Vengeance Passed On. Macy Gray

      Chapter 1

      As Jaxon Bartleight was attempting to read the daily newspaper, he couldn’t help but ask himself what he was doing. Throwing the newspaper aside, he picked up the top file. “I’ve looked over this damn file hundreds of times and still can’t seem to find the missing link on this case.”

      Jaxon finally got up and threw the newspaper in the recycle bin, then refilled his coffee cup. There was no way he could just set the file aside. “I must be slipping in my later years and should probably consider retiring and enjoying my remaining years doing what I truly enjoy—fishing, reading, and traveling around the world. Well, at least, fishing and reading.”

      The cabin near the lake was paid in full and stocked with every amenity he needed for a full and fun retirement. He had been an officer in Denver for twenty-six years. He knew he could retire, and there were some cohorts who couldn’t wait for him to do so. He had an attitude that enjoyed conflict and working alone, but he was a really good officer. No one could say otherwise. He had a way of seeing a case and a suspect, or the eyes of an outstanding criminal, and finding the piece of the puzzle that others missed. Never having married (though he came close once) or had children, he spent his life focusing on the job. Jaxon didn’t have much of a social life and spent much of his free time focusing on his house, his cabin, or his job-related items. He tried counseling once, when the department required it, but they wanted him to find a side activity away from the department, which is why he bought a cabin on a lake where he could fish all he wanted. Needless to say, it didn’t help, since he would simply take a file with him to the cabin to work on after he was done fishing or while he was sitting in the boat watching a bobber bouncing up and down with the flow of the water, sometimes going under, then suddenly resurfacing. Counseling advice followed (at least, Jaxon thought so).

      But Jaxon also knows he won’t be able to retire while this case is still unsolved because he couldn’t mentally handle leaving a job unfinished. Jaxon is a fifty-eight-year-old Caucasian single man, athletically built, with salt-and-pepper hair, visually resting on more salt than pepper. His father was a captain when Jaxon was growing up, and he had dreamed since he was a little boy of following in his father’s footsteps. Starting with the blue uniform, steel-toed shoes, light-blue shirt, and snazzy blue hat. The pants were solid dark blue, while the shirt was a nice shade of light blue. His badge was worn on the left side of his shirt, with the patch on the sleeve denoting what precinct he was affiliated with. The nice dark-blue hat with the gold trim made the entire ensemble come together. He wanted to look that good from head to toe.

      Jaxon remembered being taught by his father to never wear a white shirt because it can reflect in the dark, which gives his enemy better odds of winning a fight. He never imagined when he was young that he would switch