Unlocking Darkness (Keys to Love Series, Book Five)

  UNLOCKING DARKNESS

  Keys to Love, Book Five

  Kennedy Layne

  UNLOCKING DARKNESS

  Copyright © 2018 by Kennedy Layne

  Kindle Edition

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-943420-47-6

  Print ISBN: 978-1-943420-48-3

  Cover Designer: Sweet ’N Spicy Designs

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Dedication

  Jeffrey—Another series complete with so many more to go! Thank you for being my partner on this crazy writing journey. I love you!

  Cole—You’re completing a series of your own…your first semester of college. We are so proud of you!

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About Magical Blend

  Books by Kennedy Layne

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twelve years ago…

  When did a person accept their fate?

  Emma Irwin’s hope for being saved had all but been extinguished. No one was going to save her from the hands of this monster. No one even knew she was on a boat in the middle of the lake with someone she’d mistakenly trusted her entire life. He’d been a close family friend, a helpful neighbor, and someone she would have never thought could be so intimately cruel.

  “I’ll come and visit with you.”

  Emma swallowed against the bile that rose in her throat. She lifted her face toward the darkened sky that was crying the tears she couldn’t. She’d literally gone completely numb, but she wasn’t sure that was due to the cold or the fact that he was taking her to her death.

  She wasn’t ready to die so young.

  The fishing boat rocked back and forth as the waves churned fiercely. The gusts of wind were following the storm to the east, though the rumbling of thunder could still be heard over the steady hum of the engine. There were no stars to be seen, no moon to light the way…only angry streaks of lightning that signaled the end was near.

  Would she be dead long before the storm had passed?

  Emma was no longer shivering as her thoughts once again turned to her family. She didn’t want them to think she wasn’t happy. Would they believe that she no longer loved them? How was it possible to miss them so much while she was still breathing?

  She would give absolutely anything to be back home, warm and comfortable in her bed. As it stood, tomorrow morning would dawn a new day filled with people moving to and from without her anywhere to be found.

  That longing for what she would probably never experience again gave her one last ounce of strength to fight against the smiling monster that had been hidden amongst the residents of Blyth Lake.

  Emma kicked her legs with as much force as she could muster, trying desperately to grab the side of the boat. Her reaction did seem to stun him, but only for a second. He grabbed her wet strands of hair and all but threw her against one of the vinyl-covered cushions that were mounted to the square bench seats that spanned the width of the fishing boat. With her wrists bound behind her back, it had been a futile attempt. She landed once again on the aluminum bottom of the boat, causing her to cry out in pain when her hands dug into her lower back.

  “Why are you fighting this?” He began wrapping her legs tightly in a metal chain that never seemed to end. She wasn’t sure why she continued to scream when no one was around to hear her pleas. By this point, she barely had a voice left. “I’ll bring you a sister soon, I promise. Until then, I’ll come and visit with you as much as possible. We will all be a family…the one I’ve always wanted.”

  Emma tried to tell him that she already had a family—a mother and father who loved her very much. She also had a sister who she worshiped, not that Shae would ever know that to be the truth. Their last words had been said in anger, and nothing Emma did now could take back those words of animosity said only in the heat of the moment.

  Tears that she didn’t know she could still cry slid out of the corners of her eyes and mingled with the rain coming down from the black sky above.

  This was it.

  This was the end.

  “Please don’t do this. Please. Please. I don’t want to die. I—”

  He kissed her gently on the forehead, ignoring her pleas as he gathered her in his arms. She writhed and did her best to make this hard for him, but she was wasting her last few seconds struggling against his overwhelming strength.

  “Don’t! Don’t do this. You don’t have to—”

  The cold water swallowed her whole.

  She didn’t even have a chance to take a breath before the water closed around her, almost as if to welcome her with open arms. It was instinctive to fight against the suction dragging her down into the depths. She struggled, not caring that she was tearing the flesh right off her wrists.

  She continued to sink lower and lower against her will. The temperature changed faster and faster as she sank to the bottom.

  Her chest began to burn for oxygen and her ears filled with a pressure that was almost unbearable. She fought against the darkness and the cold, but it was now all around her. She held out hope, just like her father would have wanted her to do, anticipating for someone to save her.

  Emma waited and waited for someone to grab her from above and pull her from this nightmare, but help never came. She had no choice but to part her lips and draw in the darkness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Present day…

  “What do you mean he’s running around the Foster’s field naked?”

  “He’s trying to signal the aliens,” Deputy Byron replied as if this was a normal conversation. The only thing that gave him away was the slight lift to the corner of his mouth. “The fifth of whiskey probably didn’t help matters.”

  Mitch Kendall closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead in frustration, but nothing was going to ease the throbbing that had pretty much set up permanent residence since his return home. He’d actually found himself debating if another deployment to Afghanistan with his former unit wouldn’t have been a better alternative than dealing with the local crazies in his hometown of Blyth Lake, Ohio.

  Having a sadistic serial killer in their midst for over a decade certainly didn’t help matters.

  “Naked. You know, devoid of any clothing?” Byron reiterated, grabbing the keys to the deputies’ vehicle. He didn’t immediately head to the door. “Aren’t you going to drive out there with me, Sheriff?”

  Mitch heard a discreet cough that had to have come from Patty, who was sitting in her usual spot behind the front desk
of the small police station. The dispatcher had been doing this job since before he’d left for boot camp sixteen years ago. She didn’t blink an eye at such absurd calls, but she’d also grown up around these parts.

  “I understand that Sheriff Percy would have accompanied you, but we’re talking about Shelby Tilmadge. He’s harmless as an old tick hound and just like his father. All he wants is some attention.” Mitch waited for Byron to take the cue he’d been given and leave. It appeared that a little bit of incentive was needed. “After you get Shelby wrapped up…well, clothed and back to his residence, at the very least…go on home yourself. Feel free to take your cruiser instead of coming back to the station for your personal vehicle. That’s your part of town. Showing some police presence isn’t such a bad idea, anyway.”

  “I appreciate that. I have dinner plans tonight.”

  Mitch would have gladly asked Byron who the lucky girl was if it had been any other day, but that wasn’t going to happen this evening. Technically, it was only a little after sixteen hundred hours—four o’clock for civilian folks. He was running on maybe two hours of sleep after spending most of that time in the woods searching for the individual who’d all but waged war on his family and terrorized the town.

  “Have a good night, Byron.” Mitch headed back to his office, but he stopped short of the doorway when he saw the team of feds wrapping up for the day. Shit. There was still one more thing he needed to do before he called it a night himself. “Thorne, any updates from your end?”

  “No.” Special Agent Jay Thorne closed the file that had been laying open on the table he and his team had confiscated as a larger workspace than the average-sized desks the station offered. “The only thing we have going for us is that your sister grazed the unsub when she fired a round in an attempt to stop him from attacking her. We removed the slug from the doorframe and sent it off to the lab in hopes of collecting some trace evidence, but we’re talking close to two weeks before we receive any results.”

  “Even then, the perp would need to be in the system for us to get a hit on a viable DNA sample,” Mitch said resignedly.

  He’d been military most of his life until recently, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of how things worked in the civilian world. The federal government used the same process to examine evidence as the military’s Defense Intelligence Service did in tracking high-valued targets.

  A dull ache began to form in his hip, a memory of those times and places where he’d belonged to the action arm of ferreting out the truly evil people from inhabiting the far-flung reaches of this wide world. His body was now letting him know that he’d been on his feet for too long. His age and experience were catching up with him.

  “Are you guys heading out for the night?” Mitch asked, knowing he wouldn’t be so lucky. He had quite a few items to clear up on his desk.

  “We’re all running on fumes.” Thorne gestured for the three other men to go ahead of him. “I’ve submitted the daily report and the after action on last night’s goat rope to one of our profiling teams. I’ve included an updated summary of the details that we ran to ground, and I’m hoping to get a current profile of the unsub back in a few days.”

  Mitch debated reminding the federal agent that he’d said virtually the same thing last week, but it no longer mattered. A chip had been called in that couldn’t be taken back. Thorne wasn’t going to like it, but this was still Mitch’s town. He was ultimately responsible to the townsfolk who he served to protect.

  “About that,” Mitch began, only to come up short when there was no polite way to verbalize that Thorne’s routine chain of command OODA Loop was too fucking slow for the current situation. “You should know that I called in a favor from an old friend currently working out of Quantico. Special Agent Allison Delaney is arriving in Blyth Lake tomorrow.”

  “Like hell she is,” Thorne exclaimed in anger, leaning forward and resting his fists on the table in front of him. His reaction was expected. “Sheriff, you can’t just ring up some old war buddy over in D.C. and have them twist Quantico’s tail to request your own personal profiler. It doesn’t work like that. Special Agent Theo Stringer is damned good at his job, but you need to understand that he has to prioritize his cases. The Bureau—”

  Thorne immediately recognized his mistake, and Mitch didn’t bother to smooth it over for him. Instead, he mimicked Thorne’s posture and rested his knuckles on the opposite side of the table. He didn’t give a shit what level of authority Thorne held in the Bureau.

  Mitch understood without a shadow of a doubt that he held the ace. Besides, he had more field experience in his right thumb than this little noob, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he was dealing with bureaucracy when it came to his family.

  “My sister was attacked in her own home last night by a sadistic fuck who has murdered over eighteen women spanning over twelve years that we’re currently aware of. Gwen received twenty-six stitches to close a wound that was sliced open by a knife that could very easily have been used to kill her had this son of a bitch ever gotten the upper hand.”

  Mitch was usually more adept at handling these types of situations, and Thorne really wasn’t a bad guy to deal with. He was actually a hell of an agent, but this was just another case in what would be a long line of investigations to him. It wasn’t daily fare for Mitch, though.

  This case had become personal.

  “Special Agent Delaney won’t be here in a professional capacity for the FBI. She took two weeks’ leave to come visit an old friend. If it gets back to your boss as anything other than two friends reconnecting, I will use my considerable contacts outside of your division to have any future you might have rat-holed in some backwater shithole somewhere outside of Tucumcari, New Mexico. Your ass will be shuffling papers for the remainder of your goddamned career. Do we understand each other?”

  Thorne’s jawline became taut in his irritation, and Mitch braced himself for what he suspected would be a halfhearted rebuttal at best. In all fairness, he wouldn’t have blamed the man had he drawn a line. He sure as hell didn’t have to let Mitch in on any part of this investigation, seeing as the murders now fell under federal jurisdiction.

  Thorne was here to do a job. Any interference Mitch or the sheriff’s department introduced into the investigation would fall on his shoulders.

  “I’m going to let this conversation slide, Kendall, because of what happened last night. I understand more than you know.” The fact that Thorne didn’t refer to Mitch as sheriff was telling, but he didn’t care as long as Thorne understood where the line was drawn from here on out. There were quite a few favors that were owed to him, and he didn’t mind collecting. Hell, it was the sole reason he’d ignored his pride and requested that Allie take some personal leave to help with the investigation…off the books, of course. “Look, I’d be the same way if I were in your shoes. This unsub has dragged your family into this mess repeatedly, and we’ve been damned fortunate that we haven’t lost anyone else.”

  Thorne finally sighed in resignation as he straightened his shoulders and rubbed his eyes in exhaustion. It had been a very long thirty-six hours for all of them. Mitch’s announcement certainly hadn’t ended the evening on a good note.

  “Just promise me that Special Agent Delaney won’t hinder this investigation in any way. When we catch this son of a bitch, I don’t want a judge to let him go on a damned technicality.”

  Mitch nodded his agreement to the first part of that statement, but he wasn’t so sure there was a need to stress over the latter. He honestly didn’t think this sick and twisted individual wanted to be taken alive. Even if he had, Mitch wasn’t sure he’d allow him that opportunity.

  “You have my word.”

  Thorne tapped the table in approval before heading toward the front, stopping long enough to say goodnight to Patty. Mitch began to walk to his private office in the back, but he stopped at the threshold when Thorne called out his name.

  “I don’t want Delaney in this offic
e. And for the record, that’s non-negotiable.”

  Mitch could live with that stipulation, so once again he nodded his agreement. It was better than the alternative, which Thorne could have easily employed.

  Mitch was personally acquainted with a few officers who had taken command positions, both at the Pentagon and at various other agencies around Washington. In particular, he had one or two contacts with the NRO, and those men and women were in positions to literally move mountains.

  He didn’t for one second believe that his hands were tied. It was just a damned good thing that the military had taught him how to improvise in certain situations and to apply the minimum amount of pressure required to affect the change he needed.

  “Patty, go on home,” Mitch instructed kindly, knowing full well that she’d been into the station earlier than normal after last night’s events. “Let Special Agent Thorne walk you out to your car. It’s the least he can do.”

  It was still light outside, but taking precautions weren’t a bad idea at a time like this.

  Thorne lifted the side of his mouth in response, but he was too much of a gentleman to ignore the request. The majority of those federal boys were a bunch of Ivy League Boy Scouts. Too many of them were throttled by a suffocating bureaucracy to take the risks that were often required to bring a case like this one to an appropriate end.

  This son of a bitch needed to die…not stand trial for a year making headlines.

  Mitch recognized that he was being harsh on the federal agents who had come to town to do a job. They were good men with good intentions. He blamed his current mood on the fact that he had to go another night without closure on this case.

  He took the time to revel in the quietness that shortly followed after Thorne and Patty left the station. He walked into his private office, ignoring the boxes that he’d yet to unpack. Besides, it was only his way of denying the fact that he’d most likely end up taking the sheriff’s position permanently come election time.