Something Bad Wrong by Pruitt Eryk

Author:Pruitt, Eryk [Pruitt, Eryk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-01T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

JACK POWERS

1972

By mid-April, Sergeant Jack Powers had yet to give up. Despite taking additional cases that came his way through Lake Castor’s Crimes Against Persons division, he still ate, drank, and slept with his mind on the double homicide of Linda Harris and Steven Hicks. He still took the phone calls from Jed Hicks, even though they came less frequently. He still devoted every minute of his ever-dwindling free time to running down every single doctor who’d ever worked at Lake Castor General during Linda Harris’s time there and systematically eliminating them from his list.

It took time.

He thanked the stars that he didn’t have to do it alone.

While Lieutenant Dorritt’s interest in the case had waned considerably, Powers had found the perfect confidant in Olivia Crane, the crime beat reporter for the Lake Castor Herald. The two of them took solace by meeting after their shifts had ended at Powers’s apartment or in booths tucked away at coffee shops and diners or, as they did that night, at the offices at the Herald.

They had met there many times and enjoyed the silence left behind after the other journalists had quit for the day. Cigarette smoke still lingered in the air, and both Powers and Olivia added to it with their own, chain-smoked and washed down with a bottle and a million different ideas about how next to proceed. Their movements had become routine: first they picked a doctor’s name from the list, then they would research that name in the many databases provided by the newspaper, and then the name would be crossed off.

There were many more names to go.

They were in the middle of one such investigation—

“I’ve got a Culton Yarborough here, says he was a gynecologist at the time of the murders. What have we got on him?”

“I’ve got an article that mentions he was detained for driving while intoxicated, but I can find no record of it with the department.”

“Those doctors, man . . . they got reach. They can cover up anything.”

—when they were snapped out of it by Dorritt’s sudden appearance. He knocked before entering the office, then entered slowly.

“I had a feeling if I couldn’t find you at the Metro Diner,” said Dorritt, “that I’d likely find you here. You got any cigarettes left, or did you smoke them all?”

Powers offered him the pack, then lit one for him. “You ever heard anything on a doctor at LCG named Yarborough? Says he was a gyne—”

“I just got off the horn with Captain Jessup,” Dorritt said. “He wants to know where we’re at with that shooting down in the Back Back.”

“It’s a shooting,” said Powers. “It happened down in the Back Back. There’s been a dozen of them this year. It’s what happens down in the Back Back. It’s hardly news.”

“That’s right,” Dorritt said through clenched teeth. “It’s not news. It’s our job. If you spent half the time on that shooting or the one that came before it or, hell, even the ones yet to come as you do on these two dead kids—”

“It’s my personal time.

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