A special excerpt

   “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 perception-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 firsthand the work of serial killers who tortured, mutilated, cannibalized, and even preserved victims.

    None of this prepared me for this one.

    Luther stepped aside and let me enter.  Three lamps and the overhead light burned, yet my vision dimmed and constricted.  Images raced toward me as if fired down a gun barrel.  Acid surged in my stomach.

    This wasn’t Mike.  This wasn’t human.  Arms and legs, bruised and fractured, twisted into some grotesque Mumenschantz.  Face nonexistent.  I could make out a shattered jawbone.  Several teeth lay on the blood-soaked carpet.  A wrought-iron poker, which I recognized as being from the living room fireplace, protruded from his abdomen.

    “Told you it wasn’t pretty,” Luther said.

    I swallowed down a wave of nausea.  Relax, you’ve seen worse.  That was a lie.

    “What was the time of death?” I asked.

    “According to Sidau, body temps, lividity, rigor all suggest somewhere between ten and one.”

    “Who’s running the case?”

    “It’s a joint effort.  Sheriff’s department and HPD.  Our guy is Scotty Simpson.  For HPD it’s your buddy Tortelli.”  Luther looked down the hallway.  “Here he comes.”  He stepped aside and let T-Tommy enter.

    Tommy Tortelli.  T-Tommy to his friends.  I’d known him since the fourth grade.  First day of school.  First day we suited up for football together.  Now, at thirty-nine, he was simply a bigger version of what he had been at nine.  The word was thick: legs, arms, chest, neck.  Even his hair was thick and black.  He had played linebacker.  Still walked like one.  A straight-ahead, no-nonsense, jump-right-in-your-chili sort of walk.  At six feet, we stood eye to eye, but his 230 had me by fifty pounds.

    “Ain’t this some shit?” T-Tommy said.

    “And then some.”  I felt a throbbing behind my left eye.  I looked back at Mike’s corpse.  “I hate this.”

    T-Tommy clamped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.  “We’ll get this fucker.”  He looked at Luther.  “You tell him yet?”

    Luther shook his head.

    T-Tommy sighed.  “We’ve got two other murders that look exactly like this.”

    I still couldn’t swallow the thick saliva that collected in my throat.  Breathing wasn’t exactly easy either.  I looked at T-Tommy.  “You’re kidding?”

    “Wish I was.”

    “You’re thinking we have a serial?”

    T-Tommy stared at the floor for a brief moment and then toward the window that looked out over the backyard, eyes unfocused.  “Just a theory yesterday.  After this?  I’d say we’ve moved beyond the theoretical.”  His gaze rose to meet mine.  “At least that’s the way I see it.  ’Course, I want your opinion.”

    “HPD caught the first two murders,” Luther said.  “We got this one.  A few days ago T-Tommy came to see me.  Wanted to know if we had any similar cases.  We didn’t.”  His jaw tightened.  “Until now.  When I saw this . . . I knew this had to be the same guy and called T-Tommy.”  He massaged the back of his neck.  “Scotty’s setting up a task force room downtown.  We have more space than HPD.  They’re taking all the evidence they have on the first two murders over there.”

    The headquarters for the Madison County Sheriff’s Department, including Luther’s office, occupied the second floor of the county courthouse in the middle of the downtown square.  I suspected setting up the task force there had nothing to do with architecture.  Simply meant Luther would keep a close eye on everything.  HPD might help handle the cases, but Luther was in charge.  He grabbed this case so it wouldn’t get screwed up.  And because he had to.  For Mike. I understood.

    Luther glanced down at Mike’s corpse, closed his eyes for a moment, and then said to T-Tommy, “Why don’t you bring Dub up to speed.  I need to get back to the office.  When you wrap things up here, we’ll sit down and determine how best to handle the media.  I’ll set up a press conference for later today.”  He hesitated a beat and then turned and headed down the hallway.

    “Let’s do the tour,” T-Tommy said.