All Against All by Nathan Allen

Author:Nathan Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: contest, lottery, tontine

Chapter 18

Detective Olszewski leaned back in her chair and expressed a long sigh of frustration.

She glanced out the window of her office to make sure she was alone. The police station’s corridors were empty. It was late, and most of her colleagues had done the sensible thing and left for the day.

She reached for the small bottle of vodka hidden beneath a stack of papers in her desk’s bottom drawer. She always kept an emergency supply on standby for moments just like this.

The cause of Levi Sassmannshausen’s (aka Irvine Halpern) untimely demise was fairly easy to ascertain. His body had been discovered in a bathtub at the Traveler Inn Motor Lodge, the victim of an apparent electrocution. Forensics were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death, which presently fell under the heading of suspicious. It wasn’t unheard of for people to electrocute themselves in the bath, such as when a hair dryer accidentally fell in. But in this case, foul play seemed almost certain; the door to the motel had been kicked off its hinges, Levi was fully clothed, and severe bruising covered the entire left side of his head and face.

The fact that the electric heater in the tub was attached to a fifteen-foot extension cord was also a good indication that something sinister was afoot.

Footage obtained from a nearby surveillance craft showed two unidentified assailants fleeing the motel and escaping in a stolen vehicle sometime around three a.m. The burnt-out shell of the car was later found by the side of the road, some twenty miles away. At present, the suspects remained at large.

Detective Olszewski rubbed her eyes. Here was yet another dead body to emerge in recent weeks under suspicious circumstances. It was another family to notify. Another pointless investigation to launch; one that was unlikely to ever reach a definitive conclusion.

But she didn’t need an investigation to know what was really going on here. Levi Sassmannshausen was simply another contestant in that stupid lottery. And now he was simply another corpse in the local morgue.

Olszewski had spent close to a decade in the field of law enforcement, but for the first time in her career she seriously contemplated throwing in the towel. This wasn’t what she had signed up for. She was an idealist who wanted to defend the rights of those less fortunate than her, giving a voice to the voiceless and putting away anyone found guilty of exploiting the underprivileged and the oppressed. She shouldn’t have to spend her days cleaning up after a bunch of rich psychos and their twisted competitions.

But whenever she tried raising the issue with her superiors, she was quickly shut down. None of them wanted to know about it. She suspected this was due to the fact that the billionaires and trillionaires bankrolling the lottery were also some of the police force’s most valuable sponsors. No one was prepared to look too far into these contests if it could end up affecting their weekly paycheck.

Alice Kato had told her there were twenty-seven contestants in the lottery this time around.

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