The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) (31 page)

“So you had him killed?”

TJ sensed that Leonard was posturing himself for whatever legal battle he was about to be involved in. “You came up with the formula and you had no problems with my idea to sell it on the streets. You may not have been involved in setting everything up, but you made the drug. So, yeah, I had him killed but I was only able to do so because of the drug
you
developed.”

Leonard fell silent, his face slack with both shock and fear. What people thought of him meant nothing, but the possibility that his experiments, his quest for a spiritual connection with Rebecca Angela Miller could be forever halted because of what TJ had done, meant everything.

“I think we may be in the clear now, but the cops are absolutely going to have questions for you and me,” TJ continued. “We need to get our stories straight.”

Leonard was dazed. TJ’s words sounded as if they were spoken from the far end of a very long tunnel. The words reached Leonard’s mind but were twisted, distorted.

“Leo,” TJ snapped, “I started a fire at one of the houses on the facility grounds. I trapped three people inside that house. Two users that did some clean up work for us and a private eye that was working with the agency Louis Randall hired. They’re dead, Leo, and the firefighters are going to find their bodies very soon. They’ll tell the cops, who will be at your door five minutes after they find out about the bodies. We need to get our stories straight.”

A look of abject fear and disgust twisted Leonard’s countenance as TJ’s words began to take form and were registered in his mind. He backed away from TJ, shaking his head and looking at TJ as if he were a stranger; a monster that had assumed control and residence of an old friend’s body. “Get the hell away from me,” Leonard said.

“Don’t even think of denying everything and trying to pin this whole shit storm on me,” TJ barked.
 

“I had nothing to do with selling those drugs, starting any fire or cleaning up whatever messes you created. You stay the hell away from me.”

Leonard continued backing away from TJ and was within a few feet from the security door of his private lab. TJ, sensing that Leonard was heading back inside the lab, lunged towards him, screaming as he closed the gap. Leonard turned, bolted inside the lab and slammed the door shut. With experienced fingers, Leonard slid the well oiled deadbolt into place, locking TJ out and himself inside.

TJ pounded against the steel and wooden door for several seconds before calming himself. Inside the lab, Leonard was enclosed in terrifying silence. He turned towards the dimly lit room that held his deprivation chamber and his supplies. His last formula, number 131, had failed to produce the desired results. Yes, it had brought him to the precipice of the spiritual connection he had sought for over twenty years, but failed to bridge the final and unknown span of distance. When his most recent experiment had concluded and after he had consumed another one of his formulas which was designed to counteract the effects of the cocaine and devil’s weed, he had jotted down an idea for his next formula. The idea had come to him while he floated in the chamber. It was brilliantly simple but also demanded heavy risks be taken. He believed the formula was sent to him by Rebecca as she too was certainly desperate for Leonard to finally learn the secrets of connecting with her.

But as he stood in the silence of his lab, with TJ’s words still ringing in his mind, Leonard knew there wouldn’t be time for experiments. TJ had seen to that. TJ had taken his work and twisted it into vileness so deplorable and crude. TJ’s lust for money and power would cost him everything. Leonard didn’t care about his business, his accounts or his reputation; he only cared about his experiments and Rebecca.

He moved to the long, marble table, sat, reviewed the notes he had written no longer than ten minutes ago and began assembling the ingredients of Formula 132.

“Leonard,” TJ called from behind the locked laboratory door. He was calmer now, his voice having lost its cutting edge. “I’m sorry about all this. I’m sorry about the fires and the drugs and the mess I put you in. I’m sorry about Rebecca, too.”

Leonard jerked towards the door, stood and screamed, “You never mention her name! I should have never told you about her. Never mention her name.”

TJ remained calm. He knew that while Leonard was a chemistry genius, he was also fragile. TJ had learned how to bring Leonard to within inches of his mental breaking point, then pull back, in order to manipulate him into agreeing with his intentions. “Leo, we’ve been friends for a long time. I know how much your research means to you and I know that what I did might be interpreted wrongly by others. But, gosh Leo, the last thing I wanted was to put your ability to keep doing your research in jeopardy.” TJ paused several beats, counting to a slow five in his head. “Leo, we need to work this out before the cops show up. They’ll never understand how much she means to you. They’ll never understand the relationship you and Rebecca share. All they’ll want to do is to end it. To take away everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish. What we both worked hard to earn.”

There was no sound coming from the lab door. TJ counted to ten in his head and was about to speak when he heard the distant sound of a doorbell echoing through Leo’s house.

“They’re here, Leo,” he said in a small voice, cut with anxiety and anger. “The cops are here right now, standing outside your front door. If I go up there and speak with them without you beside me, I won’t be able to defend what you’ve done.”

TJ waited for a response that didn’t come.

The sound of the doorbell was replaced by muffled voices and angry knocking.
 

“Leo, they’re going to get in here, one way or another. Either you and I walk upstairs together and let them in, or they’ll break in your door. You don’t want them to break your door down, Leo. I’m telling you, as your closest friend, you don’t want them breaking your door down any more than you want me talking to them without you.”

Silence.

Leonard La Salle hadn’t heard any of TJ’s warnings. When he had his house designed, he had the builders construct a hidden entrance which led from a secret door hidden behind a false bookcase in his lab to a ground-level hatch nestled in a grove of cedar trees near the far end of his property.
 

Leonard was pushing the hatch open when TJ walked upstairs. Leonard was walking across the seventeenth fairway of the Ravenswood Municipal Golf Course as TJ opened the door and invited Investigator Mark Mullins and three State Troopers inside. Leonard had reached Rebecca’s resting place when Mullins asked TJ to come to the station, where Mullins had plenty of questions for TJ.

Leonard sat, as he had so many times before, staring down where her head once was. He remembered how dirty and tangled her hair was and, in his mind, he gently removed the twigs, dirt and bugs from her locks once again, Though the sun had long since set, Leonard used the brightness of his imagination to see her sitting up, smiling and struggling to speak. As had happened countless times before, his imagination terrified him when all that came from her mouth as a result of her attempt to speak was clumps of blood-soaked dirt. This was his torture, as it certainly was hers. He needed to hear what she needed to say.

“Tell me,” he whispered, “what can I do different to hear what you are saying?”

Rebecca smiled at him. Her front teeth were still missing and while her mouth was stained from dirt, he saw the brilliance of her youth in that smile. A smile of innocence, of pure beauty and of unspoiled love.

“What do you need me to do?” he whispered again. “Tell me, please, Becca.”

Off in the distance, Leonard could hear voices and could see the erratic dance of flashlights coming from the backyard of his home. Soon, he knew, the people holding those lights would find a proper direction for the lights and would find him.
“When they find me
,” he thought,
“they will violate this sacred ground.”

He turned away from the lights and the sounds, gathered his courage, and said, “Becca, we don’t have much time. You need to let me know what I have to do. I have to know how I recognize you. I know you want to tell me something, but I can’t understand what you’re saying. Please, we haven’t much time.”

Rebecca smiled at him again, then cast her eyes towards his front pocket. Leonard reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag which contained his hastily developed Formula 132. “This?” he asked in a whispered voice unable to contain his excitement. Tears grew heavy in his eyes as he held the plastic bag for Rebecca to see. “Is this finally right?”

Rebecca nodded.

She began to fade in his mind’s eye, like fog being driven away by a gentle but determined breeze.

“No, wait!” Leonard pleaded. “Tell me, is this what I need to hear you?”

He watched her dissolving smile, reached out, tried to touch her hair, but saw his hand simply pass through her misty image. She laid back down, pressing her face once more into the uncaring earth.

An outline of her body remained, but Leonard needed to squint his eyes and focus his gaze a bit above and beyond where she had laid down in order to still see her faint image. Feeling both the press of his searchers closing in on him and the pull of Rebecca’s call, Leonard opened the plastic bag, then hesitated. His last formula, number 131 was powerful but still lacked whatever mind-freeing degree he needed to hear her words. The formula he held in his hands was more powerful, that he knew. After the frustration he had felt when he completed his time in his lab and after the counteracting agent had fully removed any traces of the ingested Formula 131, he had mixed his next formula in a fit of anger and desperation. As he was pouring the extracted amino acids and what remained of the jimsonweed tropane alkaloids, he knew he was using far too much of each. But he was driven to continue. Though his use of Formula 131 did not produce an image of Rebecca in his mind, he believed he saw an echoing vision of her eyes as he floated in his chamber and mused if the muffled sounds he had heard were actually her telling him why his attempts had failed.

He finished mixing the formula together by adding six grams of the purest cocaine he had manufactured. He split his newest formula into six vials then, realizing he had made much more than what the vials could hold, grabbed a simple plastic bag that was lying atop his desk, and dumped the compounding bowl’s remaining contents into it. He had just stuffed the bag into his pocket when TJ had started pounding on the lab’s locked door.

Rebecca was fading again, her faint outlined body was being erased by some force. Though he had seen her melt away from his view a thousand times, this time felt horribly different; an air of finality was drawing her away from him.

Leonard dipped his fingers into the still opened plastic bag, pinched his fingers together and drew out a tight collection of his Formula 132. As he watched Rebecca’s image shimmer into nothingness, he snorted the formula, then, without hesitation or clarity of thought, he plunged his fingers back into the bag, and repeated his ingestion.

His plunging fingers repeated over and over until all that remained of Formula 132 was traces of powder clinging to the plastic.

When the voices grew closer and the lights were dancing around him, he felt himself slipping into a different place. Rebecca’s place, he prayed. And when the voices and the lights were upon him, she appeared. But this time, Rebecca wasn’t lying on the ground or sitting with her delicate smile in front of him. She was sitting in the backseat of a car, a look of helpless terror marring her face. Both hands, fingers splayed, pressed against the car’s windows. He saw her for only a brief moment before the car pulled away. He strained his eyes to watch her moving away, as he had done so many years ago.

In his mind, as he had done when he had first seen her in the backseat of his father’s station wagon, he ran after her, desperate to see her again and to ask his father why he had such a sweet, innocent angel in the backseat of his car.

But his father had driven too fast all those years ago, and was moving too fast for even his mind to close the growing gap between him and her.

He stood, and charged after his father’s car which he could still see in his mind. He sprinted after the car, after Rebecca. He ran until he felt something snap inside of him. Something important that he knew shouldn’t snap. He fell to the ground in a heap, his right arm extended towards Rebecca, towards his father’s distant car. He closed his eyes as tears burned a path down his face.

When he looked up, there was no car speeding off in the distance; there was only Rebecca, sitting beside him. She was smiling at him.

“Thank you,” she mouthed. “You found me.”

He saw Lucy’s face pressed hard against the plate-glass window of the bank. A deranged lunatic standing behind her, using her as a shield. His gun pressed firm against her temple. Derek had seen that final image of his wife a thousands times before; once in the real world and a thousand times in his dreams. But as he gazed into his wife’s eyes and saw the terror marring her face, he noticed that the familiar scene was different now. Morphing into something foreign. The bank’s window collapsed in on itself, becoming smaller, darker. The lunatic behind Lucy faded away, as if made of dust and smoke. And his wife’s face, the face he had loved and missed seeing, was changing, too.

Lucy’s hair darkened and stretched. Her eyes, once radiant green grew darker until they settled into a deep, rich brown. As Lucy’s eyes changed, the skin around her precious face followed suit. Derek wasn’t seeing Lucy, he was seeing someone else; her face pressed against a different window. Though this woman’s face and eyes were quite different than were Lucy’s, this face held the same terror; the same sorrowful expression of fear, of sadness of longing.

Derek jumped to his feet, confused and unable to place himself for several seconds. His energy raged against his muscles, demanding action.

“Derek.”