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  Detective Damien Drake Serial Killer Thrillers:

  Books 4-6

  The Detective Damien Drake Box Set Compilation 2

  Patrick Logan

  Detective Damien Drake Serial Killer Thrillers:

  Books 4-6

  Skeleton King

  Prologue

  PART I – A Squirrel and a Rabbit

  Summer, 1998

  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

  PART II – A Crown of Bones

  Summer, 2018

  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

  PART III – The Church of Liberation

  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

  PART IV – An End to Suffering

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Epilogue

  END

  Human Traffic

  Prologue

  PART I – The Wrong Side of the Law

  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

  PART II – A Business Card, a Scalpel, and an Auction

  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

  PART III – Everything has its Price

  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

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Epilogue

  End

  Drug Lord: Part I

  Prologue

  PART I – No Way Out

  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

  PART II - Overdose

  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

  PART III - Undercover

  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

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Epilogue

  End

  Author’s Note

  Drug Lord: Part II

  Prologue

  PART I – The Survey

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Books by Patrick Logan

  Skeleton King

  Detective Damien Drake Book 4

  Patrick Logan

  To live is to suffer,

  to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

  -Friedrich Nietzsche

  Skeleton Kingr />
  Prologue

  Sergeant Henry Yasiv took a drag of his cigarette, feeling the warm smoke fill first his throat and then his lungs.

  He rubbed his temples as he smoked, his eyes darting up and down the street that was cordoned off by police cars. It was a normal May evening in New York City—cool and damp—but it was also one that he would never forget.

  Henry took another drag and this time, he held the smoke in his lungs for a moment longer than he should have. A sudden wave of dizziness hit him, which, if nothing else, served to take his mind off of what he was about to see.

  The call came in at about 8:30. The caller was anonymous, but his voice was that of a male between forty and sixty years of age, if he hadn’t made any attempts to disguise it, that is.

  “The King has returned,” the man told dispatch. When dispatch asked him to clarify, his response had been, “The King has returned to 9th and West 21st.”

  As was protocol, even obscure and likely prank calls made to 911 in New York City were always followed up by one officer or another. The more likely the call was to be a prank, the longer it took to make it to the scene, especially if there was no further corroboration. But in this case, an eager beat cop by the name of Alan Petrovich must have been bored, or maybe he just finished stuffing his face full of donuts, when he got the call.

  He had made it on the scene in under a half hour. And after he arrived, it was only five minutes before he made a call that made it all the way to the top, to Henry Yasiv, Sergeant of 62nd precinct.

  And now, with W 21st blocked by police cars between 8th and 10th Ave, Yasiv found himself standing outside a large brownstone smoking a cigarette, while his men combed the interior of the building.

  It was no secret, to him or to his men, that he was only delaying the inevitable. But no matter how desperate Henry was to save face, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside.

  Not yet, anyway.

  During his short tenure in NYC, Henry had seen a lot of death, and it was never easy. They had lied to him, telling him that, in time, he would be able to depersonalize the victims, turn them from people to things, and in doing so, death would no longer affect him the way it would a normal person.

  But for Henry, this hadn’t happened yet, and maybe it never would.

  “Sergeant Yasiv?”

  Henry exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and turned to face one of his detectives, a man who was eight or nine years his elder.

  “Yeah?”

  The man’s lips twisted into a frown.

  “I think you’re going to want to come look at this,” the man said flatly.

  Clearly, the detective had learned how to deal with death better than he ever would.

  After a final drag, Henry nodded and then flicked his cigarette onto the street.

  “Lead the way,” he said.

  The detective stepped into the brownstone and slipped on a set of shoe coverings in the entrance. Yasiv did the same and then took a deep breath.

  “Show me what we’ve got.”

  ***

  “Officer Petrovich came through here,” the detective, a man named Chris Wentworth said, indicating the front door of the brownstone with a thin finger. He traced a line in the air down the long hallway. “He knocked several times and then forced entry when he saw suspicious movement near the back.”

  Sergeant Yasiv stared at the photographs on the walls as he moved through the hallway, trying to put a name to any of the faces of the children, the wife, the husband, that he passed. The place itself was in immaculate condition, and based on the amount of shine reflected off the occasional chrome frame, it was well looked after.

  And expensive—very expensive.

  “The back door was partly open,” Detective Wentworth continued, “but when Alan looked out, he didn’t see anybody, so he continued his search inside. That’s when he found this.”

  Detective Wentworth pointed at the open basement door and moved toward it, but Yasiv stayed him by raising a hand.

  “And where’s Officer Petrovich now?”

  Detective Wentworth had been frowning since he entered the brownstone, but now the expression became even more exaggerated until it looked like his lips might slide right off his face and onto his neck.

  When he pointed this time, the man’s thin finger was trembling slightly.

  Officer Alan Petrovich was sitting on the couch in an adjacent room. Yasiv’s first instinct was to holler at him, to tell him to stand, to avoid contaminating potential evidence, but the way he was slumped, his face cradled in his hands, convinced Yasiv otherwise. Two uniformed officers, and a man from the CSU, were hovering over him, offering him a bottle of water and a comforting rub on the back.

  It was a relief to see that he wasn’t the only one affected by death.

  Yasiv swallowed hard and turned back to the basement door. With a hook of his chin, he told Wentworth to lead the way. And then he followed the detective into the basement.

  Yasiv didn’t know what he would see down there, but had an expectation based on how shaken Officer Petrovich was upstairs. But what he hadn’t expected was something pristine, something unblemished, untarnished, just like the upstairs.

  There was no blood splatter on the walls, no bloody footprints smeared across the hardwood floor. In fact, until Yasiv made it to the back of the room, to the pool table, nothing at all seemed out of place.

  But there was something about the pool table…

  Someone had laid a tarp over top of it, one of those blue camping tarps that was crinkled in every way possible, and it seemed very much out of place in this house of neatly ironed sheets.

  The tarp itself was covering something irregular.

  Yasiv did his best to control his breathing as he walked over to it. Several men in white plastic suits were standing around the pool table, and they all took a respectful step backward as he approached.

  The expressions on the men’s faces weren’t all that different from Detective Wentworth’s.

  “You have a set of gloves?”

  Wentworth nodded and pulled two plastic gloves from his pocket and handed them to Yasiv. The sergeant slipped them on as he moved to the head of the pool table.

  With one final deep breath, Yasiv grabbed the edge of the tarp and slowly lifted it.

  At first, he saw nothing, but then one of the techs leaned in and shone a flashlight.

  Yasiv’s breath stuck in his throat, which was probably for the best; had he been able to breathe, he most likely would have moaned.

  Two hollow sockets stared back up at him, black pits embedded in the semi-bleached bone of a skull. On the crown of the head was a single finger bone, cemented in place.

  And now, Yasiv was pretty sure he gasped.

  His fingers released the tarp, and then he quickly tore off one of his gloves by using his teeth to grip the opening by his wrist.

  Wentworth looked at him, eyes wide.

  “You okay?”

  “Have to make a call,” Yasiv said quickly. “I have to make a call.”

  In the back of his mind, he was aware that people were staring at him as if he’d lost his mind, but Yasiv didn’t care.

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and with a trembling finger, Yasiv scrolled through his contacts. When he found the name he was looking for, he didn’t hesitate before calling.

  The phone rang once, twice, and then someone picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?” A gruff voice demanded.

  “Drake? Drake, it’s Sergeant Henry Yasiv.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  Yasiv rubbed his temples and shut his eyes for a moment.

  “It’s happening again, Drake. He’s back.”

  There was another pause, one that ran much longer than the first, but before Yasiv could ask if Drake was still there, the tarp suddenly slid off the pool table, revealing a complete, bleached skeleton.

  Only, it wasn’t just a sk
eleton.

  There was also a belt hanging from the hip bones.

  A leather belt, with a distinct chrome buckle at the center.

  As Yasiv’s eyes focused on that buckle, he realized that he recognized it.

  The phone slipped from his hand and banged to the floor.

  “It’s Simmons,” Sergeant Yasiv gasped. “That’s detective Frank Simmons.”

  PART I – A Squirrel and a Rabbit

  Summer, 1998

  Chapter 1

  “It’s dead,” Ray Reynolds said simply. He used a stick to lift the squirrel’s limp corpse. Its middle was crushed, and the head and legs hung low off either side of the stick.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Drake said, clutching his stomach.

  Ray chuckled.

  “It’s just a squirrel, get over it.”

  Drake shook his head and averted his eyes as his stomach did a barrel roll.

  “It’s gross as hell,” he managed from between pursed lips.

  Ray lowered the squirrel to the ground.

  “We should bury it,” he said absently.

  Drake retched and then spat a wad of phlegm on the dirt.

  “You’re a pussy, you know that?” Ray said with a laugh. “A real fucking—”

  He stopped speaking so abruptly, that Drake raised his head and looked at his friend. Ray swiped the black hair from his face, and his dark eyes focused on a patch of brush just off the dirt path on which they stood.

  “What?” Drake asked, finally managing to settle his stomach. Making a deliberate effort not to look at the dead squirrel, he stood and made his way to beside his friend. “What is it?”

  Ray hushed him and Drake listened, but heard nothing.

  “What do you—”

  Ray hushed him again, this time more aggressively.

  Drake rolled his eyes and went silent.

  He’s just fucking with me. Trying to scare—

  But then Drake did hear something—a soft mewing, a sound that a hungry kitten might make.

  Ray nodded as if realizing that Drake had suddenly heard what he was listening to. And then the boy strode over to the brush, walking deliberately, with purpose.

  Drake followed, but cautiously stepped in behind his friend. His heart was racing in his chest, even though he knew that this was silly. He was fourteen, not seven—no boogeyman was going to hop out from behind the bush.

  And yet there was something there…

  Ray bent and peeled back the shrubbery with one hand, and Drake’s breath caught in his throat.

  There, lying on a piece of exposed grass, were several baby squirrels. It was difficult for Drake to determine exactly how many, given how much blood there was.