Linger: Dying is a Wild Night (A Linger Thriller Book 1) Read online

  LINGER

  Edward Fallon

  #1

  Dying

  is a

  Wild Night

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LINGER #1 Dying is a Wild Night Copyright © 2015 by Braun Haus Media, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Braun Haus Media, LLC

  Photo Credits: Serious Boy Portrait © atikinka2/ Dollar Photo Club

  The publisher wishes to acknowledge

  and thank Robert Gregory Browne

  for his contribution to this work

  Sign up for the

  Braun Haus Media, LLC Newsletter

  and get a free ebook.

  Yes, that's right.

  A free full-length supernatural thriller

  from our growing library of books.

  Sign up here

  Other books in the Linger series

  available for purchase now

  #2

  Trail of the Beast

  #3

  Reckoning for the Damned

  #4

  Here There Be Monsters

  #5

  The Death of Dreams

  LINGER

  Dying is a Wild Night

  PART ONE

  “Dying is a wild night and a new road.”

  ~Emily Dickinson

  1

  _____

  Tacoma, Washington

  Three Months Ago

  BY THE TIME THEY REACHED the house it was already on fire.

  The boy had told him this might happen, but they had taken the chance that he was wrong.

  He sometimes was.

  They sat less than a block away in the man’s station wagon, a rapidly declining ’64 Rambler Cross Country that was far too old to be on the road. His wife Anna had inherited it from her father, and he in turn from her. There was a time when he had lovingly maintained it for her, but those days were lost—just as Anna was. Part of another life that was as foreign to him now as a goodnight kiss.

  As he watched the house burn, he heard the boy rocking quietly on the back seat, where he always sat. With the windows rolled up, the only sound was the creaking of the upholstery and the soft squeak-squeak of the springs.

  He glanced at the boy in his rearview mirror, looking for any sign that he might be cognizant of the world around him. But that face gave nothing away. The sightless eyes stared at the ceiling as he rocked, his hands clasped together in his lap. He was in the haze, and wherever he’d gone, it didn’t look as if he’d be coming back anytime soon.

  The man studied the burning house and knew it was a lost cause. There were two fire trucks parked out front, a dozen or more firefighters giving it their best with their hoses, but anyone could see it was well past saving. If this was a crime scene, the fire was probably intentional.

  The man wondered—and not for the first time—if the Beast somehow knew what they were up to and was attempting to cover his tracks. If so, he had underestimated what the boy was capable of, just as the man had, not that many months ago.

  To his surprise, the squeak of the springs stopped and the boy was with him again, reaching for the door handle. Back when they first started traveling together, the man would rush to help him, but he had quickly discovered that the blindness was not a handicap. After dealing with this physical limitation for nearly twelve years, the boy was quite capable of helping himself.

  He didn’t even carry a cane.

  The door opened and the smell of smoke and burning wood filled the car as the boy climbed out. It was pointless to ask him any questions. He would communicate when he was ready.

  He walked to the front of the car, framed in the windshield as he faced the house. Anyone watching would think that he was just another curious bystander, but the man knew he was doing what he did so well.

  The house groaned as chunks of charred wood fell away and crashed to the ground. Then the boy raised a hand, his voice—as always—a melodic presence inside the man’s head:

  Are you ready?

  “Yes,” the man said, and reached to the seat beside him for the pencil and sketchpad, flipping to a new blank page as he pulled the pad into his lap.

  Then, as the boy sent him the pictures…

  …he closed his eyes and began to draw.

  2

  _____

  Santa Flora, California

  Today

  IF ANYONE WERE TO ASK Detective Lieutenant Kate Messenger how she felt about the prospect of becoming an orphan, she would deny she even thought about it.

  She wasn’t a child anymore. She was a grown woman and certainly capable of being on her own. She had proven this many years earlier when her mother was killed, a devastating blow that had robbed her of the only parental affection she had ever known.

  Her father, always a humorless man, had raised her in the most perfunctory manner possible, making sure she was fed and clothed and housed, but having little to do with the rest of her life.

  So, in truth, Kate had been orphaned years ago.

  Now, after decades of being subjected to too much beer and far too many cigarettes, Mitchell Messenger’s internal organs had finally had enough of him and were rapidly calling it quits. But Kate left questions about the future to others and did only what was expected of her.

  Her duty.

  Every Sunday and Wednesday night.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  “I haven’t been keeping up with the news,” Mitch said, his phlegm-throttled wheeze modulated by the flow of his oxygen tank. “How many bodies did you find?”

  He sat in his armchair in a corner of the room as Kate stripped the sheets from his bed. To her surprise, his impending death had turned him into something of a chatterbox, as if he’d decided he needed to make up for all the years of indifferent silence. A former cop himself, he was always asking Kate about the cases she worked—the one thing in their lives they had in common.

  She no longer resisted sharing with him. It was the least she could do for a man whose meter was about to run out, even if she didn’t particularly like him.

  “Six,” she said. “Six bodies, if you count the family dog. Mother, father, and three children. All girls.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Another fuckin’ psycho. They’re all over the place these days. You remember Jimmy Jay, don’t you?”

  “Your ex partner.”

  “His son’s working homicide up in Tacoma now and he tells me they had one just like that a few months ago—family of four. Bastard lit the house on fire trying to make it look like an accident, but they found evidence that the victims’ tongues were all cut out.”

  The old man seemed to relish this detail, as if it had been arranged for his own private amusement. He had no life and nothing to look forward to, but he certainly appeared to take joy in knowing that some people had suffered more than he ever would.

  “I remember getting the bulletin on that,” Kate said. “And Rusty mentioned it at his retirement party last month. But it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “Oh? How can you be so sure?”

  “The details are off. Completely different M.O. The only real similarity is that an entire family was killed.”

  “Must be contagious,” Mitch grunted. “So what’s your play on
this one? You gonna call in the Feebs?”

  It had been five days since the killings at the Branford house, and with very little in the way of conclusive forensics, Kate was seriously considering such a move. But she wasn’t quite ready yet. This was her first big case as head of Major Crimes, and for better or worse, she felt the need to follow it through.

  The brutality of the killings certainly pointed to a sick and twisted mind, but whether they were the work of a roving psychopath or simply a ruthlessly brutal tactic to divert attention away from a more personal killing, was a hot topic of debate among the members of her squad.

  She wasn’t about to debate it with her father, however.

  “Hey, did I slur my speech?” he said. “Or do I need a megaphone?”

  Kate gathered his sheets into a ball and turned. “No, Mitch, I’m not ready to call in the feds just yet.”

  “What’s the holdup? They’ve got people with expertise in this area.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “When I was in the field, I took their help whenever I could. All that territorial bullshit they tell you about in the movies is—”

  “I know. I’ve been doing this for awhile now, remember?”

  “Then what’s the delay?”

  She dumped the ball of sheets on the floor, then crossed to the hallway and opened a linen closet. She always changed his bed when she came here. It gave her something to do other than sit around and stare at him and try to muster up some sympathy where little could be found.

  “I’m still working the case,” she said. “I want to be sure I haven’t missed anything before I throw in the towel.”

  “So, in other words, you wanna grab the glory.” He snorted, a thick, nasally sound that set her teeth on edge. “It’s thinking like that lets these assholes get away. Like those gangbangers you let skate last month.”

  “I told you, we didn’t have the evidence to make an arrest.”

  “Yeah, well there are always ways around that, aren’t there? Maybe if you learned to play the angles a little, you’d catch more of these creeps than you let go.”

  She almost reminded him of his own dismal solve rate, but didn’t bother. What was the point?

  She laid the fresh sheets on the bed, tucked one of his pillows under her chin and began slipping it into a new case. “I’m not interested in bending the law to get what I want. That kind of behavior is for hacks and has-beens.”

  “So I’m a hack now, is that it?”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “That’s exactly what you meant. If you’re gonna come here just to insult me, stay home next time. I got enough problems in my life. I don’t need your negative nonsense.”

  Kate almost laughed. Her father was one of the most negative creatures she’d ever encountered. Always had been. And being around him was like stepping into a toxic wasteland without a hazmat suit.

  The only reason she came here was because on some primal level she felt she owed it to her mother, who had inexplicably loved this man for most of her short life.

  Mitch grunted. “Just get the hell out of here already, will you? I’ll have Elsie do the sheets.” Elsie was the care provider Kate spent a good portion of her salary on. “Or maybe I’ll just stay in this chair. I can’t sleep anyway.”

  He began to cough then, reaching for the box of Kleenex on the table next to him. Despite his abuse, Kate instinctively went to help him, but he waved her off.

  “Go on, get out of here. Go play super cop and solve your goddamn case if you think you can. Oh, and while you’re feeling optimistic, why don’t you check in with your ex, see if he’s interested in a reconciliation.”

  Kate stiffened. That was a low blow even for dear old dad.

  “You’re hopeless.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, all right. Hopeless. One lung gone and the other on the way. But what about you? You think comin’ here twice a week is your ticket to heaven? God don’t give a shit, sweetheart. If he did, you wouldn’t have a house full of dead bodies to contend with.”

  Kate was in no mood for this. Turning away, she snatched her bag off the dresser, slung it over her shoulder, and headed for the door.

  “So that’s it? I give you a little heat and you run?”

  She stopped and spread her hands. “You just told me to leave, Mitch. What do you want from me? Blood?”

  He waved her off again. “Fine. Go. Do what you want. Just do me a favor next time and get here earlier. I got shows to watch.”

  With this, he picked up the remote in his lap, turned on the TV, and began flipping through the channels.

  And like so many times in the past, Kate Messenger ceased to exist.

  3

  _____

  SHE DIDN’T OFTEN VISIT CRIME scenes so late at night, but after circling the city to cleanse her mind, Kate found herself taking the 33 into the valley, as if something was drawing her there.

  She had no idea what.

  The Branford house sat at the end of a narrow road in the small suburb of Oak Grove, which was nestled in the mountains just east of Santa Flora.

  Thad Branford, a local custom cabinet maker, had built the house himself on an isolated piece of land that was heavily populated by oaks. The remoteness of the location had afforded the killer—or killers—enough time to be thorough, and quite savage. Examinations of the bodies had indicated that Branford’s wife Chelsea and his oldest daughter Bree had been brutally raped after their skulls were crushed with a claw hammer. Results were inconclusive on the other two daughters—twins, who where only eight-years-old.

  Kate had seen brutality before, but nothing quite like this. And she knew that the images of those bodies—or what was left of them—would linger for many years to come.

  Most of the detectives on her squad who were privy to the details agreed with her father’s assessment of the case. That there was a psycho killer on the loose. But, for now at least, Kate resisted the notion, thinking that this was exactly what the perpetrator wanted them to believe.

  She may have been wrong. And probably was. She had nothing more than her gut telling her this. The evidence they’d gathered had been disappointing, to say the least—no unaccounted for blood or prints or semen traces. No usable DNA at all. Yet her instincts were reliable at least half the time, and she had decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and look more closely at the personal aspects of the case.

  The problem was, the Branfords didn’t seem to have any enemies. Thad Branford’s employees thought he was a saint, and his friends at the local Rotary club had nothing but praise for the man. And his wife and children were well-loved in the community.

  This wasn’t evidence that could easily be dismissed, and it certainly pointed to the possibility that the murders were a random act. But Kate wondered if one of the Branfords had been singled out and the rest had merely been collateral damage or a calculated cover-up.

  Could Chelsea have had an affair, and these murders were the handiwork of a jilted lover? And what about Bree? She was barely sixteen, but could she have been seeing someone outside her usual circle of friends who wasn’t what he had seemed to be?

  These were long shots—especially in light of all the interviews they’d conducted, and the telephone and computer records they’d poured over—yet neither was beyond the realm of possibility. And until Kate could eliminate them, she had no intention of turning this case over to the FBI profilers her poor excuse for a father so revered.

  Despite the late hour, she wanted to take another look at the crime scene, and an even closer look at the wife’s and daughter’s personal belongings in the hope that something useful would jump out at her.

  Something they had missed.

  The only thing they’d found during the initial search that had raised any eyebrows was the variety of sex toys in Chelsea Branford’s nightstand drawer. But this merely indicated that either the Branfords had an adventurous love life or Mrs. Branford was one frustrated woman.


  Kate knew that finding anything new was a long shot, but she had to give it a try.

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  She had almost reached the house when she saw it: a beat-up old white Rambler station wagon parked on the side of the road not ten yards from the Branford driveway.

  She slowed her SUV as she approached, and peered inside, but the Rambler was empty.

  Was it abandoned?

  It certainly looked that way.

  On the other hand, what if it belonged to a reporter, or a couple of curiosity seekers, hoping to get a glimpse of the so-called House of Pain?

  In the first couple days of the investigation, the media coverage had been relentless, and Kate had appeared on TV to request that viewers come forward with any and all information. But with the department otherwise remaining tight-lipped, and with the shock value of a celebrity death and a fresh new political scandal now dominating the airwaves, the murders had abruptly receded into the background to make room for these more important matters.

  Which was just fine with Kate. It gave her a chance to move without the pressure of the press.

  But there was always a straggler or two, usually the hardcore crime reporters, who weren’t seduced by petty politics or celebrity gossip. And she hoped to God this car was abandoned. She didn’t need the added headache.

  She pulled her SUV into the Branford driveway, killed the engine, and scanned the area. There was no one lurking about, peering into windows—and that was a good sign, but not necessarily a definitive one.