The unexpected conincidence

Taylor Dray continued with his investigations after he left Sam's home with all the information he heard from Edmond, their family's driver.

It seemed this conclusion was headed towards an extremely dangerous direction with a tyrant syndicate.

Ray Valdez!

"Should I stop my investigations here or continue?" Taylor thought to himself.

Since he didn't want to get involved with Ray Valdez at this point in his life when his life was moving smoothly with no criminal attachments to his name.

Meanwhile, his curiosity was now poked by everything Edmond told him, but what he desperately wanted to figure out was the link between Sam and Jason.

Why would Sam target Jason to get to Valdez, or was Jason in any case connected to Valdez somehow?

Or maybe, like him in the past, Valdez also took Jason against his will and threatened him into submitting to him.

Ray Valdez wasn't the kind of man who could forgo talents that would benefit him or help build his syndicate grow stronger.

He was as greedy as he was cruel!

And when we talk about benefits, it wasn't the common everyday successes, it had to be huge, beyond a common person's imagination.

That's Valdez for you!

Hence, it wouldn't be surprising, since Valdez was capable of doing worse than that.

In the past, there were a lot of young boys like him and Jason's current age working under him who were lured during the hardship phases in their lives and manipulated to suit Ray's illegal business criteria.

He nurtured youngsters into building his criminal accomplishments and most often at times, engaged in human trafficking for whore houses, and crime targets for shooters creating chaos, including an underground brutal caged fighting which he organized amongst his trained captives as a form of entertainment and creating immense wealth.

All these were included in the evidence Taylor Dray gathered on Ray Valdez years ago, crimes that he engaged in before he was being hunted down by the FBI in his formal country.

However, Ray wouldn't add just anyone to his syndicate except if the person was profitable to him. Unless he was bound

to reap lots of benefits from that person.

So the question was, what was Valdez hoping to achieve by recruiting a guy like Jason, a clueless boy with no aim in life.

Unlike him who was known for his exceptional hacking skills in the past which was why Valdez recruited him, Jason had no single outstanding record in any field of expertise that will suit Valdez's criminal background, or was he mistaken about something?

It seems there was a link he was still missing in all these, and whatever that was, it undoubtedly instigated Taylor's curiosity the more he thought of it.

As Taylor sat in the back seat of the taxi he hired for the day, immersed in deep thoughts about Jason's connections to both Sam and Valdez, with his fingers tapping involuntarily on his lap amidst his chaotic thoughts, the driver kept glancing his way over and over again.

Taylor's actions reminded him of a passenger who boarded his car yesterday.

What intrigued the driver further were the familiarities that kept unfolding before him, as if what happened yesterday was an illusion which was about to repeat itself, exactly the same way.

The entire procedure about yesterday's incident replaying in the Driver's mind the entire time he waited for Taylor before that neighborhood just now, became insanely impossible for him to comprehend.

Starting from the airport clash, hiring his services for an entire day, stopping at the same strange creepy neighborhood he dropped his last passenger yesterday, to even talking to himself in the car and deeply engrossed in his own thoughts.

These repetitions just went on and on and plagued the Driver's mind with an intense curiosity to find out.

The only difference in this repetitive cycle was that yesterday was a lady while today was a male.

The taxi driver who went by the name Joel Paul kept glancing back and forth at Taylor Dray with an undying curiosity.

He wanted to find out what was in that creepy neighborhood he dropped off both him and the lady yesterday. Since the similarities were so frightening to ignore. Especially when he thought of how his encounter with his formal passenger ended.

He was left stranded in the middle of nowhere, the lady vanished into thin air without even paying for his services, and the guy she was pursuing gone!

On the other hand, Taylor Dray was busily engrossed in his own battles about how dangerous the direction of his investigations were heading.

From an innocent high school assault case to the involvement of a crimelord syndicate.

This was a cause to raise an alarm.

Trying to re-dig this bottomless pit in his formal life with Valdez through this investigation was undoubtedly heading to an ugly in the long run.

Valdez will take this opportunity to repay old debts since he brought himself.

But he has to help Kristine in her mission to avenge her sister.

Even though he never expected a minor act of vengeance to be linked to a Tyrant syndicate.

"Kristine! Where are you? I need your help on this..." Taylor wallowed in confusion as he held unto his head.

The thoughts of where his investigations were heading and the news about Kristine's disappearance placed him in a tight spot.

Especially with the risks of a possible abduction case of Kristine unknowingly heading into the clutches of Ray Valdez.

Suddenly, Taylor Dray was called to attention on a question from the curious Driver which intruded into his chaotic thoughts.

"Do you by any chance know someone at the house we stopped at?" Joel gave into his inquisitiveness.

Joel was still curious about what happened to the girl. Her disappearance seemed strange when he was also within close range the entire time he watched her run behind the guy they were chasing on top of a bicycle.

Upon seeing how determined the girl was to catch that guy, he decided to retrace his steps back to his taxi so he could come pick her up so they could continue their chase.

But upon his return, Joel Paul found her gone, the guy on the bicycle was also out of sight. He even scouted the area in search of her but nothing.

The only thing he saw was the pool of blood in the middle of the road which had him worried till now.

He wondered what could have happened to the young miss.

"Do you know the Wilby's?" Taylor asked.

"Oh! So that's the infamous Wilby Mansion. I know nothing other than the unfortunate incident reported about them in the news years back." Joel replied matter-of-factly.

"Then why did ask if I knew someone there?" Taylor inquired suspiciously.

"Nothing! it's just that a passenger made me stop there yesterday, then we followed behind a guy in a red truck who came out of that mansion. What's his name again? Yeah, Sam. She called him Sam." Joel narrated.

Then suddenly Taylor's mind was drawn to a peculiar possibility. Could that passenger be Kristine? Afterall, he was the one who gave her the address to that house.

Taylor sat upright, his attention completely drawn to the Driver's narration.

"Did you just say, Sam? What does the girl look like?" What a lovely coincidence, exactly the person he was looking for all this time.

"Well, She had long dark hair, extremely beautiful from her looks with pale blue eyes. At first, I even thought she wasn't real since I didn't know a beauty like that ever existed. I picked her up at the same spot I picked you, at the airport.

Oh God! This was truly a miracle on his side. If not because he was in the car, he would have hugged the driver excitedly in gratitude.

It was indeed Kristine!

"Then what happened? Could you tell me what happened to the last detail?" Taylor's voice was betrayed with a desperate aim to hear more.

"What do you mean? Am I missing something here?" Joel was now confused.

"No, you aren't! Just tell everything that transpired since you began the chase, anything you heard the lady say or what happened between those two." Taylor was trying to fight for composure and not lose his patience.

Joel was caught off guard by his words but in the end, he decided to continue either way, assuming the guy knew the lady he was talking about.

Well, he might even be lucky if the guy ended up setting the lady's fare debts. He barely took home a penny yesterday, moreover, ended up making his wife worried when he told her everything that happened to him.

"Well, nothing much. We trailed behind him and stopped at a motel, then she entered, came out, then entered again for a long time. She rushed out hours later looking very angry, then the guy came out too and entered his truck. We began the chase again and intercepted him. She beat him up! quite a tough girl, I must say. A true beauty with fighting skills!"

Taylor's growl made the driver cease his odd comments and continued.

"But he ended up successfully escaping her on a bicycle, then suddenly, the girl disappeared too without a trace. She couldn't even pay me for my services." Joel finally concluded, taking advantage to rob off his speculations about his unsettled fare.

"Don't worry about that, add the fare to mine. But what do you mean she disappeared?" Taylor pruded.

Once again, Joel narrated the rest of the details upon Taylor's response to settle the lady's debts.

He even informed Taylor about the pool of blood he saw in the middle of the road after she disappeared.

"Let's go there immediately. I would resume my search from there. She is the person I came looking for. I am very grateful. She is bound to be found once we scout the entire area and view every CCTV footage within that place." Taylor replied enthusiastically.

He was glad all his speculations about Kristine coming into contact with Valdez turned out to be false.

What a relief!

Moments later, Joel took Taylor to the exact spot but it seemed all the CCTV footage they viewed didn't include Kristine in it.

Meanwhile, Taylor wondered whose blood was piled right there since he didn't want to assume the worse about something bad happening to Kristine.

"It could be an animal's blood, run over by a car" Joel thought.

"Could be. But I need to confirm it isn't the blood of the girl I came looking for." Taylor reasoned.

Second later, Taylor Dray scooted down with an earplug he took from the driver to gather a sample of the blood for a forensic test.

His guess was, it could be Sam's or like Joel said an animal's or maybe worse, Kristine's.

"Let's go!" Taylor ushered to Joel, and soon, they were on their way to confirm their intuition.

The taxi stopped in front of the huge AID-CURE Hospital which was in alliance with the Kurt Brothers, then Taylor placed a phonecall through to a doctor named Derrick.

"Time to repay old debts. I need a favour." Taylor spoke for a while then hung up.

A few minutes later, a tall handsome-looking gentleman in a doctor coat approached their taxi and took the sample Taylor took from the accident scene to test it out.

"Do you have a data I could compare the results to?" Derrick asked.

"No! Just email me your findings I will figure the rest out." Taylor replied confidently.

"Are you thinking of hacking into the city's database?" The doctor was alarmed.

And Taylor's grin was all Derrick needed to confirm he guessed right, then chuckled disapprovingly.

"As if there was ever any doubt! Dray, you never cease to amaze me." The doctor later proceeded to carry out his part.

"Back to the scene, I need to check other prospects while waiting for the results." Taylor motioned to Joel and later, they were on the road again, back to the scene.

As Taylor intently stared at a car black box video which was parked in the opposite direction of the road where he gathered the blood sample, his phone beeped with a message from the doctor and Taylor stared in surprise and tensed as Kristine's DNA analysis came into view.

"Oh, Shit!" The blood belongs to Kristine." He hissed in worry.

All of the sudden, Taylor's attention was drawn back to the Blackbox footage as he noticed Kristine's accident happen at that moment.

He then noted the car's number plate before he ushered Joel to hurry toward tracing the car.

Taylor's moods and expression were now groomed with tension, and a fear of Kristine currently in a critical condition from the accident.