Blood Contest Read online

  BLOOD CONTEST

  A Story of

  Power, Sex, and Murder

  P. K. Abbot

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual organizations, places, or events is purely coincidental

  Copyright © 2017 P. K. Abbot

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1976485703

  ISBN-13: 978-1976485701

  DEDICATION

  To Cindy, Pam, and Kim

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Cover Design by Kristyn McQuiggan of Drop Dead Designs.

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Trey Jamieson was a very fortunate man. He had received every advantage that generations of his wealthy and powerful ancestors could provide. He was rich, well connected, and handsome. He was intelligent as well. He was bookish rather than savvy or street-wise, but that did not matter. In his late teens he had entered Yale as a legacy admission, and now at the age of 30 he was working as a vice president at his father’s investment bank. Trey lived with his loving wife and their two young daughters in a stately Georgian-style house in Princeton.

  On Christmas Eve more than a foot of snow had fallen on the streets of Princeton. Dozens of anonymous workers cursed the biting cold and shoveled through the night to restore the town to the condition which the affluent residents of the borough expected.

  By Christmas afternoon the weather was nearly perfect with bright sunshine and crisp air. Shortly after 2 o’clock, Trey Jamieson’s two little girls burst through the front door of their home with their Christmas present, a new, White Labrador puppy. The girls were only five and seven, and they were dressed in the designer coats that their mother had bought for them – identical, bright pink, puffy, down coats. On top of their blonde heads, they each wore a pair of brown felt reindeer antlers with tiny bells attached. The girls were giggling because the dog was lurching from side to side on his leash, knocking them into each other, and making the bells on their antlers tinkle.

  Trey rushed after his daughters through the front door. He chuckled to himself when he saw them. They looked like two bright pink tennis balls, bouncing into and away from each other as they careened down the path with the dog. He was laughing as he called out to them, “Remember, girls, don’t eat any of the yellow snow!”

  “Ew, Daddy!” The girls looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and giggled some more.

  They rushed through their gate and crossed the street with their father following after them. The girls started to run down the sidewalk now, between the mounds of snow, toward their friend’s house at the corner.

  As Trey’s cell phone rang, he cautioned his daughters to stay close to him, but they could not contain their excitement. Within seconds he was deep in conversation on his phone and was not aware that the girls were already two house-lengths ahead of him.

  Just then a young woman stepped out from a black Mercedes sedan, which had stopped at the corner ahead of them. She was wearing dark glasses with a sable coat and matching hat. She held a beautifully wrapped holiday present against the front of her coat and started walking briskly down the sidewalk toward them. As she passed the girls and the dog, she hugged the right side of the walk and smiled at them.

  Trey was still talking on his phone and staring absentmindedly at the Mercedes, which was now coming slowly down the street toward him. Had he not been lost in his conversation, he would have noticed the smiling woman walking toward him. He would have noticed when she lowered her package and pointed her pistol at his head.

  tff – The sound was barely audible as the bullet pierced Trey’s brain – spewing a stream of bright red gore onto the fresh snow behind him and dropping him instantly to the ground.

  The woman slid the gun behind her package again and continued walking. At the next driveway she stepped into the street and got into the Mercedes, which had now stopped for her. The sedan drove on at a moderate speed, turned toward busy Bayard Lane, and disappeared from view.

  Trey Jamieson was a very fortunate man – until this day.

  Chapter 2

  Pete Mueller was trying to read Annie Morgen’s expression, but he found it difficult. Annie had slumped so far down into the Jacuzzi that Pete could see only her lively grey eyes and spiky blonde hair above the mounds of bubbles. From the way that the corners of her eyes were crinkled, he could tell that she was about to laugh at him again, about to launch another verbal missile at him.

  “Your Jacuzzi may not get as much action as Bachelor Billy’s,” Annie laughed, “but it certainly makes an impressive amount of bubbles. Wouldn’t you agree...Tiger?” She growled out the last syllable, just to set her barb into Pete.

  Pete chuckled at the put-down, because she was aiming more at Ryan than at Pete himself. Ryan was Pete’s best friend, Billy Ryan, but Annie always delighted in exposing the foibles of Pete’s friendship with him because she despised Ryan’s promiscuous lifestyle.

  Ryan was the one who had talked Pete into buying this condo with its Jacuzzi. The condo was close to where they both worked, and it was only a few hundred feet from Ryan’s own place. Their condos were part of a community for affluent young singles in a suburb outside of Trenton, and the condos had been designed to gratify the active sensual lifestyles of those singles.

  Ryan had often extolled the advantages of the Jacuzzi to Pete, but, if Pete ever had the inclination to pursue the bachelor life that Ryan led, Pete never really had the temperament for it. Pete did not have the predatory instinct that Ryan had toward women. Pete bought the condo not for any lifestyle needs of his own, but simply for his desire to live close to Ryan, his best friend since boyhood.

  The oversized Jacuzzi was the focal point of the condo’s luxurious bath. Above the Jacuzzi there was a large skylight. Outside it was a frigid day, but inside, in the Jacuzzi, bright sunlight streamed through the skylight, warmed Pete and Annie, and lifted their spirits even in the dead of winter. From the Jacuzzi they looked out through a large one-way window at a stand of hollies, pin oaks, and pines outside. They watched a cardinal and his mate nudging away the snow and searching for berries among the branches of the hollies. It was a sensual experience for them. Ryan was right in one respect. The Jacuzzi definitely had its advantages.

  Pete had met Annie two years ago, when Annie was still working as an Emergency Medical Technician to pay for her nursing school. Pete was then a trooper with the New Jersey State Police. He had not yet been promoted to his present position, Detective Sergeant with the Crime Scene Unit for Central New Jersey.

  They dated for nearly two years after their first meeting. Then, two months ago, Pete asked Annie to move into the condo wit
h him. He presented the idea as a practical arrangement, a sensible attempt to share expenses while giving their relationship a chance to develop more fully.

  Annie knew that it made sense to share expenses, but she was concerned because she had never committed to living with a guy before now. Still she knew that she really liked Pete. So she accepted.

  Today was the first time that she agreed to share the Jacuzzi with him. It may have been the Christmas cocktails that they shared an hour ago; it may have been the long vacation in the Bahamas that they were starting tomorrow; or, it may have been that their relationship had grown, and Annie decided at last that it was time.

  Pete looked at Annie and started to smile again. She had raised herself up a few inches in the Jacuzzi and started to toss her head from side to side. Just two days ago, she had gotten another new haircut in another new color — a layered pixie cut this time in sunny yellow. But now, as she tossed her head from side to side, her wet hair started to stand out in little spikes. He thought she looked comical and was about to laugh at her, until he saw mischief again in her eyes.

  “You know, Pete Mueller, you’re awfully lucky that I met you before I laid eyes on Sergeant Ryan in his uniform. His sparkling blue eyes and copperish blonde hair are striking against his blue uniform, wouldn’t you agree, Babe? Why, I’m getting distracted just thinking about it now,” she teased.

  Pete flicked a little water at her face in reply.

  “Come to think of it,” she continued, “I think that I may be the lucky one in this situation. If I hadn’t pledged myself to you first, I may have fallen under Ryan’s spell. I may have become just another one of Ryan’s sexual conquests. Conquest number thirty three thousand…”

  Pete splashed another handful of water at her.

  “… four hundred and seventy-nine,” she chuckled.

  “Stop it,” Pete said, half joking and half serious.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled deeply before looking at him again.

  “Okay,” she said, “but I just don’t understand what you see in a guy like Ryan.”

  “He is my friend, Annie.”

  “He is just a Don Juan, a Casanova... a...a Lothario.”

  Pete was starting to lose his temper now. “Didn’t you forget Romeo?” he shot back angrily.

  “No, I didn’t forget Romeo!” she said. “Romeo is nothing like Ryan. At least Romeo loved someone — loved Juliet. I know Ryan likes women. He’s a skirt-chaser after all. But you don’t really believe that he loves any of them, do you?”

  Pete suddenly became serious. He wanted to defuse the situation if he still could.

  “Let me tell you something about Billy” Pete said. “When Billy was twelve, his father dropped dead one day from a heart attack. Billy’s mother was distraught. After three sleepless nights of crying, she asked her doctor for help. He wrote her a prescription for a very strong sedative. That night she swallowed the entire contents of the bottle. She would never see Billy again.

  Annie was silent. Pete noticed her chin tremble as a flush crept across her cheeks.

  “Annie,” Pete continued, “I know that Billy does not relate to women in the same way that most men do. Billy treats women the way that he does because he is still angry with his mother for abandoning him.”

  Pete was very quiet for a few moments. Then he went on.

  “Annie, you need to understand something else as well. Billy and I have been best friends since we were kids. We were very much alike when we were young. When this tragedy happened, it nearly destroyed him. Billy would not have survived if his Uncle Mike had not been there to take him in and to try to put the pieces together. Billy has a long way to go, but he has been struggling with this since he was twelve. I could not be the next one to abandon him, Annie, just because he hasn’t yet conquered this demon. He needs my friendship, and I think I need his as well.”

  Annie was a little tearful now. “I wouldn’t ask you to break off your friendship with him. I just need to understand why he is that way.”

  Pete grasped her ankle under the water and pulled her over the slippery bottom toward him. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her tenderly on her neck.

  Pete smiled at Annie. “Well, if it would make you feel better, Annie, you could just padlock the condo to keep Billy and his dates out of our Jacuzzi while we are in the Bahamas.”

  She chuckled at Pete’s suggestion as she blinked away her tears and wiped her nose.

  “Yes, I would like that,” she said.

  “Well, you had better hurry with that padlock,” he said. “My leave starts at midnight, and we should be in the air by the middle of the morning.”

  “I am looking forward to this vacation, Pete. After so many years of constant work and study, I desperately need this vacation. And I know that you do too.”

  “I do,” he replied. “When I left the army, I thought that the State Police would be the perfect fit for me, and, after the Academy, it was — for a couple of years.”

  “But then Lieutenant Burton showed up,” she said.

  “When Burton became my commander at the CSU, my perfect job suddenly became hell for me.”

  “How did this bad blood start between you two?” she asked.

  “After three years in the Army, I realized that I could no longer be happy there. That was when I made the mistake of asking Billy’s Uncle Mike to help me get into the State Police.”

  “Why was that a mistake?”

  “Burton was a self-made man in the State Police. Any special treatment, even the hint of special treatment, was a red flag to him. When Burton became one of my instructors at the Academy, he went out of his way to make my life absolutely miserable there.”

  “But you got through the Academy on your own,” she said.

  “Yes, but that didn’t seem to change anything for Burton. When I entered the Academy, I felt like he wanted to see me wash out, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I finished in the top half of the class — just to spite him I think.”

  “Was he really that bad?” Annie asked.

  “I misplaced my cover once...”

  “Your cover?”

  “That is what we call the hat on the state trooper’s uniform. It is important because the trooper’s badge is displayed on the front of it.”

  “But you were still just a cadet. You didn’t have a badge yet.”

  “That did not matter to Burton. It did not matter to Burton that the other cadets had stolen and hid my cover.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I was the old guy in the group. I was three years older than the other cadets because of my military service. It was just their way of keeping me back and making themselves seem better than me.”

  “Burton would not take that into account?”

  “No. Most instructors would have made me pull extra duty for a few days or a week at most. Burton made me pull extra duty until the end of the term. It was like that. Whenever I got into trouble, he wanted to make the most of it.”

  “You were only a cadet then. Shouldn’t all of that have changed when he got to the CSU?”

  “You would think that it should have, but it did not. When Burton took command of the CSU four months ago, I had been there for only two months — not long enough to acquire any commendations from the previous commander. I was still the newest detective when he arrived in the unit. I was still vulnerable, and Burton hasn’t missed an opportunity to harass or threaten me. He’s petty. I have no respect for him. I simply detest him.”

  “Well, for the next few days,” she said, “at least we should be able to forget about him and enjoy the sun and surf in the Bahamas.”

  “I’m for that,” Pete smiled.

  She moved closer to him now, brushed her lips slowly against his, and whispered, “Well, why don’t we start our vacation right now in the Jacuzzi?”

  “Why don’t we?” Pete smiled back at her and slid his hands down her back to her hips. “Do you want to t
ry something different?” he asked.

  She rubbed her hand over his chest and smiled at him as she looked into his eyes.

  “How did you know?” she purred.

  “I have something special in mind for you,” he said. “Billy said you would love it.”

  She reacted as if he had slapped her across her face. She stiffened and pushed against his chest to put distance between them.

  “Billy?” she asked incredulously. “Do you talk to him about us?”

  “No, I don’t talk about us. I just ask his advice about certain situations.”

  Annie bristled as she envisioned Pete describing their intimate moments to Ryan.

  “I suppose those situations were only hypothetical and had nothing to do with us?” she fumed. “Is he your personal confidant now, instead of me?”

  “He is just my friend.”

  “Let me tell you something, Peter Mueller. As long as you’re talking to that libertine about us, you will never get me back into this Jacuzzi. If you want to have sex in this Jacuzzi, you can just start without me!”

  Annie was furious with Pete. She stormed out of the Jacuzzi, grabbed Pete’s towel, and flung it angrily in the general direction of his head. The towel missed its mark and fell into the water near Pete’s feet, but Annie did not stop to notice. She stomped out of the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  Pete retrieved his soaking towel from the bath and muttered, “That’s just perfect.”

  At that moment his phone rang. He took one look at the phone’s display. It was Burton.

  “Mueller, this is Lieutenant Burton.”

  Pete simply replied, “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Mueller, I have been given the lead in a very high profile murder case. Consequently I am cancelling all leaves for this week. You will need to change your plans immediately, Mueller.”

  Pete’s anger started to smolder within him as he listened to Burton’s words. “Don’t you mean that you have decided to cancel my leave, Lieutenant...since I am the only one who has a leave scheduled for this week?”