“You ain’t going to like it,” Sheriff Luther Randall said.
My gut knotted. “Let’s do it.”
Life morphed into slow motion as I followed Luther down the hallway toward Mike’s bedroom. My legs felt heavy and my shoe soles grabbed the carpet as if trying to hold me back. As if they knew what lay ahead.
My name is Dub Walker. I’d worked more than a hundred homicides in my career. As a MP for the US Marines, as a lab tech with the Alabama Department of Forensic Science here in Huntsville, as a trainee and consultant in Quantico with the FBI’s Behavioral Assessment Unit, and as a crime scene and evidence analyst on cases all over the country. I’m considered somewhat of an expert in this stuff. I’ve written a dozen books on these subjects and if you do that people automatically think you know a bunch about it. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Could go either way. It was that preception-reality deal.
I’d seen angry spouses slice, dice, and shoot each other; drug deals gone sideways; murders for hire; gang massacres; Mafia hits; and a few killings that didn’t fit into any pigeonhole. I’d seen victims of shootings, poisonings, beatings, fires, explosive devices, and one-way flights off tall buildings. I’d seen first hand the work of serial killers that tortured, mutilated, cannibalized, and even preserved victims.
None of this prepared me for this one.
