Page 1 of Jonny’s Redemption

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Lieutenant Jonny Spencer stared down at the dead body.

A life gone too soon.

The man looked like he was sleeping. Not all of them did. It was the ones who didn’t that plagued his dreams.

His gaze went to the letter. Not a suicide note—a confession.

A tale of a woman’s pain. Years of suffering until she could take it no longer. A wife forced to take the law into her own hands.

I failed again.

Protect and serve.

What a goddamned joke.

“Miss Cassie finally snapped,” Johnson, the county coroner, noted. “Surprised it took her so long.”

Jonny wasn’t.

Cassie Hampton had called dozens of times. Jonny himself had been out to this very house over ten times. Domestic disturbance, domestic violence, now murder. Each time Cassie had refused to press charges. She’d call it in, a deputy would come out, Scott would stop whaling on her, and he’d leave to cool down. But Miss Cassie would never press charges, and Scott would leave peacefully only to come back, and a month later, the sheriff’s department would get another call.

Red tape.

So much damn red tape Jonny’s hands were tied. There was nothing he could do if the victim refused to make a report.

Nothing he could do unless the evidence was such the State’s Attorney had an airtight-open-and-shut case.

It didn’t matter that everyone in Cliff City knew Scott Hampton beat the ever-loving hell out of his wife. It didn’t matter every sheriff’s deputy, town cop, and state trooper knew Scott was a wife-beating motherfucker. There was not a damn thing Jonny could do.

And that was the last straw.

Without acknowledging his fellow officers or the coroner’s offhand remark, Jonny left the bedroom.

It wasn’t the stench of body decomp that filled his lungs and made his gut roil. It wasn’t the frantic 911 call from Cassie Hampton declaring her husband dead. It wasn’t even the damn note written in pretty cursive explaining how the woman had poisoned her husband and why. It wasn’t the dead body.

It was all of it.

All. Of. It.

Years of trying his damndest to help but failing.

It was his dead brother.

His dead father.

I’d failed them, too.

It was a good woman who’d been beaten down, who’d after years of abuse did not snap but plotted. And now she’d have to live with what she’d done.

Yeah, Jonny’s gut roiled all the way through the house. Not even when he stepped out on to the porch did the fresh air quell the anger that churned.

And by the time he’d made it to his county-issued SUV he was no less agitated. The drive to the station only made his disturbing thoughts turn into a plan.

“Shit,” Sheriff Baker muttered under his breath when Jonny walked into his office.

Jonny Spencer didn’t sit, he also didn’t speak.