TELL ME WHAT YOU'VE DONE
Just a little sneak peek of TELL ME WHAT YOU'VE DONE Book 2 in the Striker and Frost series.
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Prologue
It was a hard life, but at least it was a life.
Things hadn’t always been this rough for Stephanie Barringer. She wasn’t born into the sex trade, wasn’t trafficked as a child.
Wasn’t molested or abused.
But she had fallen on hard times. It started with the divorce. Messy, often brutal. Steph thought she’d come out ahead. And, for a short time, she had. The courts had granted her full custody of Tracy even though she hadn’t held a real job in years. This wasn’t her fault—she’d wanted to work but her husband said that it wasn’t necessary. He was old school, told her that it was her job to raise Tracy, his to make them feel safe and comfortable.
He’d done more than that. Topher Barringer had bought a five-bedroom home with a large backyard in one of the nicer areas of Orange County. It wasn’t Hollywood big, but it was too big for them.
And while Steph sometimes missed working, it was easy to fall into the sheltered lifestyle her husband provided for her and their only daughter. All the while, she remained adamant that she only had one hard and fast rule: no cheating. Her own parents had divorced when she’d been only six years old and she didn’t want to subject Tracy, then only three, to anything remotely similar.
And her parents’ divorce had been amicable.
But Topher’s old school mentality extended to what he believed to be his patriarchal rights, as well.
Steph had ignored the first few signs of infidelity by telling herself that this was just her history as a child of divorced parents making her paranoid.
But the evidence soon became too great to dismiss. She’d challenged Topher on this, and he’d denied everything. A good liar was he, and, for a time, Steph believed him.
She hated herself for believing him. Should have known better. Should have trusted her instincts.
Steph caught her husband in bed with another woman just three months after she’d first suspected anything nefarious was going on.
He tried to deny it. Still.
Even when she found her husband between some random woman’s legs, doing things that he rarely, if ever did, to her, Topher played the fool.
But Steph stuck to her guns, stuck to her only rule.
She’d filed for divorce, and he’d fought her. This was not to be confused with fighting for her or for their daughter.
This was fighting for the sake of fighting, to prove that he had a bigger dick than she did.
And she’d won.
Topher was ordered to pay nearly five grand in child support each and every month. She even got to keep the house.
At first, Topher paid. For half a year, Steph, who was then looking for work, which proved difficult on account of being out of the workforce for so long, got a nice little present in her account on the first of every month.
The seventh expected payment was delayed. Steph had called Topher, and he’d apologized, said he was working on it.
The money came on the 8th.
It arrived two weeks the following month and it never showed up on the ninth.
Steph had tried—she’d tried to get the money. Bills needed to be paid.
Tracy’s after school care, her car payments, gym membership, groceries. The stuff of everyday life.
In addition to child support, Topher also paid the mortgage.
For a while, anyway.
But then, like the child support payments, these too stopped coming. He’d somehow managed, with the help of his lawyers, no doubt, to shift the ownership into her name without her knowledge.
Bills piled up, collections came calling.
Steph sold her car, a nice BMW, and this held them off for a while.
She sought legal counsel, tried to force Topher to pay what was owed. But he was more experienced in these matters.
And he was ruthless.
She lost the house, and the lawyers took what little money she had left with no results to speak off. Steph was confident that they’d done their best, but they were no match for Topher’s gray-haired $750 an hour team.
She lost everything.
No longer able to afford after school care, Steph had Tracy to look after, too. Even the most compassionate job interviewers didn’t take kindly to having the confused, and now argumentative, eight and a half year old wreaking havoc on waiting rooms.
They placated her, offered her useless platitudes when all Steph wanted was a job.
Any fucking job.
She didn’t get one. Not a single offer.
It broke her heart to see Tracy suffering, to see her hungry every night and crying about wanting daddy, wanting things to go back to the way they were.
None of this was Steph’s fault, but guilt cared little for other feelings. Like Topher, it was a selfish beast.
Desperate, Steph had no choice but to turn to the oldest profession in the world.
Turning tricks.
It wasn’t… so bad.
And she’d just, sort of, fallen into it. Her first date had been just that, a date, a way to get a free dinner. But then, the man, who was shaped like a potato and whose personality had reflected his physique, asked her if she wanted to come back to his place for a night cap.
Steph had reluctantly agreed and after too many drinks, she’d slept with him.
It felt wrong, but the three hundred bucks that he’d slipped into her pocket felt less wrong.
It had been about a year and a half since that first encounter, and Steph Barringer had been turning tricks ever since.
She was always safe, usually only seeing one or two handpicked clients a week. Never two in one night and always at a location that she selected.
Always with protection.
Her experience with her deceptive and manipulative ex-husband had taught her to trust her instincts and if anything so much as felt a little off, Steph backed out without hesitation.
Today was different. She’d only planned to see one client, a quasi-regular, but a second encounter was made available, and it was an easy gig.
She’d taken it.
The John was a college kid, a virgin. His friends paid in advance and the soft-spoken, yet kind student spent most of his time with her just talking.
He was nervous and when she’d put her hand on his leg, he’d nearly come.
The deed itself lasted less than ten minutes. The kid had been surprisingly gentle, and Steph left the shitty pay-by-the-hour hotel with another three hundred dollars in her pocket.
She walked briskly through the cool night air, hands jammed deep in her jeans and clutching the six neatly folded one hundred dollar bills.
Tracy was alone, watching cartoons in a hotel room that was only a small step up from the one she’d just left.
She was thinking about what they were going to order for dinner—Tracy would want pizza because she always wanted pizza, but Steph was in the mood for a good burger—when she first heard footsteps behind her.
She didn’t turn, but she did pick up her pace just a little.
It’s probably just a junkie, she thought. Another person down on their luck doing what they had to do to survive.
But when the footsteps seemed to echo a little more quickly, matching her pace, Steph’s skin started to crawl.
She wasn’t quite at the point that she felt the need to break into a run, but she was close. She was primed.
If she’d just chanced a glance—a single glance—over her shoulder, Steph might have succumbed to this urge. But by the time she realized just how much danger she was in, something had already been slipped over her head.
It was thick and had that uncanny plastic stink of a water bottle straight off the production line.
Steph cried out and now tried to run.
It was too late.
She couldn’t breathe… all she could taste was plastic.
The person holding the bag over her head cinched the opening tight and Steph fell to her knees.
Fighting her assailant was probably her best chance of survival, but her body’s desperate need for oxygen overrode all other faculties.
She clawed at the bag, tried to slip her fingers between it and her constricted throat to no avail.
Every time she inhaled, open-mouthed, the plastic made a horrible thwap sound as it filled her oral cavity.
Her eyes bulged, her throat and lungs felt as if they were on fire.
Please… I have a daughter.
As her vision began to fade to black, Steph felt another, almost abstract, sensation.
Her pants… someone was wrenching down her pants.
The last thing Stephanie Barringer thought before her entire world went numb was that maybe Tracy was right.
Maybe a good slice of pepperoni pizza was what they should have for dinner tonight.
Part I — Day One
Chapter 1
FBI Agent Constantine Striker jammed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it.
Warm air filled his lungs, and he exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. Cigarette dangling from between his lips, Con attacked the first of what seemed an infinite number of cardboard boxes stacked in his mother’s basement.
It was a job he’d been putting off for years.
Years.
It was hard to believe that his father had died that long ago in a nothing car accident. Ironic, considering that Donnie Striker had been a career long haul trucker, a man with more experience on the road than, well, almost anyone. And then to be sideswiped by a distracted woman driving a minivan. The airbags failed to deploy, and he suffered from massive head trauma resulting in his death.
Con took another drag of his smoke and opened the first box. Inside, he discovered a stack of manifests printed on accordion style pages with faded dot-matrix ink.
Con took the first of these out, only to realize that they were all connected.
He read the opening page, allowing the rest to remain folded in the box.
It was from 1994, when he and his sister Val had only been four years old. The manifest outlined a job for a company called Warten Mills and involved the shipment of 16,000 pounds of produce from Orange County to New York City, a trip totaling 2,800 miles. For this job, Donnie billed Warten $2,950.
Not bad money for 1994, Con guessed.
He flipped the sheet and read the next manifest. It was a similar job, this time from Hollywood to Omaha, Nebraska.
The third job, California to Montana.
Con perused these for a few minutes, trying to think back to what he was doing when his father was traveling across the country.
Impossible to know.
Not only were his memories of his childhood generally foggy—the only clear ones he had were their tense Sunday dinners, when his father would return from a job exhausted and irritable—but he was only four at the time. He knew from his FBI training that memories typically didn’t form until three years old, and sometimes as late as six.
No, he remembered little of his childhood.
Not one for nostalgia, especially when he had such minimal recollection of the time, Con put the pages back in the box and moved onto the next.
It was much of the same, stacks upon stacks of travel manifests.
Jesus, he worked a lot, Con thought. There must have been a couple hundred jobs spanning only a few years.
Con shoved this box with the first off to one side. Rather than look at more of the same, he moved to other boxes near the back of the dank basement. Unlike the others, which were piled at least five or six high, this particular stack only had two boxes.
Con opened the top box, expecting more manifests. He was surprised to find a pile of faded newspaper articles inside.
Curious, Con blew dust off and then flicked his cigarette ash to the concrete floor as he waited for his vision to clear.
The article was from a publication that he didn’t recognize. Con scanned the header.
“Edwardsville Intelligencer?”
What the fuck is that?
The front page of the Wednesday, February 7th, 1996 edition was divided into six uneven sections. The headline article was about the opening of the new Edwardsville Library. The black and white, pixelated image showed a man with a tremendous mustache and over-sized scissors cutting a ribbon on the steps of a rather pedestrian looking building.
The next article had to do with a fund-raiser for the local fire department.
The only section that held Con’s interest was the smallest of the six panels.
Local Woman Still Missing.
Francine Guinnette, 32, was last seen coming home from her night class at Lewis and Clark Community College. She never made it home and hasn’t been seen since. If you have any knowledge of Francine’s whereabouts, please call the Edwardsville Police Department.
An image of the woman, plain, with dark hair and thin lips, about an eighth of the size of the man with the scissors, was inlaid in the short article.
Con looked up when he heard the basement door creak open.
“Mr. Striker?”
“Yeah?”
“In the real estate notes, I’ve listed your mother’s house as a non-smoking household.”
Her voice had a nagging twang to it that Con supposed they taught real estate agents in school or wherever they got their accreditation from.
Con took another drag then butted out with his heel.
“I’m not,” he lied.
“Well…”
Con put the article back in the box and then made his way to the bottom of the stairs. He supposed that the agent was attempting to look at him with something akin to disdain, but years of Botox abuse gave her a perpetually doughy, almost apathetic expression.
“Please, Mr. Striker, if you insist on smoking, do so outside. Otherwise, I’ll have to change the—“
Con’s phone started to ring, and the tune to Frosty the Snowman, warped by his jeans, filled the basement.
He answered without looking at the call display.
“Frost?”
“Hey, Con. Marcus has been trying to reach you, but he couldn’t get through.”
I know—I’ve been screening the asshole’s calls.
“And?”
“He reached out to me. We have a case… a dead street worker.”
Con closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. He was well aware that the real estate agent was still looking at him, but he didn’t care.
“And why does he want us to take the case? Why isn’t local PD on it?”
“Marcus didn’t say but I’m guessing because it’s a particularly brutal murder. The vic was suffocated then bludgeoned to death. She was also raped.”
Con’s eyes snapped open.
“Send me the address, I’ll be right there.”
“Will do. See you soon.”
Con hung up the phone and started up the stairs. The agent continued to look at him as if he owed her an explanation and he was forced to gesture aggressively to get her to move out of his way.
Apparently upset that he hadn’t elaborated on his private phone call, as if she had any right to know and as if Con had even the slightest inclination to tell her shit, she scowled.
This expression, strangely enough, was still part of her paralyzed repertoire.
“Mr. Striker, did you go through the boxes? If I’m to show this place later today, it’s best—“
“Get rid of them,” he said sharply, throwing on a light jacket and grabbing his keys off the long table by the front door.
“Don’t you want to—“
Con looked the woman in the eyes.
“Just get rid of the boxes.” He hesitated, then added, “All of them.”
Chapter 2
Alex Frost tied her hair up in a loose ponytail. It was the second or third time she’d done this and each time it ended up messier than the last.
It was just something to do while she waited for her partner to arrive. Anything so that she didn’t have to look at the victim again.
Fuck, it was brutal. Too brutal. The worst crime that she’d ever come across.
Nothing else even came close.
It made Alex sick to her stomach just thinking about it, and she knew that she’d have nightmares for months.
But she had a job to do. Whoever the woman was, she had a family somewhere, a family who deserved to know why something like this happened to their daughter or sister or wife.
Alex cleared her throat and turned in the direction of the approaching car. It was Con’s, and he pulled up to the yellow crime scene tape and parked.
The man got out, ran a hand through his short black hair and then immediately lit a cigarette. She watched as he took in the scene, noting that his eyes didn’t immediately go to the body, which had been discovered near the back of a parking lot on a small grassy section.
Alex was always trying to learn. Even now, even though her heart raced, and her stomach roiled, she was trying to improve her investigative skills.
Con looked at the building off to the right. His gaze fell on the corrugated metal bay doors, which remained closed. Then he glanced behind him, at the road that he’d just arrived from, to the motel and fast food restaurant across the street.
Apparently satisfied, he nodded to himself and then approached.
There were maybe twenty unformed officers at the scene, as well as the medical examiner and a handful of fully garbed crime scene technicians. Two of the latter had already excused themselves and Alex had spotted one of them vomiting behind a car.
She didn’t blame him and thought that she might feel better if she did the same. This was one of the rare instants where her pride actually came in handy.
When Art Abner, LAPD Northeast Area District—NAD for short—police chief arrived on the scene and had, on account of the sheer brutality of the crime, requested FBI involvement, none of the cops expected a young, pretty, and admittedly inexperienced Agent to show up.
Vomiting in front of them would only reinforce the stereotype that they’d undoubtedly formed while assessing her presence.
“Agent Frost,” Con said with a nod.
“Agent Striker,” she replied.
Con’s dark brow lowered a little and Alex suspected this was on account of her looking a little green. Maybe more than a little.
Art Abner, who had been speaking with a uniformed officer, noticed Con and waddled over. He was a big man, thick around the middle, with a formidable white mustache.
“Con, glad you could make it,” Art said, extending a meaty hand.
Con shook it.
“I’m glad to see your doing well, AA,” Con said, looking the man up and down.
AA held up his right arm and rolled it around in the socket.
“All healed up.” AA paused, the smile that was just barely visible beneath his mustache fading now. It was clear that even he was taken aback by the crime scene and needed a moment. Con let him have it. “You ready?”
A stall tactic if there ever was one, but Alex’s partner didn’t call him on it. While Con had never explicitly outlined the nature of his relationship with the police chief, Alex got the impression that it went back aways.
Perhaps not as far back as The Sandman, but near enough not to matter. AA was one of the few members of law enforcement in perhaps all of California who didn’t loathe Con.
“Ready.”
AA lifted the yellow tape and Con ducked beneath it first.
Alex was pleased to see that, like her, most of the cops were performing menial tasks—rooting through their pockets, sifting through the contents of their vehicles’ gloveboxes, doodling on a notepad—in order to avoid the crime scene.
Alex knew that Con wouldn’t think any less of her if she stayed away, too, but she felt obligated to be by his side when he finally saw the victim.
The trio strode to the far edge of the parking lot.
One of the CSU techs who hadn’t been sick, or perhaps before they’d vomited, had covered the body with a gray tarp.
AA nodded at a tech then cocked his head in the direction of the body.
The man, who was wearing a black, vinyl outfit drawn tight around the openings, squatted, then used a gloved hand to pinch the edge of the tarp.
He inhaled sharply, then finally pulled it back.
“Jesus,” Con whispered.
Alex exercised controlled breathing, something her Senator father had taught her and that he employed early in his career when he felt nervous before a big speaking event, and then forced herself to look.
The bludgeoned head was the most gruesome thing that Alex had ever seen. Wrapped in a clear, thick plastic bag, there were no discernible features left. Just a mass of red and gray and white, like a poorly mixed oat and strawberry smoothie. The murder weapon, whatever it was, had been so viciously used on the head that it had torn the bag in several places.
Yet, despite this gore, it was the lower half that somehow disturbed Alex most. There were no obvious injuries here and the woman’s shirt, low cut, revealing the tops of ample breasts, was undisturbed. Her jeans were a different story. They had been pulled down to her knees and her purple lace underwear had also been lowered. Her genitals, shaved, were exposed to the early morning air.
Con sighed, looked away.
“Who found her?”
“Worker at the packaging plant. Called it in immediately,” AA answered. “He… wasn’t well. Paramedics took him to the hospital. I sent an officer with them—he isn’t going anywhere.”
“Has the medical examiner announced a cause of death?”
Alex cocked an eyebrow, and her confused expression was reflected on AA’s round face.
“… cause of death?” the police chief repeated hesitantly.
“Was she suffocated before being bludgeoned?”
“Ah, hold on.” AA’s eyes moved from the body to a muscular man with round glasses. “Dr. Horn?”
The ME lifted his head and walked over.
“Any conclusion on the cause of death?”
Unlike Alex and AA, the ME didn’t find the query unusual.
“Impossible to tell right now. Once I get the body back to the morgue, I should be able to call it.”
“Was she raped?”
Another strange question from Con.
Of course, she was raped. Look at her pants and underwear.
“Again, inconclusive. Will know more at the morgue.”
Con nodded.
He appeared pensive for a moment then added, “If she was raped, I want to know if it was done pre or postmortem.”
“Noted.”
Con returned his attention to AA.
“Any ID on the body?”
This time, AA snapped his fingers at a different technician than the one who had pulled the tarp back. That man appeared poised to replace the cover at a moment’s notice.
The second tech produced a plastic evidence bag. In it, Alex saw a metal key and what looked like five or six one hundred dollar billers folded in half.
“No ID, just cash and the key.”
Con took the bag and pressed the plastic against the key to read the engraving.
“Twilight Motel, Room 22,” he said, handing the bag back. Then Con came over to Alex. “I know where it is. Come on, let’s go. I’m driving.”
Alex nodded, grateful to be as far away from the body as possible.
“I’ll keep you updated, AA,” Con said over his shoulder.
“Good.”
Then she heard the big man finally tell the tech, with what sounded like relief in his voice, to replace the tarp over the victim.
I hope you've enjoyed this preview of TELL ME WHAT YOU'VE DONE.
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