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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART I – Recovery

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART II – Restitution

  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

  PART III – Reformation

  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

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  END

  Author’s note

  Drawing Dead

  A Chase Adams FBI Thriller

  Book 3

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  As was her habit, Chase observed her opponents as they glanced at their cards rather than immediately looking at her own. This wasn’t a unique tactic; in fact, it was fairly common especially among players of this caliber. After all, once a person became aware that there were eyes on them, they fell into a transient, almost meditative state from which very little information could be gleaned. But Chase found that when players first looked at their cards, the small dopamine they received affected their irises, their blink rate, and caused the corners of their mouths to move ever so slightly.

  There were six players at the table, including herself. A Russian diplomat who went by the singular name ‘Mishenko’, Tim Tigner, the young CEO of an up and coming file sharing platform, Deb Koch, a divorcee of a Texan oil baron, and two online pros: Steven Darwish and a man who went by the incredibly cheesy nickname, The Guru.

  So far as she could tell over the course of the six-hour session, the players at the table were only interested in their cards and the twelve to fourteen million dollars at stake.

  None of them seemed capable of murder; not yet, anyway. But the night was still young.

  Chase watched as Tim Tigner looked down at his cards and then quickly tossed them into the muck. It was a routine enough act, one fueled by muscle memory no less, but there were subtle differences. On one occasion, his folded cards had collided with a stack of bills and flipped over, revealing a king and a ten of clubs. In this particular case, Chase had noticed that Tim’s thumb had lingered just a moment longer on the top card as he tossed them, which had caused their trajectory to be shorter than intended. It wasn’t much information and could have just been a fluke, but Chase knew better than to ignore this. The alternative was that when Tim folded a mediocre hand, he held the cards differently.

  The next two players to act were the online professionals, who Chase gathered were using this high-stakes private game as a testing ground before branching out to more mainstream live events. Their playing style was reminiscent of her own: tight/aggressive. And yet, every so often, about once an hour, Chase surmised, they played loose/aggressive with subpar hands. Throughout the evening, they had remained cool and composed, never getting too high or too low, irrespective of how the game played out in front of them.

  And it had served them well: both had healthy stacks of bills in front of them.

  The first online pro, Steven Darwish, made a standard raise of 60k.

  Chase watched the next player, The Guru, closely as he ruminated over his decision. This had proved difficult for her; not just reading the player for insight into their cards, but reading the player and trying to figure out which one of them might be capable of murder.

  The second to last thing she wanted was to lose two million dollars that wasn’t hers.

  The last thing she wanted was to become a victim in another poker massacre.

  The Guru tossed his cards into the muck and Mishenko quickly called.

  And now the action was on her.

  Chase flipped up the top corners of her cards and glanced at them briefly before lowering them to the felt again.

  “One-hundred and fifty,” she announced, moving three stacks of 50k toward the center of the table. It was a standard raise, 1.5 times Darwish’s bet, one that she hoped would bump Mishenko from the hand.

  As Chase suspected, Darwish flat called. It was Mishenko who acted out of character. The man had been playing extremely tight for the last hour, and she had suspected that he was going to fold.

  He didn’t; Mishenko called, bringing the pot up to nearly $500,000, with the blinds and antes considered. It was one of the bigger pre-flop pots of the night, and Chase felt her heart rate increase slightly.

  Control, she whispered in her head. Remain in control, Chase.

  Even though an hour before the game had started the prospect of sitting down at the table with two million dollars was unfathomable, the stacks of bills were in front of her now.

  Which made them her responsibility.

  Control.

  But when the flop came and the bullets started flying moments later, her thoughts changed.

  While Chase’s drive was still ultimately singular, it had transformed from control to survive.

  Survive, Chase, for the love of God, survive.

  PART I – Recovery

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AGO

  Chapter 1

  “I’m not taking it,” Chase Adams said as she stared at the blue tab nestled at the bottom of the plastic cup. “I don’t need it.”

  Nurse Whitfield stared at Chase, her thin lips pressed together tightly, but she refrained from responding. This unnerved Chase even more than when she’d instructed her to swallow the damn methadone tab.

  “I’m not taking it,” Chase repeated.

  This time, the nurse spoke up.

  “Chase, come on, please. You know you have to take it.”

  Chase lowered her eyes to the blue tab again, her lip curling in disgust.

  “You need to take it, Chase. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Chase scoffed.

  The methadone didn’t make her feel better at all; it made her feel like shit. And by some strange paradoxical irony given that the drug was designed as a less toxic replacement for the former, it worked the opposite of heroin, at least for Chase.

  Heroin made her memories go away.

  Methadone caused them to co
me roaring back in full force.

  But this wasn’t something that she felt like sharing, especially not with the nurse.

  Fuck, she thought, still staring at the innocuous blue tab. Now she regretted raising a stink; Nurse Whitfield would be watching her even more intently.

  “Please, Chase,” the nurse repeated. She was a nice enough woman and had always treated Chase with respect and yet, at that moment, Chase loathed her. “We can speak to the doctor if you want to change the dose, but you know the protocol. You have to book an appointment, and you have to continue to take your meds until you see him.”

  Four months, Chase thought sourly. Four months I’ve been squirreled away with crackheads and other lowlife delinquents, listening to them blather on about their problems ad nauseum.

  And yet, the worst part, by a large margin, was the methadone.

  When Chase had first arrived at Grassroots Recovery, the doctor had commended her on her physical appearance, something that she attributed to her running, but warned that while she looked good on the outside, her insides were in rough shape.

  Especially the insides of her skull.

  The shaking had started shortly thereafter, something that Chase thought she was mentally prepared for. Her initial outlook was not to medicate, but when a nurse found her soaked in her own sweat, locked in the fetal position and moaning uncontrollably, the doctor had quickly prescribed her 50mg of methadone. Chase had reluctantly taken the meds and had been comforted by a momentarily reprieve from the physical and psychological anguish.

  But this didn’t last long.

  Chase had tried to doze off an hour or so after taking the meds, which quickly proved unwise. Almost immediately, she was visited by some old friends, old friends that she wished never to see again: the man in the van sporting faded blue overalls, Agent Martinez sans face, and the psycho that was Rebecca Hall.

  And they all wanted a piece of her—no, not a piece, all. They wanted every inch of her soul; they wanted to tear it up, chew it, swallow it, shit it out, do whatever the fuck they wanted with it and Chase was having none of it.

  “You know how this is going to end, Chase,” the nurse continued. “You either take the tab or I’ll have to call Barney to come in here.”

  Chase’s frown deepened. Barney was another halfwit, only this one was employed by Grassroots Recovery. Grassroots wasn’t a prison — she was free to go if she so chose — but while here, there were certain rules that they had to adhere to. And taking your meds was one of the few that were stringently enforced.

  Chase sighed heavily and stared at the pill for a moment longer. Then she brought the plastic cup to her lower lip, tossed it back, and swallowed.

  “There? You happy?”

  Nurse Whitfield sighed.

  “Chase, come on.”

  Chase opened wide, lifted her tongue, and wagged it.

  “You want to strip-search me next?”

  The nurse ignored the comment.

  “Thank you, Chase. Remember, you’ve got group in an hour.”

  Chase clapped her hands together.

  “Oh, goody; sharing, my favorite time of the day.”

  ***

  The second Nurse Whitfield left her dorm, Chase hurried to the sink and put her mouth under the tap. She turned the water to freezing cold and guzzled as much as she could. Then she pulled away and jammed the first and second fingers of her right hand down her throat. Chase gagged and she felt her diaphragm quiver in protest.

  But nothing came up.

  She repeated this act a second, then a third time, but all this served to do was to fill the sink with the water she’d just swallowed.

  On her fourth try, Chase finally regurgitated the tab of methadone into the sink. It didn’t clink loudly as expected but instead stuck to the porcelain where it landed. She stared at it for a moment, wondering how something that was supposed to help her heal could be so fucking evil.

  Then, worried that the nurse might return, she picked the pill up and wrapped it in a wad of tissue. The first two-dozen or so times that Chase had puked up the tab, she’d just flushed it down the sink. But this was before she’d heard a nasty rumor that the Grassroot sinks and toilets had been specifically designed with a mesh to catch large objects and that the tabs could stay in them for up to a month without dissolving.

  Chase thought that this was bullshit, and considering that the source was a methhead by the name of Randy DeWitt, she was almost certain that it wasn’t true, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

  The prospect of being force-fed the methadone, either by liquid suspension or injection, if they found out that she was flushing the pills, was just too great of a risk to take.

  After looking around and making sure that no one was wandering the halls, Chase turned her attention to the cold-water tap. For the price she paid to be here, Grassroots wasted no money on upgrading their fixtures. The tap was the old-school kind, a simple, inverted metal cup. Chase unscrewed it and turned it upside down. She didn’t know how many pills she’d stashed inside both the cold and hot water dials over the last four months, but it was well in the double, and maybe even triple, digits. Chase jammed the newest wad of Kleenex in there and was forced to squish it considerably to make sure it fit. Two more months was a lot of pills; she was going to have to find another place to stash them.

  Chase screwed the cold water tap back on, tested it to make sure that it actually worked, and then looked up at herself in the mirror.

  No booze or drugs for four months had done wonders to her complexion, which was now a healthy pink as opposed to a monochrome gray hue.

  She almost looked alive.

  “Two more months,” Chase said to herself in the mirror. “Two more months and I can get out of this place without making a pit stop in a federal penitentiary.”

  The only problem was, after her time at Grassroots was up, where would she go?

  Chapter 2

  “No, don’t touch the body,” Agent Jeremy Stitts snapped. “Just look. Look with your eyes.”

  FBI Agent Danny Blue recoiled from the corpse as if it was hot to the touch.

  “It’s just that it seems so real,” Danny said in a strangled tone.

  Stitts stepped between the greenhorn and the body.

  “That’s because it—she—is real,” he barked.

  Danny eyed him curiously.

  “But she’s dead.”

  Stitts had to chew his lip to fight back another scathing retort.

  Of course, she’s fucking dead, you idiot. She was shot in the forehead with a .22.

  “Don’t touch the body without gloves,” Stitts repeated in a patronizing tone.

  Stitts himself took a small step backward and tilted his head as he stared at the woman splayed out in the center of the room. The bullet hole in her forehead just above her right eye had been so powerful that part of her skull had collapsed from the impact. Blood and brain matter puddled about her head and soaked her long blond hair.

  “On second thought, don’t touch the body at all. You’ve got no business touching the body; you’re not a fucking medical examiner, you’re not pathologist, you’re not anything. Just watch.”

  Something in Danny’s face changed then, and he looked younger than his 33 years. Much younger. And for a moment, Stitts felt sorry for the man. But when his eyes focused on the dead woman on the floor and knowing that there was a dead six-year-old upstairs, any sympathy he might’ve been harboring dissolved.

  Stitts indicated with a hook of his chin for the local detective to join them by the body, which he promptly did.

  “You guys grab the husband yet?” Stitts asked.

  The detective, an elderly gentleman with wispy gray hair and a clean-shaven face, shook his head.

  “He’s at the movies, believe it or not. We’re probably going to wait until he comes out to grab him, just in case. We’ve got a couple guys in the theater to make sure he doesn’t try anything, but—”

  Stitts shook
his head and interrupted.

  “Unlikely. Based on the MO here, the only other person he’s likely to put the gun to is himself. Which wouldn’t be half bad, if you asked me.”

  The detective nodded.

  “Fucking sad, isn’t it?”

  The comment, coming from a man with such experience, surprised Stitts and for a moment he didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah, it is,” he said at last. “Look, we’re done here; we’ll just wrap up some paperwork and then head back to Quantico.”

  Even though he was speaking to the detective, it was Danny who answered.

  “That’s it? We’re done?”

  The agent’s constant slew of questions was so annoying that Stitts was almost overcome with the urge to punch him. Instead, he sighed and rubbed at his eyes and temples, behind which a headache was starting to build.