The Ilium Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 38

[seymoure]

Bafflement

 

“Be able to notice all the confusion

between fact and opinion that appears in the news.”
-Marilyn vos Savant

 

Alright, time for the Sherlock Holmes aspect of this business.

Gather was our mysterious man on the street.

He was also the man Connie Cho saw take Fox from the NSA offices.

His mother, his girlfriend, Connie and Fox were all gone.

Malvito, Perry & Frost had all been killed. And those were only the field of competitors for the Horse that we knew about.

Sentalia was jetting about from one scene to the other, and we didn’t know who she was working for now. It could still be Frost or somebody we didn’t even know to add to the tally.

Connie was afraid for her life, but all Gather’s mother seemed afraid for was her dog.

All of this and we weren’t any closer to the source of all the hubbub.

The Trojan Horse fragment that everyone was so hot to acquire was still unaccounted for.

It wouldn’t be so traumatic if bodies weren’t dropping like oak leaves in late fall. It didn’t help not to know who or how many the potential victims or the killers were. Somebody could be killing all of them, or one or two might be personal disputes being settled in the all-too-intimate of styles.

“What can you tell me of Perry’s death?” I asked Rusty after we had filled him in on Frost’s demise.

First, word was coming down from upstairs that Frost had not just been killed, but some kind of torture had been involved. His feet were burned, but the shoes had been replaced.

They had been okay with us finding the body, but they wanted us to have some time before we figured out that they had some kind of information we didn’t.

“Well, someone wanted to know something,” Burton told me, “Badly.”

“Torture?”

“Nearly seared his feet to the bone,” I could hear the revulsion in his voice, “This took awhile.”

“The same method was used here with Frost,” I told him.

“We need to combine these investigations, don’t we?”

“I’ll miss you,” I informed him, “I’m on my way back to K.C. I have no other contacts here, so I might as well work from home.”

“Make sense,” Rusty said, “Travel safe.”

For the first time I was suddenly concerned about just that same thing.

© C. Wayne Owens
Continue on to Chapter 39     
Back to the Beginning