In WYOMING private investigator Dan Ballantine is tasked with finding Gary Miller, a fifty-something oil executive who happened to be close to the Beirut, Lebanon, harbor explosion of August 4, 2020. The government there declares Miller dead along with twenty other people whose body parts cannot be found. Jupiter-Saturn insured Miller’s life for five million dollars which it does not want to pay without hard evidence of his death.
Dan learns Miller has a rich young wife waiting for him on a 1000-acre ranch on the western slope of the Tetons near Jackson, Wyoming. He also learns the oil man had a close friend that turns out to not exist.
While Miller makes his way to Wyoming with his false identity, Dan drives toward the area wondering how he will search a thousand acres.
In PROTEST a roof-top sniper murders four people attending a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Old Town Sacramento. A week later he kills three people leading a ‘Don’t Confirm Amy Bennett’ rally near the California state capitol building. A few days after that he kills three more Occupy Sacramento protesters on 10th Street.
Detective Sergeant Harold ‘Harker’ Smith and his partner, Detective Roberto Alcarez, find scant evidence of these murders: bipod feet marks in roof-top ashes left by central California’s many fires and a man wearing black including a hoodie and a large black Covid-19 mask possibly driving an old work truck.
The police chief promises Sacramento citizens a SWAT member on every roof for the next protest, but the detectives fear that will not stop the sniper whom they must find in five days.
Mark Travis Books 