The Mysteries of Suspense

By Zimbell House Publishing

Eleven of our most suspenseful new voices spin tales to intrigue you on both foreign and domestic shores.
Murder, missing persons, espionage, hit-men and love gone wrong fill the pages of this tome ll for the pleasure of your inner sleuth.
This anthology was conceived and edited by Evelyn M. Zimmer.
Contributing authors include: Donald Best; Curtis Wells Dewey & Janette Alexis Dewey; E.W Farnsworth; Benjamin Fine; J. Patrick Henry; Stephen McQuiggan; Alec Robertson; D.J. Tyrer; Priya Vennapusa; Stephanie Wexler; and Matthew Wilson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zimbell House Publishing
• Release date: Apr 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781942818298

Zimbell House Publishing

Zimbell House Publishing is an independent publishing company that wishes to partner with new voices to help them become Quality Authors.Our goal is to partner with our authors to help publish & promote quality work that readers will want to read again and again, and refer to their friends.

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Acknowledgements

Zimbell House Publishing would like to thank all of the writers that submitted their work for this anthology. We chose eleven unique voices to tempt you, strictly because we like the number eleven.

We would also like to thank all of those on our Zimbell House team that worked so diligently to bring this tome to press.

Amok Machetes

E.W. Farnsworth

Officer Nigel Pounce of Boston Police Homicide, his partner and his forensics team arrived at the sleazy apartment on the South Side at ten o’clock on Sunday morning on one of those grisaille days a cosmopolitan might associate with Paris. Clouds hung over the seamy side of the city like crepe in a funeral cortege, and that was appropriate for the grisly work the police began because the murdered woman’s body had been hacked into so many pieces it was hard to consider how they could come back together as a whole even on Resurrection Day. The exception was a single hand that remained intact clutching a plain white handkerchief as if to wipe eyes full of tears or dab a runny nose.

Dot, the problem with publicity is look-alikes, Pounce said to his new sidekick Officer Dorothy O’Neill while the flashes of police photographer’s cameras provided a strobe effect. This is the sixth such mutilation killing since that hideous crime in Nashua, New Hampshire, and they’re getting progressively worse. So now that the tape is up let’s keep snoopers and the press well clear until we clean up this mess. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene any more that has already happened.

Pounce hated to have his female partner witness the mess, but Harvard grad that she was, Dot had volunteered to join Homicide and her father and grandfather had both been outstanding members of the Force. Crime solving may have been in her Boston blue-blood, but such senseless, brutal, bloody crimes as this one didn’t fit the prim Agatha Christie closed-door model. Dot had found the hand with the kerchief and probed it with her extensible probe to see whether the victim was still wearing her rings—she was not. So robbery might have been a motive though sheer rage and vengeance ranked high on the list as well. The victim’s dirty blonde hair lay here and there in clumps with blood and gore.

After the photographs had been taken, the forensics team bagged the body parts as best they could, labeling each part with the grid location where it was found. Computers would try to make sense of the chaotic jumble later, but now the police team did their work as respectfully as possible because for them this former living room was now hallowed ground and no human deserved what had happened here. The forensics team went through the entire place with a fine tooth comb, dusting for prints and bagging the woman’s belongings. Then in the mid-afternoon when the forensics team had completed their work, Nigel and Dot began their own walk-through of the apartment, remarking out loud what they observed as they went.

The two homicide detectives left the locked and sealed apartment in light rain at five o’clock sharp and proceeded directly through the heavy Boston rush hour traffic to the forensics lab to be sure that all the evidence had been laid out properly, that external lab samples had been delivered for analysis and that everything was in order so that the investigative routine could begin early the next morning. For Homicide, this killing was only one of fifteen that had occurred over the weekend, but it had the attention of the Chief of Boston Police. The series of such like murders suggested that a vicious serial killer remained at large in Bean City, the press and therefore, the public were justifiably alarmed at the prospect.

Officer Pounce arrived at his home at ten o’clock exhausted and depressed. His wife Molly, the model policeman’s wife, had made an Irish dinner that could be warmed up easily, and she had eaten only lightly with the children so that she could enjoy the meal with her husband whenever he arrived. She saw that he had not had a good day, but she didn’t pry into his business. They had agreed early in their marriage that when Nigel came home, he left the problems of his work at the office. Molly solved all the problems of running their home, so she never bothered Nigel with the minutiae of her frantic daily routine. Their ‘millionaire’s pair’ of two bright and well-adjusted children never caused them worry, though Molly kept a close watch to be sure that their normal growing pains could be addressed as soon as possible.

I finished making your sister’s new summer dress and sewed together the shirt for Joseph today. I expect he’ll like it since he picked out the material and the pattern. I also bought some sets for the back yard and worked them into the area around the garden. The marigolds will keep the bugs down, and they look so green and golden as a border.

This corned beef and cabbage is just right this evening. Thanks for making my favorite and waiting to eat with me. It’s been a long, hard day and after I finish, I’ll have to burn a little of the midnight oil looking over some papers. So tell me about Maggie’s new dress. She’s been looking forward to wearing it, but she’s been afraid to ask about it for fear of seeming to pressure you.

When they had eaten and Molly retreated to clean up in the kitchen, Nigel took his coffee to his Lazy-Boy chair, adjusted his lamp and began to go through the six files he had brought home. His team had correlated the data from the files, but they had found no significant pattern that might lead to the identification of a viable suspect. Pounce thought it possible that the six murders had been committed by different people, but he doubted that hypothesis, and it seemed so much neater to group them as a set. Solving a murder mystery, he knew, was a process of moving from a cluster of unknowns to a well-connected sequence of the known.

For Pounce, good police work was isolating and validating facts, not conjectures. On average, he and his team solved a crime a day to his satisfaction. Seventy-odd percent of Boston’s murders would never be solved, no matter how hard the Force worked, and priorities were set by the Chief and by the politicians. Taken one by one, the six mutilation murders were unsolved crimes that would soon become cold cases. Pounce hoped that considering them as linked might lead to a solution.

While he was sifting through the material in his files, his son Joseph came downstairs and sat in the Lazy-Boy next to him silently. Pounce noticed his son’s presence and said, Hello. It seems we’re both burning the midnight candle. Is everything okay?

Well, I have an idea for a school project and I wanted to know if it’d be okay with you to go for it. You see, it has to do with a theory I have about all those mutilation murders in the papers and on line. I’ve been playing with Google Earth, plotting the locations of the murders, and I believe I’ve discovered a pattern.

Pounce sat up straight in his chair. Can you tell me what you’ve found? I’m trying to crack those cases—these are the files I brought home.

If the newspaper information on the locations of the murders is correct, the pattern formed by them is roughly a crescent with one outlier that might be a star. Here is a printout of the pattern. You can see where the murders occurred, and if you connect the dots for five of them as I’ve done, you get the shape of a new moon. The outlier is where I’ve indicated it. Then, let’s overlay the image of the Islamic flag and voila! I tried all sorts of other ways to connect the dots, but nothing meaningful emerged even when I dropped out one or another location. I was trying to account for an anomalous murder—one not connected to the others. Anyway, the order of the murders may also be significant because the first five murders describe the moon in order and the last murder occurred where the Islamic star would be.

Joseph, what motive would make this pattern you’ve found significant? We have wracked our collective brains for weeks without finding a compelling motive for any of these murders.

So what if projecting the pattern was the motive, and the people who were murdered were only killed because they happened to live in apartments or houses that completed the pattern. In other words, the murderer randomly killed the people who fit the pattern. If the murderer was exceedingly careful about preparing to do these crimes, the results would, for him at least, be miraculous. In fact, the murderer, like all mass murderers, is undoubtedly insane, and his obsession with completing the pattern for the glory of Allah makes him perfect, at least in his own deranged mind.

May I have a copy of your results? I want to run this idea by a few people. As for your using what you have found as part of your class project, do me a favor. Go ahead and use it, but don’t draw the conclusion about the linkage to Islam. That could get us all in trouble. One thing more, don’t let on that you have shared this with me. And I haven’t shared any of the police files with you, so we’re okay, I think. Probably, you shouldn’t let your mom onto our secret. By the way, this is beyond good work, it is great work. I have a challenge for you, though. What can we conclude from the pattern having been completed? Does that mean that the killer would desist? If that were true, we’d have good luck and bad luck. It would be good in that no one else would have to die. It would be bad in that we’d probably never know who did these heinous murders. I see you have something else to say. What’s up?

Well, Dad, I began looking for the pattern outside Boston in other cities in the US. You know mutilation murders at random. Like ISIS running amok with machetes not in the Middle East but in every major metropolitan area in the country. And here’s my geolocation plot for Chicago. And here’s the plot for LA. And here's...

Lord, Joseph, what the heck have you found? Let’s get to the dining-room table right now and lay out all the pieces. I’ll have to take back what I said about your project. This pattern of patterns that you have found is far too dangerous even to hint about at the Boston English School. We’ll have to discuss another project entirely for your school–something innocuous, but I want you to continue working on this project here at home. Particularly, I want to know how we might predict the locations of the next murders in each city, and how we can gauge the larger meaning of all of these data points. That set of considerations is well beyond my police jurisdiction, but it may be that the Boston pattern of murders offers the key to convincing other law enforcement agencies that we’re right in looking at this as a country-wide phenomenon that is not random but diabolically purposed.

The case that Joseph put forward was compelling and remarkable for its level of detail. The boy had used the internet to derive his data, and he had developed his own criteria for including murders of interest. He had not forced the data into the pattern; instead he had elicited the patterns from the data. His mastery of the Google Earth program was evident, and his theory was that the murderers were using the same program or one like it to do their planning. He told his father that the only way he saw to beat the murderers at their own game was to think like them and to use their methods and technologies against them. The father and son worked throughout the night, and at five o’clock they packed up all their notes and data and stored them in Joseph’s room before showering and preparing for their ordinary routine. Molly saw that something had happened overnight, but she didn’t make an issue of it even though she knew neither of her men had slept that night.

Pounce decided that he and his son needed to devote three hours each night to Joseph’s special project and they created a command center in Joseph’s room using their home computers and their large screen display.

By the end of the week, they had worked fifteen hours together, and their displays now told the story in Technicolor with overlays that indicated that a template was being used by the murderers for planning and execution. Joseph began to study the timing of the murders, and he came up with a pattern for the order of murders in each of seven cities; Boston; New York; Chicago; LA; Dallas; Phoenix; and Seattle. He also began looking for the pattern in other cities when he had extra time, but his major focus was on perfecting what he knew about the pattern used in the large cities. On Friday evening, Pounce called his friend John Fulghum, PI and asked him to come for a picnic on Saturday and plan to spend the afternoon at the Pounce’s place. By now Molly was privy to what her men were doing, and she encouraged them to make every effort to interdict the future murders if they could.

Fulghum was impressed by what Pounce and Son had discovered. He went through all their data and asked pointed questions. At his suggestion, predictive displays were included with a different color coding so that at a glance enforcement officials could prioritize their surveillance and protection measures. He also advised Pounce that the right Federal POC for this widespread interdiction effort should be FEMA II in New Hampshire which had become the alternate command center during 9/11. It was close to Boston and not as subject to espionage as the Washington FEMA I was. It was Fulghum’s opinion that everyone involved with the interdiction operation should be vetted specially and that an interagency support group should brief the problem and the data in every major city within the next four weeks. Based on the experience of Boston, the pattern was completed in eight weeks from start to finish, so the cities should be prioritized from least complete to most complete. Optimally, he told the Pounces, the briefings should be accomplished in parallel. He also said that he would make religion a criterion for inclusion or exclusion from the operational team. This, he said, would be a politically explosive decision. He volunteered to introduce Pounce and Son to the ad hoc Director of FEMA II, Pete Jacoblinski, nicknamed Pete J-10, at his estate in New Hampshire the next day, and he made the call to set up their meeting. He recommended that Joseph give the brief and that his dad provide backup as necessary. From now on, Fulghum said, Joseph will be the intelligence lead because it will take too long to train anyone else and Joseph knows everything that is needed, including the computer and programming knowledge, for the task.

So it was that Joseph Pounce, the fourteen-year old, second-term tenth-grader and son of Officer Nigel Pounce, became the leader of the FEMA intelligence unit for Operation Amok Machetes. His headmaster, Mr. Plentyworth, was told by Pete J-10 that the boy was urgently needed for a national security project and that he should be allowed to take a leave of absence from school without prejudice to his record for the duration of his duty. The next day Joseph reported to work in Nashua and was from that time on call twenty-four/seven, and FEMA provided him an apartment in South Nashua free of charge. The administration also gave him the title of Analyst II at a salary of forty-five dollars per hour and vetted him for a TOP SECRET security clearance to give him official access for what in fact, he already knew. Within two weeks Joseph Pounce was flown, accompanied by two armed bodyguards, to each of the other six cities for which he had discerned the Islamic pattern. Joseph briefed each Mayor and Chief of Police about the status of completion of the pattern in their city. While on this circuit, Joseph told everyone with access to his secret briefings that he was keeping track of all activities in real time at FEMA II Command Center and that their police intelligence units would have access to his data through a secure web site URL he had created for that purpose.

Meanwhile, an interagency operational group led by Agent Kenneth Mander of the CIA, provided support teams as resources for improving and enriching Joseph’s data at FEMA II. Additionally, the NSA, CIA, NGA and ATF each provided a liaison watch team within FEMA so that each agency would have real time consultation capability twenty-four/seven. All these intelligence integration activities would have been merely academic except that in LA, the police made their first arrest of an ISIS-related jihadist attempting to kill an intended victim with his machete. The victim’s address had been predicted as a target by Joseph’s selected FOSS pattern-recognition algorithms. This was the event that allowed the entire operation to become visible at the highest levels of the agencies and allowed the Director of the CIA to go to the President for Presidential Findings to use lethal force as necessary to protect the country against a clear and present danger.

As the agency support teams discovered the scope of ISIS activities throughout the US, Joseph’s group at FEMA II began using back-bearings to discover where the Islamists command center was located. Pounce and Son had decided that if the head of the snake were to be cut off, the body would be useless. They consulted with John Fulghum for his advice, and Fulghum asked that Ken Mander be included in their brainstorming discussions in his second-story office.

Because Joseph was included in the meeting, Jack Fulghum took care to clean up his office to the extent of clearing out the ash trays, using a fan to air the place out, and straightening the stacks of racing forms that lined the walls. Fulghum even used Windex on both sides of his office door, and he vacuumed and polished his hardwood floor and rented two fold-up chairs with cushions. Nigel and Joseph visited Fulghum’s transformed office around an hour before Ken Mander arrived to set up their computer and display. So by the time the CIA agent arrived, Joseph was ready to begin without wasting anyone’s time. Mander was a quick study, and he evidently took a liking to young Joseph because he treated the boy as an equal without patronizing him.

When Joseph had outlined the problem that they faced, Mander suggested that they walk back along the lines they knew. That meant that Boston was the most likely location for the Islamist command center since all the other cities atrocities had occurred well after the murders in Boston. Mander said that in his experience Islamists gravitated towards Imams and mosques. So he reasoned, the command center, if it was located within the US, would be at one of the area mosques or at the residence of the most radical of the Imams. Joseph had anticipated this line of reasoning, so he had already plotted all those locations on his geo display. He had done something further that made Mander appreciate the caliber of this young man. Joseph had thought that the initial pattern probably required close, personal observation and involvement by the Islamists decision makers. So he did the math and showed on his screen a box within which the command center would have had approximately equal distance to each murder’s location. That led to his identifying one mosque and one dwelling, which coincidentally belonged to the Imam for that mosque.

Fulghum had listened to everything Joseph said with great interest, but he now threw out a wild card suggestion that proved he had been at work in parallel with the official effort. Fulghum said that he had been granted access to the precocious Nashua youth who had started the entire chain of events by hacking an innocent, female neighbor to death with a machete. He had no motive other than to kill the woman, and he accomplished his mission with such ruthlessness and cunning that the entire community had been stunned. Evidently, Fulghum said, the Islamists had taken a lesson from this excellent example of evil. Further, Fulghum had delved into the police listings of the young murderer’s acquaintances and classmates and discovered the names of four Islamic youths who attended the mosque that Joseph identified as a possible location for the theoretical command center. So, he said, an indirect connection existed between what he called the index murderer and the Islamic community. When Mander asked for the names of the Islamic youths, Fulghum handed him a piece of paper with the names written in Arabic and English.

Mander then said that if the pattern of Boston was used in all the cities, then the team could expect to find command centers in precisely the same location vis-à-vis the pattern everywhere. So it was imperative that they verify the mosque or the Imam’s residence as the location. He volunteered to accomplish that mission within the next twenty-four hours. He asked Joseph whether he could provide geo displays with the potential locations of the command centers in each city based on the Boston model, and Joseph said he would post revisions of those to the classified web site by midnight on the day that Mander provided the definitive information on the command center location. Joseph said he would then send an email to each city team alerting them to what he had posted and his team’s recommendations for action, which he asked Mander to provide.

Nigel Pounce, who had remained silent throughout the discussion until this point, now asked Mander if he required any assistance from the Boston Police. Mander said it was best that the police did not know about his sources or methods, but he would appreciate help in dealing with the political and religious fall out if there were any. For Nigel that meant dealing with the Mayor and the Chief of Police, both of whom had to be very careful whenever Islamic profiling was part of an operation. Nigel said that he would do whatever he could to provide cover. The area had not experienced another mutilation and murder like the one he had encountered in South Boston. He had been vigilant, he said, and the city had been lucky. He did have a list of suspected Islamist extremists and sympathizers in the Greater Boston area, but the list was too long to be of any practical use. Nigel said that he would alert the Chief to a potential for media backlash only after Mander had discovered the command center. Once the Chief was made aware of the situation, the Islamic community would vociferously denounce the infringement on their freedom of action. The only way to quell their protests was to have absolute proof of their involvement and possible leadership in committing the atrocities that were occurring across the country.

So Kenneth Mander’s team did their magic, which involves sources and methods that can’t be recounted in this venue, and they obtained absolute proof that the same Imam and mosque that Joseph had identified were at the center not only of Boston’s murders but of all the murders they had identified as being connected to Islamism. Further, they had obtained plans; names; roles; funding flows; addresses; and even detailed targeting data associated with the murderers and their own photographs proving that they had accomplished their missions. Some of this information had been intercut into recruiting CDs with ISIS advertisements on their cases. Clearly, the Islamists were on the brink of showing the world how marvelously their plans had been worked out right under the nose of the Great Satan America. Mander said that he had sent copies of the entire intelligence take to the Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA, who was at this moment sharing them with the Director of the CIA, who in turn would take the information to the President.

All these things were reported in the secure spaces of the FEMA II command center. Joseph made a few tweaks to the templates posted to his web site. He then included Mander’s operational recommendations in an encrypted attachment to an encrypted email in which all the other cities were informed of what they should be looking for. The authorities wasted no time going to local magistrates to obtain search and seizure warrants, but things were happening in Washington, DC, that served as a counterweight to the local activities in the cities. The President, when informed of what had happened during the last six weeks in a herculean effort to defend the country, went on national television within the hour and announced his appointment of an independent Counterterrorism Czar to investigate all the allegations that the CIA Director had made and determine whether any US laws had been broken in the sequence of investigations that had been done. He personally called the representatives of each of the pro-Islamic groups in the country to assure them that he had had no personal knowledge of any investigations into activities of Islamists or ISIS on American soil. He ordered his Counterterrorism Czar to be even-handed in his investigation and determine whether Israeli intelligence agents had played any active or passive part in the investigations made by the CIA.

Kenneth Mander saw the way the wind was blowing, so he went clandestine and disappeared from view. Fulghum also saw the handwriting on the wall, and he told J-10 to shut down his operation and send everyone home. Fulghum then told Pounce and Son that they had done everything possible for the cause, so they should now close down their shop and encrypt all the data that they stored off site from FEMA II. He said that the likelihood that Pounce and Son would be caught up in any investigation was minimal because Pounce was only a policeman and his son was a mere teenager. So within another twenty-four hours, all vestiges of what had been a national operation had vanished.

Meanwhile, the Islamists were not sitting on their laurels. They tried to destroy all evidence of their perfidious plan, and all the ISIS leadership in America rushed for the borders like cockroaches in the kitchen when the lights are turned on. Now all thoughts of advertising their victory over the sleeping giant of America seem to have been banished in favor of hiding and flight.

Somehow this Islamist strategy was anticipated by someone who remained in the shadows, for the ISIS leadership uniformly met with fatal mishaps in the least coincidental fashions. One bearded fanatic, for example, seems to have decided to end his life by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge with a noose around his neck. Another threw himself under a bus in St. Louis. A third was found tied to a pier near San Clemente when the tide went out, but no one could understand how he could have managed his suicide without the help of at least two others. And so it was that in every major city Islamists had decided en masse to go to see the Prophet by the fastest available means. The number of fatalities was so great that the Islamic leadership in America, as well as in Saudi Arabia, and even Iran raised a hue and cry worldwide against the Great Satan for having driven these devout believers to end their lives rather than live in fear and torment.

In frustration, because his people could find no one who was responsible for discovering and foiling the Islamist plot, and because the outcry had been redirected from the savage mutilations of innocent American citizens to the desperate suicides of Islamist leadership, the President went on national television to rail against divisiveness and religious sectarianism and vigilantism. He fired his Counterterrorism Czar because of his ineffectuality and appointed a new Islamic-Jewish Cooperation Czar to mend the widening rift between those warring factions. In a rare moment for national humor, the President stated that everything in the recent imbroglio stemmed from a potential misinterpretation of six points on a display. Surely, he opined with a serious face, Six points can as easily apply to the Star of David as to the Crescent Moon and Star. That statement was parroted in every classroom in America for the next two weeks. It was devoutly discussed in Joseph’s classes when he returned to school after his labors. When asked what he thought, he simply said, Hmm, and shook his head sagely.

John Fulghum’s office was once again full of smoke, and his glass was three fingers full of JD when Officer Pounce came to see him about another case that perplexed him to no end and a couple of personal matters. Jack poured him three fingers of elixir in a glass he wiped with his handkerchief, set aside his racing form and gave his friend his total attention.

The Chief wants me to investigate the apparent suicide of a noted Imam at a mosque in the center of Boston, but it’s the clearest case of suicide I ever saw; he was found wrapped in an anchor chain at the mouth of the Charles River with three bullets through his brain and lobsters feasting on his flesh. I had no idea lobsters ate such things. As for Joseph, he got a letter informing him that he has been selected for a special summer internship at the Central Intelligence Agency, for which he will get university credit and the opportunity to matriculate Harvard in the fall with a full paid scholarship. Finally, I received a used, but very clean machete accompanied by a cryptic hand-printed note on CIA stationery that reads: ‘BZ, P&S, KM, Esq.’ Pounce then broke out in uproarious laughter and clinked glasses with Fulghum before both raised their glasses on a level with their eyes and then drank.

Master Joseph Pounce matriculated Harvard University as a junior that fall after his stellar performance at the Farm at Langley, Virginia, during the summer. Molly was not happy about Joseph’s being detached from his peers and advanced past the initial years at the university with full course credit, but Nigel reminded her that perhaps he finally was among his peers, if he had any peers at all. They consoled themselves that Harvard was not far away, albeit in the ultra-liberal PRC, and that Joseph liked to return to his home on the weekends to be with his mother, father, and sister. Among Joseph’s courses were artificial intelligence programming, intermediate Arabic language, problems in Presidential decision making and applications of complex systems theory. His real teachers were his tutors, all ex-CIA personnel who had retired after long, distinguished careers in covert operations—and none was a Yale graduate. Checking on him every once in a while discreetly were Kenneth Mander, and of course, John Fulghum, with whom he and his father often went fishing on Lake Pontoosuc in Pittsfield.

Brown Recluse Bust

By E. W. Farnsworth

Nigel Pounce shook his head as he surveyed the carnage at the old, red farmhouse just off Route 4 near Bedford, Massachusetts. Five dead men’s bodies were displayed in the grass around the perimeter of the property, and ten other bodies were found scattered throughout the burned ruin of the house from the basement to an overhang of what used to be the attic. Smoke still rose from