Excerpt from Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three days later, Bull was dead. He was forty-five. The autopsy report showed he died of oxycodone intoxication. He had five times the lethal limit for the drug in his blood. His death was ruled an accident. Four days before Christmas, the state's investigation and postmortem for William H. Preece—Case No. WV 2005-1018—was officially closed.

Debbie took the empty prescription bottles home with her and secreted them in an upstairs dresser drawer for safekeeping. She wanted something to hold on to. Bull's death wouldn't be forgotten. He wouldn't be another number, a statistic, in the overdose death toll. Somebody was going to pay, no matter the repercussions, no matter what her enemies and the scandalmongers might dredge up about the past. There would be a reckoning.

Several weeks after they lowered Bull into the ground, the phone rang at Debbie's house. Dr. Kiser wanted to talk. It was urgent. Was he calling to offer his sympathies? No. He asked Debbie for a copy of Bull's MRI, the one taken after the ladder fall. Could she send it? The doctor needed something to put in Bull's empty patient file.

Some things about Bull's death still troubled Debbie. The bloody clothing, for instance. Could someone have murdered her brother, then tried to cover up the crime by making it look like an overdose? Debbie hadn't ruled that out. Stranger things had happened in Mingo County. She wanted an appointment to speak to the medical examiner. She wanted to know why the autopsy was taking so long. She kept calling the morgue.

"I want to look at the man who did the autopsy on my brother," Debbie told the secretary who answered the phone.

After finally receiving a copy of the autopsy report, Debbie hopped in her car and headed north on the four-lane highway to the medical examiner's office in Charleston. Corridor G, as the route was known, was built for trucks to haul coal out. Debbie wound her way through humps of mountains, their ridges glowing red, orange, and yellow with the change of season. She passed three prisons and two Walmarts during the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip. Her destination, a tan-painted building with barred windows, stood across the street from a NAPA Auto Parts store and the First Advent Christian Church. A receptionist directed Debbie and her questions to Dr. Zia Sabet, the chief deputy at the morgue, the man who conducted Bull's autopsy. Had he kept blood and DNA samples? Yes. Were there any marks on the body? No. Could her brother have been killed? No marks, no bruises, nothing to suggest someone had attacked Bull, Sabet said. But what about the bloody clothing beside the mattress in the trailer? She had seen evidence photos taken by the sheriff. Sabet told her he did not have the clothing.

Debbie had questioned everything about her brother's death. His Explorer had been taken for a joyride. Someone had stolen Bull's gold necklace and the pills left in his prescription bottles after he died. Why did his so-called friends let Bull lie passed out in the trailer so long? Why did it take them so long to call the sheriff? She was told someone hid her brother's pill bottles in a stack of cinder blocks while the ambulance made its way to the trailer. They later partied with Bull's remaining pain medications, she heard.

"I suspicioned everything when those things were missing," Debbie said.

"Your brother died of an overdose," Sabet told her.

There was also the pill residue—and an empty bottle of Lortab that belonged to the trailer's owner.

"My brother did not snort pills. When you crush them, that's what you crush them for."

"How do you know your brother didn't do that?" Sabet asked.

"Because he told me he didn't."

And she believed Bull. He had always been a man of his word, hooked but honest.

After Bull's funeral, Dr. Kiser was frantic. For weeks that autumn of 2005, he kept calling Debbie, asking whether her dead brother had ever had an MRI and offering to pay for the film. In fact, Bull did have one. It was in a big brown envelope stored upstairs beside the prescription bottles. But why on earth would the doctor need the scan? Kiser had an explanation: He admitted to Debbie that he had no justifiable reason for prescribing OxyContin to Bull, and the authorities—Kiser wouldn't identify them by name or agency—were starting to ask questions about Bull's death.

Excerpted from Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre. Copyright © 2020 by Eric Eyre. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.