Something Unfortunate
“Well written, great characters... A suspenseful edge-of-your-seat page turner”
“I enjoy reading books that have something to teach the reader... A satisfying read”
“Good storyline, great mix of characters”
Something Unfortunate - book excerpt
Chapter One
Fall had begun, and the sun had set early. Weekend darkness reigned on the anchor floor in the offices of Christopher Clark & Oliver, one of Dallas’s most prominent law firms, perched high in a downtown skyscraper. Outside, only a smattering of lights from other buildings accented blackened skyline. Inside, lights in all hallways had been turned off. No light spilled from any offices, whose darkened doorways dotted the hall like caves. From no offices, that is, except one. Ken Hargrove’s office. Once considered a catch, Ken had let himself go in his quest to ascend to the top of the legal world, sacrificing working out for working. As his blonde hair thinned, his waistline expanded. Now sporting a paunch and the beginnings of a double chin, Ken sat with his back to the door, immersed in a scattering of documents on his credenza. He stroked his goatee and mustache occasionally, lost in a world of exhibits, briefs, and pleadings.
Silence prevailed on the floor, interrupted only by buzzing fluorescent lights in Ken’s office and occasional rustling of paper as he flipped over documents. Perhaps lawyers worked on other floors of the office, but only Ken Hargrove moved on the anchor floor.
And a figure moving slowly down the darkened hallway toward Ken’s office. The figure clung close to the walls, almost invisible in the darkness. Features totally obscured by shadows, it was only an ephemeral shape, moving slowly, stepping toe to heel. Silently approaching an unsuspecting Ken Hargrove. What little light reached the hallway from Ken’s office gleamed off the blade of an ornate gold knife with an ivory handle, which the figure held in a tightly-clenched fist.
The figure stopped at the door and peered inside, eyes falling on Ken’s back as he leaned over his credenza, oblivious to all but a stack of documents. Ordinarily the windows would have acted as a mirror, reflecting the office’s interior, but Ken had drawn the mini-blinds on two-thirds of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The intruder tiptoed into Ken’s office. Moving from darkness into light, stopping for just a few seconds, eyes adjusting, and then stealthily approaching an unsuspecting Hargrove. One more step and the uncovered portion of the windows would pick up a reflection. The intruder closed the gap quickly.
The sudden appearance of movement on the window flashed in Ken’s peripheral vision. He swiveled his head and stared at a now visible reflection in the glass. He made eye contact with the person behind his back. His eyes lit up.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
*****
Frank Oliver sat motionless at an oversized desk in his corner office, unconscious or asleep. His head rested on his arms, which were crossed on the desktop. In his right hand, he gripped a hunting knife tightly, its blade covered with something dark and wet. He stirred uneasily as consciousness returned. Gradually he became aware of his surroundings. It was dark, almost pitch – the lights were out – but he knew that he was in his office. The lights of the Dallas skyline shone to the west through his window.
“Must have fallen asleep,” he mumbled, as he tried to clear the cobwebs. He sat up straight and shook his head, immediately aware of a pounding sensation in his brain. A massive headache. A migraine. He hadn’t had a migraine since his law school days, more than 30 years before. He groaned and leaned back in his chair. He wondered how long he had been asleep. He checked his watch, squinting through the lenses of his wire-frame glasses. The luminous face showed that it was after ten p.m. It had been hours!
Got to get home.
Frank stood and stretched. A wave of nausea passed through him and his knees buckled. He quickly sank into his chair. As he did, the clank of metal on wood made him aware that he still clutched his knife. He dropped it on the desk and rubbed his face. After a few minutes, the nausea passed, but a pounding in his head kept up its rhythmic boom, boom, boom. Slowly he stood again, bracing himself with his hands flat on the desk. He stood still for a moment as he fought another wave of nausea. Finally, semi-confident that he wouldn’t throw up, he felt his way out of his darkened office and turned up the hallway toward a dim light in the reception area, where elevators awaited.
Behind him, a splash of light spilled from the doorway of Ken Hargrove’s office.
Chapter Two
Joey Stephens arrived at his office building on Monday morning a bit later than usual because he had taken longer reading the paper, watching morning news shows, and getting dressed. Maybe it was psychological. After all, no siren call drew him to the office bright and early these days. He barely had enough to keep himself busy working nine to five, much less eight to six. Struggles between Frank Oliver and Ken Hargrove, both of whom typically fed him files, had driven away a few of the clients he worked for, and even arriving late, wasting time drinking coffee, and visiting with his co-workers, he would still have to struggle to fill his day.
With his six-foot frame filled out at a muscular 200 pounds, tousled brown hair, and tanned boyish face, Joey looked more like the college running back he had once been than the partner in a major law firm that he had become – and no longer wished to be. He had reached the point where, if he could find some other way to make a living, he would abandon law practice altogether. Just hang up his law books and walk away, like a gunfighter hanging up his guns.
Upon reaching downtown Dallas, Joey turned onto Elm Street almost thirty minutes later than usual. As he turned into the ramp to the parking garage beneath a 60-story skyscraper that held his office, he saw three police cars parked in front of the office building. He wondered if something had happened at the bank in the lobby. Now that would be unusual. Bank robberies didn’t often occur at downtown banks but were typically committed in the suburbs and at smaller branches. Downtown banks were too difficult to get into and out of for a quick getaway.
Joey put the police out of his mind as he negotiated a narrow, winding path down into the garage. As he ran his card through a machine that controlled gate entry, he saw two more squad cars on the first level of the garage. What the hell was going on?
Within minutes he stepped off the elevator on Christopher Clark & Oliver’s anchor floor. Two uniformed police officers loitered at the reception desk. He glanced down a hallway, where more cops milled about. Secretaries stood in small groups and talked softly while suit-wearing men he had never seen before moved around the corner looking very official.
“It’s Hargrove,” a voice said behind him.
Turning, Joey saw Clint Raymond and Paul Mustang, two senior partners with whom he worked in the firm’s construction and energy litigation section. Both wore blank expressions, as if in shock. A web of wrinkles branched out from the corners of Clint’s eyes. He had long dark hair and boyish good looks that gave him a deceptively youthful appearance for a man in his mid-forties. Paul, his contemporary and classmate at Baylor Law, was much slighter in build and already showing his age, with flecks of gray in his hair and eyebrows.
“It’s Hargrove,” Clint repeated. “He’s dead in his office. Murdered.”
“When? Who did it?”
“No idea who and not sure exactly when.”
“Has anyone talked to the police yet?” Joey asked.
“Not yet,” Paul said, “but you can bet they’ll want to talk to everyone in the section. I heard that they want to talk to Frank for sure when he gets here.”
“Does anybody know how it happened?”
Paul again provided the answer. “His secretary found him slumped over his credenza, all covered with blood. She went nuts and started screaming. One of the other secretaries had to calm her down and call the police. That’s all we know right now. We probably won’t know anything else until the police talk to us.”
“Why do they want to talk to Frank?”
“I guess he’s the most likely suspect,” Clint said. “But I don’t think anybody really believes Frank did it. He may be crazy, but he’s not a murderer.”
*****
Ken Hargrove’s body sat in a desk chair. One of the police officers had pulled Ken’s torso back from where he had fallen forward onto his credenza so that he sprawled grotesquely in the chair. His legs stretched out in front of him, under his credenza. His arms hung loosely at the sides of the chair, with his head tilted back, open-eyed, and dark crimson soaked the front of his golf shirt and jeans. A short, white-haired man from the medical examiner’s office studied the front of the body, looking at Ken’s chest and throat, trying to find any and all signs of wounds.
A fingerprint crew dusted dark powder on every smooth surface they could find. A tall, muscular African American man in an off-the-rack suit supervised. He stood in the office doorway, rubbing his thin mustache and talking to himself as he scribbled notes on a pad. His sharp eyes carefully surveyed every movement in the office, while at the same time checking for anything out of the ordinary.
K.C. Hodges had been with the Dallas Police Department for fifteen years, the past six as a homicide detective. A native Dallasite, having been a star football player at David W. Carter High School, K.C. turned down a college scholarship to stay home and work to support his family after his father was gunned down in a barroom disturbance just as K.C. started his last semester of high school. The unsolved murder led him to the police academy after completing an associate’s degree at a nearby community college, and now he was one of the DPD’s top homicide detectives. But this murder was different than your run-of-the-mill killing. While the murder of a prominent lawyer in his office in a downtown skyscraper had the potential to advance a career, it also had the potential to destroy one.
K.C. tried to process his preliminary thoughts. If he had learned anything in the past hour, it was that Ken Hargrove had at least one enemy. If anyone held a grudge against the dead man, it was a lawyer named Frank Oliver. Frank Oliver, as in Christopher Clark & Oliver.
“What’s it look like, K.C.?”
K.C. turned to see who had spoken. He grinned at sandy-haired Detective Jerry Knowles, one of his closest friends on the force, who stood just outside the office. The two weren’t regular partners, but they had worked together on occasion. K.C. smiled at the prospect that this might be one of those occasions. He motioned at the body then flipped back a few pages in his notes before answering.
“Got a white man, mid-forties, apparently stabbed to death by a large blade. Looks like it might have been a Bowie knife or a hunting knife of some sort. Multiple stab wounds. Also looks like his throat’s been cut. Either that, or he was stabbed in the throat as well as the chest.”
Knowles adjusted his half-lens glasses and squinted through the doorway at the body. He wrinkled his nose. “What killed him, the stabbing or the throat-cutting?”
“We probably won’t know until the autopsy.”
“Y’all found a weapon?”
“Not yet. I’m waiting on a court order, so we can start an office to office search.”
“What do you need a court order for? Can’t you just get consent? Or argue that exigent circumstances exist?”
K.C. smiled. “You know better than that. We’re dealing with a bunch of lawyers here. You think they’re not going to make us jump through every hoop? Even when we get an order, I’ll be surprised if someone doesn’t try to quash it, claiming there’s confidential attorney-client stuff in the offices.”
“Detective?”
Both men turned in the direction of the speaker, a young uniformed officer who stood in the doorway of a corner office just down the hallway from the dead man’s door.
The officer beckoned to them. “I think you ought to come see this.”
K.C. and Jerry approached the officer, who stepped aside and pointed into the office. “Over there, on the corner of the desk by that stack of papers.”
Across the way stood a huge desk, its top covered in scattered pages and legal pads. Just beside a stack about three or four inches high, nearly, but not quite, hidden from sight by the papers, sat a large, white-handled knife in a puddle of dark red. The same dark red color decorated the knife’s blade.
“You haven’t been in this office?” K.C. asked.
“No, sir. I just looked inside. I almost didn’t see it at first, but the blood caught my eye.”
“And yonder it sits, in plain view,” Jerry said, using legal buzz words that would justify seizure of the knife without a warrant.
The two detectives exchanged glances. They looked at the nameplate on the wall outside the door.
FRANK OLIVER.
Book Details
AUTHOR NAME: Mike Farris
BOOK TITLE: Something Unfortunate
GENRE: Crime & Mystery, Thrillers
PAGE COUNT: 346
IN THE BLOG: New Legal Thrillers
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