Deceit in the Academy: A Nate Grimes Mystery Book 2

By Allan McCarville

The murder of a homeless man and a prostitute appear to be unrelated except for one thing: in each case the killer had cut off an ear and mailed it to the Cedar City Police Department.

Are the murders the result of the growing tension between two rival drug kingpins or is there a serial killer stalking the streets?

Nate Grimes and his partner, Bill London, frantically search for clues as the body count begins to climb. In his search for the killer, Grimes makes a discovery from his past that will change his life forever

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allan McCarville
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777168490

Allan McCarville

Allan McCarville is an author and researcher who has a number of titles published in the genres of fantasy, crime thrillers and historical fiction. He and his family reside in Stittsville, Ontario where he does his best to make people think that he's normal. Apparently it's not working.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was Tyler who spotted the body.

Alex Benton and Sarah Wilson walking hand in hand sauntered past it, too interested in each other to notice any flotsam that found its way onto the harbor’s rocky shore. The teenagers were sixteen and had been going steady for almost a month, although they had not yet formally declared they were a couple to their friends. They certainly weren’t about to tell their families, not wanting their parents intervening with advice about them being too young for any serious commitments.

Tyler Benton, however, had just turned twelve and so far, his interest in the opposite sex was one of mild curiosity; it hadn’t yet become a distraction.

Hey guys! he called uneasily.

He had been walking behind Alex and Sarah, keeping far enough back so that he was not intruding on their space. That was the unwritten rule on those rare occasions he was permitted to tag along with his older brother – he had to stay out of their faces unless there was a dire emergency.

Tyler stopped walking and stared apprehensively at the object that the lapping waves had dumped on the pebbled shore. It looked like a body, he hoped it wasn’t, but even as he studied the thing that rolled lazily in the harbor’s gentle waves, he knew that’s exactly what it was.

He was pretty sure what he was looking at constituted a dire emergency.

Guys! he called out again, this time more forcibly.

The two teenagers turned back towards Tyler. The reprimand Alex was about to unleash died in his throat and he inhaled sharply when he saw what his brother was looking at.

Shit! Alex gasped realizing what it was.

Oh, God . . . groaned Sarah who reached out and put her arms around Tyler in a protective embrace. Is that . . .? she finally gasped, unable to finish the question.

Alex could only nod dumbly as he found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the corpse with a mangled face. He was pretty sure the body was that of a man, but he wasn’t positive and had no desire to look too closely.

He heard a retching sound behind him and turned around in time to see Tyler lose the battle to keep down his lunch. Alex took Sarah gently by the elbow and led her and Tyler away from the water’s edge before taking out his cell phone to call home.

This was one occasion when Alex was very happy to have some parental intervention.

***

Detective Nate Grimes watched as the body was moved farther up the shore away from the water’s edge.

The body was that of a male, although given its condition positive identification of who he was would be challenging and would need to be made through dental records or DNA analysis. There was no identification on the body, and the clothing suggested to Grimes that the man was one of the homeless people who inhabited the derelict buildings surrounding the city’s docks.

He waited until the photographer from the Cedar City’s forensics team finished taking pictures of the remains before approaching the forensics supervisor, Wendy Feltmate, who had also been waiting for her photographer to take the final shots.

Pretty badly cut up, commented Grimes as he squatted down next to the body. Question is whether this happened before he died or if the body got chewed up by a ship’s propeller.

Grimes gloved up before he carefully rolled the cadaver onto its side and pointed to a hole above the right eye, or at least where the eye used to be.

I’ll bet a year’s salary that this guy didn’t drown, he remarked bitterly.

I agree, concurred Feltmate. I’ll be able to tell you more after the autopsy, but I’d guess a .22 caliber. There’s no exit wound, and I think anything bigger would have done more damage.

Grimes silently nodded his agreement. A .22 was an effective pistol for executions when used up close. The small bullet could punch through a human skull and bounce around inside someone’s head like a ping pong ball, destroying the brain in the process.

He straightened his six-foot frame and glanced up at the leaden late afternoon sky as a light drizzle started to fall. Grimes had dark brown hair, a lock of which fell across his forehead making him look younger than his thirty-six years. His symmetrical face was tanned, a natural tan, the rugged hue of a man who spent time outdoors. He had fierce steel blue eyes that could focus a laser-like stare that even the most practiced liar couldn’t hold up against.

He was a man desired by many women, but his heart belonged to only one: a woman who died five years earlier.

He removed the gloves and rubbed his hands across his chin, feeling the stubble.

Crap! Didn’t I shave this morning? He tried to remember but could only vaguely recall waking up on his couch and stumbling into the shower, a half empty bottle of whisky perched on the coffee table. It was getting to be a habit.

The dismal overcast sky turned the scene into a picture colored in varying shades of grey. He watched the uniformed police officers as they made their way along the shore, looking for anything that might be connected to the murder.

And it was murder, of that Grimes had no doubt.

Once again, he found himself asking why he bothered working. He didn’t need the money, the insurance settlement after the death of his wife had left him a wealthy man. He was tired of dealing with death.

Bill London, his partner, approached from where he had been questioning the kids whose pleasant late Sunday afternoon stroll through the park that bordered the harbor’s south bank had turned nightmarish with their discovery of the body. London was married with three children of his own and Grimes believed his partner could relate to the kids better than he could.

Grimes was uncomfortable around kids. He didn’t dislike them; he just didn’t know how to interact with them.

How are the kids? he asked.

Pretty shook up, replied London, especially the youngest. But I think they’ll be okay. I get a sense that their families are supportive, so they’ll get through this. I got all the pertinent information, but their parents are taking them to the station now to get their formal statements.

Yeah, acknowledged Grimes. It’s better to get it over with now rather than have the kids come in tomorrow or the next day and have to relive the whole thing.

Grimes knew however, it would be a long time before the kids would get over this – if ever.

He looked out over the water that was tinted a leaden grey by the overcast sky and light rain. The harbor ran east/west, the easterly most part hooked north where a narrow inlet led to the ocean. That narrow access to the harbor was bordered by heavily wooded hills, which formed a natural barrier to the Atlantic Ocean’s damaging swells and gales.

The western end of the harbor extended a couple of miles from his left, narrowing to where the Green River flowed from the steep wooded hills through the village of Stonecrest and fed into the harbor. So far, the small village had managed to escape being absorbed by the urban sprawl of Cedar City.

It wasn’t a large harbor, but it was deep and ideal for small and medium sized freighters. Opposite from where he stood, he could see four container ships at the docks being either loaded or unloaded.

The north side of the harbor was industrialized, where in addition to the city’s docks, several manufacturing facilities strived to survive in an increasingly globalized world where large multinational corporations dominated most of the commerce, answerable to no government, only to faceless shareholders whose objective was focused on the bottom line.

The north side of the harbor was also where most of the working poor and families on welfare lived in shabby apartment buildings that butted against derelict and abandoned factories and warehouses.

He observed a number of pleasure boats making their way to the yacht club marina, their evening cruise shortened by the dismal weather. The marina was on the south side of the harbor, which was where the business core of Cedar City was located, and where the more affluent members of the population resided.

A suspension bridge spanned the harbor, connecting the two sides of the city. Two halves of the same city but separated by more than just a body of water.

A pair of men from the coroner’s office carefully lifted the remains into a body bag that was lying open on a gurney.

Who were you? Grimes wondered as he watched the body bag being transported to the waiting black van.

Occasionally one of the nameless homeless who inhabited the shadows of the city’s north side would meet a violent death. However, those deaths were usually the result of fights over drugs or alcohol and the cause of death was either a beating or stabbing.

This man had been executed. Why would someone feel the need to execute a homeless man?

Grimes experienced a burning sensation in his stomach, one that had nothing to do with the whiskey he had consumed the night before. His sense of unease was prompted by a premonition that there was something sinister prowling the streets of Cedar City.

Chapter 2

The killer couldn’t restrain a grin reliving the euphoria of pulling the trigger and snuffing out the victim’s life.

Such Power!

It would have been preferable not to kill the man but there was really no choice. Decisive action had been required. The killer’s partner had been too frightened, too timid, to act.

They thought they had everything under control, the plan seemed to be working; a plan that was finally going to bear fruit. However, those three parasites had upset those plans. Why had they waited for so many years before threatening to expose them? It had taken five years to get this far, and now that they were only a few months away from reaping the benefit of all their patient planning, three lowlifes got greedy and jeopardized those carefully laid plans.

One parasite was gone, two more to go.

The ecstasy the killer experienced when the victim not only recognized his killer, but the expression on his face knowing that he was about to die provided a thrill never before experienced.

The idea to cut off the man’s ear was not part of the original plan, but it somehow felt right. Surprisingly, the expected feelings of revulsion at the mutilation didn’t materialize.

The killer had initially dumped the body in the harbor in an effort to hide the crime. No one would miss the victim, and no one would even realize that a crime had been committed. It was pure bad luck that the body washed ashore and was found by those kids. The sketchy article about the body’s discovery that appeared in the newspaper a couple of days later had sparked a small degree of panic and worry that the discovery of the body would eventually enable the police to identify the killer’s identity.

It didn’t, and oddly the worry slowly changed to something akin to excitement.

The police evidently had no clue as to who killed the vagrant or why. In retrospect, slicing off the man’s ear was probably a good idea. With nothing to link the killer to the addicts and other street scum, it would surely serve to confuse the police.

Now one leech was dead. However, there were two more vermin who were jeopardizing their plans. They had to be eradicated, eliminated. The desire to feel the adrenaline rush experienced while killing that first victim was overwhelming.

The next target had already been identified; it was time to go hunting.

The killer receded into the background, unnoticed, just a small hooded figure slinking away in the darkness.

Chapter 3

"The injuries were all post-mortem," Feltmate informed him.

Grimes leaned back in his chair and toyed with the cable linking the handset to the phone on his desk. Grimes looked out through his office door looking for London, but his partner wasn’t at his desk.

Propeller? he guessed.

There was a slight pause at the other end of the line and Grimes heard the forensics expert shuffling papers on her desk. Yes, she replied, except for one.

Oh? remarked Grimes.

The victim’s right ear was cut off, explained Feltmate. It was too clean to be caused by a ship’s propeller.

Shit, swore Grimes as he digested this information.

Your victim was dead when he went into the harbor, added Feltmate. No water in the lungs so he definitely wasn’t breathing when he took the plunge. ME figures he was shot, then the killer or killers cut off the ear before dumping the body into the harbor. ME estimates the time of death sometime Friday night or early Saturday morning. I’ll get the report over to you by the end of the day.

Thanks, Wendy, said Grimes. I appreciate you getting this done quickly. Although no one would ever admit it publicly, autopsies on those who had no family were not a high priority. Feltmate likely badgered the ME into expeditiously performing the autopsy.

I guess it’s safe to assume that you had no luck with an ID then, suggested Grimes.

Not yet, acknowledged Feltmate. We managed to get some prints and we’re waiting on DNA results, so we can run it through the databank. I’ll let you know if we get anything, but it’ll be awhile.

Grimes thanked Feltmate again then replaced the handset back in its cradle before opening the bottom right drawer of his desk and looked longingly at the silver flask. With an effort he decided against the nip and closed the drawer.

It was getting more difficult for him to abstain from taking a drink. It was always like this as the anniversary of the accident approached; the accident that claimed the life of his wife, Shirley, and their unborn child.

It had been three days since the kids had discovered the body. A vagrant? A wino? Some old guy rejected by society and then a final rejection by the harbor that discarded him onto the shore like unwanted flotsam.

Grimes studied the thin file on his desk. Nothing. The search of the area had turned up no clues, and so far, even the CCTV tapes from nearby streets revealed nothing.

He could feel his muscles tense as he reviewed the skimpy file. At one time this guy was a living, breathing human being. He was somebody’s son, maybe a husband and father. Grimes was certain that the man didn’t plan on becoming one of Cedar City’s homeless, hadn’t planned on becoming a murder victim.

Where did your life go wrong? he asked himself.

The ringing of his desk phone jarred him from his thoughts.

Grimes, he growled as he snatched up the receiver.

Bill here, Nate, rasped London. Grimes could detect the strain in his partner’s voice. We have a situation in the mail room. You better get down here.

On my way, snapped Grimes, jumping from his chair and heading for the stairwell at the end of the corridor, pulling his shoulder holster over his head as he did so. He didn’t bother with his suit coat that was hanging on the back of his chair.

He half ran, half jumped down the stairs that led to the basement where the mailroom was located two floors below his. He bolted out of the stairwell, raced to the mailroom and pulled up short when he arrived.

Several people were standing outside the door or looking through the glass windows that provided a view of the mailroom, and although their expressions were grim, no one had their weapons out.

He made his way into the room and saw his partner and several others gathered around a desk where a young woman was visibly shaking. He hurried over and shot London a puzzled what’s up look.

London merely inclined his head towards a bubble envelope sitting on the desk, its contents partially exposed. There was a plastic bag inside the bubble envelope, with something inside it.

Oh shit! he exclaimed when he recognized what he was looking at. Anyone got gloves?

London passed him a pair of the blue plastic gloves which Grimes pulled on, never taking his eyes off the envelope. He carefully slid the plastic bag the rest of the way out of the envelope and fought back the urge to throw up as he examined what was inside.

A human ear.

Grimes had no doubts about who it belonged to.

There was a small yellow strip of paper taped to the bag. A present from The Slicer, it read.

A sense of foreboding that this was just the beginning made him shiver involuntarily.

Chapter 4

Roy Harwood was frightened.

There was something out there; something powerful, ruthless and evil. He read through his notes again, hoping that there was something that would lead to a different conclusion.

There wasn’t.

Granted, one could say that everything that he had accumulated over the past several months was nothing more than a series of coincidences. However, there were far too many for his liking, and Harwood was not a big believer in coincidences.

Harwood was a seasoned investigative reporter. It had taken him months, but he eventually managed to identify dozens of unsolved murders around the country, and in many of them Grant Harvey just happened to be in the area at the time. Coincidence? Harwood didn’t think so.

He was certain that Grant Harvey, the Cedar City cop who for years led a double life as a professional hitman, was part of the evil Harwood was now certain existed.

Harvey had been a profession killer who operated undetected for years because he was a meticulous planner. Plus, he never killed on his own turf – until the Sokolov killings several months earlier. Alexi Sokolov had approached the Cedar City police and was willing to trade information about the organization he worked for, an organization that no one even knew existed, in exchange for amnesty and protection.

Harvey had been very good at what he did. He had killed Jane Foster, the undercover cop the Sokolovs had approached, before killing the Sokolovs themselves. What Harvey hadn’t planned on was that the Sokolov’s young son, who instead of being in school as expected, was home the morning Harvey assassinated the boy’s parents. The boy witnessed the execution, getting a good look at Harvey. Harvey was subsequently forced to shoot the child as well because the boy could identify him.

Harwood’s lips twisted into a small smile of admiration as he thought about the boy. The kid turned out to be one tough little bugger and survived, forcing Harvey to make another attempt on the boy’s life. Instead of killing the boy, however, Harvey himself was killed by a police officer who had been guarding the youngster.

Harwood’s eyebrows puckered as he contemplated the hit on the Sokolovs. Why did Harvey deviate from his normal practice and accept a contract for a local hit which was riskier for him? Who hired Harvey to kill the Sokolovs and the undercover cop in the first place? The more he dug to find answers, the more questions cropped up.

Why did the Cedar City Police Department close the case file when the identity of whoever hired Harvey was still unknown? He guessed that one reason behind the decision to close the investigation was to avoid further embarrassment to the CCPD for being unaware that a professional killer was a member of the force for over fifteen years.

He was certain that Nate Grimes, the lead detective in the investigation, would have been very unhappy with unanswered questions. He also knew that the Chief of Police, Scott Winters, was an old school cop who would share Grimes’ opinion that the investigation should be pursued.

If Winters ended the investigation, then the order to do so must have come from someone higher up the food chain.

The mayor and city council? Harwood shook his head. No. While the local politicians would obviously be pleased to avoid the embarrassment, they didn’t have the authority to clip Winter’s wings when it came to a murder investigation. Every time the mayor or city council butted heads with Winters, the Chief always came out on top. The order to end the investigation had to come from higher up, someone at the state level, someone in the Attorney General’s Office or perhaps even someone with ties to the Governor.

At first, Harwood was excited as he began his investigation, believing he had the makings of a story about corruption and political interference at the highest level. But as he delved deeper into the Sokolov/Harvey story, he found connections to other crimes that like the Sokolov case had been closed with unanswered questions.

There was the drug raid on the freighter, the Estrella de Mar, and the death of Roger Smith, a man arrested for child pornography, his own stepson being one of the victims.

While Harwood had been digging up the facts surrounding the Sokolov killings, he had received a press release issued about a raid on the freighter, Estrella de Mar. Harwood knew from experience that press releases often just gave the information that the authorities wanted you to know, but seldom revealed the complete story.

The ship had been raided because the police had received a tip that the vessel was being used to smuggle drugs into the country. That in itself was not newsworthy, the police often raided ships and warehouses around the docks, but what Harwood discovered was that this particular raid was orchestrated and led by a senior DEA agent out of Washington rather than the local CCPD.

No drugs had been found. Harwood wondered if the smugglers had somehow been tipped off about the raid, or was the information the police received erroneous? The press release didn’t answer either of those questions which made him suspicious that maybe the authorities were hiding something.

The raid on the Estrella de Mar had taken place in Cedar City only a week after the Sokolov killings. Coincidence, or was there a connection?

Harwood began to investigate the background of Charles Durning, the DEA agent in charge of the operation. He discovered that Agent Durning was friends a man named Tony Bianchi, the head of a New York crime family. Harwood’s initial theory was that Durning was dirty but as he dug deeper into their relationship, it became apparent that Durning and Bianchi had grown up together, with Durning going into law enforcement and Bianchi eventually taking becoming head of his family’s crime syndicate after Tony Bianchi’s father was murdered.

Although on different sides of the law, the two men had maintained an odd but tenuous friendship.

It was while he was digging into the background of Durning and Bianchi that he began to suspect the existence of a new criminal organization operating behind the scenes, one that nevertheless could potentially be more powerful than the Mafia or the Asian triads. Was this the organization that the Sokolovs were intending to inform on?

Harwood’s source in New York informed him that the word on the street was that some organization had hit the Bianchi Family and took out the old man and their chief of security. Apparently, the Bianchi Family tried to take matters into their own hands and attempted to track down the organization behind the hit. Then they suddenly backed off. According to his sources something spooked the Bianchi’s. Not only them; several other crime families in New York were scared of something.

That was very unusual for the crime families that Harwood was familiar with.

Even more unsettling was that the fear amongst criminals wasn’t just in New York. In questioning his numerous contacts across the country, he discovered it was widespread. All facets of criminal activity seemed to be affected: drug, human trafficking, gambling, smuggling – you name it.

A faceless organization that by all accounts exercised control using blackmail, coercion, intimidation and even murder to ensure none of the pieces stepped outside of their allotted territory. He had found a couple of references to the organization as being called the Council. However, it seemed that anyone who was willing to talk about the existence of that entity were either dead or had disappeared.

Harwood made his way to the kitchen and poured himself three fingers of whiskey. He was shaking so bad with his discovery that he needed to use both hands to pour the drink without spilling it.

Too many convenient coincidences, he snorted to himself. Convenient coincidences. I like that phrase, he decided.

The drink helped to settle his nerves and he took a couple of deep breaths. Harwood, the hard-bitten investigative reporter was back in control. He poured himself another drink and sipped it slowly as he made his way back to the spare bedroom that served as his office.

He had no proof, but his gut feeling was that this Council existed and functioned in