“Where are you?” he sighed, while his hand did the search for the wooden box normally placed in the space behind the air conditioning vent.
Feeling nothing through his search and unable to sight the box, his heart skipped its beats and suddenly felt like it would collapse.
“No… no… no… no!” he cried atop his voice, recognizing trouble was what he would fall into should the box be missing.
He was sure he had it in there; there was no other place deemed safe enough to keep lurks of hair from his victims as trophies with their names clearly tagged with each hair. Frustrated and angered by the missing box, he plunged his fist further into the vent hole and searched ferociously until his finger caught a metal and sent him jerking his hand out.
“This cannot be happening!” he sounded in paranoia before looking around his living room.
There was a reason he had kept his life far away from everyone and had no friends; it was to keep his privacy just the way he intended for it to be. He had managed it for years and stuck to the “code of one” to no worries. The thought of someone entering his house and managing to cart off his trophies spelled more trouble than he could even begin to imagine.
Detective Jake raced to his bedroom to retrieve his firearm, before setting up his laptop to view the surveillance images the cameras set around his house kept on a daily basis.
Flipping through the folder on his computer meant to hold the recordings resulted in widened eyes and a gasp. “What the… what on earth!”
He was without doubt right; someone had managed to sneak into his home, gotten past the security and dealt a great deal of damage to everything he kept from the world. First, his trophy case was gone and now his surveillance images and videos had been wiped clean for the past two weeks.
“Who could do this? How is this even possible?” he asked himself in a frustrated tone before tossing the laptop in his hand against the wall and hearing it crash.
His sanctuary had been violated and a level of insult had been slapped right across his face in the most unruly of manners. His stomach sunk with pain and his knees gave way, forcing him to the ground while his eyes remained fixated on the smashed pieces of his laptop on the floor before him. There just could be no other explanation other than the fact that he had been without doubt found out.
The questions only grew longer and more disturbing.
“Who?” he asked again.
There was a level of intelligence to the perpetrating act, not to talk of the audacity the culprit had in coming into his house without notice. It made the detective sick and frightful for the first time in a long while. Looking around the room and worried there were things he was still missing, he got back to his feet.
He wouldn’t look weak or give his opponent the satisfaction of seeing him at a low ebb. The feeling remained though, while his brain tried to work its way around whatever was going on.
“How long has this been going on?” the thought while perusing his room with his eyes.
He needed to act normal but there wasn’t going to be any form of perfection in the act. He needed to set his mind straight and that wasn’t going to occur while he mopped around the room. Detective Jake had never found himself in such situation where he wouldn’t have control, but there he was and without doubt, playing second fiddle in a dangerous game someone in the shadows had just opened up.
With a subtle sigh, he reached for his jacket, picked it up and made for the door before noting a blue paper taped to the back of his door. It definitely wasn’t his; he never used suck sticky notes and had never assumed they were useful even when they gave them a bunch of them at the office. He yanked it off the door and peered closer into it to verify its content.
There were no words, but a crudely drawn smiley face. It was all his intruder left him with…
Chapter Six
D
ays trickled past and nothing about Susan’s murder gave any meaningful insight into what might have gone wrong for her. Knowing Susan darn too well and the level of risk she would always be willing to go through all in bid to close a case, Sean couldn’t help but spend sleepless nights wondering what his ex-wife might have gotten herself into.
To further cap just how odd the entire investigation was, he still couldn’t figure out why the CIA had interfered. Something about the entire ordeal stank but he still couldn’t figure out where the stench emanated from. Luke had been seemingly uneasy but it wasn’t something unusual especially when the media and entire governing body in the entire state were on his neck for answers.
In a long and perfectly dragged sigh, Sean rolled on his back and stared blankly into the ceiling. His vision remaining blurry from lack of sleep for a good period, and his throat feeling parched, he reached his left hand for the bedside stand to help himself with the remaining beer he had sipped through the night before realizing he was all out.
“Darn it!” he muttered.
Slowly rolling out of bed, and dragging his legs as though they weighed tons, he headed for the window and yanked the drapes aside to have a look out the hotel window overseeing the seaside. Chuckling some bit upon realizing he had fallen victim to marketing hype as regards the beautiful sight he was bound to get if he booked a night at the exotic hotel, he squinted and looked away briefly to the floor.
Keeping his
