Warren Williams Photography
The Mesa View B&B was meant to be a money maker, not a death trap. As far as Buck Garrison was concerned, his brand-new business in the Oklahoma Panhandle was a perfect haven of isolation for his dangerously demented brother as well as provide them a steady income. The plan was not successful–not by a long shot.
County Sheriff Lester P. Morrison didn’t know about the new B&B, a converted bunkhouse on the old Bar-T ranch, or of the two brothers living there. It wasn’t until a vacationing couple from Arkansas vanished overnight that he began to search the ditches and motels for signs of the missing travelers. With no billboards, web site, or yellow page ads, and only the sporadic appearance of a crude sign on a barbed-wire fence for publicity, the Mesa View Bed and Brekfast, was easy to miss…despite the poor spelling.
When a racist, a munitions expert, and a psychopath take up residence in an old, abandoned monastery just outside of town, local sheriff Lester P. Morrison is naturally suspicious of the strangers. The men, all ex-military, claim to be nothing more than peace-loving survivalists preparing for the next worldwide, cataclysmic event. But when a torrent of arsons sweep across Oklahoma targeting Hispanic businesses, the sheriff begins to wonder if he is standing smack-dab in the middle of ground zero.
Sheriff Lester P. Morrison is nearing retirement. He loves the peace and quiet of his small hometown where an exciting night might be a teenage speeder, a petty theft at a convenience store, or maybe a drunken family squabble. Never in his wildest imagination did the Sheriff think he would become involved in an al-Qaeda plot to kill the President of the United States, not in Cimarron County, the least populated county in Oklahoma. But that’s exactly what happens when a terrorist with a trunk full of explosives crashes his car on any icy road just outside of Boise City. Lester has a bad feeling about the mysterious, dark-skinned stranger with the full black beard, but Deputy Billy Ray Ledbetter shrugs it off as nothing more than a foolish hunch from a suspicious old man…until they find the unconscious owner of the tow truck lying in a pool of blood.
County Sheriff Lester P. Morrison wasn’t buying the popular theory that a missing teenage girl was “just another runaway.” When his investigation revealed Melissa Parker was last seen in front of a roadside bar in the company of drunken men, the Sheriff’s suspicions soared to new heights.
In fact, Melissa couldn’t run anywhere. She’d been assaulted, locked in a tornado shelter—a fraidy hole—with no food, no water, and left to die. Her struggles to escape took on a new urgency as Melissa realized she was not alone in that terrifying darkness. The survival clock was ticking.
Oklahoma wildlife photographer, Jim Cutter, had nothing more in mind than getting a decent image of a hungry coyote. Instead, a different kind of predator, a hired killer, appeared in his viewfinder; and a cold-blooded murder was captured in startling color on a digital memory card.
Even though the photographer was well-hidden, his pickup was not. When the killer spotted the vehicle, he correctly assumed he had a witness and began searching the area. Cutter suddenly became the prey and like the animals he photographed, was forced to use the tall grasses of the wildlife refuge to evade the vicious hunter. Finally, sure the killer had driven away, Cutter returned to his truck only to find one of his own business cards tucked under the windshield wiper with a chilling message scrawled on the back:
C U L 8 R