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    Jacksonville Jack 7: Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2
    Jacksonville Jack 7: Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2
    Jacksonville Jack 7: Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    Jacksonville Jack 7: Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2

    By Mike Ward

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    About this ebook

    FBI Agent Pete Neal has a serial killer to catch. Jacksonville Jack has murdered more than thirty-five women in four cities. In previous existences Jacksonville Jack has been Seattle Sidney, St. Louis Lenny and Baltimore Bertie. Although the names sound like a joke this man is anything but a joker. He kills ten women in each city and then moves on.

    There have been a lot of articles lately asking why the police and FBI haven't caught Jack and the heat is on. Not only the Jacksonville papers but also the national papers are running stories on the case and Jack has even pulled up a British newspaper online to find himself reading a psychological profile written by a female British profiler describing America's most notorious serial killer. The British woman was wrong on many counts but had scored direct hits in two areas. One of those had worried Jack and the other one had seriously pissed him off. He has promised himself the head of the British profiler if he can get it.

    Jack is showering and then he is on a hunting trip to Skyline Drive. He will be staying in Front Royal and each day he will check out Skyline Drive and the Appalachian Trail. Lying on Jack's bed is an exact copy of a uniform for a male worker in Skyline Drive. Jack made that costume himself from photos taken in Skyline Drive and from internet research. That uniform gives him the ability to be in many places in the park that an ordinary male hiker cannot be.

    In Jack's orbit in the forthcoming week will be two women with relationship problems moving toward a final argument and eventual breakup, a Swedish woman on a final trip before she settles down, a nuclear scientist with high functioning Asperger's syndrome and a couple who are both married but not to each other. Jack is struggling with the personalities of both Baltimore Bertie and Seattle Sidney who were once in the background but are now keen to come to the forefront and get involved in the hunt.

    Read on and find out who dies first. Will any of the women escape or will Jack take them all down?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Ward
    Release dateJun 8, 2016
    ISBN9781310041136
    Jacksonville Jack 7: Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2
    Author

    Mike Ward

    Mike Ward was born in Glasgow, Scotland and currently lives in Florida, United States with his wife and two children. He is the author of two novels, two non-fiction books and six series of novellas:Parallel Realities seriesThe House on Mars seriesJacksonville Jack seriesStephen Haggerty Assassin seriesLisa Molin Assassin seriesDangerous Scotsman seriesHe is also the author of 60 short stories and novellas

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      Book preview

      Jacksonville Jack 7 - Mike Ward

      Jacksonville Jack 7 - Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2

      by Mike Ward

      (Author of The Banker With a Face Full of Evil)

      Cover photo taken in Jamaica by Mike Ward

      Copyright 2016 Mike Ward

      Published by Mike Ward at Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Jacksonville Jack 7 - Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2

      Excerpt from Assassination in Annapolis

      About Mike Ward

      Other Books by Mike Ward

      Connect with Mike Ward

      Excerpt from The Banker With a Face Full of Evil

      Jacksonville Jack 7 - Jack Goes Hunting on Skyline Drive - Part 2

      Molly Syracuse was with her friend Linda Khodikyan at the Avenues Mall on Southside Boulevard in Jacksonville. The last time the two women had been together at the Avenues Mall Jacksonville Jack had sat six tables behind them. Jack had watched them while they ate and when Linda Khodikyan had left the mall, Jack had followed her to her car and taken her license tag number. When Linda had left the mall there had been plenty of people going into and out of the mall but when she arrived at her car there was nobody around. Jack had noticed that and his hunting instincts had snapped on. There had been a potential opportunity to take Linda Khodikyan down with one blow as she was putting her shopping into her car and the moves to do that and then stuff her in her car had been right there in Jack's head. Had it been the 1960's Linda Khodikyan might have made it through the day but she certainly wouldn't have made it through the night. The same possibility existed when Jack saw Linda in the present era but he knew that if she disappeared the first thing the police would do would be to run the surveillance videos from the mall where Linda had last been seen and Jack's face would have been all over them.

      It was Jack's habit to study all the law officers and FBI agents who had hunted him in the cities in which he had been active and that was what he had been doing that day. He had marked Linda Khodikyan either as a potential future victim or as someone he could use to warn Molly Syracuse off if she got too close to him. That was a double edged sword only to be used as a last resort because if he did that it was quite possible Molly would hunt him even harder. Jacksonville Jack was the fourth incarnation of the serial killer who had been Seattle Sidney, St. Louis Lenny and Baltimore Bertie and Molly and her partner Pete Neal were nowhere nearer to catching Jacksonville Jack than their colleagues in the other three cities had been. It was Molly's opinion that if anyone could catch Jacksonville Jack then it would be Pete Neal because he was one of the most brilliant men she had ever met in her time with the FBI. Pete Neal was an attractive man and Molly was even a little in love with him but nothing would happen while they worked in an office together even though a part of her wished that it would.

      Linda Khodikyan was upset. Her lover Paul Corrigan had been found dead in a burned out car in the Northside of Jacksonville just three weeks ago. Linda Khodikyan was a trophy wife with a very nice existence. She was good in bed and she enjoyed sex with her husband but he was often too tired for sex because of his long work hours. Linda Khodikyan had started the affair with Paul Corrigan a year and a half ago and she had done it partly out of frustration and boredom. Paul Corrigan had been a director of a company in Jacksonville and although she was unaware of it she was not the only lover he had. Molly knew this but Linda did not so there was very little she could tell Linda about the case. Linda had been upset when her lover had been killed and she had asked Molly to look into the case and Molly had agreed to do this purely on an unofficial basis. It was Molly's opinion that there had been something shady about Paul Corrigan. Corrigan had plenty of money but he had a wife and three different mistresses. Molly had seen copies of his bank records, his spending patterns and other items and something did not add up. It was her opinion that there was another unofficial source of income somewhere and if Molly was in charge of the case she would have actively been pushing to find where the extra money came from. There was nothing Molly could put her finger on but there were patterns there that Molly had seen before that told her that was something not quite right about Linda Khodikyan's lover. But there was only so much Molly could do. She could have and would have done more if it was Linda's husband Vilen who had been murdered but if it became known that she was inquiring about her married friend's lover then that would not have gone down well. In fact, Molly was wondering if Linda would have been as upset if it was her husband Vilen who had been found dead in his car on Northside but perhaps she was being a little uncharitable in her viewpoint there.

      Jacksonville had quite a high murder rate and most of those murders took place on the Northside and mainly consisted of people who lived on the Northside killing other people who lived on the Northside. That part of Jacksonville was very unsafe at night and a good place to be murdered over the weekend if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Molly had checked and the police had no idea who had killed Linda's lover. Linda was pretty devastated about losing her lover and more than once it had been on the tip of Molly's tongue to tell Linda that she thought his other two mistresses were probably very upset about his death too, never mind his wife.

      Today Linda seemed in a better frame of mind and as she talked to her friend Molly was beginning to have a suspicion that Linda Khodikyan may well have found out about the fact that her lover had other mistresses besides her. Molly had only met Linda's husband Vilen twice and both times had been brief so she did not know him well. Vilen was a busy man and was often preoccupied but it was Molly's opinion that Linda had a good life and should not rock the boat. Vilen Khodikyan was Armenian just like her friend Linda but unlike Linda he was a recent transplant to the United States and had been a citizen of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic until communism had collapsed back in 1991. It seemed today that Linda wanted to know about Molly's life for a change and the first thing she wanted to know was about Molly's love life which quite frankly was non-existent. Although Molly had friends in the FBI she had trouble forming friendships outside work with both men and women. Molly had very few real female friends and although she enjoyed the company of men it seemed like she intimidated them. There had been very men she had been close with and when she started relationships with men they seemed to fizzle out. She knew that her drive and focus intimidated men but she felt she needed to be her own person and that if she played a role at the start of a relationship she would have to keep on playing that role and she did not want to do that. Molly was very intelligent and she knew that intimidated some men but then again what could she do about that? Just lately her sole sexual diversions seemed to have been in dreams and that again was a strong sign that it was far too long since she had made love to anyone. Her latest sexual escapade consisted of a nightmare which had occurred the previous night when she had found herself bound and gagged kneeling on the floor of a warehouse in front of Seattle Sidney who had been one of Jacksonville Jack's earlier incarnations. In the nightmare Sidney had been trying to decide whether to set her head on fire or set her pubic hair on fire and the nightmare had ended when Sidney had poured vodka all over her head and her pubic hair and then thrown two matches at her. In her struggle to get away in the dream she had rolled on the warehouse floor and then found herself falling out of bed only to bang her head on a set of drawers. She had never dreamed about Seattle Sidney before but she had had a dream in which she awoken to find herself paralyzed with colored ribbons tied onto her pubic hair which was what Jacksonville Jack did to the women he killed. She had wondered why this was happening but she had no clue.

      As the two women talked Molly kept an eye on the shoppers entering the mall. This was something she did out of habit, as an FBI agent she was always aware of her surroundings. She was listening to her friend Linda talk but at the same time she was looking at the faces of the men entering the mall and she was wondering if any of them could be the serial killer that everyone was looking for. Although Jacksonville Jack's escapades caused women major concerns when they happened, in the greater scheme of things in Jacksonville he had not made any appreciable change to the murder rate in the city. There was always a gap between Jack's killings and he did not seem to have the same need to increase his kill rate as many other American serial killers had done. That was one of the things that was making it hard to catch Jack, it could be months between each murder. It was way overdue for his next killing and she wondered when that would happen. In fact, the killings were going on right now on Skyline Drive but thus far none of the bodies had been found and when they were they would not be ascribed to Jacksonville Jack. Molly's mind had been wandering as Linda Khodikyan talked but at the same time she had been listening to what her friend had said. Suddenly something leaped out at Molly, although Linda Khodikyan hadn't actually come out and said it she was wondering if her husband Vilen was the one who had had her lover Paul Corrigan killed. Molly was trained in an FBI technique that focused on what people didn't say as much as what they did say and this technique of analysis was telling her that Linda was speculating on that. She pushed her mind back over the conversation. Linda had said three times that she wondered what Vilen would have done if he found out. Molly analyzed the words around that and then she began to wonder about Vilen Khodikyan. She dismissed the thought almost immediately. Although Linda's husband had seemed distracted by work, Molly's impression of him was of a gentle man who was more of a teddy bear and quite frankly Linda was lucky to have a man like that and she ought to be more careful. Having said that Molly filed that thought away just in case. The evidence pointed more at Paul Corrigan having been robbed and then the car being set on fire to hide the evidence but Molly was keeping an open mind. Whatever Linda thought, Molly very much doubted that Vilen Khodikyan had had his wife's lover

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