Trix Read online

  Trix

  Kate Morris

  Ranger Publishing

  2017

  Ranger Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 by Ranger Publishing

  Note to Readers: This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is not intended to provide helpful or informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk personal or otherwise.

  All rights reserved; including the right to reproduce this book or portions of thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, email: [email protected].

  First Ranger Publishing softcover edition, November 2017

  Ranger Publishing and design thereof are registered trademarks of Ranger Publishing.

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  Distributed by Smashwords

  Cover design and ebook formatting by EbookLaunch.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file

  ISBN 13: 978-1978461437

  ISBN 10: 1978461437

  Dedication

  To all of my loyal readers of The McClane Apocalypse series who are supporting this new thriller series. Thanks for following my writing and the audiobooks.

  I’d also like to offer a sincere thanks to my friend Detective Steven Bouchard, (ret) for his help on the finer details of the detective work that was required to get this novel to print.

  As always, please visit RangerUp.com, Grunt Style, or Black Rifle Coffee Co., and get involved with supporting our U.S. military and preventing veteran suicide.

  Sincerely,

  Kate

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  I always knew my father killed my mother. I knew it before the police came one Sunday morning years later and arrested him. I knew it before the neighbors and the media and the jury that convicted him. I knew it because I helped him hide the body. I didn’t actively participate in her murder, but neither would I have stopped him from doing it. He’d called her a “drunk whore” for so many years that I had actually come to think of it as a term that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. That was until I learned that it was.

  I was twelve that Sunday when he was arrested. Before she was murdered on a typical Sunday, I’d get home from church with my mother, and I’d play in the barn. She had a pot roast ready in the oven. She always put carrots, celery, and potatoes in it. I hate celery. I also hate the smell of a pot roast cooking, although most people find that particular aroma of comfort food delectable. I don’t remember what they started arguing about. She was usually complaining about money, although I never wanted for anything, so I naturally didn’t understand the problems they had. Once, I saw her in the bathroom applying a Band-Aid to her forehead where it was bleeding. I was seven at the time.

  We lived on a small farm located far from the nearest town. Perhaps that was the reason it was so easy to cover up her murder. It was an equally small house, two bedrooms, one bath, one living room and a tiny kitchen with appliances that were ancient even then. She also complained about that a lot, too. She wanted more kids, but my father didn’t. He’d made that clear many times. I don’t think it was because he disliked me, but that he just didn’t like kids in general. I also got the impression that he constantly worried about money. He usually blamed his drinking on her bitching about money, though. I didn’t need fancy clothes or gadgets or toys. My father reminded my mother of that often and usually with his fist. He provided enough. We had food in our stomachs and a roof over our heads. Our small farm didn’t supply much beyond that, and for him, it was enough. For me, it was enough, as well. Although I think I mostly agreed with him on that point because he said it so often.

  Occasionally he would hit her. I saw him do it once when I was just a little tyke. Later, I realized he probably did it a lot more than only the one time that I witnessed. It left an impression. Nagging wives deserved to get tuned up. He told me three beers into a stupor one night that he was sure she was cheating on him while he was working the farm out in the fields all day or at the lumber yard where he worked in the winter. As an adult, I figured he was a paranoid drunk, that my mother was likely not cheating since she didn’t even have a driver’s license to get to town to do so, and I’d never seen her drink alcohol, either. But I also came to think that most women were worthless. That idea did not solely come from my father but my own experiences with them.

  He hated her. He made it clear to me many times while I worked on our farm equipment alongside him. I was always brighter than him, than both of them actually. The school system wanted to send me to a special school for gifted children, but, of course, there wasn’t money for that sort of thing, not when the tractor needed a new tire or the farm credit bank required payment for a loan on cows or my father needed more liquor. And so, I plodded along, bored as hell in regular school, and eventually fell behind from my lack of interest. It wouldn’t be until later when I was sent to live with a foster family after my father’s imprisonment that I would excel again in school.

  It was soon after one of his drunken benders that he murdered her. I was at school when it happened, but it didn’t take long to figure it out when I arrived home. There was blood everywhere in the kitchen. Her body was lying in a giant puddle of it. There was a knife in his hand. It dripped blood onto the old, sticky, black and, in some places, moldy linoleum flooring. He must’ve just done it when I was dropped by the school bus. He explained that she’d attacked him, that they’d put him away if he turned himself in, that I’d be sent to an orphanage. That option didn’t sound particularly pleasant to me, so I helped him dig a hole where he dropped her body, wrapped in a white sheet, down in. Then he made me help him clean the floor in the kitchen. A few days later we went to the sheriff’s department and reported her missing. Many people knew she was unhappy there, so it was assumed that my father was telling the truth. He went scot-free for three years before her body was discovered by a detective who hadn’t bought his story of my mother running away. Her sister had pressed and pushed the local sheriff’s department to pursue the case, even though she lived three states away. I don’t know the exact conversation, but she must’ve been convincing. I kept my father’s secret. I never told anyone what I knew. I didn’t want to live in an orphanage. I also didn’t particularly care for my mother, although I didn’t think she was a drunk or a whore. I just didn
’t care much for anyone, not even my truly drunk, selfish father. It just wasn’t in me to be adoring, loving. Maybe it was my terrible childhood. Maybe it was the abuse I witnessed and sometimes when I upset my father, the abuse I also suffered. Maybe it was because she never protected me from him. But I think I was just born this way. I was only about eight years old when I helped him cover up her murder. It probably didn’t help me to become a better person. But I did learn when he was arrested, locked up, the key thrown away, that I didn’t want to deal with the law or go to prison. I knew I’d have to be smarter than him, which, for me, I already was ahead of him on that count.

  “Please, just let me go,” the young woman in the shed softly cried as she heard me moving around. “I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”

  I wanted to laugh at her, but that would’ve been rude. She wasn’t smart, not a high I.Q. like myself. She was about average intelligence, which was why it was probably so easy to kidnap her.

  The forensics since my mother’s death had improved exponentially. If it weren’t for the investigators snooping around the farm and finding the area that had sunk in a good six inches, they would’ve never found her grave. Unfortunately for my father, he hadn’t thought to visit her burial site to inspect it for signs of an obvious gravesite. He was too busy paying hookers in the next town over, or getting drunk, or passing out wasted and then having night terrors. It was annoying really, his nightmares. He never woke completely, just disturbed my own sleep.

  “My family has money,” she pleaded. “They’ll pay you to get me back.”

  “I don’t need money,” I explained, hoping she’d just shut up.

  She had no idea who I was or why I’d taken her. It wasn’t like she’d understand. I was honest with her, though. I certainly didn’t need her family’s money, which I doubted they had. She, like all the other ones, was a runaway prostitute. Nobody ever missed them, nor would they. It’s why so many of us plucked them for our needs. It was easy, and nobody cared, nobody even reported them gone.

  I didn’t need money because I made plenty of it on my own. I always knew I’d rise above the station of my birth. I realized as I became an adult just how poor we were when I’d lived under my father’s roof. I never wanted for anything because I never understood what I was missing. I didn’t have many friends in school because most kids thought I was strange or a freak for being so much smarter than even the teachers. I certainly never had anyone over for playdates, never went to school functions or played sports. And once my mother went missing, nobody even talked to me. My ‘weird’ label had multiplied by a million. The kid with the missing and then later murdered mother. I was glad that I was sent to a foster family far away from my original home, city, and school when I was twelve.

  “I promise I’ll do whatever you want,” she said. “Let me go, untie me, I’ll cooperate, ‘kay?”

  “You’ll cooperate anyway,” I informed her. “You’ll really have no choice in the matter.”

  She whimpered as I adjusted the ropes binding her hands behind her. I opened my toolbox. She began crying at the sound of me rummaging around. I withdrew a hypodermic and a vial of clear solution. I could do this in my sleep.

  I turned on the music player, the first chords of Bach floating languidly throughout the room with the dirt floor and the wide slatted wood walls that let in just enough light to avoid turning on the overhead bulbs.

  Never once did I visit my father in prison. I had no further use for him after I realized I wasn’t going to an orphanage as he’d once warned. As a matter of fact, I’d found out quickly after his arrest that there wasn’t even an orphanage in our entire section of the state, hadn’t been one open in years. I landed in a foster situation, which wasn’t as bad as so many Monday night dramas have made them out to be over the years with their tales of horror and molestation. My foster folks couldn’t have kids, so they fostered and adopted six of society’s rejects. I didn’t want to be adopted, however, and made it clear when they first brought it up six months into my stay with them. I called them by their first names, Carol and Dan, and kept my room neat, and obeyed their rules. I shared a room with three other boys, who were adopted, and we slept on two sets of bunk beds. Their home was about six times bigger than my old house in the country. It was in the burbs where lots of kids got together and played at each other’s houses. I was biding my time with the foster parents the same as I was with my real parents. It was only a matter of time before I was out on my own. They never questioned where I went after school or on weekends. They never had to. I was always honest. I went to the state park near our home to hike or to the planetarium or the zoo. I always left out the part where I also went to the city, where we were forbidden to go, to watch the homeless people who lived under bridges or I hung out in alleys. I also never admitted to sneaking into the morgues at city hospitals to look at the dead bodies when nobody was in there. I certainly never confessed to exploring murder by practicing on animals in the forest.

  My foster father took the four of us boys hunting every fall during deer season. I asked him the next year to take me bow hunting. I was the only kid who wanted to hunt with him at all, so he was happy to do it. He wouldn’t understand my proclivities toward killing things, so I made sure to keep him in the dark. He was a good man, a God-fearing Christian, and so was his wife. They even paid for me to go to a gifted students’ academy when I got to high school. I loved biology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology. I excelled. I was in my element. Science was exciting and interesting.

  I injected her arm and watched as her eyes took on a hazy, dazed appearance. Then I walked back to my toolbox and removed the leather case, spreading the instruments out on the worn, wooden and scarred table top.

  I managed to tolerate my fellow foster kids in my new family even if they were needlessly cheerful and overly excited about the simplest things. Of course, none of them were intellectually gifted as I was since birth. My brothers, as our foster parents liked us to refer to each other, were all three into sports and girls. I had no interest in either. The sisters were younger than us at seven, nine, and ten, and like most kids at this age, we were mostly tolerant of them. They played with dolls and on the swing-set in the backyard and bugged and pestered all the brothers. This was when I realized, early into my internment at the foster home, that I’d need to get out of the house a lot. It was either that or practice my future career as a serial killer on them.

  I learned patience while living with the foster family. Many times, I’d wanted to slice open their carotids just to see how long it would take for them to bleed out. Instead, I perfected the fine art of acting. I realized I could fake just about any emotion; happiness, grief, joy, and others. I had to pretend grief when I was seventeen when they sat me down at the dinner table. I knew something was wrong because the other kids weren’t in the room and it wasn’t time for dinner. My foster mother was a great cook, and once I explained that I didn’t care for pot roast, she rarely made it. She was attentive and kind but didn’t hover, which made her a perfect care-giver in my eyes. I didn’t like people who watched me too closely. That afternoon, they made chit-chat for a few moments, and she even offered a plate of cookies. I informed them that I knew something was wrong and that they should just come out with it. I didn’t want to prolong their discomfort. It was then that they’d gently informed me that my father, the one in prison, had been killed. There was a prison riot. Apparently, he’d not worked on his fighting skills and had obviously angered the wrong person because he’d been stabbed to death with a homemade knife, often referred to in prison terminology as a shiv. They hadn’t told me any of those details; I’d had to research that on my own. So, I feigned sorrow over the loss of my murdering, drunken waste of a human father figure for the sake of my foster parents.

  My victim squirmed but was unable to do much other than twist her hips just slightly and wiggle her fingers. The medicine had finally and fully kicked in as the cello solo of Bach’s piece came to a dramatic
crescendo. My heartbeat accelerated, as well. It was time.

  Chapter One

  Lorena

  This trip was exactly what they’d both needed. It was long overdue. She’d promised Grace that she would take a vacation many times, but it had never happened. Another case would take precedence, and she’d be back to burning the midnight oil and losing track of time, space, everything including her orphaned niece. It was unacceptable. So, she’d made the plans, booked the flight and brought her niece to sunny Florida.

  They’d gone to Universal Studios where Grace- ever the Harry Potter geek- had marveled at the village devoted to the book series. Her niece had also forced her onto every ride, roller coasters included, in that theme park. Lorena’s stomach hadn’t settled until the next morning, and when she’d laid down for the night, it had felt like the world was still spinning.

  The next morning they’d hit Sea World, and, later at dinner at the Rainforest Café, Grace stated that she was going to study to be a marine biologist. Lorena had just smiled at her niece’s ever-changing career plans. It could shift on an hourly basis depending on her mood and the atmosphere.

  Then it was on to the Gulf, where Lorena’s late sister and brother-in-law had owned a home near Siesta Key. They’d settled in for the remainder of their two-week-long stay, and Lorena promised herself again and again that she’d return at least once a year for Grace’s sake.

  As she poked her toes around in the sand and enjoyed the calm serenity of listening to the gentle ocean waves lapping against the rocks of the jetty, Lorena sighed. Grace was surfing, although she was really just attempting to boogie-board, but Lorena didn’t have the heart to tell her that she wasn’t surfing. The waves were barely swells. But her precocious niece was laughing gaily and waving, and it was enough for Lorena that she was happy and being a kid for a change. She waved back and pushed her sunglasses higher on her nose again.