Read Devils Among Us (Devin Dushane Series Book 1) for Free Online

pain of the sound sent a shiver through the growing crowd. Officer Kenny
Dalton was the first to get to Henry, but he stopped in his tracks a few feet
away and then spun around and began vomiting. Someone had the good sense to
tackle Bobby before he reached the scene. Years later, seasoned veterans of the
sheriff’s department would say they had never seen so much blood in a crime
scene.
    A month to the day before her eighteenth birthday they found
Laney Bennett. The beautiful brown eyes that had charmed so many were staring,
unseeing, into the canopy of leaves above, their light gone forever.

Chapter
5
    June 2, 2001
     
    Devin was taking her time getting to Fenton. She had a lot
to consider and was in no rush to confront her family’s demons, so she had
opted for the scenic route through the Virginia countryside. She snapped the
radio off with a snort.  The DJ had been comparing the latest boy band to the
Beatles. She’d rather listen to the wind blowing through her window then that
rock and roll blasphemy.
    Devin had never been to her father’s birthplace—by the time
she’d been born her grandmother was already in a mental hospital. Her father
had come back a handful of times over the years, mostly to oversee his mother’s
house, which he still owned and rented out. But in all of his trips, he’d never
brought Devin or her brother Tucker, and, to her knowledge, he never brought
their mother there before the divorce. 
    She thought back to her parents’ divorce. She’d been nine
and Tucker was just four. It could honestly be said that Bobby and Mary Ann Bennett
had done their very best to make a go of it. But her father could never get
away from the bottle for very long, and her mother could only stand his long
absences and their gypsy lifestyle for so long.
    Eventually Mary Ann had made a permanent break from her
husband and tried to maintain some stability for her children. Even with her
best efforts, the small family moved frequently. They lived all over Richmond and in most of the suburbs. Mary Ann had preferred to live in the city, though.
Devin suspected it was to be closer to Bobby. Whenever her father was in town,
he generally ran a garage located somewhere in the city. When Mary Ann committed
suicide five years after the divorce, they were living only three blocks from
Bobby’s garage.
    Devin had been the one to find her mother and had to kick the
bathroom door in to get to her. Thankfully Tucker had been spending the night
at a friend’s house. Looking back, the signs had been evident that her mother had
slipped further and further into the darkness in the years after the divorce.
There was a part of Mary Ann that held Devin responsible for the state of their
family, no matter how irrational that was. She’d often wondered if her mother planned
for her to find her body to punish her a bit for what had become of them.
    It worked.
    After the funeral Devin and Tucker went to live with their
father, and Bobby stayed around just enough to keep them out of foster care.
His partner at the garage, Mickey, frequently looked in on them, and Devin
relied on him heavily. When she travelled to Thailand, Tucker stayed with
Mickey. The arrangement became permanent when Devin and Carter came back from
the NCAA Final Four in Atlantic City, married at twenty-one. Tucker had never
really developed a relationship with their father, but Devin had spent as much
time as possible in his garage when he was around. That’s why she knew way too
much about cars for a twenty-nine year old woman. It was also why Devin had
always been driven to be a police officer, a detective, and one day an FBI
agent. She wanted to have the resources and power to solve her aunt’s murder.
Devin saw the man her father would have been if not for that single tragedy.
Maybe if she could solve the murder, she could put the pieces back together of
what was left of her broken family.
    As Devin rounded the next curve, the town limit sign for
Fenton