DARK KILLS
A gripping detective thriller full of suspense
T. J. BREARTON
First published 2015
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is American English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.
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©T. J. Brearton
Note: in American usage school is often used to mean college or university
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A compelling murder mystery which you won’t be able to put down
On a freezing winter night, the body of a teenager is found in the snow.
Mike and Callie Simpkins moved north to restart their lives and get their finances back on track. Their son Braxton immerses himself in an online game-world of crime and gangs. When he decides to meet some of the players in the real world, tragedy strikes.
Detective John Swift must untangle a web of virtual and real crimes in order to solve this complex mystery. And as the family copes with unimaginable grief, even Braxton’s stepfather Mike comes under suspicion.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/FARMHOUSE-gripping-fast-paced-detective-thrillers-ebook/dp/B015JNEG6Q
http://www.amazon.com/FARMHOUSE-gripping-fast-paced-detective-thrillers-ebook/dp/B015JNEG6Q
A woman found dead in a remote farmhouse begins a gripping series of fast-paced detective thrillers unravelling a dark conspiracy
For the first time ever, the three best-selling books forming The Titan Trilogy are available in one edition.
Follow Detective Brendan Healy’s heart-stopping journey to uncover the truth. It all starts when he’s called in to investigate why a young woman called Rebecca Heilshorn was stabbed to death in her own home. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the crime scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets, and connections to a sordid network mixing politicians, wealth, and sex. Can Brendan solve the murder and how does it relate to his own tragic past?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE / Beneath the Covered Bridge
CHAPTER TWO / Christmas Comes Early
CHAPTER THREE / O’Sullivan’s
CHAPTER FOUR / Cops Can’t Drink
CHAPTER FIVE / The Girl on the Stairs
CHAPTER SIX / Bad News
CHAPTER SEVEN / Close to Home
CHAPTER EIGHT / Breaking and Entering
CHAPTER NINE / Desperate Measures
CHAPTER TEN / All Creatures Degenerate
CHAPTER ELEVEN / The FBI
CHAPTER TWELVE / The Dorms
CHAPTER THIRTEEN / A Break in the Case
CHAPTER FOURTEEN / Some Things Aren’t Myth
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / Poison News
CHAPTER SIXTEEN / Anger
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / Prognosis
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / The Book
CHAPTER NINETEEN / The End of the Fourth Sun
CHAPTER TWENTY / Minimizing Damages
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE / A Protégé
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO / The Drawing
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / Topper Pond
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / The Smiley Face Murders
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE / The Bouncer
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX / No One Knows Anybody
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN / Questioning
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT / The Oncoming Storm
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE / Into the Night
CHAPTER THIRTY / The Spider
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE / The Bargain
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO / Deciding to Die
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE / Free Will
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR / The Truth Coming Through
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE / Born Again
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX / Five Days Sober
Other books by T.J. Brearton
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
C.G. Jung
For my mother
DAY ONE
CHAPTER ONE / Beneath the Covered Bridge
She sat alone in the diner, her back to the door. She scratched a pen over the newspaper crossword puzzle. A steaming mug of tea sat beside the paper. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She put it to her ear without bothering to look at the incoming number, her eyes roving over the checkered boxes of the crossword.
“Gates here.”
“Dana, we got something.”
She looked out the window. “Oh yeah?”
“Dead girl. Nineteen years old. Two ten-year-old boys found her in the Clair. They ran to one of their houses and called 911.”
Dana sat up straighter.
“The spot is just a few hundred yards from the covered bridge, up river. Emergency Medical and volunteer fire responded to the call. EMTs said she had no pulse, probably been in the water overnight, but we’ll get the official word from the coroner.”
Dana Gates pushed the paper aside and stood up. “I’m on my way.”
* * *
She drove through the small hamlet of Hazleton. The day was cold. November had come and stripped the trees. Along the main street the sidewalks were empty; a smattering of cars were parked at the local stores. She kept her mind clear, preferring not to speculate about what might be in store.
Covered Bridge Lane dead-ended at the eponymous bridge. At one time, the bridge had crossed the Clair River as a main route for cars and trucks. But since the highway had come through half a mile to the north, it had been repurposed for local pedestrians and hiking tourists.
Dana parked her car in the nearby dirt lot, beside an ambulance. She got out and turned up her collar against the cold. Her husband was always telling her to put on a real winter coat, but she preferred the black pea coat she’d been wearing for the last ten years.
She leaned against the car and slipped her feet into a pair of rain boots. She fished her badge out from her bag and hung it around her neck. She stuck a pair of latex gloves into her pocket, and checked the magazine of her service weapon, holstering the gun. She didn’t like to drive with the gun at her hip.
Dana walked towards the bridge. The wind knifed into her. The autumn had been pleasant until recently; she’d even played in the leaves with her daughters. But November had come and ripped away the rest of the foliage, leaving the views brown and barren. She could smell the river as she neared; a fresh, metallic smell, like a copper kettle. The sun was already low in the sky, even though it was only mid-afternoon; it darted in and out behind the trees as she walked.
The two boys would have just gotten out of school. Probably they had taken a path through the woods — Hazleton School was back in the main part of town, but the athletic fields were near the covered bridge.
She started over the bridge, her boots clomping across the wooden planks. She heard a noise behind her. More law enforcement arriving. She was halfway across the bridge, so she just kept going. She wanted to get there and have a look before the scene got too chaotic. The first few moments were critical.
She broke into a jog, her footfalls echoing, the water burbling beneath.
* * *
The Clair was usually a shallow river. In the spring, as the snow melted in the mountains and the rains came, it grew stronger and sometimes overflowed the banks. In summer, the river tamed, purling like silk over rocks and forest debris.
The river wound alongside a small park with picnic tables. Beyond the park a path led into the forest, through thick undergrowth, and opened on a handful of spots that accessed the river. Aside from these access points, the banks were a tangle of bushes. Before long, Dana gave up dry land and sloshed along the river’s edge.
She rounded a bend and saw them up ahead, Eddie Dickerson, who was a state trooper, and two EMTs. They were in the bushes, just out of the water. Dickerson saw Dana and raised a hand. Dana waved back, but kept her eyes on the river at her feet. As she drew closer she thought she could see something next to the rocks, breaking the surface. Wet clothes.
Memories stirred, chilling the blood in her veins.
Dickerson and the two EMTs wore somber expressions. They all nodded to her as she waded closer, and then their eyes turned to the body in the water.
The dead girl’s hair was waving in the current. One hand was sticking out, a hip, a bare ankle. She was on her side, wedged between some larger rocks. Her face was a pale blur beneath the shimmering surface.
“I let the fire company go,” Dickerson said. His voice was clear and crisp. “Nothing to extract; I’m pretty sure we could lift her right outta there.”
Dana pushed her memories aside and took in the scene.
The two EMTs had gear with them — an AED and two duffel bags packed with medical equipment. They had trampled the vegetation along the bank, their boots leaving prints in the mud.
She looked beyond them. Birch and beech trees allowed some measure of visibility. Good deer-hunting forest. She wondered what small branches were broken. What undergrowth had been stomped over by the men. What evidence remained.
Then she gazed up river, considering if the body had drifted down to here. Probably not, since the water was less than a foot deep in most places. So, unlikely it had floated any distance. This was where the dead girl had entered the water.
Dana squatted down to check for blood. Nothing visible from where she stood. Had the girl tripped and hit her head? If so, there might’ve been a gash, maybe even still a cloud of blood. But there wasn’t. It was almost as if she were placed here. Dumped. She looked like a mannequin, floating there.
“Terrible thing,” Dickerson said.
Dana heard the sound of the others approaching. Brit Silas was the head of the CSI team. She came splashing through the water the way Dana had. Silas greeted Dana with a brief handshake, and suggested they get their photographic log going as soon as possible. The CSI team took pictures, measured the distance of the body from the shoreline, and tagged a few large rocks that could have trace fibers or bits of skin; tagged a few small, broken branches; picked up a bottle cap.
“Now let’s get her out,” Dana said.
The men and women spoke in low voices as they figured it out. Dana stayed back, watching. They hoisted the body, waterlogged and rigid, water pouring down.
They set her down in the area already trampled by the first responders. Dana took another long look at her now that she was out of the river. She was a pretty girl — a young woman, more accurately, about twenty years old — with a small upturned nose, full lips, long lashes. Her skin appeared grayer now that she was out of the water, her lips bloodless. Five foot seven or eight. Athletic build. The kind of girl that young men fell in love with.
But there were no obvious marks on her. Not even a bruise on her cheek from where she might’ve fallen. Nothing on her wrists. Anything else, though, was obscured by her clothes.
We’ll find out soon enough, Dana thought, as the others worked away. It could easily turn out that the young woman had taken some pills and decided to end her life by the riverside. Or, even more obviously, she might simply have drowned. Maybe she’d had a few too many drinks, wandered down here, passed out and fallen into the water, gotten a couple mouthfuls, and that was it.
But where was her car? Who was she? She looked too mature to be a local high school student. Besides, Dana had never seen her before, and she felt like she knew most of the kids in the Hazleton School, which was small. She worked a wide area, but Hazleton was her home. She wondered if she knew the two ten-year-old boys who had discovered the body.
CHAPTER TWO / Christmas Comes Early
One of the boys who’d found the body lived on Oak Street, less than a mile from the park. The other lived on the next street over. The two streets couldn’t have been more different. Oak Street was high on the bluff that overlooked some of Hazleton’s modest downtown district and the mountains beyond. There the homes were attractive, the plots of land sizeable. Moss Street was populated with double-wide trailers and small modular homes in varying stages of disrepair, many of them with ‘For Sale’ signs parked out front. The street hooked left at the end, turned to dirt, and became Dover Court, a trailer park. Eight single-wides surrounded the cul de sac, packed in tightly. A dog barked as Dana Gates got out of her car, and it kept barking as she watched Detective Robert Hamill pull in behind her in a pickup truck.
The two detectives shook hands. He put his hands on his hips and looked around. “So this is where the good times roll, huh?”
Dana glanced from one trailer to another. She saw a pair of eyes watching her through a window, then disappear.
“Which one is it?” Hamill asked.
Dana pointed at the trailer where she had just seen the boy. “Right there.”
They started over, walking through a scattering of junk, including a rusted-out fire barrel, a tricycle tipped on its side, a pile of bald tires. The dog was chained to a tree between two trailers.
“Hey,” Dana called to it. “Shaddup.”
The dog barked louder. It was a mutt, maybe part pit bull.
“So this girl was just floating there?”
“More like beached. Couldn’t have been in there more than a few hours. Coroner arrived just before I left. I doubt forensics will get any prints or fibers.”
“She had ID on her at least?”
“No wallet. Nothing. I’m sure someone is going to step up. Just a matter of time. Let’s see what the boy has to say.”
They had reached the trailer where the eyes had peered out. The stairs were a pile of concrete blocks. Dana knocked on the storm door, which rattled and shook.
Hamill looked around disdainfully. Robert Hamill was the same age as Dana — they were born one week apart; fortieth birthday parties had come and gone the previous summer. They’d grown up together, graduated together, and there the similarities ended. Hamill had gone to school in Vermont, aiming for a bachelor’s in forensic science from UVM, but dropped out. Dana had stayed in-state and completed the criminal justice program at SUNY Albany. He’d never married; she had three kids and a husband.
Dana thought she caught a whiff of booze on Hamill’s breath. “Where you been?” she asked.
Hamill frowned. “Hey, I was off today. How ’bout you? Where you been? You got that look again; you’re over there yelling at the poor dog. Trouble in paradise?”
Dana looked at the door, hoping someone would open the hell up. She rapped again. Just a few hours. Christ, it had just happened. If there was a perp, he or she could still be around. That girl had been alive and walking around a few hours ago. Dana could’ve even seen her somewhere and not realized it.
The wind picked up, rattling bits of trash around the trailers.
“Oh, it’s bad, huh?” Hamill said when Dana didn’t respond to his inquiry about her marriage. “I’m sorry, man.”
“It’s alright.” She raised her hand to knock again (was the place that big? How long would it take to get from one end to the other — ten seconds?) when the door finally opened.
A middle-aged woman in a peach-colored housedress stood inside. Her bosom and midsection bulged through the
fabric. She had opened the interior door but left the storm door closed. “What?”
Dana held up her badge and spoke through the dirty glass. “Ma’am, sorry to bother you. I’m Detective Dana Gates and this is Detective Robert Hamill. We’re with the state police, ma’am. We’re wondering if we could have a word with your son. He called 911?”
The woman looked confused. She scrutinized their badges for a moment and then their faces. Finally she turned her head and yelled into the trailer. “Scott! Did you call 911?”
“Can we come in?”
The woman pushed the storm door open with a grunt. Dana climbed up into the small entryway with Hamill behind her. The door snapped shut in their wake and they were left standing in the short, cramped corridor.
“Scott!”
He emerged slowly, a pale face materializing in the dark doorway, his finger stuck in his mouth.
The woman moved at last, towards the boy. The two cops glanced at each other and Hamill wrinkled his nose, as if to say, stinks in here. Dana almost hit him across the shoulder. Hamill was a good detective, smart, but he was insensitive and uncouth. Then again, she had been the one yelling at dogs.
“Scott, did you call 911?”
The boy pulled his hand from his mouth. “No.”
Dana followed the woman. She had the address from the 911 call, and knew this was the place. Both boys had answered the 911 operator’s questions about their names and where they lived. But since this had been the call’s origin, protocol was to come here first.
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Says he didn’t call.”
Dana smiled and nodded. “I understand. Can I just talk to him for a minute?”
The woman lingered for a moment and then sighed and moved out of the way. Dana turned her smile on Scott, who was leaning against his doorway.
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 1
