Chapter Seventeen
Ghost
February 3, 2025, Diamond Creek, Nebraska.
Life at the clubhouse was fucking crazy right now. Freeway was pissing everyone off. Bane sat at the bar all night drinking. Cash and Ryder could barely be in the same room together. King was pissed at Gunner. And Gunner was stalking his shrink.
Meanwhile, Jingles and I were looking for Warren Kelley, but the fucker kept slipping through our fingers. The shady motherfucker was up to something. The motel sat outside of town, but well within the limits of Diamond Creek.
Megan hadn’t called, but Jingles stopped by and charmed her into confessing that she had seen bikers driving around the building. They weren’t us.
In addition to that, a few nights ago, another woman in town had been drugged. This one had been raped in the bathroom of the bar.
I couldn’t keep my thoughts from traveling back to the night I met Lyssa. I had led her to the bathroom of that seedy bar outside Oklahoma City without a second thought.
My only fucking thought was about sinking my dick into her pussy and busting a nut inside her. And while she had been more than fucking willing, after what Aspen Winters had been through, I felt like shit.
I didn’t know anything about Lyssa except her first name and the way her cunt felt wrapped around my dick. For all I knew, she could have been leading me on to follow her to a hotel and steal my shit.
I didn’t really believe that. The way she moved with grace. The smile on her face as she laughed with her friends. Watching her eyes deepen from whiskey to chocolate told me how much she wanted me.
All I got from her was a fan-fucking-tastic blowjob and a quick and dirty fuck against the sink. I wanted to spend the night buried inside her. I wanted to lap her pussy until she screamed for me to stop. My biggest regret was I never got to taste her.
Something spooked her when we got outside.
She gave me an excuse about forgetting her jacket and telling her friends she was leaving, and I sat out there like a fucking chump, waiting. Twenty fucking minutes later, I didn’t want to admit she had cut and run.
I went inside, stupid enough to believe she just got caught up saying goodbye to her friends. I searched the whole fucking bar, but she was gone. I knew what had happened.
I pegged her when I called her princess. That’s what she was. She probably didn’t know I knew the difference between designer jeans and Levi’s. Her expensive leather jacket wasn’t fooling anyone. She wanted to see how the other half lived and she did.
Then she ran like the spoiled bitch she was.
Shaking my head, I brought myself back to the present and the situation at hand. This afternoon, Gunner had been sitting outside Aspen’s house because Haizley was inside with her. Thank fucking God he was, because the bastard that raped her had broken into the house and tried again.
The important fucking word there was tried.
Tried and fucking failed.
Men who raped women were a piece of shit.
Scratch that, they were lower than fucking shit.
I had seen some ugly guys with beautiful women and some very ugly women with good-looking guys. There was someone out there for everyone. It was your fucking job to find your other half. If you weren’t interested in that, find like-minded partners who shared your brand of kink.
What you didn’t do was take away their fucking ability to say no.
We hadn’t had a woman in town get drugged since Sam. Most of it happened in towns surrounding Diamond Creek. We tried to get brothers into some of those areas, but we were stretched thin with the sheer volume of reports in the other towns.
This was our fucking town, and we wouldn’t stand for it here. We needed to find this motherfucker and put him in the ground.
Gunner had brought Aspen to the clubhouse after the attack. I wasn’t sure that was the best option considering her state of mind, but when they walked through the doors, the women surrounded her, giving her the support she needed.
Our women were fucking awesome.
Haizley had called in Deputy Blackwater to take her statement, and Gunner lit into Dec about Deputy Reed and his bullshit. No one in the club had much use for Reed.
The son of a bitch thought his shit didn’t stink. He believed he was better than us because he was a lawman. He liked to pull us over just for riding down the fucking road. Making up bullshit offences about our pipes being too loud or the exhaust being too black. Spouting some shit about air pollution.
I agreed with Gunner. Deputy Reed was a shady motherfucker. Just because Nav couldn’t find the dirt, didn’t mean the man was clean. Hell, everyone had their price.
Even Declan.
King was his weakness. There was a lot of shit he would be willing to do if it meant he could protect his baby brother. And that’s how Dec would always see him.
Blackwater was a solid deputy though. He was fair, only pulling us over when we opened up the throttle on the roads outside of town. That was, if he could catch us.
Right now, he was in church with Gunner, Haizley, and Aspen while she described her attacker.
She couldn’t remember much from the first attack, but the son of a bitch made a grave mistake in trying to go back for more. According to Gunner, she got a good look at the bastard. And she scratched his face to hell.
That was shit to be proud of.
Almost two hours had passed by the time the four of them walked out of church. Haizley and Amber took Aspen upstairs to get her settled in her room. And King called the officers into church, along with Declan and Blackwater.
Gunner handed the sketch over to Nav and he scanned it into his computer. The image flashed up on the screen at the front of the room.
“Sam confirmed this was the guy who approached her at the bar back in October,” Gunner explained.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack cursed.
This guy had been making the rounds for a minimum of four months. If he was working alone, it was probably longer than that. Jack was still blaming himself for leaving Sam at the hospital with Jingles the night she was drugged. Thank God Jingles was at the bar with her, so she hadn’t fallen victim like Aspen.
Jingles had gotten Sam to the hospital as soon as she started to feel the effects. Why we didn’t think to have her sit with Gunner to make a sketch, I had no fucking idea. We could have gotten this fucker months ago.
“Does anyone recognize him?” Declan asked.
“He looks familiar, but I can’t quite place him.” Deputy Blackwater walked closer to the screen, scrutinizing the image.
“What is it?” Cash asked.
Cash seemed to be lucid today. Maybe it had something to do with Aspen being attacked. He might be acting like an asshole to Ryder and everyone else in the club, but he was like the rest of us when it came to a woman being attacked.
“I don’t know.” Blackwater shook his head.
“There’s definitely something familiar,” Jingles confirmed.
“I bet we’ve all seen him at the bar or in town. We just didn’t know who we were looking for until now,” I added as I stared at the picture on the screen. I couldn’t deny there was something about the man that was familiar.
“Dec, you said you found another body?” King asked, moving our focus from the man on the screen.
“Yea, another body found on the Powell Ranch. Before you shit a brick, I asked them not to tell Win. I know you trust him, and Grayson does, too. But I can’t have everyone knowing what is going on. Not yet.”
“So, is this guy only killing certain victims or what?” Blade asked.
“I don’t think it’s the same guy,” Dec explained. “The second body I found was a female, brunette. She had that in common with the first victim. She was also twenty-three. Whoever is killing these women is beginning to develop a pattern, but it doesn’t match the rape victims. The rapes have no pattern. They are a crime of opportunity. Some of the women have blonde hair, some red, as well as brunette. That leads me to believe these are two separate crimes. Whoever is killing these women is planning the abductions. Whether he is killing them on purpose, I don’t know yet. So far, the elements have killed both victims. Powell’s cattle trampled the first woman. The second woman fell from an outcropping of rocks. Like she had climbed up there and lost her footing.”
“Except she was naked,” King surmised.
“Except she was naked,” Dec confirmed.
“The first UNSUB is methodical. He appears to be planning everything, including their deaths. Though, we are still unsure if their deaths are intentional, or if they are getting away and succumbing to the elements. The second UNSUB is sloppy. He’s never assaulted a woman at the bar before. Aspen was different. We hoped finding her in the bathroom meant she hadn’t been raped. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The previous rape victims were all led from the bar and taken somewhere else, then dropped at a secondary location where they woke up alone. That theory was due to the lack of evidence found at the scene they said they woke up at,” Blackwater expounded.
“One goddamn psycho isn’t enough; we need to have two.” Nav shook his head. “Do we have anything at all? I need something to dig into if I’m going to find anything.”
“I have the two victims’ names. I want you to dig into them. See if there is anything that connects them. There has to be a reason the UNSUB is choosing them. Whoever they are, they are taking their time. Two bodies in four months doesn’t make a serial killer. But if I was hedging my bets, I would say this was just the beginning.” Declan looked around the room before continuing, “Aside from the mayor, the men in this room are the only ones who have all the facts.”
“Not the other officers?” Gunner asked.
“No. The others know the facts of the case, but no theories. I have been in law enforcement long enough to know that anyone is capable of this shit.”
“So, what makes him so trustworthy?” Gunner asked, motioning to Blackwater.
“You got a problem with me because I’m friends with your girl? She’s like a fucking sister to me. I’ve known her a hell of a lot longer than you have. If I wanted her, I’d have had her.”
“You’re screwed, Gun. That fucking ‘like a sister’ shit ain’t fucking real.”
“Fuck off, Cash,” Blade growled.
Jesus Christ with these two.
“What the fuck did you just say to your VP?” Cash sneered, standing from his seat. Blade followed, slamming his hands on the table. I braced myself to launch over the table if they came to blows.
“Sit your asses down,” King demanded, but neither moved.
Cash and Blade just glared at each other over the table.
“NOW GODDAMMIT!”
Blade sat first, never taking his eyes off Cash. Something had to give. Cash was pissing everyone off. It was a fragile fucking fuse ready to blow without notice.
“We’ll keep it quiet, Dec. But any more bodies, we have to tell the guys.”
“Any more bodies and we will officially have a serial killer.” Dec sounded defeated.
“Does that mean bringing in the Feds?” King asked.
“It is at my discretion. I won’t bring them in unless I absolutely need them.”
Dec didn’t want the Feds here any more than the rest of us did. He had his own way of doing things and didn’t want some stuffed shirt nosing their way in and fucking up his investigation.