HELL'S HALF ACRE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 2) by JACKIE ELLIOTT (classic literature books .txt) 📗

up to serve, and even if Coffin Cove couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the RCMP, as Sergeant Charlie Rollins informed him on his first day, he would still dedicate himself to the RCMP mission: preserve the peace, uphold the law and provide quality service to the community he served.

Charlie Rollins had been the sergeant at Coffin Cove detachment for over thirty years. He’d seen constables come and go. He was waiting for retirement, and now that Mayor Jade Thompson was shaking things up — unnecessarily, in Charlie’s view — his pension cheque couldn’t come quick enough. He’d preferred Dennis Havers, who often dropped off a bottle of Crown Royal, Charlie’s favourite tipple, and clapped him on the back for a job well done. After all, turning a blind eye was Charlie’s expert skill.

When Matt Beaufort reported for duty, Charlie looked him up and down, amused at the young man’s enthusiasm.

“There’s only three types of criminals we have to worry about in Coffin Cove,” he told the new constable, “draft dodgers, dopeheads and drunkards. The draft dodgers are all old hippies eating their granola, we don’t have to worry about the dopeheads anymore now that weed’s legal, so you’ll mainly be cleaning up after the drunks.”

He was right. In the first week, Matt spent most days hosing down the RCMP cruiser, cleaning off the vomit from another inebriated “client”.

Lily, Matt’s wife, encouraged him to use his initiative.

“Just because old Charlie sits with his feet up all day, doesn’t mean you have to,” she told him. Matt knew she was right. So he “patrolled” the streets of Coffin Cove, popping his head into businesses and shaking hands with the fishermen down at the docks. He might not be catching Canada’s most wanted, but he stopped a teenager grabbing a kid’s bike from an open garage and the wharf manager was happy that diesel theft was down.

But yesterday was different.

First, they got the call from a frantic Mr Gomich, who said he and his hiking companions had found a body. It was all a blur of activity after that. Charlie Rollins, visibly agitated, wanted to look at the remains for himself, to make absolutely certain it wasn’t a dead bear they’d found. Matt thought they should call in backup from Nanaimo right away, but he deferred to his sergeant.

They left the detachment and headed up to the gravel pit. There, Mr Gomich, an elderly woman with silver-white hair who refused to talk to him, and a younger lady, who identified herself as Katie Dagg, were waiting. Katie looked shaky. Charlie told Matt to wait while he and Mr Gomich disappeared down a trail. Nearly an hour later, the two men emerged. White-faced, the sergeant told Matt not only was the body human, he was sure it was Ricky Havers.

“There are bits of clothing still there,” he said, wiping beads of sweat off his face after the hike in and out of the woods. “I’m pretty sure they match the description of the clothes Ricky was wearing when he vanished.”

Matt hadn’t been at Coffin Cove when Ricky Havers went missing. But he heard about it when he arrived. Apart from a murder investigation a year ago, the disappearance of Ricky Havers was the highest-profile case the small detachment had dealt with in recent years.

There wasn’t much the RCMP could do. Ricky Havers was forty-two years old. There were rumours he’d been selling more than just legal weed. Maybe he’d strayed onto someone else’s patch? Pissed off the wrong people? Or maybe one day he’d just woken up and decided there was more to life than selling weed to dopeheads in this tiny backwater.

Matt Beaufort thought it was probably drug dealers who had abducted Ricky. Nanaimo, the nearest big town to Coffin Cove, was in the midst of a drug crisis. Opioids were bad enough, but for months the Nanaimo detachment had been besieged with calls about crazed teenagers attacking people with knives or attempting to “fly out of windows”. Four deaths had been attributed to a new street drug called “Duke”. It was a hallucinogenic, according to the circular sent to all the detachments. It was similar to LSD but caused extreme paranoia and psychotic rages. Matt read and carefully filed all the information he could find and kept an eye out on his daily patrols. Nanaimo officers were also reporting a new street jargon associated with the drug. Dealers required a “tithe” rather than a “payment” and referred to themselves as “Knights”. Matt had heard nothing like that in Coffin Cove, but he wondered if Ricky Havers had sold Duke from the Smoke House. Maybe he hadn’t paid his tithe? The dates fit. Ricky had disappeared around the same time as Nanaimo officers noticed the new drug.

Matt put his theory to Charlie.

Charlie Rollins dismissed it immediately. “Ricky was a layabout his whole life. Dennis was giving him a last chance. I bet he realized he couldn’t even run a weed store and disappeared in embarrassment. He’ll be back, you’ll see.”

And now Ricky was back.

In fact, Matt thought, he hadn’t ever left.

As Charlie Rollins panted from his exertion and the small group at the gravel pit processed the horror of their discovery, Matt mentally calculated that Ricky Havers’ corpse was less than ten kilometres away from where he’d disappeared. And numerous search parties had missed it.

“Shit,” Sergeant Rollins said, as the enormity of the discovery and the possible implications for his imminent retirement started to sink in.

Matt saw that Charlie wasn’t just shocked, he was scared. He wondered if Charlie had ever really conducted “extensive searches” for Ricky. Had the lazy, complacent officer just put up a few posters?

“Maybe the body was moved there, sir,” Matt said evenly. There would be time enough for blame. “Forensics should be able to tell.”

His sergeant nodded slowly, as if weighing up this possibility, and