Hey Everyone!
I thought I'd share a little snippet from Captivated By The Winter King with you, today. With all the bad press cops seem to get, often with good reason, I thought it wouldn't hurt to remember that there are an awful lot of good cops too, who only want to help people. Sheriff Gabe Chesterfield is a fictional character, but, as always, there's some truth in this fiction. Enjoy! :-)
Excerpt from Captivated By The Winter King:
The criminals he had arrested over the years had been motivated by different things. Some of the motivations Gabe could sympathize with. When people felt driven to crime because of poverty or addiction, he often felt bad for them. If possible, he tried to help them or to get them the help they needed. When someone only committed a crime because of a bad situation they were powerless to get themselves out of, they almost always chose a better path if given an alternative. Gabe considered it part of his job to help the citizens he was charged with protecting to find those alternatives if he could.
Then there were the less sympathetic reasons. The reasons people who were self-involved, selfish, and entitled had. They were so convinced of their own superiority, they thought that everyone else in the world should see it too. These people expected to be deferred to, obeyed, and to always get their own way. Anytime that failed to happen, they would get angry. Anyone who challenged, or even questioned, them was the enemy. And enemies always needed to be destroyed. Gabe had found himself in the role of enemy to people like that with alarming regularity, but none of them had yet been able to destroy him.
Yes, Gabe had a lot of experience dealing with a lot of different people and his gut feelings about them were often correct. He was always meticulous in his investigations, but it was rare for him to be proven wrong in the end. Every instinct he had screamed that Erik Daniel Montgomery, III was an abusive asshole who either drove his fiance away or murdered her.
The fact that the car she had rented had been found empty except for a few drops of her blood, and that the great man himself kept returning to the scene of her supposed accident made his cop-senses tingle. It was clear the vehicle had been crashed, but he hadn't found any trees in the vicinity with damage to match that on the car. So how had it gotten there?
Mr. Montgomery didn't seem interested in answering any of Gabe's questions, which only made him more suspicious. The night he had called the police, Mr. Montgomery had been insistent that Kathryn Graham, the woman he had lived with for twelve years, had suddenly, with no explanation, stolen from him and absconded. What she had stolen, the man had been less clear about. When Gabe had pressed him, he had admitted that nothing was missing, but he still didn't know where she was.
Being concerned about a family member who was missing without an explanation was something that Gabe could sympathize with. Calling the police and reporting that person as a thief was not. Then there was the bloody clothing that Mr. Montgomery declined to explain. Gabe had pointed out that Ms. Graham was an adult and, as such, could leave whenever she chose and go wherever she pleased. That was the point when Mr. Montgomery had stopped speaking to him and the phone calls had started.
Calls came into the Sheriff's Office from all over New England and even from some of the powers that be in Florida. Gabe had thanked all those important men for their concern and assured them that his office would investigate the disappearance of Ms. Graham with the same vigor that they would use to investigate the disappearance of any suspected victim of domestic violence. That had been enough to put an end to the phone calls.
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