Total pages in book: 17
Estimated words: 15775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 79(@200wpm)___ 63(@250wpm)___ 53(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 15775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 79(@200wpm)___ 63(@250wpm)___ 53(@300wpm)
The fact that the monster turned out to be one of their own didn’t make much difference to them. Anyone that could inflict such atrocities on a human being was not fit to be part of their society, any society.
Given that the seven men had been part of the community, held high positions and were seen as upstanding citizens, everyone was on the side of the deceased.
There was no hard evidence placing him at the gruesome scenes, but two years of hard work and piecing the puzzle together had led back to him.
Going back into their backgrounds, four of the seven men had only one thing in common. Back in their misspent youth they had been arrested for driving drunk.
Not only had they been DUI, but they had side swiped a couple on their way home from the hospital with their newborn baby girl.
The entire family had perished on the side of the road where the driver and his pals had left them to burn to death in their overturned car.
Something went hinky in the judicial system back then and the boys had been let off with probation. Something about privileged backgrounds had come into play.
At the time there was a huge outcry from members of the surrounding areas, but here in the exclusive enclave of Valley Springs, life had gone on as usual.
The four boys had gone on to college, graduated and came back to either take over their family firms and in one case ran for office and had been a sitting congressman on his way to the senate.
The Dennings had one surviving son, a thirteen year old named Claude. No one ever heard anything about the boy after the furor of the trial died down, and years later he wasn’t even a distant memory; neither was his family.
Now seventeen years later, those teenagers were men in their mid thirties with families of their own. The indictments had been sealed and life moved on.
The congressman had been the first to go. His wife and young son had returned from a weekend trip to her mother’s to find him pinned to the living room wall with his arms and legs spread wide, and his guts trailing over the seventy-two inch flat screen TV and onto the marble floor.
The other six followed in quick succession at the rate of one every two months, give or take. It was as if the killer was taunting them, giving each surviving member enough time to sweat and wonder when it would be his turn.
There’s no telling what their lives had been like in those last months, and in the beginning no one could figure out why those men? Why now?
They hadn’t been close friends. In fact after the night of the accident the friendships seems to have fizzled out, so it was hard to place them together in anyway that would’ve brought this about.
Until I did some digging and came up with the clue. At first it seemed a bit far-fetched to believe that a young boy had spent the last seventeen years plotting such a thing.
But then the judge and the then DA had been targeted. Even the lawyer who’d represented the boys hadn’t been spared.
After all the clues fell into place it wasn’t that hard to follow the trail back to the source. But he was so good he never left anything behind. All I had was that one case that involved all the players.
I hadn’t been doing so well. With no evidence and just my gut, it was an uphill battle from beginning to end. But I used my special word skills and was sure I was swaying the jury to my way of thinking.
It didn’t bother me that I was about to send this guy up on nothing but my gut. I put a lot of stock in what my gut tells me, and nothing else made sense.
No one else had any reason to go after those seven men. But there was always that one glimmer of doubt. To be honest, the doubt never started until the first day I met the defendant.
I’d got a judge to convene a grand jury on the limited evidence I had, and they had seen enough there to bring an indictment. But one look at him and I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d thought.
You’d expect someone suspected of such deeds to be a rough, unshaven behemoth who’d spent his life living in the woods somewhere, living off the land and taking shots at anything that moved onto his path.
The man that walked into that courtroom was none of the above. He was suave, handsome, clean-cut and highly intelligent.
I knew when I saw the first female juror blush and hang her head when he turned those piercing silver blue eyes on her that the sure thing I had that morning was in danger.