Twisted Threads (A Cape Trouble Novel Book 3) Read online

  TWISTED THREADS

  A Cape Trouble Novel

  By Janice Kay Johnson

  ISBN-10: 0-9890418-8-3

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9890418-8-1

  Twisted Threads

  Copyright 2015 Janice Kay Johnson

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Seductive Designs

  Photo copyright: Couple © Novelstock.com

  Photo copyright: Window © Felix Pergande

  Photo copyright: Man with knife: © John Williams/ Depositphotos.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to an online retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Note from the Author

  About The Author

  Also Available from Janice Kay Johnson

  WHISPER OF REVENGE - EXCERPT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Shit like this made Detective Sean Holbeck wonder why anyone ever risked having kids. From that first unfocused, vulnerable look after birth, they were heartbreak waiting to happen.

  The powerful beam of his flashlight illuminated a slice of the dense, wet woods ahead. He swept it methodically from side to side, aware of other searchers in a line stretching to his right and left doing the same. One of them regularly shouted some variation of “Arianna! Please come out. Your parents are scared.”

  Yep, forget having kids.

  A thick clump of sword ferns demanded a closer look. In lieu of a walking stick or staff, he carried a golf club given to him by one of the search and rescue volunteers. It had a whole new life as a walking stick and tool for probing. He waded into the ferns and tapped with the butt end of the club until he was confident no body lay hidden beneath the dripping wet fronds.

  Fifteen year old Arianna Keezer had apparently been threatening suicide for days. Not one of her empty-headed friends had thought to confide in a parent, teacher, counselor. The grocery store clerk, the librarian. Any adult.

  When she’d been discovered missing from her bed this morning – something like sixteen hours ago – the friends were shocked. Maybe she’d just run away, they said hopefully. Until someone thought to check her Facebook page, which had what was, in essence, a suicide note. If she’d posted it in hopes of grabbing attention, she’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

  He took a swipe with his forearm to clear his face and only made it wetter. Damn, if only this miserable drizzle would let up. Too bad that was unlikely, given how usual this weather was for western Oregon in early March.

  Cursing the darkness, he started forward again and swept the beam of the flashlight from side to side. He watched for obstacles, hiding places, a color or texture that didn’t belong. He diverted to check the backside of a rotting log. Nada. Two steps later, he set his foot down only to find no ground beneath it. Next thing he knew, he’d crashed to the forest floor.

  He lay with his cheek on sodden earth slick with rotting leaves. Never having a kid. No way, no how.

  “You okay, Sean?” the volunteer to his right called.

  “Yeah. Stepped in a hole.” He rose to his knees, pulling his foot from the deep depression, and got up. Despite a rain slicker, he was soaked to the skin. He’d be cold, too, if he stopped moving for long enough.

  His whole day had been spent trying to figure out where Arianna might have gone. They’d scoured beaches, contacted everyone she’d ever known. Searched her bedroom for a clue. The parents sat side by side in the living room, clutching each other’s hand, their faces tight with dread and, in the father’s case, guilt, because he’d discovered a Colt Revolver he hadn’t kept locked up was missing. That guilt would tear this man apart if his daughter was found dead. Sean understood guilt.

  Not until nightfall neared had one of the girl’s friends remembered this super romantic spot in the woods where Arianna and her boyfriend went to be together. “You know.” She almost sounded shy. The shell-shocked father had only nodded.

  This was the boyfriend who’d ditched her two weeks ago, precipitating the crisis. When asked for directions to “their” spot, he’d wrinkled his brow and mumbled, “Well, uh, we just hiked. I mean, we didn’t go one place. You know.”

  Favorite words.

  He had showed them where he usually parked, out of sight of any passing traffic on Highway 101 running up and down the Pacific Coast. By the time family members, neighbors, volunteers and cops had gathered, it was pitch dark and Arianna had been missing for a minimum of twelve hours, and likely a lot more depending on when she’d slipped out. Now, when Sean briefly illuminated his watch, he saw that it was almost 11:30.

  He wiped water from his eyes just as his flashlight beam found the trunk of a huge fir or hemlock rising from a tangle of vegetation that might disguise the well sometimes found around the old trees. More ferns, salal, whips of currant or huckleberries. The guy to his left and he converged on it.

  Sean thumped the golf club, praying for all he was worth not to find the girl. Let somebody else get there first for a change. The dead rarely gave him pause anymore. Dead kids…they were different.

  Because secretly, he did want to have kids of his own despite seeing his own parents’ unending grief. Or, at least, he had once upon a time. Before he’d scraped too many off the pavement of major highways, cuffed abusive parents while the morgue techs carried out small, battered bodies, found lost children too late. A few months ago, he’d been part of a surf rescue. Eight year old boy. They never could get him breathing again.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  A shout came from his left. “Found her!” He sagged forward, his forehead resting on rough bark, before he resigned himself and pushed away.

  By the time he reached the source of the shout, several dark shapes were already clustered around the girl and had her illuminated in the converging beams of their flashlights. Ill-dressed for a cold, rainy night, she huddled in a shivering ball, but she was alive, staring dazedly at her rescuers. One had already wrapped her in a space blanket.

  Sean unzipped his slicker and lifted his shirt to pull out his Glock. He aimed it high and well-ahead, pulling the trigger twice in the pre-arranged signal.

  Then, after holstering his own weapon, he stooped and picked up the Colt that lay on the ground beside the girl. Which, thank God, she hadn’t used.

  Sean raised a shout, “She’s okay! Just wet and cold!”

  Like an echo, it continued on in each direction, down the ragged line of search and rescue people. “Okay! Wet and cold.”

  As pissed as he was at Arianna Keezer for putting the people who loved her through this, Sean still felt knee-buckling relief.

  H
er father had another chance. He wouldn’t have to spend a lifetime damning himself.

  *****

  Sean’s body jolted hard enough to give him whiplash. What the hell—? That could not possibly be his phone.

  It was. He’d had it on vibrate as well as ring, so it gave an emphatic little bounce on the bedside stand. He blinked a couple times to bring the lighted numbers on the clock into focus. 4:13. Unlucky?

  He groped for the phone, stabbed it with his thumb, and cleared his throat. “Holbeck.”

  “Sorry, Detective, I know you were up late last night.”

  More like this night, he thought grumpily, recognizing the dispatcher’s voice.

  “Deputy Walker asked me to call. She has a body. She says the throat was cut. And, um, you’re up next.”

  Wonderful. “Location?” Sean asked.

  The address was in one of the many small ocean-front communities that contracted with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement. This one, unfortunately, was as far away from Cape Trouble as it could get without being in the next county north.

  “All right,” he said, still groggy enough to sound drunk. “Tell Walker I’m on my way. It’ll probably be half an hour.”

  Call over, he swung his feet to the floor, groaned and scraped a hand over his face. When he went out the door five minutes later, he was unshaven but dressed and carrying instant coffee in a travel mug. Unlike earlier, a crescent moon added some silver to the landscape before a scudding cloud covered it while he watched. He let the salty night air wake him up as he walked to his Subaru, parked in the driveway since he had yet to figure out what to do with all the crap piled in the garage.

  He pushed the remote to unlock, but paused before opening the car door. Except for the constant, background murmur of the surf, the night was quiet enough for him to hear an intermittent, mechanical hum he knew came from his next-door neighbor’s house. One window glowed softly, through and around drawn blinds. Did that damn woman never sleep?

  She gave him something to ponder as he drove, wending his way through town to the highway. He liked mysteries once he had enough clues to become confident he’d arrive at an answer. Too bad all he knew about Emily Drake was that she was beautiful, she kept really strange hours even by his standards, and she rarely emerged from her house, which, like his, was one of the aging cottages in old town Cape Trouble. To all appearances, she lived alone, although just the other day he’d heard the old guy who lived across the street call, “Feels like spring, Mrs. Drake,” when she ventured as far as her mailbox.

  She’d smiled and waved at Gus Rumbaugh, which was more than she did when she set eyes on Sean. For him, any nod she gave in answer to a greeting was distinctly chilly.

  What had become a familiar frustration every time he thought about Mrs. Emily Drake finally kicked his brain into gear, and finally back to business. A slit throat? Burris County, situated on the Oregon coast, had a population of not much over 25,000 people. Murder was unusual and, when it happened, typically was either a domestic or the result of a drunken confrontation in a tavern. Like anywhere, they had exceptions; one doozie was the discovery last summer that Cape Trouble held the burying ground of a serial killer who’d been active for twenty-something years.

  Odds were this would turn out to be a domestic. Except cutting someone’s throat… That’d be a hard thing to do if you were intimate with the victim. A stabbing, sure, usually with a knife grabbed from the kitchen counter. A gunshot, fists, those were weapons used when a husband or wife lost it. Cutting a throat would have to be more calculated.

  He frowned. No point in reasoning ahead of the facts. Sean checked the names attached to that address – Francis and Rita Lowe – and otherwise concentrated on the narrow, winding Pacific Coast highway which on this stretch clung to a cliff-edge. Every once in a while, that sliver of moon reappeared and let him see a shimmer of seafoam breaking on rocks a stomach-plummeting drop below. Once he’d had to repel down the cliff along this stretch to reach a car that had plunged through the guard rail.

  From long practice, he blocked the memory of what he’d found at the bottom.

  He didn’t quite make it in a half hour, but close. Sean found the house, no problem, a fancy place in a development he’d driven through before of nice homes on half acre or more lots. In daylight, all would have spectacular views and some were oceanfront. He didn’t need to see the house number, not when light blazed from the front windows and a marked sheriff’s department car sat in the driveway.

  As he walked up to the porch, the sound of a woman sobbing rose over the ever-present roar of the surf. It was like a metronome: inhale air, exhale wail.

  Ringing the doorbell, Sean wondered if anyone else was here besides the deputy. Please no kids, he thought with unusual fervency.

  The minute the door opened and he saw Rebecca’s face, he winced. “She have a relative or friend who can come?” he asked in a low voice.

  One of only two women deputies with the sheriff’s department, Rebecca was about his age, he thought. She looked like the runner he knew she was. Along with working patrol, she had been trained as the department negotiator. He’d seen her in action, and knew her to be good. Rebecca had a natural warmth. Everyone liked her.

  He’d never seen her look haggard or so grim. “I wanted you to see the scene before I let anyone else in the house,” she said.

  “All right. You started a log?”

  “I did.”

  Sean took the notebook she handed him, scribbled his own name and the time, and stepped inside. The woman sitting on the sofa with her hands over her face appeared small in the midst of a vast living room that swept into dining room and kitchen. Sean was made instinctively uneasy by the vaulted ceiling and huge open space with walls of windows, most without blinds or drapes. The wife seemed oblivious to his arrival.

  “Bath in the master bedroom,” Rebecca murmured. “Mrs. Lowe woke up, her husband wasn’t in bed with her. Bathroom was dark, which puzzled her as he usually turned on the light when he went in to take a leak. Uh, not her words.”

  Sean nodded his understanding.

  “She called his name, didn’t get an answer, but decided to use the bathroom herself before she went looking for him. It wasn’t her habit to turn on the light. She tripped over something.”

  Sean grimaced.

  “Remembering that made her start to cry. I haven’t gotten anything else coherent out of her.” That even Rebecca hadn’t been able to calm her was bad news.

  “Okay. It’s a good start.”

  “She’d turned the light on,” the deputy said to his back.

  Sean felt sure she wouldn’t have touched anything but the doorbell and the comforter she’d found to wrap around Mrs. Lowe, but Sean would have to ask eventually. Right now, he just wanted to get a look. The sobs were like fingernails on a blackboard, creating a desperate need to silence them.

  He snapped on gloves before he reached the hall. Place appeared to have three bedrooms, a linen closet and a second bathroom. He edged open each door, turning on lights and taking a cursory look. He couldn’t imagine anyone lurked, but better safe than really sorry. He was relieved to see that one bedroom was probably set up for guests, and the other was a home office. So one blessing: no terrified kids.

  The master bedroom was vast, too, with the kind of deep carpet that made him feel as if sand was sucking at his feet. King size bed, covers rumpled on both sides. A dresser and an armoire. Two additional doors, both partially open. Behind one was a walk-in closet as big as his kitchen.

  The bathroom…well, even with his experience, it was hard to look past the naked body slumped over the tiled rim of the Jacuzzi tub. The angle of the hairy lower legs looked wrong – probably because the wife had knocked them askew. The arms and head hung down, allowing the blood to run into the tub. And, man, the knife had bitten deep enough to damn near decapitate this guy. He’d been forced to kneel and bend forward, Sean thought. Mess minimized. The killer might even
have gotten away without being sprayed.

  Or maybe not. Sean watched a drop fall from the faucet. A few seconds later, another. It might be a chronic drip, the kind a homeowner put off having fixed. But it might also be that a stranger didn’t know how tight that handle had to be turned.

  He wouldn’t have let more than a gentle stream run for fear of awakening the wife, but that would be adequate to wash off his hands, rinse some blood off his forearm. Who knew?

  He had taken the time to dip a probably-gloved finger into the blood and write three large letters on the tiled wall: BCD. Maybe it was only that they were written in blood, or the way it smeared and dripped, but Sean thought the breadth of the letters, the slashing strokes that made them, projected more rage than the skillful slice of the knife across the victim’s throat. Was the killer signing his work, or were those three letters supposed to mean something?

  Sean took another look at the picture as a whole and shook his head. He’d never seen anything like this before. An assassination.

  Squatting, he leaned forward far enough to allow him to see the face in profile, at which point he swore. Oh, damn. He knew this guy.

  *****

  In unison, everyone gathered in the living room gusted sighs of relief when the EMTs ushered Mrs. Lowe out the door. For a minute, nobody said anything. Sean’s ears still rang, and he could only imagine how Rebecca felt after her prolonged exposure.

  They’d tried to call a friend of Mrs. Lowe’s and gotten no answer. She had no family locally. Sean assumed she would be sedated and admitted to the hospital for the night.

  At least he hadn’t had to do a notification. The dead had done it for him.

  The ME was currently in with the body, and Major Crimes Lieutenant Wilcynski had summoned state crime scene investigators who had immediately gone about their business. Another detective, Jason Payne, had showed up not long after the lieutenant, who’d barked, “What the hell are you doing here?” Sean hadn’t heard the answer.