Bones Of Contention: The McKinnon Legends - The American Men Book 3 Page 2

Was the Brotherhood and Council of Nine so smug as to think they were immune to the dangers even simple fisher folk could see?

  Turning back and away from the sea, he faced his wife. “Melitta, it is time. The servants are waiting for you at the dock.”

  “I will have the men come help lift your litter and take us to the ship,” she said, then turning to leave their quarters.

  He grabbed her wrist keeping her from leaving. “No, Wife.” He shook his head resolute in his decision. “I am staying until the last Brother has left us. I may be broken in body, but in mind and soul I am still one of them.”

  Melitta understood what he was saying. To stay at this point could be suicide. She lifted her chin in defiance of the sea and angry volcano. She loved him and she would face this by his side.

  “If you stay then I stay,” she said calmly, oddly feeling at peace with her decision.

  “Are you insane? No, I forbid it! Argyros!” he yelled for his faithful manservant. He would have her removed by force if that was what it took to save her. He had been a fool not to see this coming. He should have seen her to the ship and safely aboard before he revealed his plans to remain behind. With him gone she would be a wealthy widow. She could seek another husband. He hated the idea, but he wanted her to have a life he could no longer give her. He was dying.

  “No, Lysander.” She came to sit on the edge of his litter, softly stroking his beautiful, rich ebony hair. “I am staying. We will either survive this together or we will die together. Without you I am dead anyway.”

  Lysander freed his household giving each enough to start a fresh life wherever the tides took them. Six chose to stay. Seventeen chose to go. Stowed aboard the wizards' ship, one followed the child at Melitta’s command.

  And on the morning of the second day standing on the balcony supported by his wife, Lysander held Melitta tightly as Thera erupted in a manifestation of power and an enormity that no man living or dead had ever seen before or since. They knew there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. The wine cellar was the best they could manage.

  The collapse of the caldera produced a tsunami three hundred feet high which reached them in less than seven minutes, wiping the lingering fleet of Atlantis and the Minoan civilization of Crete totally from the face of the earth.

  It would be another thirty-five hundred years before Lysander and Melitta’s story would come to light.

  Chapter 1

  October 10, 2010

  Martin County Line, Texas

  Sheriff Josh McKinnon pulled his Crown Victoria to a stop about twenty feet from where she lay against the bright green sign that told travelers heading south on Highway 349 they were entering Martin County.

  From his headlights, he could see her jean-clad legs spread slightly apart. Her right arm was stretched above her head and her left arm was tucked under her body. Her deep blonde head was turned away from the roadway. At first glance he could not determine if she had been killed here. Perhaps she was a pedestrian struck by a lone car. He doubted it since the closest town or dwelling was miles away. It was more likely someone disposed of her body on this desolate stretch of highway. He could just make out drag marks along the side of the roadway, but they were coming from the direction of the field just to the west. Perhaps a wild animal dragged her from the field before dropping her along the side of the road. Josh pondered the possibility. It would not be the first time he had seen such a thing, except, it usually involved baby calves or small herd animals, not human remains.

  He turned off the engine as the police radio crackled to life.

  “Sir, what’s your 20?” asked Sissy Rimes, the county dispatcher.

  Josh could tell she must have just gotten the news. It was amazing how fast bad news traveled.

  “I’m at the county line on Highway 349. I’ll call you on the secured line, 10-4?” Josh released the switch on the mic.

  “10-4, Sir. Better hurry, though. I’m getting calls already, and I need to know how much to tell them.”

  “10-23.” He gave her the order to stand by. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “10-4, Sir. I’ll stall them as long as possible, but you know how it is around here. Telegraph, telephone, or tell-a-woman, the end result is the same. By the nine o’clock news they will all know.”

  He would have corrected her if she had not been right on that account.

  He did not want this out on the general airways until he could secure the area. Popping the trunk release just before unfolding his six-foot-four-inch frame from the car, he slipped on his cowboy hat. He would have preferred the ball cap sporting his daughter Jesse’s softball team, but regulations were regulations, and here in Texas anything besides a Stetson was just one step shy of heresy.

  “You’ve got to stay inside the car on this one, boy.” He scratched his Doberman K-9 partner behind the ears before shutting the door on Saber’s whine and single bark of protest.

  Walking to the back of his car, he lifted open the trunk, and the interior light shined brightly against the early evening twilight. Reaching inside to get the crime scene kit, he wondered why it seemed things like this always happened at the worst possible time for law enforcement personnel; for the victim, he guessed it was never a good time for them.

  Today was Jesse’s fifteenth birthday party. However, he felt certain seven teenage girls would never miss him. Thank goodness for his housekeeper, Lilly, who had been with a McKinnon household as long as he could remember. He was just the one lucky enough to have her at present. However, with Jesse quickly growing up to be a young adult and his cousin Gage having a new baby on the way, he was sure he would be losing Lilly soon.

  He slammed the trunk lid with a resounding thunk and just stood there for a moment. Squinting eyes of cobalt blue fringed by dark lashes, Josh looked around at a landscape seeing very little change in the last one hundred and fifty years. He just let the land talk to him hoping it would tell him something... anything.

  It was the only witness he had at the moment.

  Dotting the rich farmland were brand new cell phone towers. Somehow these looked out of place to him here on the nearly unbroken horizon of this West Texas countryside. If those were removed, Josh thought, you would have seen the same background as in the photo of his great-great-grandfather hanging in his family room. The photo had been taken of Gavin McKinnon just before going off to the first World War in 1918.

  “Nope, not much has changed,” Josh mumbled to himself. He thought it especially true on this desolate stretch of asphalt called Highway 349 which served only one purpose in Josh’s estimation: to join the Middle-of-Nowhere with Not-Much-Else.

  The Martin County line on Highway 349 was located between the crossroads town of LeMesa and Midland, famous for unrivaled high school football. In short, Martin County was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by large family and commercial farms and fields that in July were filled with bright yellow sunflowers as far as the eye could see. The fall crop was usually cotton, and this time of year those fields were a blanket of snow white cotton bowls, ripe for the impending November harvest.

  Shallow oil wells with their distinctive hammerhead pumps dotted these same cotton fields. Endlessly, steadily moving up..down..up..down..up..down, they were a testament to the unrelenting pursuit of the precious oil reserves located just below the surface. The people of Martin County went about their lives just as rhythmically as the up and down of the wellheads.

  Yesterday, last week, last year - it was all the same as one day flowed into the next until a person could completely lose a decade. He loved it here. It was home and had been for most of his thirty-eight years.

  Nothing ever happened here in Martin County which was just fine with him. He had voluntarily left behind the excitement of large city law enforcement several years earlier after he fought and won custody of Jesse.

  As a single man raising his child, he could not afford to die in the line of duty. So leaving the S.W.A.T. team in Miami in 2003, he won the office
of Martin County sheriff. The McKinnon name was just as solid and just as much a part of the fabric making up this country as the cotton and oil. Running for sheriff just seemed to be the logical thing to do. The timing had been perfect for him to toss his name into the political arena. Sheriff Davis retired after a twenty-two year run in office leaving the slot open. Josh won by a landslide and had subsequently been reelected.

  So here he was on the evening of his daughter’s birthday doing what he had promised the voters he would do, protect and serve. Old Man Hammers had called him at home with the news that he found the Jane Doe as he was moving his tractor from one field to another. Josh knew that had this been Miami there would already be so much activity around the body, little evidence collected would be credible. However, Mr. Hammers said he had seen enough cop shows on television to know not to touch anything and to call him “straight away.”

  Staking out the spot from the highway’s edge on the east and back to the cotton field on the west, Josh ran the yellow crime scene tape to prevent unauthorized entry into the area.

  Methodically combing the square from the outside edge to the body, he found absolutely nothing.

  “Guess I need to make the call,” he said flipping out his cell phone and waiting for the Dawson County sheriff to pick up. Straddling the county line blurred the line of jurisdiction, so ownership of the case was not clear-cut. He wondered if that was intentional on the part of the murderer or just coincidence.

  “Miller here.”

  Josh heard the deep and familiar voice. Sheriff Miller was the man responsible for him even thinking about running for office. He was a man Josh looked up to and respected greatly.

  “Sheriff Miller, this is Josh.”

  “Hey, how are you? I’ve not see you in a month of Sundays, young man.”

  Josh could hear the commotion going on in the background. He had caught the sheriff at a bad time it would appear by all accounts.

  “I’m good, Sir, thank you. However, this is not a social call, so I won’t keep you long. I have a body straddling the county line. She technically belongs to both of us. You want in on this, or do you want to ignore the technicalities and sign over jurisdiction?”

  “Technically, Son, I have an ex-wife, and I choose to ignore her as well. So this one is all yours as far as I’m concerned. I’m ass-deep in alligators with the theft of fifteen thousand gallons of fuel.”

  “The D.A. won’t be a problem?” Josh already knew the answer, but he wanted confirmation of what he suspected to be true.

  The seasoned law enforcer was quick with his return answer to Josh’s question. “No, I really don’t think so. However, let me check with him to see if he has any heartburn turning loose of it. I have to be honest though, I really see no issues. He thinks he is overworked and underpaid as it is. I keep havin’ to remind that son-of-a-bitch he ran for office and to just quit the belly achin’.”

  “I understand,” Josh acknowledged nodding his head. He had also voluntarily run for sheriff so there was no draft involved. He knew what the position paid and the hours it would involve when he took the oath of office. The district attorney did as well. He was a man Josh shared no respect for on either a personal or professional level, so he could understand the Sheriff Miller's point of view.

  “Just fax over the forms, and I’ll sign them tomorrow once I get back to the office.”

  Josh closed his phone, but not before promising a round of golf the following Saturday. Sissy was still waiting for him to call her back and he knew it was time to call in the coroner. Midland was closer, but Lubbock had better facilities. He began to snap photos while he waited for the other deputies, highway patrol, and coroner to show.

  Stepping closer to the body, Josh noticed for the first time how the victim’s clothes hung slack on her body.

  Something did not fit in his mind. Tossing aside the pair of latex gloves he had used to secure the area, he pulled on a fresh pair since he did not want to contaminate the body any further if possible. Laying out a sterilized plastic tarp, he knelt down to turn the body over.

  “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed as he touched her for the first time.

  His victim was nothing except bleached bones. The clothes had been cleverly used to hide all traces of the skeleton, and a wig covered the skull and skeletal face.

  He recovered from his shock and took a deep breath. Some jackass was playing a sick pre-Halloween trick on him placing a skeletal model just like the one he remembered seeing in his college biology class. He looked around thinking the perpetrator of the hoax might still be close at hand. All he saw was the first highway patrol car pulling to a halt.

  “Evenin’, Sheriff.” The patrol officer sauntered over touching the brim of his uniform hat in salute.

  “Evenin’.” Josh returned the salute knowing he was just about to become fodder for the water cooler down at the local Department of Public Safety. “I hope you weren’t busy tonight. I may have called you out on a false alarm.”

  “Nope, not busy. You know as well as I do this godforsaken stretch of highway is where they put those of us who have pissed off the wrong person for one reason or another,” he said with a resigned shrug.

  “What’s your story?” Josh tossed out, not one bit offended at the young officer’s bashing his birthright. The young man was unhappy with his assignment. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

  “I screwed the daughter of the top aide to the lieutenant governor right after graduation from the academy. I just happened to be the unlucky bastard who got caught with his pants down around his ankles. Hell, how was I supposed to know her daddy played golf and went to church with the assignment officer?”

  “Somehow it just didn’t matter she was drunk and out for a good time?” Josh was making a huge assumption, but knew the type, praying all the while Jesse did not go down such a path.

  “Nope, not a damn bit of difference. I’m out here in this hell hole all the same,” he whined, bitterly.

  “Hum,” Josh’s response was neutral. He was not so sure he would have been so merciful had it been Jesse he found in such a compromising position with this asshole on legs.

  “What’s your story?” The officer asked in return.

  “I asked for the votes and the privilege of being out here in this ‘hell hole’ as you call it.” Josh was here because he really wanted to be here. The residents of the county were his family and his responsibility to keep safe.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Josh could tell this young officer thought he was a country bumpkin with no real world experience. Josh’s mom had always taught him to never judge any book by the cover and never, ever judge another mortal man, period. That, she said, was never his place. He had often wondered why she placed it in those terms, but just never bothered to ask. Now, she was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and the opportunity was past. Her stories were so far fetched at this stage that reality was no longer feasible for her.

  The young officer was speaking again bringing Josh back to the present.

  “By the way, she doesn’t look like a false alarm to me.” The young officer tossed his head toward the corded off area where the body of the Jane Doe lay.

  “You don’t think it looks like a hoax, like maybe some punk stole a skeleton from the high school biology lab?”

  “My brother is an orthopedic surgeon. I roomed with him in college, and I’ve seen the models. That, my friend, is no model. Some sick son-of-a-bitch has strung some poor woman together. I’d bet my last paycheck on that one.” The highway patrolman was positive. Josh could tell.

  “Damn it,” Josh spoke softly under his breath thinking on most days nothing ever happened in Martin County.

  It was looking like this was not most days.

  Chapter 2

  October 12, 2010

  Josh knocked on the opaque glass door with black letters painted neatly in block script.

  Room 117 - Forensic Lab A

&nb
sp; “Come on in.”

  He heard the female voice behind the glass. He was to meet Dr. Jamison Gillman in Room 117 of the Natural Science Building located on the campus of Texas Tech University.

  Jamie Gillman, renowned criminologist and forensic anthropologist, looked up from the silver examination table at the man entering the door.

  The magnifying headset with an attached headlamp made her eyes look huge, and had those eyes not been the most beautiful green he had ever seen, Josh would have laughed.

  “I’m here to see Dr. Jamison Gillman. I have a three o’clock appointment. I’m a little early,” he said closing the door behind him.

  “Sheriff McKinnon, I presume,” she smiled while pulling off the latex gloves and tossing them into the receptacle at the end of the examination table.

  “Yes, Ma’am. The uniform gives me away every time,” he smiled ducking away for a second time from the beam of light projecting off the headset.

  “Oh, sorry ‘bout that, Sheriff,” she said taking the headset off and standing up from the work table. “I’m Dr. Gillman.”

  She smiled indulgently at his look of surprise.

  He took the hand she offered as she came around the corner of the examination table currently covered with what looked to Josh to be the remains of a human mummy.

  “I was expecting a man. My bad,” he confessed before the meeting progressed too far.

  “Not a problem, a common mistake. You can call me Jamie.”

  It was apparent to him that years of people mistaking her gender had taught her to be resilient.

  He also thought she was cute in a quirky sort of way. He guessed she would have to be a little quirky to deal successfully in her chosen profession. He lumped her in with morticians and medical examiners, both necessary, just not his idea of a dream job. He figured to each her own bliss.

  “My office is down the hall. Let me secure my esteemed guest here and then we can visit,” the doctor said while pulling on another set of gloves.