A
DARK PATH
Series: Katrina
Williams #3
by
Robert E. Dunn
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Pub
Date: 8/7/2018
Sheriff's
detective Katrina “Hurricane” Williams confronts deep-rooted hate
and greed in the Missouri Ozarks in this riveting police procedural…
What
at first appears to be a brush fire in some undeveloped bottom land
yields the charred remains of a young African-American man. As
sheriff’s Katrina Williams conducts her in-spection of the crime
scene, she discovers broken headstones and disturbed open graves in a
forgotten cemetery.
As
Katrina attempts to sort out a complex backwoods criminal network
involving the Aryan Brotherhood, meth dealers, and the Ozarks
Nightriders motorcycle gang, she is confronted by the sudden
appearance of a person out of her own past who may be involved. And
what seems like a clear-cut case of racially motivated murder is
further complicated by rumors of hidden silver and dark family
histories. To uncover the ugly truth, Katrina will need to dig up
past crimes and shameful secrets that certain people would kill to
keep buried . . .
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Burning is not the best way to dispose
of a body. It’s hard to get a fire hot enough, long enough, to burn through the
layers of fat, muscle, and bone to destroy all the evidence you need gone. It
doesn’t smell very good either.
Before it ever got to me, the situation
had worked through a few preliminary steps. First, the pair of teens who
discovered the fire debated calling it in. They had been parking and fooling
around in a secluded spot off a rutted dirt track—usually used by fishermen
going to the lake. I imagine it was a tough debate among hormones,
responsibility, and fear of angry parents. They told me later they would have
let the blaze go if the boy’s father hadn’t been a volunteer fireman.
After a brutally stormy spring, the
summer had been hot and dry. Over recent weeks, the Ozarks had fallen into a
deep drought. Lake levels were way down, crops were withering, and small fires
were whipped into big ones by even the smallest breeze. The boy had been
lectured about it so many times, it was impossible for him to pretend
ignorance.
After the kids called 911 to report
what they believed was a trash fire, deputies and the fire department were
dispatched. The boy’s father showed up on the pumper. I understand there was a
parenting opportunity that involved a little tough love.
That opportunity was probably lost when
the embers were raked out and doused. In the center of the smoking pile was a
charred lump everyone assumed was a log. When it was hit with direct pressure,
the log split open. Under the black surface was pink meat and steaming flesh.
That was when they called me.
My phone rang a few minutes shy of two
a.m. Late Saturday night—or early Sunday morning—depending on how pedantic you
are about that sort of thing. I’m not at all, at least not at that hour. I was
in bed, and not yet sleeping because it wasn’t my bed.
Every call to my phone rings the same
tone except one, the Taney County Sheriff’s Department. I knew it was a work
call even without the tone. Real life always intrudes whenever I find a bit of
peace in my life.
“This is Katrina,” I said softly into
the phone.
“Who’re you whisperin’ for?” our jailer
asked. He laughed like he actually knew something. It was a thick, rheumy
cackle that made me picture the soggy cigar in his jowled face.
I was actually relieved. If he was
calling, I might be able to stay in bed. “What do you want, Duck?” His name was
Donald Duques, earning him the permanent sobriquet, Donald Duck—always
shortened to simply Duck. He laughed again and I became unpleasantly aware of
being naked.
“Got a body,” he interjected between
wet hacks of laughter.
“What?” Given who he was and the old
school Ozarks diction, I can be forgiven for thinking he was commenting about
my appearance.
I was about to give him some choice
thoughts on his manners when he said again, “We got a body. Out on the west
side shore of Bull Shoals by Kissee Mills.”
Detective Billy Blevins shifted in the
sheets behind me. His arm moved against my bare thigh and hip. I was distracted
by the warm contact. “What?”
Duck laughed again. “What’d I catch you
doin’? Work can’t hold your attention?”
“Why are you calling me?”
“I told you—”
“Why you, Duck?”
“Oh,” he swallowed the laugh. “Gettin’
a little overtime. Workin’ weekend overnights on dispatch.”
“Then stick to the job at hand, would
you? What’s the call?”
“Couple ‘a kids called in a fire.
Calvin called for a detective when the fire department found a body in the
brush heap.”
“Where?” I stood and broke contact with Billy’s arm.
My skin immediately regretted the loss.
“That undeveloped bottom land, down the
fishing trail that goes off of Hole Road.”
“Who’s there?”
Duck told me the names of deputies on
scene and I started searching for my underthings. They were close by on the
floor. Finding them made me think of losing them. I smiled.
“I’ll be half an hour,” I informed
Duck.
“From your place?” He sounded
surprised.
“Half an hour,” I repeated and broke
the connection.
Moonlight through a high window
illuminated Billy lying in the sheets. It was a nice sight. I was amazed—and
alternately delighted and terrified—by that development in my life. Not as
amazed; however, as I was that he’d never woken while I talked on the phone and
dressed. Maybe I was projecting. My own sleep was fragile and filled with
ghosts. Billy seemed to have the ability to sleep without demons.
He and I had circled each other for
years. We were deployed to Iraq at the same time. In the worst moment of my
life, Billy appeared for the first time. I don’t even know if the memory is
real. Everything else about that time is solid and undeniable. I was brutalized
by two superior officers. They left me for dead in the blowing brown dust that
eddied behind a mud wall. Grain by grain, the dun-colored wind piled a grave on
top of me. I pulled myself from the dirt, staggered then crawled to a road.
Insurgents found me first. They would have shot me like a rabid dog in a ditch
if an Army patrol hadn’t shown up. All of that is true. And it’s true that a young
medic, a corporal, cleaned and stabilized me in the back of a rushing Humvee.
There’s a little piece of that, the piece I believe but don’t know: Billy
Blevins was that medic. He’s never said and I’m afraid to ask. But I believe.
There were so many reasons why we never
should have gotten to this point. I hated giving up any moment of lying naked
with him.
Still. . . I’m a cop and the real world
was calling.
A
PARTICULAR DARKNESS
Katrina
Williams Book 2
Pub
Date: 9/12/2017
From
the author of A Living Grave comes a gripping police procedural
featuring sheriff's detective Katrina Williams as she exposes the
dark underbelly of Appalachia . . .
Dredging
up the Truth
Still
recovering from tragedy and grieving a devastating loss, Iraq war
veteran and sheriff's detective Katrina Williams copes the only way
she knows how—by immersing herself in work. A body's just been
pulled from the lake with a fish haul, but what seems like a
straight-forward murder case over the poaching of paddlefish for
domestic caviar quickly becomes murkier than the depths of the lake.
Soon
a second body is found—an illegal Peruvian refugee woman linked to
a charismatic tent revival preacher. But as Katrina tries to
investigate the enigmatic evangelist, she is blocked by antagonistic
FBI agents and Army CID personnel. When more young female refu-gees
disappear, she must partner with deputy Billy Blevins, who stirs
mixed feelings in her, to connect the lake murder to the refugees.
Katrina is no stranger to darkness, but cold-blooded conspirators
plan to make sure she'll never again see the light of day . . .
We
had lights on our helmets and a flashlight each, but our progress was really
because of Billy’s familiarity with the path. Three turns and one crawl-through
and we came out into a chamber. At one end water dripped and trickled, seeming
to bleed right out of the stone and filled a small basin. At the other end, the
basin emptied into a silent steam that disappeared into a fissure the size of
my fist. In between was a flat space on which we sat. Billy pointed out shapes
and features in the walls and ceiling.
“Are
there bats?” I asked.
“Not
all caves have bats,” he answered without laughing or making me feel bad for
asking. “But this one has something better. Something special.”
He
slipped down to his knees and put his face low. For a second I thought he was
going to put his head under the pool of water. Instead, he shined his
flashlight around until he found what he wanted.
“Come
look at this.” His voice had become a whisper.
I
joined him staring into the light beam within the water. What, at first, I thought
were reflections, moved away from the light. Fish. They were tiny, like
minnows, but the color of bleached bone. Their eyes were small and dead
looking. It was as if I was looking into a ghost world.
“Down
here.” Billy pointed with the flashlight then poked a finger into the beam.
There,
along the line of his finger was a white rock.
“A
pebble?” I asked.
“Wait.”
The
rock moved and the strange shape resolved into what appeared to be a tiny
lobster.
“Crayfish,”
I said excited. It was so colorless it was practically transparent at the
edges. “So pale.”
“They
don’t need color in the darkness. They don’t need eyes either.”
I
sat up, stunned and elated by the place I was in. “Thank you,” I said looking
around. “For sharing this with me.”
“This
isn’t what I wanted to share,” Billy said.
He
reached to the lamp on my hard hat and killed the light. After a moment, he
turned off my flashlight. Again he waited a few seconds to turn off his
flashlight. Finally, after a longer pause, he turned off his own headlamp.
We
were in the kind of complete darkness I don’t think I’d ever experienced. It
was thrilling and jarring at the same time. I reached and took his hand without
even thinking. The black we were in was like distance and I wanted to be close.
“Why?”
I asked.
“Look
around,” he answered, softly.
“It’s
dark,” I said. “Nothing but black.”
“There’s
no light. But absence isn’t exactly black.”
“I
don’t understand.” I shook my head then wondered why.
“Some
of the guys I know . . .” Billy said then stopped.
I
knew he was talking about something different then, but still the same. A
change in subject not in meaning. I waited, like waiting for a suspect. He had
to be the one to fill the silence.
“Veterans,”
he continued. “Guys who were over there. We talk sometimes.
They talk a lot
about the things they see when they close their eyes. It’s always personal. No
one ever has the same experience or the same . . . vision on events. Look
around. Do you still see nothing?”
I
did as he asked and noticed for the first time that blackness wasn’t exactly,
only blackness. There were patterns of light, vague shimmers, not entirely
seen, but not simply imagined, I was sure.
“Something
. . .” I admitted.
“Our
eyes don’t like complete darkness. When there’s no light to be seen, the optic
nerves still fire, populating the void with specters. The thing is, your eyes
won’t see what mine do and I won’t see what you experience. Darkness is
singular. What you see, is your particular darkness, no one else’s. No matter
how well you describe it, no one will see it the way you do.”
“You’re
not talking about darkness.” I actually thought I heard fear in my voice.
“You’re
holding my hand.”
“Yes,”
I answered, squeezing.
“Is
it real?”
“What
do you mean?”
“My
hand. Me. Am I real”
“Of
course,” I said. “Why would you not be?”
“That’s
what I tell the other guys. We all have our own darkness within us and
sometimes it gets out, it shadows our lives, the entire world we see. Those
times we get so wrapped up in seeing our own thing, our own darkness, we forget
the real out there beyond it.”
He
let go of my hand and I was suddenly untethered. I was adrift in my own
darkness. It was a familiar feeling. In a way, comforting. The same way what is
familiar and expected is always somehow a comfort. But I didn’t want the
darkness anymore. I realized I wanted his hand.
“Billy
. . .”
He
touched my face. Then the touch became a hold as he placed his hands to each
side with his fingers in my hair. His thumb rested on the scar that framed my
eye and I didn’t mind.
“I
don’t want to live in the dark anymore,” I confessed.
Then
Billy Blevins kissed me.
When
we walked out of the crevasse and entered the cave’s mouth, the world was a
circle of light to be walked into. It spread and opened as we approached. When
I stepped through, I understood what Billy had said about breathing sunshine.
A
LIVING GRAVE
Katrina
Williams Book 1
The
first in a gritty new series featuring sheriff’s detective Katrina
Williams, as she investigates moonshine, murder, and the ghosts of
her own past…
BODY OF PROOF
BODY OF PROOF
Katrina
Williams left the Army ten years ago disillusioned and damaged. Now a
sheriff’s detective at home in the Missouri Ozarks, Katrina is
living her life one case at a time—between mandated therapy
sessions—until she learns that she’s a suspect in a military
investigation with ties to her painful past.
The
disappearance of a local girl is far from the routine distraction,
however. Brutally murdered, the girl’s corpse is found by a
bottlegger whose information leads Katrina into a tangled web of
teenagers, moonshiners, motorcycle clubs, and a fellow veteran
battling illness and his own personal demons. Unraveling each thread
will take time Katrina might not have as the Army investigator
turns his searchlight on the devastating incident that ended her
military career. Now Katrina will need to dig deep for the
truth—before she’s found buried…
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I
felt like it was the end of summer. Not that there was a hint of green or the
creeping red-oranges of leaves turning. In Iraq, everything was brownish. Not
even a good, earthy brown. Instead, everything within my view was a uniform,
wasted, dun color. It was easy to imagine the creator ending up here on the
seventh day, out of energy and out of ideas after spending his palate in the
joy of painting the rest of the world. This spit of earth, the dirty asshole of
creation we called the Triangle of Death, didn’t even rate a decent brown.
I
had been in country for eight months. I had been First Lieutenant Katrina
Williams, Military Police, attached to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st
Airborne Division for a little over a year. Pride and love had brought me here.
Proud to be American and just as proud to have come from a military family, I
was in love with what the ROTC at Southwest Missouri State University had shown
me about my country’s military. I fell in love with the thought of the woman I
would become serving my nation. I wanted to echo the men my father and my uncle
were and add my own tone to the family history. Iraq bled that all out of me.
Just like it was bleeding my color out into the dust. Bright red draining into
shit brown.
It
was the impending weight of change that made me feel like the end of summer. As
a girl, back home in the Ozarks, the summers seemed to last forever. It wasn’t
until the final days, carried over even into a new school year, when the air
cooled and the oaks rusted, that I could feel them ending. Their endings were
like the descent of ice ages, the shifting of epochs. That was exactly how I
felt bleeding into the dirt. The difference was that I felt an impending death
rather than transition. The terminus of an epoch. In Iraq though, nothing was
as clear as that. It was death; but it wasn’t.
Lying
on my back, I wished I could see blue sky, but not here. The air was hazed with
dust so used up it became a part of the atmosphere. There was no more of the
earth in it. Grit, like bad memories and regret, hanging over an entire nation.
I coughed hard and it hurt. A bubbly thickness slithered up my throat. Using my
tongue and what breath I had, I got the slimy mass up to my lips. I just didn’t
have it in me to spit. Instead, I turned my head to the side and let the bloody
phlegm slide down my cheek.
Dying
is hard.
Wind,
hot and cradling the homeland sand so many factions were willing to kill for,
ran over the wall I was hidden behind. It eddied there, slowing and swirling
and then dumping the dirt on my naked skin. A slow-motion burial. Even the land
here hated naked women.
I
stayed there without moving, but slipping in and out of consciousness for a
long time. It seemed long, anyway. I dreamed. Dreamed or remembered so well
they seemed like perfect dreams of—everything.
Green.
We
played baseball. Just like in old movies with kids turning a lot into a
diamond. No one does that anymore, but we did. My grandfather played minor
league ball years ago and I had a cousin who was a Cardinals fan. Everyone was
a Cardinals fan, so I loved the Royals. When the games were over and it was
hotter than the batter’s box when I was pitching—I had a wild arm—my father
would take me to the river. Later when we had cars, I was drawn there every
summer to swim and swing from the ropes. We floated on old, patched inner tubes
and teased boys. That was where I learned to drink beer. My father would take
me fishing on the river. My grandfather would take me on the lakes. I used the
same cane pole my father had when Granddad taught him about fishing. Both of
the men used to say to the girl who complained about not catching anything,
“It’s not about the catching, it’s about the fishing.” I don’t think I ever
understood until a good portion of my blood was spilled on the dirt of a world
that hated me.
My
head spun back to the moment and back to Iraq. If I was going to die, I would
have done it already, I figured. At least my body. That physical part of me
would live on. That other part of me, the girl who loved summer… I think she
was already dead. Death and transition.
Robert
E. Dunn was born an Army brat and grew up in the Missouri Ozarks. He
wrote his first book at age eleven turning a series of Jack Kirby
comic books into a hand written novel.
Over
many years in the, mostly, honest work of video and film production
he produced everything from documentaries, to training films and his
favorite, travelogues. He returned to writing mystery, horror, and
fantasy fiction for publication after the turn of the century. It
seemed like a good time for change even if the changes were not
always his choice.
Mr.
Dunn is the author of the horror novels, THE RED HIGHWAY, MOTORMAN,
and THE HARROWING, as well as the Katrina Williams mystery/thriller
series, A LIVING GRAVE, A PARTICULAR DARKNESS, and the upcoming A
DARK PATH.
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