Dead Ringer

  DEAD RINGER

  By

  Pandora Pine

  Dead Ringer

  Copyright © Pandora Pine 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition: July 2018

  PROLOGUE

  Massachusetts Correctional Institution- Cedar Junction

  2000 Main Street

  Walpole, MA 02070

  17 October

  Detective Ronan O’Mara

  Cold Case Unit

  Boston Police District C-6

  101 Broadway

  South Boston, MA 02128

  Dear Detective O’Mara,

  My name is Thomas Hutchins. My friends and family call me Tank. You might know me better as The Riverside Ripper. Around here, I’m just known as inmate 889345.

  I’m sure you’ve heard this line a million times before but, I’m innocent. The problem is that I don’t have an alibi for the night Lorraine McAlpin was murdered. I was home alone watching the Sox get their asses kicked by the Yankees. My cell phone verifies that I was home, or at least near the cell tower closest to home. The only problem is that Lorraine McAlpin’s house is near that cell tower too.

  “My” DNA was found at the scene of the crime. I use quotation marks over the word “my” because there’s a slight wrinkle in my story. My DNA isn’t just my own. I share it with my identical twin brother, Tim Hutchins.

  I’m not throwing my brother under the bus here. I’m really not, but if I didn’t kill Lorraine McAlpin, then that only leaves one other option. I don’t want to believe Tim is capable of committing this crime. Worse, I don’t want to believe he’s capable of letting me take the fall for something he did.

  According to the testimony at my trial, Tim was at home with his wife, Michelle, on the night of the murder. Would my sister-in-law lie for my brother? I can’t say for certain. They’ve got three small children under the age of six. Tim owns his own business and is the sole provider for his family. Life for his family would change greatly if he were sitting here wearing an orange jumpsuit instead of me.

  I have a new lawyer. His name is Bradford Hicks. You may have heard of him. He successfully got Marco Bishop’s conviction in his triple murder case overturned. I’ve also hired a local private investigator named Jude Byrne.

  I’m writing to you because I’ve heard of your success with your partner, Tennyson Grimm, in solving cold cases. It’s too late for your detective work to save Lorraine McAlpin, but it isn’t too late to save the next victim of her killer.

  It also might not be too late to save me from twenty-five to life as a guest of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections.

  I’m enclosing Bradford’s phone number and email address. I would like to meet with you to discuss my case if you are available for a consultation. It would mean the world to me, Detective O’Mara, to be able to sit down with you and lay out the facts of this case. As I said, I’m innocent. I know you and Mr. Grimm can prove it.

  Take care,

  Thomas Hutchins

  Inmate 889345

  1

  Ronan

  November…

  “What the hell is all of this…Stuff?” Ronan shouted. He was trying to work on his vocabulary in an effort to become a kinder, gentler member of the Cold Case Unit. It was only half working.

  There was an enormous pile of shit sitting on Detective Ronan O’Mara’s desk. “Stuff” was the best out-loud word he could think of to describe the stack of files, mail, newspapers, and other miscellaneous stuff that was piled on top of his workspace.

  It was the second week in November and technically Ronan had been out of the office since August when he’d been shot by a suspect in a copycat murder case. He’d been a few days away from returning from his medical leave when his future father-in-law had passed away. After that, he and his fiancé, psychic, Tennyson Grimm, had been off to the great state of Kansas to bury the man along with the hatchet in an old family quarrel.

  Ronan and Tennyson had ended up staying in Kansas for longer than either of them had expected and when they’d gotten back to Massachusetts, they were two weeks away from the wedding they hadn’t even started to plan. Not wanting to get married on the steps of Salem City Hall or at the Witch Museum, Ronan had taken two weeks of vacation time to help Tennyson plan the wedding of their dreams.

  Thanks to help from their friends, they’d managed to pull off the perfect Day of the Dead wedding on November 1. The biggest surprise of the day had been the late-arriving Kaye Grimm. Ronan hadn’t been sure if his mother-in-law would choose to come to New England for the wedding.

  Tennyson’s Baptist mother had spent the majority of her life believing homosexuality was a sin. He’d come out to his parents as gay and psychic in the fall of his senior year and Kaye and her husband, the dearly departed David, had kicked Tennyson out of their home on the day of his high school graduation. Tennyson hadn’t spoken to either of his parents until David’s spirit had paid Tennyson a late-night visit asking him to reconcile with his mother.

  The newly married couple had taken a week off after their wedding for a quasi-honeymoon. They were going on a family cruise to Bermuda after Christmas, which would serve as their actual honeymoon. Ronan had figured the week after they got married would be filled entirely with sex and naked time, but instead it had been partially spent helping his boss and son move into their new house.

  In truth, it was an offer Ronan couldn’t refuse. Captain Kevin Fitzgibbon had been his boss for a little over a year now. He and his adopted son, Greeley, had moved into their house with Tennyson while Ronan had been in the hospital recovering from being shot. The man who shot Ronan had a kill list and Ten, Kevin, and Greeley were all on it. The captain had wanted them all under one roof to better protect them all.

  Of course, having two extra people living with you when you were trying to get it on like Donkey Kong wasn’t the most convenient thing ever. What Ronan hadn’t known was that Kevin and Greeley had been waiting for a house to go on the market in their neighborhood. That very thing had happened when they were all in Kansas and Kevin had put an offer on the house, sight-unseen which had been accepted. The only problem was they couldn’t set up a date to pass papers until after the wedding.

  They’d spent the first three nights after they’d been married in the Honeymoon Suite of the Hawthorne Hotel, courtesy of Jace Lincoln, Captain Fitzgibbon’s sort-of boyfriend. According to what Ronan knew, those two crazy kids hadn’t really been able to get a solid relationship off the ground.

  “For the love of God, Ronan! This is a place of business, not Sesame Street. If you want to play Oscar the Grouch, do it at home!” Captain Fitzgibbon said from behind him.

  “If I’m Oscar the Grouch, that must make you Big Bird!” Ronan turned around and looked up at his boss. Ronan was 6’3”, but Kevin towered over him at 6’6”.

  “Funny! What the hell is all this shit?” Kevin peeked around Ronan’s desk looking at the odd grouping of things lumped together.

  “I was just asking my esteemed colleagues the same question, but no one was answering me.” Ronan’s tone was a near-growl.

  “Hmm,” The captain chuckled. “Guess you’re on your own then. I did bring you a coffee, but since there’s no place to set it down, I’ll just hand it to you. Carry on!” Fitzgibbon handed him the cup from the expensive place across the street.

  Ronan was about to zing him with a parting shot when he noticed the na
me written on the cup. “Newlywed.” Fitzgibbon earned a reprieve from his razor-like wit over that one.

  He turned back to his desk after taking a sip of the near-volcanic brew. Where the hell did he even start with this pile? Well, what would Tennyson do if he were here? Plopping back down in his chair, Ronan thought that question over.

  “Organize it into same-sex piles!” Ronan nearly shouted hopping back to his feet. That’s exactly what Ten would do. He grabbed all of the brown accordion-style case files from under the pile and stacked them on his chair. Next, he wrangled all of the newspapers into order from oldest on top, to newest on the bottom. He also grabbed all of the mail addressed to him and made a pile of that.

  The rest of the shit on his desk was just that, shit. There were sales flyers from Men’s Warehouse and old sandwich wrappers. There was even an ancient cup of coffee with his name written on it. Ronan shivered. That cup was from the day he’d been shot. Christ, couldn’t anyone have helped him out by throwing this away? Gathering up all the trash, he walked to the can and dumped it all in.

  When Ronan got back to his desk, he organized the piles from tallest to smallest. The mail was the shortest stack sitting in front of him so he grabbed the letters and started flipping through them. What he was concentrating on were the return addresses. He sorted out all of the ones with addresses out of New England.

  Notoriety from their reality show and news coverage by the Boston media had made him and Tennyson famous in crime circles across the country. Parents of missing children sent him letters all the time begging for his and Tennyson’s help. They were sure that Ten could find their kids like he’d found Michael Frye.

  It killed Ronan to read all of the letters. What killed him more was showing them to Tennyson. Sometimes Ten got a lead on the letter-sender’s child just by touching them. If that was the case, Ronan took down all of the information and got in touch with local law enforcement and let them take it from there. If Ten didn’t get any additional information, Ronan wrote a personal letter to the family and let them know he’d be back in touch if anything changed.

  Ronan was nearly finished flipping through the envelopes when one with a return address to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections caught his eye. This was definitely not a missing child letter. His curiosity piqued, Ronan opened the letter and started to read.

  “The Riverside Ripper? Jesus Christ!” Ronan muttered, setting the letter down on his desk. He vaguely remembered the case from three years ago. A woman’s body had been found on the banks of the Mystic River in Charlestown in July. She been beaten and stabbed. Her cause of death had been exsanguination.

  One local news station, famous for their use of alliterative headlines, had dubbed the killer The Riverside Ripper, as if this had been an episode of Criminal Minds and not real life. Of course, the name caught on and soon every media outlet in Boston was using it, even though there had been only one murder with that MO.

  There was one thing Tank Hutchins was right about, every con in prison proclaimed their innocence. That fact made him no different from the roughly eight hundred men housed at Cedar Junction. What did make him different was the letter sitting on his desk. Hutchins was the first inmate to write to him asking for his and Ten’s help in looking into his conviction.

  What had really grabbed Ronan’s attention wasn’t the high-powered Boston defense attorney or the fact that this guy had a private dick working for him, but the fact that he had a twin brother. Twins were the oldest wrinkle in the detective genre. It can’t be me, officer, it was my twin brother… This, of course, spawned the whole idea of an evil twin versus a good twin.

  Ronan was intrigued, no doubt about it. The problem was that he was a Cold Case Detective. There was no way in hell Fitzgibbon was going to let him run off on a field trip to Walpole to interview a man who’d been convicted of a crime. There was no cold case here. There was just a letter from a man desperate to get out prison any way possible and wanting to use Tennyson’s gift to do it.

  Shaking his head, Ronan shifted his attention away from Tank Hutchins’ letter and went back to the rest of the unopened letters stacked on his desk.

  2

  Tennyson

  Psychic Tennyson Grimm was looking at a masterpiece. The beef roast was done to a perfect 145°F. The tiny fingerling potatoes, which were Ronan’s favorites, were also perfectly roasted, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The baby asparagus tips were steamed and artfully arranged on the plates. The only problem with the perfect dinner was that Tennyson’s perfect husband was MIA.

  Ronan had sworn up and down that he’d be home by 6pm for dinner, but it was now 6:30pm and there was no sign of him. There had been no phone call, no text, no smoke signal, no message in a bottle, no passenger pigeon with a note tied to its leg.

  Ten wasn’t worried about his husband. He had the television tuned to the local ABC affiliate and there was no breaking news about a member of the Boston Police Department being involved in anything newsworthy.

  He was about to shoot off a text to Ronan when Dixie, their four-month-old Papillon mix puppy raced toward the front door barking her fool head off. That could only mean one thing: Ronan was home.

  “Dixie, my little pixie! Daddy missed you, princess!” Ronan cooed.

  Tennyson couldn’t begrudge Ronan a little time with the puppy. He’d been home most of the day with their little lady. After all the psychic readings Ten had to cancel after Ronan was shot, his calendar was very much open. He’d spent most of the day calling and emailing his client list letting them know he was home from his honeymoon and available to book readings. The rest of the day was spent doing mountains of laundry and making dinner.

  “Ten?” Ronan called out.

  “In the kitchen!” He lit the candles on the dining room table and waited for Ronan to be wowed by the presentation.

  “You are not going to believe what happened in the office today. Some assholes-” Ronan stopped dead when he walked into the kitchen with Dixie in his arms and saw the candles and his husband. “Oh, man.” Ronan sucked in a deep breath before he set Dixie down on the kitchen floor. “I totally forgot about dinner. I just got so caught up in getting caught up.” Ronan shook his head. “You look…” He sucked in a rough breath.

  Ten was dressed in a pair of tight fitting blue jeans that he’d had to work to shimmy himself into. He wasn’t sure how much of his perfect dinner he would be able to eat before he would be undoing the top button, but that was sort of the point anyway. Instead of a shirt, Ten was wearing a blue apron. “I look, what?” Ten stalked toward Ronan, his dark eyes never leaving Ronan’s blue ones. “Good enough to eat?”

  Ronan nodded, looking too stunned to speak.

  “Let’s eat before it gets cold.” Ten reached for Ronan’s hand and tugged his much larger husband toward the table.

  “I can’t believe you did all of this,” Ronan managed to say as Ten pushed him into his usual seat at the table.

  “It was your first day back at work. I wanted you to come home to a nice dinner. With our crazy schedules, there aren’t going to be a lot of nights when I’m going to be able to cook for you like this.” Before Ronan had been shot, they’d worked out a system where Ten would spend two weeks in the office with him working on cold cases and then the next two weeks working at West Side Magick, the Salem, Massachusetts psychic shop he co-owned with his best friends, brothers Carson and Cole Craig. Next week was when Ten was scheduled to go back to work with Ronan.

  “It looks so good, Ten.” Ronan held up his water glass. “To you, babe. The man of my dreams. My husband!”

  “Right back at you!” Ten clinked his glass against Ronan’s. “Dig in. Don’t be afraid to tell me if it sucks.”

  Ronan shot him an are-you-nuts look and grabbed his knife and fork. He cut into the prime rib and slid a bite into his mouth. He moaned obscenely.

  “Is that good or bad?” Ten narrowed his eyes at his newlywed husband. A moan like that in the bed
room Ten could decipher. Out of the bedroom, fully dressed, was another matter entirely.

  “Oh my God! This is heaven!” Ronan didn’t even look up from the potato he was stabbing with his fork. “You remembered that I love these little finger taters too!” He didn’t waste any time shoving it into his mouth. He moaned again. This time more obscenely than the last.

  Ten laughed. He had heard of food porn before but hadn’t believed the hype. He knew he needed to get eating if he was going to have enough fuel to get through what was to come tonight. It was all he could do to keep from moaning out loud when he took his first bite of the beef. He’d have to send Bobby Flay an email to thank him for the spot-on recipe. “How was work?”

  Ronan frowned. He set his hand on Ten’s knee. “We’re having a romantic dinner. You don’t want to hear about that now.”

  Ten raised his husband’s hand to his lips. He brushed a kiss over his knuckles before sucking Ronan’s index finger into his mouth and swirling his tongue around the tip. “Well, I’m sure as hell not gonna want to hear about it later, when I’m naked and my mouth is full of dessert…”

  Ronan swallowed so hard his throat clicked. He shook his head as if he were trying to remember what they’d been talking about before Tennyson had let the dessert menu slip.

  “I think you mentioned something about an asshole when you came into the kitchen.” Ten winked suggestively.

  Ronan’s eyes bugged out. Obviously, Ten’s suggestion wasn’t helping Ronan’s memory. “Oh! Oh yeah, the assholes at work.” Ronan shook his head again. “When I came in this morning, my desk was piled so high with shit, I couldn’t see O’Dwyer’s desk if I was sitting in my chair.”

  Ten snorted. “What kind of shit are we talking about? Real shit or metaphorical shit? I mean you were out of the office for a long time.”

  “Funny, babe. There was a shit-ton of mail, newspapers that were deliberately left there as an act of protest, or laziness, and about ten case folders with a letter left on top of them.” Ronan leveled his gaze at Tennyson.