by Linda Berry
Girl with the Origami Butterfly
A Sidney Becker Mystery Thriller
LINDA BERRY
Copyright © 2018 by Linda Berry
Girl with the Origami Butterfly is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. This story was originally published under the title, Quiet Scream.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or in any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
www.lindaberry.net
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Interior layout by Jami Carpenter
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To my mother and father,
who taught me the magic and beauty of books.
Other books by Linda Berry:
Hidden Part One
Hidden Part Two
Pretty Corpse
To learn of new releases and discounts,
add your name to Linda’s mailing list:
www.lindaberry.net
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
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
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Also By Linda Berry
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A wonderful community of friends and family assisted in making this a suspenseful and entertaining work of fiction.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my editors, whose fearless comments kept me on the straight and narrow when I wanted to veer off course—including Denice Hughes and my husband, Mark Fasnacht. A heartfelt thank you for the amazing editorial talent of JT Gregory, who invested countless hours identifying stress fractures in the construction of the story. Trish Wilkinson, with her remarkable eye for detail, applied the final gloss and sparkle.
A warm thank you goes to my muse, LaLoni Kirkland, who joined me in the trenches with good cheer and enthusiasm, exhaustively drumming up plot and character ideas until the final choices rang true.
I greatly appreciate the assistance of criminal investigator Mark Rogers, Chief of Police Jim Doherty, Officer Jason Oviatt, and legal expert John Gragson for their insightful counsel on law enforcement procedures.
A big thank you to my dear sister, Francine Marsh, and Cathey Kahlie for reading Girl with the Origami Butterfly in its final stage and giving it two thumbs up.
CHAPTER ONE
BAILEY’S LOW, INSISTENT growls woke Ann from a dreamless sleep. She found herself sprawled on the overstuffed easy chair in the living room, feet propped on the ottoman, drool trickling down her chin. She swatted at the drool, half opened one eye and peered at the antique clock on the mantle: 11:00 p.m.
Ann heard Bailey sniffing at the front door, and then the clicks of his claws traveled to the open window in the living room. She opened her other eye. Her sable hound stood sifting the breeze through his muzzle with a sense of urgency. She didn’t want to fully waken but she knew what was coming. Sure enough, Bailey trotted back to the front door and whimpered while gazing expectantly at her over one shoulder. Damn those big brown eyes.
Normally Ann would be in bed by now, but she had passed out after dinner, exhausted from carting her boxes of organic products into town at sunrise and standing for hours in her stall at the farmers market. By the time she loaded her truck and headed home, the pain in her calves had spread up her legs to her back and shoulders, and she felt every one of her forty-five years.
Bailey whined without let up. He knew how to play her. Ann looked longingly toward her bedroom before returning to the hound’s pleading eyes. This was more urgent than a potty break. He’d no doubt caught the scent of a deer or rabbit. Now he wanted to assail it with ferocious barking to assert his dominance over Ann’s small farm. Then he’d settle in for the night.
Since the unsolved murder that rocked her small town three years ago, Ann had refrained from going out late in the evening. Still, she felt a pang of guilt. She and Bailey had missed their after-dinner walk. She was determined to sleep in tomorrow, but if the spirited hound didn’t exhaust his combustible energy, he’d be circling her bed at dawn, demanding that she rise.
“Okay, Bailey, you win.” Ann heard the weariness in her voice as she heaved herself from the chair and shuffled to the front door. Fatigue had settled into every part of her body. Her limbs felt as heavy as flour sacks. “But only a half-mile up the highway and back.”
Bailey sat at attention, tail vigorously thumping the floor.
Still dressed in jeans, a turtleneck sweater, and solid hiking shoes, Ann grabbed her Gor-Tex jacket from the coat rack, wrestled her arms through the sleeves, pulled Bailey’s leash from a pocket, and snapped it onto his collar. The boards creaked softly as they stepped onto the covered front porch into the damp autumn chill. The moist air held the promise of the season’s first frost. Her flashlight beam found the stone walkway, then the gravel driveway leading to the highway. A good rain had barreled through while she slept, and a strong wind unleashed the pungent fragrance of lavender and rosemary from her garden. Silvered in the moonlight, furrowed fields of tomatoes, herbs, and flowers sloped down to the shoreline of Lake Kalapuya, where her Tri-hull motorboat dipped and bobbed by the dock. A half-mile across the lurching waves, the lights of Garnerville shimmered through a tattered mist on the opposite shore.
Following the hound’s tug on the leash, Ann picked up her pace, breathing deeply, her mind sharpening, muscles loosening. Steam rose off the asphalt. Scattered puddles reflected moonlight like pieces of glass. The thick forest of Douglas fir, red cedar, and big leaf maple engulfed both sides of the highway, surrendering to the occasional farm or ranch. Treetops swayed, branches dipped and waved, whispered and creaked. The night was alive with the sounds of frogs croaking and water dripping. The smell of apples perfumed the air as she trekked past her nearest neighbor’s orchards. Miko’s two-story clapboard farmhouse floated on a shallow sea of mist, windows black, yellow porch light fingering the darkness.
Ann didn’t mingle with her neighbors, few as they were, and she took special pains to avoid Miko, whose wife had been the victim of the brutal murder in the woods adjacent to his prope
rty. The killer was never found, but an air of suspicion had hovered over Miko ever since. Ann detested gossip and ignored it. She had her own reasons for avoiding Miko—and all other men, for that matter.
When they reached the narrow dirt road where they habitually turned to hike into the woods, Bailey froze, nose twitching, locked on a scent. He tugged hard at the leash, wanting her to follow.
“No,” she said firmly, peering into the black mouth of the forest—a light-spangled paradise by day—black, damp, and ominous by night. “Let’s go home.”
Bailey trembled in his stance, growled with unusual intensity, tugged harder. The hound had latched onto a rivulet of odor he wanted desperately to explore.
Ann jerked the leash. “Bailey, home!”
Normally obedient, Bailey ignored her. Using his seventy pounds of muscle as leverage, he yanked two, three times until the leash ripped from her fingers. Off he bounded, swallowed instantly by the darkness crouching beyond her feeble cone of light.
“Bailey! Come!”
No sound, just the incessant drip of water. Ann’s beam probed the woods, jerking to the left, then right. “Bailey!”
She heard a steady, muffled, distant bark.
He’s found what he’s looking for. Bailey’s barking abruptly ceased. Good. He’s on his way back. She waited. No movement. No appearance of Bailey’s big sable head emerging through the pitch.
Ann trembled as fear took possession of her senses. She bolted recklessly into the woods, her light beam bouncing along a trail that looked utterly foreign in the dark. Her feet crushed wet leaves and sloshed through puddles. Her left arm protected her face from the errant branch crossing her path. A second too late she saw the gnarled tree-root which seemed to jump out and snag her foot. She fell headlong, left hand breaking the fall, flashlight skidding beneath a carpet of leaves and pine needles. Blackness enveloped her. Shakily, she pulled herself to her feet, trying to delineate shapes in the darkness, left wrist throbbing, the moist scent of decay suffocating.
The forest was deathly still, seeming to hold its breath.
Soft rustling.
Silence.
Rustling again.
Something moved quietly and steadily through the underbrush. Adrenaline shot up her arms like electric shocks. Ann swept her hands beneath mounds of wet leaves, grasping roots and cones until her fingers closed around the shaft of her flashlight. She thumbed the switch and cut a slow swath from left to right, her light splintering between trees. Her beam froze on a hooded figure moving backward through the brush dragging a woman, her bare feet bumping through the tangled debris.
The man kept his face completely motionless, eyes fixed on hers in a chilling stare. The world became soaked in a hideous and wondrous slowness. He lowered the woman to the ground and hung his long arms at his side. He was quiet; so was Ann. He radiated stillness. The stillness of a tree. It was hypnotic.
Ann felt paralyzed. Tongue dry. Thoughts sluggish. Then threads of white-hot terror ripped through her chest and propelled her like a fired missile into motion. Switching off the beam, she turned and sprinted like a frightened doe back along the trail.
His footfalls crushed the earth behind her, breaking through brush, snapping branches, closing the space between them, his breathing thunderous. Any moment, he would yank her by the hair, pull her down.
Ann’s world narrowed to a pinpoint. Everything except survival ceased to exist. She darted off the trail, skidded down a steep ravine, hobbled and splashed across Deer Creek, heard the man bulldoze through thickets, plummet down the slope, stumble, fall, curse, regain his balance, resume crashing after her like a bear through a woodpile, heaving, staggering, steps slowing down as he splashed through the creek.
Ann ran light-footed and sure, shoes springing off the deep mulch of the forest floor. She understood the features of the marsh that lay ahead. The smell of peat moss and a current of frigid air guiding her steps. Her footsteps sank deeper into wet earth and soon she was wading into the black shallows through dense clumps of reeds. When she reached a monstrous fir that lay like a great beast across the wetland, Ann crawled beneath the carcass of rotting wood. She backed into the hollow where Bailey once hid and refused to come out. Jagged wood scratched her skin and cold water swelled through her clothes and hair, shocking her flesh. Imprisoned, she listened, trembling. No sound. Then the heavy weight of a man splashed into the marsh and sloshed along the full length of the fallen tree, circled back, stopped.
Ann’s body went rigid. Threads of nausea reached up around her throat and she tasted bile on her tongue.
With a short guttural sound, the man hoisted himself onto the trunk of the tree and it compressed a few inches into the bog. The ceiling of Ann’s hiding place pressed down upon her. Water crept higher, and with effort she kept her nose in the desperately thin space above the water line. The weight of her prison shifted as the man marched up and down the length of the tree. Agitated. Did he know she lay within? Was he taunting her? Or was he using the tree as a lookout to scan the surrounding wetland and woods?
A ghastly creeping terror rose from a place beyond thought. Her heart knocked so furiously against the cage of her chest she felt certain the man would hear. She heard him jump off into the shallows with a big splashy crescendo and the tree bounced up higher above the water line. For a breathtaking moment she didn’t hear him move, and then he waded away and the tree settled firmly into the oozing earth. Silence sealed itself back over the forest.
CHAPTER TWO
AT 11:43 P.M. THE RADIO crackled and the scratchy voice from dispatch erupted into the cab of the Yukon. “Hey, Chief?”
“Yeah, Jesse.”
“We got an elk collision on Old Garner Highway. Just past mile marker thirty-four. West shore. Hit and run.”
“I’ll take it.” Police Chief Sidney Becker glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Almost midnight. “I’m a couple miles away. Notify Vicki.”
“Already done. She just got there. She was in the area.”
“Copy that. Over.” Sidney turned on her strobe, hit the high beams and punched the gas pedal, accelerating into a corridor of tall trees. Forest flashed by on both sides of the Yukon. An earlier storm left the highway slick as grease but the tires of the SUV grabbed the asphalt like talons. Sidney soon spotted the animal control vehicle parked off the road ahead, its red strobe fracturing the darkness. Pulling in behind, she scoped out the scene. Vicki Slope was on the job, reflective strips on her canvas uniform brilliant in the headlights. An elk with four-foot antlers lay twisted on the shoulder of the road between the two vehicles, a trail of blood leading from the point of impact on the highway.
Sidney lowered the window, adjusted the spotlight to illuminate the area, killed the engine, and climbed out. A cold wind bit into her skin, encouraging her to flip up the collar of her uniform jacket. Pinesap seasoned the moist air. Not much moonlight shone through the dense cloud cover.
Vicki had attached chains to the carcass and was winching it up the ramp to the flatbed. Sidney hated seeing the senseless loss of an animal, especially one as magnificent as this. Thank God it was dead and she didn’t have to put it out of its misery. Sidney took photos as the elk was loaded, then she joined the Linley County worker at the rear of her truck.
“We gotta stop meeting like this, Chief,” Vicki said, her long horsey face and limp blond hair pulsing crimson.
“Got that right.” Large animal collisions happened a dozen times a year and caused more accidents if the carcass wasn’t promptly removed. Though gruesome, Vicki’s job was critical to public safety. She’d been scraping animals off Oregon roads for six years, and nine in Alaska before that. “Damn shame,” Sidney said, turning her eyes away from the elk.
“Yeah, damn shame this good meat’s going to waste.” Vicki peeled off her thick leather gloves and stuffed them into an oversized pocket on her work pants. “God knows, there’s plenty of folks around here who could use it. When I worked up in Alaska, I delivered
all road kill to churches and charities. It went a long way in feeding the poor and homeless.”
Though Sidney agreed with Alaska’s policy, she kept her viewpoint to herself. She had a sworn duty to uphold the laws of Oregon. “Lawmakers here think if we let folks eat their road-kill, it’ll encourage them to poach.”
“That’s bullshit,” Vicki snorted. “Nobody deliberately hunts animals with a vehicle. We’ve seen the damage a large animal can do.”
Sidney had seen the damage, all right. Deer and elk pulverized cars and could launch over the hood through a windshield, mutilating and killing passengers. “Who called it in?”
“Passer-by. He put flares around it and waited until I got here, then he helped me drag it off the road. Must weigh five hundred pounds. He left just minutes ago.”
“Decent of him. He see who hit it?”
“Dunno. He wasn’t up for conversation.”
“Whoever the culprit was, he must’ve smashed the hell out of his hood and bumper. You see anyone driving by with one headlight?”
“Nah. Pretty quiet this time of night.” Vicki shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “Pisses me off the hitter didn’t call it in.”
“Yeah, me too. Probably drunk or high or has priors. He’ll call it in tomorrow when he finds out a police report is needed to file an insurance claim. Did you recognize the good Samaritan?”
“Too dark. He had his jacket hood over his face. He was strong, though. He did most of the pulling. But I got his license plate.” She tapped her temple.
Sidney pulled out a notebook from her breast pocket. “Shoot.”
“It was a silver Mercedes.” She spouted off the license number.
Sidney scratched it on the pad, shoved it back in her pocket. “You should be working for the FBI with that memory of yours.”
Vicki laughed. “No, thanks. I like what I do. Autonomy is priceless.” At five-foot-four, she had to crank up her neck to meet Sidney’s eyes. “You getting taller, Chief?”
“Nope.” Sidney spread her feet slightly apart and hooked her thumbs on her duty belt. “Still six feet. It’s these new shoes. Thick tread.”