Skye Cree Boxed Set Books 1 - 3

by Vickie McKeehan

  Kiya suddenly reversed her course to head over to an area Josh had missed. She pawed at a newly plastered section of sheetrock next to a generator and a washer and dryer. This time, Josh could tell it was fresher than the rest of the wall because no one had bothered slapping paint here.

  He looked around for anything he could use to bash in the drywall. A sledgehammer would’ve come in handy right about now, he thought. When he found nothing but a broom, he simply kicked through the gypsum with his foot. It didn’t take long for him to realize it was a phony wall. It took him a few minutes longer to completely knock away all the plasterboard.

  Behind the jagged panels were three sets of mummified remains, complete with grotesque-looking skulls similar to those one might see in a horror movie.

  The skulls stared back at him just like in his dream.

  At one time, the bodies had been propped up inside their tomb in a space no larger than five feet across and back. What clothes Josh could make out were in tatters. One body, with longer auburn hair still attached, a female by the look of the hair, appeared to be wearing a flowing blue nightgown. A white shirt and blue jeans hung loosely on the bones of the second set of skeletal remains in the middle. The third skull had graying black hair still visible, a pair of pale blue pajamas draped over the bones.

  There was enough difference in the decomposition of the man placed in the middle so that Josh could tell he’d been added well after the other two.

  On closer inspection, when Josh leaned his head into the opening, he spotted the bullet holes in each skull. Cocking his head, he noticed a crumpled piece of paper, wadded up next to the feet of the woman. Gingerly, he stuck his hand in and snatched up what was now as brittle as parchment.

  Carefully Josh unfolded what looked like a legal document. Reading over the words, paragraph by paragraph, it explained a lot.

  Fifteen long minutes went by and had Skye pacing at the top with her shirt covering her nose and mouth. All this time, she’d heard nothing except the house settling. Nerves edged up, starting at her fingertips and ran along her arms. Finally she inched toward the dimly lit landing again. Still met with an eerie, hollow silence, she finally shouted down into the vast darkness, “Josh, come on, answer me.”

  Skye held her breath, her hand over her nose, trying to deal with the stench that seemed to get worse all of a sudden. As she continued to peer into the basement, she saw no movement, not even a shadow. “Come on, Josh. Don’t make me come down there.”

  “You sound like my mother,” Josh finally returned as he climbed the stairs with Kiya in the lead. “Stop right where you are. You don’t want to come down here, Skye.”

  “What’s wrong? What is it?”

  “Frank’s own personal hellhole.”

  Josh guided Skye out of the house and onto the front porch, describing what he’d seen as he went. “Someone walled up Elena and Frank Senior. Looks like they didn’t offer much in the way of resistance. By the looks of their clothes, I’d say they were shot in their sleep. Who the other guy is though, is anyone’s guess.”

  “The bones will tell,” Skye muttered. “Something definitive, something tangible, that links directly back to Frank. That’s what Kiya wanted us to know.”

  Josh nodded. “Those bones tell us exactly what we needed. Frank’s a sick bastard and has been for a very long time.”

  “How do we explain being here, Josh?”

  “I’d like to know that myself,” Leo added from the bottom step, his face only a slightly lesser shade of green than it had been an hour earlier.

  “The only way we can. We call the Monterey County Sheriff’s office, tell them we were looking for the De Palos and suggest they call Drummond in Seattle. Hopefully, Harry will be able to talk us out of this mess.”

  “Sounds like a plan. But Harry’s gonna be pissed when he finds out we held back coming here.”

  “I love it when you use ‘we’ at a time like this. But since I’m the one who did the holding back, I’ll take the heat for all of it.”

  “And I love it when you offer to do that. But if Harry doesn’t know us both by now, if he doesn’t trust us to do the job we’re getting paid to do then we have a problem with him in the future. We need to know it now. You saw this, didn’t you, Josh? All of it.”

  “Yeah, I did. But this is all still very new to me, Skye. I needed to experience this, the stuff that came to me in the dreams, the visions, for myself, up close and personal. It’s a validation. It’s what Kiya wanted me to know from the beginning. Just like she did to you each time you saved one of those girls. Besides you, who would’ve believed me?”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  About that time, Josh looked around at just how far the house was from the nearest neighbor. He took out his cell phone only to see he had no service. “Anyone have a signal?”

  “Nope,” Leo said. “At one point, I even walked down to the gate. Still nothing.”

  “Nor me,” Skye echoed, checking her phone. “What now?”

  “Then I guess we haul ass out of here and call the cops as soon as we get one.”

  “I don’t understand,” Skye asked the first sheriff’s deputy on the scene, a thirty-something guy named Vince Hogue. “Why didn’t anyone in San Caruso bother to look for Elena and Frank De Palo Senior before now? How is it no one knew they were dead years ago? You guys didn’t even know they were missing.”

  The deputy narrowed his eyes. “There are reasons for that. For one thing, they were reclusive. After Frank left for college, they stayed out here away from town, never came into San Caruso much. I’ll be honest, that was fine with most people. Over the years their attitude had managed to wear pretty thin on folks. They were known to feud with just about everyone in town at one time or another over some silly dispute. Frank Senior even took it a step further a time or two and sued. That caused hard feelings up and down Main Street. In some instances, it caused the townsfolk to lose their paychecks to millionaires who didn’t care about anyone else but themselves.”

  “So we aren’t talking about people who were missed?” Josh said.

  Hogue nodded. “That’s right. To my way of thinking, it was an out of sight, out of mind kind of thing. If Frank Senior and Elena stopped coming into town at some point, I guess no one really cared, hence no one bothered making the trip out here to see what was going on. Besides, if anything was wrong, Frank should’ve let us know. Now, we understand why he didn’t. I think the only other person who ever asked about them over the years was some tax attorney out of San Francisco—a guy who showed up here out of the blue one weekend nosing around.”

  Josh cocked a brow. “You might want to check to see if he ever made it back to the Bay Area. I’d bet money he didn’t.”

  “Come to think of it, I do seem to remember getting a call that said he’d gone missing. I just assumed he’d run off with a woman or something. Never heard another thing about it, so I thought he turned up. You know those tax attorneys like to live off other people’s money. They eventually have to go on the run for some reason or another.”

  “Maybe this lawyer is the one who broke into the house and used that window we found where the lock had been tampered with,” Skye pointed out. “Maybe Frank caught this guy snooping around and killed him, too.”

  Josh turned to Hogue. “I know Frank got into some trouble when he was sixteen after beating and raping a cheerleader. Do you know if there are any unsolved murders of other young women in the area that go back to say, when De Palo lived here as a teen?”

  “We don’t get many murders around here,” Hogue objected in a defensive tone. But then he cocked his head as if considering the town’s history. He scratched his jaw. “Wait a minute, now that I think back to when I first joined the sheriff’s department some thirteen years ago, seems to me we do have a couple that remain unsolved. One was a ten-year-old by the name of Cheryl Wittingham. Someone took a baseball bat and bashed in her skull. Volunteers found her the same night her par
ents reported her missing. She’d been left in a culvert over on Jackson Street. The other was fourteen-year-old Denise Holland. A seasonal fruit picker found her body ‘bout a mile from the old winery outside town. She’d been beaten around the face and strangled. Hey, you don’t suppose Frank De Palo could’ve killed them, do you? He’d have been just a kid when those murders happened.”

  “Did he know either girl?”

  Hogue rubbed his chin. “Seems like I remember the report mentioning Frank might’ve known the Holland girl in school. And little Cheryl lived down the street from the De Palo family on Lawnview.” Hogue looked around. “Not this house out here, one of the other De Palo houses they owned in town close to the middle school. Holy cow, wouldn’t that be something if we could solve two fifteen-year-old homicides.”

  About that time it looked as though the entire Monterey County Sheriff’s Department pulled down the dusty lane and headed straight for them. Skye watched as several vehicles came to a screeching stop.

  Skye, Josh, and Leo stood off to one side and watched law enforcement descend on Frank’s childhood home, or one of them.

  “If it’s been eight years since the parents were alive, that was about the same time Frank lived in Portland, gainfully employed, I might add,” Leo pointed out.

  “Which means what?” Skye asked. “Josh and I already figured he’s probably good for killing Bianca and Lisa while he lived there.”

  “You might want to include a woman by the name of Meaghan Riddick in that,” Leo suggested. “Frank’s co-worker?”

  “Go on,” Skye prompted.

  “Meaghan ended up dead while Frank lived there. Co-workers said she often went head to head with Frank over projects they shared.”

  “This guy’s body count is giving me the willies,” Skye reiterated. “How did Meaghan die?”

  “In Meaghan’s case, the coroner said she killed herself, had a lethal dose of meth in her system. Her death was ruled a suicide so it didn’t show up, officially, in any police reports you might’ve found, Skye. But her friends and family disputed that the scientist ever cooked meth let alone ingested it.”

  “Interesting. What did you mean earlier, Leo? When you said Frank was gainfully employed at the time his parents were murdered? Why is that important?” Skye stressed.

  “I think what Leo was getting at is that Frank didn’t do it for the money,” Josh stated. “He didn’t kill his parents for their fortune. If you’re thinking that for motive, Leo checked. Frank’s never had money problems. He doesn’t have an ugly addiction to crack. He doesn’t have a gambling problem. In fact, his personal net worth, without his parents around, is probably in excess of eight million dollars in liquid assets. His part of the De Palo family money he got from his grandfather. I’d say his parents didn’t have a cash-on-hand problem either, since their net worth totals just under twenty million. Think about it, Frank was their sole heir and yet, he never reported them missing or dead. There was never a probate hearing. Shooting Mom and Dad wasn’t about an inheritance.”

  “You want to fill us in on what else you found?” Skye said. “Because I know you’ve got something you haven’t shared.”

  “How do you guys keep doing that?” Leo asked. “How do you seem to pick up on things?”

  Skye just grinned. “It’s a knack. Or Josh calls it our own mind meld trick,” she said with a wink.

  Josh took out the crumpled piece of paper he’d found in the De Palos’ burial chamber from his pocket. “This is a commitment order—from a judge. His parents were about to have their very sicko son committed to a private mental hospital in San Diego.”

  Skye’s mouth fell open. “They knew and were about to lock him up. They knew their son was a sick bastard all these years ago.”

  “Seems they did. Like Harry said, probably as far back as childhood. Their first clue had to be when animals in the neighborhood began to go missing. More than likely after that, they discovered their son’s private stash of trophies and remains. There are jars lined up on a shelf down in one room of the basement. Since the display is right there in plain sight, the parents had to know about Frank’s penchant for dismemberment,” Josh reasoned.

  “Geez, if we don’t stop this guy his body count could work its way up to the Green River killer’s.”

  Josh walked over to give the commitment paper to Hogue before turning back to Skye and Leo. “It may be a personal goal to outdo Ridgway,” Josh suggested. “And that’s why we’re going to find a way to stop him.”

  Skye and Josh and Leo had to hang around San Caruso another couple of days to answer any other questions from the sheriff’s department. In the meantime, crime scene investigators descended upon the house out in the middle of nowhere and literally tore the place apart looking for any more victims. They found none except the three bodies in the bunker. It would take some time to positively identify the remains but speculation said it was Frank’s parents and the missing lawyer.

  Skye communicated daily with Harry and kept him in the loop. But as soon as it became apparent that they were no longer needed in San Caruso, they packed up and flew back to Seattle wondering what the rest of autumn would bring in the way of more victims.

  They knew one thing for certain, Frank De Palo would not stop killing on his own. Whether he remained in Washington State or had moved on had yet to be determined. It put everyone on edge.

  Frank had not left the country.

  In fact, he hadn’t even left Washington State but he had scurried off the mainland. He had been forced to go underground since the revelation two days earlier that he was the prime suspect in the murders of his parents and their longtime attorney, George Sidwell.

  Eight years back dedicated George had made the mistake of leaving his San Francisco home early one Saturday morning to check on the De Palos. Because George hadn’t heard from the couple in months, curiosity got the better of him. He’d driven down to San Caruso to find out why the couple had not returned his phone calls.

  The thirty-seven-year-old single lawyer had disappeared that weekend. Even though George’s girlfriend had filed a missing person report at the time, the authorities had never been able to locate him or his car. No one had ever heard from George Sidwell again after his trip south to San Caruso.

  Frank hadn’t concerned himself much with his father’s loyal attorney until the nosy bastard had showed up on the very Saturday Frank had been tidying the place up. Sidwell had even had the audacity to crawl in through a window.

  As Frank saw it, Sidwell hadn’t given him much of a choice. He’d taken care of the tax lawyer in the same manner he’d used to get rid of his parents.

  It had been a betrayal, pure and simple, when Frank learned his parents had already gone to a judge to get a commitment order. Frank still couldn’t figure out how his parents had discovered he’d killed Meaghan Riddick, his bitch of a co-worker back in Portland.

  But somehow they had. And on his visit back to California, they’d confronted him with the details which meant they’d probably hired someone to follow him around Portland for months. And not for the first time, Frank realized. They were always sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. They hadn’t asked him about the mental hospital. They’d told him. There was no way Frank would agree to be locked up ever again. The first time he was sixteen, too young to know the ramifications, although at the time it was better than prison. That time he’d let them put him away inside a mental ward to study him for four months. But he’d learned then and there how to work the system, how to play the game, what answers to give that would appease the doctors for early release. Eight years ago, he had no intentions of letting his damn mother do it to him again. When his mother said she wanted to put him away for an indeterminate amount of time, Frank lost it. That night, after they’d gone to sleep, he crept into their bedroom armed with his father’s own Mossberg, auto-loading, hunting rifle, and put an end to their scheming once and for all.

  No one could possibly have blame
d him for it.

  So for the last two days, Frank had been holed up at the cabin on San Juan Island, the one he’d bought five years earlier for just this purpose, the one on Friday Harbor, using the name James Silver. Since the place wasn’t connected to the mainland by bridge, he’d boarded his sixty-foot yacht and motored over in the middle of the night.

  At dawn, he’d packed up what he could haul on his back and trekked some five miles over rough terrain to the cabin. He didn’t really believe for one minute they’d ever catch him. But like any skilled tactician, Frank always had a plan B to cover “what if” scenarios. Now was no exception. If need be, he could get out of the country using the small plane he kept at the Friday Harbor Airport registered to Marco Silva, another of his aliases. So if that time ever presented itself, if he ever thought law enforcement was closing in, he had his escape hatch at the ready.

  The knowledge that the woman and her companion had invaded his family’s home back in San Caruso and found out his most personal secrets, discovered his trophies from childhood infuriated him. No woman would ever be part of beating him at his own game.

  That meant he’d have to do something about Skye Cree along with that slow-witted, snotty-nosed geek she hung around with.

  How the two had ever connected the dots back to his hometown, he didn’t know. But he must’ve missed a step somewhere. It had to have something to do with his entering the Ander loft. The minute the asshole discovered the cameras he’d left behind, from there, things had gone downhill.

  His perfect world had almost come crashing down because of them. Not fifteen hours earlier, he’d been positively identified by every local news channel from Vancouver to Portland as the “person of interest” in the string of Seattle homicide cases.

  With one newscast, his life at MMA had burned to black toast. He was losing everything that meant anything to him, everything he’d painstakingly put together, built since he left that crappy biotech job in Portland.