Cover
Books by Ryshia Kennie
From the Dust
Ring of Desire
Fatal Intent
Title Page
Fatal Intent
Ryshia Kennie
Copyright
Beyond the Page Books
are published by
Beyond the Page Publishing
www.beyondthepagepub.com
Copyright © 2013 by Ryshia Kennie
Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs
ISBN: 978-1-937349-55-4
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
About the Author
Chapter One
She saw him floating headless through a mist of tears.
Even the river’s roar was not enough to mask her scream, as overhead the Borneo midday sun skidded a brilliant reflection across the river’s surface.
Garrett clapped her hand over her mouth and squinted against the bright sun. As if that would shift reality or change the fact that all that stood between Malcolm and anonymity was the San Diego Chargers logo on his torn, water-soaked T-shirt. Instead, tears washed her vision.
Malcolm’s smiling face—his smiling, missing face. She choked and her foot slipped, bringing her dangerously close to the riverbank, and the body.
Brush crackled and something screeched, the sound harsh and loud in a place where there was never silence. It would have sent chills through the uninitiated but it was only an insect, an oversize bug—an insect that might not be classified, identified. There were so many and that was what brought her here. But now her guide was dead, headless. That thought alone was preposterous even when the evidence lay in front of her. She wanted to weep. She wanted to run. But it was up to her to get her team out of here. She needed another focus before panic clouded everything. And then she caught sight of Ian spewing into the tall grass that grew wild and untamed on the edge of the clearing.
“Ian!”
It was only the two of them—for now. She and Ian. Ian, who was minus the balls God had given his mother, all feminine screams and hysteria in a crisis.
Her fingers trembled and she clenched them into her palms, nails pinching the skin. Her thoughts jittered everywhere.
There was no answer as Ian began to cry in large gulping sobs.
“Ian!” she shouted, trying to use tough love, hoping that would bring him back from the edge. There was no time for sympathy and neither of them could afford hysteria. They had to survive. Small choking sounds came from the brush. “C’mon, Ian,” she muttered, swallowing her own bile as it crept up the back of her throat.
Dead.
Only yesterday morning she had laughed with Malcolm over some inane joke one of the other Iban had told him, something that related back to his heritage and the Iban’s history as headhunters.
“Headhunters,” she whispered. “Don’t be utterly ridiculous.” There were no headhunters, not anymore. Just tribal people who took great pride in a history that once had included headhunting. Once, she reminded herself, no more. Her gaze flitted back to the corpse, the corpse that was minus a head.
I’ll be back before dark. Keep to the river. I’ll find you.
Those were the last words Malcolm had spoken.
Keep to the river.
Garrett and the team had kept to the river, until it began to get dark and he hadn’t returned. Now here he was, one day later—headless.
She remembered her father’s words: “There’s violence and greed and money to be had in the jungle. That fact does strange things to men. Don’t trust anyone.”
Garrett knew that her father, a member of the university board that funded her expedition, had been referring to the resources being stripped from the jungle, legally and illegally, with no thought to anything but money. What had Malcolm stumbled on? And where were his killers now?
“It could be an accident,” she whispered and prayed it was.
The body shifted and broke free of the bank.
“No!” She raced to the river, yet it seemed as if everything was in slow motion and it was forever before she was wrestling from the river what had once been a man. She clutched the waterlogged T-shirt, reluctant to touch the water-pulverized skin for fear of what she might take away. For fear that the skin would slough off, leaving raw meat, leaving . . .
She closed her mind, clutched the material, prayed it would hold, and pulled. The San Diego Chargers logo on the T-shirt, which he’d bartered from Sid only the other day, split down the middle. She sucked in air and touched flesh. She registered blankly that his arm felt normal, just cold. Maybe her foot slipped or maybe it was all too much, but whatever it was, one minute she was standing and the next she was flat on her butt. The body was now partway out of the water but still lifting in the current and looking as if at any moment it would break free and head downriver.
She looked across the rushing water to the undisturbed forest. She refused to look at what lay at her feet. Malcolm. Even though he lived in the city, in Kuching, he was so proud of his tribe—the tribe of former headhunters. He had claimed that a hundred-year-old skull still hung in his tribe’s longhouse. The last man hunted. Or was it? Somewhere in the depths of this forest was Malcolm’s head. Or maybe—she covered her mouth with her hand, the thought too horrible too contemplate—it was at the bottom of this river.
She remembered something else, another quote of her father’s: “Things can get deadly out there. Expedition of ’62 we lost a member of the group. It was horrible. He was missing parts of his body. He was . . .” He had dragged the last bit out, leaving her in a strange mockery of suspense. “His head. We assumed a monitor got him.”
She dropped her head in her hands.
A
woman has never led an expedition.
Not possible, not at her age.
The voices of the board of entomologists, her father’s cohorts, came to her. Her father had stood up for her. Her father, the same man who had once said that fieldwork was not for a woman and definitely not for his daughter. Her father, always distant with her and passionate about his work, a fact she resented most of her life.
There was no time for memories. She took a deep calming breath.
“We have no choice. We’re going to have to take the body.” She rose.
“We’ll drag him to civilization?” Ian’s tone was dubious. “Why?”
“We can’t leave him here. That’s so wrong.” She shook her head and pushed wet hair off her face. “It’s not even that, but we don’t know what happened to him. If we leave him here, no one ever will.” She glanced at Ian. Tears welled in his eyes. “Don’t, please.”
“His body would be gone in hours,” he whispered. “I won’t let him be eaten by lizards or ants, or . . .” Ian broke off as he began breathing in hitches and bent over, clutching his belly.
And the mention of ants only reminded Garrett of what she was leaving behind, and she chastised herself for even thinking that. But they were ending an expedition with only a dead specimen, a beetle like none of them had seen before and a hunch that this was special. No live specimen, no live colony, just one unclassified insect and the hope that this would make her career. She rubbed the back of her neck and pushed the guilty thought to the background. Malcolm was dead and she was thinking of her career. She turned her attention to Ian.
“We’ll stick as close to the river as we can.” She glanced to the forest. “Of course, we’ll wait for the others. Oh, never mind waiting.” She pulled a walkie-talkie from her vest pocket. The small radio crackled as she pressed the on button. “Sid, do you copy?” More crackling.
“Garrett?”
“Sid, there’s been an accident.”
“What? Are you all right?”
“We’re fine, Sid,” she said. “Just get back, now, please.” She ended the call.
“Let’s get him out of the river.” She glanced at Ian, who looked like he was going to throw up again. “Ian?”
He nodded. “I’m fine.” He shuddered. “Move over a bit. I’ve got his belt.” But his hands were still shaking. “What a crappy way to die.”
Garrett glanced at him. “Crappy?”
“Sorry. Maybe I understated.”
“A tad,” Garrett said. She grimaced at the mundane conversation amid the grisly circumstance. But there were no rules of decorum. Not any that she knew of, not for any kind of venture into the Borneo rain forest. Malcolm was dead and the rule book was lost, or maybe it was never written.
“Okay, let’s do this. Are you ready?”
Ian nodded gamely and she could only respect him for that.
They heaved the corpse clear of the water with less effort than she expected.
She took a deep breath but kept her gaze away from the body.
“It’s not a crime.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” So much for taming her aggression, but she could feel the tears brushing the surface of her reality and anger was the only thing that would tamp them back.
“To cry.”
“I won’t.”
“I know. You never do,” he said softly. “Do you think it was tribal revenge?” He hesitated. “Or something else?” His face was pinched, his lips thin. He glanced into the emerald mystery that surrounded them. It was impossible to see past the first feet of dense foliage. Trees grew on trees, vines twisted through low-growing plants and climbed upward, seeming to cling to every living thing before reaching the tips of massive trees that grazed the sky as they formed the forest’s canopy. It was all rather mysterious and today it appeared inhospitable. “Whoever it was, they might still be around.”
“Or it was an accident, or an animal.” Garrett ached for the pain Ian was feeling. She’d seen the relationship growing between him and Malcolm, a relationship that had ended so tragically.
They had agreed to meet Malcolm farther upriver, and when he hadn’t arrived last night her team of entomologists had scoured the area in safely controlled distances from their starting point. None of them were navigators, or overly familiar with the jungle, but they had two-way radios to keep in touch. They had spent the night in a deserted hut. The hut where Malcolm had said he would meet them over twenty-four hours ago.
Garrett hunkered down beside the body. She had to get it together. But all she could think was that whatever was out there—whatever had taken Malcolm—might be waiting, for them.
She sucked in a deep breath as she forced herself to look at what remained of Malcolm. She was the team lead on this expedition. It was up to her to take care of the team. She had failed.
Chapter Two
Aidan glanced at the sun. It was time to get back. It had been time to get back to the longhouse an hour ago. He wasn’t out here for the good of the tribe. He was only out here for peace and to calm his nerves. He loved nothing better than leaving Kuching, shedding his city persona and retreating to the home he had known as a boy, the Borneo jungle. Here his thoughts were centered on the moment and on the plants and animals that breathed around him.
But his peace had been disturbed only hours before when he had stumbled on the Chinese poachers. The Chinese had shot a monkey and there was nothing he could do. The animal was dead before he arrived, and they weren’t protected. It wasn’t illegal. It was only poaching in his mind. The monkeys to him were friends and that’s where he differed from the tribe who had raised him. But many things separated him from his tribe, including the fact that he was not Iban, not by blood, and that he could function in Sarawak’s capital city of Kuching as well as he could here, in the wilds of the island of Borneo where country lines blurred.
He’d been raised by a mother who could only be called a child of the earth, a hippie some might call a flower child, for her naïve innocence and liberal ideas still went back to that era. With no stable base to call home, his mother still lived in whatever part of the world caught her fancy. She’d raised him for a time here, in Borneo, mostly in Sarawak. It was here where he’d found stability and a parent in the form of his Iban stepfather. Cliché and all, his mother was a modern-day, real-life Indiana Jane and the reason he had lived part of his time growing up as an adopted Iban.
Aidan took in a deep breath. The forest had carried on its noisy melody with no interference since the boat carrying the Chinese poachers had left. This was how he enjoyed the forest, alone. Still, he was on edge. He needed to refocus, find his center.
But there was no peace at ground level. The only way to regain peace was to go up, above the jungle floor. Despite the habits of his life in the city, climbing was still instinctive. He’d done it since childhood. The rough trunk scraped his leg as he shimmied up. It was all so familiar. He grabbed a lower branch and paused, letting the texture ground him, and then swung up. He held on with one hand and squatted on the thick branch. Here he was at home, surrounded by the land he loved, the whisper of the animals, the silent promises of the plants. It was here, above the forest floor, that he finally found his zen—the peace that could only be found in the heart of the forest. And it was as he found his zen that he immediately lost it.
He gripped the spear—one of the few belongings he treasured. Out here he kept his belongings to a minimum. There wasn’t any room or any need for the material clutter of civilization.
There was a faint rustle of underbrush. Not the tread of the indigenous tribes, for their feet were silent on well-known paths, paths that were not seen by others. This was something else. Nothing he could see, but nonetheless a presence that was as obvious as the tree bark against his hand. The feeling was gut deep, instinctive, and there was no science to go on. He had learned early that feelings were often the net between death and safety.
He dropped lightly to the ground and stood q
uietly listening. Whatever it was, it was going to be a serious shit disturber and on a scale bigger than the last group. He could feel it in his bones.
He raised his spear and loped in long strides, his feet landing soft and silent as he closed the distance between him and the newcomers. He stopped when only a few yards and dense jungle separated him from the intruders.
A mosquito landed on his bare shoulder. He expertly twitched his skin and dislodged the insect without moving anything else on his body.
Then he stopped and sucked in his breath. For the second time that day, there was death in the air. Bitter and harsh, death knifed through the forest like an alien presence. His grip on the spear tightened.
In the clearing, Aidan could see two figures leaning over something in the grass. He moved closer and swallowed heavily—a body. That was obvious from the smell. He was sensitive to the smells of death. Scents that were powerful to him were unnoticeable, he knew, by others not raised here.
* * *
“He was shot,” Garrett said. She looked around as if something would emerge from the jungle, a forest predator, a tangible threat, but only the screeching insects, loud as monkey screams, punctured the noise of a land never silent.
“Murder?” Ian said in a choked voice.
“Maybe.” How safe were they? The team was separated and there was no longer safety in numbers.
“Do you think they shot him before they beheaded him?” Ian asked and gagged.
“Don’t throw up again,” she warned and knew her words were futile. Ian could only take so much.
“I can’t help it,” he said before he turned and fled.
Garrett stood up. The brush rustled. She clenched her fists, eyes riveted on the grass as it flattened in a wave, an S shape that signaled another of the many lizards both large and small that inhabited this land. Whatever it was, it carried on in the opposite direction and the grass was soon still.
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