Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR
A VERY SIMPLE CRIME
A Very Simple Crime is the product of A Very Talented Writer. Grant Jerkinss stylish prose and rich characters set him apart. As a reader, you will enjoy every page. Its impossible this is a first novel. Dont miss it.
Ridley Pearson,
New York Times bestselling author of In Harms Way
Theres not a soul you can trust in the story... [A] well-fashioned but extremely nasty study in abnormal psychology, which dares us to solve a mystery in which none of the normal character cues can be taken at face value.
The New York Times Book Review
No one in this novel is as [he or she] appear[s] to be, and the twists and turns never let up until the very last page. This dark, chilling debut... is a real page-turner and should especially appeal to legal thriller fans.
Library Journal (starred review)
You have to admire the purity of Jerkinss writing: Hes determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.
The Washington Post
Beautifully plotted, aware of its genre roots yet wholly original, funny, scary, haunting... and oddly arresting from the very first sentence.
Nicholas Kazan,
playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Reversal of Fortune
Jerkins juggles his plot twists like a top circus acrobat in this nasty legal noir.
Publishers Weekly
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Grant Jerkins
A VERY SIMPLE CRIME
AT THE END OF THE ROAD
For my sister, Amanda Grace Beam
GOD IS
He was just a boy.
In her mind, the woman could conjure only a faint static image of the boy, like a photograph faded with time and constant handling.
The womans room in the Clermont Hotel overlooked Ponce de Leon Avenue. The Clermont, a fading redbrick monolith, wasnt the worst the city of Atlanta had to offer, but it was close. The hotel was noted for its late-night lounge, located in the basement, its main attraction being Blondie, a stripper who crushed beer cans with her breasts.
The woman knew what she had come here to do. Not consciously. She never consciously acknowledged to herself that she had come here to end her life. But that knowledge was there inside her, hidden away. Just as whatever it was that had gotten her to this point existed somewhere deep within herbut she was not allowed (or did not allow herself) to see it. Still, it was there inside her, hard and ugly and shameful.
The woman looked at her reflection in the spotted mirror. Why did men still want her? Why would they pay to have sex with her? What was wrong with men that they would pay to have intercourse with a thirty-seven-year-old meth addict who looked a haggard fifty? And she realized that she had never understood the sex act, what drove men and women to seek it outin one form or anotherover and over throughout their lives.
She finished the last of the tranquilizers, washing them down with water from the bathroom sink. Already she could feel the soothing warm fingers invading her, holding her. This was the only penetrating embrace she had ever cared for. She wished she hadnt finished the vodka beforehand, because now she needed to hurry. Now her conscious mind knew what her other mind had done. Now her two halves were working together, and for the briefest moment the point in her life when she had first been divided flashed in her mind and she saw the hard shameful thing and it didnt hurt because the hard thing was dying now.
She found a soiled Rite Aid receipt stuck to the bottom of the trash can and wrote five words on the back of it. She folded the paper and wrote the boys name across the front. She tucked the note inside the Xanax bottle, capped it, and put it in her pocket.
And she thought of the boy, and she thought about the hard, ugly, shameful thing deep within her, and she was happy because she realized that she was winning. She was going to kill that thing inside her.
THE RETICULATED WOMAN
THE PASSAGE OF SLOW-MOVING TRACTORS
had ground the red clay surface of Eden Road into a fine, rust-like powder. And the stern eye of the Georgia sun baked the powder drier than crematory ash. Speeding cars that sometimes used the lonely road as a shortcut to the reservoir left massive, lingering red plumes in their wake.
When the womans car flipped over, it sent up rolling, choking clouds of the stuff. And now the woman stood in front of the boy, both of them covered in the rust-colored dust. The blood that seeped from the womans scalp wound etched thin lines down her soiled face. And as the blood spidered through the dirt, it left an obscene red reticulation, a web of gore.
The boy stood, unmoving. His mind could not yet fully process how his environmentan environment that seemed to never changewas, in a matter of seconds, changed with a ferocity that defied comprehension.
The woman stumbled toward the boy, her hands held out stiffly before her like a zombie, like Frankensteins monster, and the boy could see that blood also dripped from her fingertips, and he could see through the dirt and the blood that her fingernails had been torn away in the accident, ripped out from their beds, leaving an exposed jangle of nerves and meat.
EDEN ROAD SNAKED WITH SHARP CURVES
more appropriate to a mountain pass than this flat stretch of North Georgia houses and small farm plots. But it was the boys road. Kyle Edwards rode his bicycle on it daily. It was only about two miles long. On one end was the Sweetwater Reservoir where Kyle bought fifteen-cent candy at the dank bait shop that smelled of earthworms, crickets, and minnows; the other end intersected Lee Road, the two-lane blacktop.
It was a safe worldmore or less. There were only three things in Kyles world that he considered dangerous and that he feared. One was the territorial bull that roamed the cow pasture that bordered the cornfield. The pasture held the green pond where Kyle liked to spend a great deal of his time, so whenever he went there, he had to be vigilant of the bull that had already crippled one boy from the area.
His other fear was of Patrick Sewell and his little brother Joel and their friend Scotty Clonts. They were teenagers. Long hair and dirty Levis. Scotty Clonts seemed to wear the same shirt every daya T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had the words Judas PriestSad Wings of Destiny printed on it in gothic script. Kyle didnt know what a Judas Priest was, but it struck him as menacingas did Scotty himself. Patrick Sewell was the oldest son of Nathan Sewell, the chairman of the Douglas County Board of Commissioners. Nathan Sewell somehow managed to get himself reelected every four years despite the fact that his son Patrick was an unemployed high school dropout (hell, they kicked him out, most folks would say) who sported frizzy red hippie hair, seldom bathed, and was suspected to be involved with drugs.
Patrick had once thrown a brick at Kyle, unprovoked, while he was riding his bike. The brick had hit him in the chest and knocked him off his bicycle into a ditch. The blow had knocked the breath out of Kyles lungs, and he had lain in the ditch, momentarily unable to breathe and certain he was going to die, Patrick standing over him, laughing.
