Читать книгу Victim Six - Gregg Olsen - Страница 18

Chapter Ten

April 4, 10 p.m.

Port Orchard

Serenity Hutchins set down her phone and looked at her notepad. She noticed for the first time that she’d been crying as she wrote down an anonymous caller’s deluge of cruelty. Everything he had said in a flat, barely audible voice had revolted her. She was sick to her stomach. Tears had spattered the top sheet of her reporter’s notebook, sending the blue ink into a swirling bloom. She took a sheet of paper towel and blotted it. The transfer of ink and tears reminded her of blood.

She dialed her editor’s home number.

Charlie Keller was in the middle of a model of a steamship, Virginia V, one of the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that flitted from Sinclair Inlet east to Seattle and points southward too. He’d painstakingly created the model himself, out of balsa and fir. His dining room table had been converted to a mini-shipbuilder’s workspace since he’d returned to Port Orchard. It was the only hobby that kept his attention and kept him out of the Indian casinos. His house was a modest one tucked in the ivy-infested woods off Pottery Avenue. It was a three-bedroom with dinged-up wooden floors, a cracked tile countertop in the kitchen, and not a window treatment to be had. Mrs. Keller was missed for many reasons, and the lack of window treatments was somewhere near the bottom on the list of a lonely man. His dog, Andy, a smooth-coated and very overweight dachshund, was curled up on a sofa cushion that Charlie had removed and placed on the floor.

The phone rang, Andy lifted his head, and Charlie got up to answer. It was after ten. As he ambled over to his cell phone on the kitchen counter, he wondered who’d be calling him at this late hour.

It was Serenity.

“Kind of late for a call,” Charlie said somewhat gruffly. He slumped back into his chair and rubbed his socked foot over Andy’s protruding belly.

“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to know what to do here.”

Her voice was shaky. Charlie Keller’s annoyance at the intrusion turned to concern.

“You sound stressed. You okay?”

“No. I’m not. I’m scared. Charlie, I just got off the phone with some freak who says he’s a killer. He said he killed Celesta Delgado. He also said he had plans for another girl.”

Charlie sat down next his model of the Virginia. “Probably a crank. Don’t sweat it. I talked to five Zodiac wannabes when I was down in San Francisco.”

Serenity didn’t think so. “He was so direct about what he did to her. He told me things that he did to the body. Disgusting things.”

“I see,” Charlie said, adjusting some line that he’d coiled on the deck of the boat model. “I’m not saying, Serenity, that he’s absolutely not the killer. But I’d bet this house that it was a crank caller. What exactly did he say?”

“He started by telling me how he subdued her, how she begged him to let her go.”

“Who?”

“Celesta, I guess. Maybe another girl. I don’t know. He says he held her for three days. He . . .” Serenity looked down at her notes as if she needed to see the words in order to repeat what the caller had said. As if his words could be erased from her mind. “He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”

Serenity stopped. She was sobbing, and she hated that she’d fallen apart, even if it was just on the phone.

Charlie wanted to say something gruff and inappropriate about the caller being a Martha Stewart hater or something, but he held his tongue. The young reporter was crumbling.

“Kid, it’ll be all right,” he said, trying to comfort Serenity, and yet glad that he was on the phone with her and not searching for a tissue in his office.

“I guess so,” she said, regaining a measure of composure. “What should I do? Call the sheriff?”

“You could. But let’s hold off until tomorrow. First, you don’t know if his info is genuine. Chances are, like I said, it isn’t. Let’s run down the story tomorrow, first thing.”

“I don’t know. I mean, are you sure we shouldn’t call Detective Stark?”

“Look,” he said, “we all have jobs to do. We’ll work the story tomorrow.”

Serenity didn’t want to argue. “If you say so.”

“That I do. Now, are you going to be all right?”

“I think so. Good night, Charlie.”

“Good night, Hutchins.”

He hung up, a slight smile on his face. It wasn’t that he was happy about the fear in her voice. It was the memory of his experiences as a young reporter.

Those days were long gone.

Serenity thought of calling someone else just then, maybe her sister. But she dropped the notion. She was still unnerved by the creepy caller, but her editor was probably right. It had been a crank call. Part of her reasoning was that killers don’t often call to brag about what they’d done. But why her? There were far bigger newspapers serving the region: Bremerton had one, Seattle had one, Tacoma too. She could understand why he wouldn’t call a TV or radio station; those would require audio and video for a story.

But why her?

She decided to make a cup of decaffeinated Market Spice tea and take a book to read in bed. While she set a mug of water in the microwave, she walked through the apartment, checking the windows, the front door, and the slider that led to the small balcony. Everything was locked. The microwave dinged, and she took her drink and the novel she was reading to her bedroom.

Yes, she thought, the caller had to be a fake.

As the crow flies, the man who’d called wasn’t far from the Mariner’s Glen apartments, where the reporter lived. He emerged from the seldom-used bank of phones in the back of the bar at the China West Restaurant and ordered another beer.

A plump man in his late fifties, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki vest that he couldn’t have buttoned if he’d tried, sat on his right, staring straight ahead as the bartender went about her business.

He slipped the prepaid phone card inside his wallet.

“Old lady pissing you off?” the man in the vest asked.

“Huh?”

“You were on the phone. Just figured your old lady was bitching at you like mine does.”

The bartender sent down a beer.

“Yeah. Never stops.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m in the same boat with you and every other guy. I’d like to shut that bitch up.”

The man sipped his beer. He wasn’t thinking of his wife just then. He had his mind on another woman.

“Yeah, shutting her up is good,” he said. “Sometimes I’d like to shut her up permanently.”

“Tell me about it.”

The man just smiled. He’d already told someone about it. And that felt really good.

Trey Vedder’s father, a prominent Bremerton dentist, thought his son’s lack of drive and tepid enthusiasm meant that he’d been given too much too soon. The nineteen-year-old college dropout didn’t seem to mind one whit when his grades from Washington State University dipped low enough for the academic watch list. His father thought otherwise and yanked him out “faster than an abscessed tooth” and told him he’d work a year. He had one caveat: “It’ll be with your hands and back instead of your brain. You need to see what’s out there for those who miss the boat.”

Trey took “the boat” literally: he took a job at a Port Orchard marina cleaning the dock, helping the harbormaster, doing whatever needed to get done.

It was late afternoon, and Sinclair Inlet was darkening as the sun moved west toward the Olympics. The foothills faded behind some feathery clouds.

“Need any help?” Trey said, more out of boredom than the desire to be genuinely helpful.

The captain of a thirty-five-foot Sea Ray, the Saltshaker, shook his head. “Got it handled, kid,” he said.

The teenager held his hand out to catch the line anyway, and the captain gave in and tossed it in his direction.

“How’s the fishin’?” Trey asked, securing the blue nylon rope.

The captain cut the motor. “Wasn’t fishing.”

Trey looked over at a white plastic bucket on the deck. He thought it contained chum used as bait. Inside, red liquid swirled to conceal what, with a little more scrutiny, he made out as a pair of gloves.

“Nope. Just a little redwood stain job in the galley,” he said. “I’ll dispose of the bucket at the transfer station.”

Trey nodded as the man snatched up the bucket. The remark, however, struck him as a little odd. A lot of boats in the harbor had redwood-stained woodwork. But he’d been inside the Saltshaker.

It was fiberglass, aluminum, and vinyl.