The Missing Fingertips: Julie Farlow FBI Mystery Thriller Book 2, page 1
THE MISSING FINGERTIPS
JULIE FARLOW SERIES: BOOK TWO
LEVI FULLER
Copyright ©2022 by Blue Scallop Digital LLC. – All rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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ALSO BY LEVI FULLER
ALMA NOVELS
Sound of Fear
Eye of Fear
Vision of Fear
Taste of Fear
Game of Fear
ISLE OF BUTE NOVELLAS
The Scent of Bones
The Secret of Bones
The Unburied Bones
The Missing Bone
Hide The Bones
LUKE PENBER NOVELLAS
Bend The Law 1
Bend The Law 2
Bend The Law 3
Bend The Law 4
Bend The Law 5
NANTAHALA RIVER
The Reticence 1
The Reticence 2
The Reticence 3
The Reticence 4
The Reticence 5
TURQUOISE VALLEY
The Kay Sister 1
The Kay Sister 2
The Kay Sister 3
The Kay Sister 4
The Kay Sister 5
WANT HER LIFE
THE LOCKET NOOSE
JULIE FARLOW
The Missing Daughter
The Missing Fingertips
AUDIO BOOK
Sound of Fear
Eye of Fear
Table of Contents
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
Chapter21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
REVIEW THE BOOK
Chapter 1
Connections. That was always his line. It would be easier to rail against him if he were wrong.
Agent Julie Farlow gritted her teeth, fear licking up her spine as the softly spoken words of the psychologist once more ripped open old wounds. A hallway appeared in her mind, bright and filled with echoing laughter. She tried to get out of the memory, knowing it was going to shift. The light started to fade; the laughter swallowed by gloom. Blood spread before her, marring the walls, making her feet slip on the tiled floor. Gone. The house, bleeding, foreboding and dark, seemed to scream the word at her as her thirteen-year-old self raced from room to room, falling so often she was soaked in blood by the time she stopped.
“Don’t fight it,” the man sitting across from her said. She tried to focus on him, on the sunlit office, so far from the memories his ceaseless prodding kept at the surface.
Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to suffer the scenes in her nightmares? Her head was pounding. From lack of sleep or from the drifting vapors of his scent diffuser. Not for the first time, she wondered if the cloying oils he put in there at the start of every session weren’t drugged.
“Let it flow,” he commanded. “Your recent attack will have opened old wounds. You need to face them all.”
She shoved his voice away and fought harder as the image shifted again. The living room of her childhood home grew smaller, damper, colder, then warmer again. The blood on her turned to water and the scent of unfamiliar soap. A blade was strapped to her hand, a rope and pulley system making her into a living marionette.
Before her, a young woman. She had been meant to save her. To stop the monster who manipulated the string. Julie only just managed to keep her scream silent as in her memory, her arm was jerked outward in a sweeping motion that spilled the woman’s lifeblood over her, over the floor.
She stood abruptly, barely seeing the too bright office or the face of the man who was supposed to be helping her get back to work, not drive her to insanity.
“Agent Farlow, stop.”
It was better in the deserted hallway. The walls, the carpet, the smell of paper, mass-produced textiles, and a hint of disinfectant were familiar. Part of a new life she had started when her last one ended. She breathed in deeply, and her head cleared a little more. Her ability to shut down the memories and shove them behind doors in her mind returned to her.
She spun to face the man approaching her, his dark copper hair clipped and neat, his eyes, dark as a deep ocean, were cool and calm and fixed on her with an intensity that made her want to run. Martin Rhoe stopped a pace away. Too close. Where the hell had this man studied psychology? Wasn’t he supposed to make her feel at ease?
“We can take a break if you need one.” His voice was like his eyes. Depthless, cool, and holding her trapped.
Julie flashed her teeth, a smile or maybe a snarl. “What I need, Dr. Rhoe is for you to sign off on my mental health so that I can get the hell back to work.”
He tilted his head to the side, unaffected by her feral display of teeth. “You are not ready.”
She resisted the urge to throw her good hand in the air and curse him soundly. Instead, she tried to keep her tone calm. “I am fine, truly. Other than this broken arm, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“So no nightmares? No melding of the traumas of your past with your more recent ones? No struggling to keep reality in focus if prompted with triggers about your experiences?”
Bastard. She thought. As if all his questions and prodding since day one of her ‘therapy’ sessions hadn’t been precisely for his stated reactions.
She shook her head, blond ponytail swishing and reflecting the light. “The only thing I am struggling with is boredom, Dr. Rhoe. I love my job, and I want to get back to it.”
“You are lying to yourself, Agent Farlow. You need to stop running. Work is a shield that you hide behind. You think I haven’t noticed the look on your face when I talk about your sisters?”
Her sea-green eyes flashed and then fell into a dead calm, the sort that had sent many a cocky ass running away back in her days of training. Dr. Rhoe didn’t even blink.
“Your job is not to determine whether my childhood trauma is still affecting me,” she said, keeping herself detached, a separate person from the rattling doors in her mind, from the tang of blood that seemed to seep out from behind them. “I was deemed fit on that count years ago. Your only task,” she continued as he opened his mouth, “is to clear me from my recent kidnapping experience at the hands of James Lun. That is all.”
“And torture.” His voice was so soft. Soft enough to have been lost if she had breathed too loudly. “You weren’t just taken. You were…”
“I know what happened,” she bit out, her shell of ice cracking. “It doesn’t affect my ability to do my job.”
“I disagree. I will have the rest of this session rescheduled for after the New Year. Go home. Rest. Think about what I said.”
She felt her nails bite into her palms as he turned and walked away. Calling him every foul name she knew, probably loud enough for him to hear, Julie stalked to the elevators. If he wasn’t going to play by her rules, she’d go straight to Kronnig and get him replaced. They had other psychologists. Undoubtedly one of them would go through the standard tests and questions and then deem her fit for duty.
****
Blood wasn’t a single shade of red. It had hues of deep crimson, bright flashes of garnet. It held shadows of mahogany and flickers of bright rose. It was beautiful.
The light in the room was a fierce cold white. Nothing could hide in it. The lamps, arching from all over the space, eliminated all shadows. This was a place of creation.
The man strapped to the table watched him move. The white shone all around his eyes. Fear. A pale blue flecked with stone gray, their irises tracked his every twitch. They were connected.
He smiled, raising the scalpel high in the air, reminded of a scene from a musical he quite liked. A barber turned demon. He’d probably be considered the same. A lover of books, turned to a demon of night.
He reached for the man’s right arm, re-checking that the tourniquet was secure, that
He picked his favorite song from the musical and began to whistle it behind his mask as his gloved hands carefully set to work, the scalpel slowly slicing through skin and muscle at the wrist.
Gifts should always be chosen with care, he thought as he sliced and whistled, bathed in the cold white light, creating something special.
****
Julie stepped off the elevator, having marshaled her thoughts into a tight argument. She would not leave Kronnig’s office until the woman let her change psychologists.
She turned the bend, steeling herself, and walked into a solid wall of muscled flesh. Big hands caught her as she stumbled back and found herself looking up at the bear of a man that was Jeremy Crinn. He seemed to have gotten even bigger since she had last seen him. Or maybe it was because she hadn’t been this close to him in a while.
“Sorry,” she muttered, pulling back enough that he let his hands fall back to his sides.
He didn’t step aside, his warm brown eyes sweeping her from head to toe then lingering on her face. She drew breath to ask him to move, but he spoke first.
“If you charge into Kronnig’s office now, bellowing about Rhoe’s methods, I guarantee you she will leave you stuck with him simply out of spite.”
She loosed that breath, and cursed, “I can’t ignore this, Crinn. I need to get back to work, and at this rate, I never will.”
Something flashed through his eyes, hurt perhaps, but he remained standing there. “It is New Year’s Eve, Julie. Kronnig is about to leave. Do you really think she’ll appreciate being held back for your rant?”
Her eyes flashed. Rant? She may never have told him the details about her past, but everyone knew she came from a traumatic background. Jeremy sighed, his massive chest expanding and then deflating. A large hand found her shoulder and engulfed it.
“I need you to trust me on this one, Jules,” he said, using the nickname only her cousin usually did. “I know Kronnig, and I know Rhoe. I can guess the hell he’s been putting you through. I can also guess that he is waiting for you to go over his head so he can prove his case that you are not ready.”
Julie bit her lip. It made sense, which given her current mood, only annoyed her more. “You’re telling me to turn around and go home?”
He didn’t react to her heated tone beyond giving her shoulder a light squeeze. “I’m actually inviting you to mine.”
Her eyes snapped back up to his face. For a tiny moment, his expression of concern for her, of persuasion not to go to Kronnig like this, cracked, and through the fissures, she saw something else. Loneliness. She sighed in a long breath. About a month ago, she had discovered that Jeremy Crinn, their best tech wiz with a checkered past, lived here, in this building. Locked behind three layers of security and double sheets of bullet-proof glass.
Part of her, the part that had come to trust him, to see him as a friend, wanted to say yes immediately, but it was held back because part of her wanted no one close to her. Maybe it was the after-effects of the grueling session with Rhoe, or perhaps she was just tired, but she couldn’t lie to herself. She didn’t want anyone close because she didn’t want the pain of losing them. She wasn’t sure she could survive more loss.
Jeremy was still waiting. Eyes steady if a little more vulnerable than she thought even he realized. He lowered his hand, his eyes locking to the wall so she couldn’t read them anymore, words forming on his lips to make light of his invitation, to make her expected rejection hurt less. She watched that all as if in slow motion and knew, deep in her bones, that she was already too late. She already cared about Jeremy Crinn. He was a friend. He was already someone it would cost her to lose.
She chuckled, mostly in despair at how human emotions never seemed to learn, then waited for his eyes to come back to hers. “Thanks, Juno,” she said, deliberately using his nickname. Jules and Juno, his favorite way to refer to them, to make them a team separate from the rest. And maybe they were.
“Is that a yes?” he asked, watching her carefully.
She flashed him a small smile, her first in weeks. “Yes.”
He grinned, a bright, untainted grin that made him suddenly look like a schoolboy. “We can order in whatever you like and,” he said, lowering his voice even though the hall remained empty. “My place has a spectacular view of the fireworks set off for miles around.”
She tried to match his grin as they both turned for the elevators. It wasn’t too hard. His enthusiasm was contagious.
Chapter 2
Julie stood by the windows of Jeremy’s apartment, the night view over Baltimore breathtaking if slightly distorted by the bullet-proof glass.
He came to stand beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off his body. She resisted the urge to sidle away. The evening had gone well so far. They’d gorged themselves on a veritable buffet of everything from Crinn’s life staple of pizza to noodle bowls and dumplings from her favorite Chinese restaurant to kebabs and shawarma from the Turkish place down the street. They had kept to safe subjects. Her training days at the academy, his creation of Goliath, the A.I. search engine that did in hours what humans would have taken decades to achieve. She regaled him with a few of Rebecca, her cousin’s, exploits, and the mess they often got in because Julie wasn’t as feminine as Becky thought she ought to be. He’d returned the favor, mentioning Bruno Rossi, a man she’d never met, but making her almost cry with laughter at the mischief they had gotten into together.
“How many minutes to go?” she asked, smiling again.
“Two,” Jeremy said, glancing at the clock on the wall above his desk.
Silence fell between them, and she swallowed a sigh. This was why she didn’t have friends. Her topics of conversation were too limited. She would not talk about anything prior to her fourteenth birthday. She would not talk about why she went into law enforcement. Her eyes shifted to Jeremy as he leaned a bit closer to the glass before them. He didn’t seem bothered by the silence. Maybe that was because he was the same. He didn’t talk about anything before his offer from Kronnig when he was eighteen and due for his release from incarceration. He never mentioned his reasons for taking her up on that offer. The silence was mutual, lacking the usual awkwardness.
“Count down time,” he murmured, shifting back beside her again.
She counted with him, glad to not be alone this year, knowing, from the small smile on his lips, he was thinking the same thing.
They breathed ‘one’ onto the glass, their word like a spell that, as it faded, lit the sky beyond with light and color. The booms were muted, hinting that this apartment was reinforced by more than just the obvious.
“Happy New Year,” she said, turning towards him slightly, eyes still on the colorful explosions, on the hope and prayers being shot heavenward for a better future.
“Happy New Year,” he echoed, his voice rougher than she had been expecting.
She glanced over and immediately regretted it. Jeremy wasn’t watching the fireworks. He was watching her, and those eyes held more searing heat than any of the explosions beyond the glass.
He bent towards her, and Julie’s mind froze. The battle that gaze had started leaving her unable to make a choice. She didn’t want the lines of friendship blurred. She didn’t have feelings for him in that way. But she was lonely, and he was so solidly and reliably there.
His lips grazed hers, warm, soft, undemanding. A New Year’s peck. Nothing to be alarmed over. But when he pulled back an inch, there was a question in his eyes, his slightly hitched breathing, his hands that seemed ready to reach for her and crush her against him.
Julie took a half-panicked step away and crashed into the potted yucca, toppling it over.
She swore and bent to straighten it, one-armed. It took two agonizing heartbeats before he was there, scooping soil back into the pot, telling her where to find a dustpan and broom.
