Читать книгу Closer Than Blood - Gregg Olsen - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

Kitsap County

Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark looked at the text message on her cell phone. It was from Adam Canfield and marked urgent. She pondered if it was something about the fifteen-year high school reunion that, in the scheme of things, was anything but urgent.

Annoying, yes. Urgent? Only to those with something to prove.

Her short blond hair was damp from a morning towel-dry as she stood in the kitchen of her Harper, Washington, home and considered the rest of her morning. There had not been any major cases in a while, at least none that hadn’t already wound their way from investigation to the prosecutor’s office. There was a lull in Kitsap County, and that alone made her a little nervous. Kendall Stark believed in the concept of calm before the storm.

Every criminal case started that way. From nothing to something. With a gunshot. A knife. An electric cord wrapped around the neck.

Kendall’s phone buzzed again. She sipped coffee and listened to the radio as it recounted more news about a stumbling economy, a soggy spring, and a shooting in Tacoma.

She opened the first message:

CHK OUT PAPER. TORI O SHOT. HUSBAND DEAD. L8R.

Then the second. Adam had a penchant for drama and never used one exclamation mark when several would do.

Can u believe it?!!!!

Kendall couldn’t, or rather didn’t want to.

Tori O’Neal had been a student at South Kitsap High. Her sister, Lainie, was on the reunion committee, along with Adam, Kendall, and Penny Salazar. No one—not even her sister—had heard from Tori in years. Her name was the proverbial “blast from the past,” and, in Tori’s case, a cold blast indeed.

I hope Lainie’s all right. This is the last thing she needs, Kendall thought as she retrieved the paper from a stack ready for the recycling center on Burley-Olalla Road. Her husband, Steven, hadn’t gone running that morning, and that meant that the morning’s edition hadn’t been picked up from the tube at the end of the driveway.

Tori O’Neal? Shot? Dead husband?

She unfolded the paper and scanned for the story.

The article was tucked near the bottom right-hand corner next to articles about toxic rainwater runoff in Commencement Bay and a tragic accident involving a church bus and a semi in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Man Dies in North Tacoma Shooting, Wife Injured

An intruder shot a North Tacoma couple in their home early this morning. Police are unsure if it was a home invasion or a robbery gone wrong. The man, an executive with an investment firm, died at the scene. The woman was transported to St. Joseph Medical Center for treatment.

“We’re still piecing together last night’s events,” Sgt. Tammy Lewis said. She cited privacy laws when declining to provide the prognosis for the woman. “There did not appear to be much of a struggle so we don’t consider this a home invasion.”

Lewis’s remark referred to several cases involving intruders who held their victims captive. The most recent case pending involved a trio of young people who’d murdered and tortured victims they’d met through Craigslist when they feigned interest in purchasing jewelry or other items.

“We can’t say anything about her condition other than to say she was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center for treatment. She was admitted sometime after midnight.”

The article’s abbreviated content was more a reflection of the timing of the shooting than what had actually occurred at the residence and who the victims had been. If it had taken place earlier in the day—and provided there were decent photos—it easily would have found itself above the fold on the front page of the News Tribune. Cutbacks at the News Tribune and other papers had shifted more editorial effort to the electronic side of the news operation. Frequent updates, blog entries, and even video supplied by “mojos,” or mobile journalists, would be featured there. Partly because her husband was in the media business, working for a hunting and fishing magazine, the Starks still subscribed to print editions of three newspapers: the Kitsap Sun, the Port Orchard Lighthouse , and the Tacoma News Tribune.

She set the paper aside and opened her laptop on the kitchen table and clicked over to the web page, where the update included the victim’s name, Alex Connelly. There was also a photo. He was a handsome man with a square jaw and dark hair that he wore combed straight back. His eyes were intense and very blue. Piercing blue eyes, even in a photograph. The image appeared to be a business portrait. In the casualness of the Pacific Northwest, a suit and tie were seldom worn unless it was for work or a wedding.

In the comments section someone had posted:

RIP, Alex. You were a great guy. It was an honor to serve with you.

Although the paper said he was an executive with an investment firm, it was clear that Kendall’s first impression was right on the money. She instantly saw the unmistakable deliberateness that came with a military background. A military man’s eyes never failed to telegraph directness. He looked straight at the camera. Unblinking. Sure. Confident. She wondered where Tori had met him. Had it been across Port Orchard’s Sinclair Inlet in Bremerton where the navy decommissioned old battleships and aircraft carriers? Or maybe Fort Lewis south of Tacoma? That was army. Or McChord Air Force Base right next door?

More than anything, she thought about Tori.

How was it that she was able to escape when her husband was likely trained in self-defense?

It was close to 8:30 and she needed to finish drying her hair and scoot out the door to work, a ten-minute drive away. That it had been a slow spring, crime-wise, was just as well. She wasn’t the kind of cop who’d signed on because she was an adrenaline junkie. She knew that type and felt they’d missed the whole point of law enforcement.

“We’re here to help people, not ride the wave of others’ misfortune,” she once told her frequent partner in investigations, Josh Anderson. “Do you really need to smile so much at a scene?”

Kendall went outside to the patio, following the sound of her husband and son in the yard. She glanced at the stump of the madrona that had once arched over the backyard with its distinctive red-and-green striated bark and canopy of waxy green leaves. It had silvered in the weather of the past couple of seasons, and a series of fissures ran from the center of the cut outward, like spokes on the wheel of an old ten-speed bicycle. The cool air from Yukon Harbor blew against her face and she touched her damp hair, wondering if she’d be able to avoid the blow dryer and just tousle it with her fingertips. It was short and she could get away with that technique most days. She was still young and attractive, but time was creeping at her and she knew that fingertip hairstyling and a light swipe of lip gloss was no longer a wise go-to regimen for the morning.

She watched Steven and their nine-year-old son, Cody, burn deadfall in a fire pit on the edge of the yard. For most, it would have been too early in the morning for such an endeavor. But not for those two. Father and son were early risers. Kendall was the opposite—the last one out of bed on a Saturday morning. The one to turn out the lights of the house in the evening. The one to check the door locks and the security of the windows.

A smile broke out over her face as she caught her son’s gaze. Cody was quiet, leaving the conversation to his father.

As always.

“Let’s get that bunch of branches from over there, son. Let’s get this thing going good.”

Kendall moved across the wet grass. “Isn’t there a burn ban?” she said, half kidding.

“You going to arrest us?” Steven said, winking at his son.

Cody remained mute, but the flicker in his eyes indicated he’d understood the irony of his dad’s comment.

“I might have to,” she said.

Steven poked the fire and put out his hand to push Cody back a step. “Full plate today?”

“Barring a catastrophe with the committee at lunch, it won’t be a long day,” Kendall said. The reunion was a week from Saturday at the Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton.

As far as Kendall was concerned, the next nine days couldn’t pass quickly enough.

“We’ve got it handled, babe,” Steven said, giving her a short kiss.

“You smell like smoke,” she said.

Steven grinned. “You smell beautiful.”

Cody set a nest of grapevines at the edge of the fire pit.

“Be careful, Cody.” The boy nodded and Kendall kissed him.

Steven patted their son on the shoulder. “He’s good.”

Cody’s autism was fickle, cruelly so. Sometimes he’d speak plainly, even spontaneously. Not that day.

Kendall climbed into her white SUV and started to back down the driveway, Cody and Steven looking smaller and smaller as she pulled away.

She hadn’t mentioned to Steven what she’d read about Tori and she knew the reason why. Tori was connected to a part of her past that she’d just as soon never revisit. She knew she’d have to say something eventually. Once it broke that their old high school friend was the wife of the murder victim, Tori’s name would surely find its way to the pages of the Lighthouse, the local paper.

She could feel her heart rate quicken and willed herself to relax. This was a stressor she didn’t need. She thought of a note on the back of a card that had come through the mail when the save-the-date and early head count cards went out six months prior. It too had bothered her. It made her a little paranoid. She hated even admitting to that kind of feeling. It was only eleven words.

I KNOW EVERYTHING. SEE YOU THERE. IT’LL BE LIKE OLD TIMES.

Just what did the sender mean? And to which committee member had it been directed?

Kendall wasn’t sure if the card was a threat or just someone’s idea of a joke. She didn’t tell anyone—not Sheriff McCray, not Josh, not even Steven—that she’d taken the card to the crime lab and processed it herself. No fingerprints but her own. No postmark. No identifier whatsoever. Later, she pored through the stack of cards to see if it had come in an envelope that she’d misplaced somehow, but she came up empty handed.

She wondered how that card got to her if it hadn’t been mailed. She also wondered if it was related to the Kinko’s e-mail.

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

Earlier that same morning, a very tired Lainie O’Neal stared at the void of her computer screen. French roast coffee perfumed the confines of her home office, the second bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment she’d rented for five years on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. She watched her Siamese fighting fish, Rusty, blow bubbles on the surface of the brandy snifter that was his home. It was just before 7:00 A.M., and she had time to polish a chapter of a book that she’d been working on—with renewed vigor—since the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” She’d dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a “content provider” for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer sought. Everything from how many mint sprigs and limes should be muddled in a mojito to the best fish tacos in Los Cabos.

She hated the whole lot of what she was doing, but reporters like her had been shoved out the door in an age that no longer seemed to value context, nuance, and depth.

Everything was free, and fast. Even the news.

Her cell phone rang and her eyes darted to the tiny screen, but she did not recognize the number. It was too early for a source to phone. Neither was it the number for one of the other reporters who’d regularly called to commiserate about their bleak futures in a post-newspaper world. A moment later, the caller tried a second time.

It must be urgent, she thought. She clapped the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Lainie?”

The voice was a whisper.

“Yes, this is Lainie O’Neal,” she said.

A second of silence and the sound of a deep breath.

“Lainie, it’s me. Your sister.”

Lainie no longer needed the early morning jolt of a mud-thick French roast coffee from Starbucks. The words were a cattle prod at her heart.

“Tori?”

Silence.

“Tori? Is that you?”

Another hesitation on the line. “I’m in the hospital. I’ve been hurt. I need you.”

“Where?”

“Tacoma. I’ve been shot.”

“Oh, wow, but no, where are you?”

“St. Joe’s.”

Lainie felt her adrenaline surge, slowly, then a tidal wave. She needed more information. She had no idea in which city her sister resided. They were twins, but they hadn’t spoken in years. Just how many, Lainie didn’t know. She refused to count the number anymore. It hurt too much.

“What happened?”

“An intruder last night. Late. I was shot. My husband was killed.”

Husband? Lainie had no idea that Tori had married again.

“Will you come? I need your help.”

Again, an awkward silence, the kind that invites the person waiting to hear to press the phone tighter to her ear.

“They’re whispering about me . . . I think they think I did this to myself,” Tori said. “To him.”

“I’ll be there,” Lainie said. “Right away.”

“No. Not now. Wait a day or two. I’ll be okay in the hospital. I’ll let you know when to come.”

“Are you sure? I can come visit you now.”

“No. Good-bye.”

Lainie hung up and looked across the room at a photograph of two little girls posing in leotards on a balance beam. Their hair was blond, eyes blue. Everything about them was the same, but in reverse. Like looking into a mirror. Lainie’s hair parted naturally on the left side of her face, Tori’s on the right. Lainie’s upper left lip had a mole. Tori had had hers—on the right side—removed when she was fourteen. Their mother dressed them alike until fourth grade, when both girls rightly rebelled. No one could tell them apart. They were so close. So seemingly identical.

Yet they were not the same.

Not by a mile.

She wondered about her sister living in Tacoma, too. An encounter with an old classmate the previous fall came to mind.

Lainie O’Neal felt a tap on her shoulder as she stood in line at a Queen Anne drycleaner. Her mind was on her job-hunting suit and the stuffed-mushroom stain from September’s “networking” meeting for displaced media professionals.

She turned around to a somewhat familiar face.

“Lainie, it’s me. Deirdre Jericho, now Landers, from South Kitsap.”

Lainie paused as the synapses fired and the memory returned. Fourteen years ago, Dee Dee was a sullen girl with blue streaks in her brunette hair and a penchant for scoop-neck tops that dropped a little low for South Kitsap dress codes.

Except for the disappearance of those blue streaks, she hadn’t changed all that much.

“Oh, yes, Dee Dee! How are you?”

“Better than last time I saw you,” she said.

Lainie nodded. “Back in high school,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

“No, not then. In Tacoma at the bar in El Gaucho. You were there with your boyfriend and you, well, you acted like you didn’t know me.”

Lainie shook her head. “I’ve never been to El Gaucho,” she said.

“It was you. I’m pretty sure. You treated me like a total bitch.”

“Honestly, Dee Dee, I never would have done that.”

Dee Dee smiled. “That’s what I thought.”

Dee Dee Jericho had come in to South when the navy transferred her dad, a commander, in the beginning of her senior year of high school.

She barely made an impression on anyone.

Kendall Stark knew she’d loathe the endeavor almost from the moment she agreed to do it. She would have rather been back home burning yard waste with Steven and Cody. In fact, she would rather be poking around the most gelatinous decomposing body than working on her South Kitsap High School class reunion committee during lunch. It was a quagmire of hurt feelings, unfinished business, and the kind of tedium that comes with agreeing on even the minutest of details. The news that one of their old classmates was involved in a shooting made all of it seem more trivial.

Who cares about what color the napkins are?

The question was rhetorical, of course.

Penny Salazar’s steely stare and finger tapping on a planning binder said everything about what she thought commanded supreme importance.

“Look, people,” said Penny, who was a sawed-off, square-shouldered brunette and ran the Port Orchard deli that had been the committee’s meeting place since the first of the year, “details are what people remember when they remember a special event.”

Kendall looked at the other committee member, Adam Canfield. Adam had always been a sensible ally, from high school on the drama team to the Kitsap Cutter serial-killer investigation when he supplied some key evidence from his Bay Street collectibles shop. He had texted Kendall with the news that Tori had been shot, but he and Kendall agreed not to mention it.

Penny could find out about it in the Lighthouse. She was an incorrigible gossip.

Adam tugged at his gray lamb’s-wool cardigan.

“Yes, details,” he said. “I’m glad we approved maroon and white, with maroon the accent.”

Adam swallowed the last of his Diet Coke and waited for Penny to disagree.

She’d made it a point to disagree with anyone’s idea that didn’t mirror her own plan for the fifteen-year reunion. She’d even come up with a theme: Fifteen Minutes of Fame.

Fifteen Minutes of Blame, Adam had thought before acquiescing to Penny’s ill-conceived plan.

“But shouldn’t the napkin design have been the other way around? I mean, our cheer uniforms weren’t white. We’d have looked like nurses if they had been.”

It was Penny again, once more using the opportunity to remind the group that she’d been a cheerleader.

“Lainie texted me,” Adam said, not surprisingly, unable to hold his tongue. “She’s not going to make it to the meeting.”

“The ferry?” Penny was referring to the most common excuses people employed when they gave their regrets about missing an event, party, or appointment on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

“No. She wanted me to tell you that her sister’s in some kind of trouble.”

Penny’s eyes widened. “Tori?” she said, taken aback by the mention of the name. Lainie’s sister hadn’t been heard from for years. Not by Lainie, not by anyone in Port Orchard. She’d vanished.

“What kind of trouble?” Penny asked.

Adam looked anxiously at Kendall, who had stuck to her word. She didn’t want to say anything about Tori O’Neal.

Penny reached for her binder and started writing something down. She looked up, satisfied, and smiled.

“Now we can invite Tori. I thought she’d dropped off the face of the earth. You know, another dead end. About half the class is a dead end one way or another.”

“That makes number two,” she said, again doing some updating in the binder.

“She’s a very unlucky girl, our Tori O’Neal,” Adam said.

Kendall looked at Adam. She knew he was making a statement swathed in irony, his forte since high school, but she didn’t like it.

“No one is that unlucky,” she said, unable to resist adding her two cents.

“Poor Lainie,” Adam said. “Torrid was fun to watch in high school, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be her sister.”

“Her twin,” Penny said, drawing the connection even tighter. “Yeah, that would totally suck.”

Penny didn’t have a way with words, Kendall thought, but she was right. Tori O’Neal came with more baggage than an airport skycap.

“I wonder what happened this time?” Penny said. “And where is she, anyway?”

“Tacoma,” Adam said.

Penny was clearly surprised and there was no hiding it. Tacoma was across the Narrows from the peninsula, barely a half hour away from Port Orchard. “That’s weird,” she said. “I had no idea she was still in the area. I thought she’d left for California or Alaska or anywhere but around here. She hated it here.”

“Yeah, imagine that,” Adam said, looking at his phone as if it would force Lainie to send another text. “Tori’s been hiding in plain sight.”

Kendall Stark returned to her office and dialed the number for the Tacoma Police Department. She identified herself and asked for the investigator in charge of the Connelly murder case, and Eddie Kaminski got on the line. She told him that Tori had roots in Kitsap and had been associated with the death of a young man, Jason Reed.

“You say it was a car accident?”

“Yes, but some things seemed odd about it.”

“Odd in what way?”

Kendall didn’t have anything specific and she felt foolish just then. “One witness said he was talking—alive—then suddenly, dead. Internal injuries can be like that. Other talk, too.”

“We deal with more than talk here in Tacoma,” Kaminski said. “We deal with facts.”

Her cheeks went a little pink. “Of course. Did you know that her first husband died, too?”

There was a short pause.

“It might have been mentioned to the other investigators,” he said. “Yes, I think it was.”

“Can we meet? I could tell you more.”

Again a slight pause.

“Hang on for a sec.” He put the phone on mute and returned a moment later. “Busy here, sorry. Sure. Maybe you can come over this way?”

“All right. I’ll figure out a time and get back to you,” she said.

After he hung up, Kaminski turned his attention to the medical examiner’s report on Alex Connelly. The sum of all the dead man had been reduced to the weights and measurements of his liver, his heart, his kidneys. His gunshot-addled brain. All were unremarkable. He was fit, healthy, and struck down in the prime of his life by a masked assailant.

A bullet to the brain had killed him instantly. The second shot was merely icing on a murderer’s cake.

He scanned the report—fifteen pages of diagrams and notes made by a pathologist who knew it was best to include every detail, mundane or not. Alex Connelly’s right earlobe bore the telltale puncture of a scarred-over piercing. As he read, Kaminski touched his own lobe, feeling the tiny lump of a scar from his own youthful indiscretion for the sake of fashion. Except for the fact that Connelly made five times Kaminski’s salary, the detective and the victim were so very much alike. Height and weight were the same. The victim had had a vasectomy. His tonsils had been removed.

Check. Check.

There was really nothing remarkable about Connelly, other than the horrific and violent way that he’d died.

By the time the body was processed and released, his widow had already arranged for his cremation. It was as fast as one of those Pyrex commercials that crow about moving something from the freezer to the oven without a second in between.