you hurt me and Timmy.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Still half-drunk from this morning’s ill-advised four-pack at the Smokin’ Oyster Brewery, Dana jogged past the long line of palm trees that were swaying in the breeze along Spellman Avenue and did her best to let the rhythmic pounding of her feet against pavement do its job.

  Some people did their best thinking while out for a run, but it had always been the opposite case for Dana. More than anything else, running provided an escape for her. An all-too-brief block of her day where she could erase the jumbled chalkboard of her mind and just be.

  And the sad fact of the matter was that the jumbled chalkboard of Dana’s mind was just too much for her to bear these days. Because not only had she literally run away from an open case back home in Cleveland, just ten minutes earlier she’d received the sickening news that an Internet video starring little Bradley had gone viral on YouTube. In the video – a disgusting horror show that had already received more than two million hits on the World Wide Web – the seemingly upstanding lawyer who’d adopted the little boy was pictured whipping Bradley so violently across his bare backside with a thick leather strap that huge red welts had piled up one on top of the other before finally splitting open and leaking torrents of bright red blood.

  Upon first seeing this brain-jarring spectacle, Dana had immediately vomited up all four beers she’d drunk that morning onto the hardwood floor of her rented vacation residence on Indian Bayou Avenue in Fort Myers Beach.

  Dana gritted her teeth and fought back the murderous swell of anger that rose up in her chest as she continued to run. The irony of her actions wasn’t lost on her. After all, why the hell should she stop running now? She’d already run away from her career – the job that had kept her going for so many years. She�
��d already run away from her responsibilities – including Oreo, who she’d returned to the capable hands of Maggie Carter with the vague promise of returning to pick him up again one day. And she’d run from the woman dressed in black, practically screaming in terror.

  Even more pathetically, Dana had run away from poor little Bradley, leaving him all alone in the world to fend for himself. And just look how that had turned out.

  Bitter tears streamed down her face and blurred her vision. She hated herself right now. Despised herself. Because she’d run away from everything and everybody in her life who’d ever meant anything to her, had let everyone down. And not for the first time, either. People she could never look in the eye again. Bill Krugman. Gary Templeton. Bradley. Herself.

  More than anything else, she needed redemption.

  But just how, exactly, could she get it?

  As God as her witness, she just didn’t know.

  Dana’s heart ached in her chest for poor little Bradley as her legs pushed back the warm pavement in steady five-foot increments. The boy with the silken blonde hair and enormous blue eyes so similar to her own. That sweet, precious little baby who’d promised to marry her one day and who’d promised her that after they’d gotten married they could live in a castle and ride horses and pick flowers all day long and go swimming whenever they wanted to. He’d needed her to be there for him, to stand up for him, to protect him, but she’d let him down. Could he ever forgive her?

  Didn’t seem likely.

  From the look of things, now she’d never be a mother.

  Still, Dana knew for a fact that before she could even dream of taking care of Bradley, or anyone else, she’d first need to learn how to take care of herself again. Anything less would be unfair to the little boy. He’d already been through enough pain and heartbreak in his short life as it was.