The Deepest Wound (Jack Murphy Thriller #3) - Rick Reed Page 0,2

made him look like a younger Sylvester Stallone.

Eric Manson was chief deputy prosecutor for Vanderburgh County, and Jack had worked with him many times. But even before his going after Katie, Jack didn’t like him. Eric was a competent prosecutor, but he had a reputation for playing fast and loose with his female coworkers—married and unmarried alike.

Jack had three reasons to hate Eric. One: Eric was an attorney, no matter which side he pretended to be on. Two: he was offering Jack Chivas Regal, which was the same as offering a glass of lighter fluid to a man in hell. And the biggest reason: Eric was taking Katie out his life. Jack would be damned if he let her be hurt by anyone.

So you think you’re good enough for Katie? “Brought my own,” Jack said, and nodded at the half-empty bottle of Glenmorangie on the countertop.

Eric picked up the bottle and examined the gold and orange label. “I forgot you were a connoisseur.”

“Every man has a hobby. What’s your hobby, Eric?” Besides chasing tail.

Eric ignored his jibe and motioned toward Jack’s empty glass. “It’s a party. And yet here I am drinking Diet Pepsi.” He made a show of looking at his watch and said, “But I guess it’s five o’clock somewhere.”

Jack resented the insinuation. “If you have something to say, counselor, spit it out.”

“What do you think I’m saying, Jack?”

Jack’s fists clenched, and Eric planted his feet.

“There you boys are,” Moira said, walking into the kitchen.

The men stared at each other for a long moment before Eric said, “Tell my fiancée I’ll be right there.”

“But will you always be there, Eric?” Jack asked under his breath, his arms dropping to his sides.

“I didn’t quite catch that, Jack,” Eric said.

The accusation was on the tip of Jack’s tongue when his cell phone rang.

“We’ve found an unusual item in a landfill. I’m afraid I need you to get over there pronto. It’s a homicide.”

CHAPTER THREE

A flock of white gulls circled in a cerulean sky, drawn by the rubbish in the Browning-Ferris landfill. On top of this no-man’s-land, three massive yellow landfill compactors with enormous steel chopper wheels lumbered up and down the hills of newly collected trash.

Jack and Liddell stood ankle-deep in discarded waste outside the chain-link fence on Laubscher Road. The putrid smell was overwhelming. Twenty feet away, a half dozen crime scene and uniformed officers cordoned off a massive area with yellow and black tape.

“Another fifty yards and the Sheriff’s Department would be working this,” Sergeant Tony Walker said, pointing at where a line of trees began. Walker was fifty years old, but except for his salt-and-pepper hair, he could pass for twenty years younger. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on his frame. He had been Jack’s mentor and partner when he first made detective a decade ago, but then Walker was promoted to sergeant and transferred to Crime Scene.

Since Tony had taken over, the Crime Scene Unit ran much more smoothly. The brass was afraid to cross him, and the other detectives respected him. It was the best of both worlds, as far as Jack was concerned.

Liddell, like Jack, was still in the clothes they’d worn to the engagement party. He brushed some cake crumbs from his knit shirt and said, “My brother, Landry, and his family are visiting Friday, and I was planning a crawfish boil. Tony, do you think I’ll get back home in, say, five or six hours to start making the roux?”

At six-foot-seven, weighing in at full-grown Yeti, Liddell was a big man by anyone’s standards. Jack called him Bigfoot for obvious reasons, but everyone else called him Cajun because of his previous job with the Iberville Parish Sheriff’s Water Patrol Unit in Plaquemine, Louisiana. He and Jack had been partners since Liddell and Marcie had married and moved from Louisiana to Evansville, where she could be closer to her family and Liddell could do what he did best—work homicides.

Walker put his hands on his hips. “Friday? Friday is five days away. It takes you five days to make that stuff?”

“You’ve never tasted my roux. It’s not ‘stuff.’ It takes time.”

Walker looked accusingly at Jack. “We’re standing outside a stinking trash dump, and he’s talking about food. Don’t you ever feed him?”

“Hey, he ate a whole cake today at Katie’s. Besides, I don’t even know what a roux is,” Jack lied, knowing that it was the base of almost every Cajun dish. Liddell had missed his calling as a chef—he loved cooking