Book Review: Sins of the Father

Synopsis:

Detective Nathan Parker opens an investigation into the body of an unidentified man discovered in the desert by the leaders of a Boy Scout troop.

He soon concludes that, although discovered in the middle of dirt back road, the man was actually tossed to his death from an airplane. And his death is somehow connected to the emergence of a new criminal organization, Red Dawn.

A secretive Joint Terrorism Task Force pops up in Phoenix to the surprise of Lynnette Finch, Senior Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix FBI Office, and the woman with whom Parker was in a relationship when his partner was murdered. Agent Kira Thompson, leader of the Task Force known as JTTF Black Bag, has a reputation for being impetuous and believing that successful ends justify the use of unconventional means.

Parker is coerced to work with Black Bag or his ex-coyote friend, Billie Carson, could face federal charges of supporting a terrorist organization. Because Billie’s freedom is in jeopardy, Parker goes along with Thompson’s plan, but one-by-one, people associated with the Task Force are picked off.

A target close to Parker is attacked. Thompson vanishes. And Parker is forced to seek help from an unusual ally in order to expose Red Dawn’s mastermind.

In Sins of the Father, the fast-pace fourth installment in author James L’Etoile’s acclaimed Detective Nathan Parker series, familiar foes, lies, secrets, and a father’s sin all converge in a deadly standoff.

Review:

Author James L’Etoile introduced readers to Detective Sergeant Nathan Parker with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona in Dead Drop. He and his partner, Josh McMillan, were assigned to patrol a road near the United States – Mexico border with the goal of interrupting the flow of undocumented migrants who were accessing it to bypass Immigration and Customs Enforcement checkpoints. McMillan was brutally murdered by Esteban Castaneda, a vicious leader in the Los Muertos gang. Nathan blamed himself, convinced that if he had responded faster to McMillan’s urgent radio call, he might have saved his partner. In the aftermath, his relationship with Lynnette “Lynne” Finch, Senior Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix FBI Office, fell apart but their paths frequently continue to cross professionally.

With time, counseling, and the presence in his life of his beloved foster son, Miguel, Nathan has gotten his personal and professional lives back on track. He met Linda Hunt at a foster parent group and after a year of dating seriously, she and her foster son, Leon, are closer to moving in with Nathan and Miguel, who is now a college student working at the Immigrant Coalition run by Billie Carson, a former coyote.

L’Etoile immediately thrusts readers into his fast-paced narrative. A group of Boy Scouts traversing a desert backroad happen upon a flock of vultures. Their leaders exit the van to determine what is blocking the roadway where the birds have gathered . . . and find themselves looking at a brown work boot. The deceased man’s legs are twisted and folded at odd angles, his wrists bound with zip ties. Soon, an ATV arrives, and two men load the dead man into it before speeding off in the direction from which the vehicle approached. They leave evidence behind, though: a single finger.

Nathan responds to the scene and becomes immersed in an intense and dangerous investigation. He quickly concludes that the man found in the road was murdered — tossed from an airplane — and discovers another victim when he observes and proceeds to a suspicious plume of smoke.

Quickly, Nathan learns that a Joint Terrorism Task Force called Black Bag has set up an operation in Phoenix without affording Lynne the professional courtesy of advance notice. Worse, the leader, Agent Kira Thompson, makes it clear to Nathan that she and her team are commandeering his investigation, and his cooperation is required in order to prevent Billie Carson from facing charges. Billie operates the Immigrant Coalition and delivers supplies to Mexico on a regular basis. Part of getting necessary aid to those who need it involves bribing local officials, but the federal agents found thousands of dollars in boxes destined for Mexico and are ready to take Billie into custody.

Nathan reluctantly agrees to work with Black Bag to take down a multi-national criminal organization known as Red Dawn, in part because the team has been compromised, their efforts jeopardized. Red Dawn appears to be muscling into the operations of several cartels, smuggling heroin and fentanyl into the United States for distribution. In fact, the threat Red Dawn poses to their operations has caused the cartels to band together against the interloper. Nathan is charged with ascertaining the source of information being leaked to Red Dawn. “I need you as bait,” Thompson unabashedly tells him.

Despite being extorted by Thompson, Nathan demands that he run the operation his own way. The feds must share the intel they have gathered thus far, and Nathan will assemble his own team, including Detectives Pete Tully and Barry Johns.

From the outset, Nathan and his crew find themselves in danger, having to rely upon their situational awareness, deductive reasoning, and law enforcement experience in order to stay alive. L’Etoile takes readers on a fraught and frantic journey with Nathan and his colleagues, revealing each step of the investigation and the reasoning that propels their methodical inquiries. Near misses and tragedy hamper their efforts and imperil Nathan’s progress toward maintaining his mental health and the delicate balance he has finally achieved in his life.

L’Etoile has crafted another intricately plotted tale in which every bit of evidence uncovered raises more questions and leads his characters in unexpected directions. When an extremely specific piece of evidence is found at the very spot where Nathan’s partner was murdered, Nathan is convinced that McMillan’s killer is sending him a taunting message. But Castaneda is locked away in a Supermax prison in Colorado. He survived being stabbed by two other inmates and is securely housed in protective custody where he is not allowed visitors or phone privileges. Castanada did vow to destroy not just Nathan, but everyone he loves. But it would be impossible for him to send messages through associates or arrange for attacks on Nathan and others in Arizona . . . wouldn’t it?

The action unfolds at an unrelenting pace and L’Etoile deftly keeps readers guessing as to how the clues and evidence being amassed by Nathan and company fits together into a cohesive whole. Indeed, nothing is as it initially seems, leaving L’Etoile’s characters as thoroughly puzzled as his readers for most of the tale.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the story is the depiction of the characters’ relationships. Most of the characters were introduced in previous installments so they are familiar to readers, fully developed and mostly empathetic. L’Etoile’s many years in law enforcement bring credibility to the frequently humorous, affectionate banter between Nathan and his colleagues, especially Barry, as well as their camaraderie, providing brief but welcome respites from the tensely dramatic plot. Nathan cares deeply for his team and is a supportive, encouraging mentor and wants to help others learn from his experience, urging them to seek help to work through trauma, rather than deny and attempt to ignore their feelings. Nathan has grown into his role as “dad” to Miguel and is ready to enjoy and grateful for the healthy relationship he has built with Linda, who is determined to overcome the emotional scars she bears after escaping an abusive marriage. But everything Nathan has worked so hard for and everyone he cares about are at risk.

And yet again, Billie finds herself entangled in a complicated situation. She and Miguel share a close relationship, and he is acutely aware that she is troubled about something, but she will not reveal what is bothering her. “She forgets we’re here to help her. Billie’s afraid to open up and ask for help,” Miguel notes.

L’Etoile navigates a complex story to a satisfying conclusion, nimbly pulling all the loose, confounding threads together in a plausible, cohesive manner. When he does so, it becomes apparent that he skillfully injected clues along the way that were easy to overlook, their importance only becoming known at L’Etoile’s expertly placed junctures. Like the previous volumes in the series, Sins of the Father is an engrossing, mystifyingly clever, and completely enjoyable, layered story. L’Etoile melds a compelling mystery with a meditation on the importance of relationships – parental, collegial, familial, romantic – in order to create a well-rounded, contented life. And through several of his characters, he illustrates that asking for and seeking help is not an indication of weakness but, rather, a way to discover and bolster our own strength.

More installments in the series are forthcoming, fortunately. It will be fascinating to see what adventures L’Etoile has planned next for Nathan, et al.

Excerpt from Sins of the Father

Chapter One

Death to a ten-year-old is a pause in a video game. It’s temporary. A momentary setback until you’re back into the game again. At their age, the boys of Boy Scout Troop 116 thought they were immortal. Or they did until they got their first glimpse of human remains.

Ken Dryden stood on the brakes, sending the fifteen-passenger van into a skid on the hard-packed desert road. A flock of eight turkey vultures pecked and tore hunks of flesh from their prey. The enormous birds didn’t budge at the approach of the speeding white passenger van. Only one bothered to look up with a flap of meat hanging from its curved beak.

The birds ignored a loud burst from the van’s horn. Dryden unbuckled and turned to the eight boys in the back. “Stay here.”

Dryden and the assistant scoutmaster, Bill Cope stepped from the van and approached the circle of birds.

“Must’ve found themselves a coyote or something,” Cope said. “Why you insist we take this road? It’s in the middle of –”

“This can’t be…” Dryden trailed off and crept toward the flock of scavengers.

“Whatever they found, they sure don’t want to give it up,” Dryden said as he waved his arms trying to chase the birds off the road.”

“Don’t blame them. Pickings are probably a bit thin out here.”

From behind, a high-pitched voice called out. “Oh, cool. What did they kill?”

Dryden turned and three ten-year-old boys stood a few feet away gawking at the feeding frenzy on the hardscrabble dirt road.

“I told you guys to wait in the van.”

“What did they find?” The tallest boy asked.

“Probably a coyote or something run over on the road, Chase.”

“There’s no tracks in the dirt but ours,” Chase said.

The birds fought and squawked at one another, tearing bits of flesh out from the beaks of weaker birds in the flock. Wings flared and cupped over the remains, claiming them.

“Mr. Dryden? What’s that?” Chase asked.

“What?”

“That,” the boy said with a trembling finger, pointing toward the largest vulture with a torn hunk of flesh hanging from its red beak.

Dryden followed the boy’s line of sight and under the bird’s talons were the remains. He felt sick when he saw it. A brown work boot. Coyotes didn’t wear boots.

“Oh my God.”

“Is it a dead person? Chase said.

“Back to the van boys,” Cope said.

“But –”

“Now!” Dryden barked the order, and the three scouts scurried back to the van.

“Why did you take us on this back road to begin with? What do we do now?” Cope asked Dryden. The two adult supervisors of this scout troop stood at the desert crossroads.

Cope pulled out his cell phone. “No signal out here. We need to call 911.”

Dryden looked back to the van and all eight boys pressed up against the windows gawking at the human remains as the carrion birds devoured their treasure.

“We gotta get them outta here,” Dryden said.

He charged the birds, and most of them backed away. Dryden got a good look at what lay in the desert crossroads — a man, twisted, mangled, and broken. Huge swaths of flesh torn away by the feeding birds. Dryden’s shoulders drooped at the sight — a dead man left in the crossroads.

“I’ll try and keep them away. Drive the boys back out to Quartzite. Call 911. I’ll wait.”

“You wanna stay out here? In this heat?” Cope said.

“It’s early, the heat won’t top out for a couple of hours. I’ll take my pack and all the water we can spare. I’ll be fine. There’s a little shade over there under that Palo Verde.”

Tall, dry creosote brush and a few taller gangly green Palo Verde trees and Saguaro cactus lined the crossroads

“You sure? It’s not like you can help that guy?”

“Whoever he is, he doesn’t deserve to get eaten by these feathered desert rats either. How would you feel if it was someone you knew?”

Dryden retrieved his day pack and two canteens from the van.

“Guys, Mr. Cope is going to take you out. He’ll stop in Quartzite for a pee break.”

“I’ll stay with you, Mr. Dryden,” Chase said.

“Everyone’s going with Mr. Cope.”

A sigh of disappointment filled the back of the van. Dryden knew Chase’s mother was going to meltdown over her precious offspring’s exposure to the dark fringes of life. He figured the Scottsdale socialite would spirit her son away to a resort in Sedona for a crystal bath and chakra realignment.

Dryden hefted his pack and slung the canteens over his shoulder while the van cut a three-point turn and returned in the direction they came.

Once the dust and engine noise died down, all that remained was the breeze cutting through the dried brush and the cackling of the vultures fighting over their prize.

Setting his pack down, Dryden broke off a creosote branch and swung it in front of him forcing the birds away from the remains. Reluctantly, the birds gave up and hopped to the other side of the crossroads.

Dryden closed in on the dead man and grimaced at the mess the vultures made. Unrecognizable. Legs twisted and folded under the body, with a boot sticking out at an impossible angle. No way Chase would earn his first aid merit badge here.

The arms were flayed out over his broken head.

“Oh God.”

Dryden noted the wrists bound with zip ties. This wasn’t a lost hiker. This was a murder victim.

He snatched his cell phone and tried calling Cope to warn him, but the screen reminded him there was no cell signal out here. He shot a series of photos of the dead man, figuring the police would want to see what they found before the vultures could finish it off.

Dryden backed off into the shade and moved out when the vultures grew brave enough to advance. Back and forth for an hour until Dryden spotted a dust trail.

It was too soon for Cope to have summoned help. Quartzite was more than an hour away and the authorities would need time to respond after Cope called them. And this dust plume was coming from the other direction and building fast.

A dead man. Murdered. Alone in the desert. Only a twinge of relief. It wasn’t someone he knew. He knew what that kind of loss felt like and felt guilty about feeling thankful. The dust plume was coming in fast and there was the faint whine of an ATV engine — high pitched and loud.

Dryden snatched his pack and blended into the brush along a game trail, hoping he didn’t encounter an unfriendly javelina. Fifty feet from the road, he hunched down as a green ATV tore into the crossroads and skidded to a stop a few feet away from the body.

Two men stepped from the six-wheel ATV, and one used a bulky satellite phone. After a quick call, the two men donned gloves and picked up the remains, tossing them into the rear cargo compartment of the ATV. They weren’t gentle about it — they were hurried. They needed several trips to gather the bits and pieces.

Once they finished loading the dead man, they sped off in the direction they came from.

Dryden waited until the dust plume died down before he stepped out from his hiding place. He approached the spot in the center of the crossroads where the body had been. There was little to prove a life ended there. The red dirt was marked by a dark circle — what Dryden believed was blood. A single human finger was left behind by the men on the ATV.

A second trail of dust appeared on the horizon in the direction Cope and the boys used on their way out.

Dryden sank back into the brush again until the Black and Yellow Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office SUV pulled to a stop near the intersection.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the finger. Had they left the finger by mistake, or was it a message?

Chapter Two

Sergeant Nathan Parker, the detective leading the Maricopa County Major Crimes unit, pulled his county-issued SUV to a stop at the dirt crossroads.

“You sure this is the spot?”

Cope, the assistant scoutmaster, had ridden along with him to make sure Parker found the exact location. One of the parents met Cope in Quartzite and drove the van of excited boys back to Scottsdale while Cope waited for someone from the sheriff’s office.

“I’m certain. I mean, I think I am. The dead man was right in the center of the intersection.” He pointed ahead. “There. See the dark spot in the dirt?”

Parker opened his door and stepped from the SUV.

“Didn’t you say your friend was supposed to be here watching over the remains? They didn’t both walk off, did they?”

Parker thought he’d been brought out on a desert snipe hunt of sorts if it weren’t for Cope’s dead serious demeanor. The man definitely believed he saw a body out here in the remote section of the desert south of the Hummingbird Wilderness Area.

Walking toward the spot Cope pointed out, Parker figured the man panicked when he came across the scavenged remains of a road kill animal. It wasn’t unusual for deer, coyotes, or javelina to wander down from the wilderness.

Cope got out of the SUV when Parker reached the spot. It was blood-soaked. But there wasn’t anything to point to a human origin. What was odd was a set of narrow tracks, tracks with deep aggressive off-road tread, circling near the blood spill. Two sets of footprints ran from the tire tracks to the dark dirt patch.

“Where’d it go?” Cope asked a few paces behind Parker.

A rustle and snap in the brush to their left caught their attention. It sounded too large for the small game which thrived in the creosote brush. Seconds later, a man emerged from behind a tangle of Palo Verde branches.

“Ken! You all right?” Cope called out to his friend.

Dryden was red-faced and breathing fast when he stepped onto the road surface.

“Deputy. Two men. Took him,” Dryden said in between ragged breaths.

“Ken? Where’s your pack? Your water?” Cope asked.

Dryden shot a finger to the brush where he’d emerged. “Dropped them.”

Parker noted the man wasn’t sweating in the hundred-degree heat and showed signs of heat stroke.

“Let’s load him in the SUV. Get him some water and let him cool off.”

Cope helped his weak friend back to the passenger side of the SUV while Parker looked at the dried, darkened dirt patch for a moment. Something bled out here, but there wasn’t anything to tell the story of what might have been.

Parker joined the two men at the SUV. Cope had gotten his friend into the passenger seat and found the case of bottled water Parker kept in the backseat. Heat related sickness was a deadly threat in the desert. Last year, six-hundred-forty-five people died in Maricopa County from heat stroke and exposure.

Cope handed Parker a cell phone. “It’s Ken’s. He captured these.”

The small phone screen displayed a disturbing image of a man, freshly disfigured and broken.

“You saw this?”

Cope shook his head. “Yeah and so did the kids. What happened to him? I mean. He’s—did the vultures do the damage?”

Parker slid his thumb to the next photo. The one showing the man’s hands bound.

“Definitely not.” Parker couldn’t explain the severity of the crushing and bone breaking trauma. It was the worst he’d seen in nearly fifteen years on the job. He’d discovered migrants left in shipping containers, Cartel assassinations, beheadings, and vehicular homicides. Nothing came close to the injuries in the photos.

“These remains were here when you left your partner behind?” Parker asked.

“They were right there, I swear. Ken wanted to stay behind and — how do you say it? Preserve the evidence. Those damn vultures were picking him apart. It didn’t seem right, you know?”

“Think he can tell us what happened to them?”

Cope looked back to the passenger seat. Dryden had his head back sipping on a bottle of water. The man was thin to begin with, an L.L. Bean shirt and day-old beard growth didn’t make him an outdoorsman.

“I don’t think he did anything with them, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Cope said.

“No. I don’t think he did. They disappeared somewhere and your friend was in the best place to see what happened.”

Parker stepped around Cope and opened the driver’s door. A waft of cool air-conditioned breeze hit him in the face. He gestured for Cope to hop in the back seat and out of the heat.

“How you feeling, Mr. Dryden?”

“Better. Thanks.” He held up the water bottle.”

“Mr. Cope here tells me when he left you behind, there was a full set of remains out there on the road. What happened to them?”

“Two men. They rode in on one of those six-wheel ATV’s from that direction.” He pointed to the road heading to the east. “They took him — the body — they grabbed up the pieces and tossed them in the back of the ATV. Then they ran back to wherever they came from.”

“They took him?”

“And they didn’t have an easy time of it. They needed a bunch of trips to get . . .”

“You get a look at the two guys?”

“Oh, I found this after they left.” Dryden pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and handed it to Parker.

As Parker unwrapped it, Dryden said, “I couldn’t risk the vultures flying off with it.”

Parker had a bad feeling about unwrapping the package. The last fold stuck to the torn skin and tissue clinging to a human finger. He wrapped it back up carefully. He pulled a small paper evidence bag from the center console and dropped the body part in the brown paper container.

“Who could do that to a human being? Animals. Why’d they leave that behind?” Dryden said.

“Couldn’t say. Maybe they were in a hurry,’ Parker said.

“They were moving pretty fast when they left.”

Dryden’s eyes held back something. Parker figured it was shock from the discovery, or heat stroke. The guy was going to need years of therapy to get past this moment.

“I’m going to need these photos. I’ve called in our people to go over the scene. They can give you guys a ride back to civilization.”

As Parker pulled his cell phone out, Cope said, “No signal out here.”

Parker glanced at his screen and confirmed as much. Reluctantly, he reached for the SUV’s radio. Transmitting a request for crime scene technical support would alert the media hounds who monitored the channel. At least he wouldn’t be asking for a coroner to respond, which would inevitably attract news crews like bees to honey.

He made the radio call and snapped a series of photographs of the scene with his cell phone. The warm breeze coming from the south marked the potential for monsoon weather. Any evidence out here would be washed away. The deep ruts worn in the soil crossing the roadway testified flash flooding was a possibility in the remote desert drainage.

Parker caught photos of the quickly drying bloodstained soil at the center of the crossroads. The size of the stain had shrunk by half since he’d arrived at the location. The desert had a way of reclaiming any sign of life. It was the way of nature. It was the way of life in the harsh environment where man was simply another source of sustenance.

The ATV tracks leading east were disappearing in the wind-blown topsoil. The fine dust returning to its natural state. A section of tracks, sheltered by a wall of thick creosote brush, maintained the deep V pattern left by the off-road tread. Hundreds of weekend hobby riders ran their motorcycles and ATVs out in the desert on the weekends, and Parker hoped the photo would show some anomaly on the tread pattern to single out a particular vehicle. He knew it was a long shot, but he needed to cover the bases.

Finished taking photos of the area, Parker noticed a plume of smoke to the east, a dark and boiling column of smoke. He couldn’t shake the connection of the missing body and the sudden appearance of the smoke rising in the east.

Parker trotted back to the SUV, made a quick radio call reporting the smoke and possible woodland fire near the wilderness border. He tossed a traffic cone out on the desert track near the blood-soaked dirt. Maybe the crime scene analysts could find something to hint at why the body was dumped there — and why it vanished.

“How you doing, Mr. Dryden?”

“Better, thanks.”

“I want to go check this out up ahead — don’t think it’s far, maybe a couple of miles. You up for it?”

“I guess.”

“I want to get you checked out by medical, they’re on their way and they’ll meet us up the road.”

“What about the guys who moved that body? Won’t they be up there, too?”

“If they were in as much of a hurry as you said they were, probably not.”

Parker pulled the SUV into drive and swung hard around the bloodstained soil — not so much for destroying any evidence left behind, but out of reverence. A life might have ended there on the patch of dust.

Parker shot up the heavy rutted road to the east, bouncing along the trail as the dark smoke plume beckoned in the distance.

Two miles from the crossroad, Parker turned a slight corner to the right and found a small shack in flames. It was likely an abandoned decades old silver mining camp. No sign of an ATV or the two men who Dryden watched. But Parker had a bad feeling about what lay inside the burning shack.

“Stay put,” Parker said, as he pulled the SUV to a stop at a distance from the burning shack.

He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the rear of the SUV and trotted toward the structure. Most of the flames were coming from the inside of the wooden structure. They had burned up and through what remained of the wooden roof.

He shot a burst of white powder from the extinguisher at the doorframe, and the tendrils diminished for a moment. Enough for him to spot human remains on the floor in the center of the blaze.