Murder Maybe by Evil

By Murray Moffatt

Shane Daniels' friend, Ben Chen, has been charged with murder and the forensic evidence puts Ben at the scene. Shane must find whoever set his friend up. Shane's Partner, Emma, must convince a young woman to tell her what really happened when her hand was crushed. Both Shane and Emma put their lives in danger as they go against cunning and ruthless adversaries who may be the definition of evil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Murray Moffatt
• Release date: Jan 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781005358549

Murray Moffatt

Murray Moffatt is a former broadcast journalist and senior public relations consultant. Over the course of 25 years, Murray wrote countless radio news stories and delivered tens of thousands of newscasts.As a public relations consultant, Murray wrote hundreds of media releases as well as briefing notes and magazine articles on behalf of clients. He delivered media relations training to executives from a wide variety of public and private companies and organizations.For years, Murray did extensive volunteer work with various organizations. He received a Mayor’s Award of Merit from the City of St.Catharines, Ontario and a provincial award (Ontario) for his work with Brant/Brantford CrimeStoppers.Murray previous published his autobiography (“A Different Kind Of Life”) through StoryWorth.Born and raised in Ontario, Murray now lives in Alberta.

Book preview

Murder Maybe By Evil

A Shane Daniels Murder Mystery

A Novel by

Murray Moffatt

Also By Murray Moffatt

A Different Kind of Life (Autobiography)

Play

Murder Best Unsolved

Murder Maybe Relative

Murder Maybe By Evil

Author's Note:

This is the third time I have returned to the characters of Shane Daniels and his partner Emma and the reason is quite simple: I like them.

They both have their flaws, like all of us, but they are never held back by their disabilities and are always determined to do the right thing.

This is my first time creating two rather nasty characters and I have to admit I enjoyed doing it. Many actors have said playing the bad guy was more interesting than playing the hero. I think that was the case with me.

Once again, I want to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read my novels and for the support and encouragement of my retirement hobby.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are all products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any mistakes are mine alone. 

Copyright 2022 © Murray Moffatt.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and recording or otherwise - without the prior written permission of the author except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Author Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win, And one cannot exist without the other.

English Singer Eric Burdon (The Animals, War)

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil

Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

Prologue

Are killers the product of their environment? Is the predilection to commit murder already determined before we are born or is it developed as we grow?

I've been thinking a lot about these questions in the aftermath of helping my friend Ben Chen clear his name of a murder charge.

Great minds have been studying the answers for centuries, so far be it for a guy like me to throw my two cents in and suggest I have any kind of insight into the debate.

I remember studying Pavlovian and Freudian theories in school and the debate over which one was correct.

Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet neurologist, is best known for his experiments involving dogs who he conditioned to salivate for food when he rang a bell. It led to the theory of classical conditioning, our unconscious or automatic learning, and is still used in behavioral theory. Adherents to Pavlovian theory believe we are basically a clean slate when we are born and everything we become in our life is learned either consciously or unconsciously.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, treating patients through dialogue with a psychoanalyst. He had the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict with our defenses against them. We are born with them. Freud will always be associated with dream therapies, interpreting our dreams as the gateway to our unconscious mind.

So, are we what we are the second we are born, or do we learn as we go? My experience in dealing with killers, and this most recent case was a prime example, is that it's a combination of both. I went up against an intelligent and very clever man who had a seemingly normal life until a change in his circumstances and his environment brought his real nature to the surface, and it was ugly and evil.

Scientists and profilers have been studying serial killers for decades and no one really knows if they all have a genetic disposition. But it's understood that the majority of the most prolific and dangerous serial killers were genetically disposed to behave anti-socially and grew up in an environment that developed a disregard for the lives of others.

The one thing I truly believe is that no matter how many times we tell ourselves we could never take another life, I'm living proof it's not true.

I admit that I've always had a bit of a temper and have had to use violence to protect myself and my clients, but it has always been done very reluctantly. The thought of killing someone had always been abhorrent to me until the day my father admitted he had murdered a young Russian-born woman I was having an affair with. He had strangled her without remorse as his end of a bargain he made with my Uncle who had murdered my mother.

We were sitting in the living room of the house I grew up in when my father confessed and without a second thought I started to strangle him, and I had no intention of stopping until he was dead. Only hearing my partner Emma's voice in my head, begging me to come home, stopped me from killing my father.

For months after that happened, I kept asking myself where that came from. A basically non-violent person was suddenly willing to kill? Was this compulsion always inside me? Did I inherit it from my father or perhaps from my Uncle Max, the Russian immigrant who murdered my mother and likely committed heinous acts in the old Soviet Union?

I loved and respected my father until I discovered what he did. To me, he was an even-tempered guy who loved movie trivia, a business owner who was respected around my hometown of Paisley for his skills as a mechanic.

He claims the shame of my mother's many affairs drove him to murder. That was his solution to the problem? Not therapy, separation, or divorce? Did he have some kind of dormant murder gene that suddenly came into play? Did he share it with me?

My father, Ed Daniels, is currently rotting in a jail cell at the Kingston Pen, which is where he belongs. My Uncle Max, my father's long-lost brother, and his partner in murder died in prison.

On several different occasions over the years, my father has tried to contact me, either by mail or phone, in an effort at some type of reconciliation. I have ignored them all, although he did manage to get me once at my home, but it was a very short conversation. I told him he was dead to me. I can't help myself.

When I think about my father I immediately conjure up images of my mother; so beautiful, loving, and gentle when I was young, and then a rotting corpse wrapped in a blanket in the hole where Ben Chen and I dug her up.

When I was seventeen years old, my father told me my mother had run away and abandoned us. Decades later, thinking about that period in my life still burns a hole in my gut.

And then there's the concept of evil as a real thing. I don't know how many books I've read, and movies I've seen, where the battle between good and evil is the central theme.

For those of a spiritual nature, it's the devil in whatever form he decides to take, like in The Exorcist, or perhaps it's Darth Vader leading the forces of the Dark Side in Star Wars. Doesn't matter which, it's all about the belief held by many that some people are simply evil; they come into the world that way, there's nothing that can be done to change that, and our prisons are full of them, both men and women.

I have been ruminating about nurture or nature, genetic disposition, and the existence of evil because of Alec MacDonald, Boyd Winton, and Jim Burnham, the three people my partner Emma and I end up dealing with as I investigated a murder and she tried to help two people, one of them her friend, Psychiatrist Dr. Charlene Anderson.

In my case, as I worked to clear my friend Ben's name, I nearly lost my life at the hands of a man who very well could have been born already sick in the head and was a living example of evil.

Chapter One

Shane Daniels wasn't paying much attention to his speed because he was in a hurry to get where he was going, but he did have his fingers crossed mentally, hoping he wouldn't pass an Ontario Provincial Police radar trap.

Shane was in his black 1969 Dodge Charger driving eastbound on Highway 401 on his way to the Elgin Middlesex Detention Centre in London, an hour's drive from his home in Brantford, but Shane was hoping to make it in about forty-five minutes.

Shane had owned the Charger since he was seventeen years old, it was a present from his father, but he never got tired of driving the sleek vehicle and feeling the power of its V8, four-barrel, 383 engine. His partner, Emma, was always after him to give it up, considering all of the money he had put into it over the years to keep it in pristine condition, but he always refused, saying the car was part of who he was.

Every time he got in the Charger and put one hand on the steering wheel and another on the Hurst selector he remembered the excitement he felt the first time he drove it and the jealous look on the faces of his high school friends. And even though his father, Ed, was serving a life sentence for murder and Shane wanted nothing to do with him, his love of the car was greater than his hate for the man who gave it to him.

Shane Daniels was well over six feet tall, with a sharply defined face, blue eyes, and thick black hair, which he kept cut short and parted to the side. There were flecks of gray showing in his hair and even more gray at his temples, which his vanity kept telling him to get rid of, but Emma insisted it made him look distinguished.

Shane was a star basketball player in high school and university and he maintained a toned physique by using the same exercise routine he employed during his playing days.

Shane lived in Brantford, a Southern Ontario City of about one hundred thousand residents west of Hamilton and an hour's drive from Toronto. He worked as an investigator for the law firm Burke and Associates, specifically for lawyer Jason Burke who hired him after Shane's short-lived career with the Brantford Police Service came to an end. When he was still a rookie, Shane was shot in the left knee during a violent domestic disturbance call and the damage left him with the permanent use of a cane.

Just east of London, Shane exited the 401 onto Exeter Road and drove to the Detention Centre where he found a spot in the facility's visitor parking area. The Elgin Middlesex Detention Centre, better known as the EMDC, was a low-rise red brick building surrounded by a high security fence. It was a 450-bed maximum security jail that also held prisoners from across the region who were on remand or awaiting bail hearings. Most of the smaller provincial jails in towns across southwestern Ontario which used to house such prisoners had been closed because many were centuries old with decrepit conditions.

Shane grabbed his cane and made his way to the EMDC's visitor's entrance. It was afternoon on the Friday of the early September Labour Day long weekend and even though the leaves on the trees had already started to turn to the reds and oranges that made fall a colourful season, summer had not lost its grip yet. The temperature was in the mid-twenties, so Shane didn't need a jacket and was wearing a golf shirt and black jeans.

His visit with the prisoner had been hastily arranged by Jason Burke, who had preliminarily agreed to represent Shane's friend Ben Chen until Shane had a chance to talk to Ben about who he wanted as a lawyer. Shane planned to suggest Ben go with Jason because he knew his employer was one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Ontario. And while Jason was not a young man, he was in his early seventies, his legal mind was still as sharp as the day he hired Shane.

Shane was escorted into the visitor's area of the jail where he sat on a metal chair at a metal table, both bolted to the floor. It was not a very welcoming room, concrete walls painted industrial green and dull lighting from overhead florescent light fixtures encased in wire mesh. Shane had been in several such rooms at various correctional facilities across Ontario and he always thought it would be impossible not to be deeply depressed within ten minutes of being there.

Ben Chen then entered the room through a security door, walked up to the metal table, and sat on the chair opposite Shane. Shane noticed right away that his friend looked haggard, his face pale and his normally spiked black hair was flat on his head and greasy. He wore the orange overalls that were given to short-term prisoners whose clothes were taken for forensic examination and they looked to be one size too big.

Ben, you okay? How're you making out? Shane asked with concern in his voice.

How am I making out! How the fuck do you think I'm making out! I'm in the Big House with hundreds of scumbags and bum buddies who are eyeing up the ass on the short Chinese guy! Ben exclaimed.

The Big House? What old gangster movie did you get that from? Shane asked.

Ben didn't answer. Instead, the two old friends just looked at each other for a few moments before smiles appeared on both their faces.

I'm glad that you haven't lost your weird sense of humour, Shane said. So, how are you, really?

I'm okay. I haven't been here that fucking long so what's going on is still sinking in, Ben replied and then said, Thanks for getting here so fast, I really fucking appreciate it.

Shane