Epsilon Creed (Joe Venn Crime Action Thriller Series Book 5) Read online

  EPSILON CREED

  Tim Stevens

  Copyright 2014, Tim Stevens

  ***~~~***

  License Notes

  This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at JD Smith Design

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  THE END

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TIM STEVENS | John Purkiss series

  Martin Calvary series

  Joe Venn series

  Shorter stories and novellas

  Chapter 1

  Ever since he was a sophomore in college, Wayne T. Cronacker had been known as Blowfly.

  A girlfriend – well, put it this way: the girl he’d somehow appealed to enough that she’d spent a full two weeks in and out of his bed before she’d finally called it quits, which qualified her as a girlfriend in his somewhat slender book of personal romantic experiences – had given him the moniker on their last-but-one night together. He’d been outraged when she’d first used it, and had tried to come back with a zinger that would squash her insult dead, but his booze-addled brain hadn’t been up to the task. That had emboldened her, and she’d taunted him with the appellation every time she’d met him afterward. Even, and especially when, she was with her friends.

  For the next year, he’d become even more of a social recluse than usual. The name had stung him. Yeah, maybe he wasn’t an uptight anal-retentive about changing his underwear every time he visited the crapper. Maybe he didn’t shave every day. And maybe, just maybe, there were more important things in life than making sure your dishes were done and your clothes were hung up every single day. Maybe political corruption, and Mid-East conflict, and starvation in Africa ranked higher on the list of things to get your panties in a wad about.

  Whatever. Blowfly he became, up until the point where even his meager assortment of so-called friends started calling him by the name.

  Which was when Cronacker started introducing himself as such.

  He’d read once in a paperback novel that US cops began referring to themselves as pigs around the time when they realized that that particular term of insult wasn’t going to go away, and decided that if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Blowfly had met a few cops in his day, and he’d never actually heard any one of them describe himself as a pig. But he liked the idea, nonetheless. It set him apart. Among all of the stereotyped guys at parties, the smooth preppie boys and the black-clad skinny-jeaned hipsters and the carefully disheveled grunge posers, he stood out as the fat, uncool asshole in a faded Coors T-shirt who barged into conversations uttering the immortal words: “Hi. I’m Blowfly.”

  The trouble with the Blowfly persona, though, was that it closed certain doors in his face. Doors to polite company, for one. Which meant that Blowfly was limited in his access to the higher echelons of New York society.

  And for a journalist, which Blowfly was, that posed a problem.

  He worked as a stringer and a freelancer, but had never been on the staff of a major news outlet ever since he’d graduated eight years ago. That suited him fine. He didn’t need a boss up his ass all the time, hounding him, sending him on crappy assignments nobody else wanted to touch, getting him to run errands. Blowfly knew he was a good writer, able to produce copy with prose that had snap and verve, and almost always on time. The editors who commissioned his stuff knew it, too. Which was why he was making a comfortable living, not great but adequate, as an independent, and he intended to keep things that way.

  But however much he cherished his freelance status, Blowfly was aware he’d hit something of a ceiling. The pieces he did for the Village Voice and the New York Post and the Staten Island Gazette weren’t anything special, as stories. Sure, they were smartly written, in Blowfly’s signature style, which combined flippancy with intelligence. But they were about mundane – hell, boring – subjects. Refuse collection along the Hudson. The plight of stray cats in the Village. The decline of chestnut vendors in Central Park at Christmas. Stupid, non-news items, which nobody gave a damn about. Which meant Blowfly’s droll, sparky prose went, for the most part, unread by the New York public.

  What he needed was a proper story.

  Which was why he found himself now, at a little before one in the morning on a warm night in May, perched on a wall surrounding a nine-million-dollar house in Scarsdale, Westchester County, New York, with the long lens of his Nikon camera trained on the bedroom window thirty yards away.

  It wasn’t the first time Blowfly had been up on that section of wall. He’d been there last night, and two nights before that. It hadn’t been easy, even with the stepladder he’d brought along in the trunk of his Chevy station wagon, which was parked within running distance down the hill. Blowfly was out of shape, not having taken regular exercise since high school.

  Both times, he’d observed the same thing. The drapes across the bedroom window, made of some thick velvety material, didn’t quite meet until a point halfway down. It was the same tonight.

  Through the gap, and through the lens of his Nikon, he had a clear view into the bedroom beyond. It was a limited view, granted, and all he could make out was the wall opposite. But twice, he’d seen a figure pass across the gap. A woman’s figure.

  Martha Ignatowski was in good shape for a chick just shy of her fiftieth birthday. Her youthfulness had been purchased, of course, from high-end makeup experts and gym trainers and plastic surgeons. But they’d done a good job, and she turned heads.

  Then again, her looks themselves might not have been the only reason for that. Martha Ignatowski was also famous. And rich.

  Blowfly knew her story backwards. She’d been born in rural Pennsylvania within farting distance of Allentown, a burg which in Blowfly’s humble opinion truly was the sphincter of America. Her folks had been white-collar workers with no prospects. Martha seemed doomed to be married by age twenty to the first guy who knocked her up. She would live a depressed life in the same backwater she’d grown up in, have three or four loser kids, and end up as wormfood by the age of seventy, killed by disappointment.

  But young Martha Cobbs, as she’d been then, turned out to be smart. Seriously smart. She’d landed a scholarship to Harvard, where she�
��d majored in Economics. After graduating, she’d put that knowledge and that smartness to excellent use.

  She’d married a rich guy.

  The rich guy was one Donald P. Ignatowski, a property magnate thirty years Martha’s senior. Martha was lucky to have been blessed with both brains and looks, and she’d had no difficulty working her way into Ignatowski’s home, and his fortune. She had no desire for kids, and he had two from a previous marriage and found no need for more, so they were well matched in that regard. The marriage lasted twenty-six years, and the couple became a fixture on the Manhattan social scene, their dazzling smiles and elegant deportment providing plenty of camera-fodder.

  Six months ago, old Donald had dropped dead from a stroke. Martha, needless to say, inherited his fortune. Which was estimated at a cool four hundred million dollars.

  Blowfly twisted his neck, trying to ease the cramp out of the muscles. He’d been up on the wall for nearly forty minutes. She was in there, because the bedroom light had gone on earlier, but she still hadn’t appeared before the window.

  Damn, he thought. Please, let it be tonight. I can’t face doing this all over again tomorrow.

  After hubby’s demise, Martha Ignatowski had kept the houses in the Hamptons and Los Angeles and Vermont, as well as the relatively small home here in Scarsdale. But her public appearances had dwindled to nothingness. Nobody knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life. Would she remarry? Donate part of her wealth to charity, something her notoriously tight-fisted husband had always avoided? The speculation in the gossip columns was rampant, but Martha wasn’t saying.

  Blowfly needed an interview. The first interview with Martha Ignatowski since she’d become widowed. It would make him, make his career. He’d be able to name his price after that. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone... all of them would be hammering at his door, sobbing with gratitude when he opened it, weeping with despair when he decided to leave it shut in their faces.

  The obvious problem was: how to persuade the good lady to grant him an audience? If the big guns like Harpers and the New Yorker and Vogue couldn’t do it, how in the hell was he, Blowfly Cronacker, going to get his foot in the door?

  The idea had come to him four weeks ago, when he’d been lying on his bed one night in his sty of an apartment above the deli in Little Italy. Blowfly had made the mistake of indulging two of his vices – booze and coke – at the same time, something he’d vowed never to do again after the last time, a week earlier. He needed to get up off his back to shove some toilet paper up his nose to stop the bleeding, but he knew he’d almost certainly puke as soon as he changed position.

  Then he had the idea, and it fired him with such enthusiasm that he leaped up, all physical discomfort forgotten, or at least pushed into the background.

  He almost made it to the bathroom on his hands and knees before his stomach heaved up its contents.

  As he barfed copiously on the bathroom floor, he ran the idea through his mind. He needed to give Martha Ignatowski an incentive to grant him an exclusive interview. A bribe was out of the question, of course. But what if there was some other way to make it worth her while?

  And then he had it.

  All he needed was his trusty camera, and a photo opportunity.

  *

  So here Blowfly was, propped uncomfortably on the top of a narrow wall in the dead of night, waiting for the moment when one of the most famous society ladies in New York City passed by the crack in her bedroom window drapes in a state of semi-dress, or better still undress.

  A few rapid clicks of the shutter was all it would take. Then he’d have his ammunition.

  He’d find some way of contacting her in person, without going through a secretary or an agent or some other minion. He wouldn’t be able to get her personal cell number or email address, but he knew she had a Twitter account which by the look of it she never used. That suggested it wasn’t managed by an intermediary. Blowfly would message her privately with one of the photos attached, and suggest a rendezvous.

  He wasn’t after her money. He just wanted an interview. It didn’t even need to be a particularly revealing one. Just a private tete-a-tete, Martha Ignatowski and the Blowfly, with a few choice morsels of personal information about herself offered up to him. It would be enough. He’d be the talk, and the toast, of the town. The Scarlet Pimpernel of the New York journalistic world.

  Blowfly wasn’t the most thorough of journalists. Even he would admit that. But in this case, he’d done his homework. He’d known about Martha Ignatowski’s Scarsdale address – it was a matter of public record – and he’d staked out the property with all due care. He’d tested the alarm systems by lobbing stones or pieces of fruit over the perimeter walls at periodic intervals while he’d prowled its circumference at night. Sometimes – usually – he’d triggered a light sensor, at least. On occasion, an alarm had gone off. Blowfly had scarpered at those times.

  But he’d become aware of a blind spot in the security. A stretch of wall toward the rear of the property, where no matter how much he disturbed the top of the wall, nothing seemed to happen. A few nights ago he’d cautiously ventured up there, with the aid of his stepladder. And he’d discovered not only that he was able to reach the top of the wall and plant himself upon it without setting off any kind of audio or motion detectors, but also that it gave him a great view through Martha’s bedroom window.

  Lulled by the balmy night and the lateness of the hour and the softly chirping crickets in the foliage of the garden beyond the wall, Blowfly almost missed the movement behind the curtains.

  Almost.

  He snapped into focus, screwing his eye against the camera, his hand twitching the lens control to sharpen the image.

  There she was.

  Martha Ignatowski, her glossy mane of artificially black hair cascading down her slender neck and back, her face in left profile.

  Blowfly glimpsed a shoulder, half-bared where a bathrobe had slipped slightly.

  Her mouth was moving. She was speaking, and vehemently.

  There was someone else with her, out of sight behind the drapes.

  Blowfly felt his pulse quicken so that the blood pounded heavily in his neck. His breathing tightened in his chest.

  A man?

  Oh my God.

  If he could grab a picture of the widowed heiress with a man, in her bedroom, he wouldn’t even have to blackmail her into an interview. The picture would be enough. Only the genuine rags like the National Enquirer would be interested in a mere photo of her in a state of undress. But if he could snap her with a new lover... the editors-in-chief of the Timeses, both New York and LA, would engage in a parking-lot fistfight to get a hold of that one.

  Martha’s Mystery Man. He could see the headline. And: Photo by Wayne T. Cronacker.

  Holy shit. It was like watching your numbers come up on the lottery draw.

  Even as Blowfly squinted down the lens, Martha Ignatowski’s head snapped back out of view. She’d stepped backward, maybe.

  He watched.

  Nothing happened.

  Blowfly heard a car cruise by on the street behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, just to make sure it wasn’t the cops.

  When he looked back, the light was off in the bedroom window.

  Dammit.

  He continued to gaze through the camera. Maybe she and the guy were banging away. Maybe, if he watched long enough, the mystery man would stand up, put on the light, present a decent profile or three-quarter shot before he went to the bathroom to take a piss.

  A minute later, Blowfly heard a sound from over to his left.

  He angled his eye away from the camera. The lawn stretched away below him, beautifully landscaped, toward the front of the house.

  For the first time, he noticed a car parked in the gravel semicircle in front.

  Not for the first time, Blowfly reflected that if he’d been a proper investigative reporter, with a professional’s observational skills,
he’d have spotted the car earlier.

  Whatever. The front end of the car was visible, peeping round the corner of the house. A silver or gray color, he reckoned. Not a high-end set of wheels. Maybe a Toyota of some kind. He knew zip about cars, other than that if you failed to keep up the payments they tended to get repossessed with all the zeal of a Delta Force team taking out a terrorist cell.

  A man appeared by the driver’s door of the car.

  Instinctively, Blowfly swung the camera across to focus on him. The guy was indistinct, shadowed by the glare flung by the spotlights covering the driveway. He could have been any age, though probably not much older than sixty and likely a lot less. Blowfly himself was thirty-four, and as such was well past the age where he automatically viewed anybody over forty as decrepit and incapable of fluid movement.

  The man paused, the car door half open. He seemed to be staring up at the house.

  Blowfly’s finger tightened. He heard the soft click and whirr of the camera’s mechanism.

  The guy’s head changed shape.

  He was facing toward Blowfly.

  Oh shit.

  Blowfly snapped another picture, though the man was still in silhouette.

  The guy appeared to be reaching into his pocket.

  He’s seen you. He’s drawing a gun. He’s gonna blow your ass right off this wall.

  But the man was merely ducking, climbing into the car.

  Blowfly waited until the car had revved up and turned in an arc across the gravel expanse before he started snapping again, the click-click-click of the shutter lagging behind his pounding heart.

  A Lexus, he noted.

  And a license plate, which he couldn’t make out.

  Had he captured it on his camera? He couldn’t be sure.

  He watched the car head briskly up the driveway to the gates. It stopped, the engine idling. An arm reached out and did something to a keypad in the wall.

  The gates eased open and the Lexus pulled through.

  Blowfly trained the camera back on the darkened bedroom window.

  He gave it another fifteen minutes before he quit, climbed back down, stowed the stepladder in the trunk of his station wagon, and drove back to Lower Manhattan.