Read The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) for Free Online Page A

promoted to a loan officer at Wellington Capital Bank on Southern.
    Detective Temeke called to confirm they had a body, if you could call it a body. Darryl couldn’t feel his legs after he’d seen it and he couldn’t feel them now.
    He sat on the bed and stared at the gun in his lap. He could either top himself, or someone else, and the someone else option seemed to be the most practical. He had two surviving daughters to take care of. It wouldn’t do to abandon them.
    He felt soft cotton beneath one hand, fingers caressing the quilt his late wife had made. There were little hexagonal boxes and perfect stitching, and then the colors all melded into a teary haze, worse than when he was drunk.
    He had tried to stop drinking, tried to stop buying the stuff when his kids were around. He brewed dandelions with ginger, cloves and orange peel. It went much further when you mixed it with wine and you got a whole lot drunker too.
    He wiped his eyes and looked outside the window at the back yard and the arroyo beyond. On the horizon he could see the west mesa and the remnants of five cinder cone volcanoes. They had erupted long ago, leaving behind a lava flow of fine black dust.
    All dead and forgotten, he thought. Like the dad he once had. He missed the tall lean figure that towered over him as a child, missed his soothing voice. He knew that voice more than anyone else. That was the pain for him.
    He gazed at the fir tree in the corner of the yard covered in snow, a reminder that Christmas was near. He began to wonder how many times Kizzy had seen the same view, what thoughts had gone through her head. This was her bedroom, after all.
    The detective had called again this morning about a journal they had only just found. A journal they should have found thirty-four days ago when the scene was first combed by a pack of field investigators. Now Darryl would relive Kizzy’s nightmare through her own words.
    There can’t be any more hate in me , he thought, until a new day came bringing a fresh portion of it.
    Kizzy was good at writing diaries. She was good at writing stories. He remembered her doing cartwheels in the sun and he could still smell the scent of her hair. Only he couldn’t quite see her face. It was a shadow now, unless he found a recent picture of her, and he was tired of slipping the small photo from his wallet and crying over it if he was honest.
    There was a knot of pressure in his chest when he recalled a recurring dream, a face with milky eyes like the one on the autopsy table. It was always without a body and he would wake suddenly and be cruelly reminded he was the one that had survived. There wasn’t even the barest threshold of life in that face and thinking of it made him dizzy, disjointed. He tried to tell himself it was just a painted doll’s head, something a child would make in sixth grade. But it wasn’t. The nightmares were always the same and a scream would catch in the back of his throat choking him awake.
    Pastor Razz said hate makes a man sick. Forgiveness means letting go, lessening the grip of bitterness and pain.
    I won’t forget. I’ll never forget , Darryl thought, brushing one hand over his close-cut hair and squeezing the gun with the other.
    There had been no funeral because forensics still had her head. Who in their right mind buries a head without a body?
    Carmel had died nine years ago from an asthma attack and he could never bring himself to spend her life insurance. It stayed in his bank for seven long years until he bought the new house. So she could share it with him.
    As for the murdered, there were men out there preying on the innocent, men still at large and men so evil their very faces were enough to keep a child indoors. One murder every month. Someone had to find him.
    Kizzy was baptized in September, a month before she was taken. Darryl wondered if that was a fluke or if it was a God thing.
    “Up is better than down,” Kizzy used to say. “That’s where the bluebells