DEAD MAN'S JUSTICE - A Place of Evil (Stone & McLeish Thriller Series of Stories Book 2) (2 page)

Chapter 2

‘Did you do it?’ The line from the
Bahamas was crackly but Randy could just about hear his sister on his cell phone in Trinidad. He knew what Rachel wanted to know and he also knew just how intense his sister could get so he answered her quickly before she repeated herself loudly.

‘Yes I did it.’

‘Good. So the fax was sent. When was it sent?’

‘Yes I did it this morning, early, before he got on the plane.’

Since the day of the kidnapping of Karla Shah, Randy Parker-Brown had somehow avoided being implicated in the sordid events in St. Lucia. Under instructions from his sister, as usual, he’d managed to change the name on a fax that was dispatched to the New York Police Department, of the person wanted in connection with Guy Randall’s murder. He deftly erased the name of Chad Loman, who was the person wanted in connection with the fatal shooting, and substituted the name Bradley John Stone. Of course it helped that Randy was the son of the Police Chief and that from a young age he would sit in his father’s office to pass the time. Sometimes he would wear his father’s police hat, or pretend to use the phone and shuffle his papers around. The other officers knew him well; when he was older he would often run errands for his father or take calls and messages when he was out on an investigation or official duty. He had the perfect cover to be able to carry out Rachel’s devious demands. It was nothing new, she was always the boss, and Randy had watched her back since kindergarten.

‘Thanks bro I don’t know what I’d do without you. How’s Dad?’

‘He’s still getting over the shock of your phone call last week. So am I. He was organizing a memorial service for you when you called him out of the blue, no warning, nothing. You nearly killed him.’

‘I know, there was nothing else I could do, after the man rescued me from the beach, I was in a coma, his wife Martha took care of me. When I came round I couldn't remember anything, not even know my own name. It was almost two weeks until it all came back to me. Martha - she’s a nurse - said it was probably the swelling on my brain going down that gave me my memory back. As soon as I felt well enough I got on a flight to
New York, and called Dad and you.’

‘Is that where you are now, back in
New York?’

‘No. I’m in the
Bahamas with this new guy, Samir Maloof. He’s a millionaire property manager for a Saudi billionaire businessman. He’s got a house on the beach at Old Fort Cay on New Providence Island. He also has apartments in New York, Paris and London. I’ll be back at my apartment tomorrow so I’ll call you then okay? And you can always get me on my cell phone, you know that.’

Ever since the failed kidnap when Brad Stone thwarted her callous attempt to murder Karla Shah, Rachel was determined to ruin his life and framing him for the murder of Guy Randall fitted the bill perfectly.

She had come across the name of Brad Stone, the wealthy American developer based in
Trinidad, in an online article before leaving New York. She planned to con him out of his fortune but something went wrong, very wrong. She fell in love with him. When Stone rejected her advances she stalked him, sent malicious emails and texts and had numerous libelous articles about him placed in the national newspapers. Finally his continual rejection of her advances culminated in her conniving to have him arrested for attempting to murder her.  Stone spent one night in the San Fernando police cells and was released the next day without charge.

Stone met and fell in love with Karla Shah, an architect, which incensed Rachel and she made repeated threats to kill her. Her raison d’être was, ‘If I can’t have him, nobody will have him.’

She kidnapped Karla.

When she had received the $2m ransom demand, Rachel didn’t release Karla. Instead she set Stone what she thought were three impossible riddles, and an equally impossible deadline of four hours, to find and rescue Karla from an island somewhere in the Caribbean. What she hadn’t anticipated however was that Stone and Mac, his business partner, and Hawk, a pilot buddy, would have the tenacity and ingenuity to break the coded riddles she had set him and find the island where she was being held captive. Karla was minutes away from drowning when Stone and Mac rescued her.

Rachel was never alone for very long. She didn’t have to try hard, her beauty and presence was noticeable in whatever surrounding. She always stood out. Not long after arriving back in her
Central Park apartment she was invited to dinner by one of her neighbors in the building. At the dinner she was seated next to Samir Maloof, a wealthy Arabian businessman. Rachel didn’t waste the opportunity. She went to work. After a carefully orchestrated few days getting to know him, he invited her to his beach house in the Bahamas.

‘Okay sis, try to keep out of trouble this time. Are you sure you know what you're doing with Stone? What if he tracks you down, they might not hold him for long, I mean what evidence do they have?’

‘Not a chance, he’s going down for murder. Samir knows the cop working the case, some guy called Ramirez. He’s gonna fix it. This time I have him. Stay in touch bro, I might your need help again soon.’

‘You want me to come over? To
New York I mean.’

‘Maybe, later, first I’ve got a lot to do, there’s someone I want to find, I’ll tell you about it later.’

‘Okay sis, later.’

Rachel closed the phone and left it on the living room table and stepped out onto the terrace where Maloof was sitting on a recliner by the pool. He was talking in Arabic to someone on the phone through a hands-free earpiece with a cigar in one hand, and a glass of whiskey in the other. The cigar hand was waving around as he expressed himself excitedly to his Saudi colleague. Rachel didn’t understand a word of the conversation. She walked towards her own lounger, removed her chiffon wrap and stretched out next to him. 

Maloof finished his phone call. He tapped the button on the earpiece to switch it off and took a long drag on his cigar. He blew the smoke up into the air and only then noticed that Rachel had returned to lie beside him.

‘Hi baby you were talking to your brother?’

‘Yeah, everything’s good.’

‘He changed the paperwork this morning?’

‘Yes, Stone was arrested when he arrived at JFK today. Ramirez has him in custody. It’s all going according to plan.’

Chapter 3

The icy cold December air slapped Stone’s face as he walked out of the airport terminal doors; he wasn’t dressed for the New York weather. He still had on a pair of knee length shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. That morning he’d left his home in the Caribbean and also left clear blue skies and sun-soaked days. The grey snow-filled sky above his head seemed to reflect his rapidly deteriorating mood. The embers of Laura’s smile in his memory were fading, becoming dimmer by the second, he was determined to keep them burning.  

Two officers, with their hands on Stone’s shoulders, guided him across the concrete forecourt. The other two officers carried his suitcases and hand luggage towards the waiting black and white. Ramirez reached his car and stood beside the rear doors. His trademark smirk almost broke into a sarcastic smile of achievement. The matchstick bobbed and weaved, coming perilously close to escaping, but somehow it survived.

Detective Finch followed them to the side of the car, his face a mixture of concentration and apprehension. Stone wondered how many years it would take Finch to grow his own smirk. He raced in front and opened the rear door and, as polite as ever, ushered Stone inside, holding out his hand to show the way.

‘Wait,’ said Stone. ‘This is all a mistake a…a mix up, it has to be.’

‘Of course it is, it always is…get in the car Stone,’ said Ramirez.

‘If I could just call…’ Stone reached inside his coat pocket and dug out his Blackberry and started to punch in a number.

‘Officer take the phone away and search him, take everything.’

‘…Chief Parker-Brown, he’ll tell you, he was there the night Guy Randall was shot dead, it was his brother-in-law Chad Loman that…’

Ramirez cut him short. ‘Call who?’ He took the arrest warrant back out of his inside pocket, which had a fax stapled to it. The officers removed Stone’s personal possessions and took the phone before he could complete the call.

‘Let me see now, here it is, there’s a fax all the way from sunny Trinidad signed by…’ Ramirez pretended not to be able to read it. ‘Guys my specs are at the precinct, what does this say? Hey help me out here Finch.’

Finch knew what it said on the paper but had to go along with his boss’s charade; he took the papers from Ramirez and read it out. ‘Chief Nathaniel Parker-Brown,
Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, San Fernando, Trinidad.’

‘Thank you Mr. Finch.’

It was as if someone had just told Stone that the world was going to end in five minutes time, his expression was the same. Common sense, he thought, had deserted everybody. Someone he knew and trusted, despite their earlier differences, had issued and signed a warrant for his arrest, framing him for murder.

An alarming thought lit up like a neon sign in the space just behind Stone’s eyes, causing him to frown as if in some pain, it was a seed of an idea that was germinating at warp speed. The woman who had all but destroyed his life in
Trinidad, who had stalked him, terrorized him and kidnapped Karla, and who had been declared dead for two weeks, was behind the frame-up.

She was back in business.

The night of the rescue, high on a hill on the
Caribbean island of St. Lucia, she was shot by her accomplice Jack Bissett. The bullet only grazed her shoulder but the force knocked her backwards through an old rickety fence and over the top of a cliff. Inexplicably, despite a thorough search of the beach below by the local police, no trace of her body was found.  A guy out on the beach walking his dog found Rachel unconscious and carried her back to his house where his wife Martha, a nurse, cared for her and nursed her back to health. After recovering from the coma sustained by the fall, Rachel returned to New York.

Two weeks after the shooting, Stone and Karla were on their deck celebrating her safe return to
Trinidad with a glass of wine when Stone’s cell phone rang. Their life was just returning to normal. It was the stalker Rachel Parker. The memory of that call and her voice will probably stay with Stone for the rest of his life.

She was back from the dead.

The eerie possibility that she was once more digging her evil fingers into his life sent a blood curdling, bone rattling shiver all the way down to his toes.

Could she be behind this?

‘Are you okay Sir?’ asked Finch.

Stone’s face had turned as pale as the December sky, Finch’s voice snapped Stone out of the nightmare he was reliving.

‘What? Y-Yes. I guess, as well as anyone could be charged with a murder they didn’t commit.’

Ramirez was already behind the wheel and Finch went to sit alongside him up front. Two of the uniformed officers bundled Stone into the back seat and then sat either side of him locking his shoulders, he just about had enough space to breathe in and out. Stone’s mind went numb. His belief system, usually rock-solid, was being jack hammered into a thousand pieces.

There was only one person who could help Stone at a time like this, someone who would cut through the bullshit and make sense out of non-sense, one person who he knew he could rely on come what may.

He needed to call Mac.

Chapter 4

Maloof sat back and took a sip of his whiskey; he was deep in thought, he was looking out to sea watching a yacht in full sail tacking across Old Fort Cay in the afternoon breeze. Rachel was smiling quietly to herself, to see Stone behind bars for murder gave her more satisfaction than the whole escapade in Trinidad. Maloof eventually spoke again after some minutes.

‘I’ll call Ramirez tomorrow and make sure he has it all figured out. In the meantime there’s something I need you to do for me. What time is your flight back to
New York this evening?’

Rachel lifted her head up slightly and raised her up shades wondering what Maloof was going to ask her.

‘I have to be at the airport at five, why what is it Samir? What could I possibly do for you?’

There was more to Maloof than Rachel had anticipated, he was well aware of her background and his contacts and network stretched far and wide. Everything was business to Maloof. For him business and pleasure were inextricably linked. The dinner at which they had met was not a chance encounter as Rachel had thought, but a carefully choreographed arrangement planned specifically to meet her. He had five important buyers visiting from
Saudi Arabia, their mission was strictly confidential, and they had requested something particular by way of entertainment. That’s where Rachel’s previous line of business came in handy.

In each city that Maloof operated in,
New York, Paris, London and Milan, he would ensure that he recruited the best, the woman with the right credentials to organize his affairs and clandestine requirements.

‘I need you to set up five rooms on the first floor of the warehouse. Khaled will take you out there when you arrive back tomorrow, he knows a contractor who’ll clean the rooms up, decorate, fix the lights and plumbing and you’ll buy the furniture. Each room is to have a king size bed and a nightstand, a TV, mini bar and bathroom. Good quality sheets, drapes and furnishings. Cost is not an issue. Understood?’

Rachel didn’t know what to say. She had her own plans and working for him wasn’t one of them. As he was giving her his instructions she kept a neutral face, she didn’t want to anger him and besides, he was becoming very useful making sure that Stone ended up in jail. She decided it was too soon to make a fuss, so she cooperated.

‘Sure honey, I’ll get right on it when we get home.’

‘Good.’ Maloof maintained his serious manner and finished his drink, stubbed out the cigar and stood up. He took off his silk robe threw it onto his lounger and walked to the edge of the pool. He turned back to look at Rachel. ‘When the rooms are ready there’s one more thing I need you to do, well five actually. They’ve got to be carefully researched and the goods have to be just right. The guys fly in from Saudi tomorrow night. The instructions are in the envelope on the table beside you.’

If Rachel was confused and surprised at Maloof’s business like orders, she was now becoming worried and anxious to know just what he wanted her to do. She leaned across and reached for the envelope and sat down on the edge of the lounger. She opened the flap and took out the papers. There were five separate sheets that appeared to be a set of bespoke physical characteristics of the ‘goods’ Maloof required her to procure. She eventually lifted her eyes to look at Maloof and tried not to act shocked. Maloof was watching for her expression but Rachel cleverly gave nothing away. He knew she would comply. He dived into the pool splashing water everywhere and spraying drops over Rachel’s legs.

She placed the sheets back into the envelope, fixed her stare on Maloof swimming up and down the pool and wondered just how she was going to carry out his sordid demands. Maloof had all the right connections with all the wrong people and offered to resolve her problem with Stone. He didn’t want her to have any loose ends or old ties from her past lurking around. Maloof was a very jealous man.

Rachel knew she had to comply with his demands.