Zero Tolerance by John Luciew

Author:John Luciew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: suspense thriller, books like david baldacci, books like james patterson, books like john grisham, books like michael connelly, good indie authors, good indie thrillers, great new authors
Publisher: John Luciew

Reading and re-reading that e-mail and staring at that final, cryptic question, Michael Sullivan believed he did, indeed, have a match. Not the kind Columbo was always looking for to light up one of his cheap stogies. Sully had a match for who had written the strange e-mail. It had to be the bright kid who wanted to be a writer. The kid Sully had put the screws to when he came for a visit last spring. The kid named for a drink. What was it? Champagne? Yeah, but kid didn’t spell it that way.

Sully had a match for something else, too. A place right out of “Dawn’s Early Light.” Could it be the county reform camp, the boot camp run by some guy who insisted upon being addressed as colonel? Made sense. After all, the e-mail had been sent from the county system.

The camp was already on Sully’s mind. He’d be going to the River County Reform Camp for Boys tomorrow, in fact, to cover Gov. Winters’ speech.

But what about the other things in the e-mail? The references to training “his boys” to attack. The allusions to mind control and manipulated suicide? The comparisons to perfect alibis, internal corruption and government officials turning on each other?

Government officials, Sully thought.

Recent headlines flashed in his mind: “COMMISSIONER’S HOME ATTACKED BY TEENS.” “TEEN TERRORISTS ATTACK SECOND COUNTY OFFICIAL; JUVENILE DIRECTOR SERIOUSLY INJURED.”

Then the buzzwords from the e-mail: Boys. Mind control. Military school. Colonel.

No way, Sully thought, his mind making connections too outlandish to be believed, yet too powerful to dismiss out of hand.

Could this kid named after a drink mean that the teen terrorist attacks in River County were somehow linked to this camp and that colonel? Was this pretend colonel training his “boys” to whack River County officials, then providing the kids with the perfect alibi?

It sounded far-fetched. But for some reason, Sully didn’t think it was.

And what about the suicide? Sully didn’t recall hearing about any suicides at the camp. It’d been opened a year at most, and he would have remembered something like that. Besides, Gov. Winters wouldn’t be about to hail the installation as a model of juvenile reform if some kid had offed himself there in its first year. Winters wouldn’t go near the place. His staff would never let him.

Sully didn’t know much about the camp’s leader, either. There was some coverage when the camp opened, but Sully considered it mostly fluff. But he could find out. He could dig up all there was to know about Col. Hogan and his camp, and he could do it before tomorrow’s press conference with the governor.

First things first, however. Sully needed to confirm his initial hunch. He needed to find out if Josh Champaign was, indeed, a resident of the River County Reform Camp for Boys. It just didn’t fit, Sully thought. Why would a kid like that be locked up? He was a computer nerd, and his family was rich. He didn’t fit the profile.

Since juvenile records were sealed, Sully couldn’t confirm his suspicions through official channels.

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