The Last Victim (A Ryker Townsend Story) Page 6

  “Good question. Give me his address.” I took down the information. A post office box. “He had to have a connection to Seattle…a reason to come here. Most killers hunt in the general proximity to where they live. It’s a comfort zone because it’s familiar. Applewhite had to cross this guy’s path somehow. What about social media? Did he have a Facebook page?”

  “Yeah, he did, but he wasn’t very active. He hadn’t posted anything for months. Nothing to indicate why he’d traveled to Seattle, but I’ll keep looking. Maybe an older wall post, or reading what his friends wrote, will give us a lead on any connection he had to Seattle.”

  “Good idea.” I made a note. “Maybe he used an online dating service? I hear the ratio of men to women in Alaska is four to one.”

  “Sounds like a place I should visit. A girl’s got to test drive her eyewear.”

  I smiled.

  “Oh, and check to see if he had a pilot’s license or owned a plane. Living on an island, being a pilot would come in handy for weekend getaways.”

  “Will do. Anything else?”

  Sinead’s simple question stopped me. Anything else?

  Yeah, there was something else—a missing piece that made me think of the grisly photo I’d taken with my cell phone of Nathan’s dead body and his terrorized face—with his dead eyes, gray lifeless skin, and gaping mouth. That image had been a far cry from Applewhite’s DMV photo where he’d grinned.

  How, where and why had the guy crossed paths with a killer? Something in his life made that happen. It struck me that I had to dig into Applewhite if I wanted an answer. I had to make a deeper connection with a dead man.

  “Gimme a sec.” I turned away from the lens to shut my eyes and focus.

  Don’t go there.

  No, I have to.

  I forced my mind to imagine what he’d seen through those dead eyes in his final seconds. Applewhite’s eyes had been portals for the evil that had hunted him and his brain still held the terror of being butchered—dark memories cruelly fed to him by all his senses as it was happening.

  I felt it…all of it.

  It was never difficult for me to imagine the atrocity. My mind had become fertile ground over the years, but picturing the gruesome photos triggered the sensation I had at the crime scene when I was alone yet felt a presence over my shoulder.

  That odd feeling of being watched and my deep connection to Applewhite hadn’t happened before. Why this guy? Why now? I’d stayed behind in Seattle—alone—for personal reasons. I’d preached to my team they should follow their gut.

  How could I do anything less?

  “Hey Ryker, are you feeling okay? You look…tired, like you’re coming off a weekend bender,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like something they use to grow mushrooms.”

  I sighed and dropped my chin to my chest.

  “Thanks for the visual, Royce. Gimme a sec.”

  I stood and found a mirror. Apparently, dropping in on my sister, cold, hadn’t been enough self-abuse. Under fluorescent lights, my skin looked pale and I had dark bruising under my eyes. I looked like a booking photo.

  “Truly wretched.” I grimaced. “Dylan Avery would disavow knowing me.”

  Dylan was my roommate in college. He relished his hours in front of a mirror and spent more on hair products than he did on textbooks. His priorities were quite clear. When he was satisfied with the way he looked, he’d indulge in one more spin by the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, I’d screw me.’ Only one good thing came from my time of living in the shadow of Dylan’s ego. He’d cured me of clocking face time in front of a mirror. I splashed cold water on my face and toweled off.

  After I got back with Sinead, she furrowed her brow and opened her mouth to speak before I interrupted her. I’d made up my mind.

  “Let Crowley and the others know I’m booking a flight to Alaska, to search Applewhite’s home. I’m following a hunch.”

  “Okay. Whatever you need, Ryker, I’m on it.”

  Sinead signed off, leaving me to feel the weight of my decision to stay. I’d asked my unit chief for a personal day in Seattle to go looking for my sister, but maybe my intuition had shown me a better reason for my change in plans. The case. My decision to stay had been about doing something unprecedented to stop this guy and unexpected minutia often broke a tough investigation. I couldn’t ignore the feeling.

  My mother had taught me to accept my dreams as part of who I was. She didn’t live long enough to know how I’d use my ability as a profiler, but her strength filled me now as I shook off the hurt of seeing Sarah.

  I had a new plan that felt right, as if I really didn’t have a choice. If our UNSUB thought our vic was important enough to leave whole, I had to look into Applewhite’s life to find out why. Getting to know the last victim—and the reason the dead man plagued my dreams—had to be the key to finding the Totem Killer before he killed again.

  I was sure of my choice to stay—and sensed a clock ticking down—even though I had no clue why I was so certain.

  ***

  Spots of intense light broke through the darkness. His head ached with the stabs of light that slashed at him like a razor. The right side of his head throbbed with pain. Once Ben Stevens cracked his eyes open, he saw pinpoints radiate their glow in blurry colorful rings. The colors bled into the darkness to leave a ghost image on his mind, even after he couldn’t hold his eyes open anymore. When he tried to feel his arms and legs, he couldn’t. They were numb and his body was ice cold.

  He couldn’t shake the stupor of being drugged.

  In the distance, he heard a steady drone that made him want to sleep, but when a hard jolt made it feel as if the ground pulled from beneath him, his mind seized on the idea that the shake had been air turbulence and the drone was an aircraft engine. He blinked and forced his brain to think. Nighttime. In the shadows of a dark fuselage, he glimpsed the cargo hold of a small plane and saw the movement of the pilot, a silhouette awash in lights off the control panel.

  Who are you? Why are you doing this?

  He wanted to cry out, but couldn’t make his mouth work. Ben wracked his brain to recall what happened. The last thing he remembered was being in Seattle—his home—but as the gaps to his memory filled in, he knew he’d been abducted by force.

  Ben’s heart hammered and a surge of adrenaline punched through his body as he battled the effects of the drug he’d been given to subdue him. Details came back to him—faster now—but too late to do anything about it. The face of his poor mother came to him. Picturing her brought tears to his eyes.

  Mom.

  Her face was the last thing Ben saw before the shadows swallowed him.

  Chapter Five

  Seattle - Next morning

  Ryker Townsend

  I hadn’t slept well and blamed it on a lousy pillow, but my disdain for the torture of down feathers was the least of my worries. My last phone call of the night had been to my unit chief, Reynolds. She hadn’t given me any flack over my side trip to a remote island in Alaska to investigate the life of Nathan Applewhite. In fact she commended me on my thoroughness, but after she pressed me for my thoughts on the latest crime scene, I’d been purposefully vague and she knew it. Although I’d chalked it up to a long day and she let it go, I didn’t like misleading her.

  Keeping secrets had become second nature to me, an aptitude I’d never expected to refine out of necessity. I justified my behavior by thinking that if I came back with something solid, it would make me feel better, but it did nothing for my sleep. My mind wouldn’t rest.

  When a rain storm had rumbled across Seattle during the night, I’d awakened in the throes of another dream. This time I’d sensed Nathan Applewhite behind the curtain, but I couldn’t make myself draw back the drape. I didn’t know why. Maybe seeing Nathan dead would’ve severed my tie to the dream and put finality to his life. I wasn’t ready for that. Something of him still lived in my dreams and I wasn’t ready to let him go.

  I
nstead of getting up to shake off the dream, I shut my eyes and listened to the rain in the dark until the alarm woke me. I showered, dressed, packed, and checked out of the motel in a merciful mind fog.

  On my drive to Sea-Tac Airport in my rental car, the gray skies of Seattle shed a heavy drizzle over the city. The streets glistened with the steady sluice of rain. The somber overcast morning suited my mood and wrapped me in its muggy arms, but not in a nurturing way. Within hours I’d leave the urban landscape behind for America’s last wilderness frontier. Only one case had ever brought me to Alaska, but that trip had been to Anchorage, nothing as remote as the Prince of Wales Island in the southeastern part of the state.

  Once I dropped off my rental and got to the terminal, I placed a courtesy call to the Alaska State Troopers who had jurisdiction for the island. The troopers assured me they’d have a representative meet my charter at Point Baker, someone who could take me to Nathan Applewhite’s home and knew the island and its residents.

  Applewhite lived in a very remote part of the island—Point Baker— the most northern part of the island, in a place little more than a village with a slim population, outside of peak tourist season. Wherever he actually lived, he collected his mail in Point Baker. It was a starting point.

  Seeing where he lived on a map, I wondered how Nathan Applewhite had been lured from his isolated home in Alaska and ended up strapped to a tree in the middle of the Cascade Mountains atop a brutal masterpiece of human depravity.

  I was convinced, more than ever, that I’d made the right decision to learn more about him.

  Although I had a long day of travel ahead, I took comfort that I’d have help on the island.

  The first leg of my trip was a commercial flight to Ketchikan, where I had my longest layover. I had to allow enough time for the seaplane service to pick me up from the main airport and take me to a departure location at Harbor Point. By the time I checked in for the final part of my trip, it was late afternoon. I traveled plenty, but I’d never become good at it.

  I saw my gear loaded into the cargo hold of a de Havilland Beaver before I stepped off the dock onto the seaplane’s float pontoon. I had to duck under the overhead wings to get into the plane and I folded like a human accordion. After that picture invaded my brain, polka music became my ‘ear worm’ and I couldn’t make it stop playing in my head. It would be a tedious flight.

  With my long legs, the interior was a tight fit, but it could accommodate up to six people. The only other passengers onboard were three older Native women. None of them made eye contact. I took comfort in my cloak of invisibility. I would’ve reveled in quiet reflection, except for the musical instrument bellowing in my head. There was only one way to tolerate an accordion—ending the blasted song.

  As the aircraft taxied across the harbor, I felt its uneasy buoyancy as it skittered along the surface of the water, jetting a rooster’s tail of spray as the plane built speed. The loud mind-numbing drone of the single-engine, propeller-driven aircraft didn’t allow for much conversation with the pilot or the other passengers. That suited me fine.

  The plane lifted off and leveled out, making the visibility better. I couldn’t take my eyes off the abundant terrain dotted with evergreen trees and scattered lakes that mirrored the sky. Steep forested mountains had snow still nestled deep into ravines and a family of white Dall sheep leaped through jagged rocks without effort.

  The sheep were a beautiful remedy to my raging case of ear worm. The polka music died to a low oompah thump.

  After a long hour, the pilot made an announcement he’d be landing soon. He’d have to rely on instrumentation and keen eyesight. There was no control tower in such a remote locale. When I saw the pilot search for other planes in his flight path and look below for a safe place to land—where he wouldn’t settle on top of another pilot—I couldn’t help but do the same.

  Ass preservation. It had always been a good motivator for me.

  Crosscurrents tossed the plane and whipped it sidelong as the pilot made his final approach to Point Baker. My stomach had to catch up with the rest of my body as the fuselage dipped and plunged. Within minutes the aircraft made its watery landing and pulled next to a wooden pier for offloading.

  The Native women deplaned in a hurry and disappeared before I had a chance to dazzle them with my charm. After I claimed my one bag, I followed the instructions I’d been given by the Alaska State Troopers, to wait for the local contact. I found a place to stand near the Point Baker Community Building with its makeshift U.S. Post Office. At this hour, the place was closed, but Applewhite’s mailbox would probably be inside. The red-stained wood, with large letters painted in white, made the building an easy spot to notice me, but I had a feeling I’d stand out anywhere in Point Baker.

  I pulled out my cell phone to check for messages, but before I thumbed through my calls, I heard a sound that flashed me back to the Cascade Mountains. The loud throaty caw of a bird forced me to look up. In an evergreen tree near me, a large black bird eyed me and cocked its tufted iridescent head to get a better look.

  A raven.

  I would’ve dismissed the scavenger, but I found it hard to look away until the purple tinged Trickster took off with an ear-piercing shriek. It screamed its passage as it lifted off the branch with ease, a creature of the wind. Massive velvet wings beat and caught air currents to defy gravity in a powerful, explosive exit. I watched the bird fly toward the nearest mountain until it disappeared.

  Not a coincidence.

  Although I couldn’t see the raven anymore, I felt the wake of its presence and my never-ending tether to a crime scene that I couldn’t shake. To distract my mind from my raven conspiracy, I checked my voice mail messages that had stacked up while I was in the air. Most of the calls were from Lucinda Crowley. Her last message summed it up.

  Something’s got you spooked and you’re shutting me out. Man, normally you’re fearless. Kind of spooky cool under fire actually, but something’s up that you’re not telling me. I heard her sigh over the phone recording, but before she ended the call, she said, Watch your ass, Ryker.

  I sighed.

  “Sorry, Luce. It’s hard to watch my ass when I’m fondly attached to it. It’s a matter of perspective.”

  I had to admit. A part of me had been unraveling since the start of this case. My escalating dreams were only a bad sign things were getting worse. If the job had become too much for me to handle, I didn’t know if I could face everyone knowing it. Some things a man had to deal with alone.

  My job defined me. It was part of who I’d become, by choice. If I couldn’t do it anymore, I didn’t know what that would make me—except a misfit, prone to insomnia with social skills in dire need of a makeover.

  After I deleted her messages, I got a chance to look around and saw Point Baker wasn’t complicated. I’d seen pictures and researched what I could online last night. The village’s main economy came from commercial trolling and gillnetters. Although the setting was breathtaking, only a handful of cabins, docks, and public buildings gave any indication people actually lived here year round.

  The utter silence took me completely by surprise. No city noise. No traffic.

  With the sun hanging low in a cloudy evening sky, the dank smell of the cove mixed with the stench of decaying fish carcasses and brackish seawater. I closed my eyes to listen to the lapping waves against the shore until I heard the screech of a bald eagle. The impressive predator made graceful circles in the sky. Held aloft by its ample wingspan, the eagle foraged for a meal in the fading hours of the day as deepening shadows stretched along the steep craggy bluffs surrounding Point Baker.

  It would be dark soon and I’d need a place to stay and something to eat. In the interest of full disclosure, I had to hit the head, too. Even though I had crossed the line into Nathan’s world—a place radically different from anything I’d ever experienced—I felt an undeniable bond with an island I’d never been.

  The cold slap of déjà vu made me re
alize. What I sensed had come through the eyes of a dead man.

  ***

  Hearing about the FBI’s Ryker Townsend coming to the island and Point Baker had been a shock at first. It hadn’t been easy operating under the radar of law enforcement and doubts over getting caught were natural. The Totem Killer had made the initial assumption that the investigation had turned up a clue that pointed an accusing finger. It had taken guts to stick it out and not run—but that element of danger had turned into an irresistible thrill. To stay ahead of the FBI and operate under the noses of the state troopers had turned into a deadly game.

  In hindsight, Nathan Applewhite had been the perfect bait to lure Townsend. It all felt like part of the plan now.

  Residents on the island had been talking about dead Nate and the FBI coming to investigate. After the initial uncertainty, the profiler’s unexpected visit seemed like a stroke of fate now, one that would play nicely into the hands of the Totem Killer. Any encounter would be risky, of course. The Alaska State Troopers were in the mix, since the profiler had contacted them for help, but that only made things more fun.

  Seeing Ryker up close fueled an adrenaline rush of excitement. The federal agent stood outside the Point Baker post office with a stern expression on his face as he thumbed through his cell phone, checking messages and killing time.

  Killing time. They had that in common.

  Ryker looked bored. If he’d come to the island for excitement, he’d come to the right place. Having the FBI’s lead investigator at Point Baker made it feel like the moth flitting perilously close to a warm flickering death, but who was the flame—and who would play the part of the oblivious insect?

  The Totem Killer smiled.

  ***

  Minutes later

  Ryker Townsend

  When a vehicle rumbled to a stop behind me, I glanced over my shoulder to see a white Ford Explorer with the blue and gold Alaska State Trooper logo on the door. The words Loyalty, Integrity, Courage were painted on the rear panel. I locked eyes with the trooper and nudged my chin in greeting before I grabbed my bag. By the time I reached the truck, the driver had boots on the ground and showed me an ID badge.