Page 1 of Into The Rabbit Hole

Chapter 1

TheObserver

* * *

She didn’t deservetodie.

She was a niceperson.

Merissa.

Her family would be devastated. He could just imagine the tears and the heartbreak. They may never get over herdeath.

He understood. He’d never been able to get over his mother’sdeath.

Time never healed him; it only made his loss feel worse. Every day was worse. Maybe it would have been different if his mother had died of natural causes. Maybe he could have accepted that and tried to moveon.

Butmurder…

Murder was different; it meant she had a chance to live, but someone else took it fromher.

They called him a psycho. Maybe he was. He certainly thought like one, but they made him that way. Benjamin Vanderville made him this way, so they could all thankhim.

Admittedly he no longer saw the boundaries that existed to keep right and wrong separated. He just saw revenge; everything else was details. However, he did feel for Merissa because of all she’d been through with her involvement with Wade Vanderville and the loss of theirbaby.

He’d been on the fence for a long time on her part in this game. In the end he’d decided that her death wasnecessary.

Merissa was a sacrifice for a cause. A necessarysacrifice.

His cause might not have been her cause, but she served her purposewell.

It was time to speed things along and really get his plan in motion. It was time to get serious and up thegame.

The time for simply scaring them all wasover.

He answered his phone and pressed it to his ear as itrang.

“What’s next boss?” said his truly psychotic partner incrime.

If people thought he was a psycho he wondered what they would think of his friend. This man had no heart and could kill without blinking an eye, or having any form of afterthought. Life and death were nothing tohim.

Their stories were similar: both were products of revenge. Merissa’s was, too. Revenge was the essence they had in common. That was why they were so easy to recruit for this grandscheme.

However, only this guy could have killed Merissa so effortlessly. There was something soulless about him that didn’t care about right and wrong. He’d offered straightaway to kill her without any thought to it atall.

“Come back here, we have things to do,” he said into the phone and lowered it back to the table when his friend hungup.

On the flat screen TV before him the press were having a fieldday.

Wade Vanderville arrested formurder.

That was the headline, and boy was it on every single channel. He’d flicked through a few minutes ago and yes, every channel was reporting the latest Vandervillescandal.

He’d timed it perfectly with Taylor’s little tryst a few days ago. That had been for fun more than anything, but still timed perfectly. People like them did themselves in. He’d gotten to know their personalities and behavior over the time he’d watched them so knew what they were likely to do even before they thought about theiractions.

That made him one step ahead of the game. Admittedly, Wade was a wild card because he never anticipated his return and that everything would play out sowell.

He wondered what they’d all think now. Their precious Wade, arrested for murder. The guy had no alibi, no witnesses, nothing. His friend had left the knife right by Wade after he covered the thing with Wade’sfingerprints.