Chasing Angels (Teagan Doyle Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Mailing List

  Teagan Doyle Mystery Series

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter14

  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

  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

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Mailing List

  Call of Chaos Cover

  Call of Chaos - Chapter 1 Sneak Peek

  From the Author

  Also by Karin Kaufman

  CHASING ANGELS

  TEAGAN DOYLE MYSTERIES

  BOOK 1

  KARIN KAUFMAN

  Copyright © 2020 Karin Kaufman

  Series cover design by Deranged Doctor Design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  TEAGAN DOYLE MYSTERY SERIES

  Chasing Angels (Book 1) — Out Now

  Call of Chaos (Book 2) — Coming Soon

  Shallow Graves (Book 3) — Coming Soon

  PROLOGUE

  The distance between earth and heaven isn’t measured in miles but in perception. God is close to us all, and angels guard our homes, our loved ones, our churches, our cars. If only we could see.

  That’s what John Bergland, my friend and boss, likes to say.

  I long to see. And that longing led me to my apprenticeship with Berg, because—odd thing—while angels make themselves scarce, demons are everywhere.

  But where perch demons, there perch angels. And there rules God.

  Right?

  CHAPTER 1

  I heard the crack of hard shoes, felt the old and supple church floor flexing as someone strode up the aisle. I turned.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the man said as he hastened to join me, “but we wanted to get the kids off. My wife says you’re the one she called?”

  “Teagan Doyle,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Matt Peterson. Thank you for coming. I can’t tell you how grateful we are. Carissa will be here in a minute.”

  I unbuttoned my long red coat—a years-ago gift from my mother—but kept it on. “Will your children be back soon?”

  “No, they’ll be gone all weekend, with a friend of the family.” He sniffed and tilted his head at the stained-glass window at the end of the sanctuary. “How about that thing, huh? To think this will be our living room—or great room, we’ll call it.”

  “You don’t often see stained glass that size in a Protestant church, even an Episcopal one. Archangel Michael slaying the Dragon.”

  “How do you know it’s Michael?”

  “His name’s on the shield in Latin and Hebrew.”

  “Yeah? I thought it was a motto. We can put that in our brochures one day. We’ve made a start on renovations, as you can see.” He spread his arm out, inviting me to pivot in the direction of the nonexistent sanctuary doors. “We sold the doors to make the space more open concept. We’ll probably widen the entrance again to make it a true great room. We sold a few rows of pews, too, though not to a church, funnily enough. People use them as benches.”

  Carissa Peterson rounded the corner and entered the sanctuary. Until the building had been wholly transformed into a B&B, I decided, I’d persist in calling it a sanctuary.

  “Liam and Sophie are off,” she said, falling in beside her husband.

  “It’s Teagan Doyle,” he said.

  “Yes, I met her at the door, Matt.”

  Like her husband, Carissa Peterson was in her late thirties. Slim, with long chestnut hair and pale skin, she walked hunched forward, eyes downcast. In an effort to ward off the cold, she wore jeans, a blue mock turtleneck, and a bulky brown cardigan.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” she said. “Why don’t we go to the kitchen? Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

  “Maybe I should give Teagan a look around first,” Matt said.

  I nodded. “I’d like to see where you found the body.”

  “I’ll take you down there, and then we’ll meet for coffee in the kitchen. All right, Carissa?”

  “Fine,” she said. “What about Mr. Bergland?”

  “I’ll be picking him up in an hour in Fort Collins,” I replied.

  Matt watched his wife as she walked off. Waited. Then he said, “We’ve dreamed for years of buying an old church, making it a home, and then turning it into a bed and breakfast. I don’t want to lose this place—it’s one in a million. Neither does Carissa, really, but she’d leave tomorrow if she thought you couldn’t help us.”

  “We’ll do our best, Mr. Peterson.”

  “Call me Matt.”

  He led the way out of the sanctuary and down a hallway to a brown steel door. “I keep it locked so the kids won’t take a tumble on the stairs,” he said, retrieving a key from his jeans pocket. Opening the door, he flicked a light switch on the wall and headed down the wooden steps.

  “Steep,” I said.

  “Yeah, careful. It’s dry down here, even though only half the floor’s concrete, so it doesn’t smell moldy, and we haven’t found evidence of mice. Yesterday morning the contractor was opening up the basement to make it all one room when he found the body. He tore a bigger hole in the drywall for a better look and then called the police.”

  I didn’t have to ask where they’d found the body. Matt’s contractor, perhaps assisted by the police, had busted a twelve-by-eight-foot rectangle in the drywall ahead. Taking a flashlight from my coat pocket, I aimed it at the gaping hole. “Have they identified him yet?”

  “They think it might be the church’s old priest. He went missing two years ago.”

  Two parallel runs of drywall panels, spaced about eighteen inches apart, partitioned the basement into two rooms. Those eighteen inches—cause for a lot of wasted floor space—puzzled me until I realized the double wall camouflaged an enormous and low-hanging air duct. “He didn’t die here, judging by the small amount of blood on the subfloor. And here”—I pointed at
a two-inch brownish red smudge on the interior of the drywall—“this looks like blood.”

  “Wait, I’ve got a photo of him.” Matt slipped his phone from his jeans pocket.

  “You took a photo?”

  “We need to protect ourselves, and if this sinks our B&B plans, I want reimbursement from someone. He was mummified, so it doesn’t look as bad as you’d think.” He navigated to his photos, tapped one, and handed me his phone.

  The man’s body, stuffed between two pairs of wall studs, was dressed in a dark blue suit and white shirt, his feet clad in argyle socks and black sneakers. On the short side with light brown hair, he sat leaning against one of the studs, head back, his leathery neck slit to the bone. Blood, now the color of rust, caked his shirt.

  “His throat was cut,” I said.

  “Yeah, the police said right away it was murder. Of course it would be. He didn’t drywall himself in here.”

  “Did he have a wallet on him?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  I gave him back his phone. “If I understood Carissa, she wasn’t here when the contractor found him.”

  “She was out and the kids were at school. But Liam and Sophie heard from the neighbors that cops were here, and by now they know about the body. The photo didn’t bother you?”

  “I’ve seen bodies.”

  He took half a step backward, tucked in his chin. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “You’re paying.”

  “Are you old enough to be doing this kind of thing? I mean, you’re young—and, well, a woman. No offense.”

  “No offense taken. I’m thirty-seven. Not so young.”

  “I would’ve guessed younger. I can’t imagine Carissa doing what you do. Or me, for that matter.”

  “You really want to ask me if I’m inexperienced.”

  He shrugged.

  “This will be my sixth case, but my associate, who’s seventy-six, has vast experience. There’s no finer man in the business.”

  “Why didn’t your associate come?”

  “I’m going to pick him up soon. He can’t drive.”

  “That so?” Matt glanced anxiously toward the door. “Listen, there’s something else, and Carissa doesn’t know about it.” Once more he navigated to his phone’s photos. “There was a note on the other side of that post there, not by the body. The police took it with them.”

  “But you took a photo of it?”

  He handed me his phone.

  “It looks like it was folded several times.”

  “Yeah, two or three.”

  “‘We have Jack,’” I read aloud. “‘He is with us in aeternum. Porta clausa est. He was sealed, in fire-steel and in water.’”

  “Creepy, huh? That’s Latin—I looked it up. It means something like he’s with us forever, the door is closed.”

  I typed my email address into his contacts. “Send me a copy before we go upstairs. The one you took of the body too. Was the missing priest’s name Jack?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, working his phone. When he’d finished, his eyes shot again to the door. “Do you think this note is connected to the murder or the sounds and smells?”

  “It’s way too early to tell. Out of curiosity, how did your wife hear about me?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a connections kind of woman. Okay if we go up? Since finding the body I don’t like to leave Carissa alone too long, even in the daytime.”

  “I could use some coffee about now,” I said, starting for the stairs.

  When Matt reached the landing, he took the key from his jeans and was about to lock the door when I stopped him. “Don’t lock it. My associate and I might need to come down here.”

  He pocketed the key. “Just don’t tell Carissa it’s open. She’ll freak. Though why she thinks a lock makes a difference, I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. I think it’s the violence of what happened down here. That’s what gets to her. She believes something, you know, lingers because of it.”

  He gave me a lukewarm smile and we left the basement, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee working like a trail of breadcrumbs to lead me toward the kitchen.

  The notion that a past violent death could reach into the present and harm the living was nonsense, but I understood the fear. Before discovering the body, the Peterson family had already been put through the wringer in their new home: a foul stench that came and went, strange noises, unexplained cold drafts, lights going out, objects that appeared to move on their own—the full panoply of supernatural occurrences.

  The day after construction work revealed the body, Carissa, her voice brittle and on the edge of hysteria, had phoned me, pleading for help. Then I’d phoned Berg.

  Matt directed me to a round table in the couple’s restaurant-size kitchen. I took the seat nearest the wall and wriggled out of my coat, letting it fall between me and the chair back. Carissa set out coffees, spoons, and a stainless-steel milk pitcher, while Matt dug packets of sugar from a drawer.

  Tossing the packets on the table, he sank wearily into his chair and lowered his chin to his hands. Dark circles the color of bruises sat like half-moons under his eyes. “There could be ordinary explanations for everything, couldn’t there?”

  “Could be.” I poured milk in my cup, shook in a packet of sugar, stirred. “Have you had an electrician out?”

  “Yeah, and he didn’t find anything wrong,” Matt said.

  “Still, there’s often a natural explanation for things you’ve described. My first case was like that. As it turned out, some old pipes were rubbing against each other in a crawl space, making a moaning sound. A plumber separated the pipes, problem solved.”

  Matt dropped his hands and sat straight. “See, Carissa?”

  I took a long sip of coffee before going on. “At another house, a flowery scent filled the air in a couple’s back yard. To the husband, it smelled like his mother’s lavender sachets, and the kicker was, it appeared every night about seven o’clock, which was when he received the phone call saying she’d died. We discovered that the people living in the house next door did their laundry every night at seven, using way too many lavender-scented dryer sheets.”

  Delighted, Matt chuckled and nudged his wife.

  “It’s not perfume I smell, Matt. It smells like rotting garbage, and you know it.”

  “This has been going on for a month?” I asked.

  “Yes, the smells first,” Carissa said. “We didn’t think much about it, this being an old building. But then there were the noises, the lights—and it keeps getting colder in here, no matter what we do. We have to sit in the kitchen to warm up. It’s our dream home, did I mention that? Renovations are going to take a long time, but we were so happy when this place came on the market. We wanted either a church or an old library or fire station—something like that, with character.”

  “This is still our dream home,” Matt said, taking his wife’s hand.

  “We can’t keep lying to the kids about the noises and smells.”

  “We’re not lying. Give Teagan and this Mr. Bergland a chance, Carissa.”

  “I’m the one who called her, not you.”

  Matt turned to me and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the refrigerator. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Do you have any donuts?” I said.

  “Um . . .” He looked perplexed. “Do we, Carissa?”

  “No, sorry,” Carissa said, “but I could get some.”

  “That’s all right. I’m not familiar with Wells, but I thought I saw a small grocery on the highway in.”

  “That’s the Quick Mart on County Road 64,” Matt said. “There’s a Safeway too, but it’s in the next town over, opposite direction.”

  Carissa stretched her hands across the table, her fingers reaching out, imploring. “When we talked, you said you’d both stay the night.”

  “And we will. All night, and tomorrow night if we need to.”

  Matt slurped his coffee, his eyes on his w
ife. The bright lights of the kitchen highlighted the nascent strands of gray in his brown hair.

  Maybe my judgment was off, but he seemed more disturbed by events than he wanted to let on. He was eager to find a rational explanation for them. His nonchalance about the body was too purposeful, as though for my benefit, and his composure had wilted when he showed me the note found on the other side of the post.

  Latin sometimes did that to people in his situation.

  “Did you bring any equipment with you?” Carissa asked.

  “Such as?”

  “Meters or special cameras?”

  “We don’t use anything like that. We stay awake, listen, observe, and explore. It’s much more effective.”

  Carissa raised a quizzical eyebrow. She’d already contacted a medium and a psychic, and they’d told her the old church was a hotbed of ghostly activity—information she’d passed along to me. “I thought you needed some kind of meter to detect ghosts.”

  “Let’s see what we’re dealing with first.”

  She got to her feet and began clearing the table. “Does your husband mind you staying here overnight?”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “None. Like I said, my associate and I can stay all night. Speaking of which, I’d better get going.”

  Matt rose, took his cup to the sink, and returned for mine, waiting while I took a last gulp. “Can you find your way to the Quick Mart?”

  “No problem.” I handed him my cup and slid back into my coat.

  “I’ll show you to the door.”

  Walking a stride behind him, I said, “This church was built in 1918, correct?”

  “That’s right. Oliver Street is named for the builder.”

  “Who put up the basement drywall?”

  “If the police know, they aren’t saying, but I expect the church did.”

  “Not that long ago. There’s a solid-looking vapor barrier behind it. No breaks in the drywall before the contractor arrived? Holes?”

  “None that I saw.”

  Matt opened the heavy front doors and we walked into the bright sunshine. It was the sixth of November, the cold weather at last settling over northern Colorado, and the sun was a welcome reprieve from the oppressive dark of the Petersons’ new home.