A Distant Echo Read online

  A DISTANT ECHO

  The Chris Echo Files

  -Short story-

  TARA MEYERS

  A DISTANT ECHO

  Copyright © 2016 Tara Meyers

  1st edition

  Forest Grove Books

  Cover art design Copyright © Melchelle Designs

  http://melchelle.designs.com/

  Photographer: Tara Ellis Photography

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Thank you for downloading A Distant Echo! This is a short story of around 10,000 words, and is a lead-in to a new, thrilling crime series called The Chris Echo Files. It takes the average reader around one to one-and-a-half hours to read. In it, you will be introduced to CSI, Chris Echo, and get a special view into how things are set up for the first full-length novel, Echo of Fear. Join our newsletter to be notified of all special events and releases: newsletter

  The Chris Echo Files

  A Distant Echo, a Short Story

  Echo of Fear, Book 1

  Find them both HERE

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Chris Echo Files

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Echo Of Fear (sample chapter)

  About the Author

  One

  Chris Echo was looking at a killer.

  Pulling her long mane of brown hair back from her face in frustration, Chris leaned in close to the color 8x10 photo laid out on the desk in front of her. The sharp, intelligent grey eyes that belonged to a finely chiseled face might fool everyone else, but she’d seen his kind before. The business degree, and high paying job gave the impression of stability, but Chris saw beyond the façade.

  “If only I could convince Mick of that,” Chris mumbled, huffing heavily in frustration.

  Mick Walters was her supervisor on the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) team. She’d been a member of the elite group in the Seattle, Washington office for just over a year.

  Leaning back in the cheap office chair, Chris tore her focus away from the picture of Martin Eastabrooke to gaze at her own framed certificate on the wall. Six years of college earned her the combo criminal justice and psych degree. The Seattle PD had been eager to hire her, as a needed minority, and she spent the next six years ‘learning the beat’ as a patrol officer, and the last two as a detective. At thirty-two, she now acted primarily as a Criminal Profiler. Examining all the evidence, she’d come up with a list of suspect attributes, and sometimes - even names.

  Like now. Unfortunately, the proof on Eastabrooke was all circumstantial, and she’d been unable to give Mick anything more concrete. They were approaching the one-week mark, and Chris knew that her leads were going to go cold if she didn’t dig up something else soon.

  Looking back down at the open file, she slid the top photo aside to reveal another, smaller one beneath it. A young, pretty blonde girl with amazing blue eyes hugged the neck of a horse, while smiling sweetly. It was Lisa Emery’s senior portrait. Her parents apologized when they gave it to Chris, explaining that it was the most recent image they had of their daughter. She was supposed to graduate the next month, but her parents were burying her that weekend, instead.

  Her body was found by a park maintenance crew five days ago, stashed behind a port-a-potty. It was a popular park near the heart of Seattle, and spanned several treed acres. Her parents had no idea why she was there. Although she sometimes went jogging on the weekends, it wasn’t a location she was known to visit.

  Her time of death indicated she’d been murdered in the early morning hours on Saturday. She’d spent the previous night at her best friend’s house, and left there at six am, claiming she had to work. A simple phone call confirmed this, but she wasn’t scheduled to be at her department store job until ten am.

  During that four-hour gap, someone had stabbed Lisa Emery to death. There were only three wounds, but they were precisely placed in her torso. The official cause of death was internal hemorrhaging, but she’d also received several blows to the head, likely to subdue her. There were no signs of sexual assault, thankfully, but that was little consolation to her freaked-out parents.

  She wasn’t in jogging gear, and she was wearing makeup. This led Chris to believe that Lisa was meeting someone she didn’t want her parents or friends to know about. Chris got the warrant for her cell phone executed a couple of days ago, and there were more than a dozen calls from a burner phone over the past six months, including the night before her murder. No text messages. Whoever it was, didn’t want to be found.

  Three years ago, Chris was assigned to a case as a detective that was never solved. It involved a thirty-year-old female attorney, apparently mugged and stabbed in the alley behind her townhouse.

  Martin Eastabrooke had been one of a small handful of suspects. He and Stephanie Kerns dated briefly the year before, and according to friends, it took Kerns several months and the threat of a restraining order to end it.

  The problem was that Stephanie had a habit of dating a lot of men, often at the same time. There had been two other bad breakups that same year, but without any physical evidence at the scene to point to any of them, it was determined to be a random killing. Her purse was rummaged through, money and credit cards stolen, and there were defensive wounds on her hands that indicated she’d fought with her attacker. Everything pointed to Stephanie Kerns being mugged, and when she didn’t hand the purse over, it got physical, and she ended up getting stabbed. Case closed.

  Until now. Chris pulled the file on Monday, and after Mick gave the okay to re-open it as a possible connection, the first person she brought in for an interview was Eastabrooke. He was just as cool and collected then as he had been before, but her gut was just as certain, too. According to Mick, her gut wasn’t enough. The guy was as clean as they come, and claimed to have a solid alibi for the timeframe. She was still waiting for him to produce the ticket for the ferry he was supposedly on that past Saturday morning.

  It was hard to verbalize what it was about the man that made Chris’s skin crawl. In addition to her schooling and personal history, she had an uncanny ability to read people. There was emptiness in Eastabrooke that she had experienced before, while in the presence of known sociopaths. But there was also something else. Something dark, and sinister.

  Tuesday, she started searching the statewide criminal case databases, and by midafternoon, she’d discovered the murder of twenty-four-year-old Kelly Humphry. It was ten years ago, and in a neighboring county. Admittedly, the only similarity was the placement of the puncture wounds but it was enough to justify a comparison. The possibility of a serial killer was nothing to take lightly, and Chris had immersed herself in the investigation over the past two days.

  Spreading the three thick manila folders across her desk, Chris tapped a pen on the notepad hidden under them. It contained the copious notes she’d made from the case files, and the scribblings that was the product of her latest brainstorming session. She noted the women’s names, ages, hair, and eye color. She compared their professions, education, close friends, and public places they frequented. Other than the stab wounds, there was nothing similar about them. The only other possible connection was demographics. Lisa and Stephanie were both from King County, in or near Seattle, while Kelly lived in Sno
homish County, a half-hour drive north of the city.

  “I’m missing something,” Chris said to herself, while gathering all the portraits. Three very different women, from eighteen to thirty years old, all brutally attacked and murdered with possibly the same weapon, in the same manner. There had to be a detail she was overlooking. It would most likely entail her going back and re-interviewing all of the people connected to the earlier cases. Every point needed to be scrutinized. If she could get Mick to assign the other profiler, Carlton to it, they might be able to dig through the mountain of information in the next month or two.

  A knock on her partially open door caused Chris to jump, and she looked up quickly, already irritated at the intrusion. When she saw Andrew standing there, her irritation grew.

  “What?” she demanded, more sharply than the situation warranted.

  Cocking his head slightly, Andrew Johns squinted his dark eyes at her. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked bluntly, shoving the door wider and entering without an invitation.

  Watching him silently as he helped himself to the only other chair in the small room, Chris didn’t answer.

  “When was the last time you slept?” he pushed. Leaning back, he crossed one leg on top of the other. For some reason, the combination of his tone of voice and relaxed nature pressed yet another of Chris’s buttons.

  “That’s none of your business,” she retorted, gathering the folders and thumping them soundly into a neat pile in the center of the desk. The need to appear in control wasn’t lost on Chris and her self- psychoanalysis ticked her off even more.

  Holding his hands up in a defensive nature, Andrew then uncrossed his leg and leaned forward towards her. “Chris, I just stopped by to let you know that Mick’s called for a briefing at nine.”

  Instantly regretting her anger, Chris closed her eyes briefly while taking a deep, cleansing breath. She knew why she had a strong reaction towards any sort of condescending attitude from Andrew.

  He started coming onto her right after she was hired. His dark, handsome good looks and intelligence were both appealing. They’d spent a full month flirting with each other before she noticed the family photos on the desk in his office. Nothing had happened between them, but the humiliation was still intense. Chris fought her whole life to be taken seriously, and being labeled the office tease wasn’t how she wanted to start her CSI career. Especially not with a married man.

  Things were awkward for a while. Having to trust your team is essential, and Chris felt like she’d been lied to. But while Andrew might be a playboy, he was one hell of an investigator, and Chris came to respect him for his work ethic.

  Six months ago, it wasn’t a surprise when his marriage failed. Although he’d been single for a while, and he’d tried to ask her out a few times, Chris had no interest in taking him up on his offers. The encounter left a bad taste in her mouth, and she already had relationship issues. It was hard for her to trust. Out of the few serious boyfriends she had, the couple that started talking long term were quickly axed. A couple of them had been real sweethearts and she still felt bad about it, but the others were assholes. Just enough of a balance to keep her convinced that it wasn’t worth it.

  Peeking up at Andrew from under the hair that fell across her face, Chris did her best to tuck away her bothersome pride. “Thanks,” she said as cheerfully as possible. Glancing at the clock on the wall, she saw that the briefing was in five minutes. Standing, she tugged at her stylish black blazer, pulling it down over the edge of her khakis. Forcing herself not to continue the primping by messing with her hair, she picked up the documents from her desk and turned back to Andrew.

  He was staring at her somewhat intently.

  “What?” she demanded, the edge creeping back into her voice.

  Slapping at his thighs, Andrew stood abruptly. “Nothing, I guess,” he stated, crossing his arms across his broad chest. “If you say you’re fine, then you’re fine. But I know how hard you push yourself with these cases, Chris. It’s not your fault if there simply isn’t anything else there to discover.”

  Picking absently at the corner of her notepad, Chris debated whether she wanted to have this conversation with him. “I know that, Andrew. Really, I do. But it’s like I’m looking at a puzzle that I’ve been working on, and there’s that one piece missing that I know had to have fallen on the floor. It’s there. I’m just not seeing it.”

  “Take a break,” Andrew suggested. “Step away from it for a few days, and maybe you can come at it with a new perspective.”

  Reaching out, he placed what was supposed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder. A mix of confusing sensations sprang from the contact, and Chris almost ran for the open door, hoping the flush didn’t reach her face before she escaped.

  Two

  “This is your priority for the rest of the week.”

  Mick slapped the bulging dossier down in front of Chris, on top of the other folders. The briefing had just ended, and Chris was trying to hide both her shock and irritation at the order.

  “We have some parents putting their daughter in the ground in two days that might question why,” she replied evenly, not looking up to meet his gaze.

  Pulling a chair over and straddling it, so that he was facing her, Mick forced her to either look him in the eye, or turn away, which he knew she wouldn’t do. “Echo, you’re really trying my patience. You’re not the only member on this team. I feel that you sometimes forget that. Forensics won’t be back until next week, and Katie is still working the autopsy end of it. She should have her preliminary findings on the three comparisons by Monday. Until then, there isn’t much else to be done. And this,” he added, tapping at the other case, “takes precedence. They need an expert witness, and you’ve been selected. The hearing is next Thursday, and I need you to have every detail in here memorized.” Leaning in for emphasis, Mick left no question as to how serious he was. “All of it.”

  Feeling rightly chastised, Chris chewed at the inside of her cheek. Glancing down at the report, she noticed that it was the horrific domestic violence case from a few months before. It was one of the worse crime scenes she’d ever seen. A mother and two young children were brutally murdered by the mom’s boyfriend. He was trying to claim temporary insanity. It was clear, however, that it had all been meticulously planned, and was the act of a sadistic killer. He tried to set-up the kid’s father as the suspect, but Chris had pieced it all together, and the forensics confirmed it.

  Mick was right; these victims also deserved justice, and she needed to trust the rest of the team to follow the other leads on Lisa Emery’s murder. Plus, there was no reason why she couldn’t keep up on the rest of the investigation, while preparing for the trial.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right,” she replied, meeting Mick’s stare and giving one firm nod. “I’ll start on this right away.”

  “I’m glad you agree,” he said evenly, leaning back and relaxing slightly. Mick paused before continuing. He was always caught off-guard by her unusual gold-green eyes. When they were focused on you, it was intense. “Why don’t you work from home for the rest of the day? We both know you would take it with you anyway, and you’re much less likely to be … distracted there. In fact,” he continued, standing as if the decision were already made, “take one of your comp days tomorrow. HR tells me you’re set to lose them again, because you haven’t taken a day off yet this year. That’s not normal, Chris. Especially since the details of this case might be cause for some of your past … experiences to be brought up for you. Make it a long weekend, and I’ll set up a meeting with forensics on Monday for the testimony.”

  The only outward sign of Chris’s annoyance was the slight flaring of her nostrils. She had no doubt that Andrew must have spoken with Mick. The thought of them conspiring to force her into taking a ‘break’, was demeaning. For him to throw her ‘past’ into the mix was a cheap shot at manipulating her compliance.

  However, she knew that the only intent behind it was one
of concern. While it might be misplaced, it was genuine. There was no harm in going along with it, and as Chris stood, she had to forcefully remind herself to be thankful that she had friends that cared about her wellbeing.

  Plus, she would take all the files home with her.

  ***

  Chris’s cell phone rang as she was pulling out of the police station parking lot.

  Answering it via Bluetooth, she spoke into the air. “Hello, this is Chris Echo.”

  “Ummm …,” a small voice spoke hesitantly. “Is this the investigator I talked to the other day? I’m Emily, Lisa’s friend. You gave me your business card, and wrote this number on the back to call you at if I thought of anything.”

  Pulling out onto a busy road, Chris squinted in the early afternoon sunshine. It was a rare, warm spring day in Seattle. “No, that’s fine. You called the right number, Emily. Do you have something new to tell me?”

  Chris recalled the young girl she interviewed at her home on Saturday afternoon. It was hard to get a true impression, given the circumstances. But she seemed like your typical eighteen-year-old teen. Like Lisa, she was a high achiever in school, into sports, and up to her neck in applying for colleges. She took the news of her best friend’s death pretty hard, and Chris had hoped she might remember something after she’d had a chance to calm down.

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean, maybe.” A heavy sigh echoed through the interior of the car as Emily tried to gather herself. “Last weekend, I stayed at Lisa’s. We go – I mean, used to go back and forth between our houses.” Taking a shuddering breath, Emily sniffed loudly. “So, last weekend, we watched this movie with like, an older guy as the main character. He got with this younger gal, and I was like, ‘oooh gross’, and Lisa was like, “Why is it gross? I think the guy is kinda hot’.”