The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) (28 page)

“The compounding lab,” Derek said, surprising himself and knowing, somehow, the his senses were right.
 

“Let me tell you what this old, broken down, left for dead on the side of the road, retired cop found out about that compounding lab before you go running into trouble you can’t run back out of. First off, the place is owned by Leonard La Salle. The guy is apparently a genius, in a whole mess of different ways. Got his degree in pharmaceuticals in 2002, PhD in chemistry in 2005 and, for shits and giggles, got himself another PhD in psychology in 2008. He opened his pharmaceutical compounding lab back in 2003 and, according to the records this old sheriff was able to get his hands on, struggled mightily for a mess of years. Fact is, La Salle had filed chapter eleven or thirteen or some damn number, twice. Once in 2005 and again in 2014. But something happened in 2015 that seemed to turn his fortunes around. And, whatever it was his fairy godmother delivered to him, was damn profitable.
 

“Now, I ain’t saying what turned his business around was illegal. I ain’t saying that at all. But, whatever it was, sure did get a lot of people in Albany damn curious. Now, I am hearing what I believe to be road noise from your end of the phone, so I take it you got back to driving that car of yours.”

“I’m driving to the compounding lab,” Derek said, his voice fixed and stern.

“While I do not suggest you complete that drive, I know you well enough by now to know that me trying to convince you to take an alternate approach to your case would be futile. So, as long as you can drive and listen at the same time, I’ll keep talking. You can do both things at the same time, can’t you Derek?”

“I can.”

“Figured you could,” Ralph said. “Your old buddy Louis Randall. You do remember him, don’t you?”

“How could I forget? You’re going tell me he’s wrapped up with La Salle somehow, right?”

“Not exactly. See, Leonard La Salle’s sudden fortune, like I already said, got a mess of people interested in his doings. But, his answer to those mess of Albany people’s questions was that he had investors pouring money into his business. And you know who might have been the largest of those investors?”

“Louis Randall.”

“Old Louis invested over seven million dollars into the plant back in 2014. His money, along with roughly another two million from a bunch of other investors, turned La Salle Compounding Facility into a cash rich operation.”

Derek had only driven through the town of Ravenswood one time. Though he had an amazing ability to map out a city and its landmark buildings quickly, he found himself lost, taking random turns, then having to correct his course. He remembered faintly seeing signs for La Salle Compounding Facility and believed he had seen them near the Town’s public park and golf course. Derek continued driving randomly until he saw a sign, reading “Golf Course-3 Miles Ahead.” An arrow was emblazoned beneath words, pointing left.

“So, if the compounding lab is up to something no good, Randall has a financial interest in keeping things quiet,” Derek said as he negotiated the left hand turn and
 
increased his pressure on the gas pedal.

“I’d have to say he would,” Ralph bellowed.
 

“If La Salle got people with deep pockets to invest in his business, doesn’t that explain why his business turned around in 2015?”

“Now, that would be a fair and fine assumption, Derek, but it would also be a wrong assumption. See, those deep pockets poured in a whole lot of money but not nearly enough to explain how La Salle was able to pay off a twenty-two million dollar note he took out in 2010 on an expansion project, nor would those pockets explain how he was able to invest another five million in renovations and the building of four new buildings. La Salle sure did get a lot of cash from investors, but the books don’t balance.”

“Maybe he expanded into a new line of business?” The next road sign Derek paid attention to read, “Ravenswood Municipal G.C. 2 Miles.”

“That seems likely to me,” Ralph said. “But old Ralphy found out some peculiar information about Leonard La Salle. Way back when, in 1993, a young girl by the name of Rebecca Angela Miller was kidnapped, raped and killed. She was from Middletown, New York and that was the last place she was seen alive. Her body was found in the woods near the golf course in that very same town you’ve been in the last couple of days. Want to take a shot in the dark who found that girl?”

“La Salle?”

“And from what I heard, local authorities were interested in La Salle’s daddy for the murder. Seems he was in Middletown the day the little girl went missing. They never were able to pin the murder on him but there sure were a lot of cops who would swear on a tower of bible’s that Leonard La Salle’s daddy did the deed.”

“Sounds like Leonard had a troubled upbringing.”

“Now here’s what got those cops back in 1993 curious about La Salle’s daddy. They had run a whole mess of interviews with practically everyone in Ravenswood, including Leonard. Since he found the body, it would make sense for the police to interview him. But during the one interview he had with the cops, Leonard La Salle told the cops that he thought he recognized the girl he found dead in the woods. Like he’d seen her somewhere before but couldn’t remember where or when. Now, I certainly wasn’t a part of that investigation, but I’d find it peculiar that he believed he recognized the poor little girl.”

Derek wasn’t sure which he saw first: The sign indicating that the municipal golf course was five hundred feet ahead, or the smoke billowing up from the ground into the sky a half of a mile ahead of him. “Ralph, there’s something on fire ahead of me. I have to go.”

The main building of La Salle Compounding Facility was a two-story, eight thousand square-foot facility that seemed to be under continual improvements. Its blackened windows, clean architectural lines and pristinely kept grounds exuded an air of success. Of progressiveness. Of certainty.
 
Behind the main building, enclosed in the six-foot-high, steel chain-link security fence, were three outbuildings. The one closest to the main building was a simple, one-story, eleven-hundred square-foot structure, that housed the groundskeeping equipment, storage for seldom used or out of date lab equipment, a generator which was capable of running the entire lab for three days in case of an emergency and three black Town Cars. Set further behind the main building were two single-story homes that were used to house visiting guests and also served alternate purposes.

After La Salle Compounding Facility was in the black and actually seeing an abundance of cash, TJ Harris convinced his partner and founder of the company, Leonard La Salle, to build the quaint homes on the facility’s premises.

“If we want to make an impression on people, we need to go all out. We need to show investors what a real, legitimate operation we are running here,” TJ had said.

“Legitimate operation?” Leonard questioned. “Under your leadership, you’ve turned my company into a drug dealing menace of society.”

“One that brings in more money each month than what the business under your leadership did in any year since you opened. Leo, you have to know by now that without what I’ve done for this business, you’d be dead-ass broke. You wouldn’t be enjoying that mansion you call home and you sure as shit wouldn’t have the time or resources to do whatever the hell you do in your private lab.”

“But if this ever blows up,” Leonard replied, “if you make one mistake, everything will come crumbling down.”

“Unlike you, Leo, I’m willing and able to do whatever it takes to make sure that never happens.”

When TJ Harris arrived at the facility—an unusual visit for him considering it was the weekend—his agenda consisted of three important action items: Get rid of the “residents” staying in one of the more secure out-buildings; make sure that the dearly departed Gene Witten had cleaned up and removed every last trace of Leonard’s magical formula from the secured lab on the second story of the main building; and call two of the investors in the La Salle Compounding Facility. He needed to remind them that, though they may not have played a role in the business expansion plan he himself had designed and was fully in charge of, they continued to be at risk of losing all of their investment as well as potentially having serious legal concerns if things were allowed to go sideways.

    
But before TJ could unlock the front door using the combination of his proximity badge and his fingerprint read on the biometric scanner, he saw a car racing past the entrance gate, tearing down the manicured driveway, then behind the maintenance building where it slammed to a sudden stop.

  
“Son of a bitch,” TJ said as he broke towards the car. Though he didn’t recognize the car, he knew who would be behind the wheel and he suspected the driver wouldn’t be alone.

ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ

“What the hell are you doing here?” TJ grumbled as the driver climbed out of the car. “And who the hell is that?” he said, pointing to the woman sitting in the passenger’s seat, a trickle of blood dripping from what was certainly a fresh welt on the side of her head.

“We ran into a situation,” the driver said. “And I took the necessary steps to clean it up. Now, either you’re going to help me or you’re going to get the fuck out of my way.”

“Who is that? Tell me, who is that girl?” TJ was angry, not at his associate taking the steps he felt were needed, but at how quickly things were unravelling. Whatever needed to be done to keep things quiet and to make his mistake of replicating La Salle’s combination of cocaine with the devil’s snare weed go away, needed to be done immediately.

“She’s that Private Investigator’s assistant,” the man said. “Her name is Nikkie Armani.”

“Christ Almighty,” TJ said. “And you brought her here? Why in God’s name did you bring her here?”

“Are you kidding me? Did you not hear me? I told you she’s Derek Cole’s assistant, he’s the PI Louis Randall hired. Derek fucking Cole.”

TJ’s brow furrowed as he strained to put the dots together. TJ knew Louis Randall had hired a PI and that he had done so out of protest. From what TJ could remember Louis telling him during a phone call the two had a couple of days prior, Louis’s ex-wife worked for a PI and Louis was compelled to hire that PI. As he strained his mind, which was still cloudy from his earlier rip through his private reserve of La Salle’s wonderful mixture, the name “Derek Cole” slowly fell into clarity. “Wait a minute,” he said, his eyes growing wide and a continual flow of cognizance dispelled his mind-clouds, bringing intense worry along with clarity of thought. “I got it now. Cole is the guy Randall hired to run some BS investigation because Randall’s ex-wife works for the guy.”

“Dude,” the man said, “how much shit did you slam up your nose? Louis Randall’s ex-wife works for Derek Cole. She’s the bitch whose head one of our ‘house guests’ cracked with the shovel. Cole is the private eye who hired me as his per diem, Northeast Field Investigator. Are you putting all the pieces together yet?”

Alex Manner looked nervously between Nikkie, who was beginning to stir as she sat slumped in the passenger’s seat of Brendon Lull’s car, and TJ, who still seemed to be clouded over. When he had seen that the “hot ass chick,” as Brenden had described her, was Nikkie, he knew he had to take immediate and drastic measures or everything in his life would have quickly fallen apart. Though he had only met Nikkie a handful of times over the few months he had been working for Derek Cole, he saw the recognition in her eyes when, a few seconds after Brenden had parked his car next to his in the Rite Aid parking lot, Nikkie had glanced through the car window and looked directly at his face. He pulled out the loaded gun tucked beneath his leg, and put one 9 mm round into Brenden’s skull from a distance of eight inches. Knocking Nikkie out was his only logical next step, but what he needed to do after she was unconscious and he was behind the wheel of the recently departed Brenden Lull’s car, was a complete mystery to him.

He assumed Cole wouldn’t have left Nikkie alone and probably had seen what just went down. So as he sped away from the parking lot, he kept his attention divided between the task of driving and his rear view mirror. He breathed a single sigh of relief when, after several minutes, he hadn’t seen any car charging after him and figured that either Cole hadn’t seen what had happened or had lost visual contact with Lull’s car. But his sigh of relief, and the calming refresh it provided, was short lived. Not only had he killed a man and abducted a woman, the cut cocaine he had sold to ten residents of Ravenswood had proved to have some drastic, unknown and unexpected side effects. Things might eventually come back on him unless he found a way to clean things up.

Louis Randall told Alex that Derek Cole and his team would be in Ravenswood investigating the arson, so Alex knew he needed to keep a low profile while in town. He had considered leaving Ravenswood but there were too many clients and too many messes that his product had caused over the last several days.
 

What Louis didn’t know was that Alex had found a more profitable way to line his pockets and that he, Alex, was the person who had sold the devil’s snare laced cocaine to Bo Randall the night of the fire. Louis also was unaware that Alex had formed a partnership with TJ and had been selling Leonard’s cocaine formula to nose-hungry drug users throughout much of the Northeast.

For the better part of three decades, Louis Randall had been sending $12,500 each month to Victoria Crown in exchange for her silence regarding a martial indiscretion he and a Senator’s wife participated in. Each month, as he wrote his name on the signature line of the check, Louis Randall’s anger increased. He had tried, numerous times, to find something out about his ex-wife, something she wanted to keep quiet more than she wanted the checks to continue.
 

He had found nothing.

Though he had grown accustomed to paying the hush money and while his anger had been contracted down to a size that only filled the one minute it took him to write out the check, Louis continued searching for ways to end the charity train. When he learned about her new job, Louis began patiently plotting. And when he found out that Crown had convinced Derek Cole to hire more private investigators, his plan fell into place.