Detective Harry Olsen wants the Torrick brothers locked up for eternity. But they’re smart, hiding their criminal activity behind legal fronts. Harry needs help. One day, it arrives in the form of an anonymous email, delivering one vital brick in the Torrick empire foundation. Harry reasons the source a grudge, a vendetta to settle an old score. A furious Noah Torrick sees it the same way and vows to end it first. The truth will shock them both. Someone saw Max Torrick die, witnessing the whole bloody charade that within the blink of a terrified eye ripped their own world apart. Now, after a lifetime of living with the horror, there’s only one thing left.
Thousands of crimes go unsolved in cities like Los Angeles every year. Homicides, rapes, burglaries, car thefts and assaults—you name it, the big city has got it. But if there’s no evidence—a witness, a smoking gun, or a trail of fresh blood—there’s no case. The societal transgression becomes a numbered file in an officer’s desk drawer that perhaps he pulls out every now and then like the memory of an ex-wife or an old girlfriend to ponder the what-ifs. “What if I had tried this or asked that,” the officer wonders. Sometimes the officer might even do some fresh digging on the case—review old notes and evidence or re-contact previously unhelpful witnesses in hopes their memories had improved. It usually ends with the same disheartening results as calling an old girlfriend. Detective Eddie Jones had a file like that—the 1975 quadruple homicide at the Yangna Vista Country Club. The only difference was this file had been stamped SOLVED!
Salvatore “Sally G” Giambi, a reputed mobster and drug czar with a long criminal history, had been convicted and sentenced to one hundred and sixty years in prison for the murder of the three Los Angeles councilmen and the one local businessman found marinating in their own blood on the third-hole green that beautiful spring morning. Sally G, who later died from old age in prison, had maintained his innocence until the last, his lawyer denouncing the eyewitness accounts of Giambi’s threats against Torrick’s life that fateful morning as circumstantial. “The prosecutor hasn’t even produced the murder weapon!” Giambi’s lawyer had screamed in his closing argument. The jury concluded otherwise, putting two and two together (Giambi’s criminal past and his ill-timed death threat) to come up with forty years in jail for each murder. Giambi Enterprises, as his illegal activities were jokingly referred to, promptly disintegrated from there, the pieces of which were quickly gobbled up by the carnivorous competition including the fatherless Torrick boys, who somehow secured the lion’s share of the carcass just as their father had planned. At the time the whole affair didn’t add up for the then very young detective Eddie Jones, who had been one of the first to arrive at the gruesome scene. Thirty years later, it still didn’t, and Eddie Jones had yet to figure out why.
Like most of the two-man-teamed officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Harry Olsen’s desk faced his partner’s for what the higher-ups called “dialogue encouragement and collaboration efficiency.” So, he couldn’t help notice the old, weathered case file that Detective Jones had spread out in front of him. He grinned as he said, “Those golf course murders have been a pebble in your shoe a long time, haven’t they, partner.”
“More like hemorrhoids,” Jones replied. He shifted in his chair, grimacing as he searched for a comfortable position. “You know, I have had this shooting pain down there,” he started to say before Olsen quickly cut him off saying he didn’t want to hear about.
“You or my wife,” Jones grumbled. He returned his thoughts to the four dead men in the pictures in front him, the murder scene on the third-hole green (although, it was mostly red in the picture). The three councilmen, which included the husband and father of two, Richard Millard, and the fourth body—businessman Max Torrick—were lined up like railroad ties. “It’s like they were standing in line to buy theatre tickets before they went down,” Jones said to no one in particular. “Why didn’t someone run when the shooting started?”
“Are you talking to me, partner?” Olsen said.
“No, I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Well, that clears up that rumor.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Olsen chuckled.
“Come over here and take a look at this,” Jones said.
Putting down his copy of the word puzzle that he had been working on for the past two hours—the one Jones had received via email from the anonymous and conundrum-inclined tipster—Olsen sighed before reluctantly rising from his chair. As he shuffled stiffly over to his partner, he stretched his sinewy limbs and muttered something like “this better be good” before parking himself behind the seated Jones. He peered over his shoulder at the collage of color photographs blanketing his desk, only vaguely interested in the thirty-year-old case he had heard varied snippets about over the past thirteen years since hooking up with Jones.
Each vibrant picture told, in courageous scarlet and hopeful green, of a life seeping back into the soil from whence if came. Pools of coagulated blood, deep red and black, surround each ghoulishly gray body like moon craters, calling emphasis to the tiny imperfections and undulations of the pampered piece of acreage that only a seasoned golfer could appreciate. Four now-silent voices adorned in sunshine-yellow cotton and deep-sea-blue polyester that never got a chance to finish out the hole.
“What a cool plot, like nothing I’ve ever read before. Dunn really knows how to put you on the edge and keep you there…spine-tingling climax.”
Phil, New York
“Finally, someone wrote a good thriller centered around golf. A great read…excitement from the first tee to the eighteenth green.”
Ernie, Washington
“Move over James Patterson, there’s a new author in town…literary entertainment at it’s shockingly bloody best…”
Jessica, New Jersey
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