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 22
Saturday night Camilla and I went to Gadsden and saw the movie “Red Sparrow.” It was an okay spy movie with too much sex and too little substance. I did like Jennifer Lawrence as Dominika Egorova who was conscripted into Russian intelligence. I also liked that she was tasked with seducing Dimitry Ustinov, a Russian politician, and covertly replacing his phone with a state-provided phone. Tech stuff always got my attention.
Sunday morning was spent in church listening to Pastor Caleb trying his best to support the Genesis story and the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve. I guess Saturday’s seminar prompted his sermon. From all my recent evolutionary readings it seemed the Pastor was making a lot of leaps in logic to conclude that the creation story was a historical fact. I had to give it to him, he made a plausible argument if you looked strictly at scripture itself. I made a mental note to do a little research on a man named Ken Ham and his Answers in Genesis organization.
Yesterday afternoon after church Emily and Camilla left me alone at Hickory Hollow as they went on their quarterly adventure. Shortly after Emily moved to Boaz the two had conspired that each quarter they would have a date of sorts and pursue a unique adventure. I had no problem with it until right before they left Camilla announced they had invited Amy to go along. I was clearly reminded of what a strange situation had developed right under my nose. Amy, my ex-wife, was living next door (we shared the same driveway) and my fiancé was going out of her way to befriend the woman I’d spent most of my life sleeping with. I couldn’t figure out exactly what Camilla was up to, but I chose to trust her judgment. No doubt she was a peacemaker. At 10:30 last night I learned the three of them had gone to visit the Benedictine Sisters Retreat Center in Cullman to learn how prayer and a peaceful environment can produce spiritual growth. I thought it was rather odd that after nearly three hours with the nuns, the three found some real peace at Jim and Nick’s eating and drinking two glasses of red wine before heading back to Boaz. I didn’t ask who drove home.
I skipped breakfast with Garrett this morning to arrive at the office a little after seven. While Camilla and her two musketeers were away yesterday I had spent several hours in my war room. It had been Camilla’s idea. Not yesterday’s visit but constructing the small room to begin with when we were contemplating the renovation and build-out of our new offices. Camilla was aware of how messy I could be. At first, I had included this space behind my office as a large pantry for the kitchen. She had suggested I reverse my plans by putting the door in the corner of my office and using it to hide all my sketches, bulletin boards, strings, push pins and index cards. No doubt she had seen what a mess my office had been the two years I had rented space at Scott Plaza.
My mess had a lot to do with Bobby Sorrells and how he had trained me. He attacked his cases like an unwritten book. He showed me how to use three visuals to plot out an unsolved crime; all incorporated the use of a spare wall. The first one was a mind map of sorts. It was like a tree with multiple branches. In the center you started out with your main subject (Adam Parker). Basically, the purpose was to create various clusters of knowledge, trying to think logically, keeping similar topics and subtopics together. Bobby always said, “we have prior knowledge, X. Now we have acquired this new knowledge, Y. Let’s run all of this by an expert (which often was ourselves) and see what future knowledge will likely arise.”
The second method was simply using index cards to develop our story. It was closer to an outlining tool, but was similar to mind-mapping. It provided a little more flexibility in rearranging thoughts and ideas. Since moving to Boaz, I had taken the liberty to alter Bobby’s third method, which was more like fishing than anything. He called it cooking. He printed every piece of existing evidence on separate slips of paper and put them all in a hat. When he felt like he was spinning his wheels, he would draw two items out of his big cowboy hat. It was almost like a game. He would then try to ascertain some type relationship with the two items drawn.
It was this method that I had adapted. I had discovered a piece of software that artists were using to discover new colors. Camilla had read about it in, of all places, a cosmetology magazine. It was easily modified to generate associations among the many colors (in my case, facts or items) that had been inputted. It was this third method I had tried to use yesterday afternoon and that had caused much frustration. But, in a semi-conscious state during the middle of the night, an idea had come to me.
The two items the program had spun out that I was to attempt to associate was Kurt Prescott and Steven Knott. The only reason Prescott was even in my database was that he was Peyton Todd’s boss. This also reminded me of the other major modification I had made to Bobby’s ‘cooking’ method. I had created a version that I could use to combine facts/evidence/paper slips from the top two cases I was working on. To every other average intelligent person on earth, I would be labeled a professional rabbit chaser.
Until 3:00 a.m. this morning, I would have agreed. What made me think I was at least semi-sane was that I had been seeing some overlap in my two main cases. For example, I now knew Steven Knott was present in both the Adam Parker case and the Hannah Knott case. It didn’t seem a leap that the boss of Steven’s girlfriend (of course we still didn’t have hard evidence of this) might have a slight role in at least our love-affair case.
After Blair arrived at 8:00 a.m., I told her I didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone, and that included her and Joe. I locked my office door and shut my war-mapping door. I had spent the hour before Blair arrived online trying to learn all I could about Kurt Prescott. What had awoken me at 3:00 a.m. didn’t make any sense at all. I knew dream-like phases of the night often brewed up pure nonsense. What I had seen in my mind’s eye was Mr. Prescott wearing one of those gowns they make you put on in a hospital. Your front side is covered but your backside is open to the world. And, he was walking out in the desert. This image was still with me during my one-hour online search.
I was immediately encouraged when my first Google query produced two results that revealed Kurt had spent the eight years prior to starting the Sand Mountain Bank in Boaz as President of First Bank of Dayton, Tennessee. I couldn’t help but relate this with the fact Adam Parker had spent some time in Dayton exploring the Scopes Monkey Trial. The second result included a link to an article from the Herald-News, Dayton’s local newspaper. I clicked on that link and read the article. It was dated August 13, 2014 and mainly focused on First Bank’s new president, a Kerry Ryder, who was from Nashville. The article had one sentence that interested me. It read, “Kerry Ryder is replacing Kurt Prescott who is leaving First Bank to start his own bank in Boaz, Alabama.”
I decided to search the archives of the Herald-News, thankful that many older newspapers had invested into new technology. Their website touted the fact all 119 years of Dayton’s newspaper history was now online. What a feat that must have been. A search of ‘Kurt Prescott’ turned up three articles, including the one I had just read. The first of the remaining two articles dealt with Kurt’s tireless efforts to promote reading. It seemed he spent an afternoon every week at Rhea County High School in a revolving process of meeting with ten seniors to motivate them to become avid readers. I didn’t think this article could ever relate to the death of Adam Parker.
The second and final article was a letter to the editor of the Herald-News. It was written by a Debbie Wray thanking Kurt Prescott for all his support during the months since she had lost her son, Josh Wray, to gun violence. Apparently, Josh was found dead behind Rhea County High School two days before he was to graduate in May 2015. Ms. Wray said that Kurt Prescott had been instrumental in persuading Josh to decide on college versus joining the military. At the end of the article, Ms. Wray said, that she didn’t believe a word of the rumors that were floating around about Kurt Prescott.
After I locked myself in my office and entered my war room I spent the next four hours (without technology; another one of my war room rules) brainstorming what, if anything, connected Kurt Prescott to Steven Knott. I tried each of my three methods and the best I could come up with was they were connected by Peyton Todd. No doubt, my day, so far, had been extremely productive. I loved sarcasm. As I walked out of my office a few minutes before noon, I couldn’t help but feel depressed over my insane interest and ability in rabbit chasing.
Thursday morning, I made myself get up and go walking and jogging. I had realized yesterday afternoon when Blair and Joe were talking about enrolling in an aerobics class at Health Connections that I was rapidly becoming soft. If the two of them, both fit and trim, saw the need to toughen up and further tone their bodies I had no choice if I wanted to command respect as a bounty hunter.
The idea had come a few days ago when Mark Hale had called and said the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department was thinking about starting a program to deputize a few folks to assist them in serving warrants and arresting non-violent folks, such as deadbeat dads avoiding child support orders. It was a way for the Sheriff to balance his budget and still fulfill his duty of enforcing the law. Mark had encouraged me to sign up, saying, “I know you’re getting a little pudgy but this ain’t like arresting a serial killer. It’ll be a way to help pay for that fancy office.”
Half way to Oak Drive I was pouring sweat even though it was two degrees above freezing. As I was trying to decide what I wanted to eat for breakfast, I heard a loud rumble coming from the approaching curve. The one thing I had always hated about living down Cox Gap Road was having to put up with the James clan that lived in Sand Valley. They were a multi-generation family of rednecks that, according to rumor, did some dirty work for some shady characters out of Atlanta. Some locals referred to the Atlanta boys as mobsters. I had never had dealings with a single James, but I had on many an occasion gotten an ear full of their giant Ford pickups with missing mufflers.
As the sound got louder I saw the burnt red Ford around the corner and top the hill this side of Oak Drive. I made a mental note to start wearing some form of ear protection. The roaring engine was that loud. I stopped my jogging and moved off the road and into a shallow ditch to my left. When the truck was within thirty or forty feet it slowed to a crawl. A dark-haired man that I didn’t immediately recognize stuck his head out the passenger side window and yelled, “Connor Ford, you lying sack of shit. It’s such a blessing seeing you out here.” As the pickup pulled next to me I realized the man was Tommy Lee Gore. He had acquired glasses and a beard since I had last seen him at the Huddle House restaurant.
I decided not to respond but kept on walking. The driver of the pickup put his truck in reverse and started rolling back, keeping Tommy Lee right beside me. “Hey dickhead, you think you’re too good to talk to me?”
“Mr. Gore, you know that’s not true. I always enjoy our deep conversations.” I should have kept walking with my mouth shut.
“You smart ass, always thinking you are the smartest cat in the room.” Tommy said and turned to look at the truck’s driver. “Gator, you think we ought to have a little fun with the professor here?” Gator and Grady his brother, were twins and well known, especially down in Sand Valley. They, along with their twin sisters, Gretchen and Georgia, were the youngest generation of James’ who were just starting to have kids of their own. None of these four were out of their teens. I imagined the first crop of babies would result from Gator and Grady’s exploitation of Gretchen and Georgia.
“He looks too sweaty for my taste.” Gator looked over at me and smiled, revealing a mouthful of either black teeth or chewing tobacco.
“You’re right Gator, I think I’d rather have a piece of that pretty little woman that cuts the sweaty man’s hair. You know, the one we saw with the lovely Emily and the aging Amy.” This was all it took to wake my weak-kneed ass up. I wasn’t going to be cowered by these redneck animals, especially when they started spewing out threats.
I reached behind me and pulled out my Ruger SR9 from my nearly new leather holster. Before Tommy Lee’s shit-faced smile evaporated I had his truck door open and my left hand on the shoulder of his denim jacket. I yanked hard and he slid out of the truck head first, rolling onto the shoulder of the road and then down into the ditch. I knelt beside him pointing my ready Ruger on the bridge of his nose. “Okay dickhead, let me be clear. You stay the fuck away from me and my family or I’ll blow your fucking head off. Do I make myself clear?”
“You gonna shoot me like you did my brother. You gonna kill me and lie your way again out of prison. Go ahead.” I hadn’t forgotten Tommy’s partner. He was now exiting the truck and making the last turn around the hood. I spun and saw him welding a double-barrel shotgun that was pointed my way.
“Back off Gator.” I said as a horn blared behind me coming from out of the curve and pulling to a stop within ten feet of the Ford’s bumper. “Pull that trigger and you’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in prison.”
“What we got going on here Connor?” It was my neighbor Chuck Holland. He was an older guy, probably sixty or so, but the type you knew was hard as nails. His land joined the east side of my eighty acres and he spent most of his time cutting and selling firewood.
“Looks like the James family has taken up with one of my old friends. Chuck meet Tommy Lee Gore. You probably know Gator James.” I said lowering my Ruger while seeing Gator remove his right index finger from the Browning’s trigger and lowering it to his side.
“You boys need to get on down the road. Butch is probably getting a little antsy.” I had met Butch a couple of times. He was a cross between a rottweiler and a pit bull. He went everywhere with Chuck. I could hear him in the bed of the old Chevy sharpening his teeth, probably on the bar of an old chainsaw.
I had backed away from Tommy Lee and he was now on his feet. “Let’s go Gator. I guess Connor don’t want to talk.” The two men got back in the big Ford and drove off.
“What’s up with them assholes?” Chuck said as he eyed my Ruger.
“History. Bad blood between me and the dark-haired, thick glassed man. He’s Tommy Lee Gore. I had to kill his brother a few years back. He’s not forgotten.” I said.
“You better watch yourself. I don’t know Mr. Gore, but the James boy is a spitting image of his grandfather. He’s the only man that cranks up my fear. Give him a reason and he’ll gut you before you can breathe. You take care. I gotta run. Ms. Saunders ordered two loads of hickory.”
As Chuck drove away, I continued my walk towards Oak Drive, finally remembering I was still holding my Ruger. I slipped it back in its holster and started contemplating what I needed to do to protect Emily, Camilla, and Amy from, what was no doubt in my mind, the determined stalking of Tommy Lee Gore.
Richard L. Fricks 