Heartless: a Derek Cole Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thriller Book 1) (17 page)

“This is Route 8. Our Doctor Straus was seen turning right out of here and speeding down that a way,” Ralph said pointing to his right. “Ain’t no use us heading that way and following him, as I’m sure you’d agree, so take a left here.”

As Derek turned his car onto Route 8, he asked Ralph why he hadn’t seen a car parked near the lodge last night, though Ralph was obviously there.
 

“I do like to be close to my work. But mostly I stayed at the lodge last night because the state police didn’t want me to. They thought I’d sully up the scene. But I figured since I am the man in charge that I’d go ahead and do what I damn well pleased. I had one of my officers bring my car back to my house yesterday afternoon. I figured that if Alexander or anyone else involved in this here crime had to get back inside the lodge that they’d be more likely to do so if they thought there was no one around. Turns out the only person who showed up was some freelancer.”

The route to Roger Fay’s home was just under a mile away from the maple tree across from Straus’s lodge. Derek turned off Route 8 and onto a road that followed the shore line of Piseco Lake and then circled back towards the direction of the lodge. When they reached the trailer park that Roger Fay called home, Ralph had Derek pull his car over to the side of road in front of Roger’s double-wide but suggested that they not do any outside investigation.

“Ain’t nothing we gonna learn by traipsing around his old trailer. State police wasted a whole lot of time looking for any clue that connected Roger to Straus and came up with a handful of nothing. I just wanted you to start piecing together the events and time frame of our murder. Go ahead and drive straight for a bit. This ain’t the way to the diner still, but I want to show you something that I find very peculiar down the road a stretch.”

Derek continued driving down the road as his mind began retracing the timeline of the murders. He tried to imagine what Roger Fay had seen or done to get himself pinned to a tree. His imagination failed him again.

It was just over two miles past Roger Fay’s home when Ralph told Derek to pull over to the side of the recently paved road and onto the hard-packed dirt shoulder. Without saying a word, Ralph opened up his door, pulled himself out, and started walking across the road. Derek followed quickly behind.

“Tell me what you make of this,” Ralph said, pointing to an outcropping of large rocks on the side of the road. The rocks were set back twelve feet from the road and seemed to be in the same position they had been for the last million years. Painted on the rock in red was an image of a heart.

“Looks like some local kid wanted to spray paint a message to his girl and was interrupted,” Derek offered, not sure why Ralph seemed to think that the spray painted heart may have been important.

“That may be true, but the neighbors all say that they hadn’t seen this graffiti before a few days of the murders. And if you head on back this little trail right next to the rocks, you’ll see something else that I find a bit interesting.”

The small trail that started right beside the rock formation seemed to be made several years ago. Weeds and ground plants had recaptured much of the trail, making the task of keeping on trail a bit of a challenge for Derek.

 
With Ralph trailing behind and breathing much heavier and louder than Derek thought the simple hike demanded, Derek navigated his way through the overgrown path for roughly one hundred yards before Ralph breathlessly called from behind.

“Now if you pause a moment,” he said as he used a trailside tree as support, “and take a look around, let me know if you see anything peculiar.”

Derek glanced around the trail, then off towards the dense undergrowth that bordered the trail. He knew that Ralph wouldn’t have asked him if he saw anything “peculiar” unless Ralph felt that there was something that he found to be “peculiar.”

A second before Derek was going to report that he couldn’t see anything of interest, he noticed a small, white birch tree twenty-feet off the right of the path. On the tree was spray painted a small, red heart. The image was small but stood out clearly against the white, paper-like bark of the tree.

“Think that’s a trail marker?” Derek asked.

“Head on over, and let me know what you think,” Ralph answered, still challenged to capture his breath.

Derek hopped some small bushes and bounded over to the white birch tree. Once there, he noticed a small pile of twigs and leaves just behind the marked tree.

“Okay to see if anything is under this pile of sticks and leaves?” he called to Ralph.

“Ain’t no reason since I know exactly what’s under it. Git on over back here, and I’ll tell ya what I found.”

When Derek returned to the path, Ralph had found his breath, though his brow streamed with sweat.

“Damn hot out here. Muggy as all hell. You’d think that an ole Texas boy would be accustomed to heat and humidity but, damn if this upstate New York heat doesn’t get me every time.”

“So,” Derek pushed, “what was under that pile?”

“Same thing that is still under that pile, actually.”

“And that would be?”

“A small backpack. And in the backpack, which I am sure that you’re about to ask, is .380 caliber Smith and Wesson semi, a well folded map of the area, three vanilla flavored Power Bars, a pair of Nike sneakers, socks, clean shirt, long pants, and a towel.”

“Not sure how smart it is to leave a gun out here for anyone to find,” Derek said.

“Guns are funny, Derek. They ain’t much good with no bullets and the firing rod removed. That gun has been modified. I guess you could call it a custom.”

“Someone left the gun without bullets?”

“No, they was there. Hollow points. A full box of fifty of them, plus six loaded in the magazine. I took the liberty of removing them.”

“Get any prints off the bullets or the gun?”

“Clean as a virgin’s nightstand,” Ralph answered.

Ralph pointed further down the path.
 

“Keep on walking that way for another click. You walk your pace, and I’ll do my best to keep up.”

Though Derek wanted to talk more about the hidden backpack and the two painted hearts, he figured it was more important to keep on Ralph’s good side, and he turned to continue walking the path.

Five minutes later, the path ended at the shore of Piseco Lake. Directly across from the end of the path was the lodge of Doctor William Straus.

“Interesting,” Derek said, though Ralph was still too far behind to hear.

A few minutes later, Ralph’s breathing could be heard. He reached the end of the path next to Derek and sat down on a large rock that Derek hadn’t noticed was marked with a small, red heart.

“And beneath this rock that is now holding up my fat ass,” Ralph said, “was a flashlight, not unlike the type I found you waving around the lodge last night.”

“This whole path is a bit ‘peculiar’ I’d say,” Derek said.

“Very much so,” Ralph answered. “Now, I want to hear your ideas about this path, the objects on this path, and the three small hearts painted on the rocks and tree. I have my thoughts, but I am very curious to hear what you think.”

Derek thought of how his father would always ask him to share his thoughts about difficult to understand questions that Derek had growing up. Derek would share his views before this father would share his thoughts. When Derek asked about why his grandmother had died, his father asked him, “Derek, everyone has their own ideas of why people die. What are your thoughts?” And while Derek never felt the need to replace his father with a “father figure,” the way Ralph spoke to him made Derek feel comfortable and at ease.

“Well,” Derek started, “the fact that this trail is directly across a narrow stretch of the lake from the lodge, is marked at both the beginning and end and has some supplies stashed along the route, also near a marker, I have to think that Alexander used this route to escape after murdering the three men. Since Fay was murdered outside the lodge, I imagine that Alexander was headed towards the lake to either swim to this point or to use a boat that may have been stashed on the lodge’s side of the lake. Did you or the state police find any canoes or small boats drifting around the lake?”

“Not a-one,” Ralph answered, his smile showing his obvious satisfaction with Derek’s summation.

“Now the fact that the flashlight and backpack were obviously never collected,” Derek continued, “leads me to believe that
 
Alexander didn’t make the swim over here, that he got lost, or that he had another means of escape. I also am more convinced than ever that Alexander wasn’t acting alone.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Ralph. “I had one of my officers take a look at the underside of the lodge while you were still dreaming of lollipops and rainbows this morning. And he agrees that the screws were pulled out from outside, just like you suggested. Now that tells me that either Alexander got outside without anyone noticing or that someone else helped him get out.”

 
“If Alexander was able to get outside, he could have been the one who planted the supplies on this trail.”

“Entirely possible,” Ralph said. “But I don’t think so. You see, as soon as I discovered this lovely path, the painted heart symbols and the supplies, my little brain immediately told me that these were arranged by someone else. Someone who was planning on assisting Alexander in the murders and his escape. Someone who knew the timing of it all. These hearts painted along this path look too new to have been out in this weather too long. They are as fresh as a schoolyard bully’s mouth during recess.”

“Straus?” Derek questioned.

“I do not know who helped Alexander, nor do I know why. But I do know that wherever Alexander is, he didn’t get there by himself. And, while I don’t know for certain, I also believe that whoever called in that note of yours to the rental car place, is the someone who can answer all my questions.”

Henry Zudak needed to breathe. He had to alert someone, anyone about what was happening. He heard, though he couldn’t be certain of the exact words used, that Mark Rinaldo was dead. That shocked him more than he thought it would. After all, he knew that Alexander Black had escaped after killing three men inside of William Straus’s lodge, and that one of the victims was Henry’s old co-worker, Peter Adams. Henry also knew that his name was found on a list with a bunch of other names that he recognized and that two of the names, Adams and Curtis, were crossed out in blood. He knew that Alexander would be looking for him and for Mark, but, still, the shock of hearing that Mark was dead was hard to handle.

Then there was the more pressing issue of breathing. He certainly had enough experience remembering how to breathe when stressed. The months after the whole “O’Connell incident,” as he began to refer to it as, found him suffering from near-constant panic attacks.
 

The psychologist he met with told him that panic attacks are nothing more than his body not knowing how to process an overload of stressors hitting it all at once. He prescribed a mild sedative to help Henry through the more troubling attacks and suggested that Henry learn some “yoga breathing exercises” to help manage the more “palatable” attacks.

Henry was certain that he packed his sedatives when he hurriedly threw his suitcase together, and he knew exactly where he placed the plastic amber-colored bottle when he unpacked that very same suitcase just two days ago.

“On the sink, next to the toothpaste, behind the folded washcloths,”
he thought to himself. If only he could reach them from where he was kneeling. Though he wasn’t sure that the pills would really do him any good, the thought of getting to them at least gave him something to shoot for.

A goal.

An objective beyond his primal objective of breathing.

He knew he couldn’t talk and ask whoever it was standing behind him holding the rope tightly across his windpipe for a quick time-out. He had tried screaming to get the attention of anyone who may be in the room next door or even out in the hallway, but his scream was locked deep in his lungs.

And as black speckles began to fully cloud his vision, he accepted that breathing would not be something he would be doing anytime soon. Certainly not in time to save himself.

As the black speckles began to flash at their outer edges, Henry gave up the goal of getting to his pills and turned his thoughts to his wife. Her name was Abigail, and she would soon be getting back to the hotel room. He wished that the last thing he said to her had been
“I love you”
instead of
“Make sure that no one follows you back from the store, and please don’t forget to pick up some Fritos.”