Where
the Bodies Are
The
McAllister Series Book 1
by
L.V. Gaudet
Genre:
Psychological Crime Thriller
Step
into the twisted mind of a serial killer in this disturbing
psychological thriller.
Dead
bodies are being left where they are sure to be found. But, the
killer made a mistake; one victim left for dead survived.
Kept
in a medically induced coma while she recovers, they can only watch
her and wait for the killer to come back for her.
While
Detective Michael Underwood protects their only living witness,
Detective Jim McNelly and his reporter friend Lawrence Hawkworth are
determined to find the killer and bring his killing spree to an end.
Instead, they discover a bigger mystery.
The
killer's reality blurs between past and present with a compulsion
driven by a dark secret locked in a fractured mind. Overcome by a
blind rage that leaves him wallowing in remorse with the bodies of
victim after victim, he is desperate to stop killing.
After
learning of his victim’s survival, the killer sees it as a sign
they are meant to be together. Threatening her tenuous grip on life,
he is determined to take back his prize while he continues kidnapping
and murdering young women.
Accustomed
to a life of abuse, one victim’s experience becomes her refuge in a
desperate bid for survival.
Instead
of killing her, he keeps Katherine Kingslow imprisoned in the dark
while he continues plotting to take back the Jane Doe in the
hospital. How long can Kathy survive and will she lose her own
mind?
The
search for the killer will lead to his dark secret buried in the
past, something much larger than a man compelled to kill again and
again.
Whispers. Far away and insidious. Darkness.
To sleep more deeply is to dream more deeply.
In the darkness, where the nightmares live.
Whispers. Far away and insidious. Darkness. Escape. Trapped. Helplessness. Weak. Cold wet. Dog. Nothing. Fear welling up, bubbling up in a scream yearning to tear free from a dry scorched throat, and silenced with the silent slipping of a needle into the injection port of a thin intravenous plastic tube.
Bruising and swelling leave her barely recognizable as human in the monstrosity of the ruination inflicted on her. Days meld into weeks and still she sleeps.
The
McAllister Farm
The
McAllister Series Book 2
Step
back in time to learn the secret behind the bodies in Where the
Bodies Are in this disturbing look at the boy who will grow up to
create the killer.
1981
Meet
David McAllister, the boy who will grow up to create the killer.
In
1981 there was a man who lived on a farm. William McAllister was a
private and reclusive man who, above all else, did not like to have
attention drawn on his family.
He
wanted only to be left to mind his own business and family and for
the world to do the same. But that very reclusiveness fosters
contempt and suspicion in the people of the small farming community
his family has called home for generations.
William
McAllister has a son, Jason McAllister. Jason is a troubled boy.
Growing up under his father’s strict rules and isolated from the
normal childhood relationships, he is left to explore his darker
inclinations. Seeing the darker side of Jason, William tries to rein
his son in by bringing him into the family business.
Just
then a serial killer starts preying on local young women. The
McAllisters quickly find themselves drawn into the spotlight when the
town decides William McAllister is the killer. As the town’s search
for the killer focuses on the McAllister farm and the woods behind
it, the threat to the McAllister secret grows.
The
McAllister family history is as dark as the secret hiding in the
woods. The attention is a threat to both William McAllister's
profession and his family. He has no choice but to find the killer
himself. He might not like what he learns.
Is there something wrong with me?
Why does it feel so good
to see something squirm in pain?
To see the fear and begging in their eyes?
To be the only one who can help them
if I only just stop,
but to go ahead anyway?
The shovel makes a sly shuh-king noise as its blade bites into the hard earth that likely has never been touched by the tools of men.
William McAllister struggles against the un-giving ground, putting his foot on the top edge of the shovel blade beside the handle protruding from it and using his weight and muscles to force the blade deeper.
He grunts with the effort.
The night creatures watch silently from the safety of their hideaways in the woods.
His breath turns to fog in the cool night air, coming heavier from the exertion.
Satisfied he has pierced the ground deep enough; he works the shovel back and forth before leaning on it, scraping out a pile of hard dirt. He dumps it next to where he is digging and thrusts the blade into the earth again.
It is spring and still chilly at night. The ground is still thawing from its winter freeze, making the job harder.
The trees stand sentry above, dark figures against the moonlit sky blocking out some of the stars. The lower brush surrounding him grows where the trees thin to let more light reach lower, allowing it to thrive and grow taller and thicker, giving the spot a more secluded feeling.
The wind picks up, hissing through the leaves of the treetops.
He ignores the whispering trees, continuing to dig until the hole is big and deep enough.
At last he pauses, wiping away the sweat dripping into his eyes from his forehead.
He drops the shovel on the ground and picks up a sheet-wrapped object lying on the ground behind him. It is perhaps the size of a small child of about four or five years old.
The sheet looks ghostly pale in the darkness, seeming to hover on its own in the barely visible arms of the dark-clothed man against the background of the dark woods surrounding him.
Kneeling, William gently lays it in the hole.
He picks up the shovel, standing over the hole staring down into it for a pause that lasts only a few heartbeats but feels longer.
Without a word, he starts shovelling the pile of disturbed earth back into the hole. With each thud of dirt hitting the sheet-wrapped object its startling brightness against the dark of the dirt and night grows smaller. He keeps at it, methodically tossing in shovel full after shovel full until the displaced dirt has all been replaced and the wrapped object completely buried. The rounded mound of dirt is dark against the rotting leaves and brown pine needles covering the ground all around.
With a powerful swing, he brings the flat bottom of the shovel blade down on the mound. It hits with a dull thud, leaving an indentation in the disturbed earth. He pounds it again and again, compacting the loose chunks of dirt, but it isn’t enough. He wants the mound to be level with the ground around it.
Scattering leaves, twigs, and fallen pine needles over it, he starts stomping the mound with his boots, stomping and stomping, clouds of vapour puffing out of his mouth in the chill air with the effort. He scrapes the surface with the sharp shovel blade, smoothing it.
Scattering more debris on the spot, he presses it in with the flat of the shovel and then sets the shovel down to scatter more loose debris on top.
Finished, he studies his handiwork and nods, satisfied.
There is no visible sign the ground has ever been disturbed unless you know to look. The next good rain will wash away even those faint traces.
Picking up the shovel, William moves off through the woods, eventually arriving at a farmyard.
In one direction across the farmyard is an old barn that has not been used to house animals for decades. Straw still litters the floor in places around the edges and in old stalls. The rest is swept clean. The moonlight coming in through the cracks between boards and in the windows glints dully off the rounded metal frames of old tractors huddled in the darkened interior. Like the farm itself, the tractors were passed down to him from his father.
The old barn is feeling its age and will probably need to be rebuilt in another ten years.
Close to him near the edge of the trees is a shed used for storage for anything small enough to pile on its shelves and in corners.
Centered between them across the yard is a small old farmhouse.
It is the kind of farmhouse built before building codes, when a handshake was enough to suffice and a farmer built his own house with a hammer and nails and his own sweat. The house is small but well built with two small bedrooms and a mud-floored cellar for cold storage and the only access to the cellar a trap door with a ladder that goes straight down. The walls are made of flat boards grouted between them to seal the cracks.
The house was built by an earlier generation of McAllisters when they first settled here and the farm handed down in the family.
The livestock on the farm consists of a small flock of free roaming chickens that provide them with fresh eggs, a single aging nanny goat they use for milk, and a small herd of feral cattle that live mostly unbothered in the field. An old barn without doors beyond the trees surrounding the farmyard provides the cattle shelter when they need it.
William walks across the yard and puts the shovel in the barn, hanging it on the wall, then heads for the farmhouse.
The light shining on a pole in the farmyard reveals the lines at the corners of his eyes; lines drawn by hours spent working outside under the burning sun and against the ravages of the wind and weather. He looks forty, although he is younger.
Marjory greets him at the door, wringing her hands and looking anxious.
“Did you take care of them?” Marjory asks.
He nods. “They won’t be found where I buried them.”
“Good,” she says. “Now we have to break it to them.” Marjory is upset and wishes they did not have to do this.
Today had been as any other until the racoon came.
Hunting
Michael Underwood
The
McAllister Series Book 3
Step
deeper into the twisted mind of a serial killer as he slips further
into madness in this disturbing psychological thriller.
Hunting
Michael Underwood follows on the heels of book one, Where the Bodies
Are, bringing the first two stories and their characters together as
the search for the killer continues.
Michael
Underwood has vanished and everyone is searching for him. Detective
Jim McNelly is determined to not stop until he finds him. Working
with the detective, Lawrence Hawkworth is still chasing the bigger
story he knows is behind the bodies. Jason McAllister knows he must
stop the killer he created before he goes too far. He may be the only
one who can stop him.
Unable
to let go of his barely remembered past and the search for his
sister, the killer goes looking for Jason McAllister’s past and his
family.
*****
Detective
Jim McNelly is furious. Detective Michael Underwood disappeared
without a trace with the only living witness to the McAllister
murders. Worse, Michael is not who he pretended to be. And then the
other shoe fell.
Jason
T. McAllister, tried and convicted of the kidnapping and murders of
multiple women and the prime suspect behind the bodies discovered in
the woods behind the McAllister farm, is being inexplicably set free.
He will not spend the rest of his life in prison.
Jim
is determined to find Michael Underwood, bring him down, and discover
the truth about who he really is and what his connection to Jason
McAllister is.
Working
with his long time friend, the notoriously unscrupulous investigative
reporter Lawrence Hawkworth, Jim will not stop until he finds Michael
and the answers to the bodies found in the mass graveyard in the
woods behind the McAllister Farm.
Jason
McAllister knows he must stop the real killer behind the murders he
was convicted for. As the killer spirals further into madness, Jason
is the only one who can stop him. But, he needs help. He is going to
have to talk to his father, William McAllister, the man who taught
him how to hide the bodies.
Michael
Underwood and Katherine Kingslow are on the run. A victim of domestic
abuse and only known survivor of the McAllister Farm killer, Kathy
has lapsed into Stockholm syndrome. Now she is torn between her need
to be with her captor and fear of his escalating psychotic
episodes.
Everyone
is hunting for Michael Underwood.
“Michael Underwood walked
out of that prison
and off the face of the earth,
taking our only witness with him.
I will find him and bring him down.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The steady drone of the tires on concrete should have lulled Detective Jim McNelly into a false sense of normalcy. Nothing will be normal again. Not for him, or for anyone else.
His fat jowls work as he clenches and unclenches his jaw, his thick hands gripping the steering wheel hard. His bulk is more than ample enough to fill the driver’s seat of the ancient brown Oldsmobile, almost spilling over into the passenger side.
The McAllister murders.
They are eating away at his gut, tormenting his sleep, and torturing his heartburn. They are victims he failed to save.
The phone call that brought him speeding towards the prison had shattered his morning.
Earlier:
It is Jim’s day off, but his conscience isn’t having it.
Michael Underwood vanished along with our only living witness to the McAllister murders, Jim thinks, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
Michael visited McAllister in prison after the guilty verdict came down on Jason T. McAllister. That was the last time Michael Underwood and our only witness, Katherine Kingslow, were seen.
He takes a sip of coffee, his unkempt moustache soaking up some of the brew.
The phone rings.
“McNelly,” he answers it gruffly.
“Jim, have you heard the news?”
He recognizes the voice immediately, Lawrence Hawkworth.
It was thanks to Lawrence’s investigation that we discovered the identity of the killer.
Hawkworth, that buzzard-like creature who has no shame when it comes to digging up and publishing dirt for the InterCity Voice. He’s the most notoriously underhanded investigative reporter in town, but he is effective. Otherwise, Jason McAllister would still be an unknown perp.
Lawrence Hawkworth is also his long time friend.
“No. I haven’t turned on a radio or T.V.” He’d had enough of the news long before the trial finished.
“This hasn’t hit the news wires yet. It’s more rumour than news.”
“What is it?” Jim frowns, sipping his coffee.
“The judge is cutting Jason McAllister loose.”
Jim’s grip on his coffee mug tightens and he scowls.
“What do you mean, cutting him loose? He’s being shipped today to a high security nut house. It’s not a real sentence, but at least he’s locked up for now.”
His sentence will be determined on a month-to-month basis by a board of psychiatrists and the suits that run the place.
The idea infuriates Jim. Not guilty by reason of insanity, that was the trial verdict. Instead of hard time in a penitentiary, he’s doing not so hard time in a psychiatric facility. How long he serves depends on his behaviour.
“That’s been put off. His lawyer managed to get the appeal date pushed up, fast tracked because someone at the top just wants it to go away, I’m sure of that.”
“I’m not surprised. He used the media to get the public to sympathize with McAllister while he filed his appeal against the guilty but insane verdict. The moment the verdict came down the media switched from portraying McAllister as a monster to calling him an innocent victim railroaded by the police without proof, almost in the same breath. It will be impossible to find another jury that hasn’t been tainted by the media for another trial.”
“It’s gone past that now. I doubt there will be another trial, not even a trial by judge.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rumour has it the judge is releasing McAllister pending a new trial when the appeal comes before him. The appeal is just a formality. It’s already decided.”
Jim flinches, freezes, a stone cold statue. “You’re joking. It’s not funny.”
“It’s no joke. Jason McAllister will be standing before the judge within the next few days. He’s walking out of that courtroom a free man.”
Lawrence’s words hit Jim like a physical blow, rocking him as hard as it did when the verdict came down.
His coffee cup explodes against the wall in a shower of broken ceramic fragments and coffee erupting and splattering out from the wall like dull brown blood.
It’s all too convenient. McAllister is too insane to be found guilty of kidnapping and murder, but not insane enough to be a danger to society. McAllister has just been handed a free pass, a get out of jail free card. Do not pass Go and do not collect your two hundred dollars, just go and run. Disappear.
“What secrets do you know McAllister?” Jim mutters under his breath.
“What are you going to do, Jim?”
“I’m going to get the son of a bitch.”
Killing
David McAllister
The
McAllister Series Book 4
Everyone
wants to kill David McAllister in this explosive conclusion.
David
McAllister must die.
Crazy
comes to a head in this disturbing psychological thriller.
When an
unbalanced serial killer sets his sights on a little girl, there is
only one way it can end. Someone will die.
Sometimes
the only way to stop a monster is to kill it. He has gone by many
names, but he was raised as David McAllister, and finding what he is
looking for is not enough to quiet the darkness inside him.
The
organization ordered the cleanup of the entire McAllister family.
The job
was given to Sophie McAllister.
While
Detective Jim McNelly and his reporter friend Lawrence Hawkworth
continue to hunt them down, the McAllisters move into hiding.
David
McAllster’s psychosis continues, but now Sophie’s daughter is in
danger. He believes she is his tiny sister Cassie.
The
presence of his now adult sister Cassie does not stop his dead little
Cassie from tormenting him.
***
Sometimes
the only way to stop a monster is to kill it. He has gone by many
names, but he was raised as David McAllister, and finding what
he is looking for is not enough to quiet the darkness inside him.
David
McAllister must die.
While
the McAllisters move into hiding, Detective Jim McNelly and his
reporter friend, Lawrence Hawkworth, continue to pursue them. Jim and
Lawrence split up to follow their own leads, routes that will take
them each on their own path to discover secrets behind the
McAllisters.
Anderson
and William are trying to keep the group together and ahead of the
detective hunting them while trying to resolve the issue of what to
do with David, Kathy, Rose Bheals, and the boy Jason brought, Billy.
Kathy
is becoming increasingly fearful both for and of David and wants out,
but feels trapped. She is certain death is the only way out.
Cassie
swore to kill David for what he did to Connie and the others. Torn by
memories she does not have and the knowledge of the dark hole this
life will bury her in, she needs to escape.
Sophie
has been ordered to kill David and Kathy. She may have to kill her
own brother, Jason, too. When the time comes, she’s not sure if she
can do it.
With
Marjory’s lapses into the foggy confusion of Alzheimer’s, nobody
believes her when she really needs them to, when Sophie’s little
girl’s life is at stake.
David
is slipping further into madness and, convinced she is the little
sister he lost so many years ago, he is going to take little Lauren
with him. Having his now adult real sister, Cassie, there is no help.
Will
someone reach David and Lauren in time as the blackness closes in and
rage takes over?
“Day-vid,” little Cassie whispers in a taunting sing-song.
“Day-vid.
Why did you hurt me David?”
She stares at him with vacant eyes, the light of life extinguished.
“Did you mean what you said? That you are going to kill him?” Kathy asks, looking at Cassie.
Kathy still feels the shock. It fills every fibre of her being, numbing her and pushing the world away to some distant place. She feels like she is trapped in a bad movie.
“Did I mean what?” Cassie does not look at her. She can’t. Every time she looks at Kathy she is filled with anger.
“At the farm; you said you are going to kill him. Did you mean it?”
“I meant it.” Cassie glances at her and quickly looks away.
Kathy swallows, thinking.
Do I ask? What will she do, kill me? Isn’t that what I want? To die? To get this all over with? The only way out of this is death.
“Who did you mean?” she asks, hesitating. “Which one of them are you going to kill?”
“Does it matter?”
Kathy feels nauseas. I don’t know who I want it to be, she thinks.
“I feel like this is unreal,” Kathy says. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m not. No thanks to you.”
“That’s harsh.”
“You deserve it.”
Kathy’s throat constricts and her eyes burn with the tears that threaten to come.
“It’s time to go.” The voice has the raspy tremor of age.
They look up at Anderson’s intrusion. Kathy is anxious he somehow knows what they are talking about.
Cassie gets up and walks away without looking back.
Kathy watches her go. “She hates me,” she says softly.
“She has good reason to,” Anderson says.
He reaches one age-gnarled hand down to help her up.
She reaches up, taking his hand and letting him help her up, surprised at the strength in his withered muscles.
They walk to the vehicles together, where everyone is waiting.
Anderson moves to walk next to William.
“We have to drop off your Mrs. Bheals somewhere at the first chance,” Anderson whispers to him. “We have too many people involved in this already. I don’t think I can do anything for that woman David brought, but we can get rid of the old woman before it’s too late for her.”
William nods.
“I couldn’t leave her there. You saw the place. What it’s like; the patients. She doesn’t belong there. There is nothing wrong with that woman’s mind. I don’t know why she was in that place.”
“Family probably wanted to put her where she can’t trouble them,” Anderson says. “It happens when you get old.”
“What about the kid?” William asks, his eyes shifting to look at the kid following Jason.
“I don’t know. I have to find out.” Anderson’s face is grim.
I don’t want to tell them the kid is probably going to have to be disposed of, he thinks. But, William probably already knows that.
L.
V. Gaudet is a subjugated cubicle dweller by day and a Canadian
author of dark fiction by night, a member of the Manitoba Writers’
Guild, the Horror Writers Association, and Authors of Manitoba.
L.
V. grew up with a love of the darker side; sneaking down to the
basement at night to watch the old horror B movies, Vincent Price
being a favourite, devouring horror books, and has had a passion for
books and the idea of creating stories and worlds a person can get
lost in since reading that first novel.
This
love of storytelling has L. V. working writing and editing into a
busy life that includes a full time job, family, and doing the little
things to help the writing community including offering encouragement
to others in the online writing community and volunteering time
editing the Manitoba Writers’ Guild newsletter and helping with
their Facebook presence, proofreading for the HWA newsletter, and
visiting schools for I Love to Read month.
L.V.
Gaudet currently lives in Winnipeg with two rescue dogs, spouse, and
kids.
L.V.
Gaudet’s books are available in ebook and print format at online
bookstores.
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