Burning at the Boss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery) Read online

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  Burning at the Boss

  by

  Martin Roth

  Martin Roth’s Johnny Ravine Private Detective Series

  Set in Australia, these books feature private detective Johnny Ravine.

  * Prophets and Loss - when Melissa Stonelea’s born-again Christian husband is found strangled in the bondage room of the city’s classiest brothel, a page of the Bible stuffed in his mouth, she doesn’t need to hear more of her pastor’s sermons on the healing powers of forgiveness. She needs revenge.

  * Hot Rock Dreaming - Australian Christian Book of the Year finalist. The judges wrote: “Hired to investigate the death of an Aboriginal painter, private detective Johnny Ravine is drawn into a complex mystery as dangerous as it is intriguing. Environmental politics, land rights and Aboriginal spirituality are explored with subtlety. For the hero and reader alike there is a valuable lesson to be learned about the importance of discerning which voice is proclaiming life and love when all is not as it seems. A compelling novel.”

  * Burning at the Boss – a hellfire preacher is murdered and investigator Johnny Ravine learns that huge sums are missing from the charities that he administered. Was the preacher really using the money to pay off gunrunners? And, if so, why?

  Martin Roth’s Acclaimed “Military Orders” Series of International Thrillers

  In the Middle Ages, military orders like the Templars defended Christians and fought for justice. Now, in Martin Roth's latest series of novels, a church has established a clandestine new military order, to fight for today's persecuted Christians...

  * Brother Half Angel - an underground Christian seminary in China is under siege from sword-wielding members of a local cult who still pay homage to the bloodthirsty extremists who tried to expel all foreigners from China in the nineteenth century.

  * The Maria Kannon - a killer is on the loose in Japan, targeting members of a small church community. It becomes apparent that the key is a mysterious card left at each murder scene – a card depicting the Maria Kannon, a statue of a Buddhist deity that was once revered by persecuted Japanese Christians.

  * Military Orders – a missionary is murdered in India and the local police are falsely claiming that he was the leader of a gang engaged in the theft and sale of precious temple artworks. It quickly becomes clear that he was involved in something much bigger than simple mission work. But what?

  * Festival in the Desert – a US military officer is kidnapped by terrorists in West Africa and a Christian mission hospital in the region is under attack. It is time to call on the New Mercedarians, the clandestine military order dedicated to fighting for Christians under attack around the world.

  Learn more, and check for new releases, at Amazon’s Martin Roth author page or at the author’s own website. Check the author’s Facebook page for special promotions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

  BURNING AT THE BOSS

  Special Kindle Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please buy an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this ebook and did not buy it, or it was not bought for your use only, then please return to Amazon and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2012 by Martin Roth

  All rights reserved. This ebook or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  Burning at the Boss was first published in 2012 by Ark House Press.

  Visit the author website: http://www.military-orders.com.

  GO TO THE END OF THIS BOOK FOR EXCERPTS FROM TWO OTHER MARTIN ROTH NOVELS, PROPHETS AND LOSS AND MILITARY ORDERS.

  PROLOGUE

  He is a gunrunner, and at this moment in our history a gunrunner is almost as important to me as life itself.

  He is strong and stout, with a paunch and many dark secrets. He tells me his name is Grapper. Under a bright Asian moon we drink coffee from cans that once held beef and I tell him our three most urgent needs. Guns, guns and guns. Plus ammunition.

  He regales me with anecdotes about smuggling weapons to rebel fighters throughout Asia, though I hear little. I have not eaten in two days, and yesterday I lost one of my best men.

  But his arrival gives me hope. Because this provision of weapons from a secret donor tells me that someone cares. We are not alone in our struggle.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet the famous Johnny Ravine,” says Grapper. “I’ve heard all about you. Interesting. The leading freedom fighter has a Western name.”

  I am about to explain, when an enemy rocket explodes with a fiery flash. A cascade of sparks descends directly on our position. It is time to move.

  So he never gets to learn my dark secret. And I never hear his. At least, not until a couple of decades later. But then it is probably too late.

  A couple of decades later…

  CHAPTER ONE

  You cannot love until you learn to trust.

  I recall long nights in the mountains fearful that the next missile blitz will be the one that kills me. I recall just once allowing my heart to yield to a woman and much later learning she was an enemy spy. I recall the years of self-loathing that continued even after I gained sanctuary in Australia. I trusted no one. Not even myself.

  Yet through a determined effort of discipline and willpower I have overcome my tendencies towards gloom and self-pity. I am no longer on a path of self-destruction. I have stopped cocooning myself for days on end in my dingy home, subsisting on instant noodles and DVDs of 1950s black and white movies. I actively try to mix with people, to take an interest in them. I no longer deny my weaknesses. I am beginning to trust.

  Now I am ready to love.

  * * *

  “Turn left at the next junction,” said Miriam Reezall, seated beside me in my spluttering blue Mitsubishi Sigma and directing me as we drove in the fearsome midday heat through a maze of wooded country lanes. “We’re nearly there. Johnny, I am so, so nervous.”

  I had elevated the car air conditioner to the strongest setting, and it resonated like a light airplane buzzing alongside us, while drawing in smoke from the wild bushfires that were spreading through the Yarra Valley and making the car interior smell like a barbecue without the sausages.

  It was a bushfire that overnight so mercilessly killed Miriam’s father, Pastor Jim Reezall, in his Yarra Boss home, on the edge of the Valley. But this fire was no accident. It was deliberately lit, causing an intense conflagration that incinerated his ancient wooden house, probably in minutes, and then swept up the hillside, scorching several hundred mountain ash trees before the local volunteer firemen brought it under control.

  Almost certainly someone had murdered the pastor.

  Many would say he got what was coming to him. Pastor Reezall was renowned as the hellfire preacher who seemed incessantly to be calling for fire and brimstone to rain down on the unrighteous of the world. He was the elderly pastor who kept appearing in the local newspapers and on television to condemn sinners. He even had his own late-night show on Yarra Boss community radio where he stridently promoted his views.

  I certainly did not welcome the death, but I did not feel entirely unhappy about it
, either. I had never met the pastor. But he had two daughters, and for the past few months I had been dating Miriam, the elder of the two. It would be fair to say that love had yet to blossom, but we enjoyed each other’s company. We just needed more time together to cement the relationship.

  So, in a twisted kind of way that made me feel guilty, I was pleasantly surprised when she phoned this morning with the tragic news.

  “Who would do something like this?” she had asked, after I expressed my condolences. It was a rhetorical question. Then: “Could you help me, please Johnny?”

  Could I? Of course.

  “I need to see Dad’s house. What’s left of it. The police said it’s been pretty much destroyed. Would you drive me? I know it’s right out of your way, and you’re probably busy, but I really need to be with someone. I can’t face going by myself.”

  She needs me. I’m her rock. The person she can rely on. The first person she reaches out to when she has problems.

  I glanced at her. Miriam had a natural elegance that was appealing. She taught English at one of the local secondary schools, but she could have been a deportment teacher, the way she sat upright. Even on these twisting roads she could probably have kept a book balanced on her head. She was wearing a pleated blue cotton skirt and a floral blouse and I guessed that she had been pulled out of class with the news. I approved. It was appropriate clothing for a teacher. I could not comprehend those Australian schools that let their teachers turn up to class wearing jeans and T-shirts.

  Had she been crying? It didn’t appear so. Her freckled skin was smooth, her eyes were clear, her short, curly, brown hair was neat and tidy and school teacherish. She seemed supremely calm. Perhaps it was simply that the thunderbolt had yet to strike—that the sight of her father’s house, or, worse, a visit to the morgue to view the corpse, would cause her to collapse into a paroxysm of weeping. I suspected the reason was somewhat different—after all, as she had told me several times, she and her father just did not get on.

  We were passing a farm. Dappled cows huddled under trees to avoid the harsh sunlight. A roadside sign warned of a total fire ban.

  “I phoned him a week ago,” she said. “I did stay in touch.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, glancing at her once more. What else could I say? In recent years she and her father had seldom communicated. Now I realized why she needed to see the death scene. She was stricken with guilt.

  “He was still very healthy,” she said. “Even at seventy-four. He was doing push-ups. And I could listen to his radio show. So I knew he was okay. I did stay in touch. And I lived nearby, in Healesville. Just a twenty-minute drive. He knew I’d quickly drive round if he had problems.”

  I had met Miriam at a fundraiser for Melbourne’s small East Timorese community—she was actively involved in refugee welfare work—and she seemed fascinated to learn about my past as a freedom fighter for a couple of decades in East Timor. She had pumped me with questions about what it was like to be a warrior in the jungle, facing death every day, and I had ended up asking her out.

  Though I’m not really sure if dating is the right word to describe our involvement. As well as having a teaching job she was a devoted mother to ten-year-old Jonah, and she also seemed to be involved in a myriad of causes. Men were not a priority.

  In any case, I hadn’t dated a woman for…well, if the truth were known, I’d never properly dated a woman, despite being nearly 50 years old. My spell as a freedom fighter in the jungles of East Timor kept me out of the dating scene for much of my adult life. Yes, I did eventually get married, but to a young girl I hardly knew who later turned out to be an enemy spy. The ensuing couple of years when I tried to deaden all the pain with alcohol—before smuggling myself into Australia—saw me involved with a succession of bar girls. You wouldn’t call it dating.

  But I was in fine shape. I was good looking—so everyone told me—and had overcome the years of self-hatred. I didn’t drink any longer. I didn’t play around. I was now back in church, attending regularly. A pastor’s daughter ought to appreciate that, even if Miriam didn’t herself seem to attend any longer.

  She directed me into a narrow dirt lane, surrounded by high, yellow grass, then spoke again: “A lot of people won’t be sorry to see him go. He didn’t have many real friends…”

  Her voice tailed off as we rounded a bend and confronted the scene of the firestorm. I stopped the car and gazed up at a scene of destruction. Before us was an eerie sweeping hillside of hundreds of tall, skinny trees, every single one of them black and leafless, like huge used matches. It was as if we were seeing the trees in silhouette, even though they were starkly lit from above by the high, bright sun. Or as if we were looking at a television image that was all in black and white. A layer of ash on the ground below the trees resembled snow.

  I stared ahead, squinting, trying to locate the pastor’s house, or what remained of it. But nothing was visible.

  A police car was parked obliquely in the middle of the lane, blocking any traffic, and one hundred yards further along, under a sprawling sycamore tree, I could see a fire engine. I drove towards the squad car and stopped next to a temporary sign that told me that the road was closed.

  A lone officer, a skinny young guy with a lean face, dark glasses and swept-back brown hair, was inside the police car with the motor running and, no doubt, the air conditioner switched on. He remained motionless as I got out of my car into the searing heat. I approached, and he put his window down a touch.

  I leaned against the car. “G’day. Johnny Ravine. I’m a private detective. And a friend of the family. Looking into the death of Pastor Reezall. I’ve got his daughter in the car with me.” I pulled a name card from my pocket and pushed it through the slit at the top of the window. He gave it a cursory look.

  “Sorry chum. It’s a crime scene.”

  Chum? I had never been called that before. Wasn’t that a dog food? I didn’t expect to hear it from a scrawny Aussie policeman in his twenties who was probably half my age—or Miriam’s for that matter. Already I was disliking the guy.

  “It would mean a lot to her.” I pointed back to my car. “Just a quick walk-round of the house where her dad died. She’s pretty distraught. You can imagine. We won’t be long.”

  “Crime scene’s a crime scene. Can’t be done. Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry.

  “Even for his daughter?”

  “She should have made some sort of arrangement with my bosses before she came. I can’t let her through.”

  “Where are your bosses? Can I talk to them?”

  “They’ll be on the road back to Melbourne right now. You’ve missed them.”

  I scanned the area. “Where is the house? I can’t even see it.”

  “There’s a small dirt track leading to it. Further down where the fire truck is.” He beckoned with a thumb, as if he were trying to hitch a ride. “You don’t see it from here. It’s behind that small hill.”

  “Someone poured petrol over the place…?” It was meant as a question, not a statement. The officer shrugged and pushed his dark glasses further back on his face.

  “I don’t see any cars down there with the fire engine. Where are all the investigators?”

  “The place was swarming this morning. But they’ve left.”

  “Any suspects yet?”

  The man seemed to be looking at me hard for the first time. “Look mate, your questions are getting above my pay grade. I don’t reckon I’m going to be able to help you much more.”

  Mate. That seemed an improvement. Not that he was displaying any signs of mateship.

  I drummed my fingers on the top of the patrol car, waiting. But he wasn’t about to relent. It was at that moment I realized that Miriam had arrived.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “We need to get through.”

  “It’s a crime scene,” I explained.

  She didn’t appear to have heard. “That’s my dad’s house.” She banged on the patrol car window. “Excu
se me, mister. Can you move your car please, and let us through.” Her voice carried authority. No school kid would dare give her trouble. Even in the powerful heat she looked impressively composed.

  The officer remained impassive. “You’ll need to talk to my bosses.”

  “This is ridiculous,” protested Miriam. “Do you think I’m going to steal something?” She looked around. “I’ll have to walk.” And she set off down the road.

  “No…” I muttered helplessly. The cop would never let her through. He was too young and inexperienced to be expected to exercise discretion. But I could also see that she was determined and that she probably expected me to accompany her.

  The officer was out of his car in an instant. He grabbed her arm. “I must ask you not to walk any further,” he declared. “This is a crime scene.”

  I knew I had to intervene. “Miriam, he’ll have to arrest you. He has no choice. I’ll try to contact his bosses and get their permission. I’m sure they’ll let you have a look.”

  She looked at me with—what? Disappointment? Anger? Pity? I wasn’t sure. Without a word she turned and walked back to my car.

  “I’m going to report him,” she said. “It’s my father.” Then she pointed across a field to a long ridge that ran towards the scorched trees. “Turn around Johnny. Once we get to that ridge no one can see us from the road. We can get to the house that way.”

  I did a cautious U-turn in the narrow space. Then I drove back around the bend. Out of sight of the officer I veered off-road and stopped in tall grass, next to some bushes.