The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Case of the Perfectionist Professor, written in 2018, is my sixth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Late on New Year’s Eve in the small town of Boaz, Alabama, Snead State Community College teacher Adam Parker was found dead slumped over in his car. A preliminary investigation indicated the fifty-year-old biology professor died of a heart attack. Marissa Booth, Adam’s daughter and Vanderbilt School of Divinity professor, didn’t agree.
Four days later, Marissa hired the local private detective firm of Connor Ford to investigate her father’s death. She declared local police officer Jake Stone had likely murdered her father. She pointed Ford to a multi-month Facebook feud between Adam and several local people, including Stone and Boaz City Councilman Lawton Hawks. The controversy allegedly related to Adam’s research that contended that, in layman’s terms, long-term indoctrination caused actual genetic mutations that directly affected future generation’s ability to reason.
Over the next year, Connor Ford discovered multiple and independent sources of motivation to quiet and possibly murder the controversial professor. Ford learned that a civil lawsuit and widespread public outcry had effectively run Adam out of Knoxville, where he was a biology professor for over thirteen years. Ford also learned that Adam had become the number one enemy of Roger Williams, a self-made local businessman, and his son Alex, who is a Republican candidate for governor of Alabama. Adam had discovered Alex and Glock, Inc., the Austrian-based gun manufacturer, was exploring not only the possibility of setting up a large facility in Boaz but also supplying pistols for Alex’s highly touted and controversial ‘arm the teachers’ proposal.
Connor Ford has his hands full enough with these suspects. Add in his need to determine whether Lawton Hawks and Jake Stone are friends or foes of Roger and Alex, which accentuate the pressure no normal small-town private detective can handle.
Will Connor’s discovery there is a link between Dayton, Tennessee, and the 1929 Scopes Monkey trial and a rogue group of CIA operatives bend Connor and his two associates to the breaking point?
Read this mystery/thriller to find out if Adam Parker was murdered and how, and what role the long-standing controversy between science and religion had in destroying the life of a single perfectionist professor.
Chapter 33
Yesterday after church I had received a notification on my iPhone that Adam’s Open Curtains App was active. I still had mixed feelings about having Tony at the Sheriff’s office add my phone number to the App on Adam’s iPad. On the one hand I liked knowing when either Roger, Alex, Russell, or Jake were moving about in their vehicles. And, for some strange reason, it was pleasing to know when Marissa was mobile. But, the notifications were too frequent. It was every day that I now received half a dozen or even a dozen texts—every time one of the five drove even an inch. Two days after Tony had added my phone number, I had stopped going to Adam’s iPad to see if the OC’s App was recording any audio that was worth listening to. It was now Blair’s job to review the content of each one of these notifications.
Maybe because it was the weekend, more particularly, it was Sunday afternoon, and I was kind of bored. Camilla, Emily, and Natalie were visiting Amy at the Playhouse and I was between novels. I walked to my study and pulled Adam’s iPad from my briefcase. I clicked on the Open Curtain’s icon and quickly saw that it was Roger who was on the move. There was about a five-minute delay between the beginning of the target’s words and the sending of the notification. I pressed the ‘Audio’ button and listened.
Roger: “I’ve told you a dozen times I will not pay you $100,000. But to shut you up and show you I’m fair I’m going to give you another $5,000.”
Second voice: “Fair? Mr. Hotshot, you don’t want to know what is fair. You’ll pay me the exact amount I’m demanding, or you’ll regret learning about fairness.”
I would have known the voice anywhere. It was Tommy Lee Gore. There was several seconds of silence. It felt like a minute or more.
Roger: “Meet me at Cox Chapel Methodist Church. It’s on Cox Gap Road, after you go off the mountain, about a half mile before you get to Sand Valley Road.”
Tommy Lee: “I know where it is.”
Roger: “Pull to the back of the church next to the creek. Be there in fifteen minutes. I’ve got your money.”
Tommy Lee: “I’ll be there.”
I walked into mine and Camilla’s bedroom and outside onto the balcony. I sat alone waiting. I switched to the ‘Travel’ side of the App and watched a little blue dot on a map make its way south on Highway 431, turn left on Cox Gap Road and wind its way down the long curvy road through two-horseshoe bend turns. No doubt the App used Google Maps. The church was labeled just like it was on Google. In less than ten minutes, the blue dot stopped just a little to the northwest of the church, right beside the thick blue line drawn depicting the creek. I heard Roger mumble to himself as he no doubt got out of his Cadillac.
Roger: “I wish I had the fucking guts to kill the bastard.”
In a couple of more minutes I heard Tommy Lee say, “what you got?” That was the last thing I could understand, but that didn’t keep me from knowing there was a very heated argument taking place between the two men. They apparently were just far enough away from Roger’s car and the Open Curtains device to inhibit the needed clarity.
The next thing I heard was Roger say, “we’ve got a fucking problem. I just met with Tommy Lee Gore. I thought he might kill me. He is hotter than hell. Threatening to teach me a lesson.” Roger was now back in his Cadillac talking with someone on his cell phone.
I wished someway the Open Curtains App could detect something, maybe a phone number, for the person called from inside a target’s vehicle. Nonetheless, the only response the male voice said was, “I’ll take care of it.”
That was all Roger, or anyone said. I sat and watched the blue dot return to Boaz and park at Rand Corp in the Industrial Park. Roger didn’t mouth a word during the entire drive, either to himself or to anyone else.
I walked back to the study and put Adam’s iPad back in my briefcase. I heard Camilla calling from the kitchen, “Connor Cat, where is you?” Since our second date and since she learned what I did for a living she had called me that, saying she bet I was as cunning as a cat after its prey. I was glad the drop-dead gorgeous brunette was fully deluded.
I spent all afternoon yesterday with Mark and Tony trying to convince the DA to issue a warrant for Roger’s involvement in Natalie’s kidnapping. We split our time between the Sheriff’s Department and DA Abbott’s office. Every time we would walk some new fact back across the street to Abbott, he would request something else. One would think that what we already knew would be more than enough to at least bring him in for questioning. Paige and I were a witness to Natalie being held against her will at Roger’s lake house. Not to mention, Mark’s team having found Beanpole dead shortly after Paige, Natalie, and I had seen Jake Stone driving towards the house (I hadn’t mentioned that I was not positive it was Jake). All this and the recordings of Sunday afternoon’s conversation between Roger and who I knew was Tommy Lee Gore clearly illustrated direct involvement by both Roger and Tommy. I knew when I left Guntersville that Roger Williams was a powerful man around Sand Mountain and that money talked. I suspected we were going to have to produce a videotape showing Roger admitting his complicity in Natalie’s kidnapping. Driving back to Boaz, I thought about contacting Sherlock Industries or whoever created the Open Curtains App to suggest they somehow add a camera to their GPS and audio-recording device.
The Pencil Driven Life 