Duplicity--A Tale of Murder Mystery and Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Duplicity

  Copyright

  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

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  Complete List of Titles

  About the Author

  DUPLICITY

  A SMOKE & MIRRORS BOOK

  A Tale of Murder, Mystery and Romance

  H. D. THOMSON

  DUPLICITY: A SMOKE & MIRRORS BOOK - 2

  by H. D. Thomson

  Previously published as Shrouded in Mystery in 2012 by Bella Media Management

  Copyright © 2012, 2016 H. D. Thomson

  All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in whole or in part, scanned, photocopied, recorded, distributed in any printed or electronic form, or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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

  Formatting and cover by Bella Media Management.

  True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

  —Arthur Ashe

  Chapter 1

  He came to with a jolt. Wind rushed through the broken windshield and slashed vicious tentacles against his face, while shattered glass and snow lay scattered across the dashboard and his lap. Pain cut into his skull and the back of his neck. With a tentative hand, he touched his brow and came away with damp fingers.

  Blood.

  He blinked several times, unable to understand why he sat behind the wheel of a car.

  Some type of car accident? He couldn’t remember.

  The vehicle rested at an odd angle, its nose dipped downward, and the driver’s side tilted toward the pine tops. Waning light turned a cloudless sky to a dirty gray. Dawn or dusk? He didn’t know. He couldn’t think. How had he gotten here?

  Lifting his hands, he peered at them. They were large, long-fingered, and free of calluses. Fine brown hairs dusted their backs. Stranger’s hands. His hands.

  He wrestled for answers—a memory, an image, a clue to his identity—anything.

  Nothing but a black, empty slate.

  Panic welled in his throat and cut off the air to his lungs. He couldn’t remember anything about himself. He didn’t have a name, a past, a family. He didn’t exist.

  Finally, he managed to drag in a lungful of air, but its frigid sting rushed past his throat and into his lungs too fast. Oxygen flooded his head, and white sparks danced across his peripheral vision.

  No. He needed to stop. Now. And focus. Think.

  He forced himself to relax, to calm the wild thump of his heart. After a moment, he managed to breathe in a slow, steady rhythm, and the panic eased. He turned and noticed the passenger to his right. A man sat slumped, silent, his body thrown forward and held in place by his seatbelt.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  No answer.

  He nudged the man’s shoulder with a hand. “Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  Something wasn’t right.

  He unbuckled his seatbelt and slapped a palm against the dashboard to stop from pitching forward. Awkwardly, he twisted in his seat, eased forward and ducked to get a better look at the person’s face. That’s when he noticed the hole above the passenger’s open and unblinking eye. For several long, heartrending seconds, he stared at how the blood pooled from the wound, and then dripped, again and again, slowly but steadily onto the person’s jean-clad leg.

  A gunshot wound. Had to be. “Jesus!”

  Until now, he hadn’t noticed the pungent odor of death and how it clung to the interior of the car. At the stench, his stomach lurched but kept from heaving its contents.

  The passenger wasn’t even a man but a kid in his late teens. A dead one at that. And the boy sure as hell didn’t die from a car accident with a bullet hole in his head.

  Repulsed by the idea, but determined to find something of importance, he dug inside both outer pockets of the teenager’s jacket. He needed something to tell him what the hell was going on or at least who sat dead in the car with him. Next, he unzipped the kid’s jacket and felt around. His fingers caught on something jutting from a shirt pocket. He pulled it out and lifted it up to get a better view.

  A picture. He managed to make out that it was a photo of the passenger and a woman with her arm draped over his shoulders. They stood in front of a building of some type. He turned the photo over and read:

  Me and Katherine at the Morning Dove.

  At least it was something. But not nearly enough to tell him who either one of them was.

  Had he been the one to kill the kid?

  There’d have to be a gun.

  Quickly, he stuffed the picture inside the pocket of his down jacket and started searching. The fading light forced him to grope around the seat and floor by his feet and that of the dead teenager. He reached for the glove box, the most logical place for a weapon, and kept his gaze away from the body.

  He didn’t find a weapon inside, but he did find a flashlight, which he flipped on and aimed at the car’s floor. Still no gun. The relief was almost immobilizing. Because if he’d found a gun, he’d have proof that he’d murdered the boy. The idea of sticking the barrel of a gun into that kid’s face—

  No. He didn’t want to go there.

  He aimed the light in the back of the car where the beam caught on a navy blue duffle bag. Finally something. Not liking the idea of reaching over the back and brushing up against the dead teen, he decided to go outside and around. He opened the door, jumped out, and landed in a foot of snow, which seeped under his pants and bit into his skin.

  Suddenly lightheaded, he bent over and rested his hands across his knees. Eyeglasses, he hadn’t noticed until now, slipped from his nose and fell to the ground. He plucked them from a snow as gray and lifeless as the sky and put them back on. When he rose, a wave of dizziness seized him. He swayed and latched onto the car’s roof with one hand. God, he was weaker than he’d thought.

  After he regained his equilibrium, he opened the back door, unzipped the duffle bag and aimed the light inside. And froze. He’d hoped for some clue to his past—anything—but what he discovered was far from what he’d imagined.

  Cold, hard cash. The bag was stuffed with bundles of it, all tied by bank straps. With the flashlight trained on the bag’s interior, he lifted one bundle out and fanned the top edges and did it again to ensure he wasn’t hallucinating. Hundreds
. Every single one of them. The bills trembled against his fingers, while his heart rate kicked into a rapid rhythm. At the very least, there had to be more than a hundred thousand in front of him.

  How? Why? What type of person carried this amount of money around with them?

  He dropped the bundle back into the bag, opened the sides wider and realized he wasn’t done. Far from it. Something large rested inside. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled the item from the bag. Beneath, the flashlight’s beam, the dark silver gleamed as if recently polished.

  A gun.

  “Holy Shit.”

  Something big had gone down, and he’d been involved. But what?

  He hated the feel of the gun beneath his fingers as he shoved it back in the bag. But even though he disliked touching the weapon, he’d obviously found it important enough keep one around.

  What the hell type of person was he?

  Then he heard something other than the wind through the pines. A cry. It had a distinct rhythm, growing low, then high, increasing in intensity as it approached.

  He stilled.

  The murdered teen, the cash, the gun. All incriminating, all unexplainable. The police or paramedics would never believe him. He didn’t even believe himself.

  Fear shot him into action. He grabbed the bag—he might have lost his mind, but he wasn’t stupid enough to leave something like that behind—pivoted and stumbled away from the car and the dead boy.

  He left a visible trail in his wake, but he didn’t see any other option with a deep carpet of snow covering every dip and mound of dirt. Even though it should have impeded his movements and momentum, he dodged trees, jumped over snow-crested logs and jogged his way through the thick, white powder with astonishing speed and agility.

  After a good half-hour, he slowed to a walk, surprised at how his lungs and limbs quickly recovered from the demanding pace he’d forced on both.

  The siren had long since died, while darkness had descended in its entirety. Surely if he’d been followed, they’d have found him by now. Even though somewhat reassured by the thought, he continued through the forest.

  A noise crashed from behind. He jerked around and searched the darkness, moving backward with cautious steps. Another sound. He stopped and listened. He heard the flap of wings and a rustle of leaves.

  A bird.

  He laughed and turned back around. His feet hit black, wet tarmac. Headlights flashed and blinded him. He stumbled back. A horn blasted. Wind hit him in the face.

  A car sped past, feet from where he stood. His heart hammered against his ribs. Two more steps and he’d have been coating the car.

  The moon broke through the clouds, illuminating pines and snow on either side of a two-lane highway. He kept to the edge of the road, his rubber-soled boots scraping against small rocks and broken asphalt. Maybe being visible to anyone who drove by wasn’t the smartest move but getting lost in the forest wasn’t any better. If he didn’t find some form of shelter soon, frostbite would be the least of his worries.

  The duffle bag against his side felt reassuring yet unsettling, while the gun inside felt a whole hell of a lot more than unsettling. Shivering, he stuffed his hands into his coat pockets and flexed his fingers to try to work the stiffness from their joints. When he brushed something from inside one of them, he pulled out a plastic rectangle, possibly a card of some type.

  Even with the moon as a source of light, he couldn’t make it out. He grabbed the flashlight from his back pocket and pointed its beam on the card. After a moment, he realized it was a driver’s license. He didn’t know why the I.D. was in his coat pocket instead of a wallet. He was too damn thankful to have some type of identification.

  He glanced at the picture. The person in the photo had gray eyes, short, brown hair, thick-framed glasses and a wide jaw—none of it familiar—which didn’t mean anything. He didn’t think he’d recognize his own reflection if he looked in the mirror. Aloud, he read the first name on the license.

  “Clark.”

  He repeated it along with the last name, rolled the syllables between his tongue and lips and tried to get a feel for it. There was no dawning realization or understanding, no sudden burst of recognition. The name didn’t mean anything. But there was an address.

  “Boston. Finally, I’ve got something!”

  Getting there didn’t bother him. He had enough cash to hire a pilot if he needed to. And once in Boston, he should be able to get some answers.

  With a sense of purpose now, Clark stuffed the license back in his pocket and searched his other ones for a wallet or any other form of identification. All he found was a package of spearmint gum in his pants’ pocket, and he could barely make that out because his glasses had filmed with moisture. No wonder he’d had such a hard time reading his driver’s license.

  With the flashlight cradled beneath an armpit, he used the collar of his flannel shirt to wipe the lenses and the same frames like the ones in the photo. When he put them back on, Clark noticed his vision, even with the aid of the flashlight, hadn’t improved. Puzzled, he took his glasses off again and aimed the flashlight’s beam at the lenses. He scowled. They were nothing but plain glass.

  Why was he walking around with non-prescription glasses? Were they a disguise? Even though none of it made sense, there had to be some rational explanation. Well, until he learned the reason, he’d keep wearing them.

  A faint rumble disturbed the evening air. The sound grew louder as Clark moved along the road. A car’s engine. He thought of diving back in the woods, but if he didn’t get out of these harsh elements, he was liable to die from exposure. Tense, expecting the worse, he turned and relaxed somewhat. A pickup, not a patrol car, appeared around the bend in the road.

  Maybe his luck was turning around. Hell, it couldn’t get much worse.

  Hitching up a thumb, he waited and hoped for two things: one, the driver hadn’t witnessed any police or paramedics with sirens, and two, they were kind or naive enough to pick up a hitchhiker.

  The pickup rushed past, and then slowed and rolled to a stop a couple hundred feet away. Without giving the driver a chance to change his mind, Clark ran down the road, opened the passenger door and peered inside.

  A heavy-set man with a baseball cap, in a desperate need of a shave and shower, sat behind the wheel. He took one look at Clark and whistled. “You okay buddy? Your face looks like it met up with a two-by-four.”

  Clark heard the suspicion in the driver’s voice and explained, “More like a steering wheel. I had a tire blow out a couple miles back and hit a ditch.”

  The man snapped a piece of gum between his teeth and seemed to hesitate as if weighing his options. “Hop in. I’m going as far as Pinetop.”

  Thank God. Clark slipped inside the interior’s warmth and slammed the door behind him.

  “Not the best place to break down.” The driver shifted his rear against the vinyl seat and steered the truck back onto the road. “Since we’re going to be up close and personal for a while—the name’s Stu. And you’re?”

  “Clark. Clark Kent.”

  Chapter 2

  “What’s wrong?”

  Katherine Spalding placed the receiver back in its cradle. She looked up to where George, her assistant, stood by the doorway to her office of Morning Dove’s Youth Shelter for the Homeless.

  “Kincaid’s donation hasn’t come in this month, and I’m getting the runaround from his office. He’s dodging me as if I were the Black Plague.”

  George leaned a jean-clad hip against the doorframe and rubbed at his gray beard. “It could be bad timing or a busy schedule.”

  “I don’t think so. Until now, he’s always returned my calls.”

  “Maybe it’s time we started looking around for another company with some spare change. But right now, it’s late. Worry about it tomorrow. You’ve been here since six this morning, and it’s almost six now.”

  She looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh, shoot. I’m going to be lat
e if I don’t get moving. I promised to have dinner with my parents. They’ve invited some of the family over tonight.”

  “There you go. Get out of here and have some fun.”

  “You don’t know my parents.”

  George raised a thick, gray eyebrow. “Then, all I can say is ‘best of luck’.”

  Her lips twitched. “Thanks, I might need it.”

  After she shrugged into her jacket and grabbed her purse from under her desk, Katherine followed George down the hall and into the lobby. At the front door, she paused and glanced back at George. She’d almost forgotten. “You haven’t seen Brian today, have you?”

  “Nope. Sorry. He’ll show up.”

  “Hmm. I hope so.”

  But she wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t seen him for weeks, and even if he’d ended back on the street, word would have gotten back to her. There was a close-knit network out there. She’d checked with the police, and they’d put out a missing person’s bulletin, but it hadn’t helped. In their eyes, hunting down a homeless teenager was the least of their worries.

  The sad part was Brian had shown so much promise. He’d been off crack for a month and searching for a job. Now it looked like he’d either gone underground or moved out of the city.

  George’s weathered face turned somber. “Get that look off your face. You should know more than anyone that you can’t save the world. So don’t start getting yourself trapped in that mindset. Otherwise, you won’t be much help to anyone. Some of these kids are beyond hope by the time they find this place, and no matter how much support we give them, it doesn’t mean they’ll make the right choices. They all have free will.”

  “I know. But it doesn’t make it any easier—”

  “Will you stop—”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll stop worrying. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She waved a farewell.

  After stepping outside, she pulled her collar up against her neck, stuffed her bare hands into her pockets, and huddled deeper into her coat. Mid-January in Boston and she was already tired of the winter and all it entailed. Other than Thanksgiving and Christmas, this was the busiest and saddest time of the year for her.