Blind Curve

By James Jay Johns

This is a story of political hard ball. A sailor who is an advocate for an environmental coalition gets push-back from a big developer who arranges an accident which kills the advocate's wife. The police believe she was killed in a one car accident but the advocate knows that there was foul play involved. The advocate takes things into his own hands and after that events which ensue move rapidly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Jay Johns
• Release date: Jun 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465908803

James Jay Johns

James Jay Johns has been a writer for a long time, over fifty-five years and still counting. Most of his writing has been non-fiction, mainly technical in nature during many years of employement, but over the years he has written a lot of fiction mostly for his own gratification and has even written some poetry. He has had many short non-fiction pieces published and for more than ten years he edited a quarterly publication for a large non-profit organization. About fifteen years ago, when he retired from full time employment, (which he refers to as a 'previous life') he began to write fiction, mainly for his own enjoyment. His writing spans several genres, but he is presently concentrating on mystery and romantic fiction. He has decided others might want to read some of what he has written, so it is now available in eBook form from Smashwords Publishing, as well as many other booksellers. email Johns at [e-mail], or visit his website jjjohns.net where you can send him mail. Images on this page from Free Digital Photos. (http://freedigitalphotos.net), and Free Stock Photos (http://freestockphotos.biz).

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Blind Curve

James Jay Johns

Copyright 2011, James Jay Johns, all rights reserved

Published at Smashwords

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This is a work of fiction any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

Blind Curve

1This investigation had started out very routine. It had seemed like an ordinary single car accident. The woman driving the car was going too fast around a sharp curve and slid sideways into a bridge abutment. It became more difficult sprouting a lot of raw edges and loose ends when a nine millimeter slug was found in the passenger side air bag compartment.

The accident investigation was about finished when the slug turned up. The medical examiner didn’t find any evidence that the bullet had struck the woman driving the car; however, it could have grazed her since she had massive head injuries, sustained when her head struck the concrete as her car slid sideways into the bridge abutment, which could have obscured a superficial bullet wound.

The State Police accident investigation team assigned to help the County police with the technical details was ready to call it a one car accident. They were about to close the file by the time that slug turned up...and now this. Detective Sgt. Stanley L. Williams of the Baltimore County Police sat with his elbows on the edge of his desk, in his office in the Parkville precinct. His face was buried in his hands. After a while he leaned back, ran his fingers through his thick dark hair and took several slow deep breaths.

He picked up the express mail packet turned it over and looked at the postmark again—Dents Creek Maryland. According to the State Police, Dents Creek was a tiny town somewhere about the middle of the upper Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It consisted of a fried chicken fast food outlet, a small used car lot with an auto body shop which doubled as its sales office, a Gas’n Go convenience store, a one room tavern where the hard drinkers congregated, a large rambling run down building which served as the local deli/ wine shop/ video rental/ bait and tackle shop, and local hangout for the wine-drinkers in town—there apparently were a few—and about a dozen or so nondescript houses.

It was way out in the middle of nowhere spread out along about a quarter mile of a narrow, poorly paved, county road that roughly paralleled the marshy shoreline of the Bay. There were widely scattered houses on both sides of the road for several miles in both directions out from the town but no real settlements in any direction for at least ten miles. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to mail this packet from an isolated spot. That had to mean something, but what?

The date of the postmark was almost two weeks ago. The Morgan investigation was pretty much at a standstill and whoever received the package had taken a quick look and hadn’t seen a connection to any live investigation so the package had been passed from one squad to another until someone actually read through enough of the material in it to realize it had to be connected with the investigation into the Lisa Morgan accident that Sgt. Williams had been working on. So finally, it had landed in his in-basket.

Williams dropped the packet onto the desk, rolled his chair back, stood and stretched. He was tired. It was way past the end of his shift. His partner, Henrico Sanchez, had left hours ago. He knew it was long past time for him to head home, but he was hooked on this new twist in what he had thought was, for all practical purposes, a closed investigation.

He walked across the bull pen to the coffee service area and refilled his cup with stale coffee. He was too tired to make a new pot; he just added lots of sugar and creamer to cut the edge of the awful stuff. At least it was hot and a source of caffeine to keep him going.

He sat at his desk again; stirring the coffee automatically, as he absently stared across the room. Sanchez was sure the package was some kind of a prank. Maybe it was, but if it was real it meant that some people were about to be killed—or already had been—and it was connected to the death of the woman in the car with the nine millimeter slug in the air bag compartment. He was sure of that but he was too tired to think straight, couldn’t concentrate. His head was all jumbled. Things would look clearer in the morning.

He took a sip from his cup, then grimaced, walked back over to the coffee mess, dumped the terrible stuff in the sink, rinsed his cup and put it up on the rack. The kids would be glad to see him for a little while before they went to bed and it would be nice to have some good food even if it was warmed over, because he had missed supper time again. Sarah Jane would have saved something for him in the oven hoping he would get home before too late and wouldn’t be too tired to eat. She always did even though too often he didn’t get home until pretty late and often was so tired he didn’t want to take time to eat. It was a constant running battle and he knew she was right; he needed to spend more time with the kids.

In the car his mind just wouldn’t let the strange turn of events go. The packet had been in his in-basket when he’d arrived around 8:00 in the morning. He had looked through the contents before showing it to Sanchez.

It wasn’t much, just a bunch of newspaper clippings and a beat up audio cassette tape. He and Sanchez had read all the clippings, most of which were about the accident in which Lisa Morgan was killed, but a few were about some of the men involved in the big Clear River development on the lower Eastern Shore. None of it had anything to do with the Lisa Morgan accident investigation as far as they could see.

All the information about the accident in the clippings had come from the police and they had seen it all before. Anyone could have collected the clippings, why were