Runs Deeper Read online

  Runs Deeper

  R.D. Brady

  Books by R.D. Brady

  The Belial Series (in order)

  The Belial Stone

  The Belial Library

  The Belial Ring

  Recruit: A Belial Series Novella

  The Belial Children

  The Belial Origins

  The Belial Search

  The Belial Guard

  The Belial Warrior

  The Belial Plan

  The Belial Witches

  The Belial War

  The Belial Fall

  The Belial Sacrifice

  The Steve Kane Series

  Runs Deep

  Runs Deeper

  Stand-Alone Books

  Hominid

  The A.L.I.V.E. Series

  B.E.G.I.N.

  A.L.I.V.E.

  D.E.A.D.

  The Unwelcome Series

  Protect

  Seek

  Proxy

  Published as Riley D. Brady

  The Key of Apollo

  Be sure to sign up for R.D.'s mailing list to be the first to hear when she has a new release!

  Chapter One

  Skaneateles, New York

  The raspy breaths of renowned criminal defense attorney John Hadley warred with the sounds of the heart monitor and pulse oximeter keeping track of his weakening heart. A tinge of chemicals tainted the air, a mixture of disinfectant and sickness.

  Death himself stood next to the bed, knowing he didn’t need to do anything. Hadley’s skin was so thin it was almost transparent, and there was a gray cast to it. Hadley wasn’t long meant for this world. In all honesty, Death could probably just turn around and walk out, and Hadley would still die within the week.

  Death smiled. But where’s the fun in that?

  Golden Oaks Senior Center had been John Hadley’s home for the last five years as his health declined. It was a private, exclusive senior home, an old antebellum mansion, complete with columns at the front door, refurbished as a testament to the wealthy’s ability to travel in comfort to the next world. The forty rooms inside had been renovated to allow for the medical beds and equipment while still maintaining the feel of a luxury home. But the antique finishes and high-thread-count sheets couldn’t prevent what was coming. No one could avoid death.

  But of all the places Death had killed people, he had to admit that this was the nicest. And the easiest to infiltrate. A simple CCTV system monitored the halls but not the rooms. Disabling it was a simple measure of unplugging a cord. After, of course, slitting the throat of the guard monitoring the feeds and shoving him in a closet.

  So now he was free to take his time. A member of John’s large extended family visited him daily, but at night it was just him, a handful of other patients, and the nursing staff. Hadley’s wife Linda had passed away three years ago. His family agreed that was the moment his own health had begun its decline. It was the general consensus that John just wanted to see Linda again.

  Death had read all of that in a newspaper article on the famous criminal defense attorney. It was a pre-obituary: a rundown of the man’s life before he actually died.

  One of the monitors beeped. Death headed over to the darkest corner of the room, crouching down behind the old recliner, careful not to disturb the heavy brocade drapes.

  The door opened, and a stout middle-aged woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, hurried to the bed. She flicked a few buttons on the machines, making a note on the clipboard hanging next to the bed.

  Replacing the clipboard, she stood next to the bed, looking down. She patted John’s arm. “It’s all right, John. Enjoy your dreams. All is well here.” She left the room moments later, closing the door softly behind her.

  Not once did she look in the corner.

  Death stood tilting his head toward the door. Retreating footsteps told him she’d headed back to the first floor. He waited for another thirty seconds before heading back to the bed. There were only two nurses on duty at night, along with the recently deceased security guard. There were, however, another two guards at the main gate who could arrive within a minute.

  And they had dogs.

  Which meant he needed to be very careful in how he extricated himself once he was done.

  Death pulled out the syringe and pulled back the plunger. Sadly, this method meant that John’s would be a quieter death than he generally liked to provide. But never let it be said he couldn’t adapt to circumstances.

  Grabbing the saline line, he inserted the point of the syringe and pushed the plunger, forcing the air into the transparent tubing. Slipping the syringe back in his pocket, he waited. John didn’t stir.

  His gaze flicked to the heart monitor as the rate began to increase. He smiled as it kept increasing. Death has come for you, Johnny boy.

  All the machines seemed to shout out a warning at once. Death quickly slipped back into the corner, this time right behind the door.

  The door swung open. The same nurse bustled in. She hustled to the bed, quickly lowered the head, and began CPR. “Don’t you die on me, John.”

  Death slipped out the door without her even noticing. He walked quickly down the stairs, hearing a nurse from the other floor hurrying down to help. Grabbing an apple from the basket on the counter, he slipped out into the dark night. He took a bite. It was tart, just like he liked it. Above, shadows moved across the windows in Hadley’s room.

  One down. Many more to go.

  Chapter Two

  Auburn, New York

  The communal area of Cellblock 14 in Auburn Penitentiary was filled with over three dozen men in bright-orange jumpsuits. Above them towered two tiers of cells, each normally holding two inmates. But today the cells had been cleared. The inmates were given a choice: yard time or attend the Brotherhood of Eternal Oneness service.

  About half the inmates remained behind, and a few others had been given special permission to join from the other cellblocks. Usually prisons were a mix of sizes, shapes, and ethnicities, although it trended toward minorities. In fact, appearance was one of the only things that the men had left to differentiate themselves from one another. But these men all looked strikingly similar. Each had long, stringy, or bushy hair and shaggy beards.

  Now they all sat on the ground in the common area, their attention focused on the orange-suited speaker in front of them.

  Jack Kane, convicted murderer, raised his hands as he spoke. The group sat in rapt attention, occasionally nodding their heads. Kane had them all spellbound.

  Declan Reed, New York State Police investigator, was in the control tower at Auburn prison, watching Jack’s service. He needed to be here today. He needed to see Jack Kane disappear into the system. He leaned closer to the monitor to get a better look. “Can you get any audio from in there?”

  Hal Franklin, the Auburn guard in the tower with him, raised an impressively bushy eyebrow. “You sure you want to hear that garbage? You don’t want to just wait for the replay?” Hal nudged his chin toward the back of the room.

  A three-person media crew stood filming Jack and his followers. The on-air talent stood with her arms crossed, her foot tapping on the floor impatiently, or maybe nervously. It was hard to tell from this distance. Next to them were two men in suits, surrounded by another six guards. One of the suited men was Doug Bradford, the warden of Auburn Penitentiary.

  Bradford was in his early fifties and had been a police administrator in Albany before being tapped for the warden position. He had a big, ruddy complexion and the beginning of a gut that he tried to hide with larger jackets. Declan thought it made him look like a kid playing dress-up.

  Bradford had granted the media access to the prison. Any other warden would have said no. But Bradford liked the attention notorious serial k
iller Jack Kane drew to his prison. Bradford had plans beyond running a prison. Declan knew he was positioning himself to make a run at commissioner. Bradford thought Jack and the notoriety he brought would help him achieve that. In fact, Bradford had been one of the most vocal voices arguing against Jack’s transfer to the supermax at Southport.

  To say his argument was shocking was an understatement. Jack had started a riot at Auburn a few months back. His followers had killed three other inmates, four guards had been hospitalized, and the damage to the prison had amounted to close to half a million dollars. Bradford had tried to turn the riot into an argument for more money and better services. Jack had been put in solitary for a few days, but as soon as he got out, the warden had allowed media access to Jack’s sermons again, although Jack hadn’t been interviewed. His followers, however, had spoken on his behalf.

  Declan shook his head. Jack had played the man like a fiddle, getting him to do everything he wanted. Declan would have had a little sympathy if it had been any other inmate, but the warden and the rest of the world knew exactly what kind of man Jack was: a violent psychopath without a drop of conscience. Psychopaths made up about eight percent of the population, but most weren’t violent. Oh, they had no conscience, but it tended to manifest through cons that destroyed people’s financial or emotional lives.

  Jack, though, he was that special kind of psychopath who horrified and captivated people’s imaginations. The type who killed because they could and because they simply wanted to. Jack, with his confirmed twenty-seven kills, had now joined the ranks of Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and John Wayne Gacy.

  And the warden had overlooked all of that to extend his own fifteen minutes in the spotlight. Bradford knew who Jack was and still had a large enough ego to think that he was the one using Jack.

  Idiot.

  Back in college, Declan had had a criminology professor who’d explained psychopaths in a way that had stayed with him, even all these years later. She said you needed to think of psychopaths as aliens. Psychopaths do not feel the way normal humans do. They do not think the way normal humans do. They are cold and calculating, like reptiles. Therefore, the best way to understand them was to imagine that if you pulled back their skin, you would see a scaly green skin underneath. The only thing they truly had in common with humans was their appearance.

  Declan shook his head. He’d always thought that was an extreme example. But now that he understood the extent of Jack’s damage, he realized she was right. In fact, she may have even undersold a psychopath’s otherness.

  Declan shrugged, focusing again on Jack leading his “flock.” “Want to? No. Need to? Yeah.”

  With a sigh, Hal flipped a switch. The speakers kicked on. Jack’s voice burst into the control room.

  “Society has told us we are invisible, that we are less than human. They have put us in cages and taken our identities from us. But we know we are meant for greater than this. They cannot remove who we are. We reject their classifications. We reject their labels.”

  Jack’s followers let out a cheer.

  In the community room, the guards shifted, gripping the beanbag rifles they held. Declan shook his head. Jack had somehow convinced his followers that the key to salvation came through rejecting the society that had rejected them.

  “That’s enough,” Declan said.

  Hank quickly lowered the sound. “He gives one of these every week. Before the riot, the warden even broadcast him to other cellblocks.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish. Kane gives me the willies. You see all those guys? They look like mountain men. And the smell …” Hank shuddered. “If they bathe once a month, we’re lucky. The sooner that man is out of here, the better.”

  Jack had started his own religion in lockup—the Brotherhood of Eternal Oneness. They rejected the labels and rules society had placed upon them. The media ate it up, talking about Jack like he was some sort of savior of inmates.

  The fact that the rejection of society’s rules was what had landed all the inmates in the system in the first place seemed to have escaped their notice. They also glossed over the initiation: the removal of an inmate’s fingerprints. Most found ways to burn them off, but a few had cut their fingers at the first knuckle. Fingerprints were how society identified them, and according to Jack, they would no longer give society that option.

  Declan stared at the man he’d known for decades, the man who’d killed dozens of people, starting with his own father when he’d been just a boy and ending with Bess Davidson, his maternal grandmother. Later today, Jack would be firmly ensconced in his cell at Southport Correctional Facility, one of the state’s four supermax prisons. He would be in lockdown twenty-three hours a day and have little contact with outsiders. Usually, Declan was not a supporter of supermax prisons for very many inmates. Research had long demonstrated how damaging that type of isolation could be on the human psyche.

  But Jack’s psyche was already damaged beyond repair. If there was one inmate who deserved to be isolated from the rest of mankind, it was Jack Kane. After all, he was just an alien walking around in human skin. He would survive just fine, just like the crocodiles had.

  Declan smiled as Jack’s gaze drifted over the window to the tower. Yeah, I’m here, Jack. And soon you’ll be tucked so far into a hole that you won’t be able to harm another living soul.

  Chapter Three

  Dover, Maine

  The face of Sigmund Gillespie, Jack’s defense attorney, took up the screen in the living room. Sigmund was an in-demand defense attorney who loved to try his cases in the press. He’d become Jack’s attorney only after Jack had been sentenced to consecutive life sentences.

  Dark hair surrounded a round beefy face as Sigmund glared through the TV screen. “It’s a travesty. Questions still remain as to the guilt of Jack Kane.”

  The camera shifted angles to Jane Macoby, the reporter who’d been granted access to Jack’s last hours in Auburn Penitentiary. “But he was found guilty of twelve counts of murder.”

  Sigmund waved away her words. “Please. The country was caught up in serial killer fever. He did not have an impartial jury. With the media coverage, an impartial jury was impossible. In fact, I have already submitted my motion for a new trial due to ineffective counsel and to have those verdicts overturned. They simply gathered together a group of unsolved crimes, and if Jack was anywhere near the area, they pinned them on him.”

  “What about the murders in Millners Kill? There are eyewitness accounts—”

  “Please. Who are these eyewitnesses? Julie Granger, the sister of one of the victims and the girlfriend of the more likely suspect, Steve Kane? Don’t forget, Steve Kane was found guilty in the murder of Simone Granger.”

  “That verdict has been set aside.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that a jury of his peers found him guilty at the time. And Steve was in Millners Kill at the time of the more recent murders as well. He had just as much opportunity to commit those murders and much more motivation than Jack. After all, the town of Millners Kill turned its back on Steve. I say he was looking for a little payback.”

  Steve Davidson’s gut clenched at his words. Even all these years later, even after he’d changed his name from Kane to Davidson, even after he’d moved to the middle of nowhere, also known as Dover, Maine, the world still tried to link him to the murders in Millners Kill.

  For the most part, he’d avoided watching any of the coverage of Jack behind bars. But Steve knew this was going to be Jack’s last TV appearance for a while. And Steve needed to see him one last time. He wanted to see the monster he’d somehow missed all those years. But it hadn’t helped. With the beard and the long hair, it was hard enough to accept that the inmate was even Jack, never mind a monster.

  Jane’s perfectly manicured eyebrows rose. “Are you saying Steve Kane is responsible for those murders?”

  Sigmund raised his hands, shaking his head. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that.
I am saying, however, that there was a rush to judgment. And until we completely investigate all available suspects, we can’t—”

  The screen went black. Steve jolted, turning around as Julie Davidson, formerly Julie Granger, walked toward him and tossed the remote on the couch. Her brown hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun, her face was absent of makeup, and she wore blue pajamas with pandas on them. She was beautiful.

  “You need to stop torturing yourself.”

  “I’m not. I just wanted to see …” He gestured vaguely toward the TV.

  Julie sank on to the arm of his chair. “See what? What new angle Jack’s taking to try and pin things on you again? It’s over. He should be settled into his new prison by now, and he’s even farther away than he was before. The media won’t have access to him.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Julie tipped his chin up toward her so she could look into his eyes. Steve stared back into the face he knew better than any other. It was the face he wanted to see first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. “Jack took ten years from us. Don’t let him steal another minute.”

  “You’re right. You’re beautiful.” He pulled her into his lap. She let out a small laugh as she slipped her arms around his neck. “You’re perfect.”

  “And I’m all yours.”

  “And you’re all mine.” He lowered his mouth to hers.

  “Daddy? Mommy?”

  Steve sighed, his head dropping to Julie’s forehead before raising it again. Bess Davidson, Steve and Julie’s four, soon-to-be five-year-old daughter walked into the room, rubbing her eyes. Her pajamas proclaimed she was a future CEO. Although at this moment, she was a very tired-looking one. She let out a giant yawn that set her brown curls shaking.

  Steve smiled, his heart expanding like it did every time he looked at her. He and Julie had made this incredible little being. She was the only living blood family that he was proud to acknowledge. “What are you doing up, buttercup?”