Suicide Watch (The Corey Sullivan Series Book 3)

Suicide Watch

Former Federal Probation Officer Corey Sullivan has left the job, the courts, and the criminals behind. After years of drifting, he arrives in the quiet mountain town of Barlowe, Oregon, looking for something smaller, slower, and easier to survive.

A campus security job at the College of the Mountains seems like the perfect place to start over. But Sullivan’s new post is nothing like the low-pressure retirement job he imagined. His younger colleagues are ambitious, aggressive, and eager for danger, while Sullivan is treated as an aging liability who can barely keep up.

Then two people die on campus.

The city authorities quickly rule both deaths suicides: a student found hanged, and a vagrant who appears to have burned to death in the woods. No one sees a reason to question the official conclusions. No one except Sullivan.

His body may be slowing down, and his instincts may be doubted by everyone around him, but Sullivan still knows what a crime looks like. As he begins to pull at the loose threads, he becomes convinced the deaths are not suicides at all.

To prove it, he will have to challenge the authorities, outlast his own department, and face a killer who may already know Sullivan is watching.

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Excerpt from the book

Most of his friends, before they retired, had a back-up plan: fish, golf, maybe dump the wife and move to Thailand. He’d had no such plan. He had retired less conventionally.

He wrote a quick note directing the deposit of his pension checks and left town. For a little over two decades, he'd kept moving. He was living no one's dream of how to spend the golden years.

Sullivan was in search of nothing when he arrived in Barlowe. At age sixty-nine, he'd come by chance as he had every place else in the last twenty years. He came on a whim. Nothing in particular drew him. He didn't know how long he'd stay, just that it wouldn't be forever.

It might have been different if he were younger, but not now. He had no wife, no family and it was too late to build one now. His greatest gift—at least as he saw it—was that he had no need to build something or become part of anything.

He lived like a fugitive, though no one was chasing him. In fact, probably no one who understood his situation considered him guilty of wrongdoing. Though, as he recalled, no one had urged him to reconsider. All agreed it would be simpler if he just disappeared. He could hardly remember what he was running from, but he'd gotten in the habit of hiding and moving on. Living differently now would seem careless; be like a guy with lung cancer who returns to smoking.

His relationships during his one-man diaspora consisted mostly of bartenders and cocktail waitresses. This was handy since every city had them, and he could pick up a conversation right where he'd left off. His closest friends were memories and, as years passed, he wasn't sure which of them were based on reality.

With the exception of a few, he didn't miss anyone much. He doubted whether they missed him. People who stayed where he'd left didn't dwell on such things for long. He'd be kidding himself to think otherwise.

All that tugged at him related to the job—to the district, to the game, but he was still clear enough to recall that even then he'd only been on the fringe. Always an outsider, providing a dubious service that no one much believed in. There'd been moments when he had played a big part in certain things, and he missed that. He also missed a handful of the guys.

He'd had maybe a dozen jobs since. They had meant little in the beginning and even less in the end. He justified them by believing they filled in the blanks and that there might come a time when this would be handy. By holding these verifiable jobs, he could prove that he'd been alive, not in prison or a psych ward or a treatment facility. Nobody, not even the government, went back farther than ten years. It made him laugh. Hell, if you worked, hadn't been convicted or fired in the last ten years you could qualify for a Top Secret. It didn't much matter what you'd done before that. No one searched beyond ten years.