[2017] The Extraction

  The Extraction

  Steven F. Freeman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  Copyright © 2017 Steven F. Freeman

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  To those struggling to live again

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Ruth Gresh, Sharron Grodzinsky, Elaine Rivers, Priscilla Gould, Scott L. McCarroll, Willow Humphrey, and Chris Daniel for their invaluable feedback and assistance.

  OTHER BOOKS BY STEVEN F. FREEMAN

  Blood Passage (published under “Malcolm Pierce” pen name)

  Erased (published under “Malcolm Pierce” pen name)

  CHECK OUT THE BOOKS of the author’s “BLACKWELL FILES” THRILLER/MYSTERY SERIES!

  (Books 1 – 3 combined: Nefarious, Ruthless, and T Wave Boxed Set)

  Book 1: Nefarious

  Book 2: Ruthless

  Book 3: T Wave

  Book 4: Havoc

  Book 5: The Devil’s Due

  Book 6: The Evolution of Evil

  Book 7: Tears of God

  Book 8: When the Killing Starts

  Book 9: The Dig

  Book 10: Thirty Seconds to Live (Coming in 2018. See below for notification when available.)

  Would you like Amazon to notify you when the future books by the author are released? Just click on Steven F. Freeman’s Amazon Author page, then click on “Add Favorite” below the author’s picture.

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  Author website: www.SteveFreemanWriter.com

  Like your thrillers more intense? Author Steven F. Freeman also writes under the name Malcolm Pierce.

  Blood Passage

  Maintenance supervisor Brian Francisco goes to sleep for the night in his Midwest apartment and awakes to find himself a prisoner aboard an oil tanker at sea.

  “An Unforgettable ride” Readers’ Favorite five-star review

  “To penetrate a man’s personality, to know exactly what he will do under any given circumstances—that is the beginning of success.”

  Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, THE BIG FOUR

  CHAPTER 1

  Your fiancée dies in twenty-four hours reads the first line of the note.

  This must be some kind of sick joke—one of my former colleagues on the Bureau messing with me. They should know better.

  Still…it’s best to be sure. Breaking into a sweat, I grab my cellphone and select “Trin” from the Favorites list. The call rolls straight to voice mail without ringing.

  I text her.

  Tense seconds pass without a reply. Not like her—not like her at all.

  I force myself to read the rest of the note.

  Your fiancée dies in twenty-four hours.

  Unless you, Agent Farr, unravel these rhymes

  To reveal the location of boxes with clues.

  But make haste! You must do so five separate times.

  Each box has two clues: one easy, one not.

  You mustn’t proceed until both are revealed.

  Two hints are required to find the next box

  And uncover the clues I’ve already concealed.

  For the first of the boxes, you must solve but one clue:

  Begin at the end of your previous life

  Where four runs to five, and six fall in an arc

  In this way, you’ll find her who would serve as your wife.

  Dealing with this kind of twisted shit from criminals is one of the primary reasons I retired from my FBI criminal-profiling job three years ago. So it stands to reason that nobody I know would stoop to this level of depravity as a prank—not with me.

  I stop to consider. If this isn’t a joke…

  It’s real. Someone really has kidnapped Trin.

  My mind races. What does it mean: four runs to five and six fall in an arc? How the hell does that help me find the first box?

  Then it hits me—I haven’t finished reading the note.

  At the end of the clues, your dear Trin awaits

  In this manner only will she stay alive.

  Solve all the riddles. Begin right away.

  Or come two o’clock tomorrow, your fiancée dies.

  CHAPTER 2

  Someone put some time into crafting this note. Plus they’ve tracked me enough to know I typically check the mail on Wednesdays, my midweek day off, around 2:00 P.M. This threat certainly feels real. But to be sure, my first step is confirming its authenticity as soon as possible.

  I call Hunter Kolb, my former contact in the Atlanta PD. “Kolb, it’s Decimus Farr.”

  “Long time no talk, Farr,” replies the lieutenant in his Louisiana drawl. “How ya been?”

  “Look, I don’t have time to chat. I got a note just now. Someone claims they’ve kidnapped Trin.” While speaking, I remove my handgun from its lockbox and slip it into my rear waistband.

  “Trin…?”

  Damn, I’ve really fallen out of touch with my former colleagues. “My fiancée. Trinity Beasley. Can you send a squad car to meet me over at her place?” I pass along her midtown address.

  “Sure thing, Farr.” He pauses. “Damn, I’m sorry, dude.”

  “Thanks, but there’s no time for that. We’ve got to roll.”

  Racing from my house, I jump into my ride and peel out of the driveway—as much as an aging Malibu with persistent mechanical issues can peel.

  On the way to Trin’s condo, my barrage of frantic calls to her cellphone go unanswered.

  In the past, working a case jacked me up, focusing me. I’m jacked up now but in an entirely different way. The moisture from my mouth seems to have made its way to my palms, and I have to fight down waves of panic. No wonder doctors don’t operate on their own family members. Personal relationships trash your professional judgment.

  Images of Trin drift unbidden through my mind—her caress, her welcoming smile, the curve of her face. Since the time we started dating, she represented a welcome respite, a safe harbor, to the shit storm from which my life had just started to emerge after so many years in the Bureau. Yet commitment’s inevitable companion is risk. The greater the love, the greater the devastation when that love is torn away. And now this note threatens to do just that, to send me into a tailspin I’d never dreamed possible—ironically just a month after we announced our engagement.

  I shake my head. These thoughts won’t help get her back. Personal relationship or not, top analytical skills are required to recover my fiancée. That means I need to keep my head in the game.

  Minutes later, my car pulls into a parking space fronting Trin’s condo. I bolt to the front door and unlock it.

  Before I barge in, years of training and hands-on experience kick in. As a profiler, I was rarely first on the scene of a crime. But thanks to those few times and my initial FBI training, I established a pattern of healthy caution.

  I draw the Glock 22 from the rear waistband of my jeans. Of course, the Bureau didn’t let me keep the one they issued. But I’d grown accustomed to the sidearm’s feel and bought my own within a month of retiring. With all the people I’ve put away, it seemed a sensible precaution—as today’s events bear out.

  I crack the door. In the space of a second, I bob my head around the frame and pull it back.

  Nothin
g.

  I peer around once again, this time leaving my head in place.

  Everything looks normal, nothing unusu—

  Wait! There in the corner, near the sliding glass door at the back of the unit. A circular oak table rests sideways on the floor, pieces of the porcelain vase that used to sit in its center scattered on the short, stiff carpet.

  Do I charge into the condo and risk a one-on-one shootout? Or do I wait for reinforcements, knowing every second puts Trin in more danger?

  Before I decide, a pair of Atlanta PD Chargers screech into the parking lot and slide onto either side of my sedan. Good thing they had the sense to leave their lights and sirens off. No point in giving anyone inside the heads up company has arrived.

  A short, stocky officer exits the passenger side of the closest squad car. “Decimus Farr?”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I answer, relieved I won’t have to convince them I’m not the criminal. “I just peeked inside. No one’s visible, but there’s a table knocked over near the back door. Looks like there was a scuffle.”

  The officer—Sergeant “Russell”, according to his name badge—nods. “Me and the boys will clear it. Lieutenant Kolb told me about your situation…and your background. You can come in behind us if you want.”

  By now, three other officers have joined us at the front door. With military precision, they penetrate the apartment and clear each room in order—one covering while the other advances.

  “First floor’s clear!” shouts Russell to his comrades. He points to the staircase. With raised pistols, they ascend the steps.

  Within two minutes, the “all clear” shout rings from above. The forensic guys will be here shortly, but for the work I used to perform—and will unexpectedly do again now—there’s no reason to wait.

  I turn to Russell. “I’ll be careful not to disturb the scene.”

  He nods.

  Time to get to work…and see what I can learn.

  CHAPTER 3

  I move towards the back doorway with deliberate steps. Despite the mid-November chill, beads of sweat break out on my forehead.

  As a profiler, I normally visited crime scenes later than the forensics guys, if at all. My job was to examine those scenes in order to make behavioral inferences about the perps—what they did before, during, and after their crimes. Those behaviors played a part in tracking down their identities.

  Time to resume habits I haven’t used in three years.

  As much as I want to inspect the fallen table, I can’t take the chance of missing key evidence along the way. Clues have a habit of appearing where they want, not where you think they should be. So I take my time moving around the room.

  For the most part, Trin’s place appears to be in order. Beside the dining-room table in the middle of the room sits evidence of her usual morning routine: a dirty coffee cup in the sink and the morning’s newspaper still spread on the kitchen counter, where Trin scans it as she washes down her breakfast of Greek yogurt with java. And her purse sits in the corner. I peek inside. There’s her cellphone; there’ll be no tracking her via that.

  I push back the terrifying thought that this could be the last newspaper she’ll ever peruse. Any chance of recovering my fiancée will vanish if I let my emotions get the best of me. Staying cool under pressure has never been more important than it is now—or more challenging.

  Now to the knocked-down table. It’s the decorative kind, meant to hold a knickknack or lamp. It’s fallen sideways, away from the door’s entrance. There’s no way to tell if it was pushed by someone on the way in or on the way out.

  I turn to Russell. “You’ll dust this for prints, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. And we’ll check for any of the usual sources of DNA. But don’t hold your breath.”

  The man’s right. Anyone who could muscle an adult woman out of her condo while disturbing only this diminutive table knows what he’s doing. This isn’t the kind of inexperienced criminal likely to leave behind fingerprints or hairs.

  I return to the kitchen and peer into Trin’s coffee mug. It’s still a third full. Before feeling the side of the mug to see if it’s still warm, I check myself.

  “Have any gloves?” I ask Russell.

  He hands over a pair, the usual latex variety.

  I pull on the left glove, then hesitate. Considering how many times I’ve been in this place before now, and how many hundreds of my fingerprints already litter its interior, it hardly matters whether or not I’m gloved up. But the ritual is too ingrained to ignore, so I snap on the right one.

  The mug is stone cold. Of course it would be. Trin always set her coffee to brew at 7:00 A.M., and it’s now 2:30 in the afternoon. But there’s too much at stake to make more assumptions than necessary.

  Time to examine the rest of Trin’s place. I tour each room, checking my impulse to rush with the fear of missing some key bit of evidence.

  In the bedroom, I see a folded note on the nightstand. It wasn’t there three nights ago.

  “Farr” is printed on the outside of the note.

  I unfold the paper.

  How much time have you wasted by looking in here

  While the time of Trin’s death draws ever more near?

  This note…the overturned table…Trin’s absence. The conclusion is inescapable. My fiancée has indeed been kidnapped.

  CHAPTER 4

  One thing you can say about cops: they take care of their own.

  Within minutes, the Atlanta PD has sent a BOLO for Trin as a kidnapping victim out to the entire metro force. In the meantime, a three-man forensic crew arrives at her condo to pour over its interior for any trace evidence left behind.

  “Farr,” says a voice behind me. Kolb reaches me and gives a somber nod of greeting.

  I show him both notes—the one from my house as well as the one from Trin’s dresser. “This first one was slid under my door. I found it when I was heading out to the mailbox a little while ago.”

  “What time was that?”

  “A little before two o’clock. Both notes are directed to me. That means the clues will probably be meaningful only to me. I doubt anyone else could make heads or tails of it.”

  “Probably not,” he says. “But we ought to run them by someone else just in case—two heads being better than one, ya know.”

  “Agreed. And I know just the person.” I ponder my next step. “Do you mind if I take the first note to my old HQ? They can run it for prints, too.”

  “Naw. Go ahead and take both. I’ll have to list Sampson as owner so we don’t corrupt the chain of evidence.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Your FBI buds will be able to process them faster anyway. We got a backlog something fierce. In the meantime, my crew will focus on tracking down the perp from the evidence here.”

  I nod, hoping his effort will be successful. But I can’t pin my hopes on that—not when my fiancée has less than a day to live.

  A half-hour later, I arrive at my former workplace of nineteen years, the Atlanta FBI office—a nine-story edifice of reflective windows nestled in the northeastern suburb of Chamblee. Ralph, the guard, smiles in recognition and waves me through the lobby checkpoint. He hasn’t seen me in three years, but how often does he see a six-three dude who’s maintained his linebacker physique from his college football days striding through the lobby?

  I step off the elevator on the fourth floor and make my way to the desk of a petite redhead, the only person with whom I regularly communicated after retiring from here.

  She looks up and smiles. “Hey, Grinder,” she says, using the nose-to-the-grindstone nickname I picked up early in my career. “I thought you jumped off this merry-go-round.”

  I nod towards my former colleague. “Hey, Sampson. You and me both.”

  “So what’re you doing here?”

  I lower myself into the seat next to her desk. “Trin’s been kidnapped. Guy says he’ll kill her in twenty-four—wait, make that twenty-three hours—
unless I follow five sets of clues to her location.”

  Sampson raises an eyebrow. “Welcome back to the nut house, huh?” She always had a way with words. “You think it’s one of your former cases, coming back after you?”

  “Most of them are still locked up,” I reply. “But indirectly, yeah. Either the offender himself or a family member or friend of one of them. I don’t see who else it could be.”

  Sampson nods. Besides me, she was the only other person in the Atlanta office who worked for the FBI’s BAU—Behavioral Analysis Unit. That’s the profiling group, the one tasked with analyzing crime scenes and deducing as much as possible about the offenders themselves. With those inferences, the Major Offender Task Force, a joint team comprised of agents at all levels of government, has a better chance of tracking down criminals.

  Sampson follows a by-the-book approach to profiling, while I used a less traditional technique. You’d think that would have set us up to argue, but our differences actually made us a better two-person team—my yin to her yang.

  Neither of us need to speak the words. We’ll solve this case together. She’s not one to protest that I’m no longer an agent, especially given the number of cases I helped her with.

  She nods to the clear, plastic sleeve in my hand. “Got some evidence?”

  “Yep. This is the note left at my house a little while ago. Someone slid it under the front door. And this second one was left on the dresser in Trin’s condo.” I hand over the documents. “Can you have the lab process them while I’m working to decipher the clues?”

  “You’re going to go along with the clue thing?”

  “What choice do I have? It’s my best shot at tracking down Trin before time runs out.”