Broken Saint, The (24 page)

I didn’t know whether the chief was going to hold
his own press conference. When we get a murderer and we know the prosecutor is
going to indict him, most of the time the chief does hold one. It’s good
publicity—how we got our man, the guy’s off the streets,
et cetera
. But with
Samosa going to do one at five o’clock, I imagine the chief would wonder
whether it would be the right move. On the one hand, the chief would be able to
talk up how Ryan took a bullet, and how the guy we nailed wasn’t the Hispanic
guy Samosa accused us of persecuting. Then again, it might look cheesy to have
dueling press conferences, like we were responding to Samosa’s press
conference.

I think it would look better to just issue a
written statement to the media about the investigation. That way, it’s Samosa
who runs his mouth, and cops who actually do the work and get the bad guy.

But I was happy to leave that kind of question to
the chief. He’s real good at it, and I trust him. I get pissed at him when he
tells me not to bend the rules, like when we could’ve pushed Hector a little
harder to rule him in or out. But I think I’m beginning to understand where
he’s coming from. For the chief, every decision is about how he’s going to
explain it in a press conference, in an op-ed, or when he gets hauled before
the City Council. He figures if he can’t explain it, it wasn’t the right
decision. And if it wasn’t the right decision, it’ll be that much harder for us
to do our jobs because we’ll lose personnel or something like that. That’s the
way a good chief thinks, and Murtaugh is a good chief. So I should try not to
get pissed at him all the time. I should try.

I’ve done about thirty murders total, almost two a
year. Funny thing is, each one works out different. I don’t mean about whether
the victim deserved to die. That’s almost always the same: no, the victim
didn’t deserve it. Maricel? We didn’t really get a good look at her, but I’d
definitely put her in the category of didn’t deserve it. She did some stupid
stuff, sure, but not any stupider than the stuff I’ve done. She didn’t have the
self-confidence to know that some shitheads are unworthy of her. Coming from
her background, I can’t blame her. Plus, she was twenty-one. I was twice her
age and still didn’t know it.

No, I mean each case turns on something small.
With this case, it was Ryan spotting Jared’s shoes in Amber’s apartment after
she told us she was going to drop his sorry ass. All Ryan and I were trying to
do was help Amber realize that Jared was a total douche. She told him we had
his shoes, and he—being not only a total douche but also a murderer—figured we
were going to come after him.

A guy with eighty or ninety IQ points would have
turned himself in, tried to deal down to manslaughter or even self-defense.
With a seventy or seventy-five IQ, he would have decided to hit the road, buy
himself some time, and try to figure out some of the less-obvious routes to
Mexico or someplace.

But it takes a truly world-class level of stupid
to think that the best way to deal with the situation is to fire a few rounds
at a couple of cops standing on the porch. After all, you do that, there’s only
a couple of outcomes. You fire crooked and miss them both, you take out one of
them, or you drop them both. Within the next ten minutes, fifteen at the
outside, you’re either in cuffs or you’re dead. Really, how else could it end?

Of course, it didn’t end this afternoon. It’ll go
on for a good long while. My guess is that Jared won’t get the needle. I don’t
think he set out to kill Maricel that day. They just got into it, and him being
a shithead he grabbed a knife.

The three Gersons, I’m a little worried about
them. Al Gerson really believes in what his church says. He’ll be all right.
When he came clean at Maricel’s service on campus, he’d turned the corner. His
wife, Andrea? I can’t really say. I didn’t hear her talk much about the church,
and if she’d bought into it, she might not have been such a mess about her
other twin dying and Mark going crazy. I don’t see her getting much better. And
Mark, with his disease. If he keeps going off his meds just when he needs to
stay on them, good chance he’s going to end up dead one of these days.

And there’s my partner, Ryan. Maybe in a little
while I’ll be able to think about what happened without falling apart like I’m
doing now. I know we could all get shot any moment. That comes with the job. When
I got raped and got the shit kicked out of me at the Nazi compound last year,
that was on me. I knew who I was dealing with. I knew the risks I was taking. I
walked right into it.

But Ryan getting hurt bad? While he’s trying to
protect me? I don’t see how it could be any less fair than that.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand how Kali
and Ryan think, but, really, I wouldn’t bet on it. I want more than anything to
believe Kali that Ryan will be okay—and that even if he isn’t, that will be
okay, too. But I’ve got way too many bruises, too many scars, to think that
way.

The way I think, if Ryan lost a lot of blood, and
his BP was down, and it’s possible that fucked up his brain one way or the
other, the best thing to do is assume his brain is going to be fucked up. I
could be wrong, but I doubt it. And if I am wrong about this, that will be
great. Not okay, but great.

I know Ryan and Kali think God is just terrific,
but I’m not seeing it. If he’s all that great and all that good, God could stop
being such an underachiever. Like when Jared Higley was going down I-15 at ninety-five
miles an hour—the wrong way—with a BAC of 1.9, and he flew past four different
overpasses. That was four opportunities to send his car into one of the concrete
abutments. Four opportunities for Maricel not to get stabbed and die out on the
river.

If God could just show us how great and good he
is—not all the time, but just once in a while—it might be a little easier for
spiritual morons like myself to get in line and sign up. I don’t get any satisfaction
out of being a nonbeliever. Believe me, I don’t. I truly want to believe
there’s someone who knows what he’s doing, someone who’s thought this stuff
through. I desperately need to believe that there’s some reason it’s not me in
the ICU, why it’s Ryan lying there and it’s a good chance he’s going to die of
sepsis or his brain is already mostly dead. “God works in mysterious ways” just
doesn’t cut it for me. Not about this.

Why does God have to be all that mysterious?
What’s so terrific about being mysterious? After a while—certainly after two
thousand years—doesn’t it start to look like he’s stalling, like maybe he isn’t
all that great or good?

Toss us a bone. You can bet that’s what I’d do if
I was great and good.

With some luck, in a couple of days I’ll learn
that Ryan will be okay. Then he’ll be telling me how it wasn’t that big a deal
getting shot, how it was worth it because we took Jared off the street, maybe
helped Amber get back on track. I won’t be surprised if he tells me he’s
meeting with the Gersons every week and he’s beginning to see real progress.
And he got Hector to go Mormon. And he’s going to keep working on me. That
would be great. Maybe he’ll tell me that in a couple days. If I knew how to
pray, or who to pray to, that’s exactly what I’d be praying for right now.

###

About the Author

Mike Markel is the author
of the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series:

Big Sick Heart

Deviations

The Broken Saint

Three-Ways

Fractures

He
lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife.

Thank
you for taking time to read
The Broken Saint: 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.

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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 (Volume 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 (Volume 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 (Volume 3)

Seagate and Miner investigate the
murder of Maricel Salizar, a young Filipino exchange student at Central Montana
State. The most obvious suspect is the 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 (Volume 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 wrong. Evidence
strewn around his small apartment suggests that he spent his last night with a
number of different women. One was Tiffany, a former student who still resented
the injustice of getting a C in the course when he promised her a B if she
slept with him. Another was Austin’s beautiful girlfriend, May, who had never
before encountered a man she could not totally beguile. Then there was his
thesis adviser, Suzannah Montgomery, who might have inadvertently revealed to Austin
some information about her past that could ruin her own career. These three
women 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 (Volume 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 expect 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. In their toughest case yet,
Seagate and Miner try to solve a mystery awash in enormous fortunes, thwarted
ambitions, and grudges both old and new.

Three-Ways: Prologue

Following is the Prologue of
Three-Ways
, volume
4 in the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series.

She stood on the concrete
pad outside his apartment, squinting as the headlights swept past every few seconds,
even now, a few minutes before midnight. She shielded her eyes and peered
through the picture window into his small, unlit living room. Then she glanced
down the row at the other four apartments. One picture window was outlined by a
rectangle of light.

The apartment next door was dark. She knew the
unit was occupied, but she didn’t know who lived there or what hours they kept.
Since his apartment was the end unit, there was only that one neighboring unit.

She stepped onto the pebbled black rubber mat, one
side torn away so that it read Welcom, and put her ear to the door. She waited
a moment, listening for any sounds from inside the shabby one-bedroom unit in
the old flat-roofed, one-story brick building four blocks from campus.

She knocked, three taps on the battered wooden
door. A few seconds later, she heard his muted footsteps. A light came on in
the living room and the door opened. “I didn’t expect you,” he said. She did
not reply. He adjusted the belt on his dark green terrycloth bathrobe.

“Please.” He stepped back, sweeping his arm,
gesturing for her to enter.

She walked in and placed her bag on the small pine
table near the door. Her eyes scanned the humble furnishings: a threadbare blue
couch, two mismatched upholstered chairs, a black plastic entertainment center
with a TV, a pile of a dozen DVD cases, and a portable stereo system with small
speakers built-in. A few books lay on the wooden coffee table, one of them open
at the spine. Off in the corner was the tiny kitchen, just a small refrigerator,
a narrow range, a white enamel sink chipped down to the black steel, and a few
feet of speckled Formica countertop.

Her gaze settled on the three sets of dirty dishes
and glasses on the small round kitchen table with its two matching dining
chairs.

He said, “Is there something in particular you
needed?”

She looked at him and began to unbutton her short
cotton jacket. She watched him as his eyes were drawn to the blue and yellow
silk scarf knotted loosely at the neck of her sheer silk cream blouse with its
top two buttons open. Removing her jacket, she watched him stare at the
outlines of her nipples shifting against the silk. Her jacket rustled as it
slid off her shoulders and fell softly onto the carpet.

He smiled as she removed her clothing deliberately.
First the blouse, and then the skirt and the panties. She left the blue and
yellow scarf knotted at her throat. She slipped out of the low heels and
followed him into the bedroom.

He untied the belt on his bathrobe and let it drop
to the floor. He retrieved the two pillows, one on the floor, the other askew
in the middle of the queen-size bed, and arranged them neatly, one on top of
the other, centered at the head of the mattress. He tossed aside the rumpled
top sheet.

She said, “Is there wine?”

When he turned to face her, she was pleased to see
that he was already erect. “Out in the living room,” he said. He followed her
to the bedroom doorway so that he could see her glide through his apartment.
Although she could feel his eyes on her, she moved confidently, her posture
tall and straight.

She saw the half-empty bottle of white on the
coffee table, surrounded by three glasses: one empty, two with a few sips left
in the bottom. She walked into the kitchen, confident that he would watch her
rise on her toes and stretch to get two clean glasses from the top shelf of the
cabinet to the left of the sink.

He watched her come back toward him, the bottle in
one hand, the two glasses, crossed at the stems, in the other. She kept her
arms at her sides as she walked, knowing how much he appreciated the way her
breasts swayed in rhythm with her gait.

By the time she was at the bed, he was already in
position, on his back, his fingers interlaced behind his head on the stacked
pillows. She glanced down at his penis to be sure he was ready.

She placed the two glasses next to each other on
the night stand and half-filled each one. She put the bottle down next to the
glasses.

Slowly she sank onto the mattress, swinging one
leg over him and settling on her knees. “Are you sure you can—so soon?” she
said, the question a casual compliment. She knew the answer.

Unlacing his fingers and resting his arms at his
side, he said, “Come closer and we’ll see.”

She bent at the waist, lowering her trunk until
her palms rested on the mattress on either side of the stacked pillows. She
felt his erect penis touch the inside of her left thigh. She pulled the thigh
away and watched him smile. Her breasts were three inches above his face.

He lifted his head, slowly, and she pulled her breasts
away. He laughed gently, and she smiled a little bit.

His hands came up and grazed her hips, his fingers
lightly running up her flank and tracing the undersides of her breasts. He
heard her begin to sigh.

His fingers slid down her sides, slowly, across
her hips, then inward, toward her sex. She gasped when the fingers began to
caress the folds of her vagina. He raised his head and kissed one nipple, and
then the other.

She closed her eyes and reached between his legs,
taking his penis and guiding it to her sex. She heard him moan. She held it
steady and lowered herself onto it, the both of them beginning to breathe
deeply.

They moved slowly in rhythm for a minute.

“Now?” she said, opening her eyes to gauge his
response. He nodded silently.

As she untied the loose knot in her yellow and
blue silk scarf and removed it from her neck, his hands came up and lightly
stroked the underside of each breast.

She rocked up and down gently, pausing at the top
of the movement when only the tip of his penis was inside her. She reached
behind her and let the scarf trail across his scrotum.

“Now.” He opened his eyes and lifted his head off
the pillows.

She stopped rocking to concentrate on the task.
She slid the scarf under his neck and adjusted it so that each end was the same
length. She noticed his eyes fixed on her breasts as they swayed above his
face.

He moaned softly as she knotted the scarf at the
front of his throat and began to tighten it. She started to rock again, feeling
his penis get even harder as she tightened the scarf.

His eyes began to close, his moans of pleasure
becoming longer and lower. Steadily she tightened the knot at his throat.

His moans turned to groans and his hands lifted
off the mattress as she pulled at the knot. After a few moments his eyes opened
wide, and his hands reached up toward his throat. He appeared to be trying to
shout, but he couldn’t produce a sound. His fingers grasped at the scarf, but
it was too tight against his throat. His eyelids began to close, as if he were
falling asleep. The skin on his cheeks began to pale, then turn a faint blue.
His hands fluttered in the air for a moment before falling to the mattress. He
was no longer breathing.

Her face contorted as she pulled hard on the knot
one last time, increasing the pressure and maintaining it for several long
moments. She felt the bulge of his penis increasing inside her, exciting her
more, even though he was now lifeless. Beads of perspiration formed on her
upper lip as she rose and fell on his erect penis for another minute, until she
climaxed. She paused, the sensation flooding her body.

She let go of the scarf, placed her hands on the
mattress, near his shoulders, and began to rock back and forth again, her
breasts almost grazing his still face. She lifted her hips, exposing the tip of
his penis, paused, and then fell onto it, violently. She knew this time it
would take only a few thrusts. Then, when it was over, she paused, breathing
deeply, her eyes closed, her head bowed, letting the pleasure radiate through
her body.

“What you did was wrong, Austin.”

Gently she lifted herself off him. Standing next
to the bed, she looked down at his beautiful, motionless body, his muscular
chest and arms, the slim waist, and that wonderful, hard penis.

She untied the knot in the scarf and removed it
from around his neck. She stroked the silk, trying to remove its creases. She
tied the scarf loosely around her neck and walked over to the dresser with the
mirror on top, leaning against the wall. Looking at her image, she smoothed the
scarf again and, satisfied, walked into the living room, where she put her
clothes back on: the panties, the blouse, the skirt, and the shoes.

She walked over to the coffee table, bent down,
and with her forearm swept all the glasses onto the soiled grey carpet. They
didn’t break. She crushed one of them under her heel. Then she walked into the
kitchen and swept the soiled dishes off the counter and onto the linoleum
floor, where they broke with a satisfyingly clatter.

She went back into the living room and kicked the
coffee table over, then lifted a dinette chair and swung it, shattering the
table’s glass top. She worked her way methodically across the small living
room, upending, knocking over, and breaking every object in her path.

She was breathing heavily now from her exertions.
She picked up her jacket from the floor and put it on, retrieved her purse from
the small table near the door, and paused. She walked back into the kitchen and
grabbed a paper napkin from the counter. She went to the door and rubbed the
napkin across the knob twice as she left the apartment. She pulled the door
shut and wiped the knob on the outside, and then put the napkin in her purse.
She glanced down at the four other units in the brick building. There were no
lights on in the unit next door. She walked at a moderate pace toward her car,
which she had parked a block away.

###