Murder Mountain: An Eli Quinn Short Mystery / Prequel

  MURDER MOUNTAIN

  An Eli Quinn Short Mystery (Prequel)

  By Robert Roy Britt

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Roy Britt

  RobertRoyBritt.com

  Find other front matter at the back of this short book.

  Praise for the Eli Quinn Mystery Series

  FIRST KILL (Book 3)

  ★★★★★ “Jam-packed with thrilling fight scenes, witty banter, and well-worn characters, FIRST KILL is an excellent addition to the private detective genre with a likeable hero and a lovable sidekick.”

  — IndieReader

  ★★★★★ “Methodical, yet fast-paced thriller… FIRST KILL solidifies Quinn as a deeply developed hero with great potential for future installations.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  “Britt offers a sharp, hearty narrative… Another worthy outing for the quick-witted, ever evolving private eye.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “An exciting thriller … full of intrigue, sex, and even some humor.”

  — Bestsellersworld.com

  “A well-plotted story full of twists and turns with a cast of attention-grabbing characters and dialogue that throws sparks all over the place.”

  — Silvia Villalobos, author of Stranger or Friend

  DRONE (Book 2)

  “A brisk detective novel sequel that packs a punch.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  ★★★★★ “Quinn’s second case reads as if it were written by a master reaching the height of his craft. With its witty banter, cast of colorful secondary characters, and promising detective agency, DRONE sidles into the genre with aplomb. … Characterizations are top notch, the plot is believably paced with ratcheting tension, and the prose is highly polished. … Quinn’s personality gives him an everyman feel that makes him easy to connect with. Unlike more intellectual literary detectives, Quinn is relatable and fun to root for.”

  — Foreword Clarion Reviews

  ★★★★★ “Fast-paced with a few thought-provoking twists, DRONE is reminiscent of a noir detective story with a 21st century flair.”

  — IndieReader

  “Immediately absorbing and thoroughly entertaining.”

  — Bestsellerworld.com

  “Robert Roy Britt’s writing is engaging and captivating—written both with a mature slant and just a little camp. Britt takes on a well-trod genre and introduces a distinct yet fitting addition to its hall of fame. Both brilliant and humble, hard-nosed and gentle, Eli Quinn’s mettle is thoroughly tested in curious and entertaining ways. It’s hard to make an original detective, but Britt is more than up to the challenge. He does a wonderful job of telling this twisting tale with excellent pace.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  “A delightful read, a page turner.”

  “You will not be able to put it down.”

  “Britt has a keen feel for dialogue.”

  — Amazon Readers

  CLOSURE (Book 1)

  “Quinn’s narrative often sports the hardened cynicism of a seasoned veteran … Solo nearly steals the story; he can intimidate with a single bark and a follow-up growl.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Fascinating plot.”

  “Great characters.”

  “A great read.”

  — Amazon Readers

  MURDER MOUNTAIN (Short Prequel)

  “An excellent quick mystery.”

  “An engaging tale of pursuit.”

  “Britt writes tight prose.”

  — Amazon Readers

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The story of Eli Quinn, private investigator, really starts here, before he becomes a detective. On the heels of the first two books in the series—Closure and Drone—it was time to circle back and, in this very short prequel, reveal the events that shaped the man.

  To readers who know their geography: Please excuse me for moving mountains. The real Murder Mountain is a genuinely frightening place inside the Emerald Triangle, not far from where this tale unfolds.

  This story is dedicated to the innocent victims of the tragic marijuana wars in Humboldt County and the rest of the Emerald Triangle along California’s North Coast.

  Chapter 1

  ~ ~ ~

  Murder Mountain wasn’t the stuff of legend. It was real. And the odds were good that another body would be added to the count today. Maybe mine.

  I’d been chasing Devin DeRouin for six months. It was like chasing a ghost—digging through paperwork and databases, interviewing people, calling police stations around the country in a vain search for a fugitive who left no trail. Nothing but dead ends.

  Until now.

  Now here he was, real as the towering redwoods that disappeared into summer fog so thick you could reach up and curl it through your fingers. I had DeRouin cornered in the heart of the Emerald Triangle—as much as you could corner someone in an endless redwood forest. And one of us was not coming off this mountain alive.

  Acknowledging my intentions caused a whole-body shiver. I breathed deeply to calm my nerves. I needed all my wits and physical energy.

  There are few human forces stronger than vengeance. Survival, maybe. I had vengeance on my side. DeRouin was a survivor.

  The forest floor was soft and quiet, a blanket of natural mulch eons in the making. I’d spotted DeRouin twice through the trees. He was running. Let him run. Let him exhaust himself. We were miles from anything. I’d waited six months for this. Another half-hour wouldn’t matter. Patience. Smarts.

  DeRouin knew his way around these woods. He would be in shape. He was almost surely packing a gun.

  But I could run forever. And I had a gun, too. And I had a secret weapon: Solo, the world’s greatest K-9 private eye. At least that’s how I thought of my 110-pound German shepherd, even though he’d flunked the K-9 final and I knew next to nothing about working a K-9 dog. And we’d never practiced actually tracking someone down.

  Now, half a year after the search for DeRouin had begun—with the indispensable help of Samantha Marcos—I couldn’t be sure Solo would know whether to attack the bad guy or lick him to death. And if it came to a shootout, I had roughly the same confidence in my gun skills as those possessed by my dog. I had no option but to trust both of us.

  Chapter 2

  ~ ~ ~

  Jess had been dead three weeks when Samantha Marcos started helping me track down her killer. Sam and I had been a really good investigative reporting duo at the newspaper. I was good. Sam was amazing. Together we were really good.

  When my wife Jess was shot, life became a meaningless blur. I could not eat. I drank far too much. I couldn’t go back to the paper, didn’t know if I ever would. The managing editor of The Arizona Republic said not to worry, take all the time needed. But I had nothing to do, nowhere to stuff my grief, nothing useful to occupy my mind. No suspect in custody on which to heap all my anger—anger at him, anger at myself for letting Jess get into the situation that got her killed, anger at the universe for letting Jess die while we were in the middle of one of those fights where you don’t speak for a day, but you know you’ll make up. Or at least you think and hope you will.

  The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had made no significant progress finding the killer. After three weeks I was out of my skin just sitting around. Sam came by when she got off work, around eight o’clock, just to check on me, she said. It was about the fifth time she’d done that.

  I’d polished off three Sierra Nevadas and switched to red wine to go with my pan-fried chicken. The doorbell rang while I was in the middle of eating. Solo didn’t bark. He was ge
tting used to Sam. I hollered that it was open, and she came in.

  While Sam and Solo kissed, I got another glass out of the cupboard and poured wine for her.

  “How you doing, Quinn?”

  My brain felt electrified, nerves firing, no words coming. I set the wine on the breakfast counter next to mine, walked around and slid back onto the stool to finish my chicken. “Want some?”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I ate.”

  I pointed at her wine.

  “Thanks,” she said, picking it up.

  I cut, chewed, swallowed, drank. Sam stood and watched. She took a sip of wine and set it down.

  “You’re staring,” I finally said.

  “And you’re sliding into depression,” she said.

  “I’ll be OK.” I didn’t mean it. I’d never suffered clinical depression, didn’t know what it felt like. Whatever I was feeling seemed expected, given what had happened. Except for the black hole. Every time I tried to look ahead, see the future, all I could envision was a black hole. Not the kind in space that you can’t see, but a real, tangible, visible one. Darkness ahead, light behind. Maybe it was a feeling more than an actual visible thing, but it filled my mind’s eye again as Sam spoke.

  “Quinn, it’s time to do something, not just sit around.”

  I had no idea what she meant. I just looked at her. Looking at Samantha Marcos was no doubt a favorite pastime for many men. But I couldn’t do it in my current emotional state, so I looked away, finished my wine.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  I forked a piece of chicken, pushed it around my plate.

  “We investigate things for a living,” Sam said. “It’s what we do. We’re really good at it. So let’s do it.”

  “We don’t investigate murder,” I said. We did corporate malfeasance, political corruption and institutional wrongdoing—essentially the stuff that ran Arizona—but not murder.

  “Investigating is investigating,” she said. “And you’re the best at it.”

  I was numb. Yet I couldn’t argue with the logic, except that she had our respective skill levels inverted. But I didn’t have any better ideas for what to do with my time. I nodded. And so it began.

  We started with what we knew.

  The paper had published a story about an anti-gun protest to be held at a park in Phoenix, a peaceful rally meant to draw attention to recent shootings by toddlers. A two-year-old in Phoenix had shot and killed his mother. Across the country, toddlers were finding guns and using them at the rate of once a week, with the toddlers themselves frequently the victims. An accompanying editorial called for stricter state gun laws. It was that editorial, at the paper I worked at, that triggered the combustible situation that ended in my wife’s death.

  Jess sent me a brief text to say she was going to the rally. I didn’t think much of it—Jess was active about supporting causes she believed in. It’s one of the things I loved about her. And since we hadn’t spoken since our argument the night before—I don’t even remember exactly what it was about—I texted back with a simple “OK.” That was our last conversation.

  What I failed to consider was this: Given the mounting controversy on the topic, there were as many counter-protestors at the rally as protestors, and with Arizona’s open-carry laws, the pro-gun crowd was packing. I don’t know if thinking about that then would have led me to try and stop her, but I couldn’t dismiss the possibility, and it weighed like a hundred-pound sack of bones around my neck.

  A guy in the crowd had pulled out a pistol with a silencer and shot my wife, then disappeared before anyone knew what had happened. We gleaned that much from the news, including the story Sam had written.

  Sam pulled me back to the present. “I just got the full video footage,” she said.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Beach.”

  Jack Beachum, my best friend and a member of the Sheriff’s Posse in Pleasant, the town north of Scottsdale where we lived. Beach had fed me plenty of leads and tips over the years, none more valuable than this one—the surveillance video of the shooting.

  Sam and I watched the video together in my living room. I’d already seen a still photo taken from it, a shot of the killer’s face, blown up and grainy, released by the sheriff and all over the news. Police had made a positive ID based on a tip from a someone who saw the photo on the TV news. After that, two other pictures of Devin DeRouin were circulated in the press. One at age twenty as an Army private in Iraq. Another from a year ago, a mug shot after a DUI. Sam had copies of those, too.

  On the video, DeRouin acted like anyone else at the rally in the park. Standing around, listening to a speaker up on stage. Then he ducked around the corner of a building, pulled the gun out, picked a victim, and fired just one shot. We couldn’t see where the shot went on the video, but we already knew it travelled about sixty yards to its victim. Head shot. Either a really lucky shot, or one from an expert. On the video, nobody reacted, because nobody saw or heard the silent shot. DeRouin tucked the gun away and jogged out of the video frame.

  That’s the extent of what we knew for sure.

  “Why,” I said. “Why Jess? Why this rally? Why him?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out,” Sam said. “We know what happened. Figure out why, or understand his motivation, and we’ll find him.”

  “Sheriff can’t find him,” I said. “Been three weeks. Seems like long odds for you and me.”

  “You have anything better to do?”

  I shook my head.

  Chapter 3

  ~ ~ ~

  Solo could identify DeRouin’s every footstep, but he didn’t need to. We moved ahead at an easy jog now, and he dropped his nose to the ground every ten feet or so. He didn’t bark. It wasn’t his thing.

  We moved swiftly and silently, downhill along a narrow trail lined with ferns that dripped with the dew of condensed fog. My jeans were soaked from knee to ankle, trail-running shoes soggy but stiff-soled.

  At a ravine, DeRouin had just crested the other side. It appeared we had closed the gap to almost nothing, but that was just an effect of the topography. We were maybe a hundred yards apart as the crow flies, but much more terrain than that was between us.

  DeRouin stopped, turned and aimed his pistol.

  I dropped to the ground and slid off the trail behind a decayed log and heard a whistle and a thwump, the bullet embedding in the soft bark of a giant redwood behind me. I pulled Solo down next to me. No more shots came. DeRouin wasn’t one to waste bullets. Or make noise.

  A heavy 9mm pistol in my hand, I rolled down the hill a few feet and peeked over the mossy log just as DeRouin turned and started running again.

  There were five miles between us and DeRouin’s campsite on the other side of Murder Mountain. According to my apparently reliable source, the dreadlocked, pot-smoking Markus Simper, the camp was a simple setup with an old 16-foot travel trailer, a tent, campfire and a pickup truck. A few minutes ago I’d come to trust Markus after finding and disabling the trip wire he’d warned me about.

  I could catch DeRouin easily. If we got into hand-to-hand combat, he didn’t stand a chance. My hands and feet were lethal, and I had full confidence in them and the deadly moves Master Choi had taught me. I had less confidence in my shooting. I’d done some hunting as a kid, but other than some recent training from Jack Beachum on how to handle a pistol, I hadn’t used a gun since I was a teen. As long as the target held still and presented itself as a bulls-eye surrounded by colorful circles at twenty-five paces, my chances were good.

  DeRouin had been a sniper in the Army. He knew his way around this forest. I couldn’t expect to sneak up on him. And I couldn’t let him get to his pickup.

  It was time for a Plan B. Unfortunately I didn’t know what that was. I pulled the topo map from my back pocket and unfolded it. After a six-month chase, no way I was letting my wife’s killer slip away again.

  Chapter 4

  ~ ~ ~

  A
fter two months our investigation was finding a lot of dead ends, not much else.

  I’d dug up all the easy stuff, done all the obvious interviews with family and friends. DeRouin had very little family, and he was estranged from them. His father was dead. A sister said she hadn’t seen or spoken to him in twenty years. Never married. No kids.

  His mother, in her late seventies, lived in Florida. I flew out and talked to her. What I learned was no surprise. Her son had been a handful. Always in fights. Smoking pot at thirteen. Got his GED and skipped his senior year of high school, hit the road. She got a few letters from him while he was in the Army, heard from him on her birthday for several years after that, then gradually he withdrew completely.

  Meanwhile, Sam had run every inquiry and database query she had legal access to, and a few she didn’t. I’d sought help from my old college roommate and good friend, Pauly Peterson, who was in the CIA now. I knew Pauly would turn over every stone short of those that might get him fired, and maybe even those, to help me. He came up empty.

  Devin DeRouin had simply vanished.

  DeRouin served in the first Gulf War, in 1990. He had a pistol-class sharpshooter’s badge, second of three levels for marksmanship in the Army. He was months away from rotating out of Iraq when caught up in a controversy involving the deaths of Iraqi civilians under suspicious circumstances. Excessive violence was the only official term I could ferret out from Army reports that Beach photocopied from the official investigation and passed along. Shooting innocent people is what I surmised. There were no court martial proceedings, but DeRouin was given an Other-Than-Honorable Conditions Discharge, “the Army’s version of firing someone for cause without having to go through the rigmarole of a trial,” Beach explained.