Deviations (26 page)
Authors: Mike Markel
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Police Procedurals, #Women Sleuths
Mike Markel is the author
of the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series:
He
lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife.
Thank
you for taking time to read
Deviations: A Detectives Seagate and Miner
Mystery
. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting
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The
Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery Series
To sample or buy any of
these titles, visit
Mike
Markel’s page on Amazon
.
Visit
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BIG SICK HEART
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
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
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
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
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 was the last person Detectives Seagate and
Miner expected to discover dead in the alley next to a strip club. His marriage
was a formality, but both he and his wife, Florence, were discreet. He was
involved with a dancer at the club; his wife, with Lee’s oldest and most
trusted friend, Ron Eberly, a landman who always seemed short of funds.
Rossman’s business enemies, all from outside the family, included a group of
ranchers who held him personally responsible for the methane in their water, as
well as a radical environmentalist at the university who was forthright in
explaining to Seagate and Miner how she planned to put Rossman out of business
for good. 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.
Following is the prologue
from
The Broken Saint
, volume 3 in the Detectives Seagate and Miner
Mystery series.
From the little stand of
trees and shrubs between the river and the Greenpath, he gazed across the narrow
river toward the municipal golf course. The moonlight, flickering behind the
rushing clouds, outlined the rolling mound of a hazard beyond the silhouettes
of the naked, gnarled black cottonwoods, mountain alders, and river birches on
the far bank. The river ran fast, tossing invisible spray over the rocks that broke
the shallow surface near the bank. Dead leaves scratched across the gravel and
brushed at his feet on a frigid February night.
He looked to his left and his right on the
Greenpath, then across the river to the modest swell of the fairway near the
fourteenth hole. There was no one. He turned and scanned the parking lot
adjoining the three-story corporate building in the small industrial park. There
were no cars in the lot, no lights on in the building.
Reaching down and gently touching the artery in her
neck, he felt a faint pulse. He kneeled beside her body and placed his ear next
to her mouth and nose. He felt a slight breath, warm in the frozen night.
He began to undress her. She wore no jacket or
coat. He looked at her clothing, all of it tight fitting—the dark t-shirt with
some indecipherable writing on it, the jeans that seemed too narrow to slide
over her ankles. Even the socks seemed too small.
Sweat forming on his upper lip, he strained to
bend her arms so he could remove her shirt. He felt a slight release as it
ripped when he pulled it over her shoulders.
Carefully he raised her shoulder and reached
behind her back to unhook her dark bra, but he found no clasp there. He grasped
the bra in the front, his trembling knuckles grazing her small, cold breasts as
he lifted it and pulled it up toward her chin. It caught on her jaw, then on
her nose, but finally it was over her shoulders. He disentangled it from her
arms, the elbows stiff in the cold. He folded it and placed it next to her on
the sandy gravel.
He stared at her breasts, the nipples dark smudges
in the dim moonlight. His trembling finger touched a nipple, hard in the cold.
He pulled his finger back. He held his hand in front of his face, the five
fingers spread. Then he lowered his hand gently until each finger touched the
soft breast, pressing it delicately, feeling it yield only slightly. With an
unsteady hand, he slowly traced the delicate arc of her breast, from her
sternum, downward, then beneath its gentle curve.
Suddenly, horrified, he jerked his hand away from
her body. For many months he had dreamed of her, but now he was choking on guilt,
shame, and despair.
He unbuttoned her jeans, tugged at the zipper to
lower it, and tried in vain to pull the denim over her hips, first one, and
then the other. He pulled at the jeans from her knees, but the fabric was so
tight against her skin that he could not gather enough in his fist to secure a
grip. He placed a palm in the hollow above her hip to keep her from sliding
across the gravelly dirt. With his other hand he pulled hard on the denim.
Finally, the fabric moved, and he managed to release her hips. He looked up as
he heard the growl of a passing motorcycle, its rider oblivious to the scene in
the patch of trees and shrubs not ten yards from the Greenpath.
He reached down to remove her thong. He could not
look away from the narrow, straight line of black hair that led down to her
vagina. As he folded her jeans and thong and placed them next to her shirt and
bra, he began to weep.
He crouched beside her and tried to lift her in
his arms. Feeling the soles of his shoes sink into the sand and gravel, he
studied the uneven, sloping surface, with its river rocks, tree roots, and
stumps half-hidden beneath the tall brown grasses. He did not trust himself to
carry her safely to the river. He lowered her carefully to the dirt and then
stood straight and walked around to her head.
He grasped her arms, above the elbows, surprised
by their thinness, and lifted her trunk. Now only her heels touched the ground.
He smelled coconut in her jet-black hair, thick and straight. He gazed at her
breasts and her sex, indistinct in the flickering shadow his body cast in the
dim moonlight.
His hands gripping her slender arms, he walked
backward, slowly and haltingly, hunched over, her hair pressed against his
chest, down the bank toward the river. Struggling with unsteady steps, he
continued backward into the water, dragging her silent body. His feet tingled
as the water rose over the tops of his shoes. The water rose higher and higher
on his jeans, over his knees, until it reached his crotch and he gasped.
Her ankles and legs and buttocks now slid beneath the
surface, and he felt her body shudder. He thought he heard her moan from the
sudden chill. Although the water was warmer than the freezing air, it felt ten
times colder.
He walked backward, deeper into the river, the
water covering her trunk. Now he was sure he heard moans of pain through the
gurgle of the rushing water.
His left foot slid off a large river rock covered
in a slick film and he lost his balance. Instinctively, he released her arms,
watched them rise slightly in the cold night air, then fall, slapping the surface
as he tumbled backward into the river. The river enveloped him, the frigid water
stabbing at his face and his neck. As the water penetrated his heavy coat, then
his flannel shirt, he turned over onto his stomach and struggled to right himself,
his hands grasping for something secure on the riverbed. The icy water rose
inside his sleeves.
Finally, his churning legs touched the riverbed,
and he could extend his head, his arms, his trunk into the freezing air. The
water had soaked through his clothing. He gasped for breath, shivering. He
scanned the rippling surface, panicking because he had lost her in the black
river.
Then she appeared, fifteen feet away, half-floating
on her back, with only her knees and breasts breaking the surface of the dark water.
She was caught up on some rocks, her head invisible beneath the surface.
He fought to maintain his footing, his sodden
clothing weighing him down like anchors as he trudged over to her. He lifted
her head out of the water, bending down to listen for a breath. But the lapping
of the water against his chest and over her body was too loud. He placed one
hand on her forehead, the other on her chin, and pushed her head beneath the
surface. The weight of his jacket started to pull him over, but he pushed back
with all his might against the flow, trying to keep his footing.
He held her head beneath the surface for another
long moment, feeling his tears against his frozen cheeks, hearing his teeth
chattering in the night. “I am so sorry,” he whispered as his body convulsed in
the freezing river.
He grasped her arms, above the elbows, and walked
backward toward the shore. His body shaking, numb from the water, he slowly
pulled her from the river. Her breasts and her sex glistened in the faint moonlight.
Pulled down by his wet clothing, he slowly made his way over the rough surface
of the river bank, back toward where he had left her clothes. Exhausted, he
carefully let her trunk sink until she was reclining on the ground. He was
breathing heavily.
He lifted her again by the arms, and as his hands
felt the sand on the back of her arms, he began to weep again for what he had
done. He dragged the body farther until, finally, sheltered by the gnarled
cottonwoods and the shrubs, he laid her softly on the scrub brush and gravel,
next to where he had placed her clothing. Once again he tried to hear her
breathe, tried to feel a pulse, but this time he was certain she was dead.
He strained to shake off his own coat, heavy with
river water. He started to dress her, but he struggled to get her thong, her
jeans, her bra, her t-shirt, and her socks onto her wet, sandy body, rigid in
the cold. He pulled and tugged at her clothing. It was necessary to cover her
naked flesh. He worked in the faint silver moonlight that dodged the swift
clouds down at the river on a frigid February night.
###
