The Body Reader

By Ray Wilkins

The Body Reader is a detective/thriller novelle introducing the red haired rebel detective Cordelia Storm who accepts no rules except her own. Canberra, Australia is threatened by a blood thirsty serial killer who knows no mercy, Storm must solve the case otherwise more people will die. This book will keep you awake at night and at the same time warm your heart. It is the first in a series of stories featuring Cordelia Storm "Storm."

Cordelia Storm is:
An Artist
A Rebel
A Fighter
A Winner
A Mother
A Police Detective
A Bike Rider
A Woman who believes in only ONE person - Herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ray Wilkins
• Release date: Jul 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476326887

Ray Wilkins

Ray Wilkins grew up in Australia. He has lived and worked in England, Germany, Switzerland, India, Austria. He now lives in Belgium where he runs the People and Art Factory together with his partner Cordula Ehms. He is a wellknown Coach, Trainer, professional artist and songwriter. Other books he has written are "The girl with nine toes", "The body reader" that will be released in November 2011 and his epic novel "Japara" in January 2012.

Book preview

The Body Reader

A Cordelia Storm mystery novel

by Ray Wilkins FRSA

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Cover art: Red by Ray Wilkins

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Cover design: Cordula Ehms

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Copyright © 2012

by Raymond Richard Wilkins

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Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

More information about Ray Wilkins

www.peopleandartfactory.blogspot.com

or visit him at Facebook.

This is the first story introducing

Cordelia Storm. There will be

more to come in the future.

Be brave for a change.

Chapter 1

"Fear the wrath of the Almighty, all you sinners and worshippers of the Devil. God will punish each and every one of you on that day when you commit the unforgivable sins of fornication and adultery. Remember the true verses of the Ten Commandments as written by the finger of God and witnessed by Moses on the Sinai mountain. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery!’ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife!’ Hear me now, and fear the power of God that cleanses the spirits and souls of man and woman of any thoughts of sin, sodomy or fornication. Bow down in His name, lower your heads to the ground in the presence of the only righteous God of purity and heavenly justice."

He was dressed in black, wore a long cloak that brushed the ground, and his ragged top hat had seen better days. He stood on top of one of the white dirt hills that are the landmark of a mine shaft. He was the Lightning Ridge resident preacher, thin as a pencil, his full beard unkempt and spotted with grey, his hair long and dirty. His eyes burned with an eerie intensity that bordered on fanaticism. But everybody standing around him bowed their heads and prayed for forgiveness even though the nearest woman or neighbour’s wife lived at least a hundred miles away. This was opal country, the only black opal field in the world. Dotted with hundreds of vertical shafts that bored up to three hundred metres down into the snowy white earth and stone. It was an all-man world, too rough and rugged for women.

Most of the miners worked their mines for six months of the year, then travelled back to their wives and families living in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne or even as far away as Perth. It was a hard life, filled with suffering, pain and endurance and sometimes bitter disappointment. A good man could make a small fortune inside three weeks and another could die a pauper having worked his mine for more than ten years. In nineteen fifty-nine, the fossickers lived mostly underground in cave-like rooms with tin chimneys that stuck out of the ground. The chimneys sucked smoke from the fires to the outside world and at the same time brought fresh air into the dark, dingy homes. Underground, it was much cooler than on the surface where it was sometimes up to forty degrees. Underground temperatures averaged twenty-two degrees.

In one of these subterranean homes the preacher lived alone with his seven-year-old son, Jonas. His mother had died two years before of tuberculosis that she had caught when the family was living out in the bush in the Kimberly ranges where the preacher had tried to convert the aborigines to Christianity.

The preacher believed himself to be a good God-fearing father; he beat his son with a wattle branch whenever he sinned or was lazy. And sometimes he even locked him up for days in a small cave filled only with darkness and desert rats. Punishment, his father said, was the only pathway to God. He taught the boy about the seven mortal sins, engraving them into his heart, and instructed him how women were created by God for but two reasons, to bear children and test the purity of man by enticing him with Godless seduction.

Women were dirty and possessed by the Devil, and it was his God-given heritage and heavenly duty to cleanse the opposite sex of the Devil’s curse.

Sometimes, he said to his son, It may even be necessary to take their lives in the name of God. Only then can man live in a world free of attempted seduction and the moral weaknesses of womankind.

Two years later, the boy’s father fell down a mine shaft and broke his neck. Some miners did not believe it was an accident. Some believed that the boy had killed his own father. One of the miners took Jonas back to Canberra where he lived with his wife and five kids, but the boy did not get on well with the other children. There was a lot of fighting, especially between and the two older girls.

The miner then turned Jonas over to the authorities and a Court magistrate ordered that he become an orphan of the state. Jonas then lived for eight years in a home for disturbed children.

Chapter 2

With one sweaty hand, Cordelia quickly reached behind her back to open the clasp so that she could pull off her bra. Now, at last, she was able to move more freely. This is a really big one, she thought as she pulled the paint-speckled black t-shirt back over her head.

She slowly rubbed finely ground chalk pigments and rabbit skin glue into the thick, raw canvas with her bare hands. The new canvas leaned on a wall in her studio. At three metres long and two metres high, it was so big that she sometimes stood on tiptoe to reach the top edge. She was one point five metres short, forty-five years young, with long mahogany-red hair, deep brownish-green eyes, and had a trim athletic figure.

She possessed what some people called a razor-sharp sense