Boots by Jessie Cooke

Author:Jessie Cooke [Cooke, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Redline Publishing
Published: 2020-01-06T23:00:00+00:00

16

Three Months Earlier

Detective Mark Williams sat on the edge of his bed and set the alarm on his phone for 6 a.m. He had to be at the station early in the morning for a meeting with the brass. He was being considered for a transfer to the Gang Task Force and tomorrow morning would be his second interview. He had to be at the top of his game and that meant getting plenty of sleep…for a change. Williams had a hard time sleeping; he had ever since he caught his first case. The first time he looked into a pair of dead eyes, they never left him. They came back to haunt him over and over in his sleep, each case different, each one a new victim and each perp a new monster. It wasn’t always the ones who passed that had the dead eyes. Williams had looked into plenty that were attached to a living, breathing…monster.

He tried to put the latest pair out of his mind as he switched off the lamp on the nightstand and lay back on the cool cotton sheets and closed his eyes. He lay there for several minutes before the night terrors had a chance to assault him and tried to conjure up a pleasant image instead. He thought about his wife and for a few seconds a sense of peace descended over him. But then the picture of her in his mind changed, morphing from the first time he’d seen her along the side of the river, wearing that blue sundress with the yellow flowers…to the last time he’d seen her, wearing the same dress, as she lay in the coffin at her funeral. He ripped his eyes open just as his phone started to ring. As he was most nights when duty called, he was almost thankful for the intrusion. He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was his partner, Kelly Rivers.

“Yeah?”

“Hey. Dispatch is sending a bus out to a house in Guadalupe, and uniforms are already on scene. They’ve got an adult female victim, possible suicide.”

“Shit.” Williams hated suicide calls. Most of the time the first responders and deputies could handle it without a detective on scene…but a lot of the younger deputies would request investigative backup simply because they wanted to hand off the paperwork to someone else. Williams and Rivers would end up stuck there all night between waiting for a preliminary from the medical examiner and dealing with the family. This wasn’t what he needed the night before his big interview. “Does it even look suspicious?”

Rivers snorted. “You know the drill, they’ll say it does so they can dump it in our laps and head out to Krispy Kreme before they go off shift.”

“Fuckers.” Williams picked up a pen off his nightstand. “Give me the address.” He wrote it down as Rivers rattled it off. It was a neighborhood both of the detectives knew well. Guadalupe was a small suburb of Phoenix with only about five and a half thousand residents, made up of mostly Native American and Hispanic people.

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