No Good Deed Left Undone

"He had an itchy feeling, something he had seen that his memory had recorded but that he wasn’t paying attention to…"

When a man has everything, he can afford to be generous. Lawyer, philanderer, and horseman Grant Wodehouse is generous to a fault—until he’s stabbed to death with a pitchfork in his barn. The killer could be anyone—his lover’s husband, his troubled son, the homeless guy he lets sleep in his barn, his unscrupulous partner or even his wife.

Methodical Detective Sam Lagarde doesn’t miss a clue as he questions an ever-growing list of suspects, only to discover the killer has been hiding in plain sight the entire time. Always one step behind the killer, finally Lagarde’s only recourse is one he never wanted to take.

Read a Sample…

Lagarde filled Black in on his interview with Emma over a cup of coffee in the office. The best way he knew to figure out what was bothering him was to talk it through with his partner.

“Are we missing something obvious?” he asked Black as they took the back road from Kearneysville to Wodehouse’s Charles Town office. They had filed the initial paperwork for the Wodehouse murder and dropped off the compass Lagarde found in the hayloft and Wodehouse’s cell phone for processing. “I have this weird feeling that there was something right in our faces and we missed it this morning, something big, important, that we should have seen.”

Black glanced over at his partner. It was his turn to drive while Lagarde went through his notes. The first part of the trip would be through hilly farmland with large open pastures and fields. There would be fewer S turns, but this was still a two-lane road with rises high enough to conceal a vehicle charging toward him in the oncoming lane.

He kept his eyes on the road while he speculated out loud. “Let’s see, a guy goes out to his barn in the early morning to let out his horses. His wife gets up to make them breakfast. She can see the barn from her kitchen window, which means she can see who approaches the barn at the stable level. But, she can’t see if someone drives or walks up to the barn from the other side, the entrance to the upper level hayloft. So, while she’s making coffee and frying up eggs, or boiling them or whatever she does with them—and, wait a minute, where were the eggs she said she called down to the barn to tell him were getting cold? Why didn’t you see them on the table? Did she dump them in the trash before she went down to the barn to find him, or before we got there? Or were they metaphorical?”

Lagarde looked at him. Black never ceased to surprise him. “Right! Problem number one with what I observed at the house and what we were told: metaphorical eggs. So, was Emma lying about the course of events this morning, or the timing of those events, or omitting something? Or all of the above?”