One Good And Deadly Deed

Dudley Lynch

Description

'Bodies are piling up in Flagler. For fans of Bones and Preacher comes a sharp supernatural police procedural set in the heart of Texas. It was not Luke McWhorter s plan to become a law enforcement officer when he left for Yale Divinity School. But three generations of his family had worn the star, and after graduation, the needs of his community called him home to serve and protect. His theological training and his seventeen-year career as sheriff suddenly collide when bodies start piling up in Flagler, Texas. Two pilots are found brutally murdered in McWhorter s hometown, torn to pieces by their own plane s propeller, next to an ominous warning written in blood on the hanger wall.In this fast-moving whodunit, McWhorter needs all the help he can get. He is joined by his chief deputy, Charles Chuck Del Emma; his FBI-agent girlfriend, Angie Steele; a precocious college student; and a 4,000-year-old mummy. Together, they tackle a crime spree that

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773055640
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

One Good and Deadly Deed
A Sheriff Luke McWhorter Mystery
Dudley Lynch




Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Some Months Later
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Discover the Series!


Epigraph
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.
Lord Byron


Chapter 1
The fact that none of the body parts was covered told me no one from Dr. Konstantina Smyth’s office had arrived at the hangar yet.
Doc Konnie was adamant about not contaminating a victim’s remains. The fastest way to get on her bad side was to throw a plastic sheet or a tarp or a couple of towels over a corpse. Or over body parts.
And it wasn’t only our outspoken Greek-born medical examiner who was dyspeptic on the subject.
It was the law.
I memorized the statute word for word. This way, I could spell it out in no uncertain terms when people at a crime scene got careless, not keeping their hands off the deceased. Or, for that matter, off the dead person’s possessions. I’d point out that anyone who — quote, unquote —
willfully touches, removes, or disturbs the body, clothing, or any article upon or near the body . . . shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.
So in West Texas’s Abbot County, at a crime scene involving loss of life, even we law enforcement types waited for the ME’s white van to show up before touching the body. Until then, we looked for clues elsewhere. Or else we stood around and waited.
When I entered the hangar, that’s what a half-dozen people were doing: standing a few steps inside the door. Gossiping, kibitzing, pointing.
Waiting.
All of them were dressed like I was — in protective gear. But they were acting like they’d just gotten out of church. Clustered in a group, they were enjoying a social moment before heading to the parking lot.
Or maybe I was thinking that because I’d stepped out of a church building a few minutes ago myself. A church building where I’d been the preacher.
I was quite certain there were other sheriffs in America who preached. Just about anyone can run for sheriff. That includes country preachers, many of them self-taught in theology. Some of them preached every Sunday morning.
But I wasn’t one of those. This was the first sermon I’d preached since becoming sheriff nearly seventeen years ago.
I had a copy of the church program jammed in my inside coat pocket. The cover offered the bare details of the morning’s activities.
Today’s sermon by
Sheriff Luther Stephens McWhorter,
B.A., M.A., Doctor of Divinity
“Sworn in, eyes up”
How heaven and your local sheriff view wearing a badge and carrying a gun . . .
But no one in this group was going to ask about any of that. They were too busy taking extreme care where they rested their eyes. I didn’t blame them. I’d never seen a crime scene like it.
Pools of crimson and body parts of all sizes littered the hangar floor.
In all directions.
But it was the plane that dominated the view.
I knew what kind it was. The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 350i was an iconic plane from a lineup of aircraft with a distinguished pedigree. I knew all this because I’d always found the King Air 350i more princess than king.
Even at a moment like this, it looked like a resplendent metal sculpture as much as an aircraft. Walk around it, and the very nature of what you were looking at seemed to change before your eyes. This was a consequence of the craft’s exquisite, complicated design. I found the sight of one mesmerizing.
“You ever see anything like this?”
A woman’s voice came from behind me. One I knew well. It belonged to one of my deputies. A detective actually.
Detective Rashada Moody.
Detective Moody was my department’s only woman deputy. Only African-American deputy. Only left-handed deputy. Only deputy who’d been a beauty queen contestant. And the only one of us to have a four-year college degree in criminal justice. “Deputy Only,” we jokingly called her. But at the moment, there was no humor in Deputy Only’s voice. And I knew she wasn’t talking about the airplane.
“No,” I said after a moment.
“Somebody didn’t want these poor fellows viewable at their funerals,” she said casually before reverting into the professional I’d always admired. “I was the first officer here . . . if you’d like to know what I’ve noticed.”
Her tentativeness was more than a courtesy. It hadn’t been that long since I’d been the first one to roll up on another horrendous crime scene, a sickening scene near a remote, abandoned house thirty miles west of town.
The smell of rotting corpses and the sight of buzzards devouring them had made me ill. After several episodes of acute gastronomic distress, I’d managed to withdraw a short distance and summon help. Detective Moody was one of those who had responded. Now, here we both were again.
But before she could propose a place to start, I issued a directive to the others. “People, why don’t we vacate the hangar until the ME can get this sorted.”
Detective Moody turned to join the departures, but I caught her wrist. It felt warm. She seemed embarrassed, likely for not immediately recalling that I had seen this much ugly and more not long ago — and had been physically devastated by it. How could she ever forget the sight and smell of me and my vomit-drenched clothes and car.
I released her wrist and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “If we’re careful, you and I can walk through this.”
She nodded and pointed to the plane’s starboard engine — the right wing from the point-of-view of the pilot looking forward. “I think the poor guy hit by those propellers was shoved into them from the side.”
I looked from the propellers to the body parts and then back to her. “You’re going to have to show me why.”
“It isn’t pretty.”
“Ugly is all I’m expecting to see today.”
Detective Moody headed for the largest body part visible on this side of the plane, staying a half-dozen feet away from it. That was close enough.
Her point was undeniable. The upper part of the body had been hacked in two, beginning with its head and proceeding just below its waist.
I thought of pig carcasses I’d seen in slaughterhouses. Cleaved neatly in halves. Only pigs weren’t butchered with their clothes on. This individual had been. And the propellers had cut through them like a seamstress’s clippers.
To say the human remains we were looking at had been chopped into symmetrical parts was not quite accurate. One side of the face had most of his nose. But if the propellers had struck another inch to the right, the nose too might have been sliced into matching parts.
The sight was so divorced from my sense of the normal that my judgment felt unplugged. Sounded like it too. “Wonder if the blades sliced his belly button in two.”
Detective Moody gasped.
I wished for a hole I could crawl in. But she understood. “Like I said, it isn’t pretty.”
The body had no legs. They’d both been hacked off at an angle at similar locations below the knees.
My mind tried to picture how this could have happened. But it wasn’t having much success. The geometry wasn’t working out.
I’d once investigated another accident involving a young woman who’d failed to notice that a plane’s propellers were still spinning. Jousting with heavy slabs of knife-edged metal spinning at hundreds of revolutions per minute hadn’t been a good idea. Thinking about it, I could still picture the blood droplets on the hangar ceiling — ample testimony to the extreme forces involved. That plane too had been a Beechcraft King Air.
And I recalled one other thing.
Most airplane propellers on conventional twin-engine craft spin clockwise, as viewed — again — by the pilot looking forward.
This time, the body of the victim I could see had been nearly sundered by the four powerful aluminum propellers spun by the engine on the right wing. But beyond that, my mind’s re-creation of the scene wasn’t meshing with the evidence.
The remains of a victim struck hard enough to have been split in two at the waist should have been thrown back toward and under the plane’s left side. But if this had been the case, where did all the carnage on the plane’s right side come from? It desecrated the hangar floor almost all the way to the white-paneled wall.
And why were there large pools of blood near the plane but not in significant amounts close to where the victim’s main body parts were