Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

Lazlo waited patiently for Stevens’s rant to stop. “See! You didn’t get fired, Tom. If you do this one more thing for me, you will not only be vindicated, but you will have helped to close one of the biggest crime operations this country has seen,” he encouraged.

There was more shouting.

“Look, all you have to do is examine a couple of bodies for evidence. I can’t trust the M.E. not to miss something, especially when it comes to El Gordito. Come on, Tom, this is important!”

“When?”

“I don’t know the exact time, but it will be today. This case is too high-profile to wait for an autopsy on Monday.”

There were more comments on the other end of the line, but now the shouting had stopped. Lazlo finished the conversation with, “OK, I’ll text you the details. Lucy Walker is on reception at the morgue. She’ll let you in, no questions asked.”

Lazlo put his phone down next to his plate and was finally able to take a bite out of the salmon and cream cheese bagel he had prepared. He picked his cup of now-lukewarm coffee and went to pour it out and make himself a fresh one.

Over the sound of his vibrating espresso machine, as it forced hot water through freshly ground and tamped beans, he heard his phone ping. Cousins had sent a text confirming that the chef of Mayhem had been found dead in the same way. Lazlo confirmed receipt by a return text and finished his breakfast before settling into one of the large couches in the living area to watch the news on TV.

It was clear to John that some time would now pass before Lazlo’s friend would be able to take a look at the bodies. The appointed medical examiner would first have to perform the official autopsy and it was a Saturday, so there would be travel time, too.

As he considered what to do in the meantime, his thoughts turned to Jennifer. He couldn’t risk visiting her, but he could, if he was careful enough, get a message to her. A message that would help ease her and her father’s anxiety. The news of El Gordito’s nightclubs being shut down, the immigrant workforce being detained, and possibly a double homicide being pinned on El Gordito should give them hope that things were moving in the right direction.

He just had to come up with a way to get the message to them without actually going anywhere near the apartment where they were staying.

It had taken John two hours to set in motion a process that, he hoped, would get his message delivered to Jennifer. When he returned to the brownstone, he found Lazlo still on the couch, now asleep. He guessed that Lazlo’s friend Tom Stevens still hadn’t called him back with the information he’d been waiting for.

To avoid being seen by other spirits, John had possessed multiple hosts on his way to Kingston Residences and the rental where Jennifer and her father were staying, all the while checking spirit faces for signs of aggression, and mortal faces for signs of possession. Opportunities to discreetly switch hosts had not always presented themselves at just the right location and so, like a hitchhiker, some of the legs of his journey had taken him temporarily in the wrong direction before he could get back on track.

It wasn’t until he had reached Brooklyn Heights that he had finally figured out how to get his message delivered. He had exited one of his hosts on Piedmont Street, in front of another condo building two doors away from the Kingston Residences building. The doorman had caught his host, a young woman, as she fainted upon John’s departure, and John had slipped into the lobby where he had found all he needed in reception to write a note and seal it in an envelope. He had left it on the reception desk with the full address of the rental. He hoped that the receptionist, who was pre-occupied with catching up on social media on her phone, would eventually find the envelope and have it forwarded to the correct building. The message gave a brief update and was signed with a heart and a ‘J.’ To avoid using her real name on the envelope, John had marked it for the attention of Miss Holly Gibney––a reference to a character that Jennifer had liked in a series of novels by Stephen King. It seemed fitting––the heroine frequently encountered the supernatural and was involved in crime fighting.

Now, John was having a well-earned rest at Lazlo’s brownstone. It was a few minutes after eight in the evening when the detective was awoken by a text on his phone. Tom Stevens had written that he had just left the morgue and was on his way. He would be outside Lazlo’s house, waiting in his car, in twenty-five minutes.

When Stevens’ gray Camaro arrived, Lazlo went out to the street and got into the passenger seat. John sat in one of the rear seats, listening in as Stevens gave the details of his examination. In his opinion, the bruising on the bodies of both chefs was consistent with them being bound and force-fed. In addition, the body of Ignacio Felix had the edge of one of his front teeth broken. The break had caused a fissure along the length of the tooth, within which Stevens had found a sample of blood together with a small piece of latex. Stevens theorized that at some point, the sharp edge of the tooth had cut through the glove and skin of one of the assailants’ hands. Blood had been drawn, and the fissure had caught a sample of both blood and glove. Despite the presence of stomach bile in the mouth, he explained that it did not appear to have compromised the blood sample. Probably because it was so tightly packed in, with the latex acting like a seal. Stevens admitted that the sample wasn’t a lot to work with,