Already Gone (A Laura Frost FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1)

by Blake Pierce

  She recalled a particular case. A guy who had battered his wife to death, then staged it to look like a break-in. The FBI had been called in after the local PD made no headway at all on the case. It was Laura, with her outsider’s perspective, who had managed to see that the man was guilty as hell. He’d gone to prison for life.

  He could have been one of the potential suspects on her list, if it wasn’t for the fact that she knew he was still locked away. Maybe it was someone like that, someone who could directly point to her as the one single person responsible for their incarceration. But a few years in jail wasn’t really enough to justify murder, was it? And those who had gone to jail for life, well, they were still there.

  A family member? She’d had that idea early on. She remembered one woman who had killed her own husband, shooting him right in the face. She had tried to use the battered woman defense, although there had not been enough evidence for it to stick. Laura had felt bad for her, partly believing her and partly not. She’d ultimately been convicted. Laura remembered how the woman’s teenage son had screamed in the courtroom, until he was taken out and forcibly restrained. Could it be him? Did he hate Laura enough to try to get his revenge in this way?

  No. She couldn’t believe it. Grief and fear for a parent were not the same thing as killing intent. The tears that had streamed down his face told her that he was at least empathetic. These killings—they were cold. Ruthless. They weren’t the actions of someone who could feel that emotional pain.

  A thought struck her. A memory from a courtroom, of a man who seemed to feel no remorse whatsoever for what he had done. In fact, he had tried to pretend that he was insane at the time of the kidnapping he was eventually sent down for. But that had all been a story.

  Laura had been a junior agent then, nowhere near as experienced as she was now. She hadn’t been able to distinguish the truth in his eyes when he said he didn’t remember anything that had happened, that he had been in some kind of fugue state.

  That was back in Brooklyn. Years ago. It was a missing persons case when she was brought in as an extra body to help with the hunt. She remembered long nights searching through the city, accompanied by police dogs and even local volunteers, all of them combing through abandoned buildings and back streets and looking for some kind of sign that would tell them where the young woman had gone.

  She’d had a vision. One of the first times that a vision had actually led her to solve a case. She’d followed it right to where the woman was being held, passing it off as pure luck, and found them. The man who had kidnapped her, and his victim. He had been standing over her with a knife, ready to end it all. But Laura had pulled her gun, stopped him with the threat of death, and arrested him. She had saved the woman’s life.

  In fact, it was the first time that she had earned the reputation of having such a lucky touch on these cases. The start of her lucky streak, something that was infamous enough within the agency for Nate to have known about it before they were partnered up. That was where it all began.

  Laura had gone to court to see the kidnapper enter a plea of insanity, and that night at home she had had a terrible vision. She had seen this same man going on to murder several women, strangling the life out of them and then abandoning them in their own homes for their families to find. She had seen the vivid colors, felt the last exhalation of the women’s breath on her cheek, watched their eyes as the life drained out of them. She had awoken shaking, terrified that he was going to get away with it.

  It was simple. If he was judged to be insane, he would be sent for mental treatment. Then, once he proved himself to be sane—which the physicians would think was a result of their treatment—he would be released. He would be free to kill again.

  Laura couldn’t let that happen.

  So she had gone into the courtroom and presented herself as an expert witness. She had spoken to the killer’s state of mind when she arrested him. She had embellished it a little here and there, just enough to make him sound absolutely sane and rational, to show that he had had every intention of killing the woman before she interrupted. That had put paid to his insanity plea. Even so, the fact that he had only kidnapped and tried to kill someone, rather than actually doing it, gave him a lighter sentence.

  Attempted homicide. It didn’t exactly carry a short sentence. But he must have gotten out early, probably on good behavior. Some kind of reform program.

  Laura didn’t have to look it up. There was no point. She knew now. She knew why the feeling of déjà vu had been so strong when she walked around the apartment in which Caroline Birchtree lost her life. She knew why she had looked at the body in the kitchen of Nadia and Paul Frost’s house, and felt that same tingling feeling. She knew now.

  She had seen all of these victims before. Years ago, she had seen them in another vision. She had watched them die the first time. She just hadn’t been able to put it together until now, because of all of the awful things she had seen between now and then, both in person and in her mind. She had managed to partly block them out, believing that she had seen a future which no longer existed.

  But it did exist. It was real. It was happening now. What she had seen wasn’t what would happen if the killer was released early because of an insanity plea. She had seen what was going to happen all along.

  No, that wasn’t quite right, she realized. Horror shot through her veins, making her hair stand up on the back of her neck. No, if she had let him enter his insanity plea, he would never have needed to kill these women. He would probably not even have remembered Laura’s name, because she would not have personally testified against him. She would have just been the anonymous agent who caught him. It wasn’t as though they’d had time to introduce themselves to one another while she was arresting him.

  She had been right all along. Her vision had been correct. But her actions taken to prevent it had actually been what caused it to come to pass. She wasn’t the hero who had saved a woman’s life.

  She was the woman who had damned several more to death.

  And they had the wrong guy in custody. Brent Dockhand had nothing to do with this. The killer was still out there.

  He was going to kill in her name again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Laura looked up as Nate walked in, almost jumping out of her skin. Just for a single moment, she was so scared she almost reached for her gun. Her nerves were going haywire, so many terrible thoughts about the revelation she’d just had going around and around in her head.

  “I’m not getting anything out of him… whoa, are you okay?” He paused halfway to the board, frowning at her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “You’re not going to get anything,” Laura said grimly. “He’s innocent.”

  Nate turned fully to face her, his arms crossing over his chest. “I take it this means you’ve come across some new evidence?”

  “Better than that,” Laura told him. “I’ve worked out who the killer is.”

  Nate blinked. “Are you going to let me in on it?”

  Laura scrubbed a hand across her face. “Sorry. I only just worked it out. I remembered the case. This was years ago, back in Brooklyn. He was put away directly because of my expert testimony about his mental state. I stopped him from getting away with a cushy psychiatric sentence. It’s got to be him.”

  Nate was already moving to the computer. Perhaps seeing she was still reeling and in no state to navigate the complex and outdated database system, he leaned over the keyboard, nudging her wheeled chair out of the way. “Name?”

  “Ed Bronston,” Laura told him. “Edward, maybe. I know he went by Ed during the trial.”

  Nate’s fingers sped across the keys, clacking out the name. “Here we go. Wait, you said he didn’t go to a psych ward?”

  “No,” Laura said, looking up and frowning. “He went to jail. Why?”

  “Well, his last release is recorded as being from Albany State Hospital.” Nate shook his head, scanning quickly through the re
sults on the screen. “Ah, here: he was jailed for a year first. That’s why he didn’t come up when I was scanning for recent prison releases.”

  “What does it say?” Laura asked, bending her neck to see the screen while he stood in front of it. “Why wasn’t he kept in jail?”

  “Uh…” Nate clicked to open up the record, waiting for what seemed like an age for the page to load. “Looks like he started exhibiting abnormal behavior which was referred to the prison’s psychiatrist. Then he was referred on to a psych ward for evaluation, where he bit a fellow inmate.”

  “Bit?” Laura wrinkled her nose. “He should have been restrained, surely?”

  “Hmm,” Nate agreed, scrolling through another page of a scanned-in handwritten report. “I don’t know. Sounds like the other prisoner was doing work in the wards, maybe. Earning some good behavior points by serving food. Then he got too close to Bronston, who bit the inside of his wrist so deeply the guy nearly bled out.”

  For just a brief second, Laura had a vivid image of a vein spurting blood into an open mouth, and she swallowed down nausea. Had she seen that before? Or was it just her imagination working overtime at the gruesome story? “And that didn’t get him thrown into solitary?”

  “Apparently, it was deemed that he was suffering from a severe mental break and delusions, and hearing voices.” Nate clicked onto another report before continuing. “His release record shows that he was given a clean bill of health after several years of ongoing treatment which showed gradual improvements. He was then released back to live with relatives—here, in Albany.”

  “He’s from here?” Laura asked, searching for the information on the screen.

  “You didn’t know that?” Nate’s voice held a note of surprise.

  “No,” Laura said, sighing and shaking her head. “I thought he was from Brooklyn. But it makes sense. That’s why he’s killing here. Because this is where he lives, not because it has any particular significance to me.”

  “Well, then how did you figure out it could be him?” Nate asked, frowning. “I mean, it does make sense. It looks like this is our guy. I just don’t get how you made the leap.”

  “Call it divine inspiration,” Laura said, getting up from her chair and gesturing to the screen. “Whatever it was, we’ve got to go. Do you have his current details?”

  Nate nodded, grabbing a piece of loose paper from beside the monitor and scrawling down the address he had on the screen. “I have his parole address. Nothing else is registered to him—no car, no cell phone number, no employment record. I guess we better hope he’s at home.”

  “If he’s not there, we’ll have the sheriff track him down,” Laura said, already rushing for the door. “Come on. We haven’t got any time to waste. There’s only a few hours left until evening starts to draw in—and we need to find him before he kills again.”

  Nate followed her as she marched as quickly as she could through the halls of the precinct, out to their waiting car. This was it. Laura knew they were on the right track, knew it in her bones—and they weren’t going to miss him this time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Laura glanced up at the sky as she got out of the car, noticing just how low the sun was. They had the benefit of it being late summer on their side, because darkness wasn’t happening until later in the day. But it was still coming. It was happening inexorably, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  The only thing they could do was to stop Ed Bronston before he struck again.

  The building they had pulled up in front of was an apartment block, shabby and faded. Paint was peeling on the window frames of the ground floor, and someone had tagged spray paint by the entrance. Their path to the door was littered with a punctured football, empty chip packages, and a broken down old children’s stroller with no wheels.

  It wasn’t the nicest place to live. Bronston had gotten out of a psych ward, and before that prison, so there was a good chance that he was unemployed now. If this was even his home. Most parolees had to live with a family member, someone who would take them in and vouch for them. If time wasn’t so much of the essence, Laura would have stopped to talk to the parole officer first, find out what Bronston was doing now. What his situation was.

  But the parole officer had not answered the call when Laura had tried in the car, and there was no time to wait. They had to go in now, even if that meant not having all of the information on hand. It made her itchy, made her hands twitch back toward her gun in fear, but what else could they do? If they waited, another death was certain.

  But even that thought pulled her up short as they approached the intercom that controlled the front door. Death—she had been thinking all the while about the death of the next victim. But what about Nate?

  His death was coming soon, too, and Laura hadn’t allowed him to get close enough to potentially trigger another vision. She had been too focused on the case. She hadn’t wanted to see his death coming. She just wanted to save as many lives as possible, and then worry about him afterward. She had assumed that his death was a long way off.

  But maybe that wasn’t the case. She had seen the shadow over her father not long before the cancer first appeared. Death had been on the way for him even then. It had been many years coming, but it had started when she saw the shadow.

  So, what if the events of this evening would set Nate’s death in motion? What if he was about to get shot, or receive some other kind of injury, that would limit his life? What if it would eventually become infected, or he would need some kind of transplant that failed, or a hundred other million possibilities that she could think of that could lead to his death further down the line?

  He should not even have been there. It was too dangerous. But Laura could not say that to him now—could not expect him to go back to the precinct meekly just because she told him to.

  So, instead, she took control.

  Laura walked right up to the intercom, first testing the door to see if it was broken, and then hit all of the numbers she could see except for the one she actually wanted. She didn’t want to alert Ed that she was coming, and that included telling someone out loud why they were there. She waited, and sure enough someone was lazy; they unlocked the door without bothering to see who it was that was down there, no doubt assuming she was delivering something.

  Without waiting to check that Nate was following her, because she really didn’t want him to, Laura turned and pushed the door open, running inside. She took the stairs two at a time, racing up as fast as she could, her gun drawn. She held it in front of her as she hit the third floor, only a little out of breath, and surged down the hall.

  She counted off the doors as she passed. Apartment thirty-one, apartment thirty-two, apartment thirty-three. And there! Thirty-four, his address. This was where Ed Bronston lived. This was where they were going to find him.

  Laura paused only for a moment by the door, leaning her head against it and listening. There was no back way out here. If Ed wanted to run from them, he was going to have to jump out of the window. She didn’t much rate his chances of survival if he tried that. Still, there was a chance that he could destroy evidence if he knew they were coming. She only had a short time to make this work.

  She hammered on the door, shouting loudly, announcing that the FBI was present and Ed needed to open up. She waited for just a few moments, then hammered again, repeating the same routine. Nate had caught up to her, much to her chagrin; he slammed his forearm against the door as well, joining her voice with his before nodding to her and gesturing for her to step back.

  “Nate, no,” she began, afraid that this was the thing that would get him into trouble—but before she could say or do anything else, he had stepped back and launched a powerful kick right at the door lock. On the second try, it splintered away, exploding backward in a shower of broken shards of wood, and Laura was ready.

  She stepped right in front of Nate while he was still recovering his balance, before he had the chance to go i
n first.

  “FBI! Come out with your hands above your head!” Laura shouted one last time, before moving rapidly into the cramped hallway. Shoes littered the space near the door, and she had to step over them, all the while keeping her eyes on three spots: a door up ahead, a door to the right, and a bend around the corridor to the left.

  “Show yourself!” Nate bellowed from behind her, making Laura wince. He was too close. Why couldn’t he just wait? Why did he have to come in right behind her?

  Because he always has your back, a traitorous voice in the back of her head reminded her. And it was true. She was always able to count on him.

  She just wished that wasn’t the case right now.

  She nervously drew level with the first door on her right, then in one swift motion reached out with one hand to push it open while the other pointed the gun right inside. It turned out to be a bathroom, stained and with a chipped and discolored toilet and basin, but utterly empty otherwise. A quick glance told her everything she needed to know, and Laura continued onward.

  She swung around the corner, putting her back against the wall and pointing the gun straight ahead. The view opened up, and she could see that ahead was a combination living room and kitchen, all of the kitchen cupboards visible from here and all filthy. She hedged along hesitantly, knowing that Ed Bronston could be behind any door, could be waiting for her just around the corner where the room opened out. But there was nothing else she could do. She had to press on—had to be the first in line. She couldn’t let Nate take her position.

  Laura steadied her gun with both hands, then rushed forward. She slammed her back against the wall again as she swept the kitchen and living room area, seeing that it was empty. As soon as she was sure that there were no other doors from this part of the apartment and that there was no one in sight, she reached for the door handle of the final room and wrenched it open. Inside was a bedroom, equipped with only a mattress directly on the floor, but again it was empty.