9780553580761: Cold Water Burning
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553580760 ISBN 13: 9780553580761
Verlag: Bantam Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Alaskan private detective Cecil Younger is plunged into a deadly new case as he investigates the mysterious disappearance of a man, charged and acquitted in a vicious three-year-old multiple murder, and soon discovers that others connected with the original case are dying, one by one. By the author of The Angels Will Not Care. Reprint.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Straley lives in Sitka, Alaska, with his son and wife, a marine biologist who studies whales. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of The Angels Will Not Care, The Woman Who Married a Bear, The Curious Eat Themselves, The Music of What Happens, and Death and the Language of Happiness.

Aus dem Klappentext

g author of The Angels Will Not Care

P.I. Cecil Younger works out of Sitka, Alaska, a land of perfect beauty and not-so-perfect lives, where there is nothing more dangerous than an unsolved crime except maybe the man trying to solve it....

Three years ago someone brutally killed four people on the scow Mygirl. In a crowded courtroom Cecil Younger helped the accused go free. Now the man charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared. As a storm bears down on the Alaskan coast, two people connected with the case die in separate, sudden, and bizarre explosions of gunfire.

Younger is certain that someone is trying to finish the grisly job begun on the Mygirl three years earlier. But to prove it he must chase down a wooden sloop on the wind-lashed sea. Out in the lethal storm Younger will come face-to-face with the shocking truth that has already twisted so many lives and now could end his own.

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The storm had passed, Toddy was dead and I was clinging to the overturned hull of my yellow skiff. I pulled down the hood of my rubber survival suit and looked up to see gulls circling the tangled mess my life had become. There was no help, and there wouldn’t be. Light dazzled on the tip of every gray-green wave, but there were no ships. I was wide awake in the empty sea wishing I could go back in time, back to the dock before I had pushed away, back to the unsolved homicide, back to the recurring nightmare of murder, gasoline and children screaming.

It could be argued that being a private investigator in a small Alaskan town is one of the worst career decisions a person with a high-school diploma can make. But there’s lots of opportunity for free time. In that regard, the summer started off well. I had spent six wonderful days catching a few of the early king salmon, all thanks to the money I’d made working for a rich herring boat captain who had crushed some fool charter fisherman’s face in a bar brawl. The case was my dream come true: a rich client with serious felony charges. The summer was looking up, but summers are short here. The skipper settled his case long before trial; I had spent most of his money on bait and boat repairs before September came around.

I would never have gone out into that storm willingly. The weather radio had been tracking two low-pressure systems on a collision course in the north Pacific. If the systems joined forces it would become the kind of storm that would crack the limbs off alder trees and churn the shoreline white. I still remember the feeling of those few days as the storm moved in: black clouds like bags of anvils rolling up over the horizon, and the trees along the beach standing motionless as if they were trying to hide from what was coming. I remember the expectation and the dread before the storm hit.

It was two days before the peak of the storm when Patricia Ewers walked into my office and asked me to find her husband Richard, who had gone missing with fifty thousand dollars of their money. Richard Ewers’s case may have been my greatest success as a defense investigator. Three years ago he had stood trial on four counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson, and had been found not guilty.

He had been accused of killing two adults and two children on board a fish-buying scow, soaking the deck with gas, and setting the whole mess on fire as he escaped in a red tin skiff. This was Richard Ewers. My client.

A five-month murder trial is an ordeal that forges loyalties that only come out of combat. All the subtle conflicts boil down to “us” against “them.” I thought of Patricia Ewers as an old army buddy. Captain of the “us,” Patricia provided the strength and calm presence during the wildest part of the ordeal. All through the halfhearted police protection, the ugly phone calls and the reporters digging through her garbage, she never wavered in her support of Richard. She and her parents had stood by him; they had lost both their houses and their savings accounts to legal fees. The not-guilty verdict was some vindication, but nothing could pay them back for what they had been through.

When I saw her walk up my stairs unannounced three years later, I knew something more serious than a multiple murder count had to be bothering Patricia Ewers.

“Cecil, he’s gone. I think they killed him this time.”

I put my hand on her back and moved her to my sagging couch near the woodstove. “He took the money. In cash. A large amount of cash,” she said as she flopped herself on the old couch. Dust rose up in a plume. “I told him not to take it.”

“What money?” I asked her as I offered her a towel to dry her hair, for she had been caught in a rain squall walking to my house.

“The tabloids. They kept offering Richard money for his story. I told him not to take it. We were through the worst of it. We had made it through the trial and things were beginning to calm down. But they kept offering more and more money. He’s had trouble finding work, you know; no one would hire him in the fishing industry. Anyway, when they finally offered a hundred thousand dollars for an article, book, and film rights, he told them he would take it.”

“One hundred thousand dollars?”

“We had only gotten half of it. There was fifty on signing the deal and the rest after he did the interviews. I know, we shouldn’t have taken it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that, Patricia. I was just wondering if they wanted my story.”

“Have you been found not guilty of mass murder?” She said it sarcastically.

“No,” I said, “but I’m close friends with some people who were. That should be worth a couple of grand at least.”

“You can have it, Cecil. I mean, jeepers, we have no control over the story. They could print anything.” She held her hands up as if framing the headline in the air. “Mygirl Murderer Beats the Rap.” Then she buried her head in her hands.

I could understand her concern. Richard’s story had everything for the tabloids: drama, sympathetic victims, terrific color photographs. It had everything except a killer behind bars.

The murders occurred in late August of 1995. The Mygirl had been anchored in Kalinin Bay just north of Sitka. It was just after dark, past midnight on that Alaskan summer evening, when a man got into a skiff and pulled away from a conflagration. He left behind the bodies of a father, a mother, their nine-year-old daughter, and a teenaged boy who had been visiting the scow.

The parents, Charlie and Edna Sands, were each shot once through the chest before the fire started. Their daughter Tina had been clubbed over the head and almost surely died in the blaze while she was semiconscious. Albert Chevalier, the fourteen-year-old visitor, was shot repeatedly, in the arms and legs and once through the skull. His body was the most charred because the arsonist had doused the boy’s body with gasoline before spreading the accelerant throughout the rest of the scow. The two Sands boys escaped the fire. The boys told investigators they had heard a commotion up in their parents’ quarters and just as they went to investigate, the scow burst into flame.

Across the bay, Albert Chevalier’s brother Jonathan had seen the first signs of the fire, rushed over in his skiff, and pulled the Sands boys off the burning scow.

Later, in trial, Jonathan Chevalier swore he saw someone leave the Mygirl in one of the scow’s three tin skiffs. According to Jonathan, whose little brother, Albert, died that night, the driver of the tin skiff “could have been” Richard Ewers.

I’ve been asked dozens of times if I thought Ewers was guilty of four killings, and I always say the same thing. “I don’t know who killed those people.” But the truth is I believed wholeheartedly in Richard’s innocence. I just couldn’t prove it.

Ewers was the only hired crewman on board the Mygirl. Richard had been hired by Charlie Sands off the docks in Ballard, Washington. He had worked the Alaskan fisheries and Charlie needed a seasoned hand to help bring the scow up the coastline. It seemed incontrovertible that seconds after this mysterious man who could have been Richard Ewers pulled away from the Mygirl in a skiff, the scow went up in a bonnet of flame. Most of the usable evidence was lost in the fire and almost everything else of forensic value was washed overboard as local fishermen battled the fire.

A day and a half later, heat and smoke shimmered off the charred remains of...

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Verlag
Bantam Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553580760
ISBN 13 
9780553580761
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
206
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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