The M1 Theory by Brian Hesse (best novels to read for beginners .TXT) 📕

  “I will give the boys some time to do their thing, and I will be there in about thirty minutes.”

 Sandra leaned over to kiss Eric on the cheek before getting dressed to go to the Lorey residence, but pulled back just before making contact. She was intelligent enough to be aware of her growing feelings for this man, as she contemplated in the dark, she really knew nothing about. I don’t even know what the hell you do for a living, she considered with another growing wave of excitement.

  “Little puzzles to unravel,” she whispered in the dark, as she placed her leather .45 holster around her strong but feminine smooth right shoulder.

#

  “Is the scene cleared?” asked Sandra, addressing a young patrol officer just outside the front door of Thomas’s home.

 “Yes detective, the scene is clear.” The young man, no more than twenty-five, she guessed, looked absently at a pocket sized writing pad, and began, “Thomas Lorey reported that his Father, Thomas Lorey Senior came home drunk and tried to kill him. He said he passed out and when he woke up, his Father was lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor with a gunshot to the head.”

 “Ok detective. I need you guys to leave the scene. Leave one patrol car here in case your needed. I will process the scene and talk to Mr. Lorey.” Without another word, Sandra entered the Lorey residence. Unlike most of her colleagues, to their annoyance, she relied more on instinct than facts. Since she could remember, she always had a sixth sense about when something is wrong. She thought to herself with amusement, psychics would probably call that extra sensory. Maybe something to do with sensitivity to people’s aura, or whatever. She didn’t much care what others called it. She referred to it as simply being in tune with her surroundings, from the physical, to the abstract. Regardless of the origins of this extra sense, she immediately felt that something was wrong with the atmosphere of the scene. She passed the living room on her way to the gore splattered kitchen, and briefly looked at the face of, who she surmised, was Thomas Lorey. She saw something in his eyes that reminded her of the plastic people of her youth. That’s what she used to call the department store mannequins in her neighborhood while growing up. She would gaze through the exhaust covered windows of the various jewelry and clothing shops that lined the busy Main Street Boulevard. She would gaze in wonder at the store mannequins with the very real eyes that would follow you in any direction you sauntered. That’s what she saw in Thomas as she passes by him, theatrically wrapped in a wool blanket, and sipping on hot tea made by one of the interviewing officers. She walked into the kitchen and began a grid search of the entire room careful not to walk in the splatters of drying blood that decorated the floors and walls. She made her way around the table and could see the brown colored broken glass scattered in a small area of the floor. Several small shards lined the bottom of the stainless-steel kitchen sink just above the main pile on the floor. She backed around to the other side to take a closer look at the elder Mr. Lorey. Without a prolonged inspection, she could see that the position of the gun on the floor, the penny sized hole of the nine-millimeter in the left side of his temple, the baseball sized exit wound of the right side of his face, and the blood spatter pattern on the far wall, all added to corroborate the story she received by the patrol officer.

  “Hi Thomas, can I call you Thomas?” she asked, careful of her tone, so as not to close any emotional doors.

  “Yes, you can call me Thomas.”

  “And you can call me Sandra.” “Just tell me what happened. I think this would be a great place to start.”

  “My Dad came home drunk, as is the usual for a Friday night. He started in on me, like he always does. Saying that I am a failure, and a disappointment.”

  Sandra was not surprised by the unemotional tone in his voice. His emotional affect did not match the tears slowly streaming from the corner of just his left eye. This imbalance between emotional tone and saddened facial expression only served to support her original observation that, something was just not quite right.

 “Why did he say you were a disappointment?”

  “I dropped out of the University a few months ago.”

  “Oh. What was your Major field of study?’

  “Neuropsychology,” he replied with a tome of pride that, as she observed, certainly matched perfectly the look of pride spreading across his face.

 “So, then what happened?”

  “I told him he was a stinking drunk, and the cause of my Mother’s death.”

  “He caused your Mother’s death?”

  Thomas looked at Sandra as if he were talking to a mindless lab rat. “Not literally, detective. He was an abuser, and caused her to take multiple sedatives and such. She crashed her car one evening, straight into the concrete beam of the Washington Street Bridge.”

 “I’m very sorry to hear that, Thomas” She surprised herself to utter these words, because she was truly beginning to feel sorry for this sad young man sitting opposite her in the dimly lit living room of a house with so many obvious skeletons in the closets.

 Thomas began, “he attacked me. He was so much stronger than me. He got my back and applied a chock hold. Before I knew it, the world went dark. When I came to again, I found him dead on the kitchen floor.”

  Sandra realized that she was pushing the proverbial envelope with her next question, but she could not leave without trying. When she was a patrol office, working the toughest section of town, she would often ask suspects if she could search their vehicles during routine traffic stops, when she suspected that something was amiss. She was always astonished at the number of experienced criminals dumb enough to give permission for the search.

  “Thomas, you think I can look around your house. You know, maybe your Father left a suicide note.”

  She watched as his expression changed from the sad, but prideful self-proclaimed genius, to an angry insulted child.

  “You may not search my house. What are you trying to do? I am getting a lawyer if I have to.” Thomas was red in the face and huffing like a child that just threw a temper tantrum in a candy store for not getting what he wanted.

  With her second suspicion confirmed-The one that told her that he has something to hide, she stated calmly, “thank you for cooperation,” and walked out the front door, leaving Thomas alone to consider what went wrong with the experiment.

Another Talk with The Chief

  Sandra still could not help feeling disoriented by the all too familiar sense of de ja vu, as she sat in the chief’s untidy office. She also felt what she could only describe as, vindication, as she noticed the mounting piles of headache the chief accumulated on his desk since her last reprimand.

  Looks like our little Lumber Jack is keeping the old fart busy, she thought to herself as she suppressed a sly smile. The Lumber Jack is the nickname of the killer, known to have committed ten gruesome hatchet murders throughout the country sides of Pennsylvania. Each victim was found in pieces placed neatly in large and small piles among the old ruins of various abandoned farmhouses in the State.

 Sandra was torn quickly away from her gloating fantasy by the seriousness in the chief’s voice. Previous reprimands, despite his obvious genuine frustration, were always laced with a hint of playfulness. If not playfulness, at least an understanding that she was never in any real danger of suspension. But this time was different. The chief meant business, and as she thought, I better listen up and play the game.

 “Guess who called me? Go ahead detective, take a good guess.”

  Without having to expend an ounce of mental energy, she stated, “Thomas Lorey.”

  “Well give the great Detective Sandra a gold fucking star.”

  Sandra knew for sure that she was in real hot water, and it was about to get hotter. She never heard the chief abandon the clean confines of professional respectability, and curse.

  “Guess what Detective. He is threatening to get a lawyer. I think he just may have a case.”

  “Chief, I only asked if I could search for a suicide note.”

  The Chief interrupted her before she could say another word in her defense-A defense full of holes. Every detective who attended Civil Rights 101 knows that you never asked to search a person’s home during an apparent suicide investigation, and if you suspected something foul, you went through a process before proceeding with a search.

 “You know full well what you were doing. More importantly, even a dip shit straight out of law school would know what you were trying to pull.”

  Sandra opened her mouth to explain her hunches, when she was subdued into silence by the glare in her bosses’ eyes.

  “You are becoming a liability detective. I am placing you on suspension for one month with pay. I figure this will cool your heels a bit, and my ass will be covered.”

   Sandra threw her gold shield on the mound of files littering his desk. She released the full clip from her .45 semi-automatic and placed both on top of her shield. Without another word she started for the office door.

   “Wait right there. Before you go, I want to say something off the record.”

  Sandra did not give him the satisfaction of seeing a small grin of triumph spreading across her soft shapely lips. She remained with her face toward the door as he spoke.

  “After you return, I am putting you on the Lumber Jack case. I believe in your hunches Sandra, but the Lorey case is closed. The verdict by our team is in, the Lorey case was a suicide. In fact, if the old man was alive, he would be charged with attempted homicide. Anyway, before you go on your little paid vacation, I want you to get familiar with the case. We brought an eleventh victim into the morgue last night. This body is a bit more intact than the others. Go to the morgue, and talk to your dead.”

 Sandra calmly walked out of his office, and headed downtown to the city morgue to see a new friend, Tonya Miller of Lancaster Pennsylvania.

The Lumber Jack Killer

  Sandra prepared herself mentally before the steel elevator doors opened to the strange isolated world of the city morgue. She always hated coming here to witness the final, not so gentle, handling of one’s mortal remains. As the elevator door dinged open, signaling her arrival, she was met by the characteristic sounds of saw blades biting through bone, and the sound of the long steel drawers banging shut, sealing the dead for the final days before burial, or burning. She thought to herself, this really drives home the fact that we are nothing more than bags full of water and meat.

 Sandra approached autopsy room number three, of five, and cautiously opened the door. She wanted to hear Dr. Emmanuel Zeigler speak into the small microphone hanging from the ceiling, directly above the form lying on the cold stainless-steel gurney. She watched as Dr. Zeigler, chief pathologist, removed the powder blue bloodstained sheet from, what was once, Tonya Miller. Tonya Miller, she thought, a young woman full of hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Tonya Miller, as she remembered from the file she read in the parking garage of the hospital, was a twenty-two-year-old student at Penn State Community college. She was last seen walking across the campus lawn at