Winter’s End
PROLOGUE
“I don’t know why Jimmy insists on playing him,” Sheriff Dale Townsend says, raising his voice over the hammering rain and the swish of the Jeep’s wipers. “It’s obvious the guy just isn’t on form. His confidence is gone, he’s tensed up and he’s gripping the bat too hard. Jimmy should rest him a couple of games, give him a chance to get his head right, then bring him back for the end of season run-in.”
His companion, Deputy Andy Miller, keeps both hands on the wheel and his eyes firmly on the pool of light in front of the vehicle. “Rendall hit three-eighty last year,” he says. “You can’t write off a guy like that, especially when we could still make the title. He’ll come good.”
“Maybe.” Dale rubs his hands and stares absent-mindedly out at the darkened landscape. A flash of lightning illuminates the trees bordering the highway, a jumble of drenched foliage and stark blue shadows. Darkness returns as a shift in the tone of the wind tells him that they have left the woods behind. Four miles of flat grassland before the trees return as the road reaches the town. Four miles to home. He checks his watch.
“Your wife waiting to give you hell when you get in?” asks the deputy.
“Naw, she knows I’m going to be home late, even if I can’t be sure of the exact time when the weather’s so goddamn miserable.”
“When’s your car going to be finished in the ’shop?”
“Tomorrow. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”
“Well if it takes longer, you’re welcome to keep hitching a ride with me. Until my shift changes next week, anyhow.”
Sheriff Townsend is about to reply when the lightning flashes again and his attention is grabbed by something ahead on the highway. “What the hell?” he says.
The deputy eases off the gas and, on reflex, hits the blue and red strobes.
The twin headlight beams pick out a man who is bare from the waist up with rain dancing from his exposed skin. Townsend’s first, almost unconscious thought is that he must be freezing cold. The man is staring calmly at the ground in front of him, absolutely still, with his hands at his side. In each of them he holds a hunting knife. At his feet is the naked body of a woman, her flesh white in the glare.
“Andy, call Dispatch,” Townsend says.
He draws his pistol and reaches for the door, then steps out into the downpour. The water hits him like a cold shower as he raises the comforting weight of his gun and carefully sights up on the figure in front of him. “Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department,” he shouts. “Put down the knives and step slowly over to the vehicle with your hands where I can see ‘em.”
To his left, the other door opens and Andy steps out, the dim crackle of the radio still faintly audible behind him. The deputy mirrors Townsend’s movements, keeping his gun trained, ready to shoot.
The man, who Townsend guesses is young, no older than his mid-twenties, looks up and his gaze settles on the Sheriff. Face pale from the cold. Dark hair drenched. Eyes black pits reflecting the blue and red flashes from the Jeep’s lights. A slow, almost mocking, smile spreads across his face as he gently places the knives on the floor. Then he strides calmly to the Jeep, keeping his hands in the air.
Andy cuffs him and frisks him for other weapons while Townsend goes to check on the woman. She looks to be in her late thirties, with shoulder-length dark hair and a trim build. Her face is familiar and quite attractive, despite the unreal presence death brings. Her chest is a welter of slashes and stab marks washed clean by the rain. Townsend has little real hope of finding her alive, but checks for a pulse as a matter of procedure. Nothing. Lightning flashes again and, if anything, the rain gets harder.
“Arrest this guy on suspicion of murder,” he calls out to the deputy behind him. “And notify the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. We’ll need to get someone out here.”
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.