Death Sentence - A Val Bosanquet Mystery

Chapter One

Reincarnationists maintain that new life springs from death, a time for celebration as well as sorrow. East Feliciana Parish Deputy Sheriff Val Bosanquet was not a believer, but before the sun sank on a fateful July day, he would readily agree that one man's demise had led to, if not exactly a birth, certainly a rebirth. 

Val, a former New Orleans homicide detective, was a campus cop when Clinton middle-school teacher, Diane Laing, went missing. She was the fourth woman to disappear in a series of suspected abductions. Back then, he had his hands more than full with Crescent City iniquity to pay much heed to events along the Mississippi state line. If it had not been for his cousin Nath, a young Marine, the Laing abduction might have quickly fallen off his radar. His cousin spent a fortnight's leave as part of the search teams combing the woods and soya bean fields surrounding the location of the last positive sighting of the victim. Each evening he would phone Val, updating him on the search and picking his brains as to what direction the investigation should be taking next. Nath had thrown himself into the hunt with the same steely determination and vigor that would mark him out as a soldier of exceptional ability. With youthful naivety, he was convinced sheer energy would help good triumph over evil. He had attended the same high school as Laing, but could not swear to ever having spoken with her. Over one hundred people volunteered to assist the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office look for the local girl. Despite their best efforts, the searchers did not discover a single trace of the missing twenty-three-year-old. Nath took it hard. He refused to believe the worse and insisted she was still alive. 

Ten years were to pass before Laing surfaced. 

During those years, Val had again dropped out of law enforcement. His brother Marcus manipulated him into signing on as the Chief with a campus PD. His stint on the university's payroll ended badly and he left New Orleans for the East Texas border where he found a job with a private investigations agency. The sheriff of East Feliciana Parish, as sliver-tongued as any snake oil salesman, had enticed him into trying his hand at rural law enforcement. The two men met during the cleanup operation in the wake of Katrina. Seeing the destruction visited on the city of his birth and witnessing the worse the human race could offer convinced Val that he had more to contribute to society than the checking of credit ratings for Texas banks. 

Val moved northeast, bought and restored a ramshackle shotgun house outside Clinton. As he sawed and planed wood, he played rock albums on an ancient stereogram the previous property owner had left behind, and then, in his spare time, started to tour goodwill shops to add to the collection of 1970s vinyl. Since leaving a devastated New Orleans, Val had gained twenty pounds and developed a pathological hatred of golf. He slotted smoothly into his new job and there was nobody more surprised than he was when he rediscovered the investigative grit that had made him New Orleans youngest ever homicide lieutenant. However, the break that led to Laing's discovery had not sprung from any rejuvenated sense of purpose, but from a fatal accident and the contents of a department store's shopping bag. 

Word of the fatality reached Val late on a Friday afternoon, the penultimate day of July. A few minutes later and he would have been off-duty and might have missed the shout. A vehicle had swiped a forty-three-year-old white male as he was returning to his car parked on St. Helena Street. 

Val cradled the phone on his shoulder so he could search through the clutter on his desk for some scrap of paper to note the details. He found a dog-eared internal memo and turned it over. 

"What did you say his name was?" Val asked the Clinton PD officer who had called him to report the fatality. 

"Jake Harrell. He was carrying an out-of-date Louisiana driving permit."