Hollow Green Read online

  Hollow Green

  And Edgar Vincent Thriller

  Hannibal Adofo

  Contents

  Thank You

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  From The Author

  Ways to Contact

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  1

  Many people claim that Edgar Vincent is a brilliant detective.

  But some also claim that he is a terrible man.

  Being a homicide detective over the span of twenty years undoubtedly attributed to his jadedness, his former problems with self-indulgence, and his absenteeism from being a father in his daughter’s Claire’s life for over a decade.

  How old is she now?

  Vincent turned down the darkened street corner, the flashing of the blue and red lights coating the scene just up ahead.

  Twelve?

  No. She’s thirteen.

  Or is it fourteen…?

  Vincent drew in a deep breath and exhaled his frustrations with his lack of vigilance. He parked his sedan at an angle to the cruiser of the patrolman currently cordoning off the area with yellow tape, the sedan’s engine still idling as he slipped out of the car, patted the patrolman on the shoulder, and said, “How’s the knee, Billy?”

  Billy Hicks, twenty-two years old (nearly twenty years young than Vincent) but still looking closer to a boy of sixteen, tilted his patrolman’s cap up and shrugged, still languishing over his once-promising career in football had been shattered along with his right knee.

  Vincent thought, that’s what this line of work usually attracts and entails. Broken dreams and lives cut short. And Vincent’s own tale was hardly any different.

  He moved toward the porch of the two-story colonial house covered in fall leaves, the chill from the dead of night giving him gooseflesh as he spotted the next-door neighbor speaking to two of the boys in blue by the side of the house—an elderly woman in a pink robe with plain red rose patterns stitched into the fabric, her eyes glossed over and her expression permanently etched into a shocked grimace that would probably linger for the next couple of days.

  She found the body.

  Her weekend is shot to hell.

  The scene around the property in Hollow Green, a modest town, home to ten thousand citizens, about twenty of which began to assemble outside on the street to get a peak of the carnage inside the house.

  They were eager and wide-eyed Midwesterners with that shared morbid sense of curiosity that all people seemed to adhere to, suffering from that age-old condition hardwired into the human mind that drove a person to take a close and personal look at someone else’s tragedy and find it entertaining.

  In most instances Vincent would instruct Billy to push the crowd back, but this was the second murder in Hollow Green in less than four days had Vincent’s mind focused on more pressing issues.

  Vincent released the buttons on his dark gray overcoat then ascended the steps to the porch one long stride at a time and for a man of his height, at six-foot-one, it took him two hearty steps before he made it.

  There he met the one person who could navigate his bullshit and greeted him with a nod in front of the door.

  Detective Angel Sandoval, an LAPD transplant who’d moved to the sticks to get away from the violence, only to find that it was now coming back to haunt him like a bad habit he couldn’t kick had his hands in his pockets and shaking his head, still trying to fathom how not one but two murders could take place in a part of the nation where crime was virtually nonexistent.

  Hollow Green was supposed to be a retirement job for the fifty-six-year-old Sandoval, but now, tonight, he was starting to feel like he was back on the violent- and vice-littered streets of L.A.

  “Shaping up to be a hell of a night, Eddie.” Sandoval adjusted the belt around his waist, a habit he developed after he quit sucking down cancer sticks. “Had to call in the medical examiner from Chicago to help us out. Our coroner blew his dinner when he saw the body…”

  Vincent shook his head as they made their way inside, never shy of amused at the lackluster and sometimes behind-the-times mentality that certain “professionals” in this town exuded.

  Vincent motioned inside the house. “Lead the way, Sandoval. Time to earn that meager paycheck.”

  They moved into the foyer, a stairwell directly in front of them leading up to the second floor. A few patrolmen and women were walking the grounds, talking in hushed tones, concerned and vexed looks on their faces, law enforcement officials who’s toughest calls in a town like Hollow Green never reaching a crescendo greater than that of shooing away the drunkards out of the local watering holes after they had overstayed their welcome.

  “Where is it?” Vincent asked Sandoval.

  He nodded upstairs.

  They climbed the staircase, slowly, stepping away and over the ruby-red footprints that ascended the stairs as they made their way to the second floor, the overwhelming smell of iron invading their senses

  Blood.

  The scent was unmistakable.

  As they rounded the top of the stairs, the patrolman watching over the hallway, a timid-looking young woman trembling and trying to avert her gaze from the body lying five feet away from her, turned to Vincent with a pleading look in her eye, relaying an undeniable request to be anywhere else but here.

  What’s her name?

  Riley. That’s right.

  Vincent nodded. “Patrolman Riley.”

  She nodded back. “Detective Vincent.”

  He motioned ahead of her. Riley stood aside. Vincent laid eyes on the body.

  And the damage that had been done was staggering.

  Lying face down in a pool of blood was the corpse of a young woman. Had it not been for the welts and bruises and contusions and lacerations peppered all over her body, Vincent would have been able to identify her as been somewhere in her mid- to late twenties.

  Her left arm was jutting out above her head. Her right arm was tucked under her stomach. Her legs were folded at angles that made them look like they were in mid-stride when she fell. He thought that must have been running.

  “We got a name?” he asked.

  “Karen Mercer,” Sandoval replied.

  Vincent looked to the bedroom on his right, four feet away from the body, the woman’s hand reaching out toward it like her final salvation.

  One that she had never found.

  “What’re you thinking?” Sandoval asked.

  Vincent moved closer to the body, made sure to keep an appropriate distance, and slipped on a pair of latex gloves as he took a closer examination of the crime scene. The woman’s face was turned to the left, her black and lifeless and dilated pupils staring straight into Vincent’s golden hazel, no reaction being elicited from the hallway light above, a trail of blood running behind her like some kind of wounded snail. Every part of her body seemed to be a shade of black, purple, and blue.

  The time that had passed had caused the bloodstains to partially dry, and the early stages of postmortem bloating were starting to rear its ugly, unsightly head.

  Someone beat the life out of her.

  Severely.

&nbs
p; Vincent then took a closer look at the woman’s blood-caked and matted hair; the back of her head was dented inward gruesomely from a severe and savage blow. He pointed, his fingers two inches away from making contact. “That’s how she died,” he said. “Blunt-force trauma.” He stood up. Stood back. Motioned around the hallway as he took in the entire scene. “She fled up the stairs, the killer struck her in the back of the head, and she fell.”

  Sandoval said, “We can’t find the murder weapon yet. I’ve got the uniforms still searching around the property.”

  Officer Riley exhaled. She turned away and faced the port window that overlooked the roof and down onto the lawn outside.

  “Riley,” he called out.

  Riley turned around dutifully, offering Vincent her full attention. “Yes, sir.”

  “Get yourself a cup of coffee. You’ve been hanging out up here long enough.”

  Riley shook her head. “No, sir. I’d like to stay.”

  Vincent could see the commitment in her eyes, the dedication and the perseverance, but Riley still couldn’t stand the sight of what she was looking at.

  But she would.

  It was her job.

  Vincent nodded his approval.

  He moved back to the stairwell. “Obviously, she fled up the stairs from the killer.”

  Sandoval nodded. “Right.”

  “So the killer came in from somewhere on the ground floor. Obviously.”

  “Correct.”

  Vincent continued to soak in the scene, his eyes moving from the stairwell and back to the body as he attempted to piece together the puzzle.

  “Next-door neighbor made the call,” he said to Sandoval. “Right?”

  Sandoval nodded. “She called it in at 10:04 p.m. Said she heard shouting from inside the house. Patrolman Young and Blythe were the first responders. They got here at 10:13 p.m. Young said the front door was closed. Blythe checked the back door and found that it was kicked in.”

  Vincent nodded. “That’s our point of entry.” He stepped toward the stairwell. “Let’s take a look.”

  As Vincent began to descend the staircase, however, a ruckus began to occur down in the foyer as Chief Leonard Mason, a portly man with a Midwesterner’s mindset and build, escorted a towering young woman, in a clean-cut suit through the front door, a stone-cold gaze in her eye and an “I don’t take any shit” stride as she walked into the scene, people she viewed as subordinates clearing out of her way like the parting of the Red Sea for the coming of Moses.

  Mason spotted Vincent and pointed a finger. “Detective,” he said. “Come down here, please.”

  Vincent arrived at the bottom of the steps, Sandoval in tow, and saw a statuesque, bronze skinned and majestic looking ice queen reach into her pocket and pull out her identification.

  “Special Agent Miranda Stone,” she said flatly, with all the authority in the world. “I’m with the FBI.”

  Vincent sighed.

  This is going to be a long night…

  2

  “You boys can head on out,” Stone said. “FBI’s going to take over from here.”

  “On what grounds?” Vincent asked, brushing a strand of his dark brown hair out of his face out of frustration more than it was bother to him.

  “On the grounds that this is now a serial. A serial means a serial killer, detective, and that puts the ball in our court.”

  Vincent smirked. “I know you think we’re a gaggle of Podunk small-timers who don’t know the difference between rapport and report, Agent Stone, but I’d think it would serve the best interests of the Bureau to cooperate with us instead of dismissing players from the field right off the bat.”

  Stone took a moment to size Vincent up, her brain applying the hours of psych courses she took at Quantico to best him, to treat him like a player in a chess match rather than a fellow human being.

  It was her biggest flaw.

  Agent Stone ran her hands over her short-cropped hair looking a bit exhausted and short on patience. “Where did you work before here, Detective…?”

  “Vincent,” he said. “And I worked for Chicago PD. Homicide.”

  “Well, Detective Vincent, I’m sure that a man who made a lateral move to somewhere like Hollow Green didn’t do it by a matter of choice.”

  “That’s wonderfully speculative of you, Agent Stone. But I actually made the move here because I simply felt like turning the volume down on a ten-year career that consisted of watching guilty people get off on plea bargains after injecting their innocent children with methamphetamine.”

  Stone may have been a homicide agent.

  But stories like that made her stomach do flips.

  “Regardless,” Stone said, “I’m going to need your people to clear the scene and head on over to the facility. I’ve got a forensics crew on their way, and I’m pretty sure we already know the party responsible for this.”

  Sandoval shot Vincent a look.

  Sandoval said, “I don’t want to say you’re jumping to conclusions, Agent Stone, but how do you know who it is?”

  Stone looked to Chief Mason. “Can we speak out of earshot?”

  Mason nodded and guided them over to a corner as he ordered a patrolman to deal with the crowd outside trying to get a closer look inside the house.

  Stone lowered her voice. “I’m sure you men are familiar with Trevor Anthony Michaels.”

  Vincent felt a shiver travel up his spine.

  He knew about Michaels. The man had committed a string of brutal homicides up the East Coast, and the MO each time consisted of a young woman—the same age as the one upstairs—being bludgeoned to death after the perpetrator broke and entered into their homes.

  He was caught after DNA evidence, more specifically saliva, linked him to the bodies, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

  A bystander saw him at a rest stop on the Florida coast during his run from the law, a tip was phoned in, and twelve hours later, Michaels was arrested and charged with the murders of four women in the state of Illinois with a one-way ticket to the gas chamber.

  Only his lawyer got him off a psych plea two years later.

  “Michaels was sprung from the Hollow Green Mental Health Facility six months ago,” Stone said. “He was checking in with his parole officer consistently until two weeks ago, when he failed to show up for work one day. And now, this week, it appears he’s returned to Hollow Green to take up his old hobbies.”

  A glare came into Chief Mason’s eye. “How the hell were we not notified that he was released from the facility?”

  “You were,” Stone said. “As a matter of fact, I believe your office was notified by the Department of Corrections some time ago. Whether it was human error or plain and simple negligence, the failure to know that Michaels had been sprung was your department’s oversight.”

  Sighs were exchanged. Heads were shaken. Hisses were made.

  “Look,” Stone said, “we don’t have time to sit here and point fingers. What we need to do is start canvassing the streets, sending people out on patrols, and locking down every nook and cranny of Hollow Green until we find our suspect, which is most likely Trevor Michaels.”

  Vincent shook his head.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Any of it.

  He said, “You really think Michaels is dumb enough to come back to the one town where he was locked up to start killing again?”

  Stone leered at Vincent as she squared her shoulders. “Look here, detective. If you insist on trying to jam me up, I’ll make sure that I slap you with an obstruction charge.”

  “Horseshit.”

  Chief Mason squeezed Vincent by the elbow. Cool it…

  Stone said, “What I need for you to do is get back to your station and pull up any and all information you have regarding Mason and his victims. I’m also going to need to take a look at the body from earlier this week, Deborah Kauffman.” She looked at Mason. “I believe you said she’s over at Greer Funeral Home?”

 
Mason nodded. “I’ll notify the undertaker you’re on your way.”

  “Excellent. We’ll need to do a DNA profile and match whatever secretions are on the body to samples of Michaels.” She moved toward the door and motioned to the chief. “I’ll meet you at Greer Funeral Home in ten minutes.”

  And then she was gone.

  Vincent turned to the chief. “She’s making wild assumptions and taking broad strokes with this whole thing, chief.”

  The chief said, “I’m aware of that.”

  “This can’t be Michaels.”

  “What’s your evidence to point to the contrary?”

  Vincent shrugged. “Nothing yet. But I’m positive that the man isn’t foolish enough to return to his old stomping grounds within earshot of the prison he was holed up in. Look, the fact that he escaped is the only element that Stone is holding on to as her lead in all of this.”

  The chief poked a finger in his chest. “Look, Eddie. We’re working with a countdown clock on this one. We’ve got two bodies, and now an entire town on edge as a result.”

  Vincent glanced over his shoulder at the wide-eyed and terror-stricken faces of the citizenry outside looking in.

  “It’s the Feds’ ball,” the chief said. “It’s their court. It’s their game. Serials are what they do for a living.”

  A glare came into Vincent’s eye, one that reflected a weighted history filled with a procession of wicked people who did unspeakable things that required Vincent’s prowess and insight to solve.

  Which he did.

  But instead of fighting the chief, instead of poking holes in the less-than-airtight logic of Special Agent Stone, Vincent kept his mouth shut, went back to the station with Sandoval, and twiddled his thumbs inside the conference room as he waited for the next body to drop.