Still Heartless: The Thrilling Conclusion to Heartless (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 5)
I seldom read the book’s forward. The way I see it, a forward is something that comes before the story and the reason I’m reading a book is for the story itself. If I really like a book, I may go back and read the forward, just to see if there was something of critical importance contained in its pages.
There seldom is, especially in fiction.
So, you may ask, why the heck am I writing a forward to this book? Because, my dear and valued reader, this forward does contain some critical information about Still Heartless. But you did purchase this book for the story itself, so I will present the aforementioned and promised critical content in as brief and concise a manner as possible.
While this is the fifth book in the Derek Cole series, it actually fits in the Cole timeframe between Those of the Margin and The Observer. If you haven’t read those books, no big deal. Yes, my feelings are hurt, but this book will stand on its own and while you are encouraged to read all the Derek Cole you can get your eyes on, the only book you need to read before this one is Heartless (which is FREE on Amazon, Kobo and iBooks). Since Still Heartless falls before The Observer and the Devil’s Snare, Nikkie, Crown and other characters do not appear in this book.
As of the writing of this forward, Heartless has been downloaded, purchased, read, shared, loaned, borrowed, stolen, etc, etc, well over 50,000 times. That means 50,000 people were left wondering what the heck happened to Alexander Black. This story serves to answer that question.
Before you fire up your email server, craft out a wonderfully worded email and send me the most commonly asked question about Alexander Black: I know living without a heart is not possible. If not impossible, it would be stinking hard! This is “fiction,” perhaps “fantasy fiction.” And because of the freedom fiction affords an author, I contend that Alexander Black does not need a heart to live, no more than does Pennywise need to have come from Madison, Wisconsin and not from some alien planet. (If the Pennywise reference was lost on you, may I suggest It by Stephen King?)
That’s all I felt compelled to add to the dreaded Forward. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I present, Still Heartless. The Thrilling Conclusion to Heartless.
T Patrick Phelps
January, 2016
CHAPTER ONE
He was cold. Frigid. He struggled to open his eyes, to move, but none of his muscles responded. His mind swayed from reason to confusion, never remaining in reason long enough for him to string together consecutive thoughts. The voices he heard, muffled and distorted as they bounced inside what seemed to be a narrow space, could not be understood. He knew the voices were speaking words, but the meaning of them failed to register.
He slipped again. Somewhere deeper and much darker. His realization returned but offered no solution. No identifiable signs indicating a way to escape the deepness. He felt like he was in a hole, long, narrow, and too smooth for a hand to steal a pulling grip.
He then felt movement, the cause of which was not from his own choice but from some outside force. The movement was brief and halted with a shuttering shake. Instantly, he felt warmth, flooding over his still unreachable body. It offered a hope. A chance to come to some understanding and knowing. He thought the movement would offer an exit.
He imagined himself swimming in the cool waters of Piseco Lake, feeling the soft current wash over him. He knew he still harbored the wish he had taken the chance to swim that one day, so as to know what immersion would feel like. This feeling, now seen not as a dream but something foreboding, turned sour. It was cold, too cold, and was followed by pain, enhanced by his inability to prevent its directed march.
“Son of a bitch!” the medical examiner said. “We have a serious issue over here!”
The medical examiner stopped once the body’s chest cavity was fully opened, skin pulled back, and muscle tissue removed.
“Get someone down here, now!” she said to her assistant. “Now.”
CHAPTER TWO
Derek Cole:
I won’t say I didn’t think about Alexander Black after I finished healing from the gunshot wound he gave me. I did think about him, what had happened to him and if, as Ralph suggested, the medical examiner had a terrifying surprise when she conducted the autopsy. But I never heard any more about him. Neither did Ralph. Truth be told, I never asked about Alexander and never brought his name up during conversations I had with Ralph.
I was content to believe since I never heard anything from the authorities who took his body out of Hilburn, that he was, at last, dead.
I was wrong.
After I left the hospital and was feeling good enough to move out of my parents’ house and get back to living my life again, I tried to put Alexander out of my mind completely. He represented pure evil to me, a being that must have been kept alive by some foreign, external force. That’s the only way I could explain it to myself. Alexander Black was evil incarnate, his soul, the captured breath of the devil himself.
A few months post-gunshot to the stomach incident, I accepted a case which found me chasing a possible ghost around the coast of Maine. Just the type of case I needed to stop thinking about powers from another world! That case in Maine took a lot of out me, physically, mentally and, probably most severely, emotionally. When I arrived back home at my apartment outside of Columbus, I was eager to find a boring, run of the mill case, to get me thinking normalcy really did exist. I wanted the type of case which gave private investigators a hard-on; a bit of mystery, low on potential danger and a fat check once the case was closed.
I didn’t have time to search for a case like that.
Three things happened to prevent my pursuit. The first was caused by a freelance reporter from Queens, who apparently had a friend or two in the Melville Police Department. This reporter—his name was Shawn Nolley—wrote an article that was picked up by a news syndication, and was published in major newspapers and online blogs around the country. That son of a bitch mentioned my name as the private investigator who broke the case wide open, completely ending my long-standing desire to keep out of the public eye. Apparently, Nolley didn’t have the inside scoop on the medical background of Alexander since he never mentioned, what I would think would be mentioned in bold letters in the title, about Alexander being heartless. He did, however, know about Ken and Thomas O’Connell and did seem to know a bunch about the doctors back in Chicago.
When I first read Nolley’s article, my first urge was to contact him and correct his many mistakes. He was accurate when he wrote about Alexander being assumed dead at birth and being smuggled away to Hilburn to serve as a lab rat. He was right when he said Ken and Janet O’Connell knew nothing about Alexander actually being alive and were, justifiably, pissed as hell when an unknown source spilled the beans on what the Chicago based doctors and Straus’s team had done. I knew the unknown source was Michelle Mix, a fact I had no intention of ever sharing with Nolley or anyone else for that matter. He had plenty of things right, but the assumptions and “creative license” he employed distorted the facts into pure fabrications.
Nolley wrote, “Thomas O’Connell hired a private investigator to track down and stop Alexander,” but he never mentioned thatThomas was working with Alexander the whole time. Nolley also wrote, “Ken O’Connell, driven by rage and a desire for revenge, acted alone in the killing of the doctors in an exclusive Adirondack Lodge, as well as in the Greater Chicago area.” The article was written to make Alexander Black out as a victim and having no role in the deaths that mounted up after his escape. Thomas
O’Connell was portrayed as the “dupe of the family,” and as being “clueless and motivated only by a desire to establish a relationship with his twin brother.”
Honestly, I can’t say I was pissed about my name being mentioned in the article. After all, the notoriety brought in more paying clients than I could have found in twenty years through my own anemic advertising campaigning. What did piss me off is Shawn Nolley devoted a full paragraph to my wife Lucy’s murder and my failed suicide attempt.
That was going too damn far and when I had the opportunity to meet with Shawn face to face, I let him know exactly how I felt about his inclusion of by far the most personal and difficult time of my life. I spent a day in jail and Shawn spent two days in a hospital. I won by one day.
In the end, Shawn agreed not to press charges and I agreed not to sue him for whatever the hell my lawyers were telling me I could sue him for. We walked away, went on our ways and I never saw another published word from Shawn Nolley.
The second thing that prevented me from chasing a dream case, was my case in Maine I mentioned. To this day, I can’t tell you why I took the case since it was way outside of what I believed to be my skill set. The pay was good, which certainly was a big draw, but the way the case was presented to me and the people who did the presenting, was what delayed my quest for the proverbial “big fish.”
The last thing happened after I finished the Maine case and was—again—spending some time recovering. I received an email and, as soon as I read it and saw who it came from, I knew I had unfinished business to take care of before I could even think about taking on any new case, no matter how profitable.
“Freelance Detective Derek Cole.
I trust this email finds you well and that the injury you suffered at my hands has healed and has not left you with any lasting or permanent disabilities. Please know, I held no ill feelings towards you and only wounded you because I believed you presented a significant threat to me. Perhaps not a physical threat, but a threat much more terrifying. At least for me.
Your dedication to your client, my brother, Thomas, was inspiring. So much so, I have decided to contact you to let you know I am very much alive. Though there is no heart beating in my chest, I live.
I am sure you are wondering what I may or may not be planning and whether or not you should fear for your own safety. Allow me to put your mind at ease: I am going to kill you. Soon, I hope. Not because you played any role in my life, but due solely to your involvement in the interruption of my plan.
As for my remaining plans, nothing has or will changed. While I have added your name and the name of the police officer I believe you were working with, my list remains unfinished. I despise unfinished business.
I’ll be in touch.
AB”
My strongest skills have nothing to do with technology. I can fire up my email and hunt and peck my way around a keyboard well enough to send off an email or two. That’s about the extent of my skills with computers. And my interest as well. It seems I see more people everyday, walking through life, with their faces buried in their phones. They’re looking at a tiny screen of life, desperate not to miss out on something while all the while, missing what’s happening on the immense screen in front of them.
I have no interest in losing my life to a screen.
I read it’s possible to trace from where an email was sent. That, I can’t do. So, before I spent ten or fifteen minutes sending Alexander a reply, I called in some favors.
CHAPTER THREE
The first call I made wasn’t for assistance with Alexander’s email, but to Ralph Fox. I needed to make sure he knew about Alexander’s email, his threat and that he had added Ralph to whatever twisted list he was working off of. I also figured Ralph knew more about what happened with Alexander after he and I left Long Island. Ralph, being the type of person he is, never shared any news about Alexander Black because I never asked any questions. Ralph is the type who is calculated about what he says and, more importantly, what he doesn’t say. If he isn’t asked a question, Ralph doesn’t say anything.
The truth is, I never fully came to grips with the whole “Alexander Black” case. I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wrap my little brain around anyone living without a heart. I could say I didn’t understand the medical reasons the doctors gave to explain how Alexander stayed alive, and that would be true; but I was also scared to understand things. When you spend your entire life—whether your life lasts for five years or one hundred—growing comfortable with the way things are, staring into the face of something contradictory to what you’ve grown to accept and believe, is terrifyingly discomforting.
Alexander Black terrified me.
I consider myself to be a fairly open minded guy. I believe there’s something greater or at least, “bigger” than me at work in the universe. Not sure if that something bigger is good, evil or dead-neutral; just that something is out there. My mother used to tell me—in fact, she still does—that everything happens for a reason.
“We may not understand why something happened for a long, long while,” she told me a few days after I buried my wife, “but someday, everything falls into place.”
I never wanted to tell my mother, but I think that’s a line of bullshit. Some things just happen and don’t need any cosmic reason. The son of a bitch who killed Lucy had a reason for doing so; he was insane; jacked up on prescription drugs and the form of drugs no doctor would every prescribe.. But why it had to be my wife? There was no grand reason for that.
Things without any discernible reason are the things that scare me. Alexander Black is one of those things.
Ralph and I had spoken several times since the day I was discharged from the hospital on Long Island. He was asked to stay close to the crime scene at Hilburn while the state police tried to make heads or tails of the whole thing. Not counting Alexander, the police were looking at a crime scene which stretched from Hilburn Psychiatric Hospital on Long Island, west to Chicago and north up to Piseco Lake. When they counted up the bodies, the crime included seven dead, a freelance detective with a gun shot wound to his gut, Thomas O’Connell—Alexander’s brother— and whatever his criminal involvement in the whole case turned out to be and two people, Dr. Stanley Mix and his wife, Michelle, being untraceable. The case was a shit-storm I was happy to walk away from. But Ralph wasn’t allowed to hand over his case file, sit down for a few interviews and then walk away.
Being a freelance detective, any time spent on closed cases (if the Alexander Black case could be considered closed or not is an entirely different matter) is time not earning revenue. I walked away from a sixty-two thousand dollar a year job with the Columbus Police Department, head-on into a career that paid absolutely nothing unless I was hired by a client. Sitting around the hospital for four or five days sucked, as did recovering back in Columbus for the better part of two months. If I hadn’t taken a case that took me up to Maine for a week, I would have had to find a job as a security guard somewhere, just to pay my bills. And if I got stuck beside Ralph, answering questions and sharing theories, I probably would have scrapped the whole Freelance Detective Agency thing, tucked my tail between my legs, walked into the Columbus Police Department, and begged for my job back.
As it turned out, the state police couldn’t wait for me to get the hell away from the case. Sure, they visited me a few times while I was in the hospital and even called me when I was recovering in my parents’ home a couple of times, but they didn’t want a freelancer like myself involved. They probably felt I would muddy up the waters, despite the fact that the waters around Alexander Black were already as dark as his last name.
So, when I called Ralph after reading the email Alexander sent me around thirty times, I wasn’t surprised he was a bit shocked about the reason I had called him.
“Now, you and I have spoken plenty of times since we sort of closed the door on the whole Hilburn fiasco,” Ralph said, his Texas drawl accentuated for effect, “but unless my memory is slipping, I do
not recall the name ‘Alexander Black’ ever coming up during any one of those multiple conversations. Makes me curious why you’re calling me out of the blue to talk about him. Makes me curious.”
I knew Ralph well enough to know when he repeats himself, he’s got some information to share. I told him about the email I received and how my name and his were mentioned as “additions to his list.” Ralph just grunted as I spoke, as if what I was saying had no impact on him at all. When I finished, I asked, “So, what can you tell me about Alexander Black and what happened after the medical examiner conducted the autopsy?”
“You’re assuming,” Ralph began, then paused several beats, “that the aforementioned medical examiner did indeed conduct a post mortem examination.”
“I am, but considering it was Alexander, not sure if it could be classified as being ‘post mortem.’ ”
I could hear Ralph draw a deep breath in, followed by the raspy rattle sound of him releasing his breath. “The truth of whether or not the medical examiner did any examination is just one more thing piled onto the whole pile of unknowns about the case. See, she was working alone in the morgue the night they brought the bodies of Dr. Straus and Alexander in. She was working late on another case and figured she may as well stay and get two more autopsies done. She thought there was one of her assistants working with her in the morgue, but she was wrong. Turns out, her assistant cut out soon after the coroner dropped off the two bodies, leaving her all alone.
“State and local police told me they were unable to locate the medical examiner when they went down to the morgue the next day to get her results. They wouldn’t tell me all that much, just that good old Dr. Straus was still lying all dead and cold on the table, but that Alexander’s body was nowhere to be found. I asked them about running the tapes to see what they turned up.”