The Blood Dahlia (The Dark Angel Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “Yeah, didn’t think that would work.” Lynch tried to replay the dream he’d had in his head. He was a detective, a professional at pulling small details out of nowhere. There had to be something there to work with, or was this one of those things where there should be a big warning label that says, “Don’t walk into the dark void.”

  Two words stuck out to him. Paul said he hadn’t scratched the surface of what was possible yet. The other word was plane. This caused Lynch to form an image in his mind of a ladder going up and down from where he was. Where he was on one rung on that ladder. The question was, how could he move to another rung, another plane where simple concepts like space and maybe time meant something? How does he do it in the first place? It’s a clearing of his mind. A seeing of everything around him dissipate and fade into the background of where he was going. Each time he returned, by focusing back on where he left. Whether or not it would work, was beyond his understanding, but there was only one way to find out.

  Clearing your mind when it is cluttered and worried is a true skill. It was something Lynch had to teach himself when he realized what was happening after his first accidental visits to this place. He considered himself a professional at this now. They always say even the most professional athlete feels the strain and stress of the playoffs, some rise and others crumble under it. This was Lynch’s playoffs and the fear and confusion he felt made clearing his mind and entering that trance-like state impossible. He couldn’t even focus on the world he remembered to return. There was too much spinning around. Too many other voices and emotions still impinging on him.

  Slowly he cleared one thought after another. A few slipped back in, and he chased them out for the second, and sometimes third time. One by one they left, and sparkles appeared. As a thought raced back in, they disappeared. He cleared out the thought and brought them back. Once they were all clear, he was out of the cold, out of the darkness, and into another space of bright flashes and sparkles. They were blinding, like a flash picture in a dark room, but each flash gave him a view of what was around him.

  Above him was the train yard that he remembered. Workers ran around tending to their tasks, far away from the border of yellow tape that surrounded the crime scene. A layer of water appeared to separate him from them. Lynch reached up and touched it with a single finger. As that finger pushed on it, the everything he saw bent and distorted inward. The world extended and stretched outward as he pulled his finger back. It stretched like taffy stuck on the end of his finger until it let go and bounced back into shape.

  He tested it again. This time Lynch extended all five fingers into it. They sank in easily. The world he saw distorted around them. Each finger squeezed inward, and then pulled back, removing a palm sized glob. There in his hand was the world above him. His eyes peered into it and watched a train move slowly down a track and slam into the back of another line of cars. Two small men ran across the tracks to the train and checked the couplers before one of them moved back and thrust his hand up in the air while whistling. The train lurched forward, pulling the newly connected cars with it down the track. That’s when Lynch brought the glob up to his face to look at it straight on, he could clearly see straight down for as far as the tracks went.

  That answered that, he was still at the train yard, just the other side. A thought he confirmed by turning the glob to see the red-clad warehouse and main office. Lynch found himself mesmerized, like a child looking at the world inside a snow globe for the first time. Lost in the wonder. Lost in the thought he held the entire world in his hand. As he looked around it from every angle, he saw a view of the crime scene Lucas could only dream of seeing. Everything in perfect clarity, from a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view.

  Beyond the glob, below him, another sight grabbed his fascination. It appeared with each flash of light and hung there for a split second in the darkness, like an after image of the world. He watched, forcing himself to not succumb to the natural reaction to blink with each flash. It was the world he saw above him, but in a black and white negative, and one additional feature. A long black tube running through it, from the office, to some mystery place in the distance, he didn’t know where it ended, but he had every intention of finding out. There was no doubt the answers to this mystery could be found there.

  Lynch traveled for a long time, if time meant anything here. Every so often he looked up at the world above him. It reassured him to see something that looked somewhat normal, while so much surrounded him that wasn’t. He thought the day turned to night above him, but instead his path led him into the corner of the universe where light did not reach. It wasn’t just dark, it was void of anything, which felt eerily familiar to Lynch. The flashes continued, but they were behind him and only illuminated what was directly in front of him. Beyond that, it was just a dark mass that crept and moved like a wall of worms. Then it hit him.

  He had seen this before and he looked up, or up from his perspective. And there IT, or she, was. Flowing red hair, ruby lips, and emerald eyes. With the next flash, he saw the feminine lines of her neck merging into her shoulders. Just a hint of a collar bone before anything that resembled a human melted into the nothingness of her presence.

  She stared at him. Lynch thought she was as surprised to see him as he was to see her. Neither moved toward the other, and just stayed there in silence until Lynch mustered up the courage. “I know what you are, and I will stop you.”

  There was a screech, and she disappeared. Lynch was left with the decision to either follow her or head back. A little voice, in the recesses of his brain that didn’t hurt, reminded him of how reckless he had been, running into this and chasing her in a world he didn’t yet understand. Any other part that listened had to agree. Hell, he’d just held the world in his hand, he thought. He had stretched his understanding further than he had ever imagined. It might not be a good idea to press his luck. The question left was how to get back.

  Lynch traced the tunnel back until he saw a familiar world above him. Once he was under the image of the office, he tried the only thing he knew to return. To think about what he saw from his own world and hope he would reemerge. This time, he kept his eyes open and watched as everything shimmered and shook and he slipped through the layer he was familiar with and back into the office, where he fell to the floor in a heap of pain.

  Lynch dragged himself down the stairs and out the door. With one hand on the wall of the warehouse, he stumbled around and back toward Lucas, who met him halfway. Lynch pushed away any attempt Lucas made to help him walk back past the crime scene.

  “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks. Been hearing that a lot lately.” Every word hurt before it exited his mouth.

  Back at the cars, Lynch sat on his front bumper, one benefit of having a forty-year-old gas guzzling sedan, even if it had faded mint green metallic paint. Modern designs had eliminated safety features such as bumpers and allowed automated driving systems to take over. He leaned back, and while he was not normally a fan of the heat, it felt good baking down on his face, and even eased the pain a little.

  Lucas tried to ask several questions, but each time, Lynch held up a hand. The only question he actually responded to were the few times he asked, “Do I need to call the medics?” Each received the blunt answer of “No.” There was nothing they could do to help him, and what would he actually tell them? Any attempt to tell the truth would put him in one of those white I-Love-Me-Jackets. Of course, at this point, Lynch wasn’t sure if he hadn’t gone nuts and was imagining all this.

  The pain reached a survivable level, which was something between a nuclear explosion and a freight train through a china shop, and Lynch was able to stand up. He didn’t attempt to explain to Lucas what he saw, he just confirmed, “Same as Cheryl.”

  This sent Lucas off spewing a series of statements and questions in mid-air. Lynch knew the intent was for him to answer, but he wasn’t paying any attention. He had a thought in his head and stopped Lucas mid-statement, �
�Has Darlene’s family been notified?”

  “No, not yet. Waiting for a final identification.”

  Lynch looked at his old partner and requested, “Don’t. Not for a couple of hours. I want to talk to her father first.” The look he gave Lucas was one of the visual cues partners develop in their years of working together. Not since they were both on the force had they worked this closely together on a case. Lynch hoped the trust would still be there.

  “All right. I can hold off. What’s your plan?”

  27

  On the drive over to Mr. Tolson's private residence, where he planned to just drop in on him on this normal lazy Saturday afternoon, thoughts and ideas flooded into Lynch’s head. Each crashed into the pain like a sledgehammer on a nail, but he managed to determine which were the good thoughts and which were just the pure random crap that roams around, all while trying to not end up in some fiery roadside heap of metal.

  He fumbled for his Scroll and made a call without hitting anything or prompting a honk from the Autorides and personal cars passing all around him. Being as old as it was, there was no voice connection in his car, and he was too cheap to have a conversion kit installed.

  “Lynch residence.”

  “Totter,” not the normal T Lynch uses to refer to him by, “I need you to look something up for me. Can you do that?”

  “That depends on what it is. I’m not a mind reader, and I do have my limits.”

  Lynch’s head hurt too much to groan at the sassy response. “Look at any competitors for Tolson Transportation. I need to know if any of them have suffered any high-profile accidents, financial issues, or anything that might damage their business value in the last oh… year. Let’s start there. Is that something you can do?”

  “Of course, it is a simple correlation of competitors and recent news. May I ask why?”

  “A hunch.”

  “Sir, are you having fun?”

  Lynch hung up the call without a response and kept on driving with the sun visor flipped down to block as much of the bright sunlight as he could.

  Few drove themselves anymore. Each gave that right and responsibility over to an automated piece of software intended to improve the safety of the roads. If the roads were a concern and too dangerous with rude and irrational humans behind the wheel, no one considered vehicles powered by a machine. They were able to slip into that gap that was an inch or two wider than the body of a vehicle with no warning. The ability to be precise and perfect took away any sense of being considerate and polite. They blamed any collisions involving an autonomous vehicle and a human-driven car on the human. Of course, the machine was infallible. Ignore the fact that it jerked or turned in front of the human faster than a human can react to. This irritated Lynch and forced him to stay off the freeways and interstates as much as possible. On the slower surface streets, he could control the pace and, with most of them being only two-lane roads, nothing cut in front of him. There were a few occasions when one pulled in front of him, and Lynch considered for a split second giving up a few points on his record to give it a little tap. Then he realized if he did that to a human driver they would take away the lesson, a computer wouldn’t care.

  The drive to the Tolson residence meant he had to make the choice, stay on the surface streets all the way across town, or jump on the freeway. He sat at the traffic light with the on-ramp ahead of him and thought about giving an Autoride a little tap today, maybe two. That was just the mood he was in. His headache, and the thought developing in his head created a very jaded attitude. Because of that, he took the surface streets and clicked on the radio to try to relax a little on the way.

  After four first time callers, long time listeners, and some jackass opinion that proved the host of the sports show he was listening to didn’t know the first thing about basketball, he found himself at the driveway of the Tolson residence. There was no guard gate like Devon Hines had. No great wall or towering trees. This was just a house. A grand house with white columns stretched across the front, set back on a large piece of property with rolling green grass all the way up to the white marble coping fountain. It was simple, but gaudy, in an old Greek revival sense. Not something built recently. Instead, it looked to Lynch like something built in another day and era that had been well-preserved a few times.

  His large mint green transport squealed to a stop, those dang brakes again, and he opened the door. The crashing of the water thundered in his ears, but that wasn’t all. He felt a wake, and the closer he stepped to the door, the colder it felt. So much so, he stood to the side of the door as he knocked to avoid any more discomfort. The knock summoned no one. He wasn’t sure if it was something ingrained in them, or some kind of subliminal training, but cops always knocked, they never pressed the doorbell, so he knocked again and listened. He took in the fresco painted in the archway above him. The detail hinted that it was more printed than painted, but he doubted that. Everything, from the columns to the glass door were perfect, but textures such as the brush marks that were just raised on the surface, and the paint that was a little thicker in the fluting in the columns, spoke of the hand of the tradesman who’d performed the work.

  “Sir?”, asked a voice, and Lynch stumbled backwards in the opening.

  In the open door stood a man, easily in his sixties, with a mop of white hair. The shirt sleeves of his buttoned-up white shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and long orange gloves covered his forearms. He repeated, in a southern accent, “Sir?”

  Lynch didn’t need to ask if he was Daniel Tolson, he knew right off, based on the pictures he’d seen in his research. This man had to be some kind of household help, maybe even a butler, but very old fashioned. Not many employed a real person for such a position these days.

  “I need to speak with Mr. Tolson. My name is Jason Lynch, I am a detective. It’s about his daughter.” Lynch flashed open his wallet that had a simple badge in it that showed his certification to be a private investigator, but didn’t even come close to resembling that of a cop. He hoped the eyesight of the elderly gentlemen couldn’t see the difference.

  “Right this way.” The man led Lynch through the entry and past the spacious family room toward a wall of glass doors. Lynch stayed off to the side as they walked. Not that he was trying to avoid the old man’s path, but that path walked right down the center of the wake leading up to the door. Lynch stayed just on the edge of the cold. The center door slid open as they approached, and they both stepped out on the patio. The wake stopped at the door and Lynch didn’t feel anything of the dark tunnel as he stood out on the elevated patio overlooking the rolling meadows that fell away from the house, and a very natural-looking pool. If Lynch didn’t know better, he would have thought it was a pond created by nature eons ago, but the clear water was a telltale sign. A few people floated in the pool. One of them a woman he recognized from Cheryl Hines’ funeral. She had ditched the black dress for a hot pink bikini.

  As Lynch followed his escort down a set of stairs, he saw the man he easily recognized. Even from behind, Daniel sat in a chair under the roof of the outdoor kitchen, reading. The entire setting was relaxing, and rather surreal considering what Lynch had just left.

  “Sir, a Detective Lynch is here. He would like a few words with you.”

  The book shut, but not with a slam. It was slow and drawn out. The pages even buckled some and met each other closer toward the spine before the edges finally met each other. It landed in his lap and sat there for a moment, and Lynch saw a small dip of the head. This reaction was strangely, and sickeningly, familiar. He knew his daughter was dead. Chances are he had been waiting for this visit all day, and even though he knew it was coming, it still hit and hurt him when it did.

  When Daniel finally stood up and turned toward Lynch, any color that had existed in his face was gone. It was as white as the whitest sheet. His dark dilated pupils looked like lumps of coal as they shook in their sockets.

  “Mr. Tolson, this won’t take long. I recently took up
the investigation in the disappearance of your daughter and a few other girls, and I have a few questions that would help my investigation. Do you have a few minutes?”

  Was that an exhale? It was. In fact, Lynch saw two before the man extended his hand out and responded. Daniel’s hand quivered when Lynch gripped it. “Sure,” he said, but his tone was anything but sure. “Anything I can do to help.” He motioned to a seat across from him, and then sat, not back in the seat, but on the front edge.

  Lynch took the seat and then reached for his notepad, discovering he was in his duster and not suit coat, which is where the pad was. He brushed it off and went right to the questions. “I am sure others have asked you a few of these questions before, humor me if you don’t mind. How were things with your daughter before she disappeared? Any fights or issues at home?”

  “No. Which I am sure is an answer you have heard from many before, but I can honestly say no, and let me tell you why. Just four days before we last saw her, we had a celebration. Her mother and I divorced when she was six. She was not at all accepting of my current wife when she came into my life. It took a while, but she eventually opened up, then just in the last year they became closer than close. Almost best friends, and we had a celebration just for that. I gave each of them matching lockets. So detective, no, there weren’t any issues at home.”

  Lynch noticed Daniel’s voice quivered several times during that answer. Especially when he talked about how close they had grown and the necklaces. This was a man that was emotionally torn, which was a good thing.

  “Then, what about outside? Any issues with friends? Jealous ex-boyfriend?”

  “Unfortunately, I wasn’t that aware of my daughter’s social life. She went out, but I rarely knew who with. My wife would probably have a better idea, and of course her Scroll and social accounts, which you guys already have.”