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Cotton FBI - Episode 08

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
130 Seiten
Englisch
Bastei Lübbeerschienen am09.05.20141. Aufl. 2014
Digital Series. Episode 8:

Four mysterious mass murders. All of them occurring at more or less the same time in New York. The victims: a middle-class family, a wedding party, a school group, and a police station task force. The culprits: people with no previous criminal record. The G-Team is on the case. Agent Cotton has been looking for a common thread and finds an ambiguous lead: Just before every crime, the perpetrators activated the same app on their smartphones. One evening, Cotton and Philippa Decker meet by chance in a restaurant. Both have been stood up by their respective dates, and they decide to make the best of it and have dinner together. Cotton shows his colleague an app that had just installed itself on his smartphone. Decker tries out the app. And then she pulls out her weapon and aims it at Cotton as if in a trance ...

A new legend is born! COTTON FBI is a remake of a world famous cult series with more than one billion copies sold and appears bi-weekly with a self-contained story in each e-book episode.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextDigital Series. Episode 8:

Four mysterious mass murders. All of them occurring at more or less the same time in New York. The victims: a middle-class family, a wedding party, a school group, and a police station task force. The culprits: people with no previous criminal record. The G-Team is on the case. Agent Cotton has been looking for a common thread and finds an ambiguous lead: Just before every crime, the perpetrators activated the same app on their smartphones. One evening, Cotton and Philippa Decker meet by chance in a restaurant. Both have been stood up by their respective dates, and they decide to make the best of it and have dinner together. Cotton shows his colleague an app that had just installed itself on his smartphone. Decker tries out the app. And then she pulls out her weapon and aims it at Cotton as if in a trance ...

A new legend is born! COTTON FBI is a remake of a world famous cult series with more than one billion copies sold and appears bi-weekly with a self-contained story in each e-book episode.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783838748764
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)
Erscheinungsjahr2014
Erscheinungsdatum09.05.2014
Auflage1. Aufl. 2014
ReiheCotton FBI: NYC Crime Series
Reihen-Nr.8
Seiten130 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Artikel-Nr.2188912
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe
1

It was 0900 hours by the time Cotton arrived at the crime scene. The 26-mile drive behind him had taken him across western Manhattan, the industrial region of New Jersey, and then up to North Caldwell, a town he knew only from the TV show The Sopranos.

He turned a corner onto a picturesque tree-lined street and slowly drove on. The colonial-style houses gleamed in the bright whiteness of the morning sun. Everything in this neighborhood looked well taken care of, very clean. Cotton had seen shootings in worse areas than this; actually, he was used to downright ugly areas, where shootings are the norm.

Cotton parked his car behind a collection of other FBI vehicles and police cars. He got out and followed a gravel pathway leading past rows of flowerbeds. At the front door, which was framed by grapevines, he pulled out his FBI ID card and showed it to the police officer standing there. Having passed muster, he entered the foyer of the house.

The floor was made of marble, and a pompous-looking chandelier hung from the high ceiling. The walls featured a collection of heavy-framed, professionally taken photos that displayed an upper-class white family. The way the family was posed, their hairstyles and clothing, the lighting - no details had been neglected. The photos showed an attractive couple in their forties. The man looked like someone who had spent his life signing documents. Except for a few tiny wrinkles, it appeared that his wife hadn't aged a day since her thirtieth birthday. The daughter, who looked to be about eight years old, had straw-blond hair and a charming smile. Her teenaged brother had a face covered with acne.

Cotton followed the muffled voices and other noises coming from somewhere ahead of him. He entered the kitchen, which was about half the size of his entire apartment. Almost a dozen uniformed and plain-clothes police officers stood behind a cordon of yellow tape that had been strung straight across the room.

He saw his partner standing among the law enforcement officers: Philippa "Phil" Decker. She seemed rather absent-minded at the moment. Her arms were crossed close to her chest, as if she were freezing cold despite the dark pantsuit she was wearing. Her face was as white as a sheet, perhaps due to the depressing sight before her: 9-millimeter shells strewn across the floor in puddles of blood.

Cotton looked over to Sarah Hunter. The G-team's forensic expert was crouched on the floor, searching for tiny traces of evidence. She wore a one-piece protective suit, which prevented her from contaminating the crime scene. With an experienced hand, she directed the beam of a powerful flashlight to illuminate one small section of the floor after another, while she carefully studied everything she saw. Once in a while, she would pick up something tiny off the floor with a fine-toothed set of forceps and put it into a small plastic bag.

Joe Brandenburg, Cotton's former partner in the NYPD, stood a few steps away. He watched Hunter at work with an expressionless face, his hands buried deep in his pockets. His grim appearance was reminiscent of the old-time cops who had solved crimes with brawn rather than brains. The black leather jacket he was sporting fit this image well.

"Hey, Joe," Cotton said as he walked over to him, thinking fleetingly of the Jimmy Hendrix song.

"Why are you guys getting involved with this case?" Brandenburg asked Cotton sullenly. Tact was not one of Joe's strong points. "Do those jerks at City Hall think that we can't even solve a simple murder case?"

"I'm pleased to see you, too," Cotton said dryly. "What are you doing here?"

Brandenburg knew what Cotton meant. "The town asked for an experienced homicide detective to assist with this case," he said, just as dryly. He added with a smirk, "Just goes to show you the level of my skills!"

Cotton shrugged his shoulders and turned around, almost colliding with an FBI photographer. The pale man was taking dozens of photos from all sorts of angles. His objective lens was fitted with a ring flash, allowing him to take spectacular photos, especially in macro. The pictures this camera was taking, however, would turn out gruesome, no matter how high the resolution.

Four bowls were standing on the kitchen table, each filled with blood-soaked corn flakes. Still sitting at the table, slouched over, was the married couple, the same one that Cotton had seen in the portraits hanging on the wall. Judging from the bullet holes riddling their bodies, the couple had served as target practice for someone - someone who must have been a maniac. It looked like he had emptied an entire magazine of ammo into their bodies. The male victim's mouth gaped open as if he wanted to shout. The terror that his wife must have felt at the time of her death was evident in her eyes. Lying at her feet was a tipped-over chair and the lifeless body of her daughter. The son was lying at the other end of the kitchen, near the sink.

Cotton went over to Decker. "What happened here?"

"Don't you see?" She avoided looking at her partner, trying to hide her distraught emotions. "The adult victims are Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster. They were just having breakfast when it happened." Decker gestured towards the daughter with her chin. "That's their daughter, Lucille. She was killed with a single gunshot to the head. The weapon used was a Browning registered to the father."

"Lancaster shot his family and then committed suicide?" asked Cotton.

Decker shook her head. "It looks more like the son killed his family and then himself."

"The son?" Cotton glanced over at the boy on the floor. Indeed, there was a pistol still clutched in his hand, half obscured beneath his body. "How old is he - fourteen?"

"Thirteen."

"And how did he get the pistol?"

"Probably from his father's gun cabinet. The key is still stuck in the lock."

"Why would the boy do something like that? Do we know anything about a motive?"

"No. It could be anything, from revenge to an Oedipus complex. Family dramas often don't follow rational paths of motivation."

"Maybe it was someone else who wanted to make it look like the boy did it."

"We thought of that already, but there's nothing here to substantiate that theory. Let's assume that an unknown killer shot the entire family. Why would he place the boy's body where it is now? Then there's the angle of the bullet that killed the boy. It was fired from below, pointing upward through his lower jaw. You can't make that kind of shot from anything but close range."

"I've never seen such a gruesome bloodbath before." Cotton looked at the adult victims again. "Is the time of death known?"

"Neighbors called the police at around seven this morning when they heard screams and shots being fired. The officers had to break the door in. All the doors and windows were locked from the inside. That's another sign that it wasn't anyone from outside the family. Besides, the house is secured by an alarm system, video cameras, and motion detectors. We've checked the entire system, and there's nothing suspicious. Although not all the videos have been viewed yet, we haven't found anything on them so far."

"What did Lancaster do for a living?"

"He worked for a large insurance company in Manhattan. Mrs. Lancaster was a housewife. The kids were still in school, naturally."

"Did the boy have any problems in school?"

"Not at all. He also had never had any run-ins with the law. The neighbors say that he was always friendly and helpful."

"I'm not sure why we're involved in this case. It seems like a matter for the local authorities."

"You'll have to ask Mr. High that; he was the one who sent us here. We're supposed to report back to him as soon as we're finished."

Sarah Hunter packed away all the evidence and her gear into a large case and went over to Decker and Cotton.

"Well, I'm done here," she told them. "I'll head back to the lab now and get started on analyzing everything."

"Thanks, Sarah," Decker said.

Over the following hours, the agents examined every room in the house, especially the boy's room.

In the boy's bedroom, there was a large bookshelf against the wall across from the doorway, reaching from floor to ceiling. The shelves held hundreds of books and a number of plastic models of luxury cars. The boy's unmade bed and a nightstand stood to the right of the door. The wall behind the bed was adorned with posters of scantily clad women on motorcycles. Facing the window was a pine desk supporting a monitor and a printer. The tower of the desktop computer stood in a special niche below the desk.

Cotton positioned himself in the middle of the room and turned around slowly, attentively examining everything in sight.

"Does this complete normality give you a weird feeling, too?" Decker wanted to know.

Cotton shrugged. "Truthfully, there are things that would give me more reason to be concerned. Like pictures of dissected animals."

His partner searched the desk drawers. She pulled out a manual for a DVD player. Between its pages, she found...
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