Dark Justice

  Dark Justice 2

  Rachel Sinclair

  Tobanna Publications

  Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Sinclair

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  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

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  For information about upcoming titles in the Harper Ross Legal Thriller series, sign up for my mailing list! You’ll be the first to know about new releases and you’ll be the first to know about any promotions!!!! http://eepurl.com/cTUHFP

  Harper Ross

  Bad Faith - http://amzn.to/2x8Q8Nr

  Justice Denied - http://amzn.to/2x8trZN

  Hidden Defendant - http://amzn.to/2eEcHhU

  Injustice for All - http://amzn.to/2wDJtJu

  LA Defense - http://amzn.to/2xNsVxB

  The Accused - https://amzn.to/2HZ7P4K

  Damien Harrington

  The Associate - http://amzn.to/2wE1lnT

  The Alibi - http://amzn.to/2x8QnrF

  Reasonable Doubt - http://amzn.to/2yDRmOI

  The Hate Crime - https://amzn.to/2vNR5uD

  Secrets and Lies - https://amzn.to/2yiRlkr

  Emerson Justice

  Chapter 1

  Carter, August 21. The day that Addison goes missing

  Carter Dixon got home from school and walked past his mother, who was passed out on the couch, drunk again, and went into the kitchen. He drank some milk straight out of the carton, and went over to his mother and tried to shake her awake.

  “Mom,” he said to her. He drew a breath, and shook her again. He had had to take her to the emergency room, for acute intoxication, three times in the past year. All three times, her blood-alcohol level was so high that the doctors told him that if he did not bring her into the hospital when he did, she would be dead.

  “Mom!” He shook her harder. She was breathing, but a little too shallow for his liking. Not only that, but she was not responding to his incessant shouting and shaking her.

  He was getting ready to find his car keys, so that he could take her to the hospital, when she finally woke up.

  “Whaddya want?” she asked Carter, her eyes still closed. She slowly opened them, but her face looked pained, pinched, and Carter could tell that she was already nursing a splitting headache. He never understood why she drank as much as she did. It made her feel like crap. She was always nursing a hangover, and when she wasn’t, she was passed out drunk. Those were the only two states for his mother – hungover or dead drunk.

  “Nothing. I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t have to take you to the hospital again, that’s all.”

  She put her forearm over her eyes, and shook her head. “I’m fine. I was having a good dream, and here you go waking me up. Waking me up to my reality. Don’t you know that when I’m sleeping, you’re not supposed to wake me up? Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  “Sorry mom,” he said. “I’ll just heat up some leftovers for dinner.” He looked in the fridge, and saw that there was some leftover pizza from the night before. He had paid for that pizza with his own money, which was par for the course - he usually had to pay for food, as his mother wasn’t working. All the money that his mother received was from the government and a small amount from the Social Security that she received when his father had died. Every dime she got from the government was spent on alcohol and drugs. The apartment was paid for through Section 8, and she got assistance for her utilities as well.

  His mother knew how to work the system better than anybody he knew, but that didn’t mean that she was able to bring groceries into the house. She simply never had the energy to go to the store, so it was completely up to Carter to not only pay for the groceries, but also to shop for them.

  He was 16 years old, and already a parent to his own mother.

  “Yeah, go ahead and eat that pizza,” she said. “I’m not eating though. I don’t feel so good.”

  Carter knew why she didn’t feel so good. When you drank as much as his mother did, you don’t usually feel good at all. She rarely had an appetite for food, only for booze.

  He wasn’t hungry just yet, as it was only 3:30 in the afternoon. “I’ll eat about six,” he said to his mother. “Maybe you’ll be hungry by then.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” She coughed, and eventually her coughing turned into spasms. That was another thing about his mother – she smoked cigarettes like a chimney. Basically, whenever she was awake, she put out one cigarette, and lit another one immediately. They didn’t have a dishwasher, and during the rare times that she did dishes, she would stand over the sink with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth, dropping ashes into the dishwater.

  She groaned, and closed her eyes again.

  “I’m gonna play a little basketball, and then I’ll be home for dinner around six. Then I’m going to murder you in your sleep.” He always put in a little bit of humor into what he would say to his mother, mainly to see if she was listening. She usually wasn’t.

  “I don’t give a shit what you do. As long as you leave me alone.”

  Carter sighed and changed his mind. He wasn’t going to go play basketball – even though he was supposed to meet up with some guys to do just that. Instead, he decided that he was going to get on the Internet instead.

  Carter was a member of an online Reddit group known as Incel. “Incel” was short for involuntary celibate, and that community consisted of people, like himself, who had trouble meeting women. The guys on this site were guys like him - all of their lives, they had been shunned by women.

  Sometimes, Carter didn’t like the way that the community talked about women, because many of these Incel men were misogynistic and their postings showed that. Carter wasn’t, though. He didn’t hate women, even though he was so shy that he couldn’t talk to any woman he was romantically interested in, and he felt like he was physically deformed. Ugly. He had very low self-esteem when it came to the opposite sex, so he never really had a relationship with a woman.

  Carter had joined the community because he was lonely, and he wanted to get to know other people who felt the same way that he did about himself. He liked that the men who were a part of
this community had the same issues with women that he did. A lot of them, like himself, felt as if they were ugly and unworthy. He got to know some men in the community and he started to feel not so alone anymore. He started to feel like he was somewhat normal. He wasn’t the only guy in the world who had never had a date, never had a woman look at him, never even went to a school dance.

  Even when he found out that some of the conversations in the Incel community took a turn for the violent – a lot of guys wrote about violent rape fantasies they had, and a lot of guys swore that they would get revenge on all the women who had rejected them throughout their lives – he still didn’t leave the community. He stayed because he wanted to do some good for the community. He tried to talk off the ledge some of the guys who were having these kinds of violent sexual fantasies. He knew that his advice was probably falling on deaf ears, but, at the same time, he also knew that a lot of those violent messages were just cries for help.

  He had to admit that even he had fantasies in his head from time to time. They weren’t violent fantasies, like rape and murder, but, rather, they were fantasies where he would perhaps kidnap a woman and try to force her to kiss him.

  He even had an idea that perhaps he would hire a prostitute, just to make himself feel as if he was not unattractive. He knew that a prostitute would say anything to him, if he paid her enough, and that would include telling him that he was sexually appealing. Yet, there was always a part of him that didn’t want to do that, because he couldn’t help but feel like something like that would be just totally humiliating for him. Like he had to pay somebody to say nice things to him.

  When he logged onto the Incel community website, he found that there was a lot of chatter about Addison Wentworth. Apparently, she had gone missing. That was a big deal, one that apparently happened recently.

  Addison Wentworth was one of the biggest stars in the world. When he was a young boy, he had a crush on her. It was during his childhood that she made her biggest films, and she was at the height of her popularity. From what he understood, though, she hadn’t been as popular for the past five or six years. The last few films that she had made didn’t do well at the box office, and, from all that he heard, she wasn’t quite the huge actress that she used to be.

  Nonetheless, she was still Hollywood royalty. A legend. One night, he even had seen her out at a restaurant. He didn’t go up to her, however, because he knew that people were constantly pestering her. Constantly trying to get her autograph. He was also too shy to go up to her and say anything, so he didn’t.

  And now she was missing. He really couldn’t believe what he was reading about her from the people on the message board.

  I hope that bitch rots in hell. That’s what somebody said.

  That post had thousands of likes.

  There was more than one guy on the message board who had talked about how they had met Addison on the outside, tried to approach her, and she didn’t give them the time of day. That made these posters conclude that Addison was a stuck-up bitch who didn’t deserve to live.

  Carter shook his head. The people on the message board were over-the-top and unhinged, even more than usual. He’d always read his share of postings that talked about how they hated women, but this was something else. This was a bunch of people who were piling on, talking about how Addison Wentworth had gotten what was coming to her. Nobody even knew if she was dead. However, it was the general consensus that Addison wasn’t missing, but deceased.

  He logged out of that message board, and immediately decided to go ahead and Google what had happened to her. The second he typed in her name, news articles popped up. All these articles talked about how her blood had been found in her bedroom, but she was nowhere to be found. Apparently, however, the amount of blood found in her bedroom was quite a lot.

  He looked at the pictures of the murder scene, reposted on an underground website, and he was stunned at what he saw. There was blood on the bed, a lot of it, blood on the floor, and a trail of blood that led out of the bedroom. He read on, and found that there weren’t any footsteps that could be detected coming out of the bedroom, no blood found in any area except for the bedroom, and that the police had no suspects or leads. This was all leaked information, because the police wasn’t actually making any statements just yet about the apparent murder.

  Just then, his mother knocked on the door. “You still here? I thought you were going out.”

  He shut his laptop, because he never wanted his mother to know that he was involved with this community. She probably would have hit him if she would’ve known. “Yeah, mom. I’m going out.”

  “Then get going. I got somebody coming over. So maybe you can get a piece of pizza out somewhere.”

  Carter knew who was coming over. Or, rather, he knew what kind of person was coming over. He knew that his mother turned tricks for money. For money, and for booze and drugs. His mother was an attractive woman, and booze hadn’t yet ravaged her looks. She was only 33 years old, having had Carter at the age of 17. Her skin was white and unwrinkled and her eyes were blue and surprisingly not bloodshot. Because she rarely ate, she probably didn’t weigh much more than 110 pounds. He knew that his mother would be considered to be attractive, so he wasn’t surprised that she was able to make a living off of her looks.

  Well, it wasn’t really a living, but it was at least enough money to pay for her booze and drugs.

  “Okay mom.”

  At that, he got his basketball, got his hoodie on, and headed out to the court.

  Chapter 2

  Emerson - August 25. Four days after Addison goes missing.

  I ran on the beach, my legs going faster and faster and faster. Running was something that kept me sane over the years. It was something that I started doing when I was only a kid, 13 years old to be exact. I ran cross-country, because it always kept my moods in check. The runner’s high was a real thing, and the runner’s high was the one thing that kept me from wanting to commit suicide when I was a young girl and living with my mother.

  Not that my mother was a bad mother. She was just coo-coo. She was a mother who wanted to be my best friend, and so, when I was only 10 years old, she would share her bottle of wine with me over dinner. “I’d rather you be learning how to drink here with me, than out there with your friends. At least if you drink with me, I know that you’ll be able to control it.”

  On that day, my mother was dressed the way she usually was - high-heeled shoes, a short clinging white dress, her curly red hair falling well past her shoulders. As usual, she was wearing full makeup, including lipstick, eyeshadow, eyeliner, blush, and foundation, all of it piled on so thick that you probably would have to chisel it off.

  That was the only way that I had ever seen my mother. I had never seen her when she was not wearing high heels, a clingy dress, full makeup, and her hair done just so. Some of my other friends had mothers who didn’t wear a lot of makeup, wore jeans and T-shirts, and weren’t obsessed with going to Pilates, Yoga, and circuit training classes. That wasn’t my mother.

  My mother was born in 1950, and she explained to me that when she was only 17, she went to live with some people in Laurel Canyon. “You know, I used to go to parties when I was a young girl. I got high with Mickey Dolenz and some of the other Monkees, and I met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and got high with them too.”

  I could never really be sure if my mother was telling the truth when she told me those wild stories of her youth. I had always assumed that she was a legend in her own mind. However, I did come across a picture of her when she was a young teenager, around the age of 15, and she was sitting around with a bunch of music stars whom I knew very well. Crosby, Stills and Nash, Carol King, the guys from the Monkees, some of the Beach Boys, people like that.

  It was then, and only then, that I figured that maybe she wasn’t lying. And, as she explained it, she had run away at the age of 15, which was how she ended up living in that house in Laurel Canyon with a woman who was quite a bit o
lder, and apparently was my mother’s first lover. At least, that was what she told me.

  That was the kind of mother I had. Unfortunately, because she was not exactly the best money manager in the entire world, she had recently come to live with me. As in, she showed up at my door just last week, whining about being thrown out of her apartment. Something about not paying the rent for six months, and how unfair it was that she was “homeless.”

  I almost threw her out, right then and there, because I knew damned well that she was working and being richly paid. However, I checked her bank statements and found that she had bounced many checks and was presently $3,000 in the whole. I also checked her credit and found that she had had six evictions in the past three years. The fact that her present apartment complex took her was a miracle in itself.

  We then spent the next two weeks looking for a new place for her to land. Unfortunately, with her credit history and general lack of funds, there wasn’t anything for her, aside from a slum in East L.A. I was going to make her live there until I visited it and was accosted by three homeless people and a pimp, and then was offered drugs by three different people on the way to the car.