Icy Betrayal: A Jack Keller Thriller Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Good Egg Press

  All rights reserved.

  ICY BETRAYAL

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015930983

  ISBN-10: 0986370614 / ISBN-13: 978-0-9863706-1-8 (mobi)

  ISBN-10: 0986370606 / ISBN-13: 978-0-9863706-0-1 (print)

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted by any means—electronic, mechanical, photographic (photocopying), recording, or otherwise—without prior permission in writing from the author.

  Icy Betrayal is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by OMG Media

  Interior Design by Lorie DeWorken,

  MINDtheMARGINS, LLC

  Published in the United States by Good Egg Press

  www.goodeggpress.com

  For Giselle.

  You are everything to me.

  PROLOGUE

  The human body is no match for a three-thousand-pound vehicle; even at twenty or thirty miles an hour, a car can be lethal. The sound of the bumper connecting with bone cut her to the core just as the sickening thud of his head hitting the windshield pierced the still of the Colorado night. Then, there was silence, less the idling of the vehicle at rest. Lisa Sullivan knew the man was dead.

  I firmly resolve,with the help of Your grace,

  to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life.

  —EXCERPT FROM THE ACT OF CONTRITION

  ONE

  The red LED readout on the electronic sign outside the Bank of Colorado branch in Greenleaf hypnotically flashed between the time and temperature.

  5:29 a.m.

  11°F, -12°C.

  It was late November and unusually cold, even by Colorado standards.

  Rocklin County Sheriff’s Deputy Victor Brooks drove past the bank and into the parking lot of the GreenMart on North Main, hoping to score some hot coffee to help get him through the tail end of a ten-hour graveyard shift. He was working “beat two,” an area that covered the rural, western part of the county at the base of the Front Range Mountains.

  Working “two,” as deputies called it, meant a lot of driving and no shortage of boredom. It was the largest beat geographically among the four under the 350-square-mile territory of the Rocklin County Sheriff.

  He watched as the drip of fresh coffee made its way into the pot the all-night clerk had started at his request. Another forty-five seconds and he’d be good to pour. If it took any longer, the scent of the fresh Danish in the display case an arm’s length away would lure him into 450 calories he could do without.

  “C’mon, baby,” he muttered.

  “SD-21,” screeched the handheld radio clipped to his belt. “TC, possible fatality, car versus pedestrian. Highway 46, mile marker 28.”

  Brooks had fifteen years on the force, but the location of the call surprised him. Victor Brooks knew every inch of road in his beat, and his brain was faster than Google Maps, but this particular location was one he couldn’t quite frame in his mind.

  “Roger that, this is SD-21, my ETA is 15 minutes,” he responded back to dispatch. If the drip would stop, he might be able to pour a quick cup.

  “Dispatch, Sam-9, en route to Highway 46 TC, ETA 35,” the radio squawked.

  TC was police code for a “traffic collision” and “Sam-9” was the call sign for Sergeant Jason Valenzuela, the shift supervisor for beat two. The radio transmission meant Valenzuela was leaving department headquarters in Castle Springs and heading to the scene as well. Brooks knew he would have to get through the rest of his shift without coffee.

  “Shit.”

  Highway 46 was a seldom-used, two-lane road in the far northwest corner of Rocklin County. There were cabins scattered here and there, but there were a lot more deer in the area than people. Accidents involving pedestrians happened in town, not on Highway 46, thought Brooks.

  Deputy Brooks was responding “code 3,” meaning lights and siren, but he never topped forty miles an hour due to the winding road, the darkness of the hour, and the icy road conditions. After passing the 28-mile marker, Brooks slowed his cruiser. Good thing, too. As he negotiated a slick, tight turn, the blinking hazard lights of a yellow Ford Fiesta were suddenly right in front of him. Three-day-old snow crunched beneath his tires as he braked and maneuvered his squad car to the side of the road. He positioned the vehicle so he could aim his floodlights on the car.

  As he came to a stop, the driver stepped from the Fiesta and looked back in his direction. Brooks could see the driver was a woman, appearing somewhat disheveled, with mascara stained tears streaming down her pale cheeks. The red knit cap and light coat she was wearing were no protection from the harshness of the cold morning. She looked to be in her early thirties with long, blonde hair. Brooks let out a slow whistle as she approached. She was knock-out gorgeous, he thought to himself, like something you’d see on a magazine cover. She was shaking and appeared to be close to hyperventilating.

  “You okay, ma’am?” he asked, climbing from his patrol car.

  “I’m okay. I didn’t see…”

  “Where?” he began to ask.

  “Back there,” she said, pointing to the roadside some forty feet behind them.

  The woman turned to him sobbing and asked, “Am I under arrest? I swear I didn’t see him!”

  “It’s okay, let’s calm down. I’m Deputy Brooks, what’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Lisa Sullivan,” she said, wiping her cheek and smearing more of her mascara across her face as she looked up at him.

  “Okay, let’s get you out of the cold,” he said, leading the woman to his car. He opened the passenger door of the cruiser and helped the woman inside. He reached across her, turned the heater on full blast, and told her he’d be right back.

  Brooks closed the door and walked back to where the woman had pointed. A few seconds later, he was standing next to a figure laying face down in the snow on the shoulder of the road. He knelt down and checked for a pulse, but there was nothing. The deceased was a male, likely in his mid to late fifties, wearing an orange hunter’s vest. Brooks was surprised at how cold the man’s body felt.

  “Dispatch, SD-21, I’ve got a 10-55, Highway 46, mile marker 28,” he reported into his handheld just as Sergeant Valenzuela pulled up to the scene and rolled down his passenger window. Brooks heard his last few words echoing from the supervisor’s radio inside the car. 10-55 is the RCSO radio code used to request that the County Medical Examiner respond to the scene.

  “The driver?” the sergeant asked.

  “She’s back in my unit. Gotta get a statement.”

  “You got enough flares?”

  “Fresh case.”

  “Put ‘em out. That’s a nasty turn. I’ll get the tarp. Looks like we’re stuck with more OT.”

  The RCSO was under a mandatory overtime order—they were severely short staffed, but those who controlled the purse strings in the county wouldn’t authorize any new deputy positions. The consensus was that it was less expensive to use overtime. The deputies liked the extra cash, but it had been going on for months and burnout was becoming a very real issue.

  “I’d rather go home,” Brooks said, leaning on Valenzuela’s patrol car. “I got thirty hours of OT already this pay period. It’s getting to be too much.”

  “Save up and spend it on a trip to Hawaii. Bet it’ll hit eighty there today,” said the sergeant.

  “You and the captain wanna give me some time off for that trip?” Brooks responded.

 
“I’ll get right on that, Brooksie. Right after that trip to Cabo I’ve been promising my old lady,” Valenzuela said, and then added, “I’ll call Serrano.”

  It’s during REM sleep or “rapid eye movement” when most dreams take place. Mia Serrano’s pupils darted back and forth beneath her eyelids. They followed the bright, lively colors as they exploded to blood red then broke apart and disappeared, like fireworks fading on a flat sky. But the sharp “crack” that preceded each explosion wasn’t the sound of an Independence Day celebration. Each was distinctive and ominous and caused her body to jerk beneath the covers. In her mind, she screamed at the colors. In bed, she whispered…

  “Get down. Get down.”

  The TEC-DC9 semi-automatic rang out. The red spray dissolved away as the marimba sound coming from her nightstand jolted her awake and upright.

  “Get down,” she repeated out loud, trying to focus her eyes.

  The ring tone was all the way up, and the mobile phone vibrated as it rang. In between the sounds, Mia emerged from her Ambien haze.

  “Serrano,” she said into the phone, glancing at the clock. 6:18 a.m. She was starting to focus. “Where?” Mia closed her eyes, trying to pinpoint the location in her mind.

  “Okay. Got it. Be there in ninety minutes.”

  Mia ended the call, rolled onto her side, and reached for Sasha, her Beagle/Jack Russell mix.

  “Sorry, Sasha, I gotta go.”

  Sasha slowly opened her eyes as her master kissed her head, climbed out of bed, and headed for the shower.

  Mia Serrano had never given much thought to being a cop. Growing up in suburban Colorado, her mother was a high school teacher, and her father worked for WellRock Technology. He was a real life “rocket scientist” and successful enough to keep the family firmly ensconced in the middle class community of Centennial. Chuck Serrano had hoped his daughter would follow his path and work in the aerospace industry, but it wasn’t to be. While Mia excelled in all academic subjects, it was clear she gravitated toward the liberal arts, particularly English.

  After graduating with honors and earning her teaching credential from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, she found a job teaching English literature to high school students not far from her hometown. But over time she became frustrated with the mindless bureaucracy of the public school system. Mia loved her students, but she longed to do something else, something that would allow her to leave a mark on the world.

  She had noticed a billboard on the outskirts of town—a recruiting tool for the Rocklin County Sheriff’s Office, which piqued her interest. Mia looked at that billboard every day as she drove home from the school campus, pondering a possible career change from teaching high school into law enforcement.

  The decision to make that career move became clear on one fateful day in April 1999 when the world would come to know Columbine High School as a killing field. It was the last day she ever set foot on that campus.

  It was also the day the nightmares began.

  As a woman, Mia Serrano had been welcomed into the RCSO with open arms. In the days of affirmative action, she was quite a find for the RCSO, and her Latina heritage was a bonus. She immersed herself in her career, never finding the right man, though there was no shortage of interested men. Mia Serrano was a beautiful woman. She had dark hair, cut a couple of inches below shoulder length, with natural curls and auburn highlights. Men certainly noticed her quiet elegance when she walked into a room. She never talked about it, but she was voted homecoming queen in high school some twenty years earlier and hoped no one at RCSO would ever learn that about her.

  Her transition from high school teacher to cop was surprisingly easy. Keeping peace among teenagers in a high school classroom was not that different from keeping peace on the streets of Rocklin County. She still chuckled to herself on those occasions when upon arresting someone and placing them in handcuffs they would suddenly look at her and say, “Hey, wait a minute—weren’t you my English teacher?”

  The morning sun began to faintly illuminate the sky as the four members of the RCSO traffic investigations review team, led by Mia Serrano, arrived on scene.

  “Good morning, Mia,” offered Sergeant Valenzuela, his breath hanging in the very cold morning air. “Want the dime tour?”

  “Sure, that’ll work.”

  As Valenzuela walked Mia through the accident scene, her team went right to work, dividing the tasks between the four members of the squad. They measured the distance between the Fiesta and the deceased and noted the skid marks left behind. They checked visibility and road design, and they ultimately would check the mechanical condition of the car. The braking system, lights, steering mechanism, and other key components of the vehicle would all be thoroughly checked out at the RCSO CSI lab.

  Accident investigations were highly technical and often took hours to process at the scene. Then, additional days or sometimes even weeks were needed to complete the investigation, depending on when toxicology results on the victim and the driver were completed. Once all the pieces of the puzzle came together, investigators would be able to draw an official conclusion of what happened.

  Mia’s lead assistant, Deputy Larry Voss, was handling the video and still camera duties. He followed behind Mia and the sergeant, snapping away as they walked toward the victim.

  “Did you or your deputy move anything, Sergeant?”

  “Pulled his ID and covered him up, that’s it,” Valenzuela said, handing her a worn brown leather wallet. “There’s the ID and…” he said, pulling back the tarp carefully so as to preserve the scene, “here’s your vic.”

  Mia opened the wallet and eyed the Colorado driver’s license in the faded yellow plastic window of the wallet. A hunting license was tucked behind it.

  “George Myron Lombard,” she said to no one in particular, “of Castle Springs.”

  “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Lombard,” she added in a quiet, contemplative voice.

  The wallet also contained several credit cards and $70 in cash.

  “Larry, be sure and get video of the roadway and the curve of the road where this happened,” said Mia. “And get me Mr. Lombard ‘in situ.’”

  “Will do,” Voss said respectfully. He was nearly fifteen years her senior but sincerely liked his boss. The work they did wasn’t pleasant but Mia was, and it was better than pulling overtime on the beat.

  Voss had recorded hundreds of victims “in situ,” a Latin term meaning that the object has not been “newly” moved. In essence, Mia wanted video showing the victim exactly as Deputy Brooks found him when arriving on scene. The position of the body was something Investigator Serrano would include in the final report.

  After five years of investigating traffic fatalities, Mia could often tell as much by looking at the area around the body as at the body itself. While this one seemed to be pretty straight forward, she was careful and thorough just the same.

  Mia noted that the victim was dressed in relatively light clothing given the frigid temperatures that morning. While he was wearing an orange hunters vest, his coat, pants, and shoes were inadequate for temperatures well below freezing. Mia found that a bit odd.

  She noted that the victim’s left leg was jetting grotesquely away from his body at an odd angle—evidence that the collision with the Fiesta likely broke the man’s hip. Even a relatively slow speed collision could inflict these types of injuries.

  But it was the head contusion that really got her attention. She studied it closely and then stood up looking back at the Fiesta.

  “Interesting. So our driver hasn’t given you much, Sergeant?”

  “Nope. Deputy Brooks said she was cold and pretty shaken up. He thought it best to let you talk with her about what happened,” said Valenzuela.

  “That’ll work. Once Voss is finished getting the video, cover the body back up, okay?”

  TWO

  “The Lord be with you.”

  “And with your spirit,” they recited loudly, almost in
unison.

  Most days at the 7:30 morning Mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Castle Springs, the “regulars,” as Rocklin County Sheriff’s Investigator Jack Keller called them, numbered no more than a dozen. Keller, the relative newcomer in the group, had been warmly welcomed by these regulars when he had begun attending morning Mass many years earlier. Over time he had grown rather attached to the group, even though most of the regulars were in their seventies and eighties.

  “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the lamb.”

  Blessed and quick. That was the message Father Jon Foley had gotten loud and clear early on in his stint as the pastor of St. Joe’s.

  “Forty minutes max, the closer to thirty, the better,” old man Callaghan had told him. Callaghan had been a parishioner for sixty years and was nearly ninety when he instructed the priest upon his arrival three years earlier. “We’re burnin’ daylight, me boy,” he’d said in his thick Irish brogue.

  “The Body of Christ.”

  “Amen,” said Jack to the priest. They shared a quick nod.

  Jack Keller was old enough to be Foley’s father, but the priest was the best friend the homicide investigator had. Besides, Keller preferred morning Mass to spending evenings at AA meetings.

  THREE

  Brooks gave Mia Serrano a quick rundown on his version of the events before introducing her to Lisa Sullivan. The poor woman, disheveled but no longer shivering, peered at Mia through the side passenger window of the cruiser. Brooks reached over, opened the door, and made the introduction.

  “Investigator Serrano will take good care of you. She’s the best we’ve got, so you’re in good hands.”

  Mia smiled and replied to Brooks, “There’s a thermos of hot coffee in the front seat of my car. You look like you could use some.”

  “You’re a lifesaver, Investigator.”