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 36
Camilla and I spent the entire weekend in Mentone. Depressed. After Emma and Ella’s funeral on Friday afternoon we almost decided not to go. But, we had paid a deposit when we made the reservations a few weeks ago. We ultimately decided to go and avoid contact with anyone to recover from the most disabling emotional attack either one of us had ever experienced. We returned a little before dark yesterday afternoon after having stayed in the Sequoia Room at the Mountain Laurel Inn for nearly forty-eight hours, leaving for only two hours to visit DeSoto Falls late Saturday afternoon.
Ever since Adam Parker’s exhumation and learning that he had been murdered and the autopsy had been falsified, I had assigned Joe to investigate the intricacies of how Dr. Culbert had been manipulated into abandoning a lucrative medical practice in Huntsville and moving, along with his family, to Dubois, Wyoming. I had also asked Blair to prepare me a detailed accounting from the Open Curtains App of all three of the William’s vehicles from a week before Adam’s death to a week after.
Ten days ago, Joe had asked me to ask Dalton for permission to review Roger’s banking records that had been acquired through the discovery process of the Sand Mountain Bank lawsuit. Joe had completed his assignment last Thursday but the school shooting event, along with funerals and my emotional trauma, had delayed mine and Joe’s meeting.
Joe’s investigation had been thorough and productive. He discovered that a company named Windy Mountain Real Estate, LLC had purchased Dr. Culbert’s mini-ranch outside Dubois, Wyoming. The forty-acre tract had been deeded to Bart and Danielle Collins at a real estate closing at the law offices of Phil Adams in Lander, Wyoming. Lander is about seventy-five miles southeast of Dubois. Joe had researched the land records at the Freemont County Courthouse and learned the subject land tract had been transferred to the Collins’ last January. Mr. Adams had been forthcoming and described how he never met the Collins, but Wyoming law required identity documentation before land transfers take place.
Adams said that it was a double-closing, meaning Windy Mountain’s purchase and its transfer to the Collins took place back to back. The LLC was formed in Delaware just five days before the closing. The organizing members of the LLC were a Lawton Hawks and a Clarence Livingston.
It was fate or a rare coincidence that enabled Joe to discover the identity of Clara Livingston, or it was Russell Williams’ lifelong bad luck. Attorney Adams said that Wyoming was the toughest state in America on requiring closing attorney’s to properly identify buyers and sellers, even those, as he said, “trying to hide behind near-impenetrable walls of a corporation.” If not for Blair and her Evernote database we likely would never have learned that Clarence Livingston was Russell Williams live-in girlfriend from Smyrna, Georgia. Her real name was Clara Livingston. Adams had required photo IDs for both Hawks and Clarence. Russell had done a poor job of disguising himself. Although he had worn a wig and a fake mustache, he had ignored disguising the long scar on the right side of his neck that Joe had learned was obtained during a fight with a former girlfriend over the ownership of nearly a gram of cocaine.
It was difficult to figure out why Lawton Hawks had made no effort to conceal his identity. The only thing I could come up with was that he someway had a premonition that he wouldn’t get out of the Adam Parker death and autopsy adventure alive.
What connected things back to Roger was the deposit uncovered by Joe in the mountain of discovery materials at Dalton’s office. Joe had spent days trying to find something, a check or some other type withdrawal, that could account for the million-dollar transfer to Bart and Danielle Collins. Bart, rather Dr. Culbert, had told Joe the deposit was made by wire transfer to an account his assailants had set up at Wells Fargo Bank in Dubois, Wyoming. Joe learned that the source of the million dollars was an account titled Clara Livingston at the Wells Fargo Bank in Smyrna, Georgia.
It certainly appeared that Roger was the originating source of the million dollars and that he had done a rather sloppy job of getting the money to its intended target. To me, it seemed he had used his ex-con son to facilitate another crime. I could hear Roger now saying that he had given money to his son to keep from being unfair, given the amount of money he had invested in his other son’s political campaign.
No matter what Roger would say, any one with half a mind would conclude that Roger Williams was guilty of, at a minimum, covering up the crime of falsifying an autopsy. My gut was telling me he was a full conspirator in the murder of Adam Parker.
What cinched things in my mind was what Blair discovered in her Open Curtains assignment. She had learned that Russell Williams had driven his 2017 Lexus GS 300 Sedan to 2904 Westcorp Blvd., Suite 107 in Huntsville, Alabama on the morning of Tuesday, January 2nd, two days after the body of Adam Parker was discovered. Couple this with marvelously persuasive work by Joe, I was certain it was Russell that had convinced Dr. Culbert to make the life-changing decision to falsify Parker’s autopsy, abandon his medical practice, and move to Dubois, Wyoming, changing his full identity along the way. Joe had someway persuaded Jill Traynor, a Huntsville Pathology secretary, to reveal to him Russell’s medical file. He, as Clarence Livingston, had used subterfuge to obtain an appointment to see Dr. Culbert. I found it hilarious that Russell had used the same disguise. In the medical file was a photo of the Pathology Associates new patient. Seems like Wyoming wasn’t the only entity that believed in some sort of identifying process.
Late Monday afternoon, as I sat at my desk after everyone had gone for the day, I couldn’t help but feel my grief over Emma and Ella’s deaths, slowly subsiding and being replaced with hope that I was on the trail of getting Adam Parker a little justice. As is often the case in criminal investigations, the detective isn’t always as close to solving the case as he believes. It would be a while before I learned this.
The Pencil Driven Life 