A Shattered Lens Read online

  A SHATTERED LENS

  Praise for Written in Blood

  “5/5 . . . This smart mystery by Layton Green [is] a real page turner.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  “[A] fascinating new protagonist who’s both tough and sensitive.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A satisfying page-turner for readers who appreciate literary references and existential questions with their corpses.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Dostoevsky and Poe would be proud.”

  —Knoxville News Sentinel

  “Written in Blood provides the delights of a whodunit, esoteric clues that refer cleverly to classic literary works, and, at the same time, offers the gritty sense of place and the kind of psychologically complex characters ordinarily associated with noir. These elements combine to make a smart page-turner as dark and deep as the Carolina woods.”

  —Gordon McAlpine, author of Hammett Unwritten and the Edgar-nominated Woman with a Blue Pencil

  “Written in Blood combines bookishness and murder in brain-teasing ways,doubling the pleasure of a more conventional procedural. Fast paced and braided with twists, it’s terrific entertainment.”

  —Andrew Pyper, author of The Only Child and The Demonologist

  “[W]ritten with profound elegance and clever misdirection that brings the book to a surprising climax.”

  —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  “Written in Blood is a relentlessly paced mystery that’s part old-school whodunit, part modern police procedural and part psychological thriller, with a knockout ending that the reader will never guess... and never forget.Highly recommended!”

  —The Internet Review of Books

  “[A]ny fans of the dark crime genre will be sure to enjoy this. I’m definitely going to look out for Layton Green’s books in the future.”

  —The Eccentric Trilogy

  A SHATTERED LENS

  A DETECTIVE PREACH EVERSON NOVEL

  LAYTON GREEN

  Published 2019 by Seventh Street Books®

  A Shattered Lens. Copyright © 2019 by Layton Green. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover design © Start Science Fiction

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Start Publishing LLC

  101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705

  Jersey City, New Jersey 07302

  PHONE: 212-431-5455

  WWW.SEVENTHSTREETBOOKS.COM

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Green, Layton, author.

  Title: A shattered lens : a Detective Preach Everson novel / by Layton Green.

  Description: Amherst, NY : Seventh Street Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books, 2019. | Series: A Detective Preach Everson novel ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042003 (print) | LCCN 2018043594 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633885394 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633885387 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / PoliceProcedural.|FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction. g

  Classification: LCC PS3607.R43327 (ebook) | LCC PS3607.R43327 S54 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042003

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Bonnie Jean Perdue, hometown girl

  All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

  —Anatole France

  1

  The camera felt so right in her hands. So natural. The sheer heft of it made her feel important, as if she were already more visible to the world. Everybody everywhere needed something to help them belong, Annie knew. For some it was obvious: money, drugs, guns, sex, power. For others, it could be something as simple as a pet, or a child, or a single friend.

  Something no one else could claim.

  Something to make you feel alive and special.

  What Annalise Stephens Blue wanted, what she had craved since she had first seen ET and The Goonies and The Princess Bride and countless other movies sitting on her daddy’s lap before he left home, was a camera. Not just any old transmitter of encoded images, but a real camera. A vehicle for Blue to realize her dream of becoming a filmmaker. A caster of magic spells, a chronicler of her generation, an artist who would throw a light in dark corners and speak for voices unheard.

  Guided by the pewter light of a full moon, she trod down the forested path behind her trailer park, pine needles swishing under her feet once she got past the soda cans and beer bottles and fast food wrappers clotted with dried ketchup. The stench of garbage bins faded, replaced by earth and pine and an explosion of insect chatter.

  A few hundred feet in, she stopped to peer through the night lens. What she saw gave her chills. Not just the clarity of the images, but the way the experience made her feel. Though Blue had lived in the trailer park for fourteen of her sixteen years and knew these woods like she knew her own face in the mirror, seeing the forest through the high- powered lens made her feel like someone new and beguiling, a stranger in a strange land, a pioneering explorer in the wilderness of life.

  She was no longer Blue from the trailer park, Blue with the Goodwill clothes and the mother who cleaned roach motels, Blue the shoplifter, Blue the alley cat, Blue the anorexic who loved to eat but couldn’t gain weight and had no curves, Blue the high school junior who was held back a year because of behavioral issues.

  All that was behind her now. She had taken the first step on her journey. Now she was someone full of curiosity and discernment, a budding filmmaker, a sculptor of popular culture. Someone clever and funny, wise in the ways of the world, destined for great things.

  Someone who mattered.

  Despite her giddy thoughts, her new acquisition made her nervous. Resembling some kind of advanced alien weaponry, the Canon EOS C100 was a prince among cameras, a piece of equipment so beautiful it had taken her two days to work up the nerve to touch it. What if she pressed the wrong button and broke it?

  In her head she knew her fears were unfounded, because she had read everything she could find on the camera. She knew it was made for a European market and was hard to get in the United States, that it had a Digi DV 4 processor, an EF-L series lens, and weighed only 2.2 pounds without accessories. She knew the extended ISO range allowed filmmakers to shoot under low light conditions, essential for low-budget filmmakers like herself.

  She knew all this, yet holding the Canon in her hands, using it, was a different story.

  Her destination was just a few hundred yards into the tract of forest that separated her trailer park from the Wild Oaks subdivision. She was going to set up inside the tree line on the far side of the common space, close enough to observe the nighttime activity of the Creekville upper crust. Wild Oaks was new money, not old money. A blend of professors, young professionals, and Creekville’s typical array of progressive oddballs. Modern Family in semirural North
Carolina.

  Sure, old money had scandals and depraved patriarchs, but Blue didn’t care about the dirty secrets of the smattering of business tycoons and trust fund babies in town. Everyone in Creekville hated them and wished they would move to Chapel Hill. New money was where the action took place. With the movers and shakers, the strivers, the upwardly mobile who professed their allegiance for a litany of trendy causes, but who would rather die than give up a single morning latte.

  Night Lives.

  That would be the name of her first film, an exposé on the nocturnal activities of the people who lived just across the forest from her but who thought they were so much better. Not just the parents, but the kids. The popular ones those Wild Oaks parents bred like minks. She imagined they came out of a celestial assembly line, little blond babies wearing Ralph Lauren onesies in the car seats of their BMWs and Mercedes. The Morning Star himself lived there, David Stratton, the high school quarterback and resident golden boy. Despite herself, she fantasized about dating him, though not for his popularity or good looks. No, she recognized something inside him. A darkness like her own, born not of evil but of sadness, a searing aloneness that scraped at the edges of the soul.

  How could someone that beloved ever be lonely? Did no one really know him? Was he lost and didn’t know how to escape the trunks of the longleaf pines hemming in his neighborhood like the bars of a giant prison?

  When they were kids, she and David used to play in one of the tree houses the Wild Oaks fathers hired someone else to build, until David’s parents found out and banned him from associating with the trailer park kids. In the years that followed, the forest between them became an ocean to cross, a Maginot line, a barrier more mental than physical.

  What had happened to that little boy?

  The true story of the Morning Star, both devil and angel, was one of the many mysteries she aimed to expose in Night Lives.

  David Cronenburg, she thought, watch the hell out.

  Halfway through the woods, she heard the murmur of angry whispers, too low to make out the age or gender. Blue froze. She couldn’t be seen with the stolen camera. At first she debated turning back, but teenage trysts took place in these woods—repurposing the tree houses. This could be her first big scene. Why else would anyone from Wild Oaks be out in the woods after dark?

  The thought excited her. She scurried off the path and looked for a place to hide, breathing in the damp forest air. She spotted a fallen trunk covered in fungi and tried to step over it, but her foot plunged through the rotten wood and an image of a writhing mass of insects filled her mind, a sinkhole full of centipedes and slugs and fire ants. She resisted the urge to jerk away. An artist had to suffer for her art! Instead she sucked in a breath and plowed forward, not wanting to alert her subjects, stepping over the trunk and then squatting on a rock behind it. She knew the clearing up ahead, where the voices were headed. It was a common meeting spot. After hurrying to focus the camera, she hunkered down, breathless with anticipation. She was Citizen Kane, Lois Lane. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

  Just before the voices entered the moonlit clearing, a noise in the bushes startled Blue. She jerked her head to the left but saw nothing. After a few tense moments, she realized it had probably been a squirrel. People always thought a noise in the woods must be a snake, but that was because they didn’t know any better. Snakes didn’t make noise unless they wanted to.

  Though she had lurched away, the camera remained pointed at the clearing: a subconscious reaction that pleased her. An instinct to always maintain focus on her subject. She bent to peer through the lens when a muted gunshot echoed through the forest, followed by the dull thud of something collapsing to the ground.

  Not something, she thought.

  A body.

  At first she thought it might have been a hunter, but she realized at once how ridiculous that was. No one hunted at night inside the town limits.

  After whipping the camera back and laying flat behind the log, she became a deer, a hibernating bear, as silent as anything that had ever walked the forest. Though she had never fired a gun, they were all over the trailer park. She had recognized the muffled thwap of a silencer too.

  A low, prolonged moan of pain came from the clearing. Though human, the desperation in the sound reminded her of a dog on the verge of death, whimpering with sudden knowledge, right before its owner put it out of its misery. A series of harsh whispers accompanied the moan, followed by a second gunshot.

  The moaning stopped.

  Blue’s pulse hammered against her chest. Had someone just been murdered right in front of her? Not daring to breathe, she knew she had to hide there in the mud and leaves and insects, under the cloak of darkness, for as long as it took.

  The whispering had also ceased. Now there was grunting, followed by a prolonged swish, as if something were being dragged down the path. An insect crept onto Blue’s ankle and felt its way underneath her jeans. She swallowed her revulsion and let it crawl.

  As the sound drew further and further away, a riff from her favorite indie rock band sounded loudly from her pocket, shattering the quiet like an errant baseball crashing through a window during church.

  The ringtone on her cell phone.

  No no no.

  The dragging sound paused.

  Blue jumped to her feet. A quick glance told her no one was within sight range in the darkness. She couldn’t risk staying put and catching the beam of a flashlight. As she turned and fled, the canvas shoulder satchel in which she kept her schoolbooks and personal belongings, a worn old thing she had found at Goodwill, snagged on a branch. After fumbling to grab her bag, spilling the contents in the process, she vaulted over the log and sprinted down the path.

  Moments later, footsteps pounded the earth behind her. Blue ran as fast as she ever had, fear pumping through her, adrenaline giving her wings. The trail split before it spilled into the trailer park, and she took the left fork, stuffing the camera into her backpack as she ran. The new path would put her out much further from home, but it would keep her in the forest longer, as well as stop the nosy neighbors and alcoholics in the trailer park from pointing her out to whoever emerged behind her waving a gun.The trail split again and again. The footsteps behind her faded. After jumping a creek that led to a new series of trails, Blue scrambled up a steep embankment and emerged in a weed-filled playground behind an apartment complex where she used to sift through the dumpster for discarded treasures. She slunk into the parking lot and, when no one was watching, emerged onto the road a half-mile from home. Shaking, she decided to hole up in a late-night diner a few blocks away on the edge of downtown. After slumping low in the booth and ordering a coffee, she tried to process what had happened, keeping her camera tucked safely in her bag.

  It wasn’t until an hour and a half had passed, after the waitress with sunken cheeks and tobacco-stained nails had told her she had to leave, that Blue risked the lonely walk home, flinching every time a new set of headlights swung into view.

  2

  Detective Joe “Preach” Everson set down the hatchet and wiped a line of sweat from his brow. A gust of wind caused a flurry of pine needles to drift down, adding to the layer covering the yard of his bungalow in the woods outside Creekville, North Carolina. Though the early October air remained mild, he had decided to get a head start on splitting wood for the season, knowing the weather could turn at any time.

  After spending a decade as a homicide detective with the Atlanta PD, he had moved back to his hometown over a year ago, searching for a measure of peace and solitude after a case that had broken his spirit and changed the course of his career.

  Eyeing the stack of logs with satisfaction, he took off his boots and stepped inside, where Ari was still working on the sofa in one of his sweatshirts, legs curled under her, poring over a legal file. After graduating from UNC law and passing the bar, she was barely a month into her job as a Durham County prosecutor.

  “Even Jesus took a break on Saturda
y night, counselor.”

  “You’re finished already?” she asked, without glancing his way.

  “It’s dark.”

  “Oh.” She looked up with a sheepish smile, dark hair scattered, eyes straining from the text. “In case you think I’m having fun, this expert report makes IKEA instructions seem exciting.”

  “The accountant who ripped off his clients to buy his twenty-year- old girlfriend a Porsche?”

  “That’s the one. The guy can launder money like a Sicilian but doesn’t think anyone will question a waitress with a new 911.”

  Greed and sex accounted for a vast portion of crimes in America, Preach knew. Where they were both involved, rational behavior had a way of taking a vacation to a distant tropical island. “How’s a cold beer and Chinese food sound? The good stuff, not takeout.”

  She sighed. “Lovely. Just give me a few.”

  “Sure,” he said, though her attention had already returned to the folder.

  For the most part, Preach’s year with Ariana Hale had been a thrilling one, filled with long passionate nights, bleary-eyed coffee in the morning, and intense debates on his screened porch in between, sipping bourbon as they waded through the murky lagoons of life, literature, and the meaning of it all. She challenged him, he challenged her, and they loved each other—what more could one ask?

  Still, dating a woman studying for the bar and beginning life as an attorney had its challenges. In the last few months, Preach could count on one hand the number of times Ari had stayed the entire weekend. While she was in law school, their odd schedules had seemed to mesh, but now she worked nine-to-five, or more like nine-to-nine. With his irregular hours, they struggled to find time to connect.

  After he washed and toweled off, Preach ran his fingers through his short blond hair and threw on jeans, a black sweater, and a pair of slip-on shoes. After tucking his badge and wallet into a pocket, he sipped on a tumbler of whiskey while waiting for Ari to wrap up. Unlike Atlanta, where he had carried a loaded Glock 22 everywhere he went, in Creekville he relied on the nine millimeter locked in the dash of his car for most off-duty outings.