by Mike Markel
I looked back to see the doctor still working on Abby as the ambulance arrived. The expressions on the faces of the EMTs said she wasn’t going to make it, but they worked quickly and professionally. Within thirty seconds, they had her on a gurney and hooked up to a drip. In less than a minute, the ambulance had sped off and three squad cars had skidded to a halt in front of the courthouse.
Before I took off with Mary Dawson and Abby’s attorney, I saw Ryan hustling Richard Albright through the crowd and into the back of one of the squad cars.
We didn’t have to work too hard to charge Albright with first-degree murder. There were about a hundred witnesses in front of the courtyard, as well as another three million on YouTube. That’s as of today, four days after he shot Abby Demarest in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Ryan and I are on paid leave for the week. The chief explained that we did excellent work but with all the media around, we wouldn’t be able to get anything done, anyway. As I expected, the chief put Ryan in for a commendation for jumping into the reservoir to save Abby. He deserves it. I’m glad for him.
When I got home after the murder at the courthouse, there was a small contingent of reporters camped outside my tiny house. I shut all the blinds and drapes and just stayed inside for three days. I didn’t have much food in the house. But I did have my emergency bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
That first night, I descended into one of the moods that lead to trouble. I was emotionally wrung out, still reeling from almost getting Ryan killed at the reservoir. I started to think about how I’d put Abby Demarest on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse where Richard Albright had just walked right up and shot her. The Richard Albright who had told me he was going to remove Abby like a doctor removes a cancer. The guy who had told me he didn’t do the arson fire—he said he was more of a marksman than an arsonist.
I broke the seal on the Jack Daniel’s bottle and the next day disappeared. I came to about twenty hours later and started to weep when I saw the wet ring around the fragments of the bottle on my carpet.
I checked the street in front of my house. The reporters were still there. I slipped out the kitchen door and made it to my neighbor’s house. She gave me a lift to my AA meeting, where Sarah hugged me and brought me back to her place for a couple days. Finally, the week of paid leave ended and I was really glad to return to work.
With Richard Albright now in the county jail awaiting formal indictment and Martin Hunt being processed into the state prison, attention shifted to Martin’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Sigma. The university officially banned the chapter and is talking about high-level discussions on the future of the Greek system on campus. Mary Dawson is chairing a committee to plan new programs to prevent irresponsible drinking and sexual assaults in the dorms and fraternities. The Alpha Phi Sigma national has revoked the chapter’s charter. Now the place is just an ugly two-story building with a couple dozen guys shoving their stuff into their cars and leaving for the last time.
We learned that Richard Albright got himself a high-profile attorney from out of state who announced he was going to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. He’s probably already figured out how that’s not going to work, not here in Montana. For one thing, we abolished the insanity defense. The best he can hope for is what the lawyers call “guilty but insane.” That means you get a few chances to prove you were insane, but no matter how insane you were, if you did the crime, you still get found guilty. Then the judge gets to decide whether you go to prison or some kind of institution where they treat you but still keep you behind bars. You do the time, but they give you pills and let you leave your cell for an hour several times each week to sit in a circle talking with other guilty but insane guys.
My personal opinion, from the half-dozen lectures in criminal law that I was sober enough to attend as an undergrad, is that it’s almost impossible to define insanity. My perspective, based on being a cop for almost two decades, is if you intend to kill someone, there’s a very good chance you’re insane.
Take Richard Albright. Ryan’s opinion of this guy was that he was at least guilty of being a really bad Bible student if he thought Jesus would have approved of killing anyone. Even though I don’t know much about Jesus, I do know Ryan’s right about that. Richard Albright knew one thing—that sin is bad—and therefore thought it made sense to kill sinners. Even though he could quote the line about hating the sin but loving the sinner, that message never made it down to his trigger finger. I’ve read about guys who did a lot of time inside but can’t cope outside, so they deliberately do stuff to get arrested to go back inside. I don’t think that’s what was going on with Albright. I think he needed the attention and was willing to pay any price to get it. Which is insane.
Martin Hunt was insane, too. He was willing to kill the professor who was going to kick him out of the university. He claimed he didn’t know what happened in Virginia Rinaldi’s house that night, but the fact that he tossed her down the stairs not once but twice tells me he was thinking clearly. Not well, but clearly. And when he pushed Abby into the reservoir so she wouldn’t flip on him, he was thinking clearly, too. As it turns out, he succeeded in not getting kicked out of Central Montana State University. But he is going to spend the rest of his life in a different central Montana state institution. That’s insane.
I haven’t yet figured out what motivated Abby to do the stupid things she did. Why would anyone think it’s smart to put a porn video up on the web? Lots of girls didn’t get enough attention from their parents or thought they weren’t pretty enough. Why couldn’t Abby have just gotten a stupid tattoo above her ass like those girls do? And why was she so dim that she torched her own place? Whether your roommate is home or not, you can’t go around starting a fire in an apartment complex and not realize you might hurt someone.
I think Abby suffered from a serious lack of imagination. If you’re my age with my mileage and you can’t imagine a future with at least a promise of meaning and love, that’s too bad. But if you’re twenty and the best you can imagine for yourself is that thousands of losers will get their rocks off watching you screwing someone, that’s terrible.
Once I pulled myself together after my drunk episode last week, I tried to call Elena Moranu to see how she was doing. She never picked up. Yesterday I stopped by her apartment. Her car was gone. I was pleased to see there weren’t any reporters around. That might be because most people knew her as Krista and couldn’t track down her real name. I knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. I went to the manager’s office. The guy told me she missed her rent. He waited a few days, like he does, then opened up the place. All the furniture was there, but her clothing and personal things were gone. He’s arranging to sell her stuff and rent the apartment. He said he didn’t think he would need to paint it. Elena didn’t do a lot of damage like a lot of college girls do. She seemed like a nice young woman, he told me. I told him I agreed, she is.
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About the Author
Mike Markel is the author of the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series:
Big Sick Heart (Book 1)
Deviations (Book 2)
The Broken Saint (Book 3)
Three-Ways (Book 4)
Fractures (Book 5)
The Reveal (Book 6)
He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife.
Thank you for taking time to read The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend.
MikeMarkel.com
The Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery Series
To sample or buy any of these titles, visit Mike Markel’s page on Amazon.
Visit MikeMarkel.com.
BIG SICK HEART (Book 1)
Bad decisions have finally caught up with police detective Karen Seagate. Her drinking has destroyed her marriage and hurt her job performance, and the chief is looking for any excuse to fire her. Still, she
and her new partner, a young Mormon guy who seems to have arrived from another century or another planet, intend to track down whoever killed Arlen Hagerty, the corrupt leader of Soul Savers. Clawing his way to the top, Hagerty created plenty of enemies, including his wife, his mistress, his debate partner, the organization’s founder, and the politician he was blackmailing. When Seagate causes a car crash that sends a young girl to Intensive Care, the chief thinks he finally has his opportunity. But even the chief can’t believe what Seagate does when she finally catches the killer.
DEVIATIONS (Book 2)
Former police detective Karen Seagate is drinking herself to oblivion and having dangerous sex with losers from the bar when the new police chief tracks her down. The brutal rape and murder of a state senator by a lone-wolf extremist gives Seagate a chance to return to the department, but the new chief has set down some rules, and Seagate is not good with rules. At this point, she is just trying to stay alive. With nothing left to lose and nobody left to trust—not even her partner, Ryan—Seagate goes off the grid to find the killer. She doesn’t care that she will be fired again. She has much bigger problems, now that she has been captured inside the neo-Nazi compound.
THE BROKEN SAINT (Book 3)
Seagate and Miner investigate the murder of Maricel Salizar, a young Filipino exchange student at Central Montana State. The most obvious suspect is her boyfriend, who happens to have gang connections. And then there’s Amber, a fellow student who’s obviously incensed at Maricel for a sexual indiscretion involving Amber’s boyfriend. But the evidence keeps leading Seagate and Miner back to the professor, an LDS bishop who hosted her in his dysfunctional home. Seagate takes it in stride that the professor can’t seem to tell the truth about his relationship with the victim, but her devout partner, Ryan Miner, believes that a high-ranking fellow Mormon who violates a sacred trust deserves special punishment.
THREE-WAYS (Book 4)
When grad student Austin Sulenka is found strangled, nude on his bed, the first question for Seagate and Miner is whether it was an auto-asphyxiation episode gone bad. Evidence strewn around his small apartment suggests that he spent his last night with at least different women. Each of them and their other partners had motives to kill the philandering graduate student. As Seagate and her partner try to unravel the complicated couplings, she finds herself in a three-way relationship that threatens to destroy her own fragile sobriety.
FRACTURES (Book 5)
The fracking boom in eastern Montana has minted a handful of new millionaires and one billionaire: Lee Rossman, the president of Rossman Mining and the leading philanthropist in the small city of Rawlings. Rossman is the last person Detectives Seagate and Miner expected to discover dead in the alley next to a strip club. Later, when Lee’s son is found out at the rigs, with significant internal injuries, numerous broken bones, and a belly full of fracking liquid, the detectives know the two crimes are related but can’t figure out how. Seagate and Miner must try to solve a mystery awash in enormous fortunes, thwarted ambitions, and grudges both old and new.
THE REVEAL (Book 6)
Many citizens in the small college town of Rawlings, Montana, are unsurprised to learn that Virginia Rinaldi, the world-famous sociologist, was murdered. A few are secretly pleased. Her political enemies knew her as an ideologue who used insults, threats, and blackmail to promote her unpopular social views. When Detectives Seagate and Miner begin their investigation, they discover that a local prostitute had recently moved into the professor’s house, angering Rinaldi’s college-age son. And when the community learns that the prostitute made a lesbian porn video with one of Rinaldi’s students, tensions on campus erupt, leading to more bloodshed. Drawn into a horrifying world of sexual violence and exploitation, Seagate devises a plan to flush out the killer. The plan appears to be on track—until Seagate unwittingly jeopardizes the life of her partner, Ryan Miner.
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