Nocturne In Ashes: A Riley Forte Suspense Thriller, Book One

by Chase, Joslyn

She organized her thoughts, translating them into laymen terms. “Music is about unity and variety. It’s full of patterns, woven with patterns, brimming with pattern, and then the pattern breaks. Unity and variety. Sometimes the pattern break is foreshadowed, hinted at, predictable. Other times it leaps up without warning, changing in surprising ways. But form is very important in music and I’ve been trained to find form, identify patterns, and interpret meaning from this.”

  “Right. Not so different from my line, after all.”

  “Okay, then. Some patterns are obvious, others lie beneath the surface and take a little digging. Let me tell you the patterns that came to mind as you told me about the case. You have a Boeing executive, working for a company that makes jumbo jets and contributes hugely to the carbon footprint. And you have Senator Brown, a conservative politician who swings way to the right on environmental issues.”

  “Sure, I can see a possible connection there, but how does a pot-smoking, peace-and-love-liberal, former rock star fit the picture?”

  “Did you read the Downed Illusion interview in Rolling Stone?”

  “I skimmed it just last night.”

  “I read it when it came out a year ago, but I remember the interviewer saying something like:

  “You’ve been criticized by some because even as the popularity of your band has diminished, the size of your entourage, the support group that follows you around, has actually grown. What will happen on this come-back tour?”

  Coby: “Bigger than ever, man. My people keep the faith.”

  And the interviewer: “So, you’ll be trailing trucks and buses—”

  Coby, interrupting: “Motor coaches, RVs, Harley’s, black-belching VW vans. Come one, come all. I love you, man. We’re going from one end of this country to the other and the more, the merrier.”

  “You remember that from a year ago?”

  “Well, that wasn’t exactly verbatim, but I memorize huge pieces of music. I’m trained to learn and retain. Coby’s following could be seen as having a significant impact on the environment and his attitude about it might have struck a sour chord. To someone of a certain mind bent, this could be a crime punishable by death. It’s possible you have a self-appointed executioner on your hands.”

  Nate nodded. “A plausible theory, and one I hadn’t mulled over in exactly that light.”

  “Except,” Riley shook her head, “if the killer operates on that premise and lives in this community, wouldn’t he have attacked one or more of the big violators living nearby? There are several to choose from.”

  “And that’s where my training kicks in. Serial killers, whatever drives them, are essentially predators and generally, they don’t hunt where they sleep. For various reasons, they move outside their home territory to find their victims.”

  “Uh-oh.” Riley pushed up from the couch and began pacing across the Moroccan carpet.

  “What’s your pattern recognition program telling you now?”

  “I think maybe the pattern’s about to break. What if Rainier’s rumbling has driven him home, pinned him in the area and, at the same time, agitated his instinct for violence?”

  “I see your point. If your theory is correct, the eruption may lead him to increase his killing and force him to troll locally for victims.” Nate reached out a hand and pulled her back to the sofa. “You said there are a lot of possibilities. Who might he target?”

  Riley sat still, thinking. Only her fingers moved, drumming on her denim-clad knees.

  “Several residents in Mountain Vista and just outside the neighborhood run lavish households. They own fleets of cars and boats, commute to work in sea planes or amphibious aircraft. Some even use helicopters. Bill Gates owns a home not far from here. The Nordstrom’s live just down the road a ways. But the man who leaps to my mind is Rico Ferguson.”

  “Who’s Rico Ferguson?”

  “He’s a Scottish-Italian clothing designer with a house on an island in the Case Inlet. He lifts off to work each day in a pilot-chauffeured helicopter, rides a limousine around Seattle, and owns an amphibious plane which gets frequent use on his business trips around the country. He is famously cavalier about his lifestyle, firmly believes he’s earned it by virtue of his genius and hard work.”

  “Do you know him personally?”

  “Yes, but not well. I’ve attended parties in his home, met him socially on a couple of occasions, fund raisers and such.”

  “Okay, we’ll start there. I’d like to check on him, at least warn him to be on guard. A man like that can buy his own protection. Do you have his phone number?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “Good, let’s go. I’ll drive while you try calling.”

  Riley grabbed her purse and cell phone and they hurried to the Explorer, still parked on the street. Riley looked back, into the windows of the Newcombe house, and saw her friends and neighbors, ghost-like through the darkening glass as Nate pressed the gas pedal and they roared off.

  CHAPTER 25

  RICK SPED DOWN THE EMPTY freeway, nose aimed toward the Tacoma Dome and points west. He rounded a gradual curve and as his vantage point opened up on the new vista, he saw that a snarl of traffic sprawled across the road about a hundred yards in front of him. If he continued forward, would he be able to move far enough to clear the flow path? If he turned around, could he make it out of harm’s way before the tidal wave of mud thundered across the I-5? He knew he had only minutes, seconds maybe, to get out of the danger zone.

  The radio gave forth a high-pitched emergency signal, interspersed with warnings and official announcements. He switched it off. Glancing to his left, he thought he could see a brown smudge, moving in the distance. He braked, slowing the car, and shifted into second gear. He floored the clutch and yanked the wheel hard to the left, pulling on the hand-brake until he’d come around 180 degrees. Then he let it out and regained control, heading back the way he’d come.

  He pushed Nate’s car as fast as it would go, disregarding the coolant indicator blinking amber on the dashboard. As he rounded the same curve, from the opposite direction, his heart sank. A tangle of vehicles stretched across the freeway, forming the other side of a giant set of deadly parenthesis. Rick looked to the right and a feather of apprehension tickled the back of his neck. The moving brown smudge was more than his imagination. He was trapped.

  He rode the accelerator until a crash seemed inevitable, then braked hard and came to a rough stop against the bumper of a red BMW, abandoned with both front doors open. He followed the example and bailed out, moving through the crush of empty cars and trucks, working his way to the shoulder, sprinting and weaving past vehicles left by conscientious parkers trying to keep the road clear.

  He risked another look, behind him and to the right, and could now clearly see the wall of mud bearing down with incredible speed and ferocity. He’d thought he was running all out, but the sight produced a burst of energy beyond conscious thought, his legs pumping, leaping, vaulting him to the sideline. He heard a roar, like the jet planes low overhead from Boeing field, but deeper in pitch and growing louder. The screech of metal against metal joined the cacophony as the lahar blasted over the freeway, plowing aside the abandoned vehicles, tossing them like an extra-crunchy salad.

  Rick was shoved forward by a laterally moving Ford which pitched and heaved toward a sturdy-looking Escalade. The two vehicles collided, locking Rick between them. His head banged against a window, spinning from the impact and the sudden cessation of momentum. Pieces of metal and debris flew around him and something hot hit his ear, searing it. He smelled burnt hair. He’d made it to the edge of disaster, well outside the flow path, but not outside the effects of that flow. He was imprisoned in a metal box and it was raining fire.

  CHAPTER 26

  TOPPER FLOWED ALONG IN THE river of heavy traffic on northbound Highway 16, listening to the radio broadcast, shades of the same import on every frequency.

  This is an emergency evacuation message from the Law Enf
orcement Support Agency for Pierce County, Department of Emergency Management, Nisqually River upstream from the Alder Reservoir.

  The following is not a test; I repeat this is not a test. A debris flow has been observed coming from Mount Rainier down the Nisqually River. The size of the debris flow is unknown at this time. Those people near the Nisqually River bed upstream from the Alder Reservoir could be threatened. If you are near the Nisqually River bed upstream from the Alder Reservoir, move to higher ground immediately. Do not delay. Do not call 9-1-1. Move to higher ground immediately. Park your vehicles off the road areas so that others can evacuate. I repeat, this is not a test.

  A continuing ribbon of these alerts had streamed over the radio since he’d left the parking lot at Costco. So many areas of the state had been affected by Rainier’s blast that it took more than fifteen minutes for all variations from all jurisdictions to air before the loop started over. Topper realized many of the service areas had already been hit, making a mockery of the radio warning.

  Topper pulled to the right and exited the highway at Purdy. This was three miles and a world away from the harried bustle of Gig Harbor. A ghost town. Deserted, it was little more than a long off-ramp which passed through a non-functioning traffic light and connected to a long on-ramp back onto Route 16. At the traffic light, you could turn onto the Purdy Spit and cross Henderson Bay to the Key Peninsula.

  Except that now you couldn’t.

  A line of orange and white striped storm barriers lined the road, blocking the turn-off to the spit. Topper pulled over and got out. The water level had risen, swallowing the beach, threatening to eat the road. The bay churned and seethed, full of mud and debris, a living thing intent on escaping its bounds. Topper knew that lahars must have pushed all the way to Tacoma, plunging into the Sound, carrying untold tons of mud, rock, and all the detritus gathered in passing.

  He believed that the effects from the wall of mud would continue to mount, breaching waterways and driving a tidal wave of destruction in an ever-increasing circle. The flooding and damage would swell exponentially. It was now or never.

  He moved aside three of the barricades and drove his Jeep through, steering along the narrow road, lapped on both sides by the angry waters. The Jeep’s tires bit into the pavement as he gained the other side and began the climb, rising above the writhing bay. Navigating the curving lane through Wauna, he passed a solitary figure at the side of the road, an old man, white-whiskered, with a tattered gray raincoat flapping around him as he stood frozen, shrinking, and then disappearing in the side-view mirror.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE KILLER WALKED AWAY FROM the Newcombe house, along the cart path and into his own drive. He’d watched Riley with that police detective, seen how they’d left together, and it had made him angry. He turned the key in the front door, entered, and let it fall shut behind him with a loud click. He stood in the front hall, silence washing against his eardrums, feeling heavy and drained, spurned by Riley and stunned by Rainier’s punishing eruption in the face of all he’d done. A sense of betrayal, like that he’d suffered when his mother died, weakened from pneumonia and then snatched by an early cold snap in October, rose and buffeted him. Doubts bit at him and he swatted them away like mosquitoes, while he stood in the darkening hallway, remembering.

  His father was weak, couldn’t hack living rough, off the fat of the land. Not without his wife. They moved to a city. He went to a regular school, and his father found work as a night watchman and custodian at a funeral home. They lived in a tiny apartment, attached at the back where the hearses pulled in to unload at the embalming room and when he got home from school, his father made him do his homework at the desk in the showroom, tucked between polished walnut with pink satin inlay and classic black lacquer.

  He began to learn many things at school, principally that he was stupid. Some of the kids called him a moron, or an idiot, and it’s true that he didn’t understand much of what the other children were up to with their textbooks and papers. He knew how to read and could count well enough on his fingers, but the multiplication tables were beyond him and he’d thought Andrew Jackson was a guitar player. These gaffs, and others like them, earned him scorn and ridicule, but no friends. And just as well. He couldn’t imagine bringing a friend over after school.

  He made frequent use of the school library, checking out biographies of sports figures and scientists, sometimes a mystery or a western. When he finished his homework, he was allowed to help himself to one bottle of soda from the stock in the kitchenette, kept cold and ready, should a mourner need refreshment. He sat with his book, drinking his soda at the small round table with the yellow-cushioned chair, and sometimes the door to the visitation room across the hall was left open. Sometimes, there was a body.

  When that happened, he would sit with studied nonchalance, sipping and reading in proximity to a corpse. None of the other kids at school could do anything like that. One time, his father told him they were bringing in a toddler, a two-year old who had forced a toy into a power outlet and been electrocuted. After the body had been prepared and installed in the “Serenity Room,” he’d crept into the powder-blue parlor and gazed down at the small, waxen face. He’d been gripped with the conviction that those eyes would open, boring into him, hypnotizing him with a hungry intensity. If he dared look away, the child would rise and fall upon him, frozen fingers gripping his neck, paralyzing him, draining him of life. He stood, rooted to the spot, until his father’s footsteps in the hall galvanized him into action and he dove behind a curtain, unwilling to be caught in this perverse act.

  There were many things about the mortuary that fascinated him. He delighted in prying open the caps of the central vacuum system, watching bits of paper disappear into the maw, feeling its powerful vortex against the palm of his hand. When his father was distracted in another part of the building, he would ride up and down the curving staircase in the automatic chair lift to the basement, pretending he was lord of the underworld. There was sometimes a gap in the curtain of the embalming room through which he might catch a glimpse of something chilling or gruesome, and the casket showroom at night would make a great place for hide and seek. He began to think about making a friend, but it would have to be the right kind of boy and there was no one.

  Until Toby.

  He shook himself from the reverie. He’d done his part. He’d always done his part and still the earth shook and screamed. What more could she want?

  He turned and walked to the closet, removing the hidden partition, pulling out the duffel bag, preparing another plastic raincoat. She had taught him, told him how good he was. A fine boy, she’d said. He’d always done his part.

  He readied the bag and waited.

  CHAPTER 28

  RILEY FELT LIKE HER HAIR was standing away from her head. She could almost hear a hum in the air, as if it crackled with electricity, and it brought a prickle to her skin. As she and Nate descended the hill toward Rico Ferguson’s house, she was amazed to see how much the water in the bay had risen. Choppy, chocolate-colored waves slapped the shoreline, sending spumes shooting into the air. Nate activated the Explorer’s wipers once or twice to clear dirty droplets from the windshield as Riley directed him to the bridge connecting the small island to the main road. She kept trying to reach Rico by phone, but couldn’t get a signal.

  They turned onto the approach road and rolled to a stop at an unmanned security gate made of wrought iron.

  “Now what?” Nate said.

  “Hold on, I was out here last month and I think I remember the code.”

  Nate shook his head. “He’ll change the code on a regular basis. It won’t work.”

  “Try it anyway. Seven, four, eight, two.”

  Nate punched in the number and the gate creaked open.

  “That doesn’t bode well,” said Nate. “If our friendly neighborhood throat slasher attended the same party—”

  “He’d have the same code.”

  “Chilling thoug
ht, isn’t it?”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine that I’ve been hobnobbing with a brutal killer. You think they’d give off some sort of feral scent or have a wild-eyed look that would mark them out.”

  “I’m sorry to say that’s not the norm. A personality organized, disciplined, and clever enough to pull off these killings would be crafty enough to play his part well. With a certain kind of madness comes a certain kind of cunning.”

  “Comforting.”

  “We’re not here to comfort, we’re here to warn potential victims so they’ll watch their backs.”

  They passed through the gate and over the narrow bridge to the far side of the island. Nate pulled into the circular driveway and parked the car.

  “Stay here,” he said, “and keep the door locked until I come and get you.”

  She watched Nate ring the doorbell, then pound on the door. He worked the doorknob, peering in through narrow windows flanking the heavy wooden door, and drew the gun from his shoulder holster. Riley watched him begin his circle around the house, and felt a shudder go through her as he was swallowed by bushes and gathering gloom. Her thoughts turned morose.

  How did I get here? What kind of crazy course changes in my life led to this? Not that long ago, I was a concert pianist with a promising career, a wonderful husband, an adoring son. And now I’ve lost it all and I’m sitting in a locked car, on a forsaken island, in the path of volcanic destruction, in the vicinity of a serial killer. How does that happen? Is there any way to trace through the interwoven strands composed of decisions, repercussions, and chance events, to identify the pattern, find the breaks, and discover the secret machinations that deliver us to our destiny? Can we attach meaning, find purpose, exert control, or do we simply twist in the wind?

  Nate rounded the far end of the house and returned to the car. The door locks popped up and he dropped into the driver’s seat with a sigh.