Deathly Reminders: a Derek Cole Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 6) Read online

  Deathly Reminders

  a Derek Cole Suspense Thriller

  T Patrick Phelps

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  About the Author

  Other Books by T Patrick Phelps

  Next in the Derek Cole Thriller Series

  This is a work of fiction. Any and all similarities to people or events are purely coincidental.

  Connect with T Patrick Phelps

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  www.tpatrickphelps.com

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  Copyright © 2016 T Patrick Phelps

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter 1

  Today

  12:17 AM

  His eyes felt like burning stones in their sockets. There were no tears. Not yet, anyway. Just like before.

  She was dying. Of that, he was certain. At best her life was dangling over the great edge, held only by the strength of a single strand of hair, and that strand was frayed and splitting quickly. He held her head, wrapped in his arms, tightly against his chest, rocking her with gentle movements. He didn’t need to inspect the crimson colored bullet wounds on her chest again, for he knew their locations were as close to having been as fatally placed as possible. Practically placed in specific locations by hands as skilled as those of a surgeon. Close enough to deliver the shooter’s intentions. Maybe not as quickly as desired, but just as certainly. Or perhaps the time drag between the act and the final act was a bonus for the shooter.

  The bullet’s entry afforded her just enough time to scribble out two letters, written in her own spilled blood, onto the cold tile floor on which her life would soon end. The growing pool of her blood was now swallowing those two letters as it was pumped to the foreign destination, out through the impossible-to-close-up holes and onto the cold floor.

  As he rocked her gently back and forth, he began whispering a song his mother would sing to him when he was a child.

  “To bed, to bed, cried Sleepy Head.

  Tarry awhile, said Slow.

  The moon is high, my love is nigh

  It’s time for dreams to go.”

  He glanced down at the scrawled-in-blood letters, burning the frantically drawn letters into his mind. He knew he didn’t need to see them again; they would forever be available for immediate recall. They were both familiar and expected.

  He turned his attention away from the letters and onto the thinness of her breathing. Each struggling breath seeming to grow weaker than the one before, as if her very act of breathing was draining what few reserves she had remaining.

  “In and out,” he whispered. “Just keep doing what you're doing. In and out.”

  He was tempted to feel her neck again; to fumble his fingers in the vain hope of finding her pulse strengthening. To discover her heart was building strength and momentum instead of simply following the now distorted commands of her blood-starved brain. But he knew a check would reveal nothing glinting towards hope. He knew, despite his call to 911 the moment after he found her lying on the floor in a pool of her blood, that there was no medicine to save her. No hands, no matter how skilled, could stem the receding tide of her life’s force. For he had held another in nearly the same position, the same situation, only six years earlier.

  Then, it was his wife, Lucy. Her brain invaded and turned to instant mush by a mad man with a gun. Then, he had arrived too late to hold her before the other side took her. Though he rocked her body then as he was doing to this one now, his gentle touch didn't offer any comfort. It was too late, even though he was by her side only moments after the stinging sound of the pistol had stopped bouncing its terrible rings off the walls of the bank’s lobby. He sang the same song then as well, for it was all he could drag up from a mind so occluded with the certainly approaching sorrow, pain and anger.

  He loved his wife more than he thought possible. And when his fellow police officers finally convinced him to let her body go, he knew he would never be able to let her go. He knew he would always hold on to his anger, to his pain and to the final images of her beauty-erased eyes. He thought, no, knew, as he walked away, braced on either side by two police officers, that he would never love again. He would never allow himself to. Even if someone entered his life and somehow commanded the soon-to-be-forgotten emotion of love to rear its head, no one would ever command each drop of his love the way Lucy had.

  And then Nikkie showed up. With her dark skin, radiantly green eyes, her body a near perfect expression of beauty and her soul an intoxicating elixir against which he had no defense.

  And now he held her and was about to witness her death.

  It was slow, painfully so perhaps, but also infuriatingly quick. She had just turned thirty years old. Had just told him how she felt about him and had smiled when he told her of his feelings. Of his fears and of his reluctance.

  “We’ll just take things one step at a time,” he whispered into her ear, repeating what she had told him just a few weeks before. “Step by step till we see where we end up. Okay?”

  But now he knew there would be no destination their steps would bring them to. They would never be together outside of the darkened office where Nikkie was about to die. There would be no more steps, taken one at a time or grouped in a passion driven dash.

  He recognized the change in her breathing. Short, raspy draws were being replaced by struggled gasps and painfully long delays between each breath. He knew there was a medical term for the type of breathing Nikkie was engaged in, but the term escaped him.

  “Doesn't matter,” he thought. Knowing the markers of an approaching death did nothing to prevent or delay death’s silent march.

  In the distance, he heard the growing wobble of an ambulance siren. There would be at least three cop cars as well, he figured, and then grew angry with himself as he caught himself assuming what questions the assigned detective would soon be asking him.

  Questions were part of the protocol. They would be asked and answered because they had to be. Following the rules and procedures was important. And as he felt Nikkie draw a breath thinner than those she drew before, Derek Cole, the ex-military cop turned ex-Columbus Police Department officer turned freelance detective understood the few rules, protocols and procedures he did follow were seco
nds from being abandoned.

  Nikkie Armani, his partner in his Private Investigator business for the better part of the last year, died in his arms as the telltale emergency vehicle wobble and angry, red flashing lights were joined by indecipherable voices squawking over treble-heavy radios on the street outside the office. Derek cradled her face in his hands, leaned down and kissed her cheek.

  Then his eyes and mind focused on what he needed to do.

  He knew there would be a series of questions, perhaps taking him as long as an hour or two. He would be as helpful as he possibly could while maintaining his true intentions going forward.

  Secret and silent intentions, made clear and granite-hard. Cast the day his wife was killed and fired in a blistering hot furnace for six years. It was time for the fired fury to be released.

  He may even offer the investigators, detectives and plainclothes cops a smile, a handshake and agree to their proposed understanding and recounting of the main objectives. He would walk away, after receiving and acknowledging their altruistic condolences and promises to “make the son of a bitch” pay for what “that bastard” did to Nikkie.

  But Derek Cole would walk into his own future. He would stride forward utterly free from any of the remaining burdens of rules, of protocols, of established justice.

  The sirens continued to grow louder as more responders screeched their vehicles to stops on the street and the angry, flashing lights of red and blue began painting the office’s walls and ceiling with their warning colors. The squeal of radio transmissions, the words devoid of meaning in the rapid flurry of controlled panic, occluded every other sound.

  Including the sound of rage building to a necessary crescendo inside Derek Cole’s mind.

  He pushed his foot out and scraped it through the pool of Nikkei’s blood, smearing the two letters she had written.

  Two letters, intended to be accusations, were lost to all eyes save those of Derek Cole.

  This was his battle now.

  Chapter 2

  August 19

  She had never been accused of any crime before, let alone of murder. But there she sat, dressed in a county-issued, olive drab jumpsuit, in a damp room, dripping with humidity and despair. The jumpsuit scratched at her back and shoulders, preventing her from finding even the least amount of comfort. She rested her arms on the stainless steel table in front of her, and then pulled them back when Derek and Nikkie were buzzed in through the locked door, which separated her from the corridor beyond. Her first thought was how sturdy Derek looked; broad in the shoulders, tapered waist, arms defined and vascular. She noticed his eyes next. They were a piercing blue. She thought they were the type of eyes which had melted a thousand hearts. She felt her own flutter a bit. The feeling, if only for the briefest of moments, pulling her away from her current surroundings and into a desirous world where even those facing a life behind bars, wearing nothing more appealing than a simple iteration of what the intake guard had issued her the day before, might risk a fleeting dream.

  She shot Nikkie only a glance. One intended only to acknowledge her presence but not to suggest importance.

  She waited—as the manners she had been taught instructed her to do so—till both recently arrived guests had been seated before she spoke.

  “I didn’t know where else to turn. I…I’ve never been…I have no idea what to do.” Her voice was a flood of emotions, as if she had been thinking of what to say to Derek when he finally arrived. She probably had rehearsed a thousand different opening lines but all took flight when the scene was complete, leaving her only with a staggered expression of desperation.

  Derek Cole sat in the visitor’s room inside the steel reinforced concrete walls of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s department. His associate, Nikkie Armani sat to his right, directly across from Maryanne Jenkins, Jessica Gracers’ attorney. He sighed, recognizing both the desperate words his potential client had said and the suspicious look etched across Maryanne Jenkins’ face.

  “You’d be surprised how many times a client has told me the same thing,” Derek said. “So, despite the obvious doubts your counselor at law has about our services, why don’t we start with how you heard about us?”

  “I heard about you,” Jessica said, her voice struggling for a solid purchase onto composure. “My cousin in Maine told me about you. She said she and her husband hired you to solve a challenge they were having with their son.”

  A distant memory of pain flashed across Derek’s eyes. “Maggie Bryant is your cousin?” he asked.

  “Yes. And she told me about how good an investigator you are when I spoke with her last year.” Jessica turned and glanced at Maryanne, as if the two had had more than one conversation about hiring Cole and Associates. From that one look, brief as it was, Derek understood Maryanne, like many lawyers with whom Derek shared a mutual client, was not in favor of him being hired. That look Jessica shot at her lawyer also told him Jessica, though the obvious victor in whatever battle she had with her lawyer, was filled with doubts over her own insistence about hiring him.

  “I need your help,” Jessica said as she surrendered all hopes at remaining composed. “Please. I need your help.”

  Derek looked directly at Maryanne, studying her face, reading the thoughts crowding her mind. She wasn’t going to be easy to work with, that was for damn sure, but he was used to working with lawyers whose noses got bent out of shape when their clients called in their own reinforcements. Maryanne Jenkins may try to get in his way if, and when, he started his investigation, but she wouldn’t stay in his way for long.

  Hearing Maggie Bryant’s name sparked a glint of pain in Derek. It was Maggie Bryant who had hired him when she and her husband believed someone had convinced their son that a ghost was visiting him. It was Maggie Bryant for whom Derek had violated his cardinal rule and had allowed himself to have growing feelings for. It was Maggie Bryant who stood beside Derek when he had seen what could only be described as an entity turn to mist as he stood on the Marginal Way on Maine’s coast. And it was Maggie Bryant who, once the case was closed and the mystery solved, had told Derek she needed to mend her relationship with her husband. Doing so was the right thing. Derek knew that, as did Maggie. But doing the right thing doesn’t mean emotional pain is not delivered. And sometimes, the pain is delivered with a hell of a punch.

  Derek wasn't emotionally ready for what may have happened if, instead of choosing to work on her fractured marriage, she had given herself to Derek. But Maggie was someone with whom his fears seemed to have grown shallower when he thought of her.

  “You understand how we work?” Derek asked as his thoughts raced back to the present. “You already paid our retainer, which we keep if we decide we aren’t going to accept your case. If we do accept it, we require…”

  “My client understands your terms quite well, Mr. Cole.” Maryanne Jenkins said. She looked like a hard woman. To Derek, she looked competent, intelligent and like someone who would rather take a bullet than someone’s shit. Derek glared at her, measuring her character with the distance of his gaze. He estimated her age to be late forties. Probably stood five-seven, though since she hadn’t stood the entire time he and Nikkie joined her and her client in the interview room at the jail, Maryanne could stand five-flat or six-one. Didn’t matter.

  She was fleshed out, like someone who conducted most of her professional meetings over four-course meals and heavy lunches. Maybe one seventy to one eighty-five but two hundred wasn’t too many business dinners away. She was a black woman, though Derek felt she was more Caribbean sounding than African-American. Dark hair, almost pitch black with several rivers of gray and white marking lines in the tight pull of her hairstyle.

  “If you’re trying to intimidate me with your stares,” Maryanne continued, “you might as well give up that ghost.”

  There was a bit of a Caribbean accent in her voice. Distant, like Maryanne had done a damn good job of losing most of the telltale drawl. But to someone like Derek Cole who
made a living out of noticing what people were openly showing, he also noticed what people were trying to hide. To Derek, the accent was clear.

  “Not trying to do anything,” Derek said. “Just making sure we’re on the same page, is all.”

  “Here’s how my client understands the situation: She paid you five grand just to get you and your associate, whose name I do not know, to travel down in short order from Ohio to Florida. You two will sit here, listen to what she says, spend a day doing some prelim investigation, which will probably include you doing no more than speaking with the DA and a few cops. Then, you and your associate will arrange to meet with my client and me and tell us either, ‘Thanks for the five large, but there ain’t too much we can do for you,’ or—and this is what I feel is the more likely outcome—you’ll sit down across from us and tell us ‘Good news, we think we can help you out.’ You’ll toss a few papers in front of my client to sign; releases, non-disclosure agreements and some agreement drawn up by some two-bit law student. My client will sign them, since her back is against the wall and puts more trust in something her relative told her about last year than she has in my recommendation.” Maryanne shot a sideways glance towards Jessica, who held her gaze directly on Derek’s face. “Then, you’ll tell us you two can’t start, or rather, won’t start your investigation until my client pays you for at least five days of your time. And, based on what I read on your webpage, which also seems to have been designed by a two-bit nobody, that will run my client another seven thousand, five hundred. How ‘m I doing?”

  “My name is Nikkie,” Nikkie said without pausing a beat.

  “Good for you,” Maryanne replied.

  “What you said so far sounds about right,” Derek said. “Except for a few minor things.”

  Maryanne breathed deeply, crossed her arms over her ample breasts and sat back against the chair. “Those being?”