Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
He was seriously tweaked.
Even so, it penetrated that, from the minute he stepped foot in Fret County Sheriff’s Office, he knew he wasn’t dealing with some Boondocks Let’s Play Cops and Robbers, half-ass operation.
He should have known from the early call.
In Rus’s twenty years in law enforcement, seventeen of those with the FBI, he’d noted some, not all, small-town/low-population counties (and some big-city/high-population as well) had piss-all-over-their-patch chiefs and sheriffs who hired men who were the same.
Men who were more concerned about the size of their balls than serving and protecting.
It was a toxic mixture of the need for status and control, and aggression.
It was about getting spitting mad a man took a knee during the national anthem, but feeling fully justified in defacing the American flag by making it black and gray with a blue stripe and putting that shit on everything from their cars to their backs to their coffee mugs.
It was feeling that their badge and their uniform set them apart in some way from the citizens they served, but when it came down to doing actual policework, they didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Rus was relieved the vibe here was not that.
The look of it, the feel of it, was organized, competent and professional.
Including Moran’s office.
This was where Moran did the work of serving a community in order to keep them safe, and when bad things happened anyway, as they always did, finding those who perpetrated those acts and doing what they could to aid the path to justice.
What this was not, was Moran’s home away from home, where he put his boots up on his desk and shot the shit with his deputies, a bottle of scotch in the drawer he felt it was okay to imbibe from, no matter the occasion or time of day.
He continued to study the guy.
His uniform went to a dry cleaner. He got his hair cut at a barber and not a salon, and he did that on a standing appointment, not only so it didn’t get unkempt, but also so he didn’t have to waste time making appointments. He kept fit, but it wasn’t a religion or part of his identity, it happened in the natural course of his life. He was a good-looking man, and he didn’t give two shits that he was.
Right, so maybe there was a bottle of scotch. But that, and the pictures of his wife and what appeared to be his dad and his brother on the credenza behind his desk, was as far as Moran went in putting who he was in his private life in this office.
And that scotch only came out in times of break-glass-when-needed.
This office, and the entire department, was where shit got done.
Moran barely had his ass to the seat of an ergonomic desk chair before he started it.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“Do you have an ID on the victim?”
Moran gave him a good stare as he came to realize who he was dealing with.
During those three seconds, he made the same deduction Rus just did.
Rus was here to get shit done.
Moran sat back and lifted his chin.
“She’s local. Brittanie Iverson. Twenty-five. Got deputies who went to school with her, knew her. Not well, but they knew her. Though, the family has kind of a reputation. She was born here. Works at Bon Amie.”
“Bon Amie?”
“Burlesque club in the woods.”
Rus had been intent on making it to the scene, but it didn’t escape him that, to get there, he’d driven through terrain that was dense forest and rugged.
There were towns. There were homes. There were businesses.
But for the most part, this was backwoods.
This area was about logging, hunting, hiking, fishing and keeping to yourself.
So, “burlesque club in the woods” was not something he was expecting to hear.
Moran read Rus’s reaction and explained, “We got history. Trapping. Fur trade. Prospecting. Mining. As they had a tendency to do, white men put their stamp on this place a long time ago. And where he went, other things followed. Like the need to get himself some in the wilderness.”
“Right,” Rus murmured.
“There’s a lot of lore around here, what with the lake and all,” Moran continued.
The lake and all?
Rus knew Misted Pines was where Ray Andrews decided he was going to test the skills of retired ace FBI profiler Cade Bohannan. He did this by killing girls. A mess that included Bohannan’s far more famous girlfriend’s contractor getting shot and the exposure of a sex scandal that involved some of the men of the town. And that exposure was perpetrated by those men’s wives.
It was big. It was interesting. It was lurid, shocking and had a double celebrity component with Bohannan and his girlfriend—award-winning, bestselling author Delphine Larue—so he’d followed the case himself. As did all of his colleagues, everyone in law enforcement and most of the globe since it was plastered all over the news.