Fear No Evil

“Trask doesn’t even exist.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Fine,” he’d said. “You’ll have your backup. But this is the last time, hear me? If nothing happens, you and Kate drop the investigation.”

“Promise.” Paige had smiled. “Eleven o’clock tonight. The warehouse on the corner of Sixth and Madison.”

She’d given him a quick kiss and left.

Jeff Merritt stared at the phone. He hadn’t believed Trask existed. He hadn’t believed April Klinger was dead. Kate and Paige had had a bee in their bonnet because they couldn’t stop the proliferation of pornography online. So they had created something that just wasn’t there. The time, man-hours, and money they’d wasted going after a phantom named Trask.

Then and there, he had decided to put a scare into Paige. After that, she’d quit, take a nice quiet desk job, be a good mom to their child. A good wife to him.

That was five years ago. Now Merritt slammed his fist on the desk, eyes moist. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the diamond ring he’d been carrying all these years. He kissed the cold gem.

Paige was dead and it was his fault. But he wasn’t alone in the blame. Kate Donovan was culpable, too.

And for that she would pay.

TWELVE

TRASK SAT ON THE DECK of the cabin he’d rented months before. The sun had long passed its zenith, but it was still hours from sunset.

Though he’d grown up on the opposite coast, he’d always appreciated the Pacific Ocean. Vast, endless, powerful. This particular island was different. Calm. No crashing waves, since he was in the middle of an archipelago, one of hundreds of small islands, most privately owned. Quiet, peaceful. He could retire here.

Retire? That was a long, long way off. He was in his prime, and he had no reason to give it all up now.

Still, he should have bought this island for his own private use when he’d first rented it as an escape five years ago. At first he’d told no one about it, so he had a secret place to disappear to every now and again. Away from Roger, Denise, and the others.

They were albatrosses around his neck at times, their identities known to the authorities. All it took was one slip and they’d be in custody. There was no doubt Denise would keep her mouth shut or kill herself. But Roger? He played the loyalty card often enough, but Roger would turn on Trask in a heartbeat to save his own life.

He had no one to trust. And it had always been that way. But the hypocrisy of others had really hit home when, at the age of thirteen, he’d discovered that his father-upstanding and righteous and the strictest bastard on the Eastern Seaboard-regularly visited prostitutes.

An only child, Trask was a master at blending into his surroundings. It was why he knew things he should never have known, learned the darkest secrets of the adults in his life. Not just his parents, but everyone he came in contact with. He was often in the room when conversations about him, or his peers, or his parents’ peers took place. Conversations where his parents would have freaked out had they known he’d overheard them. They would have punished him severely for eavesdropping.

This talent had served him well from an early age, at home, at school, and even now with his lucrative business. He picked up on the nuances, the unspoken words, the truth among the lies.

He’d watched his father all the time. There was not much to love in the stern man. They’d lived on an estate, on more than an acre of land north of Manhattan, quietly wealthy. Old money. Antiques. Lush furnishings. Stonebridge Academy and the right friends. But because Trask was an observant child, he’d always suspected something about his dear old dad. Something dark clawing beneath the skin. A darkness he also saw whenever he looked into the mirror.

So he’d watched and waited. He could disappear for hours in the bowels of the city and his parents never knew. He’d mastered the security system years before-a child prodigy, the headmaster had called him when he was six-and had disabled the entire school’s security system. His parents only trusted him because they’d whip him into submission.

He didn’t fear his father’s belt. It fueled the darkness inside.

One evening when he was thirteen, his mother had gone to one of her many charity events in the city. Trask was supposed to be safely stowed away at Stonebridge Academy. Thanksgiving break was over and his parents had driven him back there-doing so only because they had to meet with the school’s headmaster.

Your son has a genius-level IQ, but a disturbing contempt for authority.

Because everyone in authority was an idiot.

His father had belted him and lectured him. Trask walked first to his dorm room, then changed his mind and crawled back into the Bentley’s trunk while his parents continued to gab with the Stonebridge’s idiot headmaster.

He’d thought about killing them, but he didn’t want to get caught. A murder like that needed planning. Forethought. He’d need an alibi. But someday…

So Trask was in the trunk when his father drove to Manhattan ’s Upper East Side. After dropping off his mother at her charity event, he parked on the street. His father never parked on the street. Trask followed him as he walked up to a brownstone and a woman opened the door. She was young, in her twenties. She had huge tits.

Trask waited until his father was inside, then waited a little longer just to be safe, before breaking into the house by cracking the security code. He wanted to know exactly what his father was up to. Was he cheating on his mother? That information would be gold. Trask could use it to get anything he wanted.

He listened, following faint sounds to an upstairs bedroom.

There were more than two people in the room.

The door was closed but not latched. Trask quietly pushed it open a crack, just enough to see. Faint lighting illuminated the bedroom. His father was naked, a woman on her knees with his penis in her mouth. Another woman was behind him, rubbing his shoulders.

His father barked out an order.

“Down on your knees, bitch.” He pushed the woman off his dick and she got on all fours. He mounted her from behind. It was then that Trask noticed a collar and leash around the woman’s neck. His father pulled up on the leash and the woman’s neck strained.

The other woman got a paddle and slapped Trask’s father on his scrawny ass. Trask thought for sure his dad would whip around and deck her, but instead he groaned. “Harder, bitch.”

She hit him again. Soon his father’s behind was red. Welts began to form. The woman on the floor was gasping and crying out. Whether she was faking an orgasm or it was real, Trask couldn’t tell. But she collapsed on the ground and his father rose, his large dick bouncing in front of him. He pushed the second woman down on the bed and mounted her. He went at her like a piston, the woman’s head hitting the headboard, but his father paid her discomfort no mind. She didn’t protest, taking the pain with the pleasure, his needs more important than her own.

The foul words out of his father’s mouth shocked Trask. Never had the distinguished judge uttered the words fuck or cunt or whore within Trask’s earshot.

Trask walked away when his father was done, but didn’t leave the house. His dull but pretty mother wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but she worshipped the ground his father walked on. She did as he commanded. And here he was, fucking two whores and getting spanked. What else did he do? And were these the only two women he screwed around with? Were there others?

Trask waited until his father left. Then he walked back up to the bedroom and watched as the two women showered together, fingering each other. He stood in the steamy bathroom when they stepped out of the shower.

One screamed, but the other looked at him with curiosity. “You’re his son.”