A Twisted Faith

Twisted faith



Prologue

December 26, 1997

Bremerton, Washington

IT WAS EARLY THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 1997 IN BREMERTON, a navy town across Puget Sound from Seattle, Washington. Contractor Jeff Richardson, 34, pulled into an east Bremerton neighborhood to pick up his employee Tim Pitts, 33, for work. The split second he planted his foot on Jensen Ave., Jeff turned with a start toward the sound of a jagged crackle and the whooshing of air. It was coming from a small brown, vertical-sided house across the street. A fire had sucked in a window and black smoke poured from the splintered gash.

A neighbor’s house was on fire.

Jeff hurried to the Pitts’ door where he pounded on the door and called out about the emergency. It was 7:13 a.m., and Amy Pitts, startled from bleary-eyed to wide-awake, went straight for the telephone. Her call to 911 was one of several that came in around the same time.

The burning 1942-built rambler belonged to Nick and Dawn Hacheney. The Pitts knew the Hacheneys only in passing, based on occasional conversations on the street. Nick was a youth pastor for a church on nearby Bainbridge Island, and Dawn, a teller at a credit union in Silverdale. He seemed outgoing, the kind of fellow with a quick word and a smile; she was nice but a bit more reserved. Not cool. Just the type of person who waited for others to approach her, not the other way around. Nick liked to hunt and had set up a tented structure in the backyard that some assumed he was testing as a prototype for a hunting shelter he’d erect elsewhere. The Hacheneys had a couple of chocolate Labs named Faith and Hope. None of the neighbors had been inside the house, but there was evidence hammering inside and construction supplies being brought in that the place was in the midst of a much-needed remodel. That was about the sum of what they knew.

Having rousted the Pitts, Jeff Richardson immediately sprinted up the steep concrete steps to the Hacheneys’ door and hammered it until his fist stung. Tim Pitts, who had had joined his boss, called out to see if anyone was inside.

“Hey! You’re on fire!”

A voice came from the other side of a shaggy hedge. “They’re not home!”

The report from the unseen neighbor gave Tim and Jeff a momentary flash of relief, but in the chaotic first moments of emergencies, relief is almost always short-lived. Tim had noticed Dawn’s blue Dodge Neon parked in front. It appeared someone could be home.

From: TWISTED FAITH by Gregg Olsen, copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Press, LLC.