Quick Pivot
By Brenda Buchanan
1968
A cunning thief skimmed a half a million dollars from the textile mill that was the beating heart of Riverside, Maine. Sharp-eyed accountant George Desmond discovered the discrepancy, but was killed before he could report it. After stashing the body, the thief-turned-killer manipulated evidence to make it appear Desmond skipped town with the stolen money, ruining his good name forever.
Present Day
Veteran journalist Joe Gale is covering a story for the Portland Daily Chronicle when a skeleton falls at his feet: Desmond’s bones have been found in a basement crawl space at the long-shuttered mill. For Joe, digging into the past means retracing the steps his mentor Paulie Finnegan had taken years ago, when the case was still open. But the same people who bird-dogged Paulie four decades ago are watching Joe now. As he closes in on the truth, his every move is tracked…and the murderer proves more than willing to kill again.
87,000 words
Dear Reader,
Social media can be dangerous, fun and inspiring. While I was writing this month’s letter, I mentioned on Twitter that I was a bit stuck in my opening. Who can blame me after writing over forty letters? So author and reader @AudraNorth challenged me to make this one different by creating a Carina Press April Fools fill-in-the-blank letter (there’s a name for it but it’s trademarked so…fill-in-the-blank letter it is!). Challenge accepted and the game is afoot. We’ll go back to your normally written letters in May. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our bit of fun and please visit our @CarinaPress Twitter account in April for a contest associated with this month’s letter. We’re offering up free books and a gift card from Carina Press!
April is a __________(adjective) month for Carina Press since we have four new debut authors in our lineup! First up, I’m pleased to _______ (verb) debut author Sharon Calvin with her romantic suspense title, A Dangerous Leap. USCG rescue swimmer Kelly Bishop is used to dangerous situations, but when Ian Razzamenti demands she risk her _______(noun), she’s not sure she has the courage. Then disaster strikes and they both must face their worst fear—_______ (verb) each other.
Katherine Locke debuts in the contemporary romance new adult category with Second Position. Four years after a career-ending car accident, ballet dancers Aly and Zed risk their _______ (adjective) recoveries for the _______ (noun) they thought they’d lost. Don’t miss the prequel to Aly and Zed’s story, Turning Pointe, available as a free read on CarinaPress.com.
If you’re a fan of the male/male genre, be sure to pick up j. leigh bailey’s debut new-adult romance, Nobody’s Hero. Bradley Greene’s family rejected him for being gay, leaving him financially and emotionally adrift—until he meets Danny Ortega. Brad becomes Danny’s _______ (noun), but can Brad handle being responsible for someone else’s _______ (noun)?
Also debuting with us in April is mystery author Brenda Buchanan. In Quick Pivot, the first of the Joe Gale Mysteries, a newspaper reporter’s dogged investigation of a 1968 murder threatens to expose a Maine mill town’s _______ (adjective) secrets, making him the _________ (noun) of a killer who once thought himself too clever to be caught.
Joining Brenda in the mystery category is Daryl Anderson with Death at China Rose. The search for a long-missing woman brings PI Addie Gorsky to China Rose Fish Camp, a _______ (adjective) resort in a hidden corner of north Florida. Addie begins a _______ (adjective) hunt through the wilds of China Rose, surrounded by _______ (adjective) gators, killer _______ (noun) and a _______ (adjective) two-legged killer.
In the historical romance category, Caroline Kimberly brings another fun historical adventure with An Inconvenient Mistress. In a desperate attempt to flee her_______ (noun), Isabella North hijacks captain Phillip Ashford from a Jamaican prison and tricks him into _______ (verb) home to England. But will she be able to keep herself from _______(verb) him even if she despises the handsome, arrogant privateer?
Last this month, we wind up Angela Highland’s _______ (adjective) fantasy romance trilogy. When the Voice of the Gods breaks free of magical enslavement and rampages through Adalonia, the lost sword Moonshadow is the only hope of stopping Her—and Faanshi, Julian and Kestar must join _______ (noun) to find it and _______ (verb) the realm in Victory of the Hawk.
Coming May 2015: Marie Force’s Fatal series is available in mass-market print in retail stores, Stephanie Tyler (aka SE Jakes) delivers a new Defiance romance and Joely Sue Burkhart brings _______ (adjective) fantasies to life in her erotic thriller—is he a serial killer or the man who will meet all her deepest needs?
I hope your month is full of _______ (adjective) books that make you _______ (verb). Please visit the blog at CarinaPress.com/blog to participate in our fill-in-the-blank contest and win free books and prizes!
Happy Reading!
Angela James
_______ (job title), Carina Press
Dedication
For Diane, my beloved co-adventurer
Acknowledgments
I’ve been fortunate to have the support of many wonderful people while writing Quick Pivot.
My readers—Janice Asher, Ann Bingham, David Currier, Barbara Gauditz, Shonna Milliken Humphrey, Chris Kenty, Jane Laughlin, Marty Layne, Christine McDuffie, Pat Peard, Mary Toole and Carol Warren—provided critical feedback at many points along the way, for which I am deeply grateful.
I started writing Quick Pivot while part of a terrific writing group. I wish to thank Richard Bilodeau, James Hayman and Jane Sloven for their thoughtful critique of my work in the early going, and for their ongoing support.
My crime-writing colleague Maureen Milliken has been generous with her time and unstinting with her eagle editor’s eye. I especially thank her for her guidance about life in a Maine newsroom in this electronic age.
Big thanks also to my friend Elise Smith—who knows her way around deadlines and publishing—for her steady encouragement.
I also wish to thank a number of others who, while not involved in critiquing this particular book, have read and commented on related work. They include Nicole d’Entremont, David Kennedy, Phyllis Knight, Yolande Landry, Jean Lavigne, Kathy Metzger, Betsy Miller, Scott Nash and Nancy Gibson-Nash, Ron Schneider and Perry Sutherland.
My law partners Carol Warren and David Currier have not only provided feedback on my work, they’ve supported my efforts to keep two career balls in the air at once. I am grateful for everything they’ve done to help me pull this off. I also thank my colleagues Susan Starr, Andrea Cesario and Kristine Hedtler, for their enthusiastic support.
Thank you to my dear and talented cousin Michael Austin Kane, for the photo shoot on the beach and capturing such a nice image.
The wonderful folks who organize the annual conference known as the New England Crimebake deserve a big shout out for helping me hone my craft and encouraging me to stay the course. I wouldn’t spend the second weekend of November anywhere else.
For six years I had the good fortune to sit on the board of directors of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which allowed me to plug into the amazing community of Maine writers. I’m pleased as punch that MWPA now sponsors an annual conference—Maine Crime Wave—to nurture the crime-writing talent that seemingly lurks behind every pine tree in this wild and beautiful state.
I give thanks to my parents for all their love and support, and especially for teaching me to write
my name when I was four years old. This allowed me to have my own library card at the wonderful youth library in my hometown of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where I proceeded to check out every mystery on the shelves.
Much gratitude to my agent Marlene Stringer, for her wisdom and patience. Many thanks also to my editor Deb Nemeth, who is a joy to work with, and the entire crew at Carina Press.
The biggest thanks of all go to my spouse, Diane Kenty. Thank you for believing.
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
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter One
Friday, July 11, 2014
Riverside, Maine
From my first day at the Portland Daily Chronicle until he dropped dead of a heart attack six years later, Paulie Finnegan held me close under his crusty wing and taught me what was what. Hunched next to the police radio, black-framed glasses pushed up on his forehead, Paulie distilled small-town journalism to its essence.
A lot of time, the story you go looking for isn’t the story you’ll find. It’ll be bigger or smaller than you thought it’d be. A quiet meeting with a short agenda will get raucous. The sure bet for page one will fizzle. You’ve got to master the quick pivot.
My late mentor’s words flashed through my mind the instant I saw a skull tumble out of a collapsing brick wall in the basement of the Saccarappa Mill, freed from its tomb by a sledgehammer-wielding demolition crew. Until that moment, I was a guy writing a feature about a defunct textile factory being turned into condos. Before the skull stopped spinning on the concrete floor, I’d made the quick pivot.
“What the hell?” The goliath who’d knocked the hole in the wall pulled off his sweat-fogged safety glasses and gaped at the disembodied head. Holding up a massive hand, he dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross. After a silent moment he rose to his feet and scowled at Nate Kimball, the rookie developer planning to rehab the crumbling mill.
“You’re not payin’ me enough to deal with this shit.” He picked up his sledgehammer and lumbered toward the stairs. Neither of his helpers moved an inch, but the younger one, looking shaky, yanked his grimy T-shirt over his nose and mouth.
Nate was gulping air as though he’d been punched in the stomach, his pudgy face as gray as morning fog. The son of a local real estate mogul, he was looking to follow in Daddy’s footsteps. A gruesome discovery in the basement of his first big renovation project was going to strangle the optimistic narrative he’d been spinning for the past hour. But Nate’s PR problems weren’t my concern. Before he could object, I slid my reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket and crouched to inspect the find.
Hollow eye sockets gazed at the ceiling. A leering rictus of intact teeth shone yellow in the dim light. Using my pen, I coaxed the skull onto its left side. The back of the head was caved in, but not by the sledgehammer’s blow. A dark substance stained the cracked bone, insinuating a long-ago assault. My mind raced as I scribbled my observations. How the hell did a skull wind up behind the wall? How many others were back there?
Forcing a couple of deep breaths, I maneuvered the battered skull back to its original spot. Five feet away, Nate was a statue in the swirling masonry dust, eyes riveted on the smashed wall. It was easy to read his mind: a skull on the floor meant the rest of a skeleton must lie nearby. I edged toward the uneven hole.
“Bad idea, Joe.” His voice cracked.
I scrabbled through the smashed bricks, squatted down and poked my hard-hatted head through the two-foot-wide gap in the wall anyway, shaking away a mental image of bony fingers reaching for me. “Long dead,” I told myself. “Longtime dead.”
The stench of mold was overpowering. No light penetrated the darkness. Water dripped in the distance, but I couldn’t get a fix on where it was coming from. The sensation was like swimming underwater at night, blind and claustrophobic. I was working up the nerve to thrust an arm into the void when Nate shuffled his feet against the gritty floor.
“C’mon Joe. We’ve got to go outside and call the cops,” he said. “There’s no goddamn cell reception down here.”
I pulled my head out of the hole and eased to my feet. Buying time to calm my thudding heart, I did a slow three-sixty in the narrow hallway, then pulled out my phone and shot a half dozen photos while circling the skull.
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea to be taking pictures.”
“It’s my job, Nate.”
“Well you’re here because of me, and I want to get the hell out of here.”
Nate’s eagerness to summon the police was understandable. He had a boatload of money tied up in his plan to turn the crumbling Saccarappa Mill into a hipster magnet. He wanted to get the cops in and the bones out, fast. But it likely was my only chance for a good look, because the first lesson they teach in cop school is to keep reporters the hell away from crime scenes.
For ten bucks cash each, the demo guys agreed to stand guard. Nate and I took measured steps until we reached the stairs. Then he sprinted ahead, like a boy convinced the boogieman was on his heels.
Outside, Nate paced the cracked parking lot while stuttering out the story to a 911 dispatcher. I leaned against a graffiti-tattooed wall and wondered how a corpse came to be bricked into a crawlspace in the rundown mill that once was the heartbeat of Riverside, Maine.
* * *
The first cruiser was driven by a muscular cop wearing a name badge that said DeMauro. While Nate briefed him, I kept my mouth shut and pretended to contemplate the summer-lazy Cascabago River. Random skulls aren’t found every day in my adopted hometown. DeMauro was so keen to get a look he failed to realize there was a reporter on his heels as he jogged down two flights of chipped concrete steps into the bowels of the decaying mill.
The bruiser who’d knocked the skull loose hadn’t returned. His helpers were standing where we’d left them. “You touch anything?” DeMauro’s tone warned against bullshit.
“No friggin’ way.” The young one flicked a glance in my direction.
DeMauro dropped to one knee, unclipped a flashlight from his belt and took a long look at the skull. Then he squatted in front of the hole in the bricks and shone the light inside, scanning methodically, left to right, top to bottom. While I was maneuvering to a spot where I could look over his shoulder, a rail-thin cop who looked to be no more than sixteen years old appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
“Go back up and call dispatch,” DeMauro barked. “Get the chief and the scene techs over here. Tell ’em we’ve got human remains, but use your cell phone. If it goes out on the scanner we’ll have looky-loos crawling all over the place.”
The skinny rookie ran back up the stairs two at a time. DeMauro turned on his beam again and assessed the breached wall from floor to ceiling. Then he turned to Nate, whose
face was stiff with tension.
“You said you’re planning to turn this place into condos?”
“Yeah. Doing my due diligence.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Before closing, I get to inspect for problems.”
“Why are you taking this wall apart?”
Nate pointed first at one section and then at another. “Different coloration. These bricks are newer than those, meaning the wall was opened up at some point. I wanted to be sure there was no hazardous crap hidden back there.”
“Looks like you found a different kind of problem.”
DeMauro’s name was familiar from a recent press release. He’d joined the department that summer, fresh out of the military where he’d been an MP. Being a patrol officer, not a detective, he apparently was leery about screwing up the investigation, because he didn’t say another word to us. He stood at parade rest, blocking the hole in the wall with his body, until the young cop reappeared with a pair of crime scene techs lugging equipment. Within minutes, they were lighting the dim corridor like a surgical suite. When DeMauro moved to help, I edged toward the broken bricks, angling for a look of my own.
My progress was arrested by the arrival of Chief Barbara Wyatt. Unlike DeMauro, she knew me well.
The chief walked straight to the skull, dropped to one knee and took a long look. I backed up a few steps, hoping she wouldn’t spot me in the cluster of witnesses. But her cop eyes notice everything.
“Joe Gale.”
It was a command to follow her, not a greeting. She marched me away from the guys inspecting the skull. “How’d you get here so fast?” All business in a dark pantsuit, Wyatt snapped off each word.
“Nate Kimball was giving me a tour of the mill. I’m writing about his plans to restore it.”
“Lucky you.” Her eyes locked on mine despite the fact she was six inches shorter.
“You could say that.”
“Now it appears you’re onto an unexplained death.”
Quick Pivot Page 1