The Sound of Rain Read online

  Avenge me.

  BOOK ONE

  BEFORE MY UNRAVELLING

  CHAPTER ONE

  “She was only in the car for a little while,” Angela Chase says as we stand outside her midnight-blue BMW sedan, cordoned off with the familiar bumblebee-yellow crime scene tape. The color scheme clashes with the holiday decor of the Factoria Target store that looms above the scene.

  Christmas is two days away.

  A girl is missing.

  Everything is wrong with this picture.

  A small crowd circles around the BMW and some young blues push them away, but they contract with the wind. Some are angry that their loved ones are on lockdown in the Target.

  “I had the seat warmers on,” Angela says. “She was by herself for only a minute or two.”

  “Tell me once more what happened,” I say.

  The mother of the missing girl looks right at me. Her green eyes flash a kind of anxiousness at me. She’s still holding a Target bag. Son Samuel, five, clings tight to her hand. He’s carrying a Target bag too and trying hard not to cry while the world shatters all around him.

  “I want to go home,” Angela says. “Samuel’s chilly and my husband will be angry if I don’t get home before he does.”

  “He’s on his way here,” I tell her.

  Angela lets out a sigh. “That’s perfect,” she says. “Just perfect.”

  As we stand there in the cold and wet, my eyes land on one of the other officers helping with the search. No words needed. This mother doesn’t seem concerned about her missing daughter at all. She’s more concerned about what her husband will think if his dinner isn’t ready when he arrives home. I wonder about their home life. Expensive—obviously Burberry—coat. Car I could never afford. Hair and makeup just so. I have no idea what her home life is like, but, by the way she’s acting, I know for sure that I’d never want to trade places with her. She’s evasive at a time when other moms would be clawing at the yellow tape and screaming at us to find her daughter.

  “I know we’ve gone over this,” I say, “but let’s do it again.”

  “I can’t. I’m too upset. I’m cold. Samuel needs to get home. He has Montessori tomorrow.”

  “Mrs. Chase, your daughter is missing.”

  Angela’s Target bag slips from her fingertips and smacks the wet pavement. She’s beginning to crumble. In a strange way, I’m glad of that. I was beginning to wonder where she was storing her feelings. Or if she had any at all. As if his mother’s release of emotions has freed him to do the same, Samuel cries now. The rain starts up, and an officer brings a pair of red Target umbrellas.

  “We’ll do our best to find her,” I say.

  As we stand there, the rain rolling off umbrellas, a man pushes through the soggy crowd. He’s tall with dark, wavy hair that brushes his ears. He’s wearing a long, black overcoat, and his shoes are expensive and likely ruined from the swelling puddle that has suddenly surrounded us like a moat. Samuel runs to him and Angela follows, coils her arm around him.

  “She was acting up, Julian,” she says, crying without tears. “You know how she can be. We were doing just fine. We were. And then all of a sudden she pitched a fit. I had shopping to do. I had to get some last-minute gifts. I brought her back to the car and told her to sit, and Samuel and I went back inside. I swear to God, only for a minute. Just a little minute.”

  Julian Chase tells his wife that everything will be all right. He’s sure that Kelsey’s fine. “She must have gone back inside the store,” he says. “Remember the time she hid in the pantry?”

  Just as I introduce myself, the shoppers trapped inside Target are released. Some look relieved as they emerge. Others appear angry at the inconvenience. All of them look over at the group of us huddled by Angela Chase’s blue BMW.

  “I heard they left their kid in the car and now she’s gone. Who leaves their kid in the car?” a woman asks, loud enough to ensure that Angela hears.

  “Yeah,” says her companion, who’s older and angrier, “there’s even a law against it.”

  “No sign of her,” says Bart Collins, the officer leading the search inside the store, when he joins us. He’s in his forties with anvil-heavy eyebrows and sympathetic blue eyes. He’s wearing a jacket over his maroon shirt. His khakis are mottled with the spray from a shopper’s bright-red cart whizzing past us.

  Julian Chase stiffens at the statement. “She’s got to be in there,” he says, his eyes sweeping over the people pouring out of the store. “I’m going to go get her.” He breaks free from Angela and moves toward the doors. An officer, fresh out of the academy and completely earnest, stops him.

  “You can’t go in there, sir,” Bart Collins says.

  “You can’t stop me,” Julian says, trying to get past the officer. “It’s my daughter that’s missing.”

  Julian Chase, an executive with an international video streaming company, is one of those take-charge types. I knew it the second he made his way toward Angela, pushing past onlookers and gawkers like they were bowling pins and he was anything but a gutter ball. But the cop stands his ground.

  “Sir, you have to let us do our job.”

  He stops and looks at Officer Collins. He is at once scared and angry. Taking charge was a mask. Taking charge was his attempt to ensure that he wasn’t just standing in the rain, waiting for someone to tell him that Kelsey was still gone.

  “Then do your fucking job!” he demands. “Find my little girl! You’re terrifying her mother and brother.” He notices Collins’s heavy brows narrow, and he reels in the torrent of emotion. The fear. The confusion. The urgency. “Sorry,” he says, his voice dropping. “Just find her.”

  An empty Target store is an eerie place. Wide aisles. Pops of red everywhere highlight the corporation’s branding, but with Christmas so near, it’s red and green on overload. A disquieting starkness fills the space. Even Mariah Carey’s signature Christmas tune can’t lift the mood. Not a single person pushing a cart or wandering aimlessly for that last-minute gift that will make their Christmas perfect. A woman with a tag that says “Sherry, team leader” passes the surveillance tapes over a red laminate counter and she doesn’t look all that happy about it.

  “It’s standard procedure,” I say, though I know some businesses would balk and wait to be served a warrant.

  “Not that,” she says. “I get that. Target’s corporate policy is to work with the police whenever we can.”

  I write down her name.

  “Just can’t believe that someone lost her kid here in the store,” she says, picking at a crusty stain on her khakis. “Just makes me sick to think that we’ve got some pervert shopping here. Right before Christmas too. Makes me sick. Really.”

  “We don’t know what happened,” I say. “But I can promise you, we’ll do our very best to find her.”

  Sex offenders. Years ago nobody paid them any attention. They were imagined as wild-eyed weirdoes who lived alone or in their mothers’ basements, boogeymen who prowled schoolyards, playgrounds, and carnivals. They were around, but no one ever saw them. All of that changed with the Internet and the registries that share the details of their crimes, their pictures, and their addresses. Sex offenders, it turned out, were the guy—and sometimes the gal—down the street.

  “About those tapes,” Sherry the Team Leader says, “they aren’t the best.”

  “We’re used to lousy black and white,” I say.

  She gives an uneasy smile. “It’s not just that they’re crappy. It’s that, well, some of the cameras have been on the fritz.”

  “Some?”

  “Most.”

  “All right,” I say, trying to contain my disappointment. “I’m sure we’ll find what we need.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  The members of the Bellevue Police Department have scrutinized every inch of the store, including the storage trunks that might have held a little body. No sign of Angela and Julian Chase’s little girl.

  She’s simply gon
e.

  An Amber Alert is issued, telling everyone in Washington—everyone who watches TV, owns a phone, or listens to the radio, that is—that Kelsey Chase was last seen in the parking lot of the Target store at the Factoria Mall in Bellevue, a suburb east of Seattle. The three-year-old has dark, curly hair, weighs twenty-nine pounds, and is thirty-four inches tall. When her mother last saw her she was wearing a pink wool coat, a white-and-pink checked sweater, blue jeans, and a pair of Elmo shoes.

  With Christmas in two days, the investigative unit is short-staffed. Danny Ford, my partner in more ways than one, goes to the Chases’ while I stay at Target finishing up with the forensic team as they measure, photograph, and prepare to tow the BMW. The lab will process it for fingerprints, trace evidence, and biologicals. The car, for all we know, is the crime scene. As I stand there, lights flashing blue and red on the shiny asphalt, a few people gather. A couple brings flowers, creating a makeshift memorial faster than a female blowfly laying eggs on a newly dead body.

  Which is very, very fast.

  A woman with her teenage daughter in tow comes up to me after depositing a bouquet of red carnations with the Safeway sticker still on it.

  “I hope you arrest the mother,” she says.

  She’s dressed in all black—a uniform of the elite or someone in perpetual mourning. Always hard to know for sure on the Eastside.

  “You are, aren’t you?” she asks. Her tone is exceedingly bitter and she seems to be emboldened by her teen, who bobs her head up and down.

  I only nod. I’m not sure what to say. Or rather what I should say.

  “Isn’t leaving her kid in the car unattended against the law?” the mother asks.

  “It is, Mom,” the daughter says before I can respond.

  They move on and I stand there as the tow truck pulls away with the BMW.

  What kind of mother does leave her child in the car like Angela Chase did?

  Danny texts me from the Chases’ house only a few miles away.

  Angela Chase took a sleeping pill and went to bed and Julian said she’ll come in to talk tomorrow. Looked around the house. Nothing. See U later.

  Who takes sleeping pills hours after her child goes missing?

  Angela Chase is like no mother I’ve encountered. Frantic is the word that defines most. Unhinged. Desperate. Most guzzle coffee. Have to be forced to eat so they don’t pass out. The whole time the investigation goes on, they stay focused on what’s happening, make sure that the police are doing everything.

  Angela? She isn’t like that. Not at all.

  Angela took some pills and tucked in for the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Danny and I roll the tape on a monitor in one of the evidence storage rooms back at the Bellevue Police Department. Danny and I have a complicated relationship. Too complicated. He’s not my boss, though he acts like it. He’s a few years older and has more experience, but part of me thinks there’s something inside of him that sees me as a threat.

  Sherry, the Target team leader, was right. The tapes are lousy. We sit there in the semidarkness poring over the videos, first from camera one, the unit by the front door.

  “There she is,” I say, recognizing Angela Chase by her expensive designer coat. She came in with a crowd, and it was hard to see if the children were with her. “It looks like she’s holding Samuel’s hand, but I really can’t see him. I don’t see Kelsey at all.”

  “I’ll slow it down,” Danny says, reaching for the controls.

  Even in super slow motion, I can’t get a decent read on anyone other than Angela. “Go to the next camera,” I say.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Danny says. “I like it when you’re so assertive.”

  Actually, he doesn’t. Not at all. He prefers it when I just follow his lead. He only said that because he wants to remind me that he’s always in charge. He’s my superior. I’m one level below him at all times. Soon this case, my case, will be his case. He’ll tell me that the news media will be better served by hearing from a more seasoned investigator. That it doesn’t mean I’m not leading things, but it’s better, he’ll say, for the community.

  I know he’ll do that. I know I’ll let him. My relationship with my own father has put me into the category of women who acquiesce to win approval. It’s the part of me that I hate the most, the first element I’d change about myself if only I could. My mother left my father, sister, and me when I was seven. Stacy was only four. I was so afraid that we’d be abandoned by our father too that I did whatever I could to hold us together. That meant never pushing back, because I didn’t want to make him unhappy in any way. I lost some of what I might have become. Stacy was younger. She missed Mom, but she hadn’t felt abandoned. I wouldn’t let her. She was my baby. I know I did a good job raising her, because she has everything that I ever wanted. She knew how to grow up and live a life.

  That’s something I’m still trying to do.

  “There’s Angela,” I say, tapping my finger on the screen. She’s standing near a Nate Berkus bathroom accessories display and staring upward at the camera.

  “That’s kind of weird,” Danny says, looking at me.

  I agree and then Angela disappears from the frame.

  We stare at the images from the next six cameras, three of which approximate a South Dakota blizzard. In the final tape, we catch only one glimpse of Angela and Samuel as they stand in line at the checkout. It is so fleeting that we freeze the image frame by frame, hoping for something more.

  I look over at Danny.

  “No sign of the kid,” he says.

  “The manager was right. These tapes are terrible. They aren’t going to help us find Kelsey at all. I’m not even sure she was even there. No one saw her.”

  Danny taps his finger on a reporting officer’s stack of statements collected from the people who were stuck inside while the store was on lockdown. “One witness says she saw all three of them. Said that the little girl was being a brat and her mom was threatening to spank her right then and there.”

  I reach for the statement and read.

  “You’re right,” I say. “She says that she saw the mom take the girl and the boy toward the front door.”

  “Yeah, right out to the car, where she left the kid.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe this witness got it all wrong. She’s the only one out of dozens interviewed.”

  “Probably,” Danny says. “All I know is that if I was a betting man, and you know that I am, I’d put money on some molester freak who was looking to make his Christmas a lot jollier.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “I’m just saying what I think happened.”

  I read more of the statement and look up at Danny.

  “She says the little girl was wearing a blue coat.”

  “Mom says the coat was pink,” Danny says.

  I put down the report. “Says the girl was a blond.”

  “Witness wannabe,” Danny says.

  I change the subject to something useful. “We need to interview the parents again.”

  “No shit,” Danny says.

  “The mom’s stonewalling,” I say. “Excuses. Says she’s too stressed. Needs to pull herself together.”

  “She probably does.”

  “Her little girl is missing. What part of that doesn’t light a fire under her?”

  “Yeah,” Danny says, “that’s probably the worst thing that could happen to a parent. She’s strange, I’ll give you that. But she’s not the type to ditch her kid.”

  I call and get her voice mail again.

  “Ms. Chase, this is Nicole Foster of the Bellevue Police Department,” I say. “We really need to take an official statement from you. I know this is a really hard time, but we need your help to find Kelsey. Call me back.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning is Christmas Eve. Still no word from Angela. Or her husband. Their daughter’s story is featured on the top of all three of the Seattle TV morning news programs. A missin
g child during the holidays is tragic.

  And ratings catnip.

  Danny and I pull up the sexual offenders registry. He hovers over me and picks at a sugar cookie left over from the Records Department’s holiday party the day before.

  “What?” he asks, thinking that I’m judging him. “I’m hungry.”

  Which I’m not. At least not now. “You’re dropping crumbs into my keyboard,” I say. “That’s all.”

  He shrugs. “Sorry.”

  I know he’s not. Danny’s never been sorry about anything in his life.

  Kelsey’s been missing only a few hours, but we all feel it in our bones that this case is the worst kind.

  The kind that seldom has a happy ending.

  There are more than a dozen hits within a two-mile radius of the Factoria Target store. The number doesn’t surprise. The area around the mall is a hodgepodge of apartments, condominiums, single-family homes, and, a rarity on the Eastside, a mobile home park. It’s the mobile home park—Lake Washington Mobile Estates—that sucks up most of our attention. It’s right next-door to the mall; a trail used by residents connects the neighborhood with the Target parking lot. The map printout of the registry looks like the page has been splattered with blood. Each red dot indicates where an offender lives.

  “Jesus,” Danny says, “looks like a fucking molester convention in there.”

  I’m poring over the report of who lives where, and more importantly, who did what to earn them a spot on the registry.

  “We can rule out the man/boy love crowd,” I say.

  Danny drops more crumbs. “No shit.”

  “That’s this one. The one here. And these here,” I say as I take a sharpie and black out the red dots. “That leaves four.”

  “We can remove her and her,” Danny says. “Doubt those sick bitches did anything. They like boys.”

  I nod. I remember one of the women on the registry. Her name is Sally Ann Meriwether. She’s now in her forties and has been living in the trailer park since her release from prison almost five years ago. She’d been a Sunday school teacher at St. Louise, a Catholic church on the eastern side of Bellevue. She’d had sex with two teenage boys.