by A. E. Howe
November’s Past
A Larry Macklin Mystery–Book 1
By
A. E. Howe
The job of criminal investigator in a rural Florida county is never easy, but it’s even harder when your father is the sheriff.
When Larry Macklin investigates the murder of a mutilated stranger, the search for the victim’s identity intersects with an arson investigation. The common thread is a small group of people who were in high school together in the ’70s, including Larry’s own father. Before Larry can rule any of them out as the killer, one of them turns up dead.
Why is the murderer targeting this particular group? What past secrets could be worth killing for now? Larry is running out of time and suspects, and his search for the truth may make him the next victim.
Books in the Larry Macklin Mystery Series:
November’s Past (Book 1)
December’s Secrets (Book 2)
January’s Betrayal (Book 3)
February’s Regrets (Book 4)
March’s Luck (Book 5)
More coming soon!
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Dedication
In memory of Grendel—The slightly better trained, but no less goofy, inspiration for Mauser.
Copyright © 2016 by A. E. Howe
All rights reserved.
www.aehowe.com
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Additional Books in the Series
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
I’m a crappy detective. Oh, sorry, “investigator.” I’m a crappy investigator. I never wanted to be in law enforcement. But there I was on a Tuesday morning just after dawn, looking down a highway embankment at a body.
“We got the call about forty-five minutes ago. It took us a while to locate where along the highway the guy saw it.” The state trooper looked at me from under his wide-brimmed hat and decided my silence meant that I wanted to hear more. He went on telling me about the guy who saw the body, the fact that the witness was walking home from his girlfriend’s place, that he had busted his phone the night before, and on and on.
The body was a white male, wearing a blue dress shirt, jeans and dress shoes. The back of the shirt was blown out and covered in blood and dirt. I couldn’t walk down to take a closer look until the crime scene technicians got there to take pictures, mark evidence, collect evidence and do all the other obsessive compulsive things they do.
The crummy investigator that I was, I jumped to the conclusion that the man was probably involved in drugs, got shot by his buddies and tossed there. Well dressed, so maybe he went to buy drugs, they saw an expensive watch, tried to rob him and things went south from there. Really not a bad hypothesis.
We were only two miles from the interstate and every year a couple of bodies were dumped in Adams County, frequently from crimes committed in Tallahassee, which was in the next county over. City killers seemed to think it was clever to drop bodies out in the country. Who knew, maybe they were right. We had limited resources and not much skin in the game when it came to bodies killed elsewhere and dumped in our county. Our population was just over twenty-five thousand and our sheriff’s department had only forty full-time officers. It was easy for the drug-addled to think Adams County would be a great place to dump a body.
The crime scene techs finally pulled up behind my unmarked car. I watched them make their way carefully down the embankment, photographing everything as they went.
When they finally turned the body I got my first surprise. Even from twenty feet away I could tell that he was over fifty. There aren’t many people dealing in illegal drugs that are over forty, let alone fifty. It’s a rough and ugly business that ravages and kills those that come in contact with it.
Drugs were probably out. Robbery seemed possible. But why move the body? You go to rob someone and it goes wrong, you just leave the body and run. Unless you want some time to pass before the crime is discovered. Maybe. Revenge? Same as robbery—why move the body? Something very hinky here.
“Large caliber wound,” shouted one of the techs. “Very large. Shotgun slug maybe?”
“How long’s he been dead?” I asked. “Knowing that you can’t give me the exact blah, blah, blah until the coroner blah, blah, blah.”
“He was killed after midnight and before four, I’d say. As a guess. Ground is wet under him so he was dumped here after the dew fell this morning. Here’s a surprise.” He tilted the body’s head so that he could see what was left of the face. “Someone pounded this guy’s face into pulp. Smashed his jaw, not many teeth left. Going to make it harder to identify him.”
“Fingerprints?”
“No, the fingers are gone.” He sounded a bit surprised and lifted up the stump as though he had to show me.
“Gee, thanks,” I said, walking away. “Pete will be here if you need anything.”
Back at the car my partner, Pete Henley, was slumped in the driver’s seat, a line of drool running down his chin. I banged on the side of the car, jerking him awake.
“Jesus, Larry! Have a heart. I worked until four at the Waffle House.” Pete was thirty pounds overweight and working an off-duty gig at the Waffle House wasn’t helping.
“I’m going to walk up to AmMex Trucking and see if anyone there saw anything this morning. Keep an eye on the crime scene guys.”
After an exaggerated sigh he said, “Yeah, okay.” He seemed to think a minute and finally, unwillingly, got out of the car. Pete was okay. He just had too many irons in the fire, including a wife and two teenage daughters who wanted… well, everything.
Pete looked down the incline at the body our techs were busy processing and grumbled, “This is going to be a mess.”
I walked up the road with the sun warming my back. The trucking company was only half a mile from the crime scene, but because the road curved through pine timberland I couldn’t see it until I was only a thousand feet from the entrance.
“Oh, my,” the middle-aged dispatcher said after I told her about the body. “Was he hit by a car? Folks drive so fast. It’s crazy. Just the other day I was pulling out of the driveway—”
“This wasn’t an accident,” I said bluntly. It was too early in the morning for small talk.
“Murder?” She stared at me like I’d just told her she’d won the lottery. Only by a great force of will was she able to keep herself from picking up the phone right then and telling everyone for a thousand miles that a murder had been committed and she was lucky enough to be involved in the ultimate reality show. She’d have it posted up on Facebook before I got out of the building.
“Could you tell me who might have been coming to work this morning between four and, say, six o’clock?”
“Honey, I can do better than that. I’ll just get on the intercom and ask everyone. How ’bout that?”
“Perfect.”
She picked up the mic and started to speak when I noti
ced someone staring at me from the hallway that led back to the loading bays. As soon as I made eye contact he jumped back through a door. I started down the hall at a trot, pushing through the door into the bay where a dozen trucks were backed in.
“Who was that?” I asked an overweight man in jeans and a blue work shirt.
“Eddie. He went that way.” Looking suddenly surprised that he’d answered me, he asked in a suspicious tone, “Who the hell are you?”
I opened the bi-fold that held my badge and identification.
“Oh. He ran toward the parking lot.”
“Thanks.”
People run from cops for any number of reasons. I turned around and went back to the front desk. I was not about to go chasing someone when I could calmly walk back over to the dispatcher and get his name, social security number and home address.
His name was Eddie Thompson. Hearing that, I cringed a little inside. The Thompsons were one of the biggest families in the county. Close knit and strange. Some of them were in local law enforcement—one of our deputies was a Thompson and so were two of the Calhoun city police. Other parts of the clan were constantly in and out of jail on various offenses. Of course a lot of folks would tell you that a cop and a crook are just opposite sides of the same coin. Might even be true if the reason you got into law enforcement was for the adrenaline rush or you couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Having radioed in a pick-up order for Eddie, I talked to a dozen people who’d come into work that morning past the body dumpsite. Nothing. There were a couple drivers who had already left on runs so I wrote their names and numbers in my notebook. Yes, I’m old fashioned that way.
I walked back to the crime scene and found the CSU guys finishing up. One of them nodded to me as I passed him. “You can go down there now.”
I thanked him and looked over at Pete, who was slouched against the car reading something on his phone. No sense bothering him. I turned and started down the slope.
For me, death had an unreal quality to it. Maybe I’d seen too many horror movies. With the face smashed into an unrecognizable pulp and the hands mutilated, the body of my John Doe seemed even more like a prop on the back lot. Of course there’d been nothing in his pockets. When someone goes to the trouble of chopping off fingers and destroying dental work, they’re unlikely to leave a driver’s license on the body. So all I had to go by was his clothes and what was left of the body.
The clothes looked like they had been clean and fairly new before he was murdered in them. I looked at the bottoms of his shoes—barely worn and expensive looking. The man was certainly not a vagrant. His dress shirt had a button-down collar, but no tie. His belt was of high quality leather. My hopes of identifying him were going up by the minute. Middle-aged, upper-middle-class guys got reported missing. All the killer, or killers, had done was postpone the inevitable.
“What’s it look like?” Pete yelled down to me.
“A very dead body. Climb down here if you want to see it.”
“I’m good.”
“This guy is going to be missed.”
“Nice. I’ll put the call out for a missing white guy.”
“Tell them he’s forty-five to sixty-five.” I looked at the body. “Approximately 5’10” and…” He had a bit of a pot belly. “Two hundred and ten pounds. Thinning blond hair.” I turned the head and looked at the eyes. “Blue eyes.” From the estimated time of death, he couldn’t have been killed too far from here. “Either visiting the area or lives within two hundred miles.”
After climbing back up to the road, slipping twice, I told the coroner’s assistants that they could take the body. I took one more look around the side of the road to see if there was any evidence that the other vehicles hadn’t obliterated, then we headed back to the office.
Chapter Two
I grabbed a coffee and had just settled down at my desk to check emails and read the news when I got a text: Remember you’re watching Mauser tonight.
Damn, I’d forgotten about that. And Dad texted me instead of calling me because he didn’t want to hear me complain. Fair enough. I’d told him I’d do it.
“What’s up, Junior?” came a voice from behind me.
“Nothin’, Deputy Dud, you?” I said without turning.
“Har, har.” Matt Greene sneered as he sat on the corner of his desk and stared at me.
He was a good investigator with moments of greatness, but as a person he was a little shit. At 5’5” he was the shortest man in the department and only one of the women was smaller. He usually worked alone. No one wanted to spend a minute more around him than they had to. He had been married once. She attempted suicide and then moved to the other side of the country. I’d even heard deputies say that if he called for assistance they’d drive very slowly. Maybe his badass personality worked for him. Suspects didn’t want to be around him any more than his fellow officers and were quick to tell him everything they knew just so they could go to a cell and be around decent criminals.
“Heard you got a body.” There was irritation in his voice. He thought he should be lead on every homicide.
“Yep.” Give him nothing was my motto.
“Must be nice being the boss’s son.”
“Has its perks.” I was scrolling through missing persons, wishing he’d go away but knowing he wouldn’t.
“Who’s the victim?”
I turned in my chair. “What are you working on?”
“Arson. Happened last night. Pretty interesting.” The only trick I knew of to deal with Matt was to ask him about his cases. When he started talking about an investigation it was as though he shifted gears from asshole to insightful. “I’ve been going over it with the fire chief. Still smoking, but we were finally able to do a walk through an hour ago.” He was also notorious for being able to go without sleep.
“Interesting how?” I asked casually.
He narrowed his eyes. “Why do you care?”
“Never know, I might hear something on the street.”
“You on the street, that’s a good one. Your dad moved you to CID after what, barely two years on patrol? Faster than anyone else.” He was back to being an asshole.
Don’t go on the defensive, I had to remind myself. “Screw you.” I turned back to my computer and Matt went on about his business.
Half an hour later I’d gone through all the regional missing persons that matched our dead guy’s stats. Nothing.
Pete was just wandering in.
“Heard anything?” I asked him. I’d dropped him off at his usual morning haunt. Every day that we didn’t have a nuclear attack or something more urgent, he would spend at least an hour at Winston’s Grill, eating as many eggs and pancakes as he could get on his fork and over his tongue.
“No, everyone was askin’ me about it.” His hour at the grill on county time was not money wasted. Pete knew everyone and everyone knew Pete. His finely tuned ears picked up every bit of gossip and whisper of scandal that blew through town. Dozens of felonies had been cleared off the books by information that he got yakking with diners. People loved to talk and he was the perfect listener. Because of that he knew more about the county and the people in it, past and present, than anyone else.
“Sylvia Foster is hanging out with some guy from up north, but he sounded too young to be our victim. Might be worth a look as a possible suspect.” Pete dropped down into his chair.
I sent emails to all police and sheriffs’ departments within a hundred-mile radius of Adams County. Sending out general calls for information was fine, but poking the right people was a lot better. Then a burglary call came in. There were eight of us in the criminal investigation department, which meant there weren’t enough of us to specialize. We all grabbed cases as they came while the major violent crimes were assigned individually by our supervisor, Lt. Johnson, or the sheriff, who just happened to be my father. I took the burglary and headed out to interview the victims.
I spent an hour at a small ranch ho
use on a dirt road in the south of the county, talking with a stoop-shouldered man and his wife about the TV, electronics and a jar of quarters stolen from their house while they were at a funeral. I stood silent while the old farmer shed tears, explaining that his son was an addict and he believed he was responsible. This was one of the reasons I didn’t want to be an investigator. There was no way to make this right.
The mother explained that her son had been injured doing construction work, got hooked on pain killers, then followed meth down the rabbit hole. They wanted us to arrest him so he could detox in the county jail where he’d be looked after by a doctor. What a sad commentary on our world that parents needed their son to be locked up in order to get medical and psychiatric care.
Back at the office, Pete told me about a stolen car report he’d just taken.
“The usual—some guy gave his keys to a woman at the Eldorado Bar so she could get some aspirin out of his glove box. Of course she drove off with the car and tried to trade it for drugs, etc., etc.” He was just finishing the report. “We already found the car, so the idiot will get it back. Lesson learned, not.” He pounded away at his keyboard.
While he was talking I noticed that the arson report was sitting on Matt’s desk, very much unattended. There was no rule in the department that said we couldn’t help each other out on cases. No one had ever said we had to ask the lead investigator if he wanted any help. I opened the file and took pictures of it with my cell phone. No one noticed. I thought maybe I could have some fun looking over Matt’s shoulder on this one.
I finished up by writing up a report on an assault case. After sending it to our lieutenant I glanced at the clock. Crap. I only had about an hour before I had to go to Dad’s house and babysit Mauser. I left the office and grabbed a quick dinner on the way, not really looking forward to the rest of the evening.
Chapter Three