For his first case, Detective Roger Stark has 42 hours to find a kidnapped child, but his adversary plays by a different set of rules and continually raises the stakes until someone has to pay the price.
Roger Stark, Marshfield's newest detective, is paired with ex-NYPD detective, Ed Jones, "...fresh from a boring retirement...," to investigate the abduction of a volatile CEO's five-year-old daughter. Despite past entanglements with the CEO, Stark promises him that he'll find his little girl by the 42-hour deadline imposed by the kidnapper. However, Stark doesn't count on an elusive schizophrenic suspect or that the kidnapping is a ruse to divert attention from another far-reaching crime by a vengeful person playing by a different set of rules.
Told from Stark's and the schizophrenic's point-of-view, the story explores the collision of styles between Stark and Jones as the stress of the investigation intensifies. It shows the struggles of the schizophrenic as his hold on reality slips away while trying to solve the kidnapping the police suspect him of having committed, and his uncertainty about whether or not he could have done it. "One Promise Too Many" also demonstrates the depths to which someone will go to extract revenge on people once loved, regardless of who gets hurt.
"One Promise Too Many" combines strong elements of a police procedural with the soul of a literary classic that should keep readers turning pages fast enough to create a breeze.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
I was eight-years-old when Mother captured Father’s dimpled smile with her camera just as I had reached for his red hair. The next day, someone murdered him. Fused onto a three-inch square memorial magnet, my father’s image from that day is a constant bittersweet memory. Twenty-four years later, I saw his face stare back at me whenever I looked into a mirror. I grew into him with the dimpled smile, familiar blue eyes, and same copper-colored hair. I idolized him. At his funeral, I made a promise only a naïve boy could make. I had promised to find his killer. It was a promise I felt honor-bound to accomplish as a man.
When I was finally in a position to eventually investigate his cold case, my confidence ebbed. Fulfilling that promise weighed heavily against recent events. On the back wall of my locker’s gray interior, the magnet held a weathered three-month old newspaper article from the Memorial Day edition of the Marshfield, Pennsylvania Sentinel. It was a reminder of unfinished business, one of those recent events. In one of the article’s photographs, I stood dripping wet, shrouded in a blanket. Bobby Richardson’s anguished father pointed an accusatory finger at me. The other picture showed Bobby’s cherubic face captured for all eternity over the caption “Eight-year-old boy drowns. Stark’s rescue fails.” The underwater caverns below the thundering Hidden River Falls at the edge of town still held his body.
I grabbed the article and wadded it up, not needing the reminder that Bobby could bob to the surface at any time. He did it often enough in my nightmares. Three months after Bobby’s drowning, the haunting question remained. What more could I have done to save him? I convinced myself the answer was nothing, but some days it was a hard sell. I needed to focus on the here and now—to move on. The crumpled article thumped the bottom of a trashcan.
I slipped my tie under the collar of my white shirt in the changing room at Marshfield Police Headquarters. Over, under, around, and through, I knotted the black tie into a half-Windsor. The review board cleared me of procedural issues in the drowning, but the process stung anyway. It sucked the enthusiasm out of the job I loved, making me question my actions. Afterwards, Lieutenant Newby warned me, “Hesitant cops are dead cops.” Newby’s stern message played like a refrain from a dirge. I straightened the narrow tie and slipped on my black suit coat. A lot had happened since Bobby died. Sometimes it seemed like too much, and all of it bad. I had to find a way to put the bad behind me or risk making Newby’s warning prophetic.
Shift change commenced. Cops entered from across the room beyond the row of lockers. It was time to go. I closed the locker door, and Bobby slipped beneath the surface of my thoughts.
The detective’s badge fit snuggly in my shirt pocket, and then I headed for my first shift as a detective to help out over the Labor Day weekend. Entering quietly into this new position three days ahead of my scheduled return to duty seemed like a good idea. I sucked in a cleansing breath before pushing open the door to the catwalk behind the central processing pit. Designed to keep me grounded and focused, I mumbled my mantra. “I’m a cop.”
#
The locker room door swung shut behind me and from the other side of central processing, Newby barked, “Stark. Jones. My office!”
Dallas attorney Stan Turner hates criminal law but has a propensity for attracting murder cases anyway. So, it's no big surprise when a simple attorney-ad-litem appointment in family court evolves into a complex murder trial.
