“Listen, Bobby, I hesitated to call, but I got a situation up here.”
“Up here” was in Rocky Gap, Idaho—a small town up in the far northern tip of the state, not too far from Coeur d’ Alene. My brother was the Chief of Police.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
“Well, it isn’t quite that we need some of that big city detecting. But I think I could use your counsel.”
“Do tell,” I said. My kettle was already on its way to boiling. To hell with the breathing. “I’ll keep the detecting to a bare minimum, Jax.”
“Now, now, hey, hey,” he said. “I was only kidding. In all seriousness, we’ve got an incident up here.”
“Go on.”
“Looks like a local fella up and killed some of his family. Wife and one young daughter. I don’t have to tell you how close that hits to home. Thing is, I know this guy, Bobby. We all know him. He’s not the family-murdering kind.”
“It’s been my experience there is no blueprint,” I said.
“Well, that’s probably true in a lot of places,” he said. “But I can tell you, up here, you get to know folks.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Thing is, I heard a little about what went down there last year,” he said.
“Heard what?”
“I have a couple a friends that moved down that way—beat coppers. Word of the village has it you all ran into some pretty nasty characters in relation to a double-homicide.”
“We did,” I said. “Not sure how that relates, though.”
“You have any time coming?” he said. “I really could use you up here.”
“I’m a little busy with casework,” I lied. Things were actually slow.
“I’ve got this guy in the jail. He’s going to stand trial for the whole truckload. But he’s got some pretty strange claims.”
“Maybe he’s thinking of an insanity defense,” I said.
“Maybe. Thing is, we’ve got the Feds from Coeur d’ Alene coming up here every other day, scratchin’ at the back door. I’d like to get this thing taken care of locally—I know you get that.”
“Look, Jax, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I doubt very much if anything that happened down here has a damned thing to do with a guy going stir crazy in the sticks and taking out his entire family.”
“Part of his family,” he said.
“What?”
“I’d said part of his family. There’s one member gone missing.”
“Missing?”
“A six-year-old girl, Bobby.”
“My God, Jax.”
“Not God. The father claims the Devil took her.”
I let the words hang there in the stratosphere a moment. I really didn’t want them to come down to earth.
“No kidding, Bob,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with this one.”
“Look,” I said. “I might be able to swing a few days.”
“I know this guy, brother. He’s normally so sane it’d bore you to tears.”
“We all have our breaking point,” I said.
“He claims it wasn’t really him that did it.”
“This little girl, how long’s she been gone?” I said.
“Three days,” he said. “We think she may be in the Coeur d’ Alene wilderness.”
I felt like throwing up.
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Black Beast: A Hard Boiled Murder Mystery (A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller Book 1) Page 19
