A Dark Radiant Rain: A Sawyer Payne and Kace Mason Mystery, #1

Prologue

It was raining the night he disappeared.

An odd, soft rain that refracted the pale, anemic points of light scattered throughout the dark night in irregular and surreal ways, as if everything was taking place in a Dalí painting.

More sheets of mist than isolated and individual drops, the effect was a hazy, hypnotic vibe that seemed to suffuse the wet world entire.

The band worked in all the songs about rain they knew, and by the end of their last set had played CCR’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Prince’s Purple Rain, Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, James Taylor’s Fire and Rain, the Eurythmics’ Here Comes the Rain Again, and the Carpenters’ Rainy Days and Mondays.

It was the kind of night that felt risky, unsteady, and unsafe.

But there was nothing in the atypical atmosphere to portend a young man would so thoroughly and completely vanish off the face of the earth forever.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened.

1

Like the three previous nights, Sawyer Payne’s eyes open at 4:44 in the morning.

Instantly wide awake.

Fumbling for his phone on the nightstand, he checks for any communications from her. Finding none, as usual and not unexpected, he returns the device to the stack of unread self-help books silently mocking him from their prime position next to where he lays his head these days.

Pushing himself up out of the still unfamiliar bed, he drifts over to the window on his way to the bathroom.

Like so many nights before, he raises the white wooden slats slightly and peers into the dim, foggy semi-darkness, rubbing bits of sleep from the corners of his bleary eyes.

Across the way, in the perfectly manicured micro yards of the too close homes, bright orange plastic jack-o-lanterns flicker as if containing actual candles instead of the bulb of an electric light, fake and meretricious as most of the elements in Forgotten Coast Estates.

The Estates is a massive coastal development, nearly a city unto itself, nestled among the slash pines of North Florida along old Highway 98 in a region once dominated by the timber industry. Until the paper mill, whose acrid smoke smelling of rotten eggs, closed, it served as a repellent for tourists, snowbirds, and high-end planned and gated communities like this one.

What the hell’s he doing here?

You know what.

Hiding, of course. Nursing his wounds. Regrouping. Contemplating his as yet undetermined next move. But mostly hiding.

And obsessing.

When he’s not obsessing about what went wrong with Jules, he’s preoccupied with what happened to Ryan Shandling.

But as baffling as that bizarre disappearance is, he knows it’s just a distraction from the disillusionment of his marriage and the healing and recovery work he needs to be doing.

Still, a young man walking into a bar and never walking out again is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time, and his mind loves working whodunits—especially the more puzzling ones that involve questions of human psychology.

Ryan Shandling, a 27-year-old medical student, was here at the Estates visiting his parents at Halloween two years ago. After begrudgingly helping his dad hand out candy to all the eager little trick-or-treaters so that his mom could attend an out-of-town party with her best friend, he went on a costumed pub-crawl with his on-again off-again friend Tad Roberts.

After several hours and far more shots, the two wound up at Psycho Suzi’s, a trying-to-be trendy bar a couple of blocks outside the Estates. Somewhere along the way, Tad had met up with Jennifer Oliver, a sometime girlfriend, who accompanied them to Psycho Suzi’s.

Psycho Suzi’s is on the second story of an entertainment complex, part of which was under construction at the time. The three are shown riding up the escalator to the bar at 1:15 a.m. Later, at 1:50 a.m., the same camera shows Ryan standing out in front of the bar on the landing near the escalator talking to two young women. After a few moments, he steps out of frame and back into the bar.

Ryan Shandling is never seen again.

Security cameras cover every entrance and exit of the building. Ryan is clearly shown entering the bar, but never exiting.

Tad and Jennifer, who can be seen leaving via the escalator at 2:01 a.m., claim they both searched for and called Ryan before leaving, but unable to find him and getting no answer, assumed he had left without them. Not only is that something he had done before, but he and Tad had engaged in a drunken argument earlier and had split up sometime around 1:30 a.m.

Now, with the approach of Halloween and the two-year anniversary of Ryan’s disappearance, Sawyer thinks he sees someone across the way near the house on the left—Ryan Shandling’s mother’s house. A dark figure vanishing around the corner in the back.

He just imagined it, right? The result of a foggy night, the approach of Halloween, and thinking of Ryan Shandling.

Has to be.

Still, just in case, he should go check.

Uncle Sawyer.

He turns to see Addie, his three-year-old niece, who’s also living with his mother at the moment.

She’s squinting up at him beneath sleep-wild hair and a furrowed brow, a pained expression on her little pale face.

Have a bad dream? he asks. Need to—

My skeleton hurts.

He smiles as he bends down to pick her up, charmed as usual by what comes out of her mouth—even when she’s feeling poorly.

He doesn’t have to kiss her forehead to know she has a fever, but he does it anyway.

I’m gonna choke, she says.

He leans back a little and looks at her—running toward the restroom with her when he realizes choke is Addie for vomit.

Before he can reach the restroom she is throwing up on his Jason Isbell No Haters tee.

Clutching her small head, he supports her body as she convulses and begins to cry.

It’s okay, he says. Just let it out. You’ll feel better.

I want my mommy, she says between heaves.

I know, he says, his voice full of understanding and pity. Then he tells her the lie that he and his mother keep repeating. She’ll be back soon.

Addie’s father is the son of the man Sawyer’s mother Robin had been with most recently for a short time. Both Addie’s father and mother are drug addicts—and not the casual kind. Though no blood relation, Robin is now raising her as if she is her own, and that’s how Sawyer feels about her now—like she’s family, his own daughter or granddaughter. More and more he finds himself wishing both her parents would just stay out of her life completely. All they do is call occasionally or drop by unannounced when they want to borrow money—both of which make her anxious and upset and take her days to get over.

Using his sleeve to wipe her mouth and nose, he bends down and turns on the shower.

The vomiting subsided for the moment, she opens her mouth wide and sticks out her tongue, trying not to taste the residue of sickness still present there.

With the water warm, he steps into the shower with her, both of them still fully clothed.

He can’t believe how much he’s bonded with her during the less than three months that he’s lived here, but in many ways she already feels like one of his own, or maybe what a grandchild will feel like—if one his grown children ever get around to giving him that experience.

He has two, a girl and a boy—now a woman and a man—both in their twenties, both doing pretty well, both concerned about their dad, both on their annual Halloween camping trip with their significant others and out of touch for a little while. And though he misses them and their nearly daily interactions, he’s happy not to have to answer How are you doing, Dad? No, really, several times a day.

Rinse your mouth out, he says, holding her up to the spray of warm water. Put water in your mouth and swish it around like this. He demonstrates by actually allowing water into his mouth. Then spit it out.

She does as he just has.

Yucky, she says, still trying to keep her tongue from touching the other parts of her mouth.

Do it again.

She does.

Better?

She shakes her head and frowns, her wounded eyes and pitiful face placing a pang at the center of his heart.

He starts to take off his shirt and her PJs, but she clings to him.

Let’s get out of these clothes that have . . . choke on them, he says.

She shakes her head and hugs him tighter.

Okay, he says, maneuvering them under the warm water. Let me know when you’re ready to take them off. It’ll feel better to get them off and get cleaned up. We’ll put some fresh clothes on you. And we need to get you some medicine.

I got boo-boos, she says.

Yes, you do, he says. Show me where.

She points to her temple and her little tummy.

Need Band-Aids, she says.

Princess Band-Aids? he asks. Well, let’s get you cleaned up and go get some.

She shakes her head and clings to him even harder.

You want to sleep with Nana after we get your medicine and Band-Aids?

"You-ou-ou," she says.

His heart feels like it flips up into his throat.

You got it, he says, amazed again at how quickly they have bonded.

"And watch Beauty and Beast on your phone."

"Ab-so-lutely."

Later, cleaned, medicined, and back in bed, Addie propped in the crook of his arm watching Beauty and the Beast on his phone, he remembers seeing the figure at the Shandling place.

I need to borrow my phone to make a quick call, okay? he says.

Okay, she says, her voice still weak and raspy.

Won’t take but a second.

He lifts his phone and calls the Estates security—something residents are instructed to do before calling the police. After explaining who he is, he takes an even longer time to explain what he may have seen and why he’s bothering them with it.

We got a lot of calls like this last Halloween too, the soft-spoken dispatcher says. It’s probably nothing, but someone else already called it in, so we’re checkin’ it out. It’s what we’re here for. You have yourself a good night . . . and give your mom my best. That’s a sweet lady right there now.

Ending the call, he finds Addie fast asleep beside him, and though his arm may be useless tomorrow, he’s not about to move her off of it.

2

Kace startles awake in the uncomfortable chair she sleeps in beside his bed, the binder falling from her numb hands to her lap.

After making sure he’s still breathing, she glances at the clock on the nightstand. It’s 4:44 in the morning.

Yawning, she rubs her tired eyes and stretches, shaking out her fingers to wake up her hands. As is her perpetual state these days, she is stiff and knotted, achy and sore—only more so.

She looks down at the homemade missing persons case binder in her lap—what she thinks of rightly or wrongly as a murder book.

Do detective bureaus have missing books?

Doesn’t have the same ring to it.

She tries to remember what she had been reading when she drifted off.

With the approach of the second anniversary of Ryan Shandling’s disappearance, she is rereading everything she has compiled about the case, which as a former investigative journalist with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder is a lot.

Former investigative journalist sounds grandiose for what she was. She had been a nurse with an interest in true crime and writing when she became aware of the epidemic of drug-abusing nurses and wrote a multi-part article about it that became a syndicated sensation. The success of that piece gave her the opportunity to investigate and write others, and though none were ever as successful as that first one, she learned a bit about investigating along the way.

Her heart rate rises and she feels a dull, aching nausea low in her abdomen when she thinks about those days. Her long-term live-in boyfriend at the time had been one of the nurses stealing narcotics from the hospital and both selling and abusing them. Her exposé not only ended their relationship, but cost him his career and actually put him in prison. Even though she is hiding in the most unlikely of places, she keeps expecting him to find her and finish the job he had started back when he was on trial and had escalated from stalking and harassing to assault and attempted murder. She’s pretty sure he’ll kill her one day. Charles had saved her, used his resources to take her away, to bring her here where she is surrounded by people nearly twice her age, but she’s always believed it was just delaying the inevitable—especially now that he’s dying and Cody’s been released.

As usual, when she thinks about Cody she hears The Police’s Every Breath You Take, a song she has come to despise. After she broke things off with him and he began to stalk her, he told her that it was their song and that he would always be watching her.

God, she’d love to solve this case before Cody could get her.

Ryan Shandling’s case is never far from her thoughts—it’s a great distraction from the dread and sadness she feels and she believes each Halloween that rolls around brings with it heightened opportunities to discover what really happened to Ryan and who’s responsible for his disappearance.

She remembers now. She had been reading a printout of a lengthy subreddit on Ryan’s complicated and conflicted relationship with Tad Roberts.

The two young men had never been especially close, and it seems as if nearly every encounter ended in an argument, but for some reason they had continued to hang out occasionally over the years.

She’s very suspicious of the frenemy who not only peppered his early statements to the police and media with subtle and not so subtle criticisms of Ryan but also quickly lawyered up and refused to take a polygraph—the only person asked by authorities to do so.

Tad’s not the only one she’s suspicious of and has seemingly endless questions for. She finds the entire case nearly as perplexing as Maura Murray, JonBenét Ramsey, and Abby Williams and Liberty Rose Lynn German. But she can’t help but believe that she could solve it if she wasn’t so mentally, emotionally, and physically fatigued all the time.

Not that she’s complaining.

Caring for Charles has given her more purpose than she’s ever had and has called forth the very best of her. Charles had saved her from Cody, had offered her safety and security and a rebirth of sorts, but then she had saved him, saved his literal life so many times since then. How could she not feel that her previous career had prepared her for this moment, this most critical of assignments? She’s not only excelling as a nurse-wife, but as a human being—one focused on what really matters in life, with no time for the trivial, transient concerns that seem to occupy the time and energy of so many. These days it’s a truly rare occurrence for her to care what anyone thinks of her or for her to care in any kind of petty or judgmental way what they get up to.

And that’s so different from when they first got together—when she wasted way, way too much time caring about people’s opinions of her and her husband who was old enough to be her father. She not only obsessed about others’ opinions, but expended far too much energy in the fear of missing out, of being left out—which she was. A lot. He was too old for her friend group. She was too young for his. Ironically, she felt far more lonely and isolated back then than these days when she rarely ever sees another human being besides him—and nearly never a friend.

With as much time as he sleeps, she has never been more alone in her life, yet she’s never felt less lonely. His extended illness hasn’t just transformed him. In many ways the greatest changes have taken place within her. His cancer has caused her metamorphosis.

And part of that alteration is a seasoned and secure sense of self-confidence, which among many other things convinces her she can solve Ryan’s case, given the bandwidth to actually work it.

But, she thinks as she stands and stretches, she hopes that’s something she never gets—that would mean Charles dying.

Or, another voice inside her says—the one she thinks of as Positive Patti—full remission and recovery.

Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.

The symptoms of Charles’s particular brand of lymphoma wax and wane. He’s been in a cycle of getting better for a little while and then worse, better and worse, but she fears he won’t get better this time. He hasn’t responded too well to any treatments they’ve tried, and his condition at any given time is completely unpredictable and capricious.

As she wanders over to the window, her eyes widen in surprise to see through the fog and beyond the false flicker of plastic jack-o-lanterns a fellow insomniac gazing into the same dark abyss of night that she is.

The curve of the cul-de-sac, her home’s position near the mouth of it, and the slight incline it’s on give her a great view of both the houses in it and the ones leading up to it.

If she’s not mistaken, it’s Robin Shaw’s son, the relationships guy.

Wonder if this is when he gets his ideas and insights.

Suddenly, he looks alarmed, and she follows his distressed stare over toward Sheri Shandling’s house.

For an instant she thinks she sees a dark figure disappearing around the far side, but surely that’s just her—

Charles begins to choke, and she turns from the window and rushes over to the home hospital bed that has replaced their California King.

3

Sawyer looks up to see the reflection of blue lights flashing on the ceiling.

Carefully lifting Addie’s head with his free hand, he slowly extricates his arm and gently transfers her to a pillow.

Easing out of bed, he rushes over to the window to see an Estates security vehicle in front of Sheri Shandling’s place.

Glancing back at Addie and seeing she is sleeping soundly, he decides to get dressed, set up the baby monitor, and go get a closer look.

He throws on jeans and a Beatles tee and moves the baby monitor system from Addie’s room to his. Less than five minutes later, he is crossing the cul-de-sac, the soft, sweet sounds of Addie’s breathing coming through the small speaker of the battery-powered portable baby monitor in his hand.

He arrives at the scene at the same time as an auburn-haired woman who looks to be a bit younger than him—something unicorn-uncommon in this restricted retirement community. Her green eyes seems to glow in the flashing lights, and her skin is so pale as to look ghostly.

Like him, she must be visiting her parents. Probably brought her kids for the big Halloween extravaganza. Of course, unless she got a very late start, her kids