Fault Lines
Chapter One
"He's dead. He's dead." The woman on the other end of the phone was sobbing. I
tried to shake the sleep off. I looked at the number the emergency service had
given me - Clarrington. If the call came from Clarrington, chances were she
was standing over him with a gun. Clarrington was a small, industrial town
twenty miles from the thriving university community where I worked. Mills were
closing in Clarrington; people were more or less constantly being put out of
work, and maybe because of that - or maybe because of some esoteric reason I
knew nothing about - Clarrington was, I thought, the center of violence in the
known universe. Clarrington was like that square mile in Mexico where all the
monarch butterflies go, only every antisocial, drug- or alcohol-addicted,
violent person in the world seemed to pass through Clarrington.
"Where is he? Is he there?" I wasn't sure what to say. Nothing in my training
as a forensic psychologist specializing in child abuse and domestic violence
cases covered some of the things I ran into in the real world when I worked
emergency for the Department of Psychiatry at Jefferson University ... read full excerpt from Fault Lines ebook
