Painted ladies a chase a.., p.1
Painted Ladies (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 7), page 1
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Painted Ladies
A Chase Adams FBI Thriller
Book 7
Patrick Logan
Prologue
PART I – The First Kill
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
PART II – Breadcrumbs
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
PART III – Makeup and Butterflies
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Epilogue
END
Author’s Note
Other Books by Patrick Logan
Painted Ladies
Prologue
“Look at this faggot right here,” the man in the overcoat said with a chuckle. “Hey fellas, come take a look at this guy.”
He extended his finger at a man sporting skinny jeans and a white T-shirt. His hair was slicked back, and his chin was pressed to his chest in a deliberate attempt to avoid eye contact with the three approaching thugs.
“Where you comin’ from, homo?” One of the other men demanded. “Bet you it’s one of those faggot bars over on thirty-first.”
Despite the cool fall air, only the first man was wearing a coat. The others donned ratty sweatshirts or, in the case of the man with the slicked hair, just a T-shirt.
“Hey, Ronnie asked you a question, faggot,” the first man said.
The third member of the trio, a gangly fellow with wide eyes and a patchy mustache, finally joined into the fray.
“Hey, you got a fuckin’ problem with your ears or somethin’?”
Ronnie reached for the man in the white T-shirt, but his hand was immediately swatted away.
“I don’t want any trouble. I just wanna get home.”
“You hit me,” Ronnie said, incredulous. “This fucker hit me. You seen that, Mike? Mike, you seen that?”
“I don’t want any trouble,” the man repeated, holding his hands up defensively. “Just wanna get home.”
Mike growled and tucked the tails of his overcoat behind his back.
“Why the fuck did you hit him? He didn’t do nothin’ to you.”
“He was trying to grab me. Like I said, I just want to go home.”
With that, he tried to step around the three men, but Mike deliberately blocked his path.
“Please, just let me by.”
“I want you to apologize first; I want you to apologize to Ronnie.”
The man in the T-shirt lifted his eyes and stared at Mike. Then he looked at the other two men. The latter were soft, wannabes.
Followers.
But Mike… he had an icy stare that meant business.
“Sorry—didn’t mean nothing by it,” he said at last, trying to diffuse the situation.
He tried to slip by again, but Mike held out his hand and placed it in the center of his chest, halting his progress.
The man knew better than to slap his hand away, as he had done with Ronnie moments ago.
“That’s good,” Mike said, a sneer appearing on his face. “That’s real good. Now get on your knees.”
“W-w-what?”
“I said, get on your fucking knees, faggot.”
The two followers chuckled and the man in the T-shirt shook his head.
“Man—look, you guys have been drinking, I—I mean, I just want to go home.” He was trying not to sound desperate, but the situation was about to escalate. Looking around, he was dismayed to see that the few shops nearby had all closed down for the night. “Please, I—”
Mike wasn’t just big, but he was fast, too. His hand shot out and he grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair. Then he shoved him to his knees while pulling back at the same time, stretching his throat until it started to ache.
“Yeah, that’s a good boy,” Mike breathed. To the man’s horror, he started to zip the front of his jeans with his free hand.
“Please,” the man croaked, his eyes starting to water. “Please, let me go.”
“I’ll let you go when I’m done with you.”
With that, Mike pulled his flaccid penis out and dangled it in front of his face. He tried to look away, but his face was forced forward by the hand tangled in his hair.
“You like what you see?” Mike asked.
“Yeah, he likes it, he likes it,” Ronnie said almost giddily.
“Yeah, I know he does,” Mike confirmed, pulling the man’s face even closer. He tried to turn away, but the grip on his hair was so tight that—
All of a sudden, his head was wrenched backward, and his legs folded beneath him awkwardly as he fell onto his back.
“I told you he was a faggot,” Mike said.
The man in the white T-shirt struggled to collect himself and get back to his feet when a massive fist came out of nowhere and struck him directly between the eyes.
“Yeah, I told you,” was the last thing he heard before falling back to the pavement, unconscious.
***
“I think we’re gonna hit the rippers for a bit. You wanna join, Mikey?” Ronnie asked.
Mike shook his head.
“Can’t—gotta work in the morning.” He checked his watch and then chuckled dryly. “In a few hours.” As he spoke, he massaged his right hand. The middle knuckle was sore, and he wondered briefly if he had broken it by punching the fag in the face. This made him nervous; if it swelled up, he might be unable to grip the pitchfork properly. And if that were the case, his dad would be fucking incensed.
“I gotta get going,” he said quickly.
“Alright, catch you later,” Ronnie replied as he turned back the way they’d come. “Nice punch, by the way.”
Mike slipped his hands into his overcoat pockets, then he picked up the pace.
After about ten minutes of brisk walking, the storefronts were all but gone. Five minutes after that, Mike found himself squeezing through an opening in a chain-link fence. He was familiar with the cornfield before him: it belonged to a curmudgeonly farmer named Laurence Finnegan. Mike didn’t know him well, but his dad often had a beer with the man during the summer months. They even shared old farm equipment on occasion. All this to say, that Mike was confident that he was unlikely to receive a chest full of buckshot by cutting through the man’s field.
Or so he hoped.
“Old faggot,” he grumbled.
The field was only about fifty yards across, but the height and breadth of the corn stalks made walking difficult. Just as Mike was second-guessing his decision to take the shortcut, he heard a rustling to his left.
He fell still and craned his neck in direction of the sound. His first thought was that it was just a fox, but when he didn’t see anything, Mike’s heart began to beat a little faster.
He read a story once that there had been coyote sightings in every major city in the United States.
And that included New York City.
Swallowing hard, Mike started to walk again, this time shoving stalks out of the way to speed his progress. He’d taken only a handful of steps before stopping once more.
The sound was back, and this time it didn’t sound like either a fox or a coyote.
This time it sounded like something larger.
“Who’s there?” He demanded, trying to sound authoritative. Worried that the words had come out weak, he cleared his throat and repeated the question. “Who’s there?”
For the better part of a minute, Mike stood as still as possible an d listened. The only sound he heard was the gentle rustling of the corn stalks and his own breathing.
Get a fucking grip, you pussy.
Mike took a single step before the stalks to his right suddenly parted and a figure burst through. He had just enough time to brace himself for impact, but the man didn’t collide with him as he expected.
Instead, he passed by and disappeared into the corn on the other side.
“The fuck?”
Mike watched the spot where the man had disappeared until the stalks stopped swaying. Only then did he look down at himself.
If it hadn’t been for the gash in his trench coat, he might have passed the entire thing off as a sort of drunken mirage. But when he put a hand to the slit and then held his fingers up to the light, he knew that what had happened was very real.
Blood coated the pads of his fingers.
“What the fuck!”
His heart racing now, Mike whipped his head around, desperate to spot his assailant.
“Is that you, you fucking faggot? Come out here and fight me like a man!” he yelled. The threat had meant to bolster his resolve, but the tremulous sound of his voice only made him more frightened. “Come out and—”
The figure emerged from directly in front of him, but once again, he was too quick and slipped by before Mike could grab a hold of him. It didn’t help that the man was slippery like he was covered in some sort of Vaseline—there was simply nothing to grab on to.
Mike realized that he’d been cut again, across his chest this time, and covered the wound with his forearm.
“What the—”
The figure came from behind, crouching now, and sliced Mike’s left hamstring clean through. He cried out in pain and dropped to his knees. Forgetting all about his other wounds, he clutched the back of his leg with both hands.
“Please,” he said desperately. “I don’t mean what I—”
The corn parted directly in front of him and a man stepped into full view of the moonlight. And that’s when Mike realized his error; he wasn’t covered in Vaseline but sweat. And he wasn’t the same man whom Mike had punched in the face earlier.
In fact, Mike had never seen him before in his life.
He was completely nude and impossibly pale. The only color on the man at all was a small tuft of brown hair in the center of his concave chest and equally dark pubic hair. His penis hung limply between his legs, but he had no testicles to speak of.
“What the hell?” Mike gasped.
In each one of the man’s hands was a long, pointed knife.
“What—w-w-what do you want?” Mike asked. He tried to stand, but his injured leg refused to support him, and he fell back to his knees. “Who the fuck are you?”
The only answer came in the form of a high-pitched laugh.
PART I – The First Kill
Chapter 1
“You can take whoever you want, Chase. Seriously, whoever and whatever you need is yours.”
FBI Special Agent Chase Adams stared into Director Hampton’s eyes. She’d burst through the door and shown him the photograph of Louisa and Stitts, as well as the accompanying text—Chase, I’ve missed you—and the man hadn’t batted an eye.
He didn’t ask who the text was from, why they’d sent it to her, or even when she’d received it.
Director Hampton had simply given her carte blanche to use all of the FBI resources. The only problem was, the person that Chase wanted wasn’t in the Bureau.
“Whoever I want?” she asked.
One of Director Hampton’s eyebrows rose a little—it was nothing more than a glorified twitch, really—but he concurred with a nod.
The man was cold and calculated, and if the rumors about him were true, at one time, he had been the best Agent in the entire Bureau.
His loyalty had never been in doubt. His unconventional methods with the recruits, on the other hand…
“Whoever you want,” Director Hampton repeated. “I know you’re close with Floyd, so you can take him with you. You want someone else? Just tell me their names and I’ll pull them off whatever case they’re on and give them to you.”
Chase stared at the man a little longer. Then she shook her head.
She couldn’t get Floyd involved in this. He was just a kid, and she felt responsible for him. Floyd had nearly died back in Washington, and while he had been helpful in New Mexico, the last Agent that she’d worked with—Stacy Workman—had ended up dead.
And that said nothing of Stitts, who was bound and gagged and being held God knows where.
Her conscience couldn’t handle another death.
“No, not Floyd—someone else. I think,” Chase hesitated, once again meeting the Director’s hard stare, “I think you’re going to have to make some calls on this one.”
Chase half-expected the man to ask for more details, to question her, to ask her to explain her reasoning. But Director Hampton surprised her by immediately picking up the phone on his desk.
“Who am I calling?”
“Not who, but where,” Chase said, pressing her lips together tightly. “You need to call New York City—62nd precinct, to be exact. I’m going back.”
Chapter 2
“Rise and shine, cupcake,” the officer said as he banged his nightstick against the iron bars.
The man in the cell looked up and then grunted as he pulled himself to a seated position.
“Where we going?”
The officer chuckled.
“For a little ride—we’re going for a little ride.”
The prisoner stretched his back and his arms, then rose to his feet. He started toward the cell door but stopped when the officer pointed the business end of a nightstick toward his chest.
“Turn around, hands through the bars,” the officer instructed. The prisoner grimaced but did as he was told, sliding his wrists through the slot that they slid a tray of food through twice a day. The cuffs were slapped on his wrists, one click too tight.
“Alright, get the fuck out here.”
The prisoner stepped away from the bars and then waited for the door to be unlocked. Once in the hallway, the officer spun him around and shoved him forward. His legs were still half-asleep, and he nearly pitched onto his face.
“Keep moving.”
He bit back a scathing remark.
If I didn’t have these cuffs on…
As he made his way through the familiar hallways of 62nd precinct, the prisoner kept his eyes low. He knew that others were staring at him, trying to get his attention, but he refused to take the bait.
After all, they weren’t his colleagues anymore, or his friends. They were his captors, the ones who held the keys to his freedom.
And they weren’t about to let him go.
Not just yet, anyway.
The prisoner was shoved through the front doors and immediately squinted and turned his face away from the bright sunlight. His cell was near the heart of the police station and the only illumination that he’d been exposed to for the past two days had been from a weak incandescent bulb.
This was torture. For a fall day, New York City had never been so bright, it seemed.
Still, he enjoyed the fresh air and sucked in deep breaths until the moment he was thrust into the back of an awaiting vehicle.
The officer who had pulled him from his cell slammed the door closed, a grimace on his fat face.
“Where are you taking me?” he demanded as the car pulled out of the parking lot. “You taking me to my arraignment?”
There was no answer, but something wasn’t right about this scenario. Usually, suspects weren’t driven to the courthouse in the back of an unmarked car. Even with his checkered past and notoriety, this was unconventional, at best.
At worst, it was a hit.
“Hey? Where are you taking me?” he repeated as he sat up and tried to get comfortable. With his hands nearly numb and pressed up against the cracked vinyl seat, it was a fool’s errand.
He was about to ask again when his gaze drifted to the heavily tinted windows.
New York City, he thought glumly. You are as much a piece of me as my cirrhotic liver.
The prisoner was familiar with the route to the courthouse from a different time, a different era, even, and he knew that this wasn’t it.
The car swerved and sped down a filthy alleyway, barely avoiding an overflowing dumpster.
“Listen, you fu—”
Before he could finish the sentence, a dark BMW appeared out of nowhere, forcing the unmarked police car to squeal to a stop. Instead of honking the horn or shouting obscenities out the window, the driver calmly threw an arm over the headrest and turned.
