The Oedipus Murders Read online

  The Oedipus Murders

  Casey Dorman

  © Copyright Casey Dorman 2019

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2019 by Casey Dorman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-331-8

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for checking out one of our Crime Fiction novels.

  If you enjoy this book, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  Caught in a Web by Joseph Lewis

  “This important, nail-biting crime thriller about MS-13 sets the bar very high. One of the year’s best thrillers.” –BEST THRILLERS

  To Lai, Andrea and Eric

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  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 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Note from the Author

  About the Author

  BRW Info

  “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

  ~Sigmund Freud

  Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

  Chapter 1

  Descending through the gray curtain of fog, Regina Bonaventure navigated her white Mercedes down the tortuous curves of the narrow streets of Pelican Hill, guided only by the haloed porch lights softly visible on either side of the road. At the bottom of the hill she turned left into the parking lot of a shopping center, the wet pavement shimmering in the mist-muted glow of the metal halide lights perched atop their tall poles. The high-end mall, which fronted on the Pacific Coast Highway, was home to a collection of women’s and children’s boutiques, a hardware store, a supermarket, and three restaurants.

  It was nine at night and the stores were dark, their long low line of attached buildings appearing as black shadows against the hillside. Only the lights from the supermarket and restaurants shone through the fog. Regina was badly in need of a drink.

  She and Lucas were regulars at two of the restaurants: the expensive steakhouse and the Southwestern style cantina. She’d never entered the Asian restaurant because Lucas didn’t like Asian food. From what her friends told her, it was a generic, Far Eastern dining spot. They’d also said that the restaurant had an elegant bar, which served a variety of cocktails, including exotic oriental drinks and, of course, wine, which was what she so badly needed at this moment. She parked along the side of the restaurant in the shadows near the back, hoping that no one she knew would see her car. She prayed that none of her friends were inside.

  The bar was almost empty, and she ordered a glass of chardonnay. She’d had three glasses before leaving the house. The wine had probably contributed to her argument with Lucas—her wine and his whiskeys. It wasn’t the first time that she had left after one of their alcohol-infused fights. She usually fled to the house of a friend. Lately, though, she had been going to bars, places such as this one, but farther away from home, places where she was not likely to be recognized. Although her visits to bars were driven by fear, she also felt a thrill, entering a strange setting, knowing no one… or usually no one.

  She remembered the night she had run into an old friend, someone she hadn’t seen for years. It had been a strange encounter. The man, whom she had known since childhood—a relationship she remembered with some pain—apparently hadn’t recognized her, although she was sure it was him, despite his portly shape and the well-trimmed beard that he now wore. Later, she found him looking at her, staring, until he finally came over to the bar and sat down next to her, but when she addressed him by his name, he seemed confused. Then, as abruptly as he had come, he left without a word.

  That was months ago. She never thought about it again except when she entered a bar by herself, as she had tonight. A quick look around told her that there was no one here whom she recognized. She breathed more easily and thought about why she was here.

  Lucas was a bully. But he had been her father’s choice and Regina had always done what her father had wanted her to do. Bertram Knowles, her father, whose oil company, with its platforms dotting the Santa Barbara coastline and stretching all the way to Huntington Beach, had sold his self-built business to Exxon Mobile for billions, retiring at the age of forty-two. He’d raised his only child as a princess, especially after her mother died when she was thirteen. At college she’d lived the protected life of a sorority girl, majoring in Romance Languages with vague thoughts of a career in international journalism or fashion advertising. She expected something to materialize through her father’s connections. But when she graduated, her father told her that it was time for her to marry; time to give him a grandchild.

  She and Lucas had never had a child. Her doctors told her that she was fertile. Lucas refused to submit to an examination.

 
She signaled the waiter to bring her a second chardonnay.

  “The man at the end of the bar would like to pay for your drink,” the tall Eurasian bartender said, nodding toward her left.

  She looked down the bar. An early-thirties blonde-haired man smiled at her, then winked. He wasn’t bad looking, she thought, well dressed in a light blue sport coat, open-necked shirt, and dark slacks. He looked well built and younger than her. He could be a businessman or a golfer, topping off a day at the office or at the nearby country club with a drink before heading home, someone hoping for a little action to spice up a dreary life. He caught her eye then raised his glass in her direction. He was drinking what appeared to be whiskey. She smiled back but shook her head. “I’ll pay for my own,” she told the bartender, “but thank him.” She wasn’t about to be picked up in a bar, not this close to home, not by someone who winked at her. She shuddered.

  Was it time to return home? If she drank many more glasses of wine, she might have difficulty driving, especially in this fog. She’d have one more drink. She downed the rest of her glass in one gulp, then signaled the bartender for another. The man at the end of the bar held up his glass and raised his eyebrows as if in question. She ignored him. Even a second glass of wine had not heightened his appeal.

  She sipped the third glass more slowly. Maybe Lucas would have gone to bed. He often retired early when he’d had too many whiskeys, and she was sure that he’d kept drinking after she’d left. But now she needed to use the restroom. Better do it before heading home, she thought. She left her drink half finished and headed for the restroom at the back of the restaurant.

  When she returned, she noticed that the man at the end of the bar had gone. She relaxed a little. He looked harmless, but his friendliness had made her uncomfortable.

  In the near blackness outside the restaurant, she fumbled with her key, almost dropping her purse. She hadn’t realized how drunk she was. Finally opening the car door, she sat behind the wheel and, with some unsteadiness in her aim, touched a finger to the starter button. The car purred to life, the lights blinking on automatically. She sat for a moment to steady her head. Was she really OK to drive? Startled by a sound behind her, she turned. She stiffened in terror at the face looming at her from the back seat, the hand raised in a closed fist. Before she could utter a cry, the fist slammed into her cheek, knocking her unconscious.

  Her assailant climbed out of the car. He pulled the unconscious woman from the driver’s seat, then opened the back door and thrust her limp body onto the back seat. Closing the rear door, he got behind the wheel and backed away from the building and then headed out onto the fog-shrouded ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Chapter 2

  Doctor George Farquhar rested an elbow on his desk, his bearded chin cupped in his hand, a look of bewilderment on his round, middle-aged face as he stared apprehensively at his office door. He felt a disconcerting sensation of butterflies in his stomach, as if an unknown disaster were impending. He didn’t know who was going to walk through his polished Oak door, and it bothered him not to know.

  George’s life followed a strict routine: out of bed by seven-thirty in the morning, coffee and toast while reading articles from the newspaper or one of his psychoanalytic journals, off to the office for his first patient at ten, lunch at twelve, a break to answer phone messages and complete other housekeeping chores until two, then three more patients before more catching up on messages and notes at five, and finally home, only ten minutes from his office, for cocktails with his wife before dinner. His world was deliberately circumscribed, both in his thinking and in his actions… except when he had lapses. And yesterday George had a lapse.

  His secretary had called in sick, a rarity in the woman’s ten years of employment for the three psychiatrists who shared her services on George’s floor. George had allowed his answering service to take his calls during sessions, returning them in the breaks between clients. Everything had run smoothly until the exit of his two o’clock patient. For the next hour, one that was open due to a vacationing client, George’s recollection was completely blank. His appointment book, however, had been diligently filled in with the name and telephone number of a new client, including the note anxious and desperate, but no other identifying information. The note was in his handwriting, but he couldn’t remember writing anything. He had given the new client an appointment for today at three p.m. The thought that he had no memory of having received a call or booked a client spiked his anxiety. Pools of sweat, like telltale signs of his lapse, formed in his armpits.

  From his late teens through his early adult years George had been plagued by such bizarre fugue states: periods of time, from minutes to several hours, for which he had no recollection. Each time he became aware of his excursions only later when he “woke up” in unfamiliar surroundings without any memory of how he had gotten there, haunted by a crushing feeling of guilt that he had committed an act too terrible to face.

  George’s recurrent amnesiac condition, which he later found was termed a temporary dissociative state, was the reason he had chosen psychiatry as his medical specialty and beyond that, further training in psychoanalysis, which had included his own 600-hour personal training analysis. His analysis had not only rid him of his dissociative symptoms, but taught him that his mysterious absences were a defense against the intrusion of wishes from his unconscious, as if his mind were burying itself in sand in order to refuse the entrance of disturbing and perhaps seductive thoughts, and that the guilt he always felt afterwards was related to the sexual nature of those thoughts. His analyst had reassured him that his behavior during such periods had surely been harmless.

  But now, ominously, after a twenty-year respite, his fugues, like a disturbing object placed out of sight but not disposed of, had reappeared. Twice in the last two months he had found himself driving alone, near midnight, headed toward his home, with no memory of his actions for the previous several hours. In each case, his last recollection was of sitting alone in his house drinking a gin and tonic, usually his third or fourth. To quell his terrifying fear, he reassured himself that the episodes were related to his alcohol consumption; an alcoholic “blackout,” not without worry in itself, but surely not a return of his dissociative symptoms. But now, for the first time, George had experienced one of his fugue episodes during the workday, without any prompting from alcohol. And as a consequence of its return, he had a new client, one who was anxious and desperate, according to George’s notes, but otherwise a mystery to him.

  — — —

  Lucas Bonaventure was dressed impeccably: dark suit, jacket open to reveal a vest across his flat midriff, neatly pressed pants, highly polished wingtips. He was over six feet tall and appeared to be in his late forties, with a clean-shaven face and neatly trimmed black hair, the stereotype of a successful businessman. He occupied the leather armchair in front of George’s desk proprietarily, while exhibiting a mild frown as his eyes darted from the analyst’s face to the circular French clock on the wall, seeming to be impatient for their conversation, which had barely begun, to be over. It was only when the man began to speak that George noticed the quaver in his voice, the nervous twitch of his eyelid.

  “I really don’t know if talking to you is going to do any good,” Lucas said. He gazed at George with an aggressive stare, as if challenging him to disagree.

  “I don’t either,” George answered. When Bonaventure had entered his office, George had been seized by the thought that he knew the man from somewhere, but he couldn’t place him, and he was almost sure that they had never been introduced.

  Lucas looked around the office as if he were noticing it—the framed degrees and licenses on the wall to his right, the well-worn couch behind him—for the first time. His eyes remained fixed on the couch, a low Mies van der Rohe-designed Barcelona couch—actually a d
aybed, complete with a rolled leather headrest—created in 1930 by the famous German-American architect and furniture designer.

  George had paid more than ten thousand dollars for the leather couch fifteen years earlier, another five thousand for the matching chair, which sat slightly behind it, so that neither the therapist nor the client could see each other’s eyes. George’s training analyst had owned an identical set, and when George sat in the antique chair, listening to the associations of his clients lying on the couch in front of him, he felt the confidence of having achieved the reversal of roles, from analysand to analyst, awarded to him by his training.

  Bonaventure’s gaze lingered on the couch, as if drawn by a magnet. George was aware that the low-slung piece of furniture could represent an object of fear to a new client. Its height, a mere eighteen inches off the floor and approximately the same as the height of the seat of the analyst’s chair, signified surrender, the helpless vulnerability one felt when lying down on a physician’s examining table or leaning back in a dentist’s chair. To lie on the couch meant to give up power, something George doubted Lucas Bonaventure was used to doing.

  “I’m not in need of anything myself,” Lucas said, turning back to George and settling himself in the chair, as if he had decided that, after all, he would stay. “It’s a woman. I’m worried about her mental state; I’m hoping you can give me some advice.”

  “A woman?” George glanced at Lucas’ left hand on which a slim gold wedding ring shone.

  “An acquaintance… actually, someone who works for me.”

  “An employee, then.”

  “Yes, I’m very concerned about her.”

  “Someone you’re close to?” George asked.