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Ecw Press - Dudley Lynch

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207 pages

English

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True Detective meets X-Files in the first installment of the Luke McWhorter series Nine physicists are dead. The medical examiner has determined that the victims died from drinking coffee laced with rat poison. The owner of the house, Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner, isn t suspected, but his claim that a piece of the debris from Roswell s 1947 UFO crash was hidden in Flagler might be true. Enter Luther Luke Stephens McWhorter, a Yale Divinity School educated West Texas sheriff with all the right questions. Is the fragment real? If so, who is trying to locate it? And what has fueled the byzantine activities of Abbot County s two secret societies for the past 70 years? Working with FBI agent and girlfriend, Angie Steele, Sheriff Luke begins to put together all the pieces and come to understand the connection between seemingly unrelated phenomena.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	16 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773053820
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A Fragment Too Far A Sheriff Luke McWhorter Mystery
DUDLEY LYNCH

Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Discover the Series!

To my family. One and all.

Chapter 1
My working eye — the other one was plastic — kept telling me I’d witnessed the world’s first buzzard-cide. Or something akin to it. The bird’s precipitous plunge had looked choreographed by the grim reaper.
The spectacle had unfolded not far below where I was parked — a turnout near the western end of the O’Mahony Ridge. This chain of boulder-and-brush-covered peaks ran for forty miles through the middle of Abbot County. The stricken buzzard had disappeared from my view beneath the stunted live oaks and mesquite trees at the point where the prairies ended and the ridge began. To the north, short-grass prairies stretched to the horizon, silent and empty. Usually, they spread out beneath cloudless skies.
At first, all I’d noticed was a kettle of the birds taking lazy swirls on one of our summer thermals.
Then this bird had veered away from the others. Flown two tight circles on its own. Stretched both wings. Drawn its feet and scrawny neck close to its body. Remained motionless for a second. Tipped backwards. And plunged straight to the ground.
You’d have thought the ill-starred bird had been attached to an anvil. Its fall was as true to vertical as a plumb line.
But a deliberate act?
I decided not.
More like an act of God. The animal shouldn’t have been flying. Period.
Thinking about it, my inner choirboy dredged up a snippet from an old hymn: “Nevermore to roam. Open wide Thine arms of love, Lord, I’m coming home.”
It wasn’t unusual for me to think of old hymns. Or sermon titles. Or Bible verses. I was probably the only sheriff in the country — maybe the world — with a divinity degree from an Ivy League school.
Mine was from Yale.
Pretty expensive training for a sheriff. For certain, this isn’t the kind of background you’d expect for a West Texas county’s chief law officer. Or, in all likelihood, any other Texas county’s. But then, I was used to explaining how my whole post-high-school educational experience had been shaped by the idea of being a preacher. When people asked me how I’d ended up being Luther Stephens McWhorter, sheriff , instead of Luther Stephens McWhorter, minister of the gospel , I’d tell them it was a long story. One probably best saved for another time.
Was it because of the pain?
That was part of the reason.
But it was more because of the risk.
You can’t put much of a foundation for a new future in place if you keep obsessing over what you’ve lost.
I pushed those thoughts aside to concentrate on what I was seeing through my windshield.
The sight bordered on the majestic — if you were looking into the distance. Red-dirt prairies meet green treed hills meet endless azure sky. But the closer you looked, the more imperfections you saw. Scraggly trees meet yawning gullies meet rock-strewn grasslands. Only the azure sky carried over. One of my deputies had a puckish name for this whole area: “No Country for Old Radiators.”
It was the vastness I loved about the country. And the isolation.
I could creep up the rutted gravel road, park my vehicle, and unpack my lunch. Ease my seat back when I finished eating. Watch the clouds drift by — if there were any clouds to be had. Luxuriate in the solitude and the stillness. And, most times, enjoy a nap.
On this blistering-hot day, it had almost worked that way.
I’d savored my ham-and-cheese sandwich, corn chips, and slice of store-bought orange spice cake. Peeled and nibbled down a banana. Poured myself more iced tea from my battered Stanley thermos. Directed the car’s AC away from my face. Made a minor adjustment so my seat was less erect. And tried to decide whether to gawk or snooze.
But my thoughts wouldn’t stay away from the buzzard.
I returned my seat to its upright position. Stepped outside to relieve myself. Brushed a few cake crumbs from my lap. Slipped back under the steering wheel. And aimed my souped-up Dodge police cruiser off the ridge.
I thought I knew where the buzzard had landed, and I wanted a closer look.
The turnoff was less than a minute away. By the first “welcome mat” on the left. Not that a cattle guard is that welcoming. The metal devices are like small bridges pockmarked with holes. If a bull were to misstep on the ugly grids, the animal could break a leg faster than a cat’s slap. Hit one of the contraptions too fast in a vehicle, and you could destroy a transmission or oil pan. Or lose a few teeth.
I crossed this one at a prayer’s pace. Started inching up the weed-choked road’s twin tracks. Spotted a small whitetail deer through the live oak and mesquite trees. And prepared for my first glance of Professor Huntgardner’s enigmatic old house since longer than I could remember.
No one lived there now.
The professor was — what? — almost ninety. They’d moved him to an old-folks home some years back.
His sizable house was odd. Always would be. Not because it looked odd. In many ways, though it was showing neglect, the boxy, cinnamon-brick, two-story house was still picture-perfect. In town, it would have fit well into any upscale neighborhood built in the 1920s or 1930s. In part, that was because of its deep, wraparound front porch, edged with low brick half-walls. The Huntgardner house looked odd because it was much too grand an abode to be so far out in the boonies. It was thirty miles from anywhere, and that was by gravel road. That nearest “anywhere” was Flagler, our county seat.
The professor’s place of employment hadn’t been any closer. The University of the Hills was one of three such institutions we had in Flagler. All were church-sponsored schools of modest enrollment. They were one of our two main claims to fame. The other one was the man now living in the White House. President Jim Bob Fletcher — James Robert, to anyone from outside Abbot County — had grown up here.
I’d once been a student in one of Professor Huntgardner’s physics classes. Not a very good one — student, that is. I’d gotten my only F in two decades of schooling from Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner.
My dad had known Huntgardner too. After both of them had retired, I’d driven “Sheriff John” out to the Huntgardner place a time or two. And I’d been to it on a few other occasions.
But none of those visits had sent a morbid rewrite of verse 4 of Psalm 23 rocketing through my mind.
This one did.
Yea, I have walked into the darkest valley, and I have seen all evil . . .

Chapter 2
The nose often announces death before the eye can register it. For chemical reasons.
Putrescine and cadaverine, to name two. Powerful smells produced by decaying animal matter.
Think rotting meat bubbling in cheap dime-store perfume. Then imagine that smell a hundred times fiercer. Feel the stupefying stench as it coats your nose hairs, tongue, the back of your throat. Realize that holding your breath won’t help. By the time you detect the unspeakable nastiness in the air, it’s already seeped into your lungs.
I’d smelled decomposing flesh more than a few times as a law enforcement officer.
But I’d never lost my cookies.
Until now.
I braked hard and managed to get my door open part of the way.
Too slow.
I puked much of the packed lunch I’d eaten only minutes before onto my raised car window. Then staggered out of the car. Pivoted in a half-circle. Managed to put both hands on the front car fender. Leaned forward just in time to carpet-bomb the fender with more of my lunch.
The buzzards had been puking too. And peeing. And pooping. Mostly on themselves. As any rancher’s kid knows, this helps to cool them off — and causes them to stink to high heaven. The white streaks on their legs and feet were from uric acid of their own making.
But this wasn’t what was causing my distress. The horrendous smell had triggered that. Plus, realizing what the buzzards were feeding on.
Human remains.
The corpse closest to my car sprawled at the base of the short concrete stairs ascending to the porch of the house.
A half dozen buzzards milled around the prostrate body. When the buzzards weren’t pecking at it, they were jostling each other. This allowed me only occasional glimpses of the victim’s bloodied ribs. The denuded arm and leg bones. And the mangled areas where the face and scalp had been.
In two places in the porch shadows, beady-eyed black-and-red heads were popping up. Disappearing. Reappearing. Then vanishing again.
Over and over.
The kn