by Tyler Porter
Eyes Never Lie
By
Tyler Porter
Copyright © 2020 by Tyler Porter
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law
A Word from the Author
I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank you for taking the time to read my forth novel, Eyes Never Lie. The idea that someone would give their time, which we have so little of, to my work is truly breathtaking and I appreciate it every day. I plan to continue to write as a passion and a career for the foreseeable future and your support is my inspiration as well as my motivation. I truly hope that you enjoy this new story and that it keeps you guessing and anticipating until the unbelievable end. I hope you will consider following along with me as I continue to release new stories in the future. I have developed a presence on multiple platforms so that you can connect with me wherever best suits you. Thank you again, form the bottom of my heart, and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts on Eyes Never Lie!
This book is dedicated to my friends, family and colleagues who have supported me in this dream and journey. This path is not an easy one, but I am the most stubborn person that I know, and I don’t often enjoy when things are easy. I expect this to be a long, uphill battle and I am looking forward to it. These amazing people in my life have embraced that chaos with me and I will never be able to tell them enough how much it means to me. I love you all.
This is for you.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
- Mark Twain
Table of Contents
A Word from the Author
Chapter 1: Last Case
Chapter 2: Second Kill
Chapter 3: Eyes Wide Open
Chapter 4: Retirement
Chapter 5: Chasing the Kill
Chapter 6: Strike the Heart
Chapter 7: Starting Over
Chapter 8: P.S.
Chapter 9: Attention Getter
Chapter 10: Ready or Not
Chapter 11: You Have My Attention
Chapter 12: Patience is a Virtue
Chapter 13: Becoming the Hunter
Chapter 14: Finding a Killer
Chapter 15: Back in the Game
Chapter 16: The Optometrist
Chapter 17: Hello Detective
Chapter 18: Watch Me
Chapter 19: Brutality Lives On
Chapter 20: The Scavenger Hunt
Chapter 21: Sooner or Later
Chapter 22: Another Name
Chapter 23: Off the Scent
Chapter 24: Ten Names
Chapter 25: Good Things Come
Chapter 26: Do You See Me Now?
Chapter 27: Patience is for Fools
Chapter 28: Hunting Hunt
Chapter 29: Last Chance
Chapter 30: One…Two…Three
Chapter 31: Waiting for the Kill
Chapter 32: Only the Truth
Chapter 33: Twisted Reality
Chapter 34: Removed from Reality
Chapter 35: The Basement
Epilogue
READER REVIEWS
TYLER’S OTHER BOOKS
Chapter 1: Last Case
“Stop! Stop now!” I shouted, resting the sights of my Sig Sauer 9mm on him as he barreled toward the back of the house.
He wasn’t going to stop, but I wasn’t about to shoot him. He was our guy and I needed him alive. I’d known it before I had even made my way to the house. So far, it was going exactly as I had expected. Confrontation, denial, negotiation and then, fight or flight. He, like so many unfortunate souls before him, chose the latter. He dove headfirst out of the back window that led into a small fenced-in yard. He quickly got to his feet, nearly slipping on the shards of broken glass, ran toward the chain-linked fence, leaped over it and sprinted into the back alley heading south.
I bound after him, slamming through the backdoor with my shoulder and hopping the fence. I tried to push the thought out of my head. The thought that had been injecting itself into my conscious more and more as of late. The thought that I was too old for this. I fought it the best that I could, but like it or not, it had been thirty years. That was a long time to be running and gunning—a long time for a body to take the kind of abuse mine did and in recent years, it was catching up to me no matter how hard I resisted.
The boy was quite a bit smaller than me, and much quicker. He was even younger than I had expected, probably around eighteen or nineteen. But he was well developed for his age, and I assumed he must have been some sort of track star in school judging by the amount of distance he had managed to put between us. Up ahead, he rounded the corner to the right into another alleyway. By the time I caught up to the corner and ran around it, he had disappeared.
There was a time in my career when I would have been so naïve as to think that he was just gone, but a career in law enforcement changes perspective. Once a cop spends enough time on the street, they begin to develop a different kind of instinct. Right now, my instincts were telling me that danger was very close by. A chill tingled in my spine. I drew my pistol and held it out in front of me angled at the ground. I slowly moved forward into the alley, aware of the mound of greasy cardboard boxes and trash piled up on my left as well as the two empty dumpsters—side by side—on my right.
He couldn’t have made it to the end of the alley before I reached the start of it. It was a good five hundred yards from one end to the other. He was close, and he was waiting for me. A younger detective might have moved to the boxes, then to the dumpsters, waiting for the perpetrator to attack, but not me.
I had played this game too many times and had taken way too many cheap shots to the back of the head. I heaved forward, lifted my right leg into the air and slammed my right foot against the empty dumpster. It crashed into the other and sent it rolling forward which resulted in a noise from behind the farthest dumpster. It had hit the boy and knocked him out of his hiding place.
He stood up and turned toward me jutting his hand into his pocket to pull out what I could only assume to be a gun, but it was too late. I drove my right shoulder into his gut like a spear and slammed him onto the pavement. I could hear the air shoot out of his lungs, and he immediately began gasping for more, struggling as best he could against me, but it was no use. Can’t breathe, can’t fight. It had been a big lesson during my very first day in the academy. It was part of the training. My training officer had told me over and over that if the perp can’t stand, see or breath, they sure as hell can’t fight.
I rolled the boy onto his stomach and tore his right arm behind him pinning it to his back. He fought as I pulled back the left, but again, his lack of oxygen was playing a huge role in his ability to protest. I cuffed his hands together behind him and threw the pocketknife he had been reaching for to the side. He began trying to spit at me from the side. He mumbled some sort of inaudible insult and it was enough to spark my temper. I drove my forearm down hard into the back of his neck pressing his face into the ground.
“Ah-h, get off me you mother fucker! That’s police brutality! Ouch!” he screamed. I grabbed him by the back of his neck, which disappeared into my hand, lifted him six inches off of the ground and slammed him back
down.
“You have the right to remain fucking silent and I suggest you exercise the right to shut your fucking mouth!” I yelled at him.
“I didn’t do nothin! You can’t do this, it’s illegal! I am going to report your bitch ass!”
Unfortunately for the kid, it was the wrong day to annoy me. It had been a long day, a longer week and a bitch of a case. It really wasn’t the way I had been hoping to spend my last week on the force and this was just downright irritating. I really didn’t care if he reported me, I just wanted him to shut up. I rolled him over onto his back, pulled my pistol from its holster and jammed it against his forehead. His mouth closed and his eyes went wide as he stared down the barrel into mine. I held the weapon still and let the silence sit for several moments before I broke it.
“You have no idea what brutality is, but if you want to find out, keep talking. I’d be happy to give you a demonstration right here, right now.” I spoke in a relaxed, quiet tone.
In my experience, I’d always found that the quickest way to gain control of a situation was to remain perfectly calm when chaos erupted. It had worked on countless criminals and it was working here too. He didn’t say another word. I stood him up and leaned him forward against the dumpster while I pulled out my cell phone. I pulled up my recent calls and tapped on my partners contact. He picked up after the second ring.
“Norris where the hell are you!? Captain is pissed!” James Hunt answered.
“Yeah? What’s new?” I said.
“I’m telling you man, you gotta get your shit together. Just for three more days! I swear, Captain is looking for any reason to fire you before Friday.”
“I think Neil will calm down when he hears that I have our guy in custody.”
“…You got him? Of course you did! Last week on the job and you close the hottest case we have. Of fucking course.”
“Right, and I’m looking to close a few more before the week is up so get your ass out here and pick us up so I can get back to work.”
“Pick you up? Where’s your car?”
“I was out for a jog when I found the little bastard,” I said letting the sarcasm ooze.
“Out for a jog my ass, you haven’t exercised in fifteen years,” Hunt said.
“You’re right. Isn’t it sad that you’re in the gym six days a week while I have six-pack a night and I still put more of these fuckers away than you?”
“Fuck off,” he said, tossing his head back.
“And that’s why I’m still the boss, now get your ass out here and pick me up,” I said hanging up.
I texted him my location and waited for him to arrive. I knew, already, why Captain Connors was upset. Setting aside the fact that he was always upset, I hadn’t checked in for a few days. He hated that. He was an okay guy; he just hadn’t come through the ranks like the rest of us. He’d been the Army, claimed to have served as a member of the Military Police, but my guess was he was some sort of fact-checker or paper-pusher. I found his military background commendable, but the higher-ups had seen it as enough reason to bring him in as Captain without so much as a one day’s experience as a cop, much less a detective.
He didn’t have the first clue on what it was to work the streets or really be on a case. It wasn’t a nine to five and there was no timeclock to punch in or out of. Since the day he’d walked through the door his aim had been to micromanage the department, but trying to micromanage a group of detectives who have been around longer than you and have a combined several lifetimes more experience was like trying to put a group of wild lions on leashes. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Hunt showed up quickly and, after I threw the man in handcuffs into the back seat, I joined him up front. I liked Hunt, he was a good cop. Came from a long line of them too. His dad was a Captain in Helena, the same position that was currently occupied by Captain Connors. His grandfather was a Sheriff in some other small town in Montana, and his older brother worked on the S.W.A.T. team in Vegas. He might have been the only person I was truly going to miss. The rest of them, I was ready for a break from.
They were good people, and an okay team, but it was about time for me to move on. Time to find calmer, greener pastures to graze in for whatever amount of years I had left. Maybe get married at some point. Kids were almost certainly off the table, unless I could find someone who was longing to procreate with a fifty-three-year-old man who had too little and drank too much, but hey, I could hope.
Shelby, my girlfriend, was great for the time being, but I had a feeling it was a momentary flame. She was quite a bit younger, and to say she was out of my league would have been a massive understatement. I could keep up the charade of still being young and limber for a little while longer, but I had the lingering thought she would eventually get bored with me and move on.
These were the thoughts that were coming more frequently as of late, and they were the thoughts that were occupying my mind as we drove the four and a half miles from the suspects house to the precinct. All this time, the guy we were searching for was sleeping right outside our front door. Hunt parked the car in front of headquarters at the end of a long line of unmarked sedans. We got out of the car and I began walking toward the entrance of the building leaving Hunt standing beside the vehicle with the man I had captured still in the back seat.
“Norris?” Hunt shouted at me as more of a question than anything.
“Yeah?” I said without turning back toward him as I continued walking toward the door.
“What about him?”
“Process him and get a request in for the hot seat at three today. I got some other shit to do.”
The hot seat was the term our department used instead of interrogation room. The was the place where I shined the most. I’d trained vigorously to master the art of smelling bullshit and my reputation in Helena had been built on that ability. I knew, without even looking, that Hunt was not thrilled by my request. He had been my partner for five years, but admittedly, I had never been very good at having a partner. I worked better alone, thought better alone and honestly preferred to be alone. However, certain policies demanded that I work with a partner and if I had to do it there was no one I would rather do it with.
The issues when it came to Hunt were that he was young, capable and ambitious. Too ambitious. To someone on the outside looking in, these things sounded like tremendous qualities, but when you stick someone like that with someone like me, there is sure to be some underlying tension. I was in charge of a group of five detectives, including Hunt. He had climbed through the group quickly and I’d personally him to be my right hand. That was five years ago, and he had hit a ceiling ever since, or at least he thought.
He figured he was stuck under my thumb forever and that he would never get to the next level. There had even been rumors of him quietly considering a transfer to another department. What he did not know was that I had personally and highly recommended him as my replacement to Captain Connors. That conversation had been short and sweet. Three more days and Hunt would get the good news. Until then, I was still in charge and it was fun to get a rise out of him once in a while.
I listened to him huff and puff as he yanked the young man from the back of the car. Chuckling to myself quietly, I entered the precinct. Officer Mentor greeted me as I passed by her and I responded with a quick nod of the head. I took a right and walked down the corridor that held offices on either side. I opened the door to mine and walked in slapping the nameplate as I passed it that read Det. Casey Norris.
I sat down in the swivel chair, leaned back slightly and covered my face with my hands, rubbing my eyes softly. I hadn’t been getting very much sleep over the last few weeks and the sleep I was getting was far from quality. I wasn’t sure whether it was the ongoing cases or the looming retirement that I really wasn’t sure what I would do with. My brief moment of bliss was brought to a crashing halt by a bold knock on the door.<
br />
“Norris!” Captain Connors shouted as he barged into my office.
“Ah Neil, it’s so good to see you.” I let the sarcasm show as I slowly lowered my hands from my face. Captain Connors did not appreciate being called by his first name and showed his frustration by tilting his head while sporting an, I cannot believe you just said that look on his face.
“You would do well to remember I am still your boss for another three days Norris. Now, where in the hell have you been? No call. No check in. No nothing!”
“Captain, I know you would just love to know our every move every moment of every day, but—”
“But nothing! We have a code of conduct here and I don’t give a damn how long you’ve been here or how close I am to being rid of you, you’re going to follow that code!” Captain Connors cut me off mid-sentence.
“I got him.” I knew this statement would end the rant immediately, and I was right.
“You got him? Got who? The killer from the Green case?”
“Yes sir. Hunt’s setting up a hot seat as we speak.”
“Yeah, well you damn well better get a full confession out of him. This case has been opened too long already and I don’t want to mess around with a long trial process.”
“Trust me Neil, I’ll get exactly what you want.” I flashed him a defiant smile and watched as he stormed out of my office back into the hallway. Thirty seconds or so later, Hunt came into my office looking uncomfortable. “What’s wrong kid?”
“Captain is on a war path.”
“Is he now?” I chuckled knowing, full well, that I had caused his tantrum. Hunt picked up on it quickly.
“You fucker. You called him Neil again didn’t you?”
“Well yeah that’s his name isn’t it?” I said, deliberately playing dumb.
“It’s disrespectful! He is your boss you know.”
