by Rose A. Valenta

Created on: December 14, 2007   Last Updated: February 27, 2009

Murder in Bolingbrook

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

It was a hot and muggy July afternoon in Bolingbrook. Drew Paterson, an off-duty police lieutenant and chronic control-freak, was in the garage getting some chlorine for his swimming pool. He had the radio tuned into the local news station. Weather reports indicated no relief from the intense heat and the newscaster was warning all elderly citizens to stay inside remaining in air conditioned rooms during the heat wave.

As he approached the large blue barrel of chlorine, he noticed that a mouse had tried to chew a hole in it, but some of the liquid leaked out and almost disintegrated the rodent's body. Strange, he thought, I didn't realize chlorine was so powerful, damn! It's almost like acid. The friggin mouse almost turned to dust.

"Drew, hurry the hell up. It's hot out here." His wife, Tracy, shouted.

Tracy was young and energetic, about 30 years his junior. They had two children together, but their marriage was falling apart at the seams. If she left him, it would be his fourth failure at marriage and the child support payments would surely put him in the poor house. He suspected that she was already having an affair, as their sex life was almost non-existent lately. He went the Viagra route, but it was just prolonging the inevitable, she was ready to split.

"Not this time, you bitch!" he muttered under his breath. I should have my head examined for marrying a bimbo half my age, he thought.

The disintegrated mouse stuck in his sick mind as he remembered a case he was involved with in December of 1988 over in Joliet, 13 miles away. Drew was privy to details of the investigation. Joan Bernoit had disappeared and her husband, Gilbert, was the prime suspect. Gilbert was an auto mechanic and everyone on the case thought he had killed Joan and placed her body in a 55-gallon drum with battery acid, but couldn't prove it. He should have had chlorine, Drew thought, smiling to himself.

He went through the motions of testing the pool water adding PH and chlorine, but his mind was on Gilbert Bernoit. Suspicion was that Gilbert had a storage bin somewhere in Joliet. Maybe he rented it a little further North though or we would have located it. No body though, the acid would have eaten it. The case was cold now, but Drew

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