Event Horizon – Dr. Murder

I’ve always liked the way Arthur C. Clarke laid out his novels. Many, like the Odyssey series are broken down in what can only be called Acts. Each Act has a name. As often as not, time has passed between the various acts and the setting has shifted.

I’ve borrowed that idea with the Lawman series. In some cases, it meant going back to the earlier novels and retconning them.

I can easily see me doing this on most everything I write, even if I dust of the Challenger series and do them one day. It just an easy way to explain away months or even years.

And in Event Horizon, we have an Act titled Dead Friends.

Once upon a time, I was actually thinking of calling the novel that. But it sounds a little too much then like a zombie/vampire thriller. Instead, I decided to stay with the concept of points of no return.

In Event Horizon, I bring back someone we met in the first novel, The Cross and the Badge. Detective Andy Deshong of the Routt County Sheriff’s Office or as his friends call him, “Dr. Murder” (Now, there’s a good title for a book).

Andy is much older than Will, but the two men have a lot in common. Both are the sons of ranchers. Both have been Law enforcement Officers for a long time. But where Will was Army, Andy was Air Force. He owns a twin-engine airplane he inherited from his father and loves flying it.

When we first meet Andy, Will had just returned from the Gulf War and was settling into his new job as Detective with the Sheriff’s Office. A small potatoes kind of case crosses Wills desk, and he finds himself crossing paths with Andy. It seems Andy has been chasing the guy who committed the crime in Will’s county for years. Andy describes what he’s done on the cases as a hobby. Between them, they solve a case that has ran up millions of dollars in thefts and crossed state lines.

But Andy’s real expertise is murder. He’s handled dozens of murders, written books on the subject and teaches seminars to Law Enforcement officers. You’d think this would make a very jaded detective, the king that eats potato chips at a crime scene. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Without giving too much away, he assists Will in investigating a homicide. In the course of it all, we see a man who takes the victims to heart. Here’s an excerpt from Event Horizon.

Webster defines homicide as “The killing of one person by another.”

     Sounds simple enough.

     What Webster doesn’t say is that homicides are something that happen to other people. As a rule, I usually didn’t know the murderer or the victim.  Every homicide I’d ever investigated maintained that rule.

     Now, that had changed.

     Death had reached out and taken a friend. I’d spoken with Eva. I’d heard her dreams, broken bread with her and danced at her wedding.

    Those memories ended here with her dead on the floor.

    I remembered thinking about all the different scenarios that spousal abuse could play out into.

     Scenario One was the abuser killed the person he was abusing, and Max had followed that one to the letter. He’d killed the person that he supposedly loved.

    I think we all thought we were past this, and this wouldn’t happen.

     But it did.

     Andy was sketching out the crime scene. Later he and RJ would put measurements into it. 

    “If it’s any consolation,” Andy said without looking up, “they never get easier.”

     I’d always thought that someplace, somewhere, you built up mental armor against such a thing. That you got jaded and a dead body became just a dead body.

    “The victim,” Andy said, still adding to the sketch, “was a person. They were someone’s son or daughter. They were someone’s mother, father, brother, or sister. When someone murders them, they aren’t committing a crime against just that person, but the whole world. A crime against humanity and God.

     “Each person is unique. There will never be another person like the victim. And when they’re taken from us, we’re poorer as a people.”

I recognized what he’d said as coming from one of his books.

    I asked him about it after having read it. He explained it to me this way. “It’s a warning to those of us who work on these crimes. Murder is the worst crime imaginable, and we would do the victim a massive disservice if we brought their killer to justice but lost them in the process.”

    It struck me as a nice way to stop being objective and said so. He replied that we couldn’t be so objective that we forget we’re the ones who speak for the dead.

Dr. Murder takes the “Speakingr for the Dead” part seriously.