The darkness at deceptio.., p.1
The Darkness at Deception Pass (A Thomas Austin Crime Thriller Book 9), page 1
THE DARKNESS AT DECEPTION PASS
A THOMAS AUSTIN CRIME THRILLER
BOOK 9
D.D. BLACK
CONTENTS
UK, AU, CA Readers: Important Note
I. A Deceptive Current
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
II. Clear As Mud
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
III. Turning The Tide
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
A Note From the Author
More D.D. Black Novels
About D.D. Black
UK, AU, CA READERS: IMPORTANT NOTE
If you receive an email from Amazon or KDP asking if you’d like to update this e-book, it’s not a scam. To get the most recent version, click through and update the e-book. From time to time, Amazon releases to your markets before the final, proofread edition goes live, which means UK, AU and CA readers may get a version with some typos and other errors.
You may also be able to go to this Amazon link, which will tell you how to update to the newest version of the e-book with a few simple clicks.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and I hope you enjoy The Darkness at Deception Pass.
D.D. Black
I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.
―Lauren DeStefano
Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
―Elizabeth Stone
It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.
―Douglas Adams
PART 1
A DECEPTIVE CURRENT
CHAPTER ONE
The Waters Beneath Deception Pass Bridge, Between Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, Washington
Monday
What a bottom feeder!
Ben was the first guy Carla Rivera had dated since her breakup with David, and she was already regretting it. What was it about men that they couldn’t for one moment admit to being the lesser scuba diver? Maybe it wasn’t men in general, she decided as she swam past a bed of kelp, just the losers she attracted.
She let out a long breath, bringing herself back into the moment. Vibrant plumose anemones clung to the rocky seabed a few feet beneath her, their colors muted but striking against the dim light filtering through the water. She spotted a curious lingcod lurking in the shadows, its mottled skin blending seamlessly with the surroundings, and marveled at the intricate dance of life happening all around her.
It was a gorgeous day in and out of the sea, and perfect for a dive. The problem was, she couldn’t enjoy any of it. She was still too pissed at Ben.
After arriving late, he had complained about the gear she’d brought him, despite the fact that it was top of the line—a Scubapro Hydros Pro BCD, which provided exceptional stability and comfort and an Apex XTX200 regulator for smooth, reliable breathing. Not to mention the Atomic Aquatics Split Fins and top-of-the line drysuits. She was even wearing a brand-new Aqua Lung dive computer and body cam, ensuring she had all critical dive information at her fingertips and that they could watch their dive later from the comfort of her Whidbey Island shop, Dive or Die.
She looked to her left and saw Ben about twelve feet from her, fiddling with his monitor. She swam a few feet in his direction to bridge the gap. As much as she didn’t like the guy, she always maintained buddy-system distancing.
She smiled to herself, happy knowing he couldn’t see it. She wasn’t going to forgo a chance to enjoy the dive, even if she had to swim alongside this clamped-fin guppy. She reached her arms out and arched her back, moving three dimensionally in ways that weren’t possible on land. Feeling the weight of the saltwater on all sides like an embrace, she allowed her tensions to melt as she watched the schools of rockfish dart in and out of the anemone formations, their scales shimmering like liquid silver.
Above her, kelp forests swayed rhythmically, their long fronds creating a mesmerizing canopy that filtered the sunlight into a beautiful, otherworldly glow. Carla felt a profound sense of tranquility envelop her. Despite its unpredictable and sometimes treacherous tidal activity, she was reminded of why she loved diving here. No matter what was going on in her life at the time, here she could tap into a feeling of transcendental peace. The only other place she felt this way was at church on Sundays.
Gliding effortlessly through the water, Carla’s eyes were drawn to a cluster of giant Pacific octopuses nestled in a crevice, their movements purposeful and measured. Generally solitary creatures, it was something special to see them gathered together. The area’s marine life activity likely made for an abundant food source, allowing them to live in close community. She watched in awe, taking in every precious moment, as one of them extended a tentacle to explore a nearby sea cucumber, its delicate touch a testament to the creature’s intelligence and dexterity.
Despite her irritation with her partner, she turned excitedly to point out the scene to Ben.
Where was he?
She signaled him on the electronic device.
Nothing.
He wasn’t showing up on the receiver, which meant his equipment had malfunctioned or he’d decided to turn it off.
She swam a few feet in the direction she’d last seen him, before she’d been distracted by the octopuses. Staying calm so as not to deplete her oxygen, she immediately implemented her training.
She performed a methodical, 360-degree scan of the area, careful to keep within viewing distance of the consortium of octopuses, then scanned again.
No Ben.
What part of the buddy-system had the man not understood?
In diving, communication was key. You always stayed within six to ten feet of your diving buddy, and never surfaced without telling someone.
That’s probably what he’d done, she told herself. Most likely, he’d still been upset about the gear and had left for the surface in a huff. As she searched, she tried to set aside the fears that Ben was in real trouble. Given what an arrogant jerk he’d been about the equipment, part of her wished he were.
Not really, of course. Her mother often told her, strive to be more like Saint Rita. That’s what her mother had always done with her abusive father. But last time her father had beat Carla—instead of invoking the saint of lost causes and difficult marriages as her mother recommended—she’d run away. Having grown up exploring the Belize Barrier Reef, she couldn’t remember a time she didn’t long to escape her father’s wrath for the ocean. So she’d escaped to Mexico, then moved to the U.S. on a tourist visa and eventually settled on Whidbey Island, where her diving expertise was valued by locals and tourists alike.
Whether or not Ben was a lost cause wasn’t the only thing on her mind. Diving was her livelihood. It was a dangerous hobby, a dangerous passion, and as one of the most respected guides on Whidbey Island, she took her reputation, and her gear, seriously.
It was her duty to find this guy.
She continued the search, ascending ten feet and scanning another 360 in all directions.
No bubbles.
No Ben.
She could feel herself using more oxygen than she should, despite her efforts to stay calm.
And then the water around her began to stir, a subtle shift in the currents signaling the end of the slack tide. The calm waters would soon be gone. She glanced at her dive computer—the oxygen level in her tank was approaching the reserve mark. She was using oxygen faster than she should be.
Time to surface.
Carla continued her slow ascent, pausing for safety stops and watching the colorful undersea world disappear, still scanning for signs of life. The environment was surreal, with rocky formations jutting out like ancient monoliths, their crevices adorned with vibrant anemones. The kelp forest above cast dappled shadows, creating an almost hypnotic dance of light and dark.
Pausing about fifteen feet below the surface, her eye caught a play of light filtering through the water. Then she saw it—a shape, vaguely human, lying against a rocky outcrop.
She studied it, the swaying kelp letting odd patterns of light and shadow play with the form, and her mind.
For some reason it made her think of her
Ben!
She swam fiercely against the current and, gradually, the shape came into focus. A wrinkled face eerily distorted by the water. Carla’s breath hitched in her regulator.
Fish had nibbled away at its features, leaving it hauntingly skeletal. But from what she could tell, it was certainly not Ben. The man was at least as old as her father would be now, possibly much older.
Fear gripped her as she struggled to process the horrific sight. With the change in tide and her low oxygen, she knew she would be struggling to reach the surface, even without dragging this lifeless body along with her.
She had to leave it.
She fought the rising panic, her professional instincts urging her to remain calm. But the terror was overwhelming. She turned to swim away, accidentally flicking one of the body’s stray limbs with a fin.
Giving a final, terrified glance at the lifeless form over her shoulder, Carla let the tide pull her away from the corpse as she kicked frantically towards the surface.
CHAPTER TWO
Silverdale, Washington
Tuesday
Thomas Austin drummed his fingertips on the table, rifling through a stack of cold cases that his boss Lucy had assigned him to look over. His first week as a detective for the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department had been as exciting as watching paint dry.
Despite the fact that some categories of property crime were up in the county—porch thefts and car burglaries, for example—the types of violent crimes he and the other detectives of the Kitsap Sheriff’s Department investigated had been in decline.
That was a good thing, of course, but it had led to a fairly slow week.
Not that he minded. It was 8 AM on the Tuesday of his second week, and he was supposed to find a cold case he could crack in this stack of papers. He intended to do just that.
The four cases he’d read through that morning had piqued his interest in various ways, but none had given him clear direction. In a case from two years ago, a pizza parlor owner had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a struggling family and a trail that went cold quickly when his car was found abandoned with no signs of foul play. In the second, a series of arson incidents had plagued a quiet neighborhood in Poulsbo, with the most recent fire occurring six months ago and the case stalling due to a lack of witnesses or physical evidence.
The third case was the body of a eighty-five-year-old man found on the shore near the Manette Bridge near Bremerton, a case with few leads and no immediate suspects. The detectives assigned to the case, working closely with the medical examiner, had ruled the death an accidental drowning due to the man’s history of wandering away from his apartment.
The fourth case involved a young woman who had disappeared after a night out in Silverdale, her last known location was a bar near the waterfront. The investigation hit a dead end when surveillance footage from the area proved inconclusive.
Austin was about to dig into the next case when he heard Kendall Shaw’s voice from the hallway. “Jimmy,” she was saying, “you truly look like hell warmed over. You look like you woke up on the floor of a sports bar after your team lost the Super Bowl and you shotgunned twenty beers to get over the pain.”
Austin heard Jimmy’s laugh from the hallway. “We can’t all be model-thin and well-dressed like you, Kendall. Some of us never escaped to LA to learn about fashion and smoothies and whatever else you did down there.”
Kendall chuckled as she came through the door, followed by Jimmy and then Lucy, who had recently become lead detective in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office when their former boss, Ridley Calvin, had been elected governor.
Kendall was right. Jimmy looked tired and a bit disheveled, and Austin knew why.
He’d been sleeping on the couch for over a week after making what he thought was a wonderful gesture: offering to renovate the garage and turn it into a mother-in-law suite so Lucy’s mom could move in. Apparently, Lucy needed a little more distance and resented the fact that Jimmy had offered this to her mother without consulting her first. Austin took it as a lesson: unless you want to sleep on the couch, never set your wife up to be her mother’s bad guy.
Their morning meetings usually began with some banter between Lucy and Jimmy. It was so common, Austin noticed himself waiting for her to make fun of his meathead appearance and large muscles, which Austin knew she actually loved, and him to come up with various iterations of her nickname, Lucy O-Lemonade, Lucy O-Lovehandles, and so on.
But this morning, there was no banter. Lucy stood at the whiteboard and Jimmy sat in the back, not even around the cheap folding tables. Kendall sat next to Austin, the black leather of her jacket crinkling as she settled in. He could smell the leather polish she’d applied, which deepened its rich, high-end sheen.
He and Kendall had gotten off to a bit of a rocky start but ended up working well together despite their different styles, both in personality and law enforcement. The one thing they did have in common was that they both had corgis; Austin’s Pembroke and Kendall’s Cardigan Welsh got along famously. She had taken some time off after learning they had inadvertently nabbed the man who had killed her mother. But now she was back, and as much as Austin wouldn’t want to admit it, he was looking forward to working with her again.
Lucy cleared her throat. “I know I told you two to be working on cold cases, and we still need to do that, but we’ve just gotten a call.”
“Something to get us out of the office?” Kendall asked.
“Something that will get Jimmy and me out of the office,” Lucy countered, “but not you two. Larsen is still all over us.”
“Who?” Kendall asked.
“You know, Marty Larsen. He’s only our County Commissioner…” Apparently Jimmy wasn’t the only one Lucy planned to take her frustration out on. The rest of the team would be suffering her wrath as well.
“Right, right,” Kendall said. “We call him Larsen, pronounced Martian. Because that guy seems like he must be from another planet.”
Marty Larsen was a member of the Kitsap County Board of Commissioners from District 2. A smarmy, Napoleon-type guy, he was small, loud, and mean. Lately, he’d been using the sheriff’s department, and specifically the hiring of Austin himself, as political fodder in an upcoming special election. He objected to the hiring of Austin, citing declining violent crime statistics and saying that the money could be better spent elsewhere. It was thanks to him that Austin had been digging through cold cases like a starving man digging through a trash can looking for morsels of sustenance. Lucy had warned Austin that they needed to put a win on the board sooner rather than later, or things could get messy.
“Anyway,” Lucy said, “we got a call from the Island County Sheriff. Derby. I think it’s Will Derby or maybe Willie or Bill, or well, I don’t actually know what to call him, but let’s just call him Derby. We—”
“That’s a county over,” Jimmy said.
Lucy offered up a chilling side-eye. “That’s right Jimmy,” her voice had a smarmy lilt as if she were speaking to a three-year-old. “That’s why I said Island County. Are we in Island County, Jimmy?”
Jimmy said nothing.
“What does he want our help with?” Austin asked, trying to cut the tension.
“We’ve got the USRV,” Lucy said.
“RV what?” asked Jimmy. His perky voice reminded Austin of a puppy hoping to get a treat.
“Underwater Search and Rescue Volunteers.” Lucy’s voice was curt and she didn’t return Jimmy’s eye contact. “They are excellent, and he wants to know if he can borrow them. They haven’t actually pulled the body up yet, but they know it’s there.”
