Name Not Given Read online

  SCOTT BLADE

  a Black Lion publication©

  NAME NOT GIVEN

  a JACK WIDOW mystery

  Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  A Reason to Kill

  Without Measure

  Once Quiet

  Name Not Given

  The Midnight Caller

  FireWatch (Coming Soon)

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Stand-Alone Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Blade

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and Name Not Given are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.

  For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The publisher and/or author do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published by Black Lion, LLC.

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Preview: The Midnight Caller

  The Author

  I’m so lucky to be able to have this job. I’m grateful to fans like you.

  I dedicate this one to you.

  With thanks,

  -Scott Blade

  scottblade.com

  CHAPTER 1

  I STARED AT A DEAD WOMAN ON A COLD METAL TABLE, not a slab, like in the movies, but a table.

  In the movies, the dead woman was usually played by an actress. Usually, she would be naked or covered up with a clean white sheet. She would be a live person, pretending to be dead. She would be painted in white makeup to make her look lifeless.

  This was no actress. Nothing looked fake. No white makeup painted on her. There were no prostatic scars or fake bruises or rubbery black eyes.

  The woman I looked at was very dead.

  In life, her name had been Karen Dekker.

  Someone murdered her. But first they had beaten her nearly to death with a hammer.

  The FBI had arrested a guy. They arrested him for killing three other women.

  He was in jail for it. He was on death row for it.

  But the person who killed her wasn’t the same guy they had on death row. Which made people start to doubt that the guy they had arrested nearly two years earlier for a series of similar murders was guilty.

  How could he kill Karen Dekker if he was locked up?

  The guy that they had on death row had been convicted of killing a series of women in the same manner, hammer and all. Following the same MO. Torturing them in the same exact ways. And all for the same apparent reason—military desertion.

  He had killed a series of women because they had all supposedly gone AWOL.

  AWOL means absent without leave. The military loves acronyms, even for slang.

  Actually, AWOL doesn’t mean exactly that. The dictionary definition is absent without intent to desert. However, that’s not what most people think. Most people think it means to abandon your post, intentionally and with the intent to desert the Army.

  Like most of the world, the guy they had arrested for the murders also thought it meant to desert.

  The guy who sat on death row had less than sixty-one hours to go. He was a dead man walking.

  Karen Dekker’s broken body was bruised and blunted and pulped, nearly beyond recognition.

  As I stared over her, I noted that her captor hadn’t bothered to restrain her arms. And he hadn’t bothered because he had broken them both at the elbows. No need to tie her up. Her bashed, shattered elbows had made fighting back impossible.

  I stopped looking over her for a moment and closed my eyes. I imagined the killer. Tried to put myself in his shoes. Tried to forget who I was, that I was a good guy. I tried to think like a depraved murderer. Which I could do, easily enough. All it took was empathy and an active imagination. Luckily, I had both.

  I imagined all the horrible, gut-wrenching things that the killer could’ve done to her with a hammer. A surplus of gruesome images flashed through my brain. I imagine my facial expressions winced in response to each of them, but I kept my eyes shut. I watched them all.

  Finally, I opened my eyes. Stared back down at her. I ticked off each of the horrifying acts that I had imagined an insane psycho could do. Not one of the horrible things on my list had been missed by this killer. He had done just about everything sickening that a man could do with a hammer and a helpless, kidnapped victim.

  It was all out of a bad nightmare.

  The killer had used the hammer to shatter her elbows, bust her kneecaps, pulverize her toes into mush, and pummel her lower face and jaw to pulp.

  It looked like most of her bones in her arms and legs were crushed to sawdust under the skin.

  Dekker’s teeth were gone from her mouth, but they were in the room with us.

  They were trodden and shattered into cracked, small pieces and souped into a tin bowl, next to her head.

  Her body had been found in the water. She had washed up on shore. Which made me wonder how they found her teeth. So, I asked the medical examiner, who was just an Army physician.

  I asked, “She was washed up by the tide?”

  “Right
,” he said.

  “Where did you find her teeth?”

  “They were in her mouth.”

  “They looked like they were bashed out?”

  “The killer stuffed them back in her mouth.”

  I recoiled and said, “He put them back?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Why?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “Guess he wanted to make sure that we could identify her.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  Again, he shrugged.

  The killer had smashed her teeth apart and the medical examiner had put them out for us to see. I didn’t ask why he displayed them like that because I figured it was SOP for Army doctors.

  Like the Navy and the Marines, the Army had detailed instruction manuals for everything. I imagined that somewhere, written down in some manual, was that if human teeth were found separate from a murdered body, they were required to be collected and displayed for the investigators to see.

  Despite the enormous damage that the killer had done to this poor woman, he had left her forehead and scalp unscathed. The skin above her eyebrows was undamaged, as was her hair. All except for the damage done by seawater and the Atlantic currents.

  The killer had stopped at her eyes and nose.

  I didn’t have to ask the doctor why. I knew why.

  He had done this because he didn’t want to kill her with the hammer. He had wanted her to stay alive. He wanted her to know how she was going to die. He wanted her to feel it.

  I felt my stomach wrench at the sight of her.

  I never knew Karen Dekker. She had been a soldier and I had been a Navy SEAL, but she was still my sister. We were still a part of the military family. All soldiers were my family, same as marines and sailors.

  I tried to ignore the intense pain that Dekker had endured for a moment. And I focused on the question of how?

  How could someone lure her onto a boat and to her death like that?

  I imagined the kinds of scenarios that would require her to be tricked. The possibilities were endless, but essentially the gist of them all boiled down to two basic possibilities.

  She either knew the killer, trusted him, and allowed herself to be vulnerable. Or she had been abducted against her will. Probably at gunpoint. Most likely the latter was the case.

  That was how all the other women had been murdered.

  I opened my eyes again.

  The Army doctor had been standing there with me and one of the FBI agents that I came with.

  The doctor had been speaking, talking to the FBI agent, ignoring me.

  He had been describing the killing in detail, like a Shakespearean student who had stayed up all night studying a monologue. Now, he was reciting it to us. I didn’t care about most of what he was saying. I tuned it out until he said, “Her assailant pounded on her elbows, shattering the bones.”

  No shit, I thought.

  I closed my eyes and imagined a blacksmith hammering smoldering metal on an anvil. I imagined him waling away at it, bending and shaping it into the desired specifications of the object that he was creating. I imagined the sparks flying and spraying into tiny particles of dust and fire.

  But the killer hadn’t been a blacksmith. Blacksmiths created things. This killer wasn’t creating, but subduing, demolishing a person’s life.

  Both of her arms were stretched out and laid by her sides as natural as they could’ve been. And they still looked awkward, like a mangled plastic mannequin.

  They had told me that she was found on a more remote part of Cocoa Beach, a point that was still used for surfing by the locals, but she had floated there for up to twenty-four hours before she was found.

  Her body had been washed up after a storm. A storm that I had also been in.

  It turned out that she had been found this morning only three miles from where I had been standing, twenty-four hours ago, on a deserted beach.

  Dekker had been killed by a high-velocity nine-millimeter bullet that burst through her head and ricocheted around in her brainpan, ripping through tissue and cracking the inside of her skull.

  Three days earlier, Army Corporal Karen Dekker had gone missing from the Cocoa Beach area. One minute she had been there and the next she was gone. She had been a surfer, like me. I would say that she was much more into it than I was. I had only done it recreationally, maybe once or twice a year. According to her friends, Dekker had seen it as a way of life.

  On the last day that anyone had seen her alive, she had gone out to surf, alone. Apparently, that hadn’t been that unusual for her.

  However, she was known for being a true professional soldier. She never missed a day of work. She always called if she had to be away. That sort of thing.

  But the day she went surfing, she never returned home. The next morning she didn’t show up at work.

  After she was deemed missing, the Army MPs had started to search for her. It was a short-lived search. A major mistake on the part of the Army, in my opinion.

  They immediately jumped the gun.

  Within a few days they started to believe that she had gone AWOL. The MPs’ reasoning behind this was because there was evidence that she wasn’t happy about her new assignment. She had been stationed in South Florida and loved it. But now they were taking that away from her.

  She had been given an assignment to return to a tour in Iraq. As a part of the first all-women combat convoy to enter into ISIS-controlled areas.

  The whole thing sounded like a PR act of desperation on the part of the Army. I figured that Dekker saw this too. She probably was insulted by it.

  They say that wars are fought and won at home, not out in the war zones.

  One difference between the Army and the Navy is the culture of the generals versus that of the Navy’s admirals.

  Every admiral that I’ve ever met had been a certified history buff. It is a part of their fraternity, like how college professors sit around and argue about theories that no one else cares about. Admirals and generals argue about battle tactics. Truly this was an example of elitism at its best.

  Like the admirals I knew, Army generals were also war history buffs, but they celebrated land wars and long dead Army generals and philosophers of war. Whereas, admirals talked about sea warfare and old stories of famous ships and captains.

  One philosopher that they both shared in terms of Warfare 101 was Machiavelli.

  Good old Machiavelli said that appearances were everything. Wars are won in public opinion, not in body count or bombs dropped or land taken. If the American public supports a war, then they’ll support the victory. But if they don’t support a war, then it’s already lost.

  On the other hand, things aren’t always what they appear.

  On the surface, the appearance of what happened was that Dekker abandoned her post.

  She had already spent two tours in Iraq, way back during the height of the war. Once she returned stateside, she was quite vocal against it.

  I had learned that she wasn’t willing to go back. She desperately tried to get out of orders to return to the Middle East a few times. She had even written all over her social media her distaste for our current deployments in the Middle East, not as an ideological thing, but more out of anger that the Army was being wasted there.

  I could see her contempt for the politicians in Washington and the four stars in the Pentagon who once had been warriors and now were glorified pencil-pushers. Her words. Not mine.

  But Karen Dekker never made it to her deployment. She never made it to work. She never even made it home from the beach because she was murdered.

  I looked back down at her.

  She had two swollen eyes, black, lifeless, but opened. Unnaturally opened because they had been beaten shut.

  To open them up the doctor had sliced through the swollen lids right down the middle.

  I had asked him why and he told me it was to see if there was any evidence in them. He was concerned that the killer was pl
aying games. Because of the teeth, I imagined. But there wasn’t any evidence in the eye sockets.

  The doctor had also mentioned that he had planned to sew them shut before releasing the body to the family for what he called a “proper burial.”

  The last piece of physical evidence was that there was bruising left behind the ear that indicated that the killer had pressed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter handgun back there, and hard too. He had pressed it behind the ear, right side. Then pulled the trigger. A single shot.

  This was the only variation from the other dead women. Everything else was the same. Remarkably so.

  It was an execution. No doubt.

  The doctor said, “He really hated her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He stared at me like I was a monster for even asking the question. But the reason I asked was to get his take on it.

  “Isn’t it obvious? This was done out of hate, out of rage. Look at what he put her through.”

  I nodded. Still, I wasn’t quite convinced. Sure, it looked bad. But there was something calculated about it, like a planned mess.

  And there was something else.

  I had seen a lot of dead people in my time in the Naval Criminal Investigative Services. I had seen a lot of lifeless corpses and lifeless eyes, but her eyes were different. Something was wrong in them.

  I couldn’t quite explain it. It was like she had been shocked and surprised by what was coming at her. Which could’ve been what they all had felt, but this was more. I didn’t know what to make of it. Not yet.

  Suddenly, I felt a shiver waft over me. We stood in a cold storage room that they had to use as a makeshift morgue because the base didn’t have one.

  I was in South Florida with an FBI agent who didn’t like me all that much.

  And I couldn’t blame her because I had come along and thrown a wrench into a case that she had closed.

  In the last twenty-four hours, I had been on four different flights and in the custody of two different police forces, if you don’t count a pair of idiotic beach cops. If you did, then I had been arrested three times. Which must have been a new record for me.