Fractures: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

“Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?”

  I let out a long breath. “I don’t know … sometimes I don’t know what to say, so I lie. I thought maybe it would upset you if you knew who I really was. Your father was so banged up—and it was me did it to him. The fractured skull. It was just too complicated.” I looked down at my desk. “I shouldn’t have lied to you. I’m sorry.”

  The color drained from her face. “Oh, my God. I didn’t know my father had attacked you.”

  “You never found out the name of the woman?”

  “No,” she said. “I knew he attacked a woman, and she defended herself. I knew she hit him, but I never found out her name. She didn’t press charges. That was all I knew.”

  “It was me. He was drunk. He broke into my house. I didn’t know it was him. I thought it was a rapist or something. I hit him.” I stopped and tried to get myself under control. “Can I do something for you, Maureen?”

  “Mac asked me to tell you he was sorry. I didn’t know what he was talking about. The note just said, tell Karen I’m very sorry. I swear to you: I didn’t know he attacked you. I’m so sorry.”

  “How is Mac doing?”

  Maureen started to cry. She shook her head. “He walked out of the VA.”

  “You mean, they didn’t discharge him?”

  “No,” she said. “He walked out, with the bandage still on his head. He made it back to my place. He had gotten his hands on some liquor.” Her shoulders started to shake and her head sank onto her chest. “He tried to slit his wrists. He botched it, which isn’t surprising. I came home and found him on the kitchen floor. I called 911.”

  I felt the warm tears gliding down my cheeks. I got out of my chair and went over to Maureen, put my arms around her.

  “Where is he now?” I said after a minute.

  “Back at the VA,” she said. “All the note said was to tell Karen he was sorry. And that he would never do it again.”

  I managed to get Maureen taken care of, tell her I was sorry she’d had to go through all of that. And I asked her to tell her father that I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me, that I wasn’t mad at him or anything. That I was sorry I fractured his skull. That I wished him the best.

  I didn’t feel so good and went home after that. I don’t remember exactly what happened the rest of that day. I’d had some episodes like that a few times before. This time, when I came to I contacted Sarah, the woman who runs my AA group, and she and a couple of others came right over. There was always someone with me the next week. I was smart enough this time to call in to headquarters and talk to the chief. He said he understood and would take care of the personal-leave paperwork. He did all I could have asked him to do, and he didn’t make me feel guilty or ashamed. He didn’t need to. I’d already done that to myself.

  The next week I had it under control and came back into the office.

  “Hey, good to see you back,” Ryan said, giving me a big smile, like I’d just gotten back from a vacation. “I missed you,” he said. I decided to believe him.

  “I missed you, too.” I knew I was telling the truth.

  A little later that day, he said to me, “I found out about Florence Rossman. Her life in St. Louis that we didn’t know about?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Guess what her secret was.”

  I thought a second. “Actually, Ryan, I don’t think I want to know.”

  He looked puzzled. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, thanks, anyway.”

  ###

  About the Author

  Mike Markel is the author of the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series:

  Big Sick Heart

  Deviations

  The Broken Saint

  Three-Ways

  Fractures

  He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife.

  Thank you for taking time to read Fractures: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend.

  MikeMarkel.com

  The Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery Series

  To sample or buy any of these titles, visit Mike Markel’s page on Amazon.

  Visit MikeMarkel.com.

  BIG SICK HEART

  Bad decisions have finally caught up with police detective Karen Seagate. Her drinking has destroyed her marriage and hurt her job performance, and the chief is looking for any excuse to fire her. Still, she and her new partner, a young Mormon guy who seems to have arrived from another century or another planet, intend to track down whoever killed Arlen Hagerty, the corrupt leader of Soul Savers. Clawing his way to the top, Hagerty created plenty of enemies, including his wife, his mistress, his debate partner, the organization’s founder, and the politician he was blackmailing. When Seagate causes a car crash that sends a young girl to Intensive Care, the chief thinks he finally has his opportunity. But even the chief can’t believe what Seagate does when she finally catches the killer.

  DEVIATIONS

  Former police detective Karen Seagate is drinking herself to oblivion and having dangerous sex with losers from the bar when the new police chief tracks her down. The brutal rape and murder of a state senator by a lone-wolf extremist gives Seagate a chance to return to the department, but the new chief has set down some rules, and Seagate is not good with rules. At this point, she is just trying to stay alive. With nothing left to lose and nobody left to trust—not even her partner, Ryan—Seagate goes off the grid to find the killer. She doesn’t care that she will be fired again. She has much bigger problems, now that she has been captured inside the neo-Nazi compound.

  THE BROKEN SAINT

  Seagate and Miner investigate the murder of Maricel Salizar, a young Filipino exchange student at Central Montana State. The most obvious suspect is the boyfriend, who happens to have gang connections. And then there’s Amber, a fellow student who’s obviously incensed at Maricel for a sexual indiscretion involving Amber’s boyfriend. But the evidence keeps leading Seagate and Miner back to the professor, an LDS bishop who hosted her in his dysfunctional home. Seagate takes it in stride that the professor can’t seem to tell the truth about his relationship with the victim, but her devout partner, Ryan Miner, believes that a high-ranking fellow Mormon who violates a sacred trust deserves special punishment.

  THREE-WAYS

  When grad student Austin Sulenka is found strangled, nude on his bed, the first question for Seagate and Miner is whether it was an auto-asphyxiation episode gone bad. Evidence strewn around his small apartment suggests that he spent his last night with a number of different women. One was Tiffany, a former student who still resented the injustice of getting a C in the course when he promised her a B if she slept with him. Another was Austin’s beautiful girlfriend, May, who had never before encountered a man she could not totally beguile. Then there was his thesis adviser, Suzannah Montgomery, who might have inadvertently revealed to Austin some information about her past that could ruin her own career. These three women and their other partners had motives to kill the philandering graduate student. As Seagate and her partner try to unravel the complicated couplings, she finds herself in a three-way relationship that threatens to destroy her own fragile sobriety.

  FRACTURES

  The fracking boom in eastern Montana has minted a handful of new millionaires and one billionaire: Lee Rossman, the president of Rossman Mining and the leading philanthropist in the small city of Rawlings. Rossman was the last person Detectives Seagate and Miner expected to discover dead in the alley next to a strip club. His marriage was a formality, but both he and his wife, Florence, were discreet. He was involved with a dancer at the club; his wife, with Lee’s oldest and most trusted friend, Ron Eberly, a landman who always seemed short of funds. Rossman’s business enemies, all from outside the family, included a group of ranchers who held him personally responsible for the methane in their water, as well as a radical environmentalist at the university who was forthright in exp
laining to Seagate and Miner how she planned to put Rossman out of business for good. When Lee’s son is found out at the rigs, with significant internal injuries, numerous broken bones, and a belly full of fracking liquid, the detectives know the two crimes are related but can’t figure out how. In their toughest case yet, Seagate and Miner try to solve a mystery awash in enormous fortunes, thwarted ambitions, and grudges both old and new.

  The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

  Following is the Prologue of The Reveal, Volume 6 in the Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery series.

  He sat in his car, parked a hundred yards from her house, thinking about what had happened. For the past four days now, that was all he had thought about. What she had done. At first, it had made him furious, but by the second day the fury had cooled into determination and begun to assume a shape. He had molded that shape, kneading it, pressing and forming it, and now he was ready to act.

  Nobody would notice his car parked among all the others on her quiet street in the original residential neighborhood in the small city of Rawlings, Montana. The houses were old—fifty years, some even a hundred—two stories set on narrow lots separated by fences. Running alongside the fences were driveways of cracked pavement or pea gravel or tire ruts on grass leading to one-car detached garages in the back.

  He sat there, his fingers tapping the steering wheel, the window cracked to let out the cigarette smoke. He did not notice the sweet aroma of the turned soil from the gardens that edged the front porches up and down the block. In the purple twilight of the mild May evening, he was oblivious to the white, pink, and yellow petals of the daffodils, chrysanthemums, peonies, and tulips all around him.

  There were no street lights on this block. The close-set houses, some only ten or fifteen feet apart, provided ample illumination. He glanced at the house sitting back from the curb where he was parked. The front yard was dominated by a metal swing set and a small trampoline with netting around it to keep the kids from tumbling out. He looked up at the second story. It was unlit; the kids must be asleep. An indistinct glow came from the side of the house, near the rear. He guessed it was the kitchen. That would be the parents, sitting there, exhausted after getting the kids to bed. They wouldn’t hear anything.

  He looked down the street toward her house. The last car had left more than fifteen minutes ago. He pulled his phone from his front pocket to check the time: 10:03 pm. He flicked his cigarette out the window and watched it bounce once and then roll a few inches and come to rest on the pavement, the grey smoke snaking into the night air and then disappearing.

  He got out of the car and closed the door softly. The lock didn’t catch. He leaned against the door and it clicked almost silently. He stood there a moment, looking up and down the block, and listening. A pickup truck approached. The driver saw him and steered out into the middle of the street to give him plenty of room. As the bright cone from the truck’s headlights swung in his direction, he turned back toward his car, as if he were checking to see whether he had forgotten something on the front seat.

  The pickup rumbled past. He looked and listened again. He picked out the tiny scratching sounds of a couple of squirrels chasing each other around the base of an oak tree in a yard across the street. He heard the rustling of new leaves on a quaking aspen twenty yards in front of him in the little strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk. But he saw no one and heard nothing that caused him any concern. He was alone on the street.

  He walked around the front of his car, his finger tracing a line in the fine layer of dust on the hood, crossed the grass strip, and stood on the sidewalk. His hands in his jeans pockets and his head bowed slightly, he walked toward her house. A gentle breeze carried the sound of recorded music from the top floor of a boxy, ugly tan-brick house. Blue and red lights from a widescreen flickered across a front room in the next house.

  He stopped, her house just across the street. Although the eight or ten cars that had been parked in her driveway and along the curb had left, the house was still lit up brightly on both floors. He looked around one more time but saw no one. He stepped between two parked cars, crossed the street, and approached her waist-high wooden fence. He pushed open the gate, the old spring creaking softly. He followed the flagstone path, then climbed the five concrete steps to the painted wooden porch.

  He pulled opened the old white aluminum storm door and looked through the window in the dark blue wooden door. He glanced over his shoulder once more but saw no one on the street. He turned the knob, relieved that it was unlocked. He opened the front door slowly and stepped inside, then closed it behind him.

  He stood on a worn oval-shaped braided wool rug, the blue, green, yellow, and red braids faded with time and use. Before him was the wide staircase, made of heavy, dark wood ornately turned. The balusters were polished, but the handrail was dull, the surface scratched and nicked. His eyes followed the stairs to the second floor, which was lit by a ceiling light in the hallway.

  He glanced to his left, into the living room. The inside wall was dominated by a brick fireplace, painted white but stained grey above the firebox by decades of smoke. The room was crammed with mismatched furniture: sofas, loveseats, armchairs, and oak dining room chairs. Side tables, hassocks, and TV trays were scattered about, all of them covered with glasses, cups, china dishes, and plates.

  To his right was the dining room, with an ornate cut-glass chandelier and a heavy oak dining table with thick legs. At the far end of the dining room was the entry to the kitchen. He heard what he took to be the sound of running water.

  He walked into the dining room, over the old carpet with flower patterns and fringes around the four sides, past the oak table. He paused in the entryway to the kitchen, glanced behind him, and listened. He was confident they were the only two in the house.

  She was standing at the sink, washing dishes. Her hair was wavy, more grey than brown. She was wearing a grey wool blazer over a red turtleneck. Her jeans were black, her socks red. She wore no shoes.

  She did not hear him.

  When he stepped onto the old linoleum in the kitchen, it creaked, startling her. She turned to face him, her eyes wide.

  It took him a moment to realize she was weeping. She turned off the faucet and faced him again. “You scared me.” She wiped at her eyes with a finger. “What are you doing here?”

  He did not respond.

  She seemed to gather herself. The crying stopped. She stood up straight, her posture defiant. “What do you want?”

  His voice was soft and unforced. “I want to give you one more chance to change your mind.”

  She paused. “And if I don’t?”

  He held her gaze. “What you did was wrong.”

  She shrugged, becoming more comfortable in a familiar role. “Wrong?” She almost smiled. “That wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I don’t think you realize what is happening here.”

  She tilted her head slightly. “Tell me what is happening here.” Her jaw was high. “Explain it to me.”

  His expression showed determination and regret. “We’re way past that now.” He paused. “I explained it all before. No more talking. It’s time for you to make it right.”

  She shifted her weight. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I have no choice.”

  “You always have a choice. You could, for example, take responsibility for your own actions. You could move on.” She shook her head, like it was futile to argue with him. “But I imagine that isn’t your style. That would be a foreign concept to someone like you.”

  He advanced a few steps toward her. She started to move back but bumped into the counter, which was covered with dirty plates and glasses and silverware. Her eyes fixed on his, she moved her right hand tentatively across the countertop. Her fingers wrapped around the black wooden handle of a long bread knife. She picked it up.

  He saw the blade coming at him. His left hand came up quickly. Grabbing her wrist, he stoppe
d her tentative thrust. He twisted her wrist, pulling her trunk and head downward. She cried out. The knife fell to the floor.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “You’re going to kill me? Over this?” Now she lost her composure and began to weep again, out of control.

  He maintained his grip on her wrist, twisted it a little more. She cried out again, her upper body bowed over.

  “You didn’t get back to me,” he said.

  Through the pain and the fear, her speech was high-pitched and halting. “You know … very well why I didn’t.”

  He tightened his grip again and twisted her wrist once more. Something in the wrist gave way.

  She screamed in pain. “Do it, then.”

  “Last chance,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  As he twisted her wrist again to draw her arm behind her and spin her around to face the counter, her left hand came up quickly and she scratched at his neck with three fingernails. He flinched, more in surprise than in pain, drawing his right hand up to his neck. He removed his hand and checked it for blood, but the scratches were too shallow. His hand drew back and he hit her hard across the side of her face. She jerked back, her trunk sending glasses and plates crashing onto the linoleum. Then she fell forward and sank onto the floor.

  Still conscious, she reached out, grabbing at his leg, but she had no strength. He pulled his leg back, breaking her grip easily. He bent down and lifted her, her legs swinging weakly in the air. Gathering her up, encircling her arms, he hoisted her onto his hip. He carried her out of the kitchen and into the dining room.

  She tried to kick him, but her legs bumped harmlessly against the oak dining-room table. He stood in the entryway, looking up the staircase toward the light at the top of the stairs. He shifted her body, the legs still swinging but slower now, and shifted her weight to tighten his grip on her waist. He stepped onto the staircase.