SURVIVORS (crime thriller books) Read online

  SURVIVORS

  BOOK TWO OF THE TITAN TRILOGY

  T. J. BREARTON

  First published 2014

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is American English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  ©T. J. Brearton

  Follow T.J. Brearton on twitter @BreartonTJ

  Further novels by Brearton are scheduled for release in 2014 by Joffe Books

  Read the first novel in the Titan Trilogy now

  A #1 best-selling thriller that you won’t be able to put down

  A young woman, Rebecca Heilshorn, lies stabbed to death in her bed in a remote farmhouse. Rookie detective Brendan Healy is called in to investigate. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets and connections to a sordid network mixing power, wealth, and sex. Detective Brendan Healy, trying to put a tragic past behind him, pursues a dangerous investigation that will risk both his life and his sanity. Habit is a compelling thriller which will appeal to all fans of crime fiction. T.J. Brearton amps up the tension at every step, until the shocking and gripping conclusion.

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/HABIT-detective-mysteries-thrillers-BREARTON-ebook/dp/B00HRIJVFS/

  http://www.amazon.com/HABIT-detective-mysteries-thrillers-BREARTON-ebook/dp/B00HRIJVFS/

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE / Saturday, 8:18 AM

  CHAPTER TWO / Saturday, 8:44 AM

  CHAPTER THREE / Saturday, 9:04 AM

  CHAPTER FOUR / Sunday, 9:53 AM

  CHAPTER FIVE / Sunday, 2:11 PM

  CHAPTER SIX / Sunday, 3:25 PM

  CHAPTER SEVEN / Sunday, 4:26 PM

  CHAPTER EIGHT / Sunday, 5:38 pm

  CHAPTER NINE / Sunday, 6:44 PM

  CHAPTER TEN / Sunday, 6:58 PM

  CHAPTER ELEVEN / Sunday, 7:09 PM

  CHAPTER TWELVE / Sunday, 8:20 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN / Sunday, 9:47 PM

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN / Monday 12:53 AM

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN / Monday 1:03 AM

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN / Monday, 6:18 AM

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / Monday, 8:18 AM

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / Monday, 8:30 AM

  CHAPTER NINETEEN / Monday, 8:44 AM

  CHAPTER TWENTY / Monday 10:56 AM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE / 11:18 AM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO / Monday, 11:36 AM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / Monday, 11:53 AM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / Monday, 12:09 PM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE / Monday, 12:36 PM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX / Monday, 12:52 PM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN / Monday, 1:06 PM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT / Monday, 1:44 PM

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE / Monday, 2:44 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY / Monday, 3:08 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE / Monday, 3:31 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO / Monday, 3:55 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE / Monday 4:08 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR / Monday 4:15 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE / Monday 4:09 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX / Monday 4:20 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN / Monday, 4:28 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT / Monday, 4:35 PM

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE / Monday, 4:35 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY / Monday, 4:44 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE / Monday, 4:59 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO / Monday, 5:10 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE / Monday, 5:10 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR / Monday, 5:22 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE / Monday, 5:29 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX / Monday 7:03 PM

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN / Tuesday, 12:11 AM

  EPILOGUE / Tuesday 6:31 AM

  Titanomachy:

  In Greek mythology, the Titanomachy, or War of the Titans, was the ten-year series of battles which were fought in Thessaly between the two camps of deities long before the existence of mankind: the Titans, based on Mount Othrys, and the Olympians, who would come to reign on Mount Olympus. This Titanomachia is also known as the Battle of Gods. The war was fought to decide who would become the rulers of the Universe.

  PROLOGUE

  The crash of metal. That was what she knew before she was aware of anything else. First it crashed, and then it squealed – an ear-splitting noise like the sound of those big machines that crunched cars into compact squares. Angie was thrown forward, and at the same time her body wrenched to the side as the car started to roll.

  Her next thought was of Gloria, in the car seat behind her, and she turned her head while the car was spinning on the black freeway.

  Baby. My baby.

  And: What hit us?

  It happened so fast – too quick to process. Those headlights had been coming up in her side view, and she’d made one of those casual, slightly indignant observations, This maniac has really got it to the floor. And then: impact. A shuddering bludgeon, the back of the car, on that side, she thought it was the left side, urging the car into a skid.

  Then the tires caught on their edges, and the car was rolling over now, Oh Dear God Jesus, Gloria, my baby, they were launching up and they were over on their side. Her body was mashed against the driver’s-side door, she’d only just been driving, for God’s sake, just driving along, center lane, best place to be on the Saw Mill Parkway, let them pass you on the left, get out in front of the slowpokes on the right – in the center lane you went a sane speed, a civilized speed, and then that son of a bitch came up on her like that and . . .

  The car was sliding along on its side, and that was the screeching, and she saw something that her mind first called welding, but she knew it wasn’t welding, it was the metal scraping along the macadam, and they still had to be at least doing fifty, maybe fifty-five, and the world was a roar of razor metal sheared away by the asphalt, bitumen biting into the paint, the steel, tearing it, hot sparks like a metal-works factory, oh so much industry, so much power and combustion and things exploding in this world, and my baby. My baby.

  Gloria was suspended by her car-seat straps, hanging off to the side, just a moment of her sweet face, her big blue eyes wide – she had his eyes, she’d always had his eyes, more than anything else, and his dark hair. Damn him, goddamn him for not being here.

  The car screamed on its side, the rushing black all around her, hunting her, sucking her into its maw, and Angie felt her body start to fall, to come away from its cramped crunch against the door, and gravity taking hold, pulling her down to the jagged orange sparks. But then there was another shrieking peal of metal, and a lightning crack, a sound that then shattered into a million pieces, a bright, terrifying symphony of bells as the windshield imploded, showering her with glass.

  And the car continued to roll as it tore along the night parkway, bright white lights whipped past – Help us! – spangling the deadly splinters of glass as shards stabbed into her, nettling her face and hands and arms with white hot pain, and somewhere in there she reached out with everything and tried to shield Gloria, tumbling as the car continued its thunderous pitch onto its roof.

  Glass everywhere, and she was blind. She couldn’t see her baby. She heard something – did she hear something? High above the cacophonous monster of glass and steel and oil and engine and growling pavement. Did she hear her child?

  Oh where was she? Where did her baby go, lost in the black world, lost in the bedlam of a deafening orchestra. Angie flailed with her hands, but her
body was taken by the inertia of the gimbaling automobile, the goddamned Land Cruiser, the car he said would be good in the snow, the car that made her feel like some Westchester yuppie when she was not a Westchester yuppie, she was a girl from Hawthorne, her parents had had the same place since she was three, all she could remember, those two Goldfish plants hanging from the rusty brass hooks underneath the porch roof in the summer time; the short walkway across their tiny postage stamp lawn with the one piece of disgorged concrete that was sort of cockeyed, like a lazy eye; her bedroom window, tucked secretly in behind the twining branches of the Maple tree; her second floor bedroom that was, with the electric baseboard heaters that came on always smelling a bit like syrup and dust, like a lost crayon was slowly sizzling down inside; the ghungroos chiming around the doorknob; her mother watching ice skating on the TV downstairs, her mother’s gray hair, the ragged sponge-gold apron, her father smelling like ink toner and cigarettes.

  Her baby, she couldn’t find her, because she was pinned to the roof of the car, nothing but white noise now, no discernible sounds, no sense of direction, the grating rush of the angry road, it screamed at her, all around her, a million black teeth gritting in the riot of noise. Leering, pinwheeling around her, blank and loud and remorseless, a chasm of vibration and rage.

  They were upside down, they were on the roof of the car, and it was still careening along, trembling, shaking concussively, rattling her bones to the hollow straws of their centers, filled with cold air now, her skin scorched black and scalding with the searing fire of the sparks of metal, the flints of paint and steel in her hair, her teeth, her eyes, the glass embedded in her.

  My love. I met you when I was so young. You gave me our girl. Our baby. My love. When did you start to leave? What didn’t I do? What could I have done better for you?

  She saw him as he stood in the doorway of the restaurant, that slight smile on his face, the one that was righteous and guilty and somehow young, leftover from before time had dragged on the skin and bones and bent us over with responsibility, and the crush of reality. His eyes swimmy with drink, but still cutting through to her, the part of him trapped in there – had his eyes said goodbye?

  Thank you, my love, for giving me our baby girl.

  She’s lost now; I need you to help me find her.

  I think, I think the car is going to flip again. I can’t tell for sure but we’re lifting. I feel lighter.

  Bleeding, broken – something is broken, oh I know, my leg is not right, my arm, my throat – my throat feels hot and wet and angry. I want to scream.

  And Angie realized she was screaming, and she was crying, and there was compression from all sides. The thought occurred to her – just a mote, really, that this was in fact like those car crushers, that the Land Cruiser was not handling the stress of overturning, it was crumpling like an accordion, pinching her, trapping her, while the wreckage of it all raged around her, blood singing as loudly in her ears, her mouth open with her lips moving as if in prayer.

  When the baby fell into her arms, it was the last thing she knew, and it was warm, warm, and Gloria’s face was pressed into hers, her skin soft and calm, and the baby gripped her around her neck, and Angie found she had an arm free and she put it around her.

  They were in that position when the first police arrived fifteen minutes later, lights spinning. The highway patrolmen cleared the rubberneckers out of the way, and prepared the jaws to open the twisted metal. They were like that, enmeshed in the center of it all, mother and child.

  CHAPTER ONE / Saturday, 8:18 AM

  The FBI agent was slapping a pack of cigarettes against his palm as Jennifer Aiken entered the diner. It was a Saturday morning, and the place murmured and clattered and sizzled all around her, the smell of maple syrup and fried potatoes filling the air. The agent looked up at her as she approached, and she could already see the wariness in his eyes. He scratched at the pack’s cellophane. She sat down across from him and watched as he shook out a cigarette.

  He was about ten years older than her. She knew he’d never kicked down any doors; she’d picked him because he came recommended as a good profiler. He stuck the smoke in between his lips. She wondered for a moment if he was actually going to light it up, which would be ballsy, even for a guy with greying hair and crow’s feet framing his dark blue eyes – you couldn’t smoke in Westchester County, not in restaurants, pretty much not anywhere. It didn’t matter to Jennifer, she’d found it fairly easy to give up smoking after college, much to the frustration of friends who’d struggled to kick the habit. But he only held the cigarette there between his lips, and she saw his nostrils flare as though he was taking in the tobacco’s aroma, and then he pinched it between his two fingers and pulled it out, and held it like it was lit.

  “Morning,” he said to her.

  “Morning. Cold out there.” She mimed a shiver and then slipped her bag off her shoulder and set it down on the bench seat.

  The waitress came over with a pot of coffee, giving Jennifer a lopsided smile.

  “Please, yes,” Jennifer said, and slid her cup closer to the edge of the booth table. The waitress poured, and Jennifer said, “That’ll be good for now.”

  The agent raised his eyebrows. “Not eating?”

  “Are you?”

  “I ordered, yeah. Hungry. Sorry I didn’t wait.”

  “That’s alright.”

  The waitress was looking at them like people gawked at zoo animals, wondering if they were going to do anything which might hold her attention, or if she could just move on. Jennifer smiled politely and turned her face up. “I’m fine for now.”

  Jennifer focused on the agent. His name was Gary Petrino. He seemed rough and part Italian and his voice sounded like the gin mill had spat him out. They said he drank a bit and had an eye for the ladies, but she wasn’t one to judge. She and Petrino had only spoken twice on the phone: once for the introduction and the assignment, then again to arrange this meeting, three days later. He was looking her up and down, she could feel his eyes, like sensors, moving over her. She was thirty-one, auburn hair, brown eyes. She considered herself plain, and called it curiosity when men checked her out. Men checked everyone out. But then, looking through photos, and seeing herself objectively, something in her would tip, like a ship rolling in the Cotuit Bay, spilling the sunlight across the deck, and she would understand she might be pretty. Then it would be gone.

  He lifted a yellow folder from the seat and set it on the table beside his steaming mug of coffee. Then he turned for a second and looked out the window over Mamaroneck Avenue. The morning traffic was a hushed rumble on the other side of the glass. Jennifer thought he was taking this moment to gather his thoughts. Her gaze fell to the unlit cigarette he was holding, the familiar way it sat in the crux of his fingers, the sallow tips of his nails. Then Petrino turned back to face her.

  * * *

  “So this guy, Healy . . . Here’s the first thing; this guy is a hot mess.”

  She raised her eyebrows and settled back into her booth, the plastic giving a little groan.

  “He’s got himself tucked away. Found himself a cool, dry place . . .”

  She could see the question floating in Petrino’s dark eyes. He wanted to know why Jennifer Aiken, why the Justice Department, was looking into Brendan Healy, and what that had to do with the price of tea in China. She let that keep for now. She said nothing, attempting to pull more out of him with her silence.

  “Guy’s a wacko, if you ask me. You know he carries a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver? That gun hasn’t been standard-issue since Reagan was president. So, look, I don’t know what you know, or don’t know. I’m just going to lay it out, okay? I don’t usually do this type of assessment on law enforcement. Even if he’s . . . well, whatever. You want my profile, here it is: he’s survived some serious shit and he went through the ringer on a major homicide investigation. Yet he skedaddles after cracking one of the biggest, grisliest cases Central New York has seen. My feeling? Sure, h
e’s screwed up. Maybe he’s not interested in the world’s approval. It all turns to ashes in the mouth anyway, trust me. He’s walked away from just about everything in his life, okay. And he’s had a serious drinking problem, looks like. But still . . .” Petrino shook his head. “I think something spooked him, sent him packing.”

  Petrino relaxed his posture a little, and his weedy eyebrows that had climbed high onto his forehead dropped, and he took on that sleepy, bored look again. “Anyway, it’s all here in the dossier.” He sighed and pushed the folder across the table. Jennifer flipped it open. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Petrino tap the cigarette he was holding, as if unloading invisible ash into an invisible ashtray.

  She glanced up from the paperwork. “He lost his wife and child?”

  “Yeah. Ten years ago. Car wreck, not far from here, Saw Mill River Parkway. And then he went to work for the Mount Pleasant Police in Hawthorne. That’s north from here, six, seven miles. Did a few years as a beat cop, then somehow he got up into Oneida County as a criminal investigator. That part you know. He’s a college boy, you’ll see that right there, his records from New York University, studied neuroscience. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, right? Some trooper sergeants, some investigators, you know, they might have gone to law school or something, but this guy was a few credits shy of being called doctor. Picked up and left it.”

  “But you don’t think this was typical behavior for him, leaving his job, leaving the state?”

  Petrino shrugged. His conviction seemed gone. “I just think, you know, it’s possible, there’s more to it than that. More than some pattern he has; something else . . .”

  The agent shifted in his seat.

  “Anyway, you can look that over. From what I found, he had just the one case in Oneida County. Kind of unusual for a Sheriff’s Department to handle a homicide and not the State Troopers? I don’t know who is rubbing whose back up there, but that’s how it unfolded. There was a dead girl in a farm house; senior investigator was a guy named Ambrose Delaney . . . Now am I just telling you things you already know?”