MYSTERY THRILLER DOUBLE PLAY BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

  “Here ya go,” Blankenship said, handing over the pages to Dana. “Let me know if you find any typos in there.”

  Dana lifted her eyebrows at him. “Is that even possible?”

  Blankenship shrugged. “First time for everything, I suppose.”

  Stepping outside the airport and into the chill night air, they caught a crowded shuttle over to the airport Hilton. Twenty minutes later, Dana let herself inside her room and took a quick shower before climbing into bed with Blankenship’s transcript of the Jarvis video.

  Hair still wet, she slipped under the covers and puzzled over the words in the transcript for a solid hour, reading and rereading the words again until she’d go blind. No use. After sixty minutes, the words still looked just as indecipherable to her as they’d sounded in the video.

  Dana shook her head in confusion and refocused her attention on the first six sentences of the transcript, even though sleep was beckoning her now like the ceaseless ocean tides rolling in:

  The heathen expresses Black roots! Of the hell everyone rues, here oscillates our destiny! Today’s harbinger envelops blatant racial overtones. Therefore, He expects rabid hate of ordinary disciples! To honor evolutionary black radicalism over the highly exalted ruler has obviously only destroyed the Heavenly expressions brought raining over the helpers employed. Reality has offered overwhelming damnation to he engaged – brokenhearted – raiding our time here, effectively reducing Heaven’s own omnipresent deity to His ecclesiastical base.

  Dana shook her head again and stared at the jumble of words some more. Still looked like complete fucking gibberish to her. Then again, where was the big surprise in that? Lee Maxwell Jarvis had seemed like exactly the sort of pretentious asshole who’d somehow think his verbal diarrhea profound.

  Leaning over and plucking a pencil and some hotel stationary off the nightstand, Dana listed the sentences in order:

  The heathen expresses Black roots!

  Of the hell everyone rues, here oscillates our destiny!

  Today’s harbinger envelops blatant racial overtones.

  Therefore, He expects rabid hate of ordinary disciples!

  To honor evolutionary black radicalism over the highly exalted ruler has obviously only destroyed the Heavenly expressions brought raining over the helpers employed.

  Reality has offered overwhelming damnation to he engaged – brokenhearted – raiding our time here, effectively reducing Heaven’s own omnipresent deity to His ecclesiastical base.

  Dana stretched her aching neck and began to rearrange the words on the hotel stationary. She didn’t know what else to do. She was stumped. And that would have been putting it extremely mildly.

  She wrote out the sentences backward, then forward again, then played around with the order in which the sentences appeared. Didn’t help at all. It was clear that Jarvis’s words had blatant racist overtones to them, but it seemed peculiar to her that he’d beat around the bush like that with a bunch of fifty-cent words crammed so uncomfortably together – making sense without really making sense at all. Sort of like Blankenship’s teaching technique. Still, nobody talked like that – not even murdering white-supremacist assholes who were filled clear up to their racist eyeballs with the Holy Spirit.

  Dana sat up straighter in bed and furrowed her eyebrows. Of course nobody talked like that. Not off the top of their heads, at least. So that could mean only one thing.

  Jarvis had written out the words in advance.

  She ripped off the top page of the stationary and crumpled it up before tossing the resulting ball in the general direction of a small metal garbage can in the corner of her hotel room, feeling her heartbeat rev up in her chest.

  Poising her pencil over the fresh page now on top, she began writing again.

  The heathen expresses black roots! Of the hell everyone rues, here oscillates our destiny! Today’s harbinger envelops blatant racial overtones. Therefore, He expects rabid hate of ordinary disciples! To honor evolutionary black radicalism over the highly exalted ruler has obviously only destroyed the Heavenly expressions brought raining over the helpers employed. Reality has offered overwhelming damnation to he engaged – brokenhearted – raiding our time here, effectively reducing Heaven’s own omnipresent deity to His ecclesiastical base.

  Dana stared at the maddening words for another ten minutes, feeling ridiculous, like she’d somehow switched places with Professor Robert Langdon in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, almost as though she were currently engaged in some sort of overwhelmingly complicated puzzle or code cracking.

  She sucked in a sharp breath through her nostrils.

  Widening her pale blue eyes, she went back over the sentences and darkened in the first letter of each word:

  The heathen expresses black roots! Of the hell everyone rues, here oscillates our destiny! Today’s harbinger envelops blatant racial overtones. Therefore He expects rabid hate of ordinary disciples! To honor evolutionary black radicalism over the highly exalted ruler has obviously only destroyed the Heavenly expressions brought raining over the helpers employed. Reality has offered overwhelming damnation to he engaged – brokenhearted – raiding our time here, effectively reducing Heaven’s own omnipresent deity to His ecclesiastical base.

  Dana almost threw up. In the first six sentences, the same two words had been spelled out five times, with the beginning of a sixth repetition bringing up the rear on the sixth and final sentence:

  The Brotherhood.

  CHAPTER 39

  Angel woke at six o’clock the next morning to take her daily jog along the Lake Erie shoreline. She wanted to keep some kind of routine going, wanted to keep her mind and body active. It was the only way she knew how to deal with the overwhelming grief.

  It was another beautiful day out over Lake Erie, the sun shining brightly on the water and reflecting off the whitecaps like a million tiny diamonds. Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s played softly on her iPod, and her pace matched the slow, heartbroken tempo of the song.

  It was the right speed for her that day.

  Returning home an hour later after jogging a full six miles – twice what she normally did – Angel hopped into the shower and tried desperately to scrub away the grief. Didn’t work. Not even a little bit. As the hot shower water poured down over her body and kept the tears streaming down her face company, Angel felt a hollow sensation deep inside the pit of her stomach, missing the feeling of knowing that her grandmother would be waiting for her out in the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee when Angel had finished preparing for the day.

  After drying off, she dressed in one of her favorite outfits: a knee-length white skirt and a bright, lightweight, flower-patterned blouse. Her heart still felt heavy in her chest, of course, but her cheerful outfit helped pick up her mood a notch. The ensemble in which she’d chosen to face the day had always been one of Granny Bernice’s favorite outfits, too, and that made Angel feel just a little bit closer to her grandmother.

  Besides, Angel thought as she locked the front door of their house behind herself and descended the rickety steps out front, I may be in mourning right now, but I’m still a lady, damn it.

  CHAPTER 40

  Marjorie Trimble glared at the nervous young teller seated across the desk from her in Marjorie’s well-appointed office at First National Bank of Sacramento.

  “This is completely unacceptable, Allison,” Marjorie said, shaking her head in exasperation while going over the thick sheaf of spreadsheets in her hands for the third time already that morning. Marjorie flipped through the incriminating stack of papers some more and deepened the sharp frown already carved onto her face. “This is the fourth time your drawer has come up short and you’ve only been here a month. I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate your employment immediately.”

  Allison Trent’s soft blue eyes brimmed over with tears. “Please, ma’am,” said the twenty-two-year-old former head cheerleader for the South Braxton Regional
High School Pep Squad (Go Wildcats!), shifting uneasily in her seat and clearly on the verge of full-blown hysterics now. “It’s only thirty dollars total and I’ll gladly reimburse the difference out of my paycheck. I didn’t steal it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t calculate the transactions correctly, especially when things get really busy around here. It won’t ever happen again, I swear it. Please, ma’am, just give me one more chance. I really need this job.”

  Marjorie pursed her lips and shook her head. “No. I’m very sorry, Allison, but you’re going to have to leave now. One penny short is one too many, much less thirty dollars.”

  Disbelieving anger replaced the tears blurring Allison Trent’s vision as she realized that her heartfelt pleas had fallen upon stone-deaf ears. Her voice trembled with incredulity, threatening to crack clean in half in her throat. “But I’m pregnant, you fucking bitch!”

  Marjorie rose calmly from her chair and pressed the button for security hidden beneath the lip of her desk. “You and me both, Allison. Goodbye to you and good luck.”

  When the young girl had been escorted out of her office two minutes later by two husky security guards in matching blue uniforms, Marjorie leaned back in her comfortable leather executive’s chair and sighed. Much like Allison Trent, most people at the bank probably thought her a royal bitch, but the truth of the matter was that she really didn’t give a shit. After all, you didn’t become president of a major institution like hers without first displaying that particular character trait, now did you? Especially not when you were a woman.

  Not to mention a black woman.

  Six hours later, Marjorie had forgotten all about the unpleasantness with Allison Trent back in her office as she pulled her brand-new Mercedes into her exclusive, gated housing complex thirty miles outside Sacramento. Exiting the car, Marjorie walked quickly up the driveway and slid her key into the front door lock of her beautiful home, knowing as she did so that no one would be waiting for her inside. Some things in this life just never changed, no matter how much time had passed or how much money you’d made.

  No matter how incredibly successful you’d become.

  Marjorie sighed and stepped inside the elaborate marble-tiled foyer. Whatever. Being alone was just fine with her. Hell, she’d been alone her entire life, so why should that change now? And no matter what anyone expected from her – including the overbearing Reginald Craft III, the president of a competing bank across town and a man with whom Marjorie had made a very unfortunate decision following too many glasses of wine nine weeks earlier – the fruits of her labor wouldn’t be compromised in the least little bit by the fruit of her other labor, the one that was coming up in exactly seven months and three days now, according to her doctor. Marjorie wouldn’t get an abortion, but neither would she let the child sidetrack her career, as Reginald had so pompously suggested she should let happen.

  Marjorie shook her head again, even harder this time. No friggin’ way. Not in this lifetime, at least. She’d worked way too goddamn long and way too goddamn hard to get to where she’d made it to today, and the kid would have the very best childcare that money could buy. If nothing else, it certainly marked a hell of a lot more than she could say for her own miserable upbringing.

  Tossing her keys onto the highly polished mahogany table underneath a huge mirror in the foyer, Marjorie checked out her reflection. No glow yet, and she really didn’t expect to see one, either. She just wasn’t that kind of woman who glowed. Never had been and most likely never would be. It just wasn’t in her nature.

  She tried to smile at herself in the mirror, but it was a smile that never quite reached her enormous hazel eyes. Shaking her head again, she turned around and her enormous hazel eyes immediately widened in shock and agony as she was met at once with a huge butcher’s knife plunging directly into her newly pregnant stomach.

  “I’m here to make a withdrawal of that baby in your belly, nigger,” a huge blonde man panted, wrenching the sharp knife violently upward and spilling Marjorie’s guts all over the marble-tiled floor of her beautiful home. “Next time only spread your legs for your own kind, bitch.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Dana brought Blankenship up to speed on her previous night’s discovery while the two agents partook of the free continental breakfast offered up by the Hilton in the hotel’s leafy courtyard, munching on crunchy English muffins and washing them down with tall, cold glasses of orange juice as the bright morning sunlight streamed down from the cloudless blue sky above and illuminated the pleasant scene.

  Blankenship lifted his eyebrows at her when Dana had finished relating all the details of what she’d found in the Jarvis video the previous night, clearly impressed. “Nice work, Agent Whitestone,” he said, shaking his head in undisguised admiration. “Damn nice work, as a matter of fact. I can see why you finished at the top of your class at the Academy. I only came in twelfth out of a hundred and thirty-six, myself.”

  Dana cocked her head modestly to one side, fighting back a smile. “Hey, what can I say? I just got lucky.” She lifted up her gaze to the brilliant blue skies above. “Like they say, the sun shines down on even a dog’s ass every once in a while, right?”

  Blankenship shook his head and leaned down to extract Jarvis’s computer from his leather briefcase, flipping it open on the glass-topped table between them. “Nothing lucky about it at all,” he said. “Don’t sell yourself short like that. It might have been a simple code to break, but I wouldn’t have even thought to look for it in the first place. Takes a special mind to work like that.”

  Dana nodded at Jarvis’s computer, feeling uncomfortable with the praise and wanting to shift the conversation away from it. Pride came before a fall and she’d fallen way too many times in her life – not to mention way too goddamn hard – to give into it again now. At thirty-nine years old, she was plenty old enough to know better, plenty old enough to have learned from her many, many past mistakes. Besides, tempting fate had never worked out especially well for her, had it? No. As a matter of fact, from all indications, fate liked nothing better than to kick her squarely in the teeth each and every time that she felt like she might actually be getting a handle on the colossal train wreck of her life. “What’re you doing now?” she asked, stretching her neck and wishing like hell that the kink living there would find somewhere else to reside already. The pillow back in her hotel room had been better than the one they’d provided on the plane ride out to Seattle, but not by much.

  Blankenship reached into his briefcase again and extracted a small plug-in device, sliding the device into the USB port on Jarvis’s computer. “Gonna use this air-card here to get online, see if I can’t hack into the Brotherhood’s website and see who’s running the show and paying all the bills.”

  Dana took a sip of her orange juice and cringed against the sharp taste so soon after brushing her teeth. “Good idea,” she said, taking another quick swallow of her juice in an effort to drown out the last of the toothpaste. Didn’t work. Aim stuck around for a while. Always had.

  Three long minutes passed before Blankenship finally looked up from Jarvis’s computer again. He shook his head in disappointment. “No good,” he said. “The Brotherhood’s server is located in Nigeria, of all places. It’s also shielded by at least fourteen proxy servers that I can see from here. Basically impossible to crack with the shitty equipment I’ve got with me.”

  Dana didn’t bother asking her new partner to explain himself. She didn’t see the point. She’d experienced Blankenship’s teaching technique on the plane ride out to Seattle, and she didn’t especially care to be subjected to it again. Not this early in the morning.

  Blankenship flipped closed the computer and returned it to his briefcase before glancing down at his watch. “So, when are these guys supposed to be picking us up, anyway?” he asked. “It’s almost eight-thirty.”

  Dana looked up. Across the courtyard, two men dressed in dark blue suits scanned the breakfast crowd. The taller of the pair caught her eye a
nd lifted his eyebrows. Dana nodded back. “Right now,” she said, rising to her feet. “C’mon, partner. Let’s go catch us some white-supremacist bad guys. Maybe fuck up their white-bread worlds a little bit while we’re at it.”

  Blankenship rose to his own feet, slinging the nylon strap of his briefcase over his left shoulder. “Right behind you. Let’s go nail these fuckers to a burning cross.”

  Dana elbowed Blankenship lightly in the ribs as they made their way across the courtyard. This time it was her turn to be impressed. “Nice imagery there, Bruce,” she said. “Very nice imagery, indeed.”

  Blankenship smiled. “Wasn’t it just?”

  Dana smiled back, enjoying the sense of peace that had settled over her. Without ever having realized it, she’d somehow found herself back in the place in the world where she’d always felt the most comfortable: kicking ass at work.

  She widened her smile.

  It had certainly taken a while for her to get there, but if nothing else, it was extremely nice to finally be home again.

  CHAPTER 42

  Jelani Diggs lived in Westlake, a quiet suburb ten miles west of Cleveland featuring huge oak trees lining both sides of the tranquil streets. The A-frame structure that the old woman lived in on Woodward Avenue seemed typical of the area – old with bags of charm. Sort of like the woman herself.

  The old woman eyed Angel suspiciously through the screen when Angel knocked on her door at exactly eight forty-five a.m.

  “You got an axe to grind with me, missy?” Jelani Diggs asked. “I’m really sorry about your grandma and all – honestly, I am – but I’m too damn old to be gettin’ into any silly fistfights in the street.”