The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1) Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY LORETH ANNE WHITE

  In the Barren Ground

  In the Waning Light

  A Dark Lure

  The Slow Burn of Silence

  Wild Country

  Manhunter

  Cold Case Affair

  Shadow Soldiers

  The Heart of a Mercenary

  A Sultan’s Ransom

  Rules of ReEngagement

  Seducing the Mercenary

  The Heart of a Renegade

  Sahara Kings

  The Sheik’s Command

  Sheik’s Revenge

  Surgeon Sheik’s Rescue

  Guarding the Princess

  “Sheik’s Captive,” in Desert Knights with Linda Conrad

  Romantic Suspense

  Melting the Ice

  Safe Passage

  The Sheik Who Loved Me

  Breaking Free

  Her 24-Hour Protector

  The Missing Colton

  The Perfect Outsider

  “Saving Christmas,” in the Covert Christmas anthology

  “Letters to Ellie,” a novella in SEAL of My Dreams anthology

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Loreth Beswetherick

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941212

  ISBN-10: 1503941213

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  This one is for Marlin—thank you for sparking Angie’s Victoria to life and for being a beta reader extraordinaire.

  CONTENTS

  JANE DOE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  THE BAPTIST

  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

  THE BAPTIST

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  THE BAPTIST

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  THE BAPTIST

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  THE BAPTIST

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  SNEAK PEEK: THE NEXT ANGIE PALLORINO NOVEL

  FLOTSAM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JANE DOE

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are you, for I know you not at all?

  DAY ONE

  We all lie.

  We all guard secrets—sometimes terrible ones—a side to us so dark, so shameful, that we quickly avert our own eyes from the shadow we might glimpse in the mirror.

  Instead we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls. And on the surface of our lives, we work industriously to shape the public story of our selves. We say, “Look, world, this is me.” We craft posts on social media … See this wonderful lunch I’m eating at this trendy restaurant with my besties, see my sexy shoes, my cute puppy, boyfriend, tight ass in a bikini. See my gloriously perfect life … see what a fucking fabulous time I’m having drunk and at this party with my boobs swelling out of my sparkly tank top. Just look at those hot guys draped all over me. Aren’t you jealous …

  And then you wait to see how many people LIKE this fabricated version of yourself, your mood hinging on the number of clicks. Comments. Who commented.

  But darkness has a way of seeping through the cracks. It seeks the light …

  And then the narrative groans to a slow stop. Or the end comes violent and sudden … and the truth is there, written all over you, ugly under harsh fluorescent-white light. And there is nothing more that you can do to hide it from the detectives who will come looking.

  I’m in a hospital bed …

  I can hear the machines.

  They’re helping me breathe, trying to keep me alive. I can hear nurses whispering, two cops talking, but I can’t respond. I can’t move or feel anything at all. I’m unable to tell them what happened. I’m not dead. Not yet. But I can feel myself floating away on silvery threads.

  A doctor comes in, argues quietly with the cops. Their words drift through me in fragments. Sexual assault … gathering of forensic evidence … hospital policy … ethics … informed consent in absence of next of kin …

  They don’t know who I am, I realize. They haven’t found my mom.

  I’m sorry, Mom. I am so, so sorry. I never wanted you to find out … And they will find out. As much as I want to protect you from this, from the shame that I know you will feel, the hurt, I do want them to learn what happened. I need them to learn the whole story. Find who did this. In order to save the others. Especially Lara.

  He said Lara would be next. He wants us all. I need to warn Lara …

  I slide away for a moment, and then I hear machines again, sucking and exhaling and beeping. I realize I will not make Christmas. I think about the tiny tree in our apartment living room, and I wonder if my mom will find the gift I’ve already bought. It’s under my bed, in my room. I so wanted to see the look in her eyes when she unwrapped it.

  At first, they’ll say I just went to work—like I do every Saturday night, for my shift at the Blue Badger Bakery down by the water on the west side, where we prep for the big Sunday brunch influx. Always long lineups no matter the weather. One of the more popular brunch venues in a city fast becoming known as the brunch capital, the Badger bakes all its own breads and pastries. Even makes its own bacon.

  Like most humans, a creature of habit, I routinely ca
tch the 6:07 p.m. bus from Fairfield on Saturdays. The route takes me through the city and over the blue iron bridge to an area which is now a mix of scrappy dockyard industry and trendy gentrification—a millennial’s holy grail of tiny, boxy, colorful, pet-friendly, “loft-style” condo complexes overlooking the Gorge and Inner Harbor and latticed with biking and jogging trails and boardwalks and boathouses storing kayaks and outrigger canoes and stand-up paddleboards.

  But I never made it to work. I’d had a sense of being followed, of being watched for the past week or so. The new man on the bus last week seemed off yet vaguely familiar, but then this was Victoria—not a big city. We all move within six degrees of separation from one another. I’d probably just seen him around town. And he’d worn a dark wool hat, the collar of his jacket turned up against the December cold.

  But it was him. He’d been stalking me, studying the habits of his prey, riding the same bus. Planning his trap. He’d found his choke point—the small, dark alley through which I take a shortcut.

  My mind goes back, trying to replay the events, sort them into chronological order. Memories slice through me like sharp shards of a broken mirror … it was a windy night. Brittle with cold and thick with fog.

  It had started to snow …

  CHAPTER 1

  There is none righteous, no, not one.

  —Romans 3:10

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9

  Angie Pallorino looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of her parents’ living room. A sweep of manicured lawn rolled down to a pebbly beach, where her dad kept his boat in a small boathouse, and from where a dock jutted out into the waters of Haro Strait. But it was dark out. She couldn’t see the beach—just her own distorted reflection and glimpses of whitecaps on the black, wind-whipped water.

  Down the center of the strait ran the US-Canada border, and during daylight, the hazy-blue mountains of San Juan Island were visible over the ocean. Behind them, on a clear day, Mount Baker rose stark and volcanic white against the sky.

  It was cold. Bitterly so for December on the island. For the past nine days an arctic outflow had been pouring air down from the north, and it had brought crystal clear skies and temperatures well below freezing. But now a fat, wet Pacific front was blustering in, and the precipitation was clashing with the frozen air and coming down as snow.

  Flakes flecked with ice ticked against the windows.

  Angie hated snow—the way it smelled. The subtly metallic scent unsettled her on a deeply profound level. It was a sensation she’d never quite been able to articulate, but it was there. Always when it snowed. Worse around Christmas. She rubbed her arms, her thoughts boomeranging back to her failure on a sweltering evening last July—her inability to save the life of a three-year-old toddler. How her focus on trying to resuscitate the little girl might have also cost the life of her partner.

  Tiffy Bennett had died in her arms while her mentor and partner, “Hash” Hashowsky, had taken a bullet to the throat and bled out before EMTs could arrive. Then Tiffy’s father, standing over the body of Tiffy’s dead mother, had turned his weapon to his own head and shot out his brains. He’d been abusing his baby girl for just about her entire life, and a restraining order had failed to protect Tiffy and her mom.

  Sometimes, Angie thought, the difference between heaven and hell was people. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, you made no difference at all.

  “You look tired,” her father said, coming up behind her.

  She straightened her spine, turned to face him.

  “All those new lines around your eyes,” he said. “That job of yours, it ages you, you know?”

  “You don’t look so hot yourself, Dad—been a rough day all around. Here, give me that.” She took the box that her father was holding, and she set it near the front door. It was packed with some of her mother’s things that he thought she might want. They’d spent the morning moving Miriam Pallorino into a long-term psychiatric facility, and the afternoon cleaning out her home office and closets. The house felt hollow and huge.

  “Why don’t you quit, Angie? Especially after—”

  “After what? Losing that kid and my partner?”

  “You could maybe move to another department. Dealing with all those sex perverts who come through the special victims unit … seeing that sordid side of humanity all the time, it gets in your head. It’s changed you.”

  Anger flared hot in her chest. It came with an urge for physical violence—a kind of ferocity for which there was sometimes no real justification, which just set upon her at the slightest of provocations. Which she worked very hard to control under a cool and seemingly detached exterior. She stared at her father. Standing there in his oversize sweater with leather patches on the elbows. His thatch of dense white hair, once so black. Behind him a fire crackled in the hearth, and the walls were lined with cabinets of books, pieces of art. A life of privilege. Dr. Joseph Pallorino, professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Born into an Italian immigrant’s fortune hard-won in the mining industry. Given on a silver platter the wherewithal to indulge his personal academic passions. Her parents had always lived a rarefied life into which she never really felt she fitted.

  “I deal with victims,” she said quietly. “Survivors. Innocent and vulnerable women and children who never asked for what hurt them. I put bad guys away.” She held his gaze. “And I’m good at it, Dad. Damn good. I make a difference.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, I do.” She looked away, at the unlit Christmas tree in the corner with the gold angel on top, and a chill passed through her. “Sometimes. Yes. I do.”

  “Your mother, she thought you’d outgrow it. She always thought you joined the police out of some kind of rebellion.”

  Her gaze flared back to his. “Is that what you thought, too? That I’d get my kicks, find what I was looking for, then finally settle down in a nice Victorian character home with a picket fence and a little row of nodding daffodils out front?”

  “Angie, you have a master’s in psychology. You were top of your class. You could have gone into research, could have had an academic career—still could …” He wavered under the heat of her glare, cleared his throat, stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, and gave a resigned shrug. “I—we—just want you to be happy.”

  “Let it drop, okay? This is not the time. I’m going to order pizza—we can eat together before I go.” She made for the phone on the kitchen wall as she spoke. She’d booked the weekend off, and she and her father still had Sunday to get through, to finish moving things. To check in on her mom again, make sure that she was settling in okay. She lifted the receiver. “Want anchovies?”

  The pizza, dinner, prolonging the evening had been a mistake. Angie and her dad ate in awkward silence, lost in their own worlds without the bustling presence of Miriam Pallorino. Outside the wind howled and branches rattled against the eaves. Angie’s thoughts turned to the small room in which they’d left her mother this morning. The locked doors in the facility. The white-coated orderlies. The confusion and, yes, the fear she’d witnessed in her mom’s eyes.

  She reached for her juice, sipped, cleared her throat. “How long, really, did you know that she wasn’t well?”

  Her father did not look up. “A while.”

  “Like … how old was she when you first noticed the onset of symptoms?”

  A shrug. He picked an olive off his pizza.

  “It has a strong hereditary component, you know?” she said. “The illness occurs in less than one percent of the general population, but it manifests in ten percent of people who have a first-degree relative with the disorder, like a parent.” She waited. Her dad said nothing. Angie leaned forward. “I’d like to know when you first saw the signs, first became aware that something was … off.”

  He pushed the olive to the edge of his plate.

  “Dad?”

  He wiped his mouth and carefully folded the hem of his white linen napkin over the or
ange cheese and tomato stains. He tucked the neatly folded napkin under the rim of his plate. “She’s been on medication for quite a long time now, Angie. Keeping things under control. The first indication I had that she might be experiencing hallucinations, delusions, came in her midthirties.” He looked up. “We thought it was PTSD, from the car accident in Italy.” He fell silent for a long while. The fire in the hearth flickered. “Images, sounds, smells—they can all trigger flashbacks that can look like psychotic hallucinations, you know? The emotional numbness, apathy, social withdrawal, low energy … the doctor said it could all be signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.” He looked sad, broken, as if the bones of his large skeleton had suddenly crumpled inside him a little. He inhaled deeply. “She was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia when she turned forty-two. A mild form, one that could be successfully managed with medication. And it had been.” He paused, a strange and distant look entering his eyes. “But now, combined with the early onset of the dementia …” His voice faded. Her mother had suddenly and sharply lost touch with reality. It was why they’d had to institutionalize her. She’d become a danger to herself.