Teaser Excerpt from my new mystery novel, Who Killed Leeanne?

My latest mystery novel is scheduled to be released tomorrow, Monday February 5th. Who Killed Leeanne? is currently available for Pre-Order on Amazon Kindle at the special price of 99 cents! 

This title is also enrolled in Kindle Unlimited and will be available to all K.U. readers as soon as it's released on the 5th!

Add Who Killed Leeanne? to your Goodreads bookshelf and keep up with what other readers will say about this dark, psychological mystery novel. 

And now, an excerpt from the novel... This is the prologue and part of the first chapter!

WHO KILLED LEEANNE?

A Novel

by

Mira Gibson

LEEANNE HESSINGER / Wednesday, January 4, 2017

I watched as a seagull pecked at a crushed pigeon in the slushy parking lot outside of the local ShopRite. I’d just moved to the small town and had bought a few groceries to tide me over until the incoming snow storm had blown through. The pigeon, broken as it appeared, wasn’t dead yet, but that didn’t stop the gull. 

One bird eating the other alive. 

Me, bearing witness from my idling sedan, foot on the brakes, windshield wipers squeaking across glass, exhaust fumes billowing up around the car and seeping through the window I’d cracked open to help clear the condensation. I kept staring at the seagull as it tore into the ratty pigeon that was fighting it less and less.   

I’d never seen anything like it. 

In that moment, I learned everything I needed to know about Liberty, New York…

…but it wasn’t until my murder a year later that I understood the significance of what I’d seen that day; what God and the world and nature had tried to warn me about…

It wasn’t until I was fighting for my own life that I realized—fully—what I should’ve known all along.

SHERIFF JUDY KAVLESKI / Thursday, January 4, 2018

I knew the dead woman, not personally, but by face and name like I knew most everyone in Liberty.

It was a small town. Sleepy all winter. Teeming with tourists up from New York City come summertime. Whenever a new face showed up and stayed, the residents took notice, and Leeanne Hessinger had quite a face. 

She lay sprawled inside the entryway of the house she’d been renting, knees collapsed at a twisted angle, one limp hand draped over the bloodied slash in her sweater near her sternum as if, in her final moments, she’d tried to nurse the fatal wound. Her head was tilted to the side. A pool of her dark hair spilled across wooden floors. Jeans intact and no signs of sexual assault. Woolen socks on her feet. No boots. Coat hanging on a rack deeper in the foyer. There was a warm kettle on the stove. The empty mug beside it on the kitchen countertop had a dry tea bag inside. 

Dispatch had gotten the call from a coworker of hers, Trip Turner, who I also happened to know by appearance only. A clean-cut type. Fancied himself an actor, but he worked as a teacher over at Bethel Woods. He was slumped outside where my deputy and the responding officer were also waiting.

Murder was rare in Liberty. Crimes amounted to pot smoking and sometimes selling, petty misdemeanors at best, and when they occurred it caused more excitement than the department could handle. 

I decided not to admit to myself that this time I was probably in over my head.

I needed to control the crime scene and the only way I knew how to do that was to keep everyone but myself out. My deputy was itching to be included. Didn’t help that I’d left the front door wide open, winter wind cutting through the entryway, foyer, and the kitchen straight ahead, bringing Curt with it. I’d instructed the one officer on the scene to stick to Turner, but not question him. He was better at orders than Curt.  

“Sheriff?” He filled the doorway, a slippery stack of evidence bags in hand.

“Suppose I could use one.”

Curt hadn’t been my deputy long. 

He cracked an evidence bag open for me, passed it over, as he absorbed the unbelievable sight of Leeanne Hessinger’s body, both of us slow and constricted in our thick winter coats.

I made careful work of lowering to my knee in front of the murder weapon—a fixed-blade hunting knife that wasn’t uncommon around these parts. It rested, blood drying along its sharp edge, next to Leeanne’s thigh. I exercised balance and accidentally let out a grunt as I scooped the plastic bag around the hunting knife and slid it in. 

I was pregnant. Being eight months along as I was made for trying maneuvering, but I’d been managing just fine without accepting the help that was constantly offered. 

“Run it for prints?” asked my deputy.

It was a bit of a struggle getting to my feet, but Curt knew better than to take my arm and hoist me up. He looked lost, confused by his own question, and I wasn’t in much better shape. Wouldn’t even know the lab to send it to. Never had such an occasion, in fact. This was serious. Daunting. We both knew it would likely be the most important case we’d ever investigate. 

“Let’s get a number on it,” I suggested, because that’s what it was, a suggestion, an educated guess at how we would have to proceed. “You got a box in the cruiser, right? We’ll bag everything we can, number all of it, get it back to the station. I’ve got to get a forensics team on over,” I frowned. 

“Yes, Ma’am,” he agreed before mentioning, “Trip’s in a real state.”

“I imagine he would be.” 

Curt lingered, sucked back into the sight of Leeanne.

“Wilcox,” I said, urging him to get on task. 

I heard his boots crunching through snow as I neared the body and angled over the dead woman's pretty face. She had been known to turn heads around town. 

I wasn’t much older than her, but I knew my looks hadn’t held up like Leeanne’s. Of course, death had dulled her beauty, turned her skin gray, veins blue under her pallor. Her features remained youthful. Eternally twenty-four, though I knew she was inching towards her mid-thirties. High cheekbones. The kind of delicate, button nose that celebrities often paid for. A wide, dramatic mouth. Leeanne had a willowy physique. Long limbs and a slender waist. Swimmer’s shoulders, a tall woman who didn’t so much walk as glide. That’s how I remembered her, gliding through town like some otherworldly creature that didn’t belong; she’d drink in the scenery around her as if all of life was a wonder…

…and this was what had become of her.

It was a shame.

Outside, I made my way down the shoveled walk towards Trip Turner. He was sitting in the passenger's seat of his car, his boots in the snow, and the door open. A mile-long stare had come over him. The cruiser was parked beside him, my pickup truck behind it. 

Curt lumbered between the police vehicles, tending to that box I’d put him on. He was doing a soldierly job with a Sharpie, but the grimace, the long face gave him away. His movements were solemn. It was sinking in.

Trip sensed me approaching, but didn’t lift his eyes. He swallowed as though preparing to speak, but I realized when he said nothing, that he was only choking down emotions that were threatening to surface. He looked ill.

“I need to ask you a few things. Sorry to have made you wait.” I slipped my mittens on and rested a hand on the icy hood of the car, looking down at him. “You worked with Leeanne?”

He nodded as though something deep inside of him was trying to pull him under, then he managed, “Yes. She teaches with me at Bethel Woods. Taught,” he corrected himself in a small, bewildered voice.

“Right,” I said gently. I’d known that, as I was familiar with the majority of employees over at the Performing Arts Center. “What were you doing over here?”

He sounded shaky and raw. “She was having car trouble. Her car’s in the shop. I had been giving her rides.”

“You came to pick her up?” When he nodded, I asked, “Could you walk me through everything that happened? What time did you get here?”

Trip cleared his throat, swallowed hard, chin quivering. He mustered some semblance of control and explained, “I pulled up at a quarter to nine or so. Texted her. She didn’t come out. I called. It rang through to voicemail. Then I went to the door and saw it was open.” Emotion rose up in his boyish face and he pressed his mouth into a bitter line, determined to hold it together. “When I opened the door, I saw her on the floor.” Trip cut his eyes up to me and insisted, “I didn’t touch her, just saw her lying there, saw the blood, the knife. I called the police.” After a moment, he added, “I sat on the front steps and waited.”

It jibed with what my deputy had told me, reporting what the responding officer had come upon when he’d pulled in—Trip sitting on the snowy steps in a stupor. That’s how Curt had found him as well, nearly catatonic in a shivering heap out front when he’d arrived not five minutes later.

“Were you personally involved with Leeanne?”

“No. Not at all,” he said. “Not outside of giving her a lift to Bethel Woods when her car was acting up. I think I’m going to be sick,” he warned as he pushed out of the passenger’s seat, barreling past me to get some air. 

I thought he might keel over and make good on his threat, but he held his hand against his mouth instead. 

I gave him a moment before nearing him. Came around to face him, had to squint, the sun glared against the snow so badly, a sky of blinding haze to contend with. Trip was much taller than me, taller than most men and I had to crane my neck to meet his gaze. 

“Why don’t you go on home?” I offered. “I’ll get these vehicles out of your way. We can write up a statement later.”

“Thanks,” he breathed through his hand. When he lowered it from his face, his jaw was clenched. 

I joined Curt at the side of the cruiser and handed him the keys to my pickup. “Get these cars down the drive, would you, so Trip can get out of here?” 

“You’re letting him go?”

“He’s in no shape to talk,” I told him as I glanced back at Trip and wondered if I was right or not. “I’ll write up a statement for him, have him look it over and sign it later.”

Curt seemed thrown by the decision and reminded me, “He was with Leeanne.”

I didn’t need a reminder. 

“You think he killed her?” I questioned, “and hung around to call the police?”

The look on his face told me that that’s exactly what he thought.

“Move the cars, Curt.”