The Long Sting: A Noir Tale

By Emmet Thornton

Only one thing could cause lawyer Nick Darcy to turn down parole from his twenty year sentence--revenge. Eve seduced Nick to murder her wealthy husband with blistering sex and promises of living in luxury on his dime. Then she ratted him out to the cops.

Everyone thought the charred remains found in Eves kitchen after the fire were hers. Nick spent many years in prison tormented by the question: is Eve still alive? Now free and committed to hunting her down, Nick enlists his former law school classmate, now Assistant Deputy Attorney, Pat Dunlop for help. Nick seeks revenge: Dunlop wants a conviction for career advancement. While tracing Eves steps, it becomes obvious that someone else is following the same trail. Who could it be?

Is Eve still alive? Where is she? Who will find her? Who will survive...and who wont?

Thus begins a tale of treachery, sex, murder, money and corruption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524687700

Book preview

Chapter One

He had spent the last 19 years in Raiford Prison. He was going to refuse parole today. Again. For the last time.

Florida State Prison, Raiford is located on State Road 16 about 35 miles north of Gainesville, not far from the Georgia border. Raiford is the only prison in the state of Florida without the words correctional institution in its name. The reason is simple. It makes no effort to rehabilitate its inmates, the toughest, hardest criminals in the State of Florida. Simply stated, Raiford is about retribution, not rehabilitation. Built in 1961 and housing over 1,400 inmates, Raiford has one of the state’s two death row cellblocks and the state’s only death chamber, where serial killers like Ted Bundy and various other miscreants breathed their last. The prison population is composed of criminals of all descriptions who have committed nearly every serious crime known to mankind. The weather at Raiford is relentlessly hot and muggy. The damp air permeates everything and gives the sheets, pillows and the entire institution an inescapable mildew smell. Needless to say, that does not make the inmates’ dispositions any sunnier than they already are. One would think nobody in his right mind would stay there a day longer than required, given the choice. One would be wrong.

Dawn broke early the morning of Nick Darcy’s last parole hearing, waking him up a few hours before it was scheduled to start. Like most every other August morning at Raiford, it was hot and humid right from the beginning. Most inmates are excited, or at least hopeful about a parole hearing, either because of the prospect of gaining release, or at least getting off the cell block for a while and breaking out of the daily rut. Nick wasn’t excited or hopeful about the hearing. In fact he wished he didn’t have to go through it all again. He knew he’d be offered parole, but he frankly didn’t give a damn about it. Hell, he was glad this was going to be his last hearing.

He had once been what attorneys think of as a low-level personal injury lawyer. Lay people call them ambulance chasers, small timers who run solo practices and never land a big case or scare anyone in a courtroom. Now his law practice was nearly 20 years ago and seemed a million miles away. Since he would never allow himself to be paroled, the annual hearings of the last several years, with the Chairman droning on, were nothing more than a bureaucratic annoyance to Nick. He had long since decided to never accept parole so that when he got released there would be no restrictions on him and he could pull out all the stops to find Eve. He had loved her with every fiber of his being. She had seduced him into committing murder, then made sure he was convicted. He went to prison; she escaped with millions. And law enforcement wasn’t searching for her because they all thought she was dead. She had engineered what was, at least for 20 years, the perfect crime. Nick was just collateral damage. Now he was committed to a reckoning. To get it, he spent another five years at Raiford. Nick was willing to do whatever was necessary. To say he was all in would be a serious understatement.

Eve was so skilled at manipulation that it had taken Nick a long time to realize that she had raised treachery to an art form at his expense. Though well educated in the ordinary sense, Eve’s greatest weapon was a penetrating, animal intelligence when it came to people. It seemed she was born with a sixth sense about what made people tick. That, combined with a sinewy body, breathy voice that she could make purr and an aura of sensuousness, made her a formidable player in anybody’s book. Guys like Nick are the natural prey of women like that. Of course, any woman would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not pick up right away on the fact that he was a world-class horn dog.

Of course, Eve’s radar had homed in on Nick’s buttons the moment she met him. His swagger telegraphed an almost bulletproof confidence in his ability to seduce coupled with an unshakable belief in his raw sexual prowess. Naturally, she had used sex to manipulate him, writhing and groaning in a manner that seemed to reflect an almost other worldly response to his amorous efforts. Predictably, Nick fell for it hook, line and sinker. He was tailor-made for her plans.

During their trysts, Eve often told him how she had always dreamed of a tropical life of luxury with a sexy man like him. She fantasized about an easy, carefree existence living on a balmy tropical estate staffed with servants. Manipulating Nick was easy for her. Never having been interested in hard work and never having thought much past his next seduction, Nick became enthralled with her and began to picture himself in her tropical fantasy. When the hook was firmly set, Eve began telling him that her husband was abusive. She described emotional abuse at first, sounding like a wife bitching about an insensitive husband who worked too much, but made serious money. She gradually upped the ante, relating fabricated loud, angry arguments she’d had with her husband. When Nick became more and more jealous, she began to tell him about physical abuse. Eve related that her husband had beaten her, not for the first time, in what she described as a painful and humiliating episode. The bruise she had given herself before telling him this tale was what had finally pushed Nick over the top.

Nick saw this as a chance to protect his lover from a physically abusive husband. He made up his mind to kill her husband to cement their relationship and secure a carefree life of tropical luxury. Eve manipulated him so smoothly that Nick even thought it was his own idea. He proposed the murder to her, rationalizing that it was the only way to solve all their problems and live their dream life. She first pretended to be shocked, then hesitant and finally allowed him to think he’d persuaded her to execute the plan she had engineered from the beginning.

Nick had followed Eve’s husband Edward Madden for several days unsuccessfully trying to find an activity pattern and a safe time and place to kill him. Eve knew that her husband’s activities were erratic and knew that Nick wouldn’t be able to find a safe time and place for the murder without some help.

After Nick expressed frustration that Madden’s comings and goings were unpredictable, Eve told him about an appointment for an early morning breakfast business meeting Madden had set for the following day at a local restaurant. Nick cased the restaurant parking lot that night. Early the next morning when Madden pulled into a parking space in the restaurant’s parking lot, there was no one else around. Nick pulled up behind Madden’s car, stopped and opened the front passenger window. As Madden got out of his car, Nick asked him for directions. Madden walked over to Nick’s car and leaned inward to talk with him. He was greeted with six .22 caliber slugs in the chest. The low caliber kept the noise to a minimum; the six slugs made sure the job was done.

As Madden fell to the ground mortally wounded, Nick slowly drove out of the lot, turned right and drove half a block to the corner, where he came to a full stop at a red light before turning right again. He was out of the neighborhood before anyone knew what had happened, much less got a good look at him or his car. A few miles away, Nick wiped down the gun and threw it into a sewer.

Unbeknownst to him, Eve had watched the murder from the third floor of a building across the street and filmed it with a video camera. Later on, during the police investigation, she told Nick they were being blackmailed. Eve said she had received still photos in the mail from the blackmailer who had gotten access to the video from a hidden security camera near the scene. Eve said the blackmailer had threatened to send the video to the police. She told him the blackmailer had gotten Nick’s license plate from the video, tracked him through the DMV and followed him. She said the blackmailer tailed Nick to Eve and Madden’s estate, and figured out the killing was because of a love triangle. Eve said the demand was large, but she wrote a check for it on a joint account she had with her husband in exchange for the video. Of course, it was Eve who later anonymously sent the video to the police. After mailing the video setting up Nick to take the fall for the murder, she made it appear that her body had been burned beyond recognition when her house burned to the ground.

The DA easily convicted Nick of first degree murder and closed the book on Eve as deceased. Nick had paid the price by serving 20 wretched years in Raiford prison; she had spent the same 20 years living in tropical luxury far, far away. Obviously to Eve, Nick’s suffering was of no consequence. He was a tool to be used and put away. She was pretty confident that Nick would never figure out she was still alive, and even if he did, he’d never be able to find her. But Eve never did anything without a back up plan. When his 20-year sentence was coming to a close, she got to work. Just in case.

Nick, like the police and all the others, initially believed that Eve was dead. Yet something kept nagging at him, whispering there was more to it. There was something more, something unexplained and just beyond his grasp, but his gut just wouldn’t let it go. Sometimes he wondered if he was just obsessing out of prison boredom. Was he jumping into another black hole? Despite his doubts, he had spent many hours lying awake in his bunk dissecting the affair with Eve from beginning to end. He relentlessly revisited conversations, notes, comments and anything else he could remember from their relationship. He played devil’s advocate, testing his recollections from every angle, which led to the brutal but inescapable conclusion that Eve had played him. At last, he figured out that she was alive, what she had done, and how she had done it. It was so cruelly calculating and brilliantly executed that it was hard to believe. It hadn’t been easy for him to accept that he had been so gullible and abused so egregiously. His male ego took a serious body blow.

What he had never quite been able to accept on an emotional level was her motivation. He had been wildly infatuated with her and the possibility of living off her husband’s millions. He had been convinced she loved him as much as he loved her. It was humiliating to admit to himself that she had made him a mark from the moment they met. It had been even harder to accept that his good looks, charm and sexual prowess had failed to seduce Eve as powerfully as she seduced him. She performed lustily in bed, which had convinced Nick she wasn’t play-acting. Of course, this made her not falling for him that much harder for Nick to take. He’d never quite accepted that she never gave a damn about him, even as he grudgingly acknowledged he’d been egregiously used and abused. Although he told himself that he would hunt her down for revenge, deep down his self-image craved escape from the humiliation of being used so callously. While he was able to suppress it, the desire for sexual vindication still lurked under the surface after all these years. Nick was kidding himself in thinking it would never boil over.

Nick Darcy was the only child of a hard drinking plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer. He was bright but had performed poorly in school, largely because of his own parents’ affinity for alcohol and their volatile marriage. Nick’s father was smart enough but undisciplined. He had barely squeaked his way into law school, managing to pass the bar exam on his second try. He hung out a shingle and immediately started looking for the dream personal injury case, preferably involving horrible injuries caused by an obviously negligent, deep pocket defendant, which would provide him a fat retirement fee. Dad always needed just that one case to hit pay dirt.

Initially, things seemed promising. But as happens to so many lawyers who open their own shop, the dream PI case never materialized. To his disappointment, the hopes of a lucrative career had never been realized. Nick’s father had spent his career representing clients with dog bites, slip and fall injuries, minor criminal charges, landlord-tenant issues and the occasional will. Oftentimes, it had been more work to collect his fees from his own clients than to do the actual legal work.

He devoted so much time to his practice that there wasn’t much time or energy left for the home front. As the years went by, his drinking became more frequent and heavier. He was never a nurturing father; he treated Nick with benign neglect in his early years. As Nick matured, his father’s treatment went from benign neglect to an authoritarianism designed to prevent his offspring from causing any problems. He also committed occasional physical abuse of his wife and son when drinking heavily. The abuse caused an occasional bruise, but was never severe enough to draw blood or get the attention of County authorities.

Nick’s father had had a series of extra-marital affairs, usually in connection with drinking. Nick saw more than his share of parental arguments as he was growing up. While it had never gotten to the point of divorce, there had been many nasty arguments, especially when both parents had been drinking. Nick guessed that his mother had had her own affairs in retaliation; the unhappy marriage had limped along. Neither parent had given much attention to raising Nick, although his mother at least made an occasional attempt. He had grown up mostly on his own, doing pretty much as he wanted. His mother had never been particularly interested in kids and Nick had been an accident after a boozy dinner.

Nick had grown to full size in his early teens and was moderately tall with blond hair and soft brown eyes. Schoolwork came easily to him and when puberty arrived, he spent most of his time trying to get laid. He was pretty successful at it. Throughout his school years, Nick affected a surfer boy look, though he didn’t surf or spend much time or effort at sports. That didn’t matter much to his female classmates, most of whom were anxious to date him. This kept him busy throughout his educational career all the way up to law school graduation, by which time he had worked his way through nearly a quarter of the female law students in his class. Nick took great pride in his appearance and sexual conquests.

Having seen the toll shaky finances, marital strife and hard drinking had taken on his father, Nick vowed that he would never end up like him. He had gone to law school for the sole purpose of making money, pure and simple. He had never even given much thought to what he would do with the money when he made it; he just wanted to make damn sure he didn’t wind up like his Dad. He didn’t have a career plan. He had no real desire to expand the size of his practice. And he certainly had no desire to become a judge or hold political office. Like his father, Nick wanted to take the shortcut to retirement, dreaming of the big PI case. The irony of this choice escaped him. But if some other way of getting money presented itself, Nick was fine with that, too.

Nick hadn’t studied any harder than he had to in law school, but was good enough at cramming to make it through, graduating in the bottom quarter of the class. He figured once he got his license and started practicing, his law school grades wouldn’t matter. He had started out in a four-lawyer firm for a few years and then opened up his own shop as a solo attorney. He never had his Dad’s financial issues, but the dream case had never come along for him, either. Like most PI attorneys hoping for the big hit, his optimism gradually eroded into cynicism, but he never completely gave up hope. As his optimism faded, his enthusiasm for law practice waned. As hope for the retirement case faded, he became increasingly willing to make money by other means. Nick went through a period of heavy drinking, which resulted in his getting sued for legal malpractice. He had been sued for a will and trust he drafted that failed to reduce taxes as he had promised. He lost. Through it all, he never lost his interest in the ladies. His romantic successes allowed him to maintain some significant self-esteem, even if his legal career didn’t. It was at this point that Eve arrived at his office, asking about a divorce.

Chapter Two

Louis Johnston was the Chairman of the Florida State Parole Commission. He had been appointed by then Governor Bob Martinez in 1987, after having labored in the salt mines of various Republican campaigns for many years and putting in a solid 15 years in various administrative posts in state government. Over the years he had performed adequately, never kicking up a fuss over anything, never rising above the quotidian, never suggesting an innovation and never doing more than he had to. The Parole Commission appointment had been pretty much what he had deserved, but it had disappointed him since his now former brother in law, a State Senator, had agreed to go to bat for him. This had raised Johnston’s expectations for a plum appointment. Predictably, like a good soldier, he acquiesced and got over his disappointment. He had found working on the Parole Commission boring and it was obvious that this was the last stop in his middling career.

As the years went by, realizing that he would never rise above this job had led to a certain despondency. His drinking had gradually increased over time, but it had never reached the point of impairing his work. When his wife asked for a divorce, he agreed and didn’t put up much of a fight over the terms. He had long since given up any effort to conceal his boredom with pretty much everything in his life.

In the prison’s public Parole Board Hearing Room, flanked by two other Board members, and after several other prisoners’ hearings, Johnston’s clerk called Darcy’s hearing in a flat voice that she thought sounded professional. Mr. Johnston then began reading the Commission’s report in a low energy monotone, utterly devoid of interest.

"Mr. Darcy, the applicable rules and regulations of the Florida State Parole Commission governing parole hearings in the State of Florida require that, before we begin this hearing, the report of the permanent staff of the Parole Board regarding the petitioner be read aloud. As Chairman of this committee, it is incumbent upon me to do so. Also, as you may know from your own experience, parole hearings are recorded by a certified court stenographer. The hearings are open to the public so that anyone may attend. We note for the record that Assistant District Attorney Patrick Dunlop, who did not prosecute your case, is present in the hearing room today and is the only observer other than a young lady and one other gentleman, neither of whom is known to the Board. Nick turned and saw a law school classmate and a young woman who was a total stranger to him.

Johnston cleared his throat and began reading. By way of background, Mr. Nick Darcy was an attorney practicing law in a solo practice in the city of Oceanside, Florida. According to the uncontradicted evidence presented at his trial and placed on the record, Mr. Darcy entered into a sexual liaison with a married woman named Eve Tucker Madden, then the wife of the now long deceased Edward Madden. Mr. Madden was a wealthy businessman with a prime Intracoastal Waterway estate in the community of Snug Harbor, Florida. During the course of the affair, Mr. Darcy entered into a conspiracy with Ms. Madden to murder her husband. Their plan was to have Ms. Madden claim his life insurance and inherit her husband’s wealth so that the two conspirators could enjoy the victim’s substantial estate.

After he murdered Mr. Madden, Mr. Darcy became convinced that Ms. Madden had manipulated him and had caused him to be convicted of the murder while she inherited the estate. Mr. Darcy drove to the Madden residence to confront her. He arrived there to find the house engulfed in flames. It was later determined that the explosion and fire were caused by a gas leak.

Mr. Darcy was subsequently convicted of the murder of Edward Madden. In the penalty phase of his trial, Mr. Darcy freely admitted that he had been involved in a romantic relationship with Ms. Madden. In mitigation of his criminal actions, he contended that Ms. Madden had seduced and manipulated him, causing him to be infatuated with her to the point that he had committed murder. While this did not exonerate him, he argued that it mitigated his criminal intent, at least to a degree. He took the position that the murder was obviously a crime of passion.

Shortly after Mr. Darcy’s arrest, cremated remains found in what had been the kitchen of the residence were determined by the Coroner to be those of Eve Tucker Madden. The Coroner based his identification of the body on the testimony of Mr. Darcy and, most importantly, her dental records. Additionally, the Coroner relied on wedding and engagement rings, which had been identified through the use of family photographs supplied by Mrs. Madden’s sister in law. Mr. Darcy was unable to provide any insight into who beside himself might have a motive to murder Mrs. Madden. It was suspected that Mr. Darcy had murdered her himself as part of a lover’s triangle, but this was not charged in the discretion of the District Attorney at the time. There was no need since Mr. Darcy admitted his guilt in the murder of Mr. Edward Madden. The investigation into her death remains open to this day.

As of the date of this hearing, Mr. Darcy has been incarcerated for approximately 19 years of his 20-year sentence. Given his status as a former attorney, Mr. Darcy was assigned to the prison law library. He has worked in the library in various positions for almost the entire period of his incarceration at this institution. Throughout that time, Mr. Darcy has not only dutifully carried out the responsibilities of a librarian, but has also demonstrated initiative. He volunteered to teach other inmates courses on legal research and writing. Not only would this allow them to perform research on their own legal matters, it could also provide them with the skills necessary to work as a paralegal or other staff member of a law firm or other entity in need of paralegal services upon their release from this institution. In his library staff work, Mr. Darcy was permitted, after he became a trusty, to use the library computer system. He became adept with computers and used the internet to update and improve the prison library in many ways that are deemed to have been beneficial to the institution.

Mr. Darcy has otherwise conducted himself as a model inmate during his time at this institution. He has been recommended for parole in each of the last four years, but has declined to accept parole on each occasion. It is once again recommended by the staff that Mr. Darcy be granted parole under the standard protocol.

Mr. Darcy, each member of this committee has reviewed and analyzed this report and we have unanimously agreed that the staff recommendation is appropriate and will grant parole to you at this time, if you would agree to accept it.

"Thank your Mister Chairman and the