Colde & Rainey (A Rainey Bell Thriller) Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  About the book…

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Titles from R. E. Bradshaw Books

  Rainey Bell Thriller Series:

  Colde & Rainey (2014)

  The Rainey Season (2013) Lambda Literary Awards Finalist

  Rainey’s Christmas Miracle (2011) (Short Story-ebook only)

  Rainey Nights (2011) Lambda Literary Awards Finalist

  Rainey Days (2010)

  The Adventures of Decky and Charlie Series:

  Out on the Panhandle (2012)

  Out on the Sound (2010)

  Molly: House on Fire (2012)

  25th Lambda Literary Awards Finalist

  Before It Stains (2011)

  Waking Up Gray (2011)

  Sweet Carolina Girls (2010)

  The Girl Back Home (2010)

  Colde & Rainey

  By R. E. Bradshaw

  © 2014 by R. E. Bradshaw. All Rights Reserved.

  R. E. Bradshaw Books/April. 2014

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9903760-0-2

  Website: http://www.rebradshawbooks.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebradshawbooks

  Twitter @rebradshawbooks

  Blog: http://rebradshawbooks.blogspot.com

  For information contact [email protected]

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  Michelle, Curtie, Kate, Terry, Henriette, and Toni—Thank you.

  To the readers who continue to ask for more Rainey Bell—Thank you.

  To my support group, and you know who you are—THANK YOU FOR KEEPING MY BUTT IN THE SEAT!

  About the book…

  If you have crossed paths with a malignant psychopath, you have my condolences. Unfortunately, one taught me a great deal about trusting my instincts and in some ways inspired this book. A cunning and cold psychopath has no boundaries. Rules are for others. Empathy and remorse are nonexistent. Difficult to spot under the masks of the fiction created to hide true intentions, they wear a different face for every occasion. If you’re among the few that see the real personality under the psychopath’s façade of normalcy, good luck convincing others who have not yet comprehended the illusion. Still, as Rainey says in this book:

  “It takes a different skill set to interpret the behavior of a known person as opposed to that of an unknown subject. I wasn’t looking for a psychopath, and even if I was, I saw only what I was allowed to see. I can see more at a crime scene of a criminal’s true personality than I can across the dinner table from them. Hence, the reason I am always armed. You just never know.”

  Colde & Rainey is a different look at the behavioral analyst role in solving crimes. It is also not the edge of the seat thriller that was The Rainey Season. As a plot line needs moments of calm in order to build to the next heart-pounding moment, Rainey has taken a break from the sadists trying to murder her—or has she? Trouble has a way of finding Rainey Bell, even at a funeral.

  REB

  Dedication

  Deb, thank you for never giving up on me.

  “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

  ~Galileo Galilei

  Chapter One

  February 10, 2000

  Jordan Lake, Chatham County, NC

  9:30 a.m.

  Scattered Clouds, 47oF, High today near 70oF

  William “Billy” Bell sat behind the steering wheel of a beat-up Chevy truck with more dents and rust-tinted primer than original paint and missing its tailgate. It was his most recent “incognito accessory,” as he called the series of old jalopies he employed to catch bail jumpers.

  “Come on, Rainey Blue Bell,” Billy beckoned across the truck’s bench seat to his daughter. “Your friendly neighborhood bail bondsman needs to blend in today.”

  His green eyes exactly matched hers and glinted with the mischievousness of a schoolboy. A cloud of dust lifted from the sun-cracked dashboard, as he patted it like the head of a good dog.

  “Don’t judge her by her looks. If they can outrun this three-twenty-seven small-block, they deserve to get away.”

  “Good point,” Rainey commented, brushing dirt off the seat before climbing in. The door rattled into place after a second good hard slamming. She immediately hunted the seatbelt she hoped still existed, and asked, “Exactly, how fast do you plan on driving? I’m a federal agent. I can’t just willy-nilly go on high speed pursuits.”

  “What if we are the ones being pursued?” Billy asked, deepening his one cornered grin.

  Rainey held half of the seatbelt in one hand and dug between the seat cushions for its mate. “Now, that’s different. The question then becomes can you out run them?”

  “There are fast vehicles and then there are fast drivers. It’s good to be in one driven by the other.”

  Billy reached for the sunglasses stuck in the thick curls of his graying chestnut-brown hair and slid them down over his eyes. He put the truck in gear and pulled away from Billy Bell’s Bail and Bait, located on Jordan Lake in Chatham County, North Carolina. To her relief, Rainey found the other half of the seatbelt before her father was tempted to gun the engine and prove his point. She snapped the two parts together and then lightly clapped her hands in front of her to clean them of dust.

  “I suppose this layer of dirt is part of your attempt at subterfuge, though I’m not sure how the bright yellow Hawaiian shirt over the thermal underwear ensemble”—she paused to take in the full effect of her father’s clothing choices before continuing—“with cargo shorts no less, is going to blend in, considering it’s February.”

  “Vietnam vet, that’s my undercover persona and I have the scars to make it work for me,” he said, grinning at Rainey. “Never wander too far from the truth on your fake identities.”

  “If you’re going for breezy vet that never really left China Beach, you nailed it,” Rainey replied, “but how are you going to explain me? This Academy tee shirt might be a dead giveaway and I’ve been told I reek of cop.”

  “You’re on the take,” Billy deadpanned.

  “Got it,” Rainey said with her own one cornered grin. “So, who is this guy we’re going to meet?”

  “An old friend. He needs a favor and he might have a line on a guy I’ve been looking for. I also thought it might be time for a father-daughter drive. There’s been a lot going on with you since our last one.”

  “‘A lot’ doesn’t quite cover the last eighteen months,” Rainey noted.

  Rainey and Billy had been taking long drives together since she sta
rted visiting on the weekends at age ten, after her mother finally came clean about his existence. They drove back roads, drank too many sodas, and ate boiled peanuts. The memories piled up like the salty shells discarded in the rumpled old newspaper resting on the seat between them. Rainey loved that her father was interested in what she thought and the happenings in her childish world. The conversations changed over the years along with the menu—peanuts became the carrot sticks of an athlete in training and the whys of a child turned to the why nots of a teenager—but their drives remained a constant, just as Billy’s concern for her well-being persisted.

  “You conked out in the recliner pretty quickly when you got home. They keeping you too busy to sleep up there at Quantico?”

  “I just finished seventy-two hours in the field with a critical incident response team, not many of which were spent with my eyes closed. I guess I hadn’t caught up yet,” Rainey offered as an excuse.

  She was twenty-nine years old, a veteran federal agent, and still she didn’t want her father to know she was having trouble adjusting to the dreams that came with knowing the deepest depravities of humanity. Rainey had listened from her room, enduring the sounds of his fight for life, as Billy Bell’s nights filled with jungle combat terrors. A man who suffered through his own horrors would worry about his daughter doing the same, and she didn’t want that. Rainey was glad when he moved on to another subject.

  “You went back to the academy for sixteen weeks and then did eighteen months in supervised BAU training—you haven’t talked about it much.”

  “I’m still making sense of it all, I guess. I thought I’d seen a lot,” she paused, blinking the sudden and unwanted images from her head. “When I first started training, I heard one of the old guys say he always has a moment before each case when he wonders if he’s going to see something more depraved than he’s already seen. His meaning is quite clear to me now. I’m learning how to compartmentalize better. It will take time.”

  “Crazy shit you see,” was Billy’s simple but accurate assessment.

  “It’s not like people outside the BAU don’t see horrid things. It’s just that we witness so much of it. A cop might get one case like that in a career. We see it every day, in one form or another. If I wasn’t reading the details of an old case, I was looking at a new one. What human beings are capable of doing to one another will never cease to amaze me.”

  “Now what?” he asked. “Have they decided where to put you?”

  “They wanted to know my preference, but I will be told where I best suit the Bureau’s purposes when I return from my five days off.”

  “In other words, you have no input in the matter,” Billy said with a chuckle.

  Rainey nodded in agreement. “They could assign me to counterterrorism, white collar computer crime, even put me with VICAP entering and evaluating data, something along those lines. I think my computer forensics degree was the reason I was chosen for the program to begin with.”

  “So, you think that’s how it will go? Computer crimes?”

  “There are lots of computer-related jobs in the various Behavioral Analysis Units. My last six weeks of mentored training were with the crimes against children section, tracking a sadistic pedophile ring’s online activity.”

  Rainey shook her head and shrugged off the images that popped into her mind. She was thinking she needed to get handle on this compartmentalizing thing soon. Having ghastly images simply appear at will was not acceptable.

  She added to her previous answer, “I know I don’t want to focus on abused and murdered children, not for any length of time, not yet.”

  “Not yet?” Billy took his focus from the road and glanced at his daughter.

  “I think I can harden to it, but what they do to them—that just crawls under my skin and I can’t seem to shake it loose. I can’t sustain that level of anger and still function. It’s part of learning to set aside what I feel and see the evidence. It is a disconnect I have yet to master when the case involves children.”

  Billy stared straight ahead, as he commented, “Never harden to the pain and suffering of a child.”

  He had that thousand-yard stare again, and Rainey knew they both had seen things they would rather not remember. She spoke to break the spell.

  “I really want to work with the adult victims unit, but they’ll probably say I need to increase my knowledge base. There is so much information to process. I’m young compared to most of the more experienced candidates,” she paused and smiled at her father, “but I’m good at it, Dad. I can improve, no question, but I’m absolutely sure this is what I’m supposed to do. I just need a chance.”

  “Stay patient and your opportunity will present itself. ‘He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.’ ”

  Participating in a father-daughter ritual as old as their relationship, Rainey answered with her own Art of War citation, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

  Billy’s smile deepened the wrinkles peeking from under his sunglasses. “That bit of wisdom might save your ass one day.” He glanced at her again, which Rainey noted he seemed to be doing often, and then asked, “So, how close are you going to get to these psychos? You look like hell, by the way. Are they in your dreams already?”

  He knew. He always knew. She didn’t have to tell him. Rainey often wondered if they actually shared a brain. She spent the first ten years of her life not knowing Billy existed, but genetics will out. There was more than a little truth in Rainey’s mother’s lament, “You’re just like your father.” Constance Lee Bell Herndon may have meant those words as an insult, but Rainey never felt the sting. The pride would surge through her veins and her green eyes would sparkle, usually followed by a smartass remark that sent her mother stomping away, harrumphing as she went.

  Rainey tried not to look as worn out as she felt, making an effort to smile. “I’m just tired, Dad. This is the first time I’ve been off the clock for more than twenty-four hours in six weeks. I’ll be fine. I need some home cooked food and rest.” She reached across the seat and playfully punched him in the arm. “And you know what? I’m starving. I thought you said this truck was fast.”

  “Well, just don’t let those monsters follow you home. Set your boundaries, Rainey. You’re going to need them.”

  And with that, Billy hit the gas and the old beater roared to life, throwing Rainey back against the seat.

  “Woo-hoo,” she yelled and gripped the armrest on the door, grinning from ear to ear. They were on a straight stretch of two-lane highway with not a car in sight. “Let her eat,” Rainey shouted, which was NASCAR fan lingo for “step on the accelerator.”

  “I can’t. Got a law enforcement official in my vehicle.”

  Rainey laughed and tightened her grip on the armrest. “Right now, I’m just a girl riding with her dad. Hammer down, old man. Let’s see what ya’ got.”

  #

  Hominy Junction,

  Dobbs County, North Carolina

  11:00 a.m.

  Mostly Cloudy, 57oF

  Wellman Wise was the sort of man not easily forgotten. He stood six feet four inches from the bottom of his clown-sized shoes to the top of his pampered, bald scalp. Rainey was five feet ten inches tall, taller if the height added by her thick mane of chestnut curls counted, but she felt small next to the Kodiak bear of a man. Wise reached to clasp Billy’s hand in a firm, welcoming grip. His voice boomed out of a barrel chest.

  “Master Sergeant Bell, thank you for coming.”

  “Captain,” Billy said, accompanied with a respectful dip of his head. “I’ll put it on your bill,” he added with a chuckle.

  “I’ll owe you the rest of my life,” Wise answered and then turned his attention to Rainey. “And it is very much a pleasure to see you again, Special Agent Bell.”

  “Captain Wise,” Rainey said, offering her hand with a smile. “I had no idea you knew my father or vice versa,” she added, glancing back at Bill
y.

  “If I told you I knew the Captain, I would’ve had to kill you,” Billy said, feigning sincerity.

  Rainey knew that meant the two of them were somewhere they should not have been doing something for the United States government the average person was never to know. Covert and top secret were words Rainey learned early on, when discussing her father’s military career.

  “I think as long as the conversation stays in the present, we’re okay,” Wise offered, not too successfully suppressing a smile. “Please, have a seat,” he said, as he stepped over to a worn Formica-topped table and pulled out a wooden ladder-back chair for Rainey.

  “Thank you,” Rainey said, taking the seat and a look around.

  They were in an old diner in what was left of Hominy Junction, a living monument to the whistle-stop tobacco-farming hamlets that dotted the train tracks southeast of Raleigh, North Carolina. One in a line of little settlements built along the rails leading to what was once the “World’s Greatest Tobacco Market,” the town had gone to seed, turned back to the earth, its houses and people decaying to extinction. Rainey looked beyond the faded wallpaper, sepia-stained from years of tobacco smoke and bacon grease, through windows clouded with layers of farm dust and nicotine to the abandoned downtown storefronts.

  A covered wooden sidewalk remained intact along one side of the main street. A lonely drug store still operated in the middle of the block on the other. It looked like the kind of place kids used to gather after school for a scoop of ice cream or a malt. The windows advertised specials for arthritis pain relief and incontinence pads now; the younger generations having long since abandoned the quaintness of the small town soda fountain for the mall. The post office was at the other end of the block, identifiable by its red bricks and the blue mailbox out front. The Stars and Stripes and the North Carolina flag drooped from the flagpole, as lifeless as the town. A small branch bank occupied the lot across the street. The rest of the businesses were boarded up, replaced by the big box stores in the larger cities just a few miles away in any direction. Evidently, someone thought a fresh coat of white paint on the empty storefronts could disguise the decay. It did not.