Murder Lake : Ellen Rockne Mystery Series Book 1 (Ellen Rockne Mysteries) Read online

  Murder Lake

  An Ellen Rockne Mystery

  Dan Ames

  A USA TODAY BESTSELLING BOOK

  Book One in The JACK REACHER Cases

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  Copyright © 2018 by Dan Ames

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  MURDER LAKE

  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

  About the Author

  Also by Dan Ames

  MURDER LAKE

  by

  Dan Ames

  Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

  Wallace Stevens

  1

  Ex-Congressman Charles Holloway stood over the stove, with no idea that he wouldn’t live to see the pasta in the pot reach al dente.

  Once a powerful man around Washington, D.C., Holloway stood alone in his kitchen, humming along quietly to Sinatra playing through the house’s sound system.

  The soft jazz also performed another role, as it neatly masked the sound of the intruder making his way into the house.

  Holloway was about to reach for the strainer in the sink, oblivious to his new visitor. The visitor standing in the doorway just beyond the kitchen, in partial shadows, watching Holloway.

  It was almost sweet, the intruder thought. At the end of the day everyone was just as boring as everyone else. A congressman full of wealth and sin was making pasta marinara the same as a harried mother of three across town.

  The kitchen, the intruder decided, deserved better than pasta marinara.

  Holloway set down the pot. He then turned towards the refrigerator, putting his back directly to the visitor in the shadows.

  The intruder moved swiftly and quietly. A heavy, painful blow struck Holloway in the back of the head. The older man crashed to the floor, the pot of pasta landing next to him, spraying pasta sauce and noodles across the expensive Italian tile.

  The intruder politely closed the fridge door before dragging the prey into the dining room.

  With no small amount of effort, the intruder hoisted Holloway onto the dining room table. The act caused him to stir and his uninvited visitor quickly tied him down with a thick rope. The former congressman tried to move his hands, but the ropes held fast.

  “What do you want?” Holloway said.

  “I’d like you to stop talking,” the intruder said, and slapped a piece of duct tape across Holloway’s mouth.

  “Well, no time like the present and all that.” The intruder stepped forward, a brief smile appearing like quicksilver before vanishing.

  Holloway’s eyes went wide.

  “Yes, keep them wide,” the intruder said softly. “The next part is rather painful.”

  The intruder held up a hand, flicking the knife open so Holloway could see its shiny reflection in the dying light from the window.

  The intruder got to work, subtly incorporating the rhythms of Sinatra into his handiwork.

  ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes,’ the intruder thought, and laughed softly.

  How ironic.

  Holloway was on the table—alive, but not for much longer. Where his eyes had been were now two empty, bloody sockets.

  His wrists were slashed, enough to kill him but slowly, if shock didn’t get to him first.

  The flash of that knife had been the last thing Holloway had ever seen.

  The drip, drip, drip of his own blood onto his thick Persian carpet was the last sound that he ever heard.

  2

  Every place in this world has its pros and cons.

  People in New York City have things to complain about. So do the folks in Cairo, Egypt. Hell, I bet even the fat cats in Monte Carlo have bad days when the casinos are closed or something.

  A point I often remember when I get calls like this one.

  Ever since moving up to Good Isle from Grosse Pointe, I’d found myself both grateful for, and frustrated by, the lack of crime.

  We got a lot of spillover from Detroit in Grosse Pointe. The citizens don’t like that—Grosse Pointe’s a pretty well-off suburb and people there like to pretend that it’s their quiet little pocket of safety. I had a lot of work to keep crime down. Not to mention the inter-office politics.

  Up in Good Isle, though, the most exciting crime that we usually got was something like this:

  Two salmon-fishing charter boat crews, brawling at the little park by the marina.

  I was called down by Maddie Burfict, one of my officers, to help diffuse the situation. I guess with nothing much else to do around Good Isle, people tended to take things like salmon fishing very seriously. Seriously enough to start a fist fight over. I didn’t think it was something for the Chief of Police to handle, but when I got there, I saw that Maddie needed another pair of hands to keep the men apart.

  I had just stepped out of the car when I heard Maddie yell, “Rockne, duck!”

  For some reason, I thought she meant duck, as in, an actual duck was now pinned beneath my squad car’s tires. There was so much wildlife in northern Michigan, it seemed like a natural point of consideration.

  That is, until I was hit in the face by a salmon.

  It caused me to stagger backward, and then I caught my footing, slammed the door shut and looked down at the fish in the dirt.

  Big. Would like nice on my grill.

  As I strode over to the action, I could see Maddie and one of my other officers, Fred Donovan, stifling laughter.

  “I did tell you to duck,” Maddie pointed out.

  “Yes, thank you, Maddie. I won’t put you on drunk duty,” I replied, wiping at my face. I then turned to face the group of men.

  There were about ten of them, five on each side. Four of them were going at it with their fists—and not too well, I might add. I wondered if I should get our resident retired boxer, Billy “Dynamite” Dawkins, to start giving people lessons. The fight I was looking at now was just disgraceful.

  The other six men were the ones throwing fish and yelling. I looked over at Maddie. She was tall and muscular and I knew she liked to lift weights and could get kind of competitive with the other officers when it came to bodybuilding. Beau Gordon, head of the City Council, once told me that at one year’s policeman’s picnic, Maddie and another guy had gotten into an argument about who could run around the lake more times than the other one. The guy eventually gave up, but Maddie kept running until she’d thrown up.

  I’ve gotten pretty competitive myself in my time, especially with my younger brother John. The only way to shut him up was to beat him, sometimes literally.

  “How did this all start?” I asked.

  Maddie jerked her head at the left-hand group of men. “The charter crew here—they’re led by Richie Tobin, he’s the one on the left there in the red shirt—is saying that the other group rammed their boat on purpose. The other group, Jake Lolly’s crew, said that they didn’t hit it on purpose but if they did, it would be because Tobin’s crew was stealing their salmon.”

  “And it devolved into a schoolyard brawl.”

  “Yup.” Maddie looked thoroughly unimpressed with the men in front of her.

  I sighed. This was the glamor of a police chief’s job in a place like Good Isle.

  “I say you just let them wear each other out,” Fred said. He was my other officer on the scene. I also got the impression that he didn’t like me. He’d have to get in line, then.

  “They get into fights like this all the time,” he continued, when I ignored his advice. “It’ll be over soon and they’ll have gotten all the stress out.”

  “Thanks for the insight, Dr. Phil,” I said to him.

  Maddie chuckled.

  “Separate them and hit them with warnings, but start to fine them if they continue. If it’s going to cost them money, they’ll stop.”

  There was a sullen silence from the men as they all shuffled around a bit, sneaking glances at each other.

  Maddie cleared her throat. “Okay, Chief.”

  The radio on my shoulder came to life.

  “Chief, we’re going to need you at 304 Pinewood Ave,” our dispatcher informed me. “There’s been a murder.”

  3

  A part of me wondered if I’d brought the murder with me. Not that G
rosse Pointe had been a hotbed of fatal crimes, but being next to Detroit, one became exposed to violent crime.

  When I’d taken the gig in Good Isle, it sounded like they hadn’t had a murder in decades.

  And now, it sounded like the streak might have been broken.

  Seeing as how Fred wasn’t in my good graces, I left him to clean up the fish fight, and Maddie rode with me to the address I’d been given by dispatch.

  From what I knew of Good Isle, I figured that this was probably going to be something simple. A domestic dispute, perhaps. Most of the fights and disorderly conduct I’d had to deal with were the result of long-standing grudges and rivalries. Take those fishermen, for instance. I was willing to bet money that they’d been going at each other in one way or another for a good decade.

  The house we pulled up to was in one of the nicer neighborhoods. In a place like Good Isle, all the neighborhoods were on the nice side. Unless you strayed out past the town proper and more inland toward the freeway. That was where the less touristy people hung out, if you know what I mean. Michigan’s homegrown militia was well-known, and most of it was east of Good Isle.

  The address belonged to a grand house, with a wide sweeping porch that looked out over Lake Michigan. A million-dollar view, and a multimillion dollar house.

  I stopped to admire the porch swing. Hand-carved, it looked like. There was a window seat underneath the large bay window on the right-hand side. I could see it through the glass. And the detailing on the door frame was beautiful. I liked fixing up houses, restoring them to their former glory. Whoever had owned this house had obviously done the same. I could appreciate that.

  “So who lives here?” I asked Maddie. Benefits of working in a small town, everyone knows who everybody is.

  Maddie’s face got this little wrinkle in between her eyebrows. “Former congressman by the name of Charles Holloway.”

  “I take it he wasn’t the kind of guy who made friends.”

  “There were a lot of rumors when he retired. I don’t remember too much about it but I guess the timing of his retirement was suspicious to some people. There was one rumor that he was taking bribes.”

  A politician taking bribes? No way.

  An older woman approached us from the side of the house.

  “Thank you!” she called out. “I’m the one who called.”

  “I’m Ellen Rockne, Chief of Police,” I said. “You are?”

  “Eleanor Liebowitz,” she replied. She looked to be in her seventies, with faded blue eyes and soft white hair. “I did the right thing? Waiting? I’ve never—they never show it on the news or the shows, you know, what to do after you find the body, they just show the person finding it, and I’ve never—”

  She looked a bit pale, and I jerked my head at Maddie. We helped walk Eleanor up to the porch swing so that she could sit down. “Why don’t you tell me what happened,” I said, keeping my voice low and soothing. Maddie stood awkwardly to the side. I could tell she wasn’t sure how to handle the woman.

  “Well, I borrow books from Charles now and again. He’s got quite a huge library, and after my husband passed I’ve just been trying to find ways to fill up the time,” she said.

  “And when was the last time you saw Charles?” I asked, pulling out my notebook and a pen.

  “Oh, two days ago, when I borrowed the book.”

  “And how did he seem then?”

  Eleanor thought for a moment, her lips pursing together. “Oh, the usual, I suppose—that is, he’s always been… I mean he was, he was a rather stoic sort. I don’t think he’s had anyone really since his wife died. His children are grown and don’t seem to visit often, but he didn’t seem any different than usual.”

  “He didn’t appear worried or upset?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “No, nothing like that.”

  “All right. And how did you know that something was wrong?” I doubted that Eleanor had just waltzed into someone else’s house.

  “Well, I went up to the back door because it’s closer than the front—I live over the fence, you see and I smelled something burning. Not like a campfire. Like something was wrong. So I peeked in and sure enough there was something burning on the stove and I could see…him.”

  Eleanor choked up a little, her hands shaking. I figured it wouldn’t do any good to push. I nodded, writing down what she said in the notebook.

  “Okay, Eleanor. Did you see anybody else? A car? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing,” she said.

  “Okay, here’s my card,” I said, handing it to her. “Call me if you think of anything else. I may ask you to come down to the station later to give a more formal statement.”

  I asked Maddie to escort Eleanor home and then squared my shoulders. Death of a former congressman. The potential fallout from that actually kind of worried me a bit more than what I thought I’d see inside.

  Clearly, I was still naïve about what kind of trouble Good Isle could churn up.

  Inside, the house was dark except for the kitchen light. Where I was standing was a kind of foyer, with a living room on my left, stairs up ahead. On my right was a dining room. The kitchen was behind that, light spilling in.

  The old man was spread out on the dining room table. He’d been tied down, and I could see bloodstains on the rug underneath his limp hands. He looked pale and fragile, like paper. His face, though, was really a mess.

  There were footsteps behind me and I turned, holding up a hand. “Maddie, what time did the crime lab say they’d get here?”

  Maddie froze in the front doorway. She couldn’t see the body from there. Good. “Uh, any minute now.”

  Good Isle’s small, not enough of a police department for us to have our own crime lab. We have to get the boys up from Michigan State any time there’s a case like this.

  “Everything okay?” Maddie asked. She took another step into the house.

  “Not exactly,” I answered.

  Whoever’d killed him had slit the man’s wrists. But at some point, either before or after, the killer had gouged out the man’s eyeballs.

  “Holy shit,” Maddie said after a moment’s pause. “You don’t think—” She stopped herself.

  “Don’t think what?” I asked.

  “It’s just, the eyes.” Maddie swallowed and folded her arms. “There were rumors about Holloway taking bribes, right? One of the people who everyone said paid him was this one guy… shit, I forget his name.” Maddie screwed her face up for a second before her eyes blinked open in triumph. “Khatri! He was this uber-wealthy doctor who specializes in eye surgery. Apparently, he’s got practices all over the world.”

  “Including Detroit?” I asked.

  Maddie nodded.

  An eye doctor with a ton of money who’d bribed a politician. A politician who was now dead.

  With his eyes gouged out.

  4

  The crime lab got there shortly afterward and did their business with the scene.

  Donovan was my choice to keep an eye on the crime scene. He wasn’t too happy about it, but I didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  Once Donovan was settled in I headed home. I admit, sometimes I missed my old place. I’d spent years fixing up an old house back in Grosse Pointe. The floors, the cabinets, the crown molding, it had all been me. But it’d been years since I’d finished with that house. When it was done, it had been just the way I wanted it.

  Now I had a new project.

  When I was looking for a house to buy in Good Isle, I looked no further than the historic district. There are some gorgeous Victorian homes up around here. The wealthy titans of business, usually the auto industry, had built monster lake homes in the area.