Profile of Retribution - Excerpt

Copyright 2015 by Alexa Grace

Scrubbing his hands over his face, Bradley Lucas sighed, and thought of his two sons, Devan and Evan. He could almost imagine them bounding down the stairs with their athletic gear going to yet another practice. He'd loved his sons, but wanted them brought up right, and had created strict rules to govern their lives. Rules he never dreamed they'd break. How and why their behavior had turned so deviant was a mystery he might never solve. Answers to questions he may never get. How could the two boys he loved more than anything make a game of abducting and murdering women? Where had he and Tisha gone wrong? How could they have raised such monsters? If he could go back and change things, he'd do it without hesitation, even if it meant giving his life. But what would he have done differently? He had no clue where he'd gone wrong.

He'd been searching for his sons the first time he entered their storage unit. He'd reported them missing when they didn't come home after a night out. Devan and Evan always came home. Always. They were teenagers — seventeen-year-old high school seniors. They knew the rules and what happened if they broke them.

Once inside the unit, he'd noticed the bed with the soiled, stained mattress first, and then the leather restraints bolted to the wall just above the headboard. Repulsed, his mind spinning with confusion, he'd backed away from the bed, and slammed against a stack of large plastic bins that tumbled to the floor, spilling out women's clothing, some of it stained with what looked like blood. A ring had rolled across the floor like a plastic disc from a Tiddlywink game. Picking up it up, he held it in his hand and realized it was an engagement ring, a circle of glittering stones surrounding a bigger stone in the center. The stones were diamonds and he'd been certain they were real.

It was then he saw Destiny Cooke's name written with a black marker at the side of the bin. Destiny Cooke? Wasn't she the beauty queen who had been found murdered? Why would his boys have Destiny's clothing and ring? His mouth flew open as his knees weakened, realization sending him crashing down to the cement floor. He spread his fingers out in a fan against his breastbone in a futile effort to slow his racing heart. Gripping the sides of his head, he tried to stop the voices of denial shouting in his mind. They couldn't have killed her. Not his sons. There must be another explanation.

But he would have known the handwriting on the bin anywhere, there was no denying that. It was a crude combination of printing and cursive that his grade school teachers had harped about at parent-teacher meetings for years. It'd been written by his son, Devan.

There were other plastic bins with names on labels, a lot of them. Bins filled with women's clothing, jewelry, shoes, purses and more. All neatly stored and cataloged. Reading the labels, he recognized some of the names from a whiteboard in the sheriff's conference room, included in a list of murder victims the detectives believed were connected by the same killer or killers.

Picking himself up, he headed toward the door. As a father, his decision was easy. He'd hide his sons' evil from the rest of the world. No one would ever have to know. They were his boys, after all. It was his job to protect them no matter what they'd done. He'd come back in the wee hours of the morning and destroy the evidence. No one would have to know. He'd pull down the unit door, lock the contents and secrets away. But it had been too late.

He'd backed out of the unit and reached for the door to pull it down.

"Freeze!"

A gun barrel pressed against his back, he'd turned to see an armed deputy. There were two more in the parking lot standing behind the front doors of their patrol cars with guns aimed at his chest. They handcuffed him and shoved him in the back of a patrol car. He'd seen their expressions of disgust when they returned to the car after searching the contents of the unit. They sealed it off as a crime scene and the rest was history once they discovered the storage unit was a treasure trove of evidence that his boys had tortured and murdered seven young women.

That his sons both died left him with disbelief that the young men he loved more than life could be responsible for such absolute horror. There would be no escape from his overwhelming guilt for the pain they caused the victims and their families. The anguish they left behind could no more be undone than the murders they'd committed.