Spotlight: Rose Dhu by Mark Murphy
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A highly regarded surgeon has gone missing. Will the search for her whereabouts tear a community apart?
Dr. Janie O’Connor’s disappearance from her Savannah estate, Rose Dhu, has shocked the town to its core. Her former fiancé, Phillip Carruthers—once the most eligible bachelor in coastal Georgia and the playboy son of Savannah’s most powerful billionaire family—is the prime suspect.
Phillip maintains his innocence and seems to have an airtight alibi, and the case has local police stumped. But Detective Frank Winger, who has his own personal connection to Janie’s family, is determined to discover what happened . . . as long as false witnesses, evidence tampering, and ghosts from his past don’t get in the way.
When back-door dealings and long-forgotten enemies reveal themselves, will Frank be able to distinguish fact from fiction to figure out what happened to Janie? Or will her whereabouts stay shrouded in the shadows of Savannah’s live oaks?
Excerpt
“Pick up the kid and follow me,” Carmine barked.
“What are we doing with him?” John asked.
“We’re disposing of the evidence,” Carmine said.
They walked over to the wooden platform. It had been constructed off the levee, and the ground sloped away sharply from the shoreline, making the water beneath the platform quite a bit deeper than John had initially surmised. The pond’s surface was dotted with lily pads, and its dark waters were choked with algae. John couldn’t even see through the tannin-stained water to the bottom. For all he knew, the pond was bottomless.
A dense fog over the pond’s surface obscured the opposite shoreline, but John heard a heavy splash in the distance.
A couple of green slider turtles, perched on a nearby log, suddenly dropped into the water next to the platform—plop! plop!—but John sensed that there was something else out there. He could feel it in his bones.
The dark water below the platform eddied lazily around the pilings. For an instant, John thought he saw something dark moving in the swirling current, something massive and ominous.
Could it be?
“Throw the kid’s body in,” Carmine said.
John did as he was told. When the boy hit the water, the sheet wrapped around him spread like a pair of gossamer wings. And then he rolled over, his mouth open but his dead eyes wide and unseeing, before he began to sink beneath the water.
Suddenly, the sinking stopped.
The boy’s body lurched suddenly upward out of the water as if shot out of some unseen cannon. His arms flailed limply upward, as if pulled by a crazed puppet master, before flopping back to his sides. It was only as the boy’s body toppled back into the water that John saw the shadowy bulk looming below.
Burt, John thought. The damned thing is real.
He’d heard stories of this creature, but it was the first time he’d ever glimpsed it with his own eyes.
Burt was a sixteen-foot-long bull gator with a taste for human flesh. Rumors of the monster’s existence had percolated among those involved with the shadier nether regions of the Carruthers organization for years. John had heard that the creature lurked in one of the murky ponds somewhere near the shorebird rookery. Phillip, who had first discovered it, had reportedly nicknamed the animal after the quintessential Southern boy, Burt Reynolds.
For Carruthers Enterprises employees, this was their Loch Ness Monster. “We’ll take you to see Burt” was the ultimate threat for anyone who dared betray the company.
The gigantic gator had clamped its huge jaws around the boy’s torso. Its obsidian tail slashed back and forth, churning the water into a yellowish froth. One of the gator’s eyes was sealed permanently shut, and a pale, jagged scar tore across it. The other eye gleamed a dull topaz, its cruel light glimmering like a dim beacon lighting the way into the depths of hell.
“Good God,” John murmured.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Erika said, a thin-lipped smile on her face.
Carmine picked up the dead woman’s limp body like a sack of potatoes, walked back over to the platform, and tossed her remains into the pond. An awful thrashing sound followed, the intermittent slap of leather against wood and the occasional grunt punctuating the air as the gator feasted yet again.
John didn’t look. Hell, he couldn’t look.
He’d seen enough of Burt to last a lifetime.
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About the Author
Mark Murphy is a native of Savannah, Georgia. He’s worked as a fast-food worker, marine biologist, orderly, ordained minister, and renowned gastroenterologist, his current “day job.” When he’s not healing the sick, he writes anything he can—newspaper columns, short stories, magazine articles, and textbook chapters. Rose Dhu is his third novel.
