Chapter Two

For Jeremy Rollins, today was the proverbial first day of the rest of his life.  The story of how he'd gotten to this point was long and convoluted, fraught with injustice and compromise.  Injustice because he'd been wrongly convicted of heinous crimes and compromise because he'd willingly accepted those convictions in order to be released from jail.  He'd spent eighteen months fighting those bogus charges, appearing in court once a month ready and willing to go to trial to prove his innocence, only to have the prosecutor request yet another delay and set another court date yet another month further into the future.  Jeremy watched his life tick by one month at a time, with no idea of when or even whether he would ever be released. 

Finally the prosecutor's office made him an offer he couldn't refuse – he was to plead guilty to one count of public urination and one count of public lewdness, and in so doing he would give up all rights to have the evidence against him evaluated by judge or jury. He would also give up any right to appeal the case in a higher court.  In return for his guilty plea, he was assured he would be sentenced to time served, and he could be released that very afternoon.  After surviving eighteen months of repeated assaults and indignities at the hands of a jail population that was less than tolerant of those accused of sex crimes against children, the prospect of being immediately released from custody was too good to pass up.  It didn't matter that he didn't commit the crimes he was accused of, that there were no witnesses to the alleged lewd acts he supposedly committed or that there existed not one shred of evidence to indicate that he had done any of those things.  The simple fact was that he was charged with those crimes in a county where the prosecutor took his win/loss record very seriously, and the prosecutor in this case was not willing to accept even the slightest indication of a loss in a case like this one.  After all, the prosecutor hoped that he was going to be Governor someday.  Prospective Governors did not lose cases against sex offenders, regardless of minor inconveniences such as the innocence of the defendant, lack of evidence or the rights of the accused.

At the time he entered his guilty plea, Jeremy hadn't been told that he would forever after be legally considered a sex offender, nor that he would be required to register as such with the sheriff of any county wherein he would like to reside at any time in the future.  He would not be allowed to live within a certain distance of any school, park, playground, church or any other place where children would be expected to gather. This condition would seriously limit the choice of housing that would be available to him.  He also hadn't been told that his name would be listed in an online database of convicted sex offenders.  Any interested person would be able to look him up in said database, which featured among other information his booking photograph and his constantly updated home address. 

One other minor thing they neglected to mention was that he would be required to serve a term of probation, including six months in what was called a transitional living facility.  These facilities were also known as halfway houses, which were almost like jail except that the beds were more comfortable and the food was better.  All in all Jeremy felt he had been given a raw deal, but there was nothing to be done about that now.  He'd completed his six months in the halfway house and probation successfully.  He had gotten a job and attended all the required classes, started a savings account and fully reintegrated into the world of the unincarcerated.  Today was the day he was finally being released back into society to go and sin no more.

For Jeremy Rollins, the time for revenge was at hand.

First on his list of things to do was to deal with his good friend Joe LaMotta.  Joe had volunteered to take care of Jeremy's things while he was fighting his case.  Jeremy had been evicted from his apartment after missing two months' rent and Joe had agreed to rent a storage space and put all of Jeremy's property into storage.  Instead Joe had sold all of Jeremy's things just as soon as he got his hands on the keys to the apartment.  Anything Joe couldn't sell was unceremoniously thrown into a dumpster.  The money Joe collected went toward the care and feeding of several of the county's better known strippers and drug dealers. Upon his release from custody, Jeremy had no possessions beyond the clothes on his back, and Joe was not answering his phone. 

Unfortunately for Joe, Jeremy's cellmates were accomplished criminals.  They taught him all manner of skills which would be useful for a motivated individual intent on taking revenge.  Jeremy fully intended to make use of those skills to make life difficult or impossible for those that had done him wrong.

Also on Jeremy's list was the police officer who had arrested him, Sgt. Pete Sanbourne of the Ocean County Sex Crimes Task Force.  Sgt. Sanbourne had taken the complaint of a little girl who had been accosted by a man who exposed himself to her and urinated on her leg.  The girl gave a description of someone similar to Jeremy, so Sgt. Sanbourne had driven around the area, spotted Jeremy and arrested him on the spot.  When he showed the girl a picture of Jeremy, she said that it might have been him but she wasn't sure.  In fact Jeremy had never encountered the girl.  It was a simple case of mistaken identity.  Five days after Jeremy was arrested, a man was caught in the same neighborhood exposing himself to another young girl.  He was the same height and weight as Jeremy with the same hair color and of similar appearance.  By that time, however, Jeremy had already been charged with the crime, and the aforementioned State Prosecutor was unwilling to drop the charges lest his perfect record of criminal prosecutions might suffer.  The prosecutor, Ed Wilson, had decided that the best course of action would be to delay the case as long as possible, then offer Jeremy a sentence of time served if Jeremy would plead guilty.  It was a strategy that in the past had always work well with so-called "innocent" defendants.  It was Ed Wilson's opinion that nobody was truly innocent, and that punishing someone for something he hadn't done was just karmic retribution for something the person had done but had not been caught at.  Jeremy vowed to get even with Ed Wilson as well.

Rounding out Jeremy's list was the man who had committed the crime he was accused of in the first place.  Rob Olliver was currently in the Ocean County Jail awaiting trial for exposing himself to several young girls.  Jeremy wasn't sure how he would do it, but he was going to make sure that this man suffered for what his actions had done to Jeremy's life.  Jeremy Rollins had much to do, but all the time in the world to do it.

Chapter One

Part I - January

"If  Elvis was alive today, he'd be… well, he'd be dead by now."

Bob cringed when he heard the radio announcer's cheerful voice. He was glad Mary Ellen hadn't been in the car to hear that.  She definitely would not have reacted well to that remark.  She had reminded him just this morning that today was Elvis' birthday.

Of course, when Mary Ellen spoke of Elvis, she wasn't really talking about Elvis. Whenever Mary Ellen mentioned Elvis she was really talking about Chloe.  Mary Ellen never mentioned Chloe.  It hurt too much for her to speak of Chloe.  Four years later, it was still too soon.

Elvis and Chloe had a lot in common.  They shared a birthday.   Chloe loved to sing, and by age six she had learned to play guitar and was already becoming a talented musician.  Chloe had jet black hair and a smooth southern accent that endeared her to anyone she came into contact with.  Everyone who met her had said that she would be a star someday, and Bob didn't doubt it.

Like Elvis, Bob had sung his daughter to sleep when she was a baby, and he truly could not help falling in love with her.  He supposed it was the same for any father.  Chloe was his angel.  He would do anything for her.

When Chloe had disappeared on her seventh birthday, Mary Ellen's entire world fell apart.  At first, she did as any parent of a missing child would do.  She organised search parties, appeared on television issuing heartfelt pleas for Chloe's safe return, and tirelessly followed every lead possible, even the ones that seemed so unlikely that the police didn'y persue them.  She got into the habit of keeping the lights on at night.  Day after day she never gave up hope that her beloved daughter would at any moment come walking through the door, and she made sure that there was always someone in the house in case Chloe came home. 

Rewards were offered, leads followed, friends and neighbors interviewed, but no trace of the girl was ever found and no clue as to her whereabouts had ever surfaced.

Four years.    After four years she was out of tears, completely drained of emotion, reduced to a virtual basket case.  Bob did what he could to keep her together, but how do you heal a broken heart?  Their marriage was pretty much over, but he stayed with her, trying to do anything he could to keep her from going completely over the edge.

As a police officer, he knew that the chance his daughter was still alive was practically nonexistent.  He found it difficult to hold out hope, one part of him praying she was safe somewhere and the other part of him knowing that she probably wasn't. 

As far as missing child cases went, situations where the child was found alive after more than a few days were few and far between.  There was that one case in New Jersey where some sadistic phony psychic had proclaimed on live television quite confidently that the missing boy was dead, and that she had been in contact with him from beyond the grave, only to have him turn up alive years later, along with another missing child, both being held captive by some sick pedophile.  There was the case out of California where the kidnapped girl had escaped eighteen years later, held captive by another pedophile who kept her as a sex slave with the full knowledge and cooperation of his wife, and who fathered two children with her, all while on probation for molesting yet another child.  Then there was the case of the girl in Utah who was missing for almost a year, who turned up after being held as a sex toy by another sick bastard.  Sexual slavery seemed to be the only fate one could expect for a child gone missing for any great length of time.  For Bob Morgan, that possibility was just too gruesome to contemplate.  He was certain that she must have died long ago.  He hoped that she hadn't suffered.  He always expected that they would find her body some day, the victim of some fatal accident.  He still went out on the weekends, checking out remote areas, looking in abandoned wells and mineshafts, trying to determine how she had met her end.  The possibility that she might be alive and locked up by some screwed up pervert had never even occurred to him, but that's exactly where she happened to be.

For the past four years, Chloe Morgan had been locked in a basement room less than five miles from her parents’ home.  The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell, nor was it very comfortable.  It was decorated as one would expect a child's room to look, with many stuffed animals, posters of boy bands on the walls, and a pink ruffled canopy bed, but it was all somehow wrong.  It was as if it were contrived, a Hollywood movie studio's version of a child's bedroom, with too much lighting and a sterile quality to the decorations that gave no indication of the personality of the occupant.

Chloe’s room had no window, no clock, and no television, nothing to mark the passage of time except for the steady arrival of packaged meals that were delivered to her three times a day through a slot in the door.  Breakfast each day was cereal and milk.   Monday, Wednesday and Friday it was frosted flakes, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday it was rice crispies, and on Sunday it was raisin bran.  Lunch was a sandwich and more milk.  Monday, Wednesday, and Friday it was bologna, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday peanut butter and jelly, and Sunday it was always a turkey club and a can of coke.  Dinner was a take-out hamburger and fries every day, served with coleslaw, pickle and another carton of milk. 

The only other thing that happened to break up the monotony of this prison were the occasional visits from the men who would come to do things to her.  Once or twice a month, without warning, men would arrive to interrupt her solitude.  They would come into her room through the locked door, undress themselves, and do things to her that were both painful and humiliating.  It puzzled her how they could do those things without ever once displaying any regard for her humanity. 

She never got to know any of the men that came to her room.  It was someone different every time, and she rarely saw the same person twice.  Most of them never spoke to her other than to tell her what they wanted her to do, but some of them would ask her questions about her life before they got down to business.  She didn't get the sense that they cared about her in any way.  They just seemed fascinated with the idea that she lived in this little room all by herself.  Over the years she had asked many of them to help her escape, but none of them ever did.  They just used her and then went on their way, leaving her alone until the next man came to visit.

She had lived this way for four years.  At first, she would cry and hope and pray that someone would come and rescue her from this dungeon.  She would construct elaborate fantasies about her father busting in through the doorway, guns blazing, shooting the bad guys and taking her away from this place.  For a while the fantasies became darker, with her father coming to rescue her while one of the men was there, and perhaps giving him a taste of his own medicine with the barrel of a gun before sending  the bad guy to his maker and taking her home.  After a while the fantasies stopped.  Her father would never come for her.  He was dead and so was her mother.  

Introduction

Greetings readers!

This is the main site for my novel, Dark Blue.  I'll be posting chapters from the book here on a regular basis, starting with chapter 1, which will appear right after this post.  Eventually, the entire novel will be posted here.

Now, my friends all tell me that i'm crazy for doing this.  They say nobody's going to buy this book if they know that eventually they can get it for free.  I think they're wrong, and I'm willing to bet my future on it.

I'm counting on the fact that it's an awesome story, and that once people start reading it, they won't want to wait for me to get around to posting the chapters here.  It's the kind of story that grips you right away and takes you into dark places where you know you shouldn't go, but can't resist going nevertheless.

Starting November 30th, the hardcover version will be available either direct from this site or through one of several retailers, both online and out in the real world.   I'll also be releasing an e-book version sometime after that, but the details aren't in place yet so I'll keep you posted.

For those that just can't wait, you'll see a pre-order link at the top of this page.  Pre-orders will ship a few days before Nov. 30, and the first 500 pre-orders will receive an autographed copy that I will write something nice and personal inside of to thank the ones who got on the bandwagon first.  By this time next year, there will be an awful lot of people on that bandwagon, so those of you who get the autographed copies will be able to gloat to your friends and show them the nice note I wrote you while you sip coffee and watch me on Good Morning America.

So now, without further doobiedoobiedoo, i present....

Dark Blue - A Novel of Suspense

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