WHEN THE MUSIC DIES (MUSIC CITY MURDERS Book 1) Read Free

if it would get her some justice. I gave the detectives in Clarksville hell for months. They hated to see me coming, and they saw me much too often.”
    “I can’t imagine how you must have felt.”
    “I was so mad; I beat the hell out of the heavy bag at the gym every day for three weeks.” Mike looked out the window at nothing. “I couldn’t hit my father. I had to hit something.”
    “Are you and your dad talking?”
    Mike hesitated a moment, looked down at his note pad, and then shook his head without answering.
    “Geez, Mike. Can’t you cut your old man some slack?”
    “If he’d looked after Connie like he promised me, like a father is supposed to do, my little sister wouldn’t have been at that old quarry. She would still be here. I was on the other side of the planet serving my country; dealing with Saddam Hussein and all the other fanatical crazies.” Mike looked at Norm. “All he had to do was take care of a seventeen-year-old girl, and he blew it. She was his daughter, for God’s sake. If he’d paid as much attention to her as he did everyone else’s kids on his damn high school baseball teams, Coach Neal might have noticed his child was in danger. I have trouble with that.”
    “Has there been any progress in the case lately?”
    “I haven’t heard anything from the Clarksville detectives in months,” Mike said. “I think it’s just another cold case to them . I keep hoping something new will surface there, or here, that will rekindle the investigation, but so far there’s been nothing.”
    Norm nodded his head.
    Days were rare when Mike failed to make some type of personal effort toward the resolution of his sister’s murder. Mike vowed that this was one case he would never allow to become cold.
    Mike sat quietly for a few minutes staring out the car window. “Even after all these years, I still feel like something will happen to point us in the right direction. I need to be able to close this chapter in my life—and in my father’s life too. If I can, then maybe he and I can find some common ground.”
    Norm and Mike had previously discussed their dissimilar relationships with their fathers. Norm and his dad had been close, up until the elder Wallace’s passing five years ago. Mike hoped, at some point, he and his father could reconcile and find peace.
    Mike’s cell phone rang.
    “Mike Neal.”
    “Mike? Lou Nelson.”
    “Hey, Sergeant. What’s up?”
    “I’m sure you know Crime Stoppers has received dozens of calls from alleged witnesses to the shooting last night at Sandstone.”
    “There are a lot of folks who’d like to claim that reward,” Mike said, “but they haven’t been offering up anything new.”
    “No,” the Sergeant said, “until now.”

Chapter 2
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    Hubbard County, Tennessee
    Monday Morning
    Brad Evans sat motionless at the base of a large oak tree. He’d been in position since before first light.
    Brad had been through his alertness routine already, but his muscles were telling him it would soon be time to repeat the procedure. The drill included the flexing of muscle groups and breathing control exercises. Meant to keep an aging shooter sharp during his wait, Brad developed the ritual for himself when he turned fifty and began to feel the effects of age. It worked to delay the dulling of senses and the numbness of muscles from prolonged inactivity.
    He never had this problem in his younger pre-arthritic years, perched in the trees of Vietnam waiting for unaware Viet Cong to stroll into his kill-zone. His youthful conditioning throughout his twenties aided his ability to stay in the trees for days. The North Vietnamese placed a heavy bounty on all of America’s snipers who were captured alive. The chance to torture American snipers to death was of high value to the vicious enemy.
    Only Brad’s eyes were moving; surveying for signs of activity around him. The polished senses of an Army-trained sniper, although learned thirty-plus years earlier,