Unknown Assailant (Dr. Pepper Hunt Mysteries, Book 3) by J.L. Doucette
About Unknown Assailant:
Excerpt:
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Detective Beau Antelope looked forward to watching hours of football on his new seventy-inch flatscreen, an early Christmas present he’d bought for himself. He turned on the pregame show and sipped tomato juice and vodka; liquid relief flowed through his bloodstream. Domino, his border collie, was asleep on the couch. It would be a good day.
The phone rang and changed those plans. Murder always took priority.
Murder thrilled him more than football. He shouldn’t have felt that way and would never tell anyone. He had chosen his job for a bigger reason than keeping the streets safe from petty criminals, just as in hunting where only the big game called to him. You could keep your rabbits and sage grouse, small-time drug dealers and vandals; he stalked elk and killers.
Shower, dress, Italian espresso to go. An hour later, he turned onto the ranch road and parked in front of the crime scene.
The house where two people had died by gunshot sat at the southeast corner of the Sanderson Ranch. A stand of birch trees separated the modern log-and-stone structure from dormant alfalfa fields.
In the distance, the Wind River Mountains formed a granite boundary the length of the Eden Valley, the western slopes still dark with shadows. On the other side of the working ranch, cattle sheltered against wooden windbreaks built in the winter corral.
Memory of woodsmoke, sweet and charred, came on a current of biting wind.
The kind of place I’d want to come home to, he thought.
The whole scene was tied up in garish crime scene tape.
As he got closer to the house, he sensed a disturbance in the air, the presence of a new and unwanted energy, recently arrived and settled in.
At first look, it appeared to be a domestic murder-suicide. The coroner would come from
Cheyenne
in the morning and, after autopsy, prepare a formal statement on the
cause of death. What happened here? How did these two ordinary people
arrive at this violent exit
from life?
Domestic homicides were often referred to as crimes of passion. Those words conveyed a sense of tortured love that he believed was accurate more often than not. What they didn’t convey was the flat-out ugliness and brutality that came from a love obsession gone wild.
A somber mood settled over the house while the technicians worked in silence. The quick, repeating flash of light from the cameras made the scene feel like a special occasion, a wedding or political event. These images would never grace anyone’s home or run on the front page of credible print media. They might contribute to a reenactment of the events that occurred in this house in the dark of night.
As he left the ranch and got on the road to Rock Springs, the heavy mood of the crime scene lifted. It was still Sunday, and the ease of the day remained, helped by sunshine and snow in the desert.
There was something about the crime scene that bothered him—the position of the bodies.
Was it a straightforward murder-suicide? This kind of case got to him more than any other.
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About J.L. Doucette:
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