Cal.e.'s Korner

C.: I know D.C. is busy this week, but he sent me this email. I suppose he wants me to look at it and tell him if it sounds like something that may be popular. I know he’s been working on revisions to his thriller novel manuscript, MMURER 8: THE INERT INGREDIENT. Maybe this will tell me what revisions he’s made. 

                                 MURDER 8: THE INERT INGREDIENT

                                                               Synopsis

 Disgrace former police detective Jay McGruder reasons he has one chance at redemption. He has been haunted day and night for the last thirty-six years by two thoughts; a disturbing secret from his past, and the fact that, when the opportunity presented itself, he let the world’s most wanted criminal go free.

Jay’s chance at redemption involved meeting the world’s most wanted criminal in an empty park unarmed. It must involve Jay’s best friend, Texas Ranger Chief Mark Joliet tells Jay, an unknown person who can only be contacted on a burner phone with a four-word text. This will keep the person from being found and identified. Mark wants this plan carried out by someone who is not involved in government work and is impossible to identify. Only one person in the world who fits this description would be able to protect Jay in this situation, Mark declared.

Jay studied Taylor’s profile and decided on a plan that met with Mark’s approval. Jay knew Taylor was obsessed with not wasting time from studying his profile, but he was also cautious. The hurried manor that Taylor meets Jay belies the description Jay had read on his profile. However, Taylor had a reason for his hurried manor: he is now an octogenarian and only has four years to carry out his plan to rule the free world. Taylor planned to use the two most powerful cartels in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the power his father discovered in him as a boy, to accomplish his task.

 As the don of the one of most powerful cartels in the Western Hemisphere holds a .357 magnum handgun to Jay’s head, Taylor tells Jay he can use the  information he gathered from a clandestine website to stop Taylor from becoming the most powerful man in the free word; or he can us the information to free  his friend, Jose Leal, who is on Texas’ death row because of a decision that Jay influenced him to make, but Jay only has thirty seconds to make his decision.

As Taylor counts down to end Jay’s life, Jay remembered the horrific truth he desperately wanted to hide. His trusting nature had led him to ask his superiors to let a clinical instructor at a nursing school for permission to use the  Harris County morgue to instruct his students about preventable deaths. The instructor, a hometown friend of Jay’s, is curious about the cause of death of one of the corpses: the one that involves Jay’s secret. Jay must think fast to protect himself, his secret and Jose, so he told his friend the corpse is from an open case and is off limtes for discussion.

Complicating the situation is an insistent female nursing student whom Jay finds remarkably interesting. Alice Jones is even more interested in the mysterious cadaver than her instructor was. Jay becomes infatuated with Alice, the elder daughter of his trainer his rookie year at the Houston Police Department, on their first date.

Alice is as interested in Jay as he is in her, so they embark on a dating relationship. The couple quickly becomes intimate, resulting in pregnancy, leading to marriage.

After their first child is born and Alice is pregnant with their second child, she confronted her husband about the mysterious cadaver again. Alice says that, since her dad is a cop, she knows that she can no longer be obligated to testify against him in a court of law due to the spousal privilege clause. When Jay stands firm about telling his secret that involves cadaver number eight in the Harris County Morgue, Alice complains that he is too good at keeping secrets. Burdened by guilt and a desire to build trust with his wife, Jay decides to tell the person he trusts most in the world his awful truth. Alice then regrets chiding her husband into revealing his secret when she realizes that the consequences of knowing Jay’s secret may threaten the lives of her and her daughter, as well as her unborn child.

 Adding to the stress that his marriage is already under, Taylor is trying to kidnap Alice and the couple’s first child to goad Jay into revealing the whereabouts of Jose Leal. Jose was the man who holds the key to Taylor controlling the two most powerful cartels in the Western Hemisphere. Taylor assumed that Jay would do anything, including perjuring himself in court, if necessary, to protect his family from the harm he can cause the McGruder family.

When Alice’s father, Ben, must rescue his daughter and child from the criminal mastermind, it creates more stress than the couple’s marriage can bear. However, the dangerous criminal only known as Taylor remained at large after Jay unwittingly let him escape the reach of the two cops protecting the woman they both held dear. This threatened Jay’s and his whole family’s lives, as well as his livelihood.

Taylor then flees to his South American home. He then made plans to try to become the most powerful man in the free world: president of the United States. He also desired to find Jose Leal and control the two most powerful cartels in the Western Hemisphere; giving him untold power and the money that comes with that position, which would make him invincible, he believed.

 When Alice died of breast cancer two days before her fifty-second birthday, Jay was on an assignment in South America. Although saddened by the news that his first true love had died, he ass finally able to put his unresolved feelings for his first wife aside and find wedded bliss with his fourth wife, after two failed marriages and nine children.

As Jay confronted Taylor in the empty park, he slapped his neck as if to swat a mosquito away. As Jay did this, a .50 caliber bullet pierces the right external branch of Taylor’s carotid artery and then lodges in a white oak tree that is over forty inches in diameter.   The tree shook, it at its roots. Taylor died instantly, because the shot was timed to graze Taylor’s neck while his heart was beating, not at rest.

As Jay checked Taylor’s remaining carotid artery for a pulse, a “boy in blue’ tapped him on the shoulder. Jay followed the mysterious policeman to Mark’s car, where he phoned the governor to tell him that the next potential leader of the free world laid dead in the park. However, when Jay returned to the scene of the crime, Taylor’s body, as well as the mysterious policeman and Taylor’s ancient truck, were missing.

At the behest of the workers at the governor’s office where Taylor led the state of Texas, the Walker County Sherriff’s department, in connection with the FBI, started a search for Taylor’s body and the person who’d allegedly killed him. However, no evidence of anyone being within almost ten football fields to the site where the two men met existed, and the case remained unsolved for the next twenty-five years.

C.: Wow! Twenty-five years?! That's like, nine cat lives.