The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) (12 page)

As Crown came into Derek’s and Nikkie’s view, they stood and moved a few steps closer to the ambulance she was being brought towards. Derek counted six medical personnel surrounding the stretcher, none of them revealing any information on their faces.

As the stretcher reached the back of the ambulance, Derek and Nikkie, less than five feet away, got a good look at Crown. Her right eye was partially open; the whites of her eye, now yellowed and tinged with red around the edges, seemed to be bulging out through her partially opened lid. The hair on the right side of her head was matted down with dried blood, clinging to her skull. The paramedic on the right hand side of the stretcher pressed a two-by-two-inch gauze over both of Crown’s ears, removed the gauze then muttered something about spinal fluid and a “halo” pattern to the other paramedics. Derek saw that Crown had angry looking dark patches behind her ears and the same angry and distressing darkness below each eye.

The top of the stretcher was pushed into the back of the ambulance, then with the push of a button on the side of the stretcher, the collapsable undercarriage of the stretcher drew in the legs and wheels. Crown was pushed inside. Seconds later, the doors of the ambulance closed and the backside of an EMT blocked Derek’s and Nikkie’s view of Crown.

Derek held Nikkie’s arm and pulled her away from the ambulance. “You’re right, she doesn’t look good.”

“Jesus, Derek,” Nikkie said, her hands covering her mouth.

“She has battle signs behind her ears,” Derek said, loudly enough for the EMT’s and paramedics to hear.

“Yes, sir,” one of the blue uniformed EMT’s stated. “We see.”

Nikkie grabbed Derek’s arm. “What did you just say? What are battle signs?”

Derek led Nikkie back to the car that had served as their leaning post for the previous twenty minutes. “It’s a sign of traumatic brain injury. Dark, small bruises behind each ear and the raccoon look of her eyes. This isn’t looking good, Nikkie. Not good at all.”

“Oh my God,” Nikkie sighed.

“Listen,” Derek said, turning Nikkie to face him, both of his hands holding her arms firmly. “I’m not a medic and far from a doctor. I just saw a bunch of injures when I was stationed in Iraq. But, I need you to get to whichever hospital this ambulance is going to and keep close to Crown. The detective or whatever rank he is will want to talk with you first, which is fine. But as soon as he’s done with you, you need to leave.”

As if on cue, the man with the snow-white hair, banana-sized fingers and barreled chest approached Nikkie and Derek. “Very sorry about what happened here,” he said in a voice that seemed to resonate deep from his thick and neck. “My name is Investigator Mark Mullins.” Mark extended his oversized hand to Derek, who shook it and for the briefest moment, wondered if Mark Mullins was planning on crushing his much smaller hand.

“How’s she doing?” Derek asked.

“That’s for people with diplomas hanging in waiting rooms to say. All I can tell you is I and the sheriff’s department are going to do everything we can to catch the SOB who did this to your friend. Before that can happen, I need to speak with you. Mostly you,” he said, looking at Nikkie. “There’s a small coffee shop less than a mile from here. Tucked behind the hardware shop off of Main. Don’t know about you two, but I sure could use a few cups of caffeine about now.”

ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ

Derek and Nikkie pulled into the Morning Grind Roast House after making the five minute drive from Bo’s house. As the two walked in, they were met with a somewhat frantic waitress, vigorously waving her hand in front of her face, and the fetid smell of burnt coffee.
 

“Can I help you?” the waitress asked, forcing a smile to remove the look of nausea she was wearing when they had first walked in. “Sorry for the smell.”

“I hope that wasn’t your only pot of coffee I’m smelling,” Derek said.

“New barista,” the waitress said, tilting her head in the direction of the young man standing behind the counter, hands on hips and a deeply etched scowl of anger and fear on his face. “And no, we have plenty of coffee and the smell won’t last but a minute longer. Table for two?”

“Booth for three,” Derek replied.

Nikkie and Derek were escorted to a booth in the rear of the coffee shop. Moments after sitting, Investigator Mark Mullins joined them. Mullins ordered the “tallest, blackest and strongest coffee available, and add a shot of expresso.” He asked his first question before his ass hit the bench seat. “So, you had just come back into town after taking Bo Randall for blood work?” his sternly slanted brow dropped slightly towards Nikkie. As Nikkie spoke, he slowly and almost imperceptibly nodded his head.

“Yes, but like I said, Bo never had the blood work. He took off and I couldn’t locate him.”

Mullins paused to jot some notes in his red, covered, spiral bound notebook. “Uh huh” he said, his hand—which spanned most of the notebook’s width—was busily engaged in writing. “And, how long did it take you, including the time before you realized Bo Randall had left the building and whatever time you spent searching the area for him, for you to arrive back at Bo Randall’s house?”

It was clear to both Derek and Nikkie that Mullins was already liking Bo for the attack.

“I don’t think Bo had anything to do with the attack,” Nikkie said.
 

“Never said anything about Bo being a suspect, did I?” Mullins replied. “Just trying to iron out the time frame of it all. Hell, until I speak with the doctors up at Saint Mark’s Hospital, I have no idea if Victoria Crown was attacked the second after you and Bo left the house or one-second before you got back. Time frame is all I’m looking to figure out.” Mullins paused an exaggerated beat, then continued, “With that in mind, tell me the time from you losing track of Randall till you walked into the house and saw Victoria Crown?”

Nikkie paused thoughtfully, then said, “If he took off as soon as he walked to the back of the lab, I had no eyes on him for around an hour fifty-five. Two at the most.”

Mullins paused, seeming to be thinking over what Nikkie has just said. He then began tapping the end of his pen against the open notebook. “I’ve made that drive,” Mullins said. “The one from the lab to Ravenswood. Takes me no more than twenty minutes to hit the town line. Add another ten to get across Main and to Bo’s house. Which leaves you an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes, according to your time frame. Help me out with closing that gap.”

“If he took off as soon as he left the lab’s front office,” Nikkie said, “that means he was gone for twenty minutes before I found out he’d left. Add a few more for me to run around the building, see that he was nowhere in sight, call Crown to see if she heard from him, and now we’re up to, let’s say, twenty-five minutes. I drove around, looking for him for fifty minutes to an hour then drove back to his house. Totals up to my time estimate, doesn’t it?”

“That it does. That it certainly does.”

Derek said, “Look, it’s pretty clear that Bo could have made his way back to his house, bashed his mother over the head with whatever the hell she was hit over the head with,
if
he had help. If he had called a cab, I’m sure you would know about that already, and unless he’s a word class distance runner, he didn’t get back to his house in the time frame. So either he had someone waiting for him at the lab with a car—possible but not likely—or Bo had nothing to do with what happened to his mother.”

“Tell me again what the man you saw running away from the scene looked like?” Mullins said, completely ignoring Derek and what he had said.

Nikkie stated, again, that the distance and the obscured view she had because of the trees, made giving any accurate description impossible. “All I know for sure is that the guy, and even his sex is an assumption, was wearing a gray, hooded sweatshirt and jeans. He was probably five-eight and of average weight.”

“But you had a good enough view to know that he smiled at you, right before he ducked into the woods?”

“Flash of white was all I could make out,” Nikkie said.
 

“Uh huh.” Investigator Mark Mullins finished his notes with a flurry of his pen, closed the cheap notebook, placed his interlaced hands to rest on top of the notebook, and said, “Don’t suppose you saw him once he got into the woods? Didn’t hang out in the back yard very long, correct?”

Nikkie said, “I wanted to get back inside to check on Crown. So, no, I didn’t see him once he hit the woods. Why?”

Mullins scratched his forehead with the fingernail of his thumb, “I was kind of hoping you had seen if he dropped anything. We found a cell phone registered to Boregard Randall no deeper than a foot into the woods. It was just lying on the ground.”

“I didn’t,” Nikkie said. “Are you actually thinking Bo attacked his mother?”

“We sent the phone out for prints,” Mullins smiled and offered a small laugh. “As much as I love being a small town cop, the lack of resources is a pain in the ass plenty of times. I bet you that if I was in Albany, Syracuse or even Utica, I’d be able to carry that phone over to the office next to mine, get prints taken and have results back before I got back to my office. Should have results back in a few more hours.”

“You didn’t answer her question,” Derek said.

“That’s right,” Mullins said. “I didn’t.”

“You planning to do so?”

“Let’s lay our cards on the table, shall we? And first off, don’t think for a minute that me or anyone else in the Sheriff’s department think either of you are up to no good. Despite Louis Randall’s suggestions, you two are under no watch.”

Derek held the palm of his right hand up in a stopping signal. “What do you mean ‘despite Louis Randall’s suggestions?’ ”

Mullins leaned back against the orange plastic cushion of the bench seat. He decorated his face with a smile that seemed manufactured. “Randall, as you know, is Bo’s father. Since we picked up Bo, all he’s been doing is a half-assed attempt to discredit the department and get evidence tossed out. But, like I said, it’s all half-assed. I wouldn’t admit to this unless under oath, but the district attorney shared his surprise at how quickly Louis Randall started discussing plea options for his son. Yesterday, he comes in to the department, asks to see the county sheriff, and proceeds to tell him about you two being hired to do some ground investigation. I guess he went on and on about his concerns that you two would muddy up the waters and cause more harm than good.” Mullins looked at Derek, “Son of a bitch claimed you’re some type of a ghost hunter and all you would be looking to do is create some wild-assed story about maybe an extraterrestrial or ghostly clown starting that fire. Like that clown in that Stephen King book. What the hell was that clown’s name again?”

“Pennywise” Nikkie said.

“That’s it. Like you’d try to pin Pennywise for the arson. Anyway, the whole conversation didn’t sit right with the sheriff. He told me Louis Randall acted like someone afraid of what you two might find out.”

“We got the same impression when we met with him last night,” Derek said. “I was surprised he didn’t want to at least try to prove his son’s innocence. Shocked, actually.”

“The way I see it, either the father knows the son did the crime or the father knows something about the crime he doesn’t want anyone to find out about.”

“Exactly,” Derek agreed.

“So, as I was saying, you two have nothing to be concerned about in this investigation. I say that because I’m feeling we may end up needing information from you two and don’t want you to get all herky-jerky about working with us. That sound fair?”

“Completely,” Derek said.

“Good. The evidence against Bo Randall is pretty solid. While we don’t have an eyewitness putting him at the scene, we have enough evidence to prove in a court of law that it is highly probable that he was at least complicit in the arson. But the more digging I do, the more I smell something rotten. Something else is going on in this town and I won’t rest until I figure it out. Honestly, the Randall case is pretty much wrapped up. The DA is telling us that Bo’s attorney—his father—is working hard at getting the charges dropped to depraved indifference. The DA thinks Louis Randall will get his son to take that plea as soon as it’s offered. No sense in us running around trying to make a rock solid case even more solid if the DA is expecting a plea. But still, something isn’t sitting right with me. And I can tell by the look on your face, Derek, that you know what I’m talking about.”

“I was at the fire station this morning,” Derek picked up the conversation without skipping a beat. “A member was telling me about some strange things happening around town. Someone cutting a neighbor’s tree down in the middle of the night, some guy beating on his wife and something about three guys he knows who were arrested for slashing a bunch of car tires.”

“And all those events did happen and all the people who either admitted to the crimes or are actively mounting a defense, are all saying the same damn thing that Bo is saying.”

“And that would be?” Nikkie asked.

“None of them remember doing anything they’re accused of. Total blank memory.” Mullins chuckled. “Maybe there is some alien or ghost or that Pennywise clown hypnotizing the townsfolk and making them do things they wouldn’t normally do.”

“I wouldn’t write that in my report if I were you,” Derek said.

“Not planning on adding it to any report I fill out. Just,” Mullins paused, slowly shaking his head, “I can’t put my finger on it. But I will figure it out. Trust me, I will figure it out.”

Derek stayed at the diner with Mullins while Nikkie left to check on Crown in the hospital.

“I’ll call you as soon as I find out anything,” she said.

“And keep calling me to keep me informed. I hate to say it, but I think I can do Crown more good staying here and figuring this mystery out than I could sitting by her side. If she wakes up, let her know I’m thinking about her, okay?”

As soon as Nikkie left the diner, Mullins turned to Derek, and said, “I’m far from a doctor, but you should should know, your friend is in serious condition.”

“I know,” Derek said, his eyes tracking Nikkie as she walked across the parking lot, got into her car and drove away. “I saw that her eye was practically popped out of the socket and the sure signs of a severe brain injury.”