Death on the Dunes
by
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It was on one of those winter days when John had just finished replacing a cracked windowpane on one of the cabins and decided to take Cindy for a walk along the dunes and perhaps get a shot of the sunset with his camera. That is when he noticed something floating in with the tide and then drifting out again with the tide and it wasn’t a log.
Chapter Two
Walking over to the body, he could see she was a female and judging by the looks of her, she had been in the water for some time. Her body was swollen and had the grayish shiny tint to it and looked somewhat like a rubber mannequin that perverts buy to entertain themselves.
Cindy took one whiff of the body and wanted no part of it, for she could smell death and that was a good enough reason to stay away from whatever it was in the water.
Quickly John ran up the bank of one of the dunes and secured a piece of driftwood. Trying not to touch the body in anyway, he positioned the driftwood to stop the body from rolling back towards the ocean when the waves receded.
The body now lay face up in the sand with the next wave washing upon it, but the driftwood now prevented the body from rolling over and back into the sea. Then he went and got a couple of more pieces of driftwood and placed them against the body to secure it. Then he looked seriously at the figure of a woman lying in the sand.
She looked Asian and he suspected she was Chinese, for she was rather tall in stature and that is not a usual physical attribute of the Japanese people or the Korean people. He thought to himself perhaps she was a cook from one of the tankers that come into the harbor and tie up at the mill wharf, except this time she wasn’t doing any cooking. But wouldn’t the ship’s captain report any incident to the port authorities? Something like this certainly would have been in the papers. But he couldn’t remember seeing anything in the papers about a missing crewmember, and certainly if
On a closer inspection he noticed she had some serious-looking bruises around her neck, and from past experience they looked to him like someone’s finger marks applying pressure to the throat area. Once a body is dead, the cell tissue cannot replace itself and the bruising stays in place. Also she didn’t have on the kind of clothes you would find on a cook, she appeared to have the kind of clothes you might find on peasant working the rice paddies in
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About the Book
This is the story of a retired detective named John Clarke, who is from the
The story goes from the quiet little backwater community of Salmon Fork on the coast in
About the Author
Mr. Jim Garvey spent approximately 20 years with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
He is a widower with two grown step daughters and three grand children.
He is a graduate of Cal-State San Bernardino with a major in Business Administration and a minor in Public Relations.
He spent six and a half years in the military before starting his career in law enforcement.
Mr. Garvey retired in 1996 from the Sheriff’s Department and moved to the little town of
In his spare time Mr. Garvey writes comments on local and national issues for the two major papers in this area. He has also served as a California Senior Assembly Person for the California Senior Legislature and has served as a member of the Humboldt County Grand Jury.
His hobbies include, bike riding, reading, writing and riding his motorcycle.