The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 4-6: Redemption Thriller Series 10-12 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Read online

  Ivy Nash Thrillers

  Books 4, 5, and 6

  Break IN

  IN Control

  IN The End

  Redemption Thriller Series – 10-12

  (Includes Alex Troutt Thrillers, Ivy Nash Thrillers,

  and Ozzie Novak Thrillers)

  By

  John W. Mefford

  Table of Contents

  Break IN

  IN Control

  IN The End

  Bibliography

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY JOHN W. MEFFORD

  Redemption Thriller Series

  The Alex Troutt Thrillers

  Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 1-3 (RTS #1-3)

  Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 4-6 (RTS #4-6)

  OR

  AT Bay (RTS #1)

  AT Large (RTS #2)

  AT Once (RTS #3)

  AT Dawn (RTS #4)

  AT Dusk (RTS #5)

  AT Last (RTS #6)

  The Ivy Nash Thrillers

  Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 1-3 (RTS #7-9)

  Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 4-6 (RTS #10-12)

  OR

  IN Defiance (RTS #7)

  IN Pursuit (RTS #8)

  IN Doubt (RTS #9)

  Break IN (RTS #10)

  IN Control (RTS #11)

  IN The End (RTS #12)

  The Ozzie Novak Thrillers

  ON Edge (RTS #13)

  Game ON (RTS #14)

  ON The Rocks (RTS #15)

  Shame ON You (RTS #16)

  ON Fire (RTS #17)

  ON The Run (RTS #18)

  The Alex Troutt Thrillers

  AT Stake (RTS #19)

  AT Any Cost (RTS #20)

  TBD (RTS #21)

  TBD (RTS #22)

  TBD (RTS #23)

  TBD (RTS #24)

  Break IN

  An Ivy Nash Thriller

  Book 4

  Redemption Thriller Series - 10

  (Includes Alex Troutt Thrillers, Ivy Nash Thrillers,

  and Ozzie Novak Thrillers)

  By

  John W. Mefford

  1

  Three jolts to my senses punched my eyes open. I was choking on my own spit, my heart peppered my chest like buckshot, and a ceiling fan spun above me—in a place I did not recognize.

  Sprawled out on a hard floor, I couldn’t feel my fingers, hands, or any part of my arms. I couldn’t tell if my arms were still attached to my torso. Had my arms been severed?

  I grunted out a breath and rocked my head left and right. All that did was slingshot my mind into a staggering frenzy of dizziness. The blades of the fan suddenly multiplied by two, then three. I forced my eyes shut for a couple of seconds. Even in semi-darkness, I couldn’t find my bearings. It was as if I were spinning out of control, falling into a black abyss. “Stop!” I yelled, my voice sounding like I was gargling wet pebbles.

  Stop.

  I took in a breath, forcing my body to relax just enough to have a logical thought. I realized my arms were draped on the floor above my head. Something sharp pierced through the numbness at my fingertips. “Ow!” I lifted my arms and slowly brought them to my side, eliciting a flurry of stabbing pricks into my fingers and hands.

  Something hard pressed against the palm of my hand. I opened my eyes, my head still spinning. I closed my hand. Even with my arm on fire, tingling like I’d been shocked with a cattle prod, I could feel a handle. Focus. Looking down toward my hand, I saw something protruding upward, but I couldn’t make it out. I groaned out of frustration, my chest lifting and falling at a faster clip.

  I closed one eye, hoping to diminish my mental twister.

  It worked. Is that a…?

  I released the object. It clanged off the floor.

  It was a knife. A fucking knife! Why was I holding a weapon?

  I flinched, shifting my body away from the weapon, my senses suddenly taking in everything around me. The floor was smooth, maybe linoleum. Blood flow returned to my hands. My fingers brushed against denim. I was wearing jeans and a soft, cotton T-shirt.

  The stench of blood invaded my nostrils. I closed my eyes for a quick second, and a shudder ran through me. “Wh…what did I do?” I whispered. I looked again at the knife. It was coated in blood, as was my thumb, which I must have cut a moment earlier. On the knife I could see staggered serrations closer to the handle, which had grooves for fingers. The blade must have been six inches long.

  A breath caught in my throat. What was I doing with a knife in my hand? And where the hell was I? I glanced around the room. Wood paneling, bookshelves, a couch against the wall. Nothing looked familiar.

  How did I get here?

  I brought a hand to my cheek and felt a stinging sensation. Gently, I probed the source—three gashes about two inches in length.

  “Fingernails,” I whispered to myself, trying to recall if I’d been in a fight. Nothing concrete came to mind.

  A bit more lucid, I looked to the adjoining room. A light flickered through a partially open door.

  I wanted to call out. But at the same time, I wanted to hide. Fear enveloped my body.

  2

  I heard laughter just above the din of the grinding fan. I was still lightheaded. I knew I couldn’t stand, not without falling over.

  Curiosity overcame my anxiety, and I pushed myself onto my hands and knees. I nearly fell back over. My knees felt like they’d been hit with a hammer. Gingerly, I moved around the knife as if it were a rattlesnake, ready to lurch forward and stab its fangs into my neck, injecting me with a poison that would kill me in minutes.

  I trudged forward. Each time a knee touched the floor—a dingy gray, coated with cat hair and litter—pain shot through my kneecap. I crawled as if I were on a bed of nails. But I couldn’t stop. I had to find out where I was, what had happened. I crawled three more careful steps until I reached the doorway. I peered into the other room. An old console TV sat just beyond an enormous recliner. On top of the console was a box with blinking lights. A police scanner?

  My eyes then focused on the TV screen. A man was laughing, moving around in front of colorful curtains. A crowd hooted and hollered at his jokes. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place a name. I rubbed a palm into my eyes. Even with the dizziness dialed back, a mental fog clung to my mind like a wet blanket.

  I moved into the room. A shag carpet relieved some of the pressure on my knees. More furniture from the 1980s, all shades of brown and orange. My eyes landed on the back side of the enormous recliner again. It was a faded brown with chew marks all along the bottom flaps of fabric.

  Another two feet forward, and a ticking clock brought my eyes to the far wall. A brass pendulum swung back and forth. I quickly pulled my eyes away from the repetitive motion, hoping to avoid more dizzy spells. A framed print hung next to the clock. In red letters, it said: The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth.

  I blinked, and a sense of déjà vu washed over me. That phrase meant something…to me, to the world. A quick flash of me in a courtroom, holding my hand on a Bible, uttering those words to a bailiff. I was about to testify in a trial. Memories cracked through my mental haze. I’d been a special investigator for Texas Child Protective Services. I could see the long sideburns on a cocky bastard sitting at the defense table, giving me the eye, trying to intimidate me. He was a dad to a four-year-old girl. And he was a fucking monster. He’d abused her for at least that past year, and with this trial, he would not only lose his rights as a parent, b
ut hopefully also his freedom. He would be a convicted felon.

  Back to the here and now, I sucked in a breath. The smell of copper loomed heavily in the air. I saw an opening to another room in the corner, next to a small table. The adjoining room was dark, but that had to be the way out of this…home.

  Where were the owners?

  I pushed that question and a hundred others to the back of my mind and trudged ahead on my hands and knees, moving past the back of the hulking chair.

  As I did so, something on the chair caught my attention. A limp hand draped over the arm of the chair.

  My body went cold.

  3

  I released a quaking breath, my eyes riveted to the hand. I touched the scrapes on my face, then noticed drops of blood on the person’s wrist. For a moment, I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see who was sitting in the chair. Or what condition that person was in.

  But I had to see.

  Holding back a rush of emotion, I crawled to the side of the chair. Blood and eyes—that was all I saw at first. It was a woman. Her body looked like a pegboard. She’d been stabbed dozens of times. Her lifeless eyes were half open. If her face hadn’t been covered with smears of blood, I would have thought she was drunk, passed out.

  But she was dead. Her chest didn’t move. Her skin was a haunting shade of blue.

  My heart skipped a beat, then raced like a herd of horses. Did I kill this woman?

  Tears welled in my eyes as I tried to recall what I’d done.

  I jerked my sights over my shoulder and stared at the sign. Nothing But the Truth. It should mean something, dammit! I could see flashes of information, but I couldn’t piece the puzzle together. My brain was mired in quicksand.

  Panic set in. My breathing went haywire, my pulse bouncing around like a pinball. “What the fuck is going on?” Emotion creeped into my throat.

  Two footfalls behind me. I spun around on one knee to find a man standing in the doorway.

  “Ivy, if you want to be safe, come with me.”

  I just stared at his eyebrows. They wiggled as if they were pasted to his forehead, Groucho Marx style. But through my mental haze, something about him looked familiar.

  “Ivy, did you hear me?”

  The urgency in his baritone voice scared me. I flinched, then looked back at the dead woman.

  “I can help you.” He sounded more sympathetic now.

  I sniffled, pausing a moment to understand what was going on. I knew this man. He was kind and nice, at least that was the feeling I got from him. He extended his hand.

  “Ivy, we must hurry. I can make all of this go away.”

  So many questions flooded my mind, but I couldn’t focus on a single one. My mind was scrambled.

  “Trust me.” Behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses, his deep-set, brown eyes were sincere.

  Another glance at the dead woman. Had I killed her? I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to stave off a double-kick of nausea and rampant emotion, my heart feeling like it might burst inside my chest. I wasn’t a killer…was I?

  “Ivy, it’s now or never.” With his hand still extended, he gave me an assuring nod.

  My world was caving in on me. I had no choice. I got to my feet, took hold of his hand, and followed him into the dark room.

  4

  Six days earlier

  Sipping a smoothie in ECHO’s “office”—the corner booth at Smoothies & Stuff—I clicked through a number of online images sent to me by my real estate agent. I was hoping to find an actual office space—not a booth in a public restaurant or my apartment—for the small company I’d started about six months earlier. Like my personal life, ECHO had suffered through some growing pains, but the word-of-mouth approach to attracting more clients had hit another level in the last couple of months. The business had become what I’d always wanted—a go-to investigation company focused on helping troubled kids.

  Some in the community of San Antonio had doubted that we could be successful. At certain moments, I’d thought maybe the naysayers were right. But over time, more and more concerned parents had reached out to us to find their children, to investigate people in their children’s lives, to look into possible abuse allegations at a local church or gymnastics academy. My former employer, CPS, had even occasionally contracted us to help lessen their caseload. One case built on the next, and over time, we’d developed a steady flow of clients.

  It was time to take the next step. Get a real office.

  Lifting my eyes, I saw my agent, Danny Travante, on his phone as he shut the door of his car, a black Cadillac Escalade with shiny rims, giving the impression he was a pro athlete or maybe a member of a gangsta rap group. He was neither, but he was a self-admitted “mover and shaker.” How did I score an agent with those type of credentials? My best friend, Zahera, who was also my gynecologist. She was a tall, leggy woman who looked like an international model. She also happened to be rich and connected. My polar opposite.

  “You want to scoot over?”

  That was Cristina, my lone ECHO employee, who, even at seventeen years of age, didn’t have a problem with being direct and pushy with the boss.

  Christina sat her butt on the edge of my bench as I tried to grab my things and scoot in.

  “More impatient than usual,” I said.

  “That guy’s cologne smells like mothballs. I’ll puke if I have to sit next to him. Even over here, I’ll have to pinch my nose shut. On top of that, the guy comes across like a used-car salesman. Can he be any more fake?”

  I just looked at her with a blank stare. “Are you having one of your drama days?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Pfft.”

  I opened my mouth, prepared to offer some advice on how to deal with people that she didn’t particularly care for. But now wasn’t the time. Cristina had come a long way in the last two months. She’d been falsely accused of killing a man who’d abused her. To make matters worse, her mother had been willing to let her take the fall. After her mom was put in prison, Cristina’s mood had slowly come around. She was a survivor. Like me.

  Danny removed his mirrored sunglasses and gave me a quick “what’s up?” by lifting his chin as he walked through the door. Then he held up his finger as he continued his phone conversation, standing about twenty feet from the table.

  I scooted my body and the laptop toward the window. The temperature instantly increased about ten degrees. A hot July sun was already out in full force.

  Danny finally slipped into the opposite bench seat, his slicked-back hair perfectly coiffed and sealed into place. “How are my two lovely young ladies doing on this summer morning?”

  Cristina coughed so hard I thought she was going to gag.

  Danny lifted from his seat, put a hand on her back. “Are you okay? Can I get you something, Crissy?”

  She coughed again, almost directly in his face, and he quickly jumped back.

  “Not Crissy. It’s Cristina. I’m good. I just need some space.” She looked at me and muttered, “And a little fresh air.”

  I quickly diverted his attention as he sat back down. “Hey, I’ve been looking at some of the options you sent me. I have to admit, I can see our little company really taking off in a couple of these spaces. I’d like to get a tour of them if you can set it up.”

  He pressed his lips shut and sat back. “Not sure if you read my complete email.”

  “Sure I did.” I clicked on my email app and started looking for the email. “Why?”

  “Well, underneath the links to the specific properties, I explained that they were examples of high-end properties, with monthly rents hitting five figures.”

  “As in ten thousand bucks a month?” Cristina’s voice pitched higher.

  He winked at her. “Bingo.”

  “Holy crap. We can’t afford that,” she said.

  “Hold on.” I tapped a finger to my chin, trying to think through our cash flow. “Is there any way we can get a discount for the first six months?”

&nbs
p; “It’s possible, especially if you have a good negotiator.”

  “Who would that be?” Cristina said.

  He looked at me while pointing at her. “She’s funny.”

  “Danny would negotiate the deal. That’s what he does,” I explained.

  “Sorry, I’m not some business savant,” Cristina said flippantly, turning away to stare at the line of customers at the counter.

  Danny widened his eyes for a moment, obviously taken aback by Cristina’s attitude. Again, I tried to shift things away from Miss Sassy Pants. “So you think it’s doable…to get into one of those three places you sent me?”

  He chuckled so loudly everyone in the shop turned in our direction. “No way in hell.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I said it’s possible, not likely. I’m the best damn negotiator in San Antonio, but I can’t turn wheat into gold. Who do you think I am?” He barked out another chuckle.

  Now Danny was ng to grate my nerves. I turned my laptop so he could see the screen. Cristina was occupying herself by looking at something on her phone. It was obvious that she had checked out.

  “So, of these three listings, which one do you think would cut us the biggest break?”

  He leaned closer. “Scroll down a bit.”

  I did.

  His lips were moving but no words came out.

  “Are you trying to calculate some numbers?” I asked.

  His phone buzzed. “Gotta take this. Hold on.”

  He flipped around to face the window.

  Cristina was immediately in my ear. “He’s just toying with you, Ivy. Can’t you see?”

  I pushed out a breath through my nostrils.

  “Why are you in denial? Usually, you’re the cheap one. Why are you so fixated on this fancy office space?”