Hunting Michael Underwood Read online

  Hunting

  Michael Underwood

  L. V. Gaudet

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2016 by L.V. Gaudet

  All rights reserved

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of the book.

  Second edition published September 2018

  Cover photo by Benjamin Lambert on Unsplash

  Discover other titles by L.V. Gaudet:

  Garden Grove

  The Gypsy Queen

  The McAllister Series:

  Where the Bodies Are

  The McAllister Farm

  Hunting Michael Underwood

  Killing David McAllister

  “Michael Underwood walked

  out of that prison

  and off the face of the earth,

  taking our only witness with him.

  I will find him and bring him down.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  To sleep more deeply is to dream more deeply.

  In the darkness, where the nightmares live.

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  1Insanely Guilty

  2A Visit to the Clinker

  3Looking to the Past

  4Lawrence Talks to Cliff Hofstead

  5Lawrence

  6Peabody’s

  7It’s A Beautiful Day to Be Free

  Part Two

  8Talking to Crazy

  9A New Home, For Now

  10Investigating the Investigator

  11Secret Rendezvous

  Part Three

  12It’s All About the Kids

  13Cleaning House

  14Only More Questions

  15Proof William is Alive

  Part Four

  16A New Name and a New Start

  17Peek-A-Boo Neighbour

  18Slaughterhouse

  19A Visit and a Reason to Move

  20Trevor Swears Revenge

  21Michael Goes on a Trip

  22Next Door

  23Ryan Comes Home

  24Hawkworth has an Epiphany

  25Room Sitting

  26Plans and Counter-Plans

  Part Five

  27Jason Visits his Father

  28Finding William McAllister

  29The Boy is Trouble

  30Donald Downey

  31Ryan’s Trip

  32Meeting Marjory

  Part Six

  33Old Men Talking

  34Confrontation

  35Michael’s Father

  36David McAllister

  37Michael Visits Anderson

  38Looking for the Kid

  39Trevor Mitchell is Mr. Miller

  Part Seven

  40Sophie

  41Gone

  Killing David McAllister

  Book 4: The McAllister Series

  Part 1

  1Promises

  2Open Doors

  Other books by L.V. Gaudet:

  About the Author

  Hunting Michael Underwood

  Part One

  Free Pass

  1Insanely Guilty

  The steady drone of the tires on concrete should have lulled Detective Jim McNelly into a false sense of normalcy. Nothing will be normal again. Not for him, or for anyone else.

  His fat jowls work as he clenches and unclenches his jaw, his thick hands gripping the steering wheel hard. His bulk is more than ample enough to fill the driver’s seat of the ancient brown Oldsmobile, almost spilling over into the passenger side.

  The McAllister murders.

  They are eating away at his gut, tormenting his sleep, and torturing his heartburn. They are victims he failed to save.

  The phone call that brought him speeding towards the prison had shattered his morning.

  Earlier:

  It is Jim’s day off, but his conscience isn’t having it.

  Michael Underwood vanished along with our only living witness to the McAllister murders, Jim thinks, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  Michael visited McAllister in prison after the guilty verdict came down on Jason T. McAllister. That was the last time Michael Underwood and our only witness, Katherine Kingslow, were seen.

  He takes a sip of coffee, his unkempt moustache soaking up some of the brew.

  The phone rings.

  “McNelly,” he answers it gruffly.

  “Jim, have you heard the news?”

  He recognizes the voice immediately, Lawrence Hawkworth.

  It was thanks to Lawrence’s investigation that we discovered the identity of the killer.

  Hawkworth, that buzzard-like creature who has no shame when it comes to digging up and publishing dirt for the InterCity Voice. He’s the most notoriously underhanded investigative reporter in town, but he is effective. Otherwise, Jason McAllister would still be an unknown perp.

  Lawrence Hawkworth is also his long time friend.

  “No. I haven’t turned on a radio or T.V.” He’d had enough of the news long before the trial finished.

  “This hasn’t hit the news wires yet. It’s more rumour than news.”

  “What is it?” Jim frowns, sipping his coffee.

  “The judge is cutting Jason McAllister loose.”

  Jim’s grip on his coffee mug tightens and he scowls.

  “What do you mean, cutting him loose? He’s being shipped today to a high security nut house. It’s not a real sentence, but at least he’s locked up for now.”

  His sentence will be determined on a month-to-month basis by a board of psychiatrists and the suits that run the place.

  The idea infuriates Jim. Not guilty by reason of insanity, that was the trial verdict. Instead of hard time in a penitentiary, he’s doing not so hard time in a psychiatric facility. How long he serves depends on his behaviour.

  “That’s been put off. His lawyer managed to get the appeal date pushed up, fast tracked because someone at the top just wants it to go away, I’m sure of that.”

  “I’m not surprised. He used the media to get the public to sympathize with McAllister while he filed his appeal against the guilty but insane verdict. The moment the verdict came down the media switched from portraying McAllister as a monster to calling him an innocent victim railroaded by the police without proof, almost in the same breath. It will be impossible to find another jury that hasn’t been tainted by the media for another trial.”

  “It’s gone past that now. I doubt there will be another trial, not even a trial by judge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rumour has it the judge is releasing McAllister pending a new trial when the appeal comes before him. The appeal is just a formality. It’s already decided.”

  Jim flinches, freezes, a stone cold statue. “You’re joking. It’s not funny.”

  “It’s no joke. Jason McAllister will be standing before the judge within the next few days. He’s walking out of that courtroom a free man.”

  Lawrence’s words hit Jim like a physical blow, rocking him as hard as it did when the verdict came down.

  His coffee cup explodes against the wall in a shower of broken ceramic fragments and coffee erupting and splattering out from the wall like dull brown blood.

  It’s all too convenient. McAllister is too insane to be found guilty of kidnapping and murder, but not insane enough to be
a danger to society. McAllister has just been handed a free pass, a get out of jail free card. Do not pass Go and do not collect your two hundred dollars, just go and run. Disappear.

  “What secrets do you know McAllister?” Jim mutters under his breath.

  “What are you going to do, Jim?”

  “I’m going to get the son of a bitch.”

  Present:

  The road continues to roll under the ancient Oldsmobile’s tires.

  Cassie. The name is a whisper in his mind, haunting him.

  A car horn blares rudely, bringing Jim’s attention back to the road. He grips the steering wheel harder in his meaty hands, swerving to avoid a head-on collision. He was so engrossed in his thoughts he wasn’t paying attention to the road and drifted across the center line.

  The other driver gives him the middle finger with an angry glare as he passes.

  Jim’s mind keeps working, moving the puzzle pieces around in his head.

  When an unidentified woman was found savagely beaten and barely clinging to life, no one imagined it would be only the beginning. She was just one victim with no name or past and an unknown assailant.

  With the Jane Doe kept sedated in an induced coma, we couldn’t question her. All attempts to identify her failed and there was no missing persons report that matched her description. The best we could hope for was that whoever assaulted her and left her for dead would come back to finish the job.

  Detective Michael Underwood was placed in position undercover disguised as an orderly to watch the victim during hospital visiting hours.

  Jim makes a sour face, the name tasting foul on his tongue even without voicing it. His eyes narrow with hatred.

  Then another body showed up.

  More bodies showed up, each provoking the media to a bigger frenzy, and Katherine Kingslow went missing. The evidence pointed in one direction, that they were victims of the same killer, Katherine probably the next body to appear.

  Serial killer began to be whispered around and the media picked up on it.

  It was supposed to be a simple serial killer, not that a serial killer is simple, but complicated doesn’t even begin to describe this case.

  Suspicion that Jane Doe was the one victim who survived made her more valuable. She was our only living witness.

  Then the killer did exactly what we were counting on; he showed up at the hospital to finish the job.

  We completely botched it. Instead of catching McAllister in the act, we dropped the ball and he kidnapped Jane Doe and just walked out of the hospital with her in the middle of a lockdown and massive search.

  “That still burns me,” he mutters. “It’s still a mystery. How does a man who is the subject of a massive search by officers and hospital security swarming a hospital on lockdown just walk out with a woman in a hospital gown who could not have walked on her own, and no one saw anything?”

  Jane Doe was never found. Her body is no doubt rotting away in some secret grave somewhere. Only her hospital gown and intravenous tube and needle were found at the McAllister farm.

  Jane Doe’s identity is still a mystery.

  It was Lawrence who found the farm. The McAllister Farm was passed down in the McAllister family for generations. Jason McAllister returning at that moment, decades after the family abandoned the place, was no coincidence. Except we had no proof, only a reporter’s hunch.

  We confirmed McAllister was the perpetrator when we searched the farm and discovered Katherine Kingslow held captive in the farmhouse and the evidence that places Jane Doe there. Molly, the missing nurse from the hospital, was found there too, putrefaction already begun, in the trunk of a stolen car parked in the driveway.

  We had a new living witness.

  There was one big problem with the case, our only witness.

  We only had circumstantial evidence. There was no concrete evidence placing McAllister in the area in the days leading up to his arrest at the McAllister farm and we were up against a credible story of his arriving just that day. We needed that witness testimony to seal McAllister’s fate.

  Katherine Kingslow would not talk. She was damaged goods; damaged in a way that most victims will never recover from, even with years of intensive therapy.

  Jason McAllister was convicted on loosely held circumstantial evidence based on his presence at the farm when we raided it. There was no substantiated evidence against him.

  That leaves the much bigger mystery an unsolved case. The graves.

  Jim’s hands squeeze the wheel harder. He grits his teeth, glaring down the road ahead of him as it passes continuously beneath his car. He realizes his hands are still gripping the steering wheel as if he is trying to strangle it and forces himself to loosen his grip, bringing the color back into his knuckles that had turned white with the vicious grip.

  “Michael Underwood,” he refers to him by both names, like a criminal, “was at the McAllister farm when I showed up to search it.”

  I got there before my backup did to find Michael already on site. Only, he was oblivious to my attempts to contact him to meet me there.

  Michael Underwood, or whatever his real name is, duped us all. He came into our building as a transfer from another department. All his papers were in order. Everything about him seemed legitimate. No one thought to dig deeper. There was no reason to. These transfers are common.

  All my attempts to investigate Underwood’s background after he vanished came up empty. The man never existed before that first day he set foot in my office. He isn’t even a ghost using a deceased person’s identity.

  Michael Underwood is a likeable guy and that only makes it burn more.

  I have no proof, but I know Michael was somehow involved in the McAllister murders.

  The day after the guilty verdict came down Michael visited McAllister in prison. I had confirmation of that meeting from the guard on duty at the prison. I also learned a little of the conversation that happened behind that closed door, but very little.

  Michael raised his voice in anger, demanding to know where she is, Cassie. The guard heard the name through the door.

  “Who is Cassie? She’s a new piece of the puzzle.”

  After that, Michael Underwood walked out of that prison and off the face of the earth, taking our only witness with him. Surveillance footage outside the prison shows them together. She waited outside for him.

  I will find him and bring him down.

  Is the witness still alive? If Katherine can place Michael as an accomplice to Jason McAllister, then Michael had a good reason to get rid of her. Most likely she’s dead, her body decomposing in some hidden grave somewhere.

  He keeps coming back to that thought, hidden graves. “More victims I failed.”

  He is almost there. Jim turns his rusting brown Oldsmobile, a relic and an eyesore against the sleeker newer vehicles on the road, and heads down the last stretch of road to the prison.

  If I’m right, Jason T. McAllister could be the most prolific serial killer the world has ever seen and Michael Underwood may be his partner. But there is so much more to this story than that. There are still the bodies.

  The search for the killer responsible for women turning up brutally beaten to death, and the search for Katherine, would never have been anything more than one man responsible for multiple homicides. It was those hikers discovering a gruesome find in the woods that was the catalyst to a much bigger discovery that rocked the world.

  That remote area of forest beyond the McAllister Farm hid a big secret, a hidden graveyard with the remains of hundreds of bodies that have been buried there for generations.

  Thanks to them, we turned up something much bigger than a few missing and murdered women, bigger than the most notorious serial killer ever known. The proximity of the graveyard and farm and the evidence suggesting the recent victims were buried and dug up, pointed to them possibly being the missing bodies from the few empty graves. The connection can’t be dismissed.

  I know Jason T. McAlliste
r has something to do with that graveyard and its long buried residents and Michael Underwood has a connection to McAllister.

  I just can’t prove it. Yet.

  I couldn’t pin the graves on McAllister. We couldn’t nail him for the missing and murdered women. There was no proof that could be undeniably held against him. He could have gotten the death penalty, or at least life.

  All we had him on was kidnapping the Kingslow woman and Jane Doe, and the nurse, Molly. His lawyer denied it all, of course, arguing he was an innocent victim caught up in an unknown assailant’s crimes, charged only because he happened to own the abandoned property.

  When it looked like he would lose, his lawyer turned to the insanity defence.

  He was found guilty, determined so by a jury of his peers. What a joke.

  The words still thunder in Jim’s head, “Not guilty by reason of insanity. The defendant is considered to not have been of sound mind at the time the crimes were committed.”

  The insanity defence; everyone is insane when they are guilty. There was no evidence pointing to unbalanced behaviour. It makes no sense.

  Still, our only witness, Katherine Kingslow, wouldn’t talk. The shrink said it was useless, she was too damaged, lost within her own tortured mind from the years of abuse she had suffered at her boyfriend’s hands and then the kidnapping and being kept prisoner in a dirt floored cellar beneath the old farmhouse.

  Jim turns into the prison driveway and into the visitors’ parking area.

  2A Visit to the Clinker

  The clanging of metal doors echoes through the building, joining their footsteps in a jagged staccato echoing down the hall.

  Detective Jim McNelly wonders as he always does, why do they make these places like this, so every sound is a loud amplified clang and echo? Is it done on purpose as a daily reminder to the prisoners that they are nothing more than animals in cages? Or is it to remind the guards that?

  He follows the guard escorting him, his large frame too wide to make walking abreast comfortable in the narrow hallway. They would have had to walk so close they might as well have been holding hands.