“You sound just like your mom when you say things like that. Sure, I’m taking my vitamins, and I walk every day, too. By the way, a couple of your kids came by yesterday asking about you.”
Roxy settled back in the corner of the couch, relaxed and glad she’d called. “Oh, yeah, which ones?” Her kids were the young men and women she taught self-defense to at the local community center near Saint Pat’s. Most of them were in high school, but some were older college kids. She even taught a few housewives.
“That Vega boy and Valeree. You know the one I mean. The pretty blonde who turns red as a beet when she smiles.”
“Jose’s with Valeree?” Roxy hadn’t seen that coming. Jose was one of five boys in his family. His father had died from a burst appendix when Jose was born, and his mother worked as a housekeeper for wealthy families in the District. Valeree’s parents, on the other hand, were out-of-state lobbyists who’d recently moved to Crystal City, Virginia. They’d funded one street project after another to keep the homeless fed and in secure state housing, especially during the frigid winter months. “What’d they want?”
“Just to talk, or so they said, but if you ask me—”
“No,” Roxy breathed. “They’re in love?”
“Heh, heh, heh,” Daddy Thurston purred. “Engaged is more like it if that sparkly ring on her left hand means anything. I told them you’d be home soon, that they needed to come back to tell you their good news in person.”
“Aww!” Roxy nearly squealed. These two kids had been eyeballing each other since the day they’d signed up for her self-defense class. Both hard-working seniors with plenty of AP classes under their belts, they’d applied and been accepted by the same community college and planned to start summer quarter. “I’d love to call them. Can you get their numbers for me?”
“Now, Roxy,” Daddy Thurston drawled. “There’ll be time for socializing when you’re home. Finish your job first. It’s important, isn’t it?”
As always, he was right. “It is. I love you, Daddy,” she told him sincerely.
“And I love you, little girl. I’ll leave the light on for you.”
That was her clue to give him the same answer she’d given him since she’d been a little girl and babysat for the lady down the street. “And I’ll be sure to turn it off when I get home. Bye, Dad.”
“Bye, kiddo.”
The call ended as that annoying high-powered engine roared up the street again. What? Was the pizza man lost? Already dark outside, its headlights glared at the opposite end of the cul-de-sac as if the driver behind the wheel was watching her.
“Jesus H. Christ,” she hissed at it. “Do I need to shoot your tires out, so the rest of us can get some sleep tonight? So help me, if you wake my kids…” My kids? That made her smile. Yes. Kitty and Darrin might someday be her kids. The thought made her fist clench with the need to fist bump.
As if the driver had heard, the vehicle’s engine roared to life. The vehicle never swerved and it never braked. Roxy barely had enough time to scramble off the couch before it jumped the curb and crashed Isaiah’s front window and roared into his living room. Shattered glass flew like stinging hornets. She curled sideways to protect herself, while someone exited what she now knew was a monster of a truck. She couldn’t see more than a man’s shadow coming at her. The truck’s headlights were on high beam. He reached out to help her. She thought.
Until everything went dark.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Shit. It’s Chester Bratton,” Isaiah muttered as he crouched over the bloody body of an adult male, around two hundred pounds, medium build, sprawled on the concrete floor on his back. Out of breath from running from Tate’s SUV to the garage, Isaiah offered the obvious cause of death between fast breaths. “No knife present, but he’s been stabbed. A lot. This guy suffered. There was no way we could’ve saved him even if we’d been here when it happened.”
Tate leaned over Isaiah’s back. “I’ll say. She stabbed him at least a dozen times.”
“Crime of passion,” Keller added from where he paced at the open garage door. The agent was still freaked out that he’d seen the location of the murder in a vision, and that he’d been right. Arriving too late to save the deceased weighed on him. Isaiah didn’t blame him. No one wanted to be a hero, not this way.
They’d arrived at the scene along with the army of first responders they’d notified on the short drive over: EMTs, two fire engines and their respective crews, several MPD cruisers. Some insightful officer had already rigged a portable set of spotlights, running off the nearest rig’s generator, a smart decision considering the oil slick glistening off the surface of the service pit turned deadly swimming pool. The last thing this operation needed was for someone to fall in that and drown while gathering evidence.
Ky Winchester and his wife Eden had already notified Isaiah that they were in transit to the scene. Isaiah guessed right. Like he and Keller, Eden had heard Chester’s distress signal, but the number one player in this mess was nowhere to be found. Candace Bratton.
Tate crouched alongside the body. Crime scene protocol demanded they not do the one thing that could solve this mystery and lead them to the perpetrator once and for all. They couldn’t touch Chester’s body in hopes of gathering any lingering psychic impression Candace might’ve left behind. Not that she’d left many impressions in the past, but Isaiah remained hopeful. She was bound to make a mistake one of these days.
So they crouched there under the stark, bright lights, while they studied the agony etched on Chester Bratton’s whiskered face.
“He’s the one you saw?” Tate asked in a hushed voice. “Are you sure?”
Other responders tended to listen in on the FBI’s one and only psychic team’s discussions. Isaiah didn’t blame them. Psychics were a downright spooky oddity in the very controlled worlds of criminal investigation and forensics. So Isaiah, Tate, and Keller kept their voices low.
Isaiah nodded at Tate, but studied Chester. Had Candace known his whereabouts all this time? It wasn’t like many wives were close to their fathers-in-law, were they? Isaiah hadn’t a clue, but if Chester had agreed to meet her in the same place he’d hidden the money, had he also planned to share the five mil with her? Was that what this clandestine encounter was initially about?
Chester Bratton hadn’t been spotted since he’d supposedly skipped town, but apparently, he’d been here all along. What thief strays too far from five million dollars? But why had he selected a hideout so close to Candace’s home? All those questions gave rise to yet another. Did Kitty and Darrin know Chester? Would they recognize him if they saw him again? Had he been to their house? Did they maybe know him by another name? Was Nugget familiar with the deceased? And last, but not least, was the five million dollars really in the safe at the bottom of the pit like Keller had declared?
So yeah, Isaiah had a universe of questions. Just no answers.
Chester Bratton lay flat on his back in a lake of blood and gore. She’d only perforated his gut, and that alone was insightful. She’d wanted him to suffer. He’d been surprised by the attack, but the crime appeared preplanned and well organized. That meant she’d contacted Chester, and set the trap. Isaiah could almost hear the guile in her voice when she’d made that call, and like every other man, Chester came running to her aid.
Judging the viciousness of the wounds, she’d gotten what she’d wanted, namely the location of the five mil. But that conclusion gave Isaiah pause. In the part of the vision he’d seen, Chester had distinctly said, ‘I can tell you where it is, just don’t, God, please don’t…’ followed by, ‘If you kill me now, you’ll never know!’ Was this murder even about the money?
Isaiah snapped out of it when the side of Tate’s boot made definite contact with his shin. Ouch.
“Don’t zone out on me,” the big guy warned quietly. “Folks are watching you. Now, answer me, are you sure Chester Bratton’s the man you saw in your vision?”
“Yes, I saw him, but Keller…” Isaiah jerked his head to where Special Agent Boniface still stood, his hands clasped behind his back and rocking on the balls of his work shoes like he’d rather be anywhere else than here with a couple of psychics. Trying to keep his distance, and still undone by what—and who—he’d just realized he was, the man was obviously a stronger clairsensitive than Isaiah. “He might’ve seen more than he realizes. Get him over here.”
“Boniface,” Tate called out, waving the frazzled agent closer to the heart of the scene.
Keller obeyed, albeit he moved toward them woodenly. Reluctantly. Judging his ramrod posture and the cut of his hair, Keller was former military, but man, was he rattled. Still at attention and bristling with angst, he met Isaiah’s gaze without blinking. “Yes, sir?”
Isaiah curled his index finger, beckoning the man down to his side. “I need your expert opinion.”
“You bet.” Keller crouched to his haunches at Isaiah’s right, his wrists on his knees but his fingers interlocked in what Isaiah recognized for what it was. Denial. Keller didn’t want to be a psychic, yet he still asked, “What can I do for you, sir?”
He was no new recruit. Isaiah knew damned well Keller had seen worse things than this dead body in his military career, but what was happening to him now was extraordinarily out of the ordinary. No one expected to wake up a regular guy in the morning and end up a full-blown psychic by nightfall.
“Stop calling me sir, for one thing. Name’s Isaiah Zaroyin,” Isaiah said as he offered a handshake to seal the deal. He’d no more than touched the agent’s fingers when the image of what Keller had seen rolled through him loud and clear, confirming the physical evidence.
Candace hadn’t just stabbed Chester. She’d stabbed him with glee, twisting the knife up and into his gut, all but punching the blade into him until his blood dripped off her hands and ran off the knife handle. She hadn’t answered his pleas and hadn’t hesitated for one second when he’d offered to tell her where the five mil was.
When at last he’d dropped to his knees, she’d knelt with him, but only to deliver more strikes until he was breathing his last. Candace pushed him flat to his back then and spat into his face, “Twelve! Goddamn you, twelve! That’s what I owe you, one cut for every year of her worthless life, you fuckin’ liar! You promised you’d always be there, but you never visited, not once! How’s it feel to be lied to, huh? How’s it feel?”
Isaiah dropped Keller’s hand. He opened his mouth to report what he’d seen, but Keller beat him to it. “Chester Bratton’s Kitty Bratton’s father.”
Roxy woke up with a rag wrapped tight around her jaw and in her mouth, a bright light burning her throbbing retinas. Closing her eyelids as quickly as she’d opened them, she mumbled past the rag for someone to turn the truck’s headlights off. She could see enough. This was the same truck that had crashed into Isaiah’s house, and whoever’d done that, now had her restrained.
Awareness came slowly. Seated on a wooden chair, her arms were stretched behind her back. Her wrists were cuffed not zip-tied, and, damn, her ankles were cuffed as well. Stretching her aching back as far as she could brought no relief. She was in trouble and… Where the hell am I?
The wicked pain in her neck prevented her from turning to take in the rest of her surroundings. Her throat was drier than dirt and raw as hell. Kitty and Darrin were nowhere in sight. She called out to them, but that ended in muffled growls only. Where the hell are my kids?
Whoever’d raced that stupid truck through Isaiah’s supposedly secure neighborhood and into his living room was behind this. He had the kids. Maybe Nugget, too, and what about Leonard Sweeny? The driver would have had to get past him first. Was that kindly old gentleman hurt?
“Show yourself,” she demanded in her snarkiest tone. The rag in her mouth made it not the least bit threatening, but she thought, ‘Coward!’
A shadow crossed between her and the headlights. “It’s about time,” a man’s voice murmured. He walked to her with a swagger, like he had all the time in the world. “Took you long enough to wake up. Didn’t think I hit you that hard.”
“You hit me?” she mumbled, lifting her chin in defiance. He approached in a dark blur of shadow, punctuated by the eye-splitting high beams at his rear. “Who are you? Tell me,” she ordered. But holding her head up just to keep that all-important, officer-of-the-law eye contact was as difficult as talking through the rag in her mouth.
When the shadowy man crouched at her knee, he placed one hefty palm on the highest part of her thigh as if in warning. The nerve! His fingers clenched, triggering the clear-as-the-night-it-happened image of Mario Forsythe to center stage in Roxy’s poor battered head. She was back in that restroom, only this time she was restrained and Mario had hold of her. There was no hope of rescue. There was no h-h-hope of anything!
Bet me.
Roxy shook Mario out of her head. Blinking against the glare of those damned headlights, she planned her next move, which wouldn’t involve laying down and taking it.
“You’re a police officer,” he said as he tipped her chin up with his other hand. “Officer Roxy Thurston, huh? It’s a good thing you’re no man. I might have something to worry about then.”
She had plenty to say on that stupid opinion, but settled for a mumbled, “Where are my kids?” It didn’t come out snarky like she meant it to, but he got the point.
One upper lip lifted in what started as a smile but ended in a sneer. “Your kids? Now they’re your kids? I don’t think so. Candy Bratton only knows how to make bastards, but I’m guessing you already know that seeing as how you’re an officer of the law and everything.” Dropping his hands to his knees, he sat back on his heels, staring at her.
“Who are you?” she asked, squinting to decipher where she’d seen his face before. With the pain in her head and her vision as wonky as it was, she couldn’t tell for sure. The guy’s facial features blurred in and out of focus. If he’d hold still, maybe she could identify the creep. Turning the bright head lights out would certainly help.
“Bob Bratton at your service, Officer Roxy Thurston.” He said that with an annoying head swagger. “Sit back and rest while you can. Things are only gonna get better.”
Bob Bratton? Candace’s ex? “What’d you do to Kitty and Darrin?” she demanded, only it came out more like, “Muh mer meme ma mar.” Damn this crap in my mouth!
Bob lifted to his feet and took a sideways step away as if he had nothing more to say. But then he stopped short, cocked his right arm back, and... SLAP! His palm made stinging contact with the already tender side of her face.
Roxy’s poor pounding head bounced off her shoulder. Bright, glittering stars phased in and out at her peripheral. Struggling to stay conscious, she swallowed the blood that welled in her mouth from biting her tongue.
“You’re not in charge here, Officer,” Bob Bratton declared, “and the sooner you get that straight, the better off you’ll be. This is my game and my rules, so shut the fuck up. I’ll tell you what’s happening next when I’m damned good and ready, but baby…” He stepped back in close to trace an icy finger down her jaw to her neck. Fisting her collar, he tugged her off the chair and into his face.
She refused to shiver in fright. That was precisely what cowards like him wanted. Her shoulders screamed at the contortion of the angle of her body and his hold on her. Her back arched against her will, but one chance—just one!—was all she needed to kick this guy’s ass and save her kids.
At last he brought his nose in close enough to make out enough features to identify him in a line-up, if he lived that long. Dishwater-blond buzzcut. Clean-shaven. Rectangular face structure. Angular chin. A scar zigged through his left eyebrow and up his forehead. The man might be termed ruggedly handsome if you got past his penchant for kidnapping and battering women. He had pockmarked cheeks, but plump lips, complete with the perfect Cupid’s bow that foolish, infatuated women dreamed of. Not Roxy.
She forced her mind off what might happen in her future and concentrated on breathing as he whispered in her ear, “Trust me, Doll Face. I’ve been ready for this night for years.”
D-D-Doll Face? I should’ve known. Bob Bratton and Garrett Randall are in this together.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Say what?” Tucker bellowed over the quiet din of first responders at their work and the noise from their heavy engines idling on the street.
Still crouched with Tate and Keller over Chester Bratton’s body, Isaiah caught the wicked death glare from the doorway the second his alpha predator boss arrived. Like the total alpha he was, Tuck’s hands were on his hips and his chest was puffed out. Since the medical examiner had arrived within minutes of Tucker, Isaiah and Tate disengaged from the immediate crime scene and crossed the garage to confer with their boss.
Isaiah tagged Keller to join them as the busy MPD men and women stepped aside to clear a path for the FBI team. Amused at the local officers’ deference to their federal counterparts, Isaiah led with intros. “Boss, Special Agent Keller Boniface. Keller, Director Tucker Chase, your new boss.”
“Explain,” Tucker snapped without batting an eye or acknowledging the latest addition to his psychic team.
Tate jerked his chin at Boniface. “Keller had a vision. He saw Candace Bratton stab Chester Bratton. Mentally. The same way you just heard him say that Chester Bratton was Kitty’s father.”
A hint of chagrin shifted over Tucker’s face at Tate’s good catch. There was no way Tucker could’ve heard what Keller said across the noisy garage. “True that. And?”
“And I saw Candace tell Chester: ‘Twelve cuts for every year of her life.’” Isaiah left the profanity out as his gaze scrolled back to the deceased, now being skillfully maneuvered into a black vinyl body bag by the ME and her male assistant. “Not sure he knew he had a daughter though, are you?” he asked Keller.
“Umm…” Agent Boniface shook his head, but Isaiah got the impression he’d rather have scratched it, but didn’t want to make a bad first impression on his new boss. Isaiah also sensed Keller didn’t care for Tucker, but who did at first glance? Nobody Isaiah knew.
One-Eyed Jack (The Deuces Wild Series Book 3) Page 26
