Sound of Fear: A Suspense Mystery Novel Read online

  LEVI FULLER

  A Suspense Mystery Novel

  SOUND OF FEAR

  SOUND OF FEAR

  ALSO BY

  LEVI FULLER

  EYE OF FEAR

  VISION OF FEAR

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, people, living or dead, places, organizations, incidents, events or locations are all productions of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Blue Scallop Digital LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Blue Scallop Digital LLC

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotation in a book review.

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  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my life coach Ricardo, a wise and sweet man who shaped my perception of this world, who taught me never to live my life in fear. I learned to keep my fear in check, also acknowledge fear is only human nature.

  Table of contents

  Preface

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  About The Author

  Preface

  There’s a hunter stalking in the darkness. And it knows your nightmares.

  Alma can see your fears. They call to her, begging to be released. She’s spent years honing her craft, always one step ahead of the police. But she’s about to meet her most dangerous adversary yet.

  1

  Tell me, what are you afraid of? Tell me the darkest nightmare that shatters your sleep and leaves you shaking in fear, wild eyed, sheets clinging to your sweat-slick skin. Or maybe you'd rather share your dreams? The end result will be the same. I have always had this sense. If someone opens their heart and shares their dreams, I can see their shadows, the negatives of the bright colors, the secret fears of their souls.

  ****

  “Another one?”

  Junior Detective Violet Turner looked over at the approaching man. Mark Decleor was balding and tall, with a paunch that strained the buttons on his blue shirt. Fifteen years ago, when Nashville's serial killer Ruben Castell had finally been stopped, it was Mark who’d caught him.

  Out of the blue one day, no one knew the exact reason why, Mark had left all that, announcing he wanted to leave the busy streets of the big city behind him. Beyond reason, he had come to Marmet and had chosen their unit, joining them as lead detective, becoming the man who had to guide her through her final examines to become a fully-fledged detective.

  “Always. This sort of shit is what we signed up for. Don't tell me you thought nothing bad happened outside of Tennessee?” Although Marmet itself was a small town, the VCB was sent all the homicides and unsolved cases of Kanawha County.

  Mark threw her a dirty look and sighed down at the body the tech team was swarming over. He watched them a moment and could almost see the wings sprouting from their backs as they moved around the body like giant flies in navy forensic overalls.

  God, I have been doing this for too long. He shook the disturbing image out of his head and turned back to the most promising of his junior detectives.

  “Quit whining and give me the low-down. That's all you rookies are good for, isn't it?”

  Violet stifled a chuckle, ignoring the insult. She had been ecstatic to learn that the legend who was the man in front of her was to be her supervisor and she was proud of the relationship they'd built. He had come to trust her instincts, something that had earned her the envy and grudging respect of the rest of the force.

  She felt her light mood burst as she looked down at her notes.

  “The victim was Ellis Cadeen, 43-year-old male. Father of three, married to one Heather Cadeen, they live in Dunbar. No clues yet as to why he was here.” She glanced around the cordoned off area of Bradford Hollow before looking back to Mark. “So far, all checks have come back negative. This guy had never even gotten a parking ticket.”

  Mark shook his head. “Anything yet on cause of death?”

  “Preliminary findings suggest suffocation,” Violet said, looking past the body and into the hole beyond.

  “You mean he was buried alive?”

  “Seems that way. The autopsy will confirm.”

  ****

  I watch them order the scene cleared, the body covered and removed. Mark Decleor has been finding my kills for nearly two decades, first in Nashville, now here in Marmet, but he never sees the patterns, never links them together. Idiot. I wonder if his new junior detective will be any different or if she'll get his seal of approval on her papers and then disappear to a big city like all the others. I shake my head as she tucks her notes away, asking no questions, making no comments. How little they seem to appreciate the artistry in my work. Ellis Cadeen. He had been a lot of fun to lure in, even though his particular fear was so mundane. Buried alive. How boring. I had hoped someone would comment on the sand I chose to use. The bigger gravel was full of it. Millions of fine grains, soft and dusty. It would have tickled his throat and made him cough for hours before finally killing him. Each breath would have hurt more than the last in a slow but unstoppable progression. They don't see that. They don't see the perfect agony on his face. The melodic cry that was crushed and silenced by the weighty earth poured over him. The earnest desperation marked in blood along his shredded hands and broken nails. It is beautiful.

  “Alma, there you are. Sorry that took so long. I really wish they'd let me stay in the lab. Are you ready to go?”

  I take one last look at the site of my latest work of art and then smile at Kareena as she returns to me, tucking her police ID away. Behind her I can see her brother's protective gaze, his navy overalls marked with a double line of gold, letting everyone know that he was the lead forensic analyst. I'd watched him as Kareena approached him. He had ensured that she saw nothing of my art. Was he selfish, or did he think she would break if she beheld it? How could she, given that her job was to recreate the dead's last moments? It was one of the reasons I had fallen for her. She seemed to see the artistry, her recreations so meticulously rendered. Dhillan was still watching us, ignoring the timid intern at his back, trying to draw his attention to a specimen bag in her hands. Did he appreciate the beauty in what they had uncovered?

  “All set,” I say, my voice untouched by my thoughts.

  Kareena nods then turns to give one final wave to her older brother. I watch his dark eyes soften as he smiles back and I feel my curiosity flare. My nails bite into my palms, my face remaining set in a calm, friendly smile. No. Of all the people this world has thrown into my path, Kareena is the only love I have ever known, the only one I think is better, more beautiful, alive than dead. Her fears don't call to me like the others and I have never tried to find them. So Dhillan is off limits, for her sake and mine.

  “‘Bye, Dhillan!” I call, turning my back on him and linking arms with Kareena.

  But s
till, what would his deepest fear be? What nightmares haunt his dreams? How much fun would it be to recreate them and watch him fall to their power?

  2

  Mark looked up at the single story, red-brick building. It was unassuming and the flat black sign with the golden letters stating 'Violent Crimes Bureau' did little to make a difference. He shook his head and entered the building they'd nicknamed 'The Hut'. He had chosen the VCB because, even after he had decided to get away from the busy streets of Nashville, he hadn't wanted to give up his life as a homicide detective, and the VCB had it all under one roof. The Detectives' offices and interview rooms were to the left of the Artery – the main hall that ran down the center of the building, from the open reception at the front to the door that led to the basement storage at the back. Off the right of this central passage was the labs, offices and general domain of the Forensics team. They even had their own psychologist to offer trauma counselling to the families and friends of the victims and their own criminal profiler to help them predict patterns or to come up with an idea of who their perp might be.

  He sighed, adjusting the styrofoam cups of coffee he carried so that he could wave at the receptionist. Mark had been sure it would make it all easier, everyone a short distance away, no long waiting times for test results or input from analysts. He expected to have maybe one or two murders a year. Instead, within five years of his joining the force, Kanawha County had rocketed up the national statistics to have one of the highest violent crime rates in the US.

  Maybe I am cursed after all, he thought, remembering when Ruben Castell had told him that condemning an innocent man to death would haunt him, shadow his life and everyone's around him too.

  Mark shook off the disturbing memory, running his free hand through his balding, grey hair. Apart from the fact that it was all utter nonsense, Ruben Castell had clearly not been innocent. He was still on death row, launching yet another appeal bound to fail in the face of his strong convicting evidence.

  Maybe that's the problem. I don't feel like that's all over yet, even after fifteen years.

  He looked out of a window, through the open door to an empty meeting room. The lush green of Kanawha County's trees reached towards the glass and brought back this morning's discovery over in Bradford Hollow.

  Turning his mind back to the present, he squared his shoulders and headed to Violet's office to see if any progress had been made in the case of Ellis Cadeen.

  ****

  Dhillan watched the intern leave with the autopsy report and sighed. Violet was not going to be happy with it. Ellis Cadeen’s body had yielded nothing useful. He had died by suffocation, his airways coated in a layer of fine sand.

  He shook his head and left the morgue, moving to the laboratory section of the forensics department. That sand was his last hope. It was super-fine grained and didn't belong in the hole in which it had been found. Hopefully Lucy, his quirky but brilliant forensic mineralogist, had something useful to offer or this investigation was going nowhere.

  Lucy was sitting with her eye pressed to a microscope, humming along to the folk music that was playing on her PC.

  “Anything, Dr. Deven?”

  Lucy looked up, her honey eyes focusing on him slowly.

  “Hey Dr. C,” she said cheerfully, her mint green pigtails bouncing. “This is crystalline silica dust. Basically just clay.”

  Dhillan ignored her upbeat nature. He had known Lucy since high school and knew that she wasn't being insensitive. In fact, she was more cut up than most would be after so many years working with the dead. But bugs, soil and pollen were what made her happy.

  “Is it rare?”

  Lucy's face fell and she shook her head. “Could have come from anywhere.”

  Dhillan patted her shoulder. “Catalogue it and make sure you've cross-referenced thoroughly. Just in case. Then move on to the other samples you were given.”

  “Yes, boss,” Lucy said, tapping some keys on her keyboard, preparing to launch a program to cross reference the clay dust against other types.

  Dhillan left her to it and walked towards his office, wondering if Violet had received his pitiful autopsy report yet.

  He passed the big glass doors that lead to his sister's work space. He resisted the urge to laugh. Kareena was pacing around her room with a VR headset in place. His smile crumbled as he remembered that she was laying the virtual structure for the scene they'd uncovered earlier that day. Sometimes he thought his sister was even tougher than he was. Leaving her to her work, he moved on towards his private lab come office. There had to be something useful somewhere, he just had to look hard enough.

  ****

  “Damn it!” Violet slammed the folder shut and stared out one of the tiny windows in the VCB's new building. They were the ones who had the responsibility for investigating all the violent crimes in Kanawha County, usually the ones with no leads and little chance of not ending up in the Freezer.

  “Coffee?” Mark said, easing his girth into her small office.

  “Sure.”

  “Don't let it get you down,” Mark said, handing over one of the styrofoam cups he was carrying in a cardboard tray.

  “It's a joke,” Violet said, jabbing a finger at the tiny file a forensics intern had just delivered. The good thing about the VCB's move to the Hut was that they'd gotten their own forensics department and didn't have to wait weeks, or even months, for Charleston to out-source its tests any more. The bad thing was that disappointment was now a prompt and frequent visitor.

  Mark frowned at the folder labelled 'Autopsy Results'. Even closed, anyone could tell it contained virtually no information.

  “Did it confirm the preliminary findings?”

  “Yes. That's all it did. A man is dead and we have nothing except that he was buried alive. Apparently there were no drugs in his system, and no signs of a struggle before he was fighting to escape the ground.”

  Mark grimaced at her continued cussing but didn't call her out as he usually would have. He knew as well as she did that the Freezer held far too many unsolved cases. Too many people without justice. He didn't want to add another one to that cold storage any more that she did.

  Mark felt his earlier thoughts return, the feeling that he was cursed. When he'd finally caught that bastard Ruben, after five years of hunting and death, he'd genuinely thought it would be lessened, easier somehow, from there on out.

  “It's the shit we signed up for.” Mark said, echoing her own words to him earlier that day.

  Violet threw him a filthy look then sighed, tugging on her thick, blonde braid. “Have you contacted the family?”

  “We're doing this one in person, Violet. I've already chatted to the local police in Dunbar. They're ready for us.”

  A half-hour car journey to stew in the lack of information they had to give a soon-to-be-grieving family.

  “Sounds great,” Violet said sarcastically, but reached for her leather binder all the same. She was just a rookie. Mark would ask the questions. She'd play the part of scribe.

  They left the office and turned into the central artery that led you anywhere in the building. Her loafers made soft, slapping noises against the beige-tiled floor.

  “Oh, and Dr. Reid is coming with us.”

  Violet stopped in her tracks, grey eyes boring a hole in Mark's back.

  Jason? Could today get any worse?

  Mark threw her a cutting glance over his shoulder. “Suck it up, rookie.”

  Violet smothered a curse and began walking again.

  As she opened her mouth to ask why the hell their resident, and totally useless, psychologist was coming with, a slim man with coffee-coloured hair and startling light blue eyes rose from the seating area in the tiny foyer.

  “Sergeant Detective Decleor,” he said, greeting Mark before his eyes cut to Violet. “Hi Violet.”

  Violet resited the urge to punch him in his smug mouth. They'd slept together once, a drunken mistake
, on a night of celebration a year ago. She had viewed it as a mistake, he had seen it as an open invitation. She felt her skin crawl as his eyes lingered.

  “Detective Turner will be joining us,” Mark said, his own blue eyes cold and hard as he stressed Violet's position in the force.

  Violet felt a surge of affection for Mark swell in her chest.

  Jason's face turned from smugness to put-on surprise. “I didn't know you'd passed your final examination. Congratulations.”

  The balloon in her chest punctured and she knew he'd seen the effect of his words.

  “Ah, I see. Still waiting on the results.”

  Bastard.

  “I have complete faith that she will pass.” Mark said loudly, placing his rotund belly in Jason's personal space. “Now if you are done bantering, Dr. Reid, we are on a schedule.”

  Violet bit her lip at the look on Jason's face as he was chastised so publicly in the Hut's foyer. Holding back laughter, she led the two men out of the doors and into the glowing warmth of a clear spring day.

  ****

  Violet sighed as she flopped into her cousin's couch in Montgomery.

  “Long day?”

  Violet cracked open one eye and looked at her cousin David as he finished off the cooking in their tiny open kitchen. He had the same blonde hair she did, but his eyes were hazel.

  “You don't want to know. Trust me.”

  “Violet!”

  David's fiancée came into their small lounge, her vivid red hair tied back in a loose tail.

  “Hey, Jane,” Violet said, shifting over to make room on the couch.

  She and Jane had been close friends back in primary school, but had lost touch when Jane's family had moved counties. Although they weren't little girls any more, both had been delighted when it became clear that they still had a huge amount in common.