Chapter One
PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON
It came off the northern Pacific as if driven by a witch's broom: the
remnants of typhoon Mary, which had killed 117 in Japan, left
6,000 homeless in Siberia and flooded the western Aleutians for the
first time in sixty-two years. In the ocean's open waters it drove seas
to thirty feet with its eighty-five-mile-per-hour winds, dumping three
inches of rain an hour and barreling toward Victoria Island, the San
Juan Islands, and the largest estuary in North America, known on
charts as Puget Sound. It headed for the city of Seattle as if it had
picked its course off a map, and it caused the biggest rush on plywood
and chipboard that King County had ever seen.
In the partially protected waters west of Elliott Bay, one nautical
mile beyond the established shipping lanes that feed Seattle's East
Waterway docklands, the pitch-black night was punctured by the
harsh illumination of shipboard spotlights that in clear weather might
have reached a half mile or more but failed to stretch even a hundred
yards in the dismal deluge that had once been Mary. The freighter,
Visage, a container ship, rose and sank in fifteen-foot swells ... read full excerpt from: First Victim ebook
