Corrupted Souls
A Joe Erickson Mystery Book 3
by Lynn-Steven Johanson
Genre: Mystery, Police Procedural
Chicago detective Joe Erickson returns to the force following medical leave, and right away a high-profile murder falls in his lap. The body of a graduate student, the son of a prominent Jewish attorney, washes up on the shore of Lake Michigan with a swastika cut into his back. The hate-crime investigation leads Joe and his partner to suspect neo-Nazis, and as he digs deeper into the young man’s death, he uncovers a conspiracy that nearly gets him killed.
**Don't miss the other books in the series!**
Rose's Thorn
A Joe Erickson Mystery Book 1
Havana Brown
A Joe Erickson Mystery Book 2
Excerpt from CHAPTER SEVEN
When Joe and Sam met the next morning, they spoke about the interviews they needed to do, and both agreed they could cover more ground if they split them up and conducted them separately. But before they could finish their discussion, Joe received a call from someone identifying himself as Anthony Freiberger who said he was a friend of Daniel Silverman. He told Joe he had some information that may be pertinent to Daniel’s murder but didn’t wish to discuss it on the phone. He was a graduate student at the Art Institute and suggested Joe meet him there during his lunch hour.
Joe wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to go to the Art Institute, so he agreed to meet him in the Impressionist room near Georges Seurat’s painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” He was familiar with that area of the Art Institute and had been in that room many times. He let Sam know about his meeting with Freiburger, and Sam urged him to go on his own since he had a dental appointment was at 11:30. They agreed to begin their interviews that afternoon.
Joe entered the Art Institute and made his way to the Impressionist section. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he was right on time as he stepped into the room that housed Seurat’s painting. Standing in front of the painting looking at his phone was a bearded man in his mid-twenties, his long, dark hair pulled into a ponytail. As Joe took a step toward him, he gave Joe a wary look.
“Detective Erickson?” he asked tentatively.
“Yes. I assume you’re Anthony?”
“Call me Tony.” They shook hands and sat on one of the benches facing the Seurat painting.
“You said you may have something that could be important regarding Daniel’s death?” asked Joe, getting straight to the point.
“I guess I’ll let you be the judge of that. But a couple of weeks ago, Danny and I met in a bar on Friday after classes to have a beer and catch up. We were sitting in a booth talking, and a couple of guys in the booth behind us were talking kinda loud, and one of them started making anti-Semitic comments. He went on for a while—I swear he must have been a neo-Nazi or something, you know. That began to piss Danny off. Well, they ran their mouths for a few more minutes, and finally Danny couldn’t take anymore, he just lost it. He got up and confronted the guys. One of them stood up and got right in Danny’s face, calling him a “Hymie-bastard” and other shit like that. This guy was good-sized, a lot bigger than Danny. But Danny called him out and said, “Have at it, fat boy.” And the guy swung, and Danny put him down. Hard. I mean, he was laying there gurgling on the floor in seconds.”
“What happened then?” asked Joe.
“The bartender saw the whole thing and stopped the other guy from getting involved, and he called the cops. They came and interviewed each one of us and ended up arresting the guy who swung at Danny—for assault. They didn’t do anything to Danny because he was just defending himself.”
“You find out the name of this piece of work Daniel put down?”
“No, sorry.”
“That’s all right. The police will have it since they arrested him. What was the name of the bar?”
“The Lion’s Share on North Milwaukee.”
“Got it.”
“You think he could have done it?”
Joe looked up from his notepad. “It’s hard to tell. But we’re going to look into it. Can you describe the guy he was with?”
“Shaved head, goatee, earring, tattoos. Kinda like the other guy.”
“Skinheads.”
“Maybe. I don’t know anything about those kinda people.”
“I would steer clear of them, if I were you. And avoid that bar in the future in case it’s a hangout for their kind. You wouldn’t want to run into them a second time.”
“Scary guys.”
“Yeah. They are.”
Joe passed Tony his card and told him to call him if he remembered anything else or if he could be of assistance to him in the future. He could see Tony was still uncomfortable talking about it. To calm his nerves, Joe changed the subject and asked him what he was studying, Tony told him he was getting his MFA degree in Photography and had another year to go before he would graduate. Once he began discussing his work, his manner changed, and he relaxed. It was enough to jog his memory.
“I just remembered something. I think the guy overheard Danny giving his address to the police officer.”
“Which guy?”
“The one he put down.”
Great, Joe thought. If he knew where Daniel lived, he could have stalked him. This information would have made him vulnerable for payback at the hands of a Jew-hater. He would need to follow up, but he wasn’t looking forward to questioning a skinhead, if indeed that’s what he was. But the evidence Tony just provided was pointing in that direction.
Joe thanked him and they parted company.
Excerpt from CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
That evening while he was surveilling from the Affannatos’ flybridge, Joe saw no activity aboard Fieldings’ yacht. He told Loretta that he could be there until the early hours of the morning and not to wait up for him to leave.
After midnight when he figured no one would be coming aboard the Fielding yacht, he changed into a black t-shirt and black swim trunks. He tied a small bag around his neck, made his way down to the stern’s platform, and slipped into the water. Using a breaststroke because it caused little splashing and thus no noise, he swam toward the Fielding yacht.
Once he reached the slip where the yacht was moored, he pulled himself up onto the stern platform. Wringing out his t-shirt so he wouldn’t leave an obvious trail of water, he kept in a low crouch as he climbed the steps to the main deck and ascended to the fly deck. Once on the fly deck, he crawled to the helm station and got on his hands and knees.
Joe removed the bag from around his neck and took out a sealed plastic bag containing a GPS device in a waterproof case along with a small flashlight. Sliding under the helm station, he looked for a anything metal where he could attach the magnetic back of the waterproof case. The yacht was constructed of a sophisticated fiberglass composite, but there was a steel reinforcement strip under the helm, and he stuck the GPS device to it. It would feed the yacht’s location information to his cell phone.
Joe slipped the flashlight back into the plastic bag, sealed it, and placed it into the bag he carried around his neck. He finished descending from the fly deck and froze as he heard voices. He glanced in that direction and saw Jay Fielding and a blonde woman he recognized as Astrid Nielson, the company’s receptionist. She must have been the blonde he saw on the yacht previously. Quickly, he ducked down, and moved to the other side of the main deck and slid down into the water. Taking a deep breath, he swam under water until he reached the boat in the next slip. As he swam under it, he felt as though his lungs were going to burst. Coming up out of the water gasping for air, he waited until his breathing was back to normal. Then he swam to the end of the bow and looked toward the Fielding yacht. No one was in sight, so he swam back to the Affannatos’ yacht where he changed back into his dry clothes.
Checking his phone, he pulled up the new GPS app, and it showed the location of the Fielding yacht. Success! Right where it was moored. Using his binoculars, he hoped to get a look at Astrid and Jay, but he could not see anyone aboard. Apparently, they had gone to one of the rooms in the lower main cabin. At 2:00 am, Joe stuffed his wet clothes into his knapsack and left the Affannatos’ yacht. As he walked to his car, he was feeling good about his accomplishment tonight, despite the close call. Hopefully Jay was concentrating on Astrid and didn’t notice the drips of water Joe left on his way to the fly deck. Once at home, he would catch a few hours of sleep before going into the office. Swimming would substitute for jogging in the morning.
What is your writing process? For instance, do you do an outline first? Do you do the chapters first?
Being a person who needs structure, I have adapted the screenwriting paradigm espoused by Syd Field in his book, The Screenwriter’s Workbook, into a structural paradigm for writing a novel. Now, some people swear by Field’s book and some people swear at it. Personally, I happen to like it because it establishes a guide to write by.
What this paradigm does for a novel is to break it down into a three-act structure. As Syd Field defines it for the screenplay: Act I is the setup, Act II is the confrontation, and Act III is the resolution. At the end of Act I, a major story event (a plot point) needs to take place, and at the end of Act II, another major story event needs to happen. Since Act II is twice as long as Act I and Act III, a mid-point needs to be established that acts as a link to connect the first half and the second half of the confrontation. This link can be an incident, an event, a piece of dialogue or anything that directs the second half of the confrontation forward toward the resolution. Once these major story events are established, you can fill in all the individual events that make up the story. Such events often form chapters or parts of chapters. Now, keep in mind the events that happen within each act are fluid and subject to change as you write. While the major story events and the mid-point event remain constant, the events within the acts often can change as you write. Events may move around or be added and subtracted as needed. My advice: read Field’s book!
Describe yourself in 5 words or less!
Honest, sincere, personable, funny, and creative.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I plan to continue writing my Joe Erickson Mystery novels. I recently completed the first draft of the fourth book in the series which will be published next year. I enjoy writing these stories. I like the characters and believe they have space to grow and evolve. I also think these mysteries would also make a good film series for Netflix or another outlet if the right person would be interested. We’ll see.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Totally from my imagination. I don’t base my characters on real people, and I don’t use celebrities as images for my characters. I have a basic image for each character, but the details are always hazy. When someone asks who I would cast as Joe, my main character, in a movie, I say, “I have no idea.” I have thought about it, but I cannot come up with a forty-year-old actor that fulfills my image. Maybe it’s good that I haven’t since it would influence my writing. One thing I do for fun is to use the last name of a friend or one of my former students for a character in each of my books. Not for a bad person and not for someone that dies. But for an incidental character who appears just once. I’m curious to see if they will notice and what their reaction might be.
Lynn-Steven Johanson holds an MFA degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is retired from Western Illinois University. His plays have won numerous awards, and they have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and numerous cities throughout the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, India, and the Kingdom of Bahrain. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild of America, the Playwright Center of Minneapolis, Sisters in Crime, and is a past president of the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
His mystery novel, Rose’s Thorn, was published in 2019 by Level Best Books, and a prequel, Havana Brown, was published in 2021. His newest Joe Erickson Mystery, Corrupted Souls, was published March 15, 2022.
He lives in Illinois with his wife, and they have three adult children.
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