Once Gone (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #1)

by Blake Pierce

  Chapter 26

  Riley arrived at the parlor in Georgetown shortly before Marie’s service was scheduled to begin. She dreaded funerals. To her, they were worse than arriving at a crime scene with a freshly murdered body. They always got inside her gut in some terrible way. Yet Riley felt she still owed something—she wasn’t sure what—to Marie.

  The funeral parlor had a facade of prefab brick panels and white columns on the front portico. She entered a carpeted, air-conditioned foyer that led into a hallway wallpapered in muted pastel colors gauged to be neither depressing nor cheery. The effect backfired on Riley, adding to her feeling of despair. She wondered why funeral homes couldn’t just be the gloomy and uninviting places they really ought to be, like mausoleums or morgues, with none of this phony sanitization.

  She passed several rooms, some with caskets and visitors, others empty, until she arrived where Marie’s service was to be held. At the far end of the room she saw the open casket, made out of burnished wood with a long brass handle along the sides. Perhaps two dozen people had showed up, many of them seated, some of them mingling and whispering. Bland organ music was being pumped into the room. A small viewing line was passing the coffin.

  She got in line and soon found herself standing beside the coffin, looking down at Marie. For all of Riley’s mental preparation, it still gave her a jolt. Marie’s face was unnaturally passive and serene, not twisted and agonized, as it had been when she was hanging from that light fixture. This face was not stressed and fearful, as it had been when they had talked in person. It seemed wrong. Actually, it seemed worse than wrong.

  She quickly moved past the coffin, noticing a somewhat elderly couple sitting in the front row. She assumed that they were Marie’s parents. They were flanked by a man and woman closer to Riley’s age. She took them to be Marie’s brother and sister. Riley reached back into memories of conversations with Marie and recalled that their names were Trevor and Shannon. She had no idea what Marie’s parents’ names were.

  Riley thought of stopping to offer the family her condolences. But how would she introduce herself? As the woman who rescued Marie from captivity, only to find her corpse later? No, surely she was the last person they wanted to see right now. It was best to leave them to grieve in peace.

  As she made her way to the back of the room, Riley realized that she didn’t recognize a single person there. That seemed strange and terribly sad. After all their countless hours of video chatting and their single face-to-face meeting, they didn’t have one friend in common.

  But they did have one terrible enemy in common—the psychopath who had held them both. Was he here today? Riley knew that killers commonly visited the funerals and graves of victims. Deep down, as much as she owed it to Marie, she also had to admit that that was the real reason she had come here today. To find Peterson. It was also why she was carrying a concealed weapon—her personal Glock that she normally kept boxed in her car trunk.

  As she walked toward the back of the room, she scanned the faces of those already seated. She had glimpsed Peterson’s face in the glare of his torch, and she’d seen pictures of him. But she’d never gotten a really good look at him face to face. Would she recognize him?

  Her heart pounded as she looked at all the faces suspiciously, searching for a murderer in each one. They all soon became a blur of grief-stricken faces, staring back puzzlingly at her.

  Seeing no obvious suspects, Riley sat down in an aisle seat in the back row, separated from anyone else, where she could watch anyone who entered or exited.

  A young minister stepped up to a podium. Riley knew that Marie hadn’t been religious, so the minister must have been her family’s idea. The stragglers sat down, and everybody became quiet.

  In a hushed and rather professional-sounding voice, the minister began with familiar words.

  “‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’”

  The minister paused for a moment. In the brief silence, a single phrase echoed through Riley’s mind …

  “I will fear no evil.”

  Somehow, it struck Riley as a grotesquely inappropriate thing to say. What did it even mean to “fear no evil”? How could it possibly be a good idea? If Marie had been more fearful months ago, more wary, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into Peterson’s clutches at all.

  This was definitely a time to be fearful of evil. There was plenty of it out there.

  The minister began to speak again.

  “My friends, we have gathered here to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Marie Sayles—daughter, sister, friend, and colleague …”

  The minister then launched into a boilerplate homily about loss, friendship, and family. Although he described Marie’s “passing” as “untimely,” he made no mention of the violence and terror that had haunted the last weeks of her life.

  Riley quickly tuned out his sermon. As she did, she remembered the words in Marie’s suicide note.

  “This is the only way.”

  Riley felt a knot of guilt swelling inside of her, growing so large that she almost couldn’t breathe. She wanted to rush up to the front of the room, push the minister aside, and confess to the congregation that this was all, all her own fault. She had failed Marie. She had failed everyone who loved Marie. She had failed herself.

  Riley fought back the urge to confess, but her unease started to take on a brutal clarity. First there had been the funeral home’s prefab bricks, silly white columns, and pastel-colored wallpaper. Next had been Marie’s face, so unnatural and waxy in the coffin. And now here was the preacher, gesturing and talking like some kind of toy, a miniature automaton, and the congregation of little heads bobbing as he spoke to them.

  It’s like a doll house, Riley now realized.

  And Marie was posed in the coffin—not a real corpse, but a pretend one, in a pretend funeral.

  Horror cascaded over Riley. The two murderers—Peterson and whoever had killed Cindy MacKinnon and the others—merged together in her mind. It didn’t matter that the pairing was completely groundless and irrational. She couldn’t disentangle them. They became one to her.

  It seemed as though this well-crafted funeral was the monster’s final touch. It announced that there would be many more victims and many more funerals to follow.

  As she sat there, Riley noticed out of the corner of her eyes someone slip in quietly to the service and sit on the other end of the back row. She turned her head slightly to see who had arrived in the middle of the service and saw a man dressed casually, wearing a baseball cap drawn low, shielding his eyes. Her heart beat faster. He looked large and strong enough to be the one who overpowered her when he caught her. His face was hard, jaws clenched, and she thought that he had a guilty look about him. Could it be the killer she was looking for?

  Riley realized that she was almost hyperventilating. She slowed her breathing down until her head cleared. She had to restrain herself from leaping up and arresting the latecomer. The service was obviously coming to a close, and she couldn’t disrupt it and disrespect Marie’s memory. She had to wait. What if it wasn’t him?

  But then, to her surprise, he suddenly got to his feet and quietly left the room. Had he spotted her?

  Riley jumped up and followed him. She sensed heads turn at her sudden commotion, but that didn’t matter now.

  She trotted through the funeral parlor hallway toward the front entrance, and as she threw open the front door, she saw that the man was walking briskly away along the city sidewalk. She drew her handgun and charged after him.

  “FBI!” she shouted. “Stop right there!”

  The man whirled around to face her.

  “FBI!” she repeated, once again feeling naked without her badge. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  The man facing her looked utterly baffled.

  “ID!” she demanded.

  His hands were shaking�
��whether from fear or indignation, Riley couldn’t tell. He fished out a wallet with a driver’s license and as she scanned it, she saw it identified him as a Washington resident.

  “Here’s my ID,” he said. “Where’s yours?”

  Riley’s resolution started to slip away. Had she ever seen this man’s face before? She wasn’t sure.

  “I’m an attorney,” the man said, still very shaken. “And I know my rights. You’d better have a good reason for pulling a gun on me for no reason. Right here on a city street.”

  “I’m Agent Riley Paige,” she said. “I need to know why you were attending that funeral.”

  The man looked at her more closely.

  “Riley Paige?” he asked. “The agent who rescued her?”

  Riley nodded. The man’s face suddenly sagged with despair.

  “Marie was a friend,” he said. “Months ago, we were close. And then this terrible thing happened to her and …”

  The man choked back a sob.

  “I’d lost touch with her. It was my fault. She was a good friend, and I didn’t stay in touch. And now I’ll never get a chance to …”

  The man shook his head.

  “I wish I could go back and do everything differently. I just feel so bad about it. I couldn’t even make it all the way through the funeral. I had to leave.”

  This man was feeling guilty, Riley realized, and in pain. For reasons very much like her own.

  “I’m sorry,” Riley said softly, deflated, lowering her gun. “I really am. I will find the bastard who did this to her.”

  As she turned to walk away, she heard him call out in a perplexed tone.

  “I thought he was already dead?”

  Riley didn’t reply. She left the bereaved man standing on the sidewalk.

  And as she walked away, she knew exactly where she needed to go. A place where no one else on earth, except Marie, could possibly understand.