Murder! (Parker & Knight Book 1) by Donald Wells

1
    D etective Rick Parker looked down at the tile floor and thought one word.
    Murder!
    He was on the fifth floor of a recently built office complex in the company of his wife and was about to sit around with a group of strangers and discuss the details of his personal life.
    Murder, pure murder,
    Relational Group Therapy for Couples is what they called it, but Parker thought that he’d rather be in a dark alley facing a loaded gun.
    He was seated in a semi-circle of people with his wife at his right, and they were one of four couples. The doctor, a psychiatrist named Arnie Stahl, sat at the front facing the group. Parker saw that there were still two empty seats and he guessed that there would be another couple joining the group. It was July and the air-conditioning was at full blast to fight off the outside temperatures, which for the last few days had been hovering in the mid-nineties.
    Despite the heat, Parker wore a blue summer-weight sport coat. It hid the gun on his belt, and he never went without one if he could help it. 
    The Couples Therapist, Doctor Stahl, looked every bit of what he was. Stahl was fifty-four, of average height and size with sympathetic brown eyes and thinning brown hair. His wire rim glasses sparkled beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent lighting, and the beige carpet made his complexion look even paler than usual.
    Parker also looked every bit of what he was, a cop.
    No one ever took the large man for anything other than a cop and it was a source of frustration to him when he was a young officer in Philadelphia, because back then all he wanted to do was work undercover narcotics.
    He grew his raven hair long, added a beard and dressed, “street” and still he looked more like a cop than the veterans at his precinct.
    The problem was his eyes. He had always, and would always have a cop’s watchful, stony gaze and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it, although, someone once quipped that he could don dark glasses and go undercover as a blind drug dealer. The quip did not amuse Parker.
    Now, at forty, Philadelphia and thoughts of going undercover were long behind him. He was a detective on the Washington New Jersey Police Force and had grown to love the town, a town that was quickly on its way to becoming a city.
    The town had been a sleepy little place until 9/11, but in the aftermath of those tragic events a native son, Bart Bennett, returned to town from Manhattan, and within three years he had converted his family’s farm into a corporate campus, and had built a new factory on land that had been the old town dump.
    Soon, farm after farm was being sold off so that new apartment complexes and single-family homes could be built, and what had been a population of several thousand multiplied quickly.
    As always, more people meant more problems, and sometimes those problems were of a criminal nature, and so the town began hiring more cops.
    Parker saw it as an opportunity to leave Philadelphia, a city he had grown disenchanted with, and start fresh in New Jersey. The Washington force jumped at the chance to hire him and when the town had its first murder in over thirty years, it was Rick Parker who was chosen to investigate it.
    Parker solved that case and the three that have happened since and now he was technically the lone homicide detective on the Washington Police Force, although, his regular duties were of the more mundane variety. There was also a search on for another cop with Parker’s experience, and several candidates had applied and been interviewed.
    His wife, Rachel, gave his big hand a squeeze and Parker took his eyes from the carpet and looked into hers.
    “I appreciate you doing this. I know it’s not easy for you,” she said.
    Rachel Parker was ten years younger than her husband. A petite blonde with turquoise eyes and a wide smile, it was Rachel who broke the marriage vows when she had an affair earlier in the year.
    When Parker discovered the betrayal, it wounded