by Gregg Olsen
I hear the crushing noise of gravel under car tires, rumbling, nearly like thunder somewhere in the foothills above Snow Creek. Sheriff Gray and Mindy Newsom have arrived. She’s following his vehicle in her white van—the same one she uses for flower arrangement deliveries. I’ve known Mindy for years. We used to go out drinking when I first moved to Port Townsend. She was Mindy Scott back then. She’d just graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in forensic science. Our connection was immediate. I was new and so was she. At the time she had the office next door to me, and Sheriff Gray converted one of the old conference rooms to a lab. He had big dreams then. So did she. Mindy was certified by the state and put everything she had into being a skillful criminalist. She didn’t know it would be a part-time job.
Yet that’s how it turned out.
Seems that Jefferson County crimes with the need of her tools of the trade are few and far between. Mindy got married, had a baby, went on family leave, and opened up a flower shop downtown.
She brightens when she sees me.
“It’s been eons, Megan.”
I give her a hug. I’ve missed our friendship. I’m not really close to any other women. Not many men either.
“Far too long,” I say.
We talk about her daughter, and she asks if I’ve met anyone. My mind flashes to Dan Anderson, but that thought is fleeting and completely idiotic. I give her the bag with the hammer, and she puts it in a red and white camping cooler in the back of her van.
“You got me on a good day,” she says. “No weddings this coming weekend.”
I tell the two of them what I know so far. I watch as Mindy eyes the house and shakes her head at the tragedy that has befallen the occupants of the pretty house in the middle of nowhere. It was worse than a tornado. A fire. A devastating earthquake. It was a decisive kind of evil from within the walls of the house itself.
“Not that it will do much good,” she says, indicating the barn, the workshop and the two deputies. “I brought a couple of clean suits.”
She looks at the sheriff.
“Sorry,” she says, “I don’t have one that’ll fit you.”
He pats his belly. “Now my size is interfering with my work. My wife’s going to kill me.”
“I hope she doesn’t,” Mindy says. “You’d have to get a new criminalist because there’s no way that I would ever want to process your scene. Especially if she shoots you in the shower.”
He scratches his head and makes a face. “Yeah, she’s a neat freak. She’d probably do something like that.”
The deputies have already taped the windows with black plastic in anticipation of the Luminol test. I thank them and tell them to search the property while Mindy and I get dressed for the hut.
Once inside, she opens her kit and double-checks its contents. “Luminol is not a failsafe detector of the presence of blood, Megan. If a killer attempts to conceal his or her crime by using bleach to clean up blood, it can give an erroneous read. In some cases, Luminol can destroy DNA.”
She’s told me all of this before. I think of it as her way to move the gerbera daisies and fern fronds from her consciousness. Mindy hasn’t worked a case in quite some time. “Hammer was recovered here,” I say pointing, then turning. “And over here, see that rectangular space on the floor?”
She nods.
“Mrs. Wheaton was found rolled up in carpet. Looks like that space had something covering it.”
“All right,” Mindy says. “I’ll spray here around the workbench. We’ll see what we get and then move over to the section where you think the carpet was. I’ll spray. You’ll shut the door. I’ll photograph whatever turns up. Remember, we’ll only have twenty or thirty seconds.”
Mindy motions for me to stand back and she starts spraying the area where the hammer was found. She’s not a tall woman with long arms, but somehow, she manages to sweep in very large, even movements, depositing the misty chemical that reacts to iron in blood.
“This being a working space,” she says, “we might get a lot of false positives.”
“Metals?” I ask.
“Who knows what they did in here.”
She looks at me, picks up her camera and I shut the door.
Blue glows in the shape of an arc, revealing a couple of smears and some spatter freckles: errant castoff from what I’m sure is the hammer, on the lower half of the workbench.
The camera’s digital and set on a slow speed. Even so, Mindy’s emits the clicking sound of an SLR.
“I’d say you found your crime scene,” she says.
I drop markers in the areas that reacted with the Luminol and we move to the space on the floor.
I turn on my flashlight app and direct its soft beam to the floor. Mindy starts spraying, so evenly, so precisely that I wonder if she should have become an airbrush artist instead of a florist. There is no overlap. No place where her spray isn’t anything but perfect. I turn off my phone’s flashlight.
Right away a pale blue line appears on the edge of the rectangle closest to the front of the hut.
“Good eye, Megan,” she says as she photographs the space.
I set a marker.
“I’ll collect samples,” she goes on.
“I’ll tell Sheriff.”
I find him standing outside with Bernie.
We don’t need to speak. He can read my face.
“Oh shit,” he says.
“I’ll go inside and check on Joshua and Sarah,” Bernie says, disappearing through the front door, the screen door screeching like a bird of prey.
“It’s like we thought,” I say as we walk toward the barn, where Mindy is now collecting samples for the lab. “The Luminol lit up that workshop like the Fourth of July. Seriously. Spatter and castoff are clear as could be. Merritt hit his wife with the hammer. He dragged her over to the carpet and rolled her up.”
“Things like that don’t happen around here,” Sheriff says. “Not on my watch, anyway.”
I know he wants to believe that, of course. Truth is, places like the woods around Jefferson County are full of nefarious doings. We just don’t hear about them. Nobody calls in their neighbor to find out if something bad happened.
I think I heard a shot.
Someone screamed in the middle of the night next door. Bloody murder scream.
Haven’t seen anyone at their place for months.
Mindy is finishing up.
“What happened here was brutal,” she says. “The velocity and trajectory of the spatter shows some major rage.”
“Kids say their father was very demanding, even cruel to his wife,” Sheriff says.
“Let’s be direct,” I say. “He cut off one of her toes as punishment for some made-up infraction.”
“Infraction? Was he running a prison camp here?” Mindy asks as she continues to record samples for chain of custody. Her writing is precise, somewhere between cursive and printed. Everything about Mindy is precise. Even the way she arranges flowers. No loosey goosey English Garden bouquets with a sprig of this and bunch of that. Hers are always perfectly proportioned, symmetric and, very often, single-hued.
“You could call it that,” I say. “Family is a mix of doomsday preppers, cult-like religion and prison camp. Very little contact with the outside world.”
“Sheriff, this is going to hit the news. I need to call Ida’s sister, Ruth.”
He gives me a knowing look. He hates making family notifications. No one likes to. It’s the worst part of the job. But one of the most important parts.
I get back to the office. It’s stone cold quiet, except for the hum of our relic of a refrigerator—Harvest Gold—which is like an outboard motor on the other side of a lake. You don’t hear it unless you mistakenly hear it, and then, it’s all you hear. I settle in at my desk and once more dial Ruth Turner, on a number that she doesn’t want me to use.
Unless I really have to.
Her sister being murdered by her husband qualifies in anyone’s book.
&n
bsp; There is no local police station or sheriff department in 150 miles. I can’t send an officer in time to tell her in person, as customary in cases like this, as it will be picked up by the media pretty soon.
I dial the 208 number she gave me.
A man answers. “Who gave you this number?”
I’d have preferred hello. The man’s voice is gruff and dismissive. I’m thinking that Ruth might have the same issue with her hand-picked husband as Ida. I decide not to tell him that Ruth had come out to Port Townsend to see me. Maybe he didn’t know.
Like the way she hid wearing mascara.
“Mr. Turner, I’m Detective Megan Carpenter from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Washington. I have some news I need to tell Mrs. Ruth Turner. There’s some urgency here.”
“Tell me,” he says.
“She reported her sister missing, so it’s my duty to speak with her.”
“You can tell me. I’ll tell her.”
“It’s the law, sir.”
It wasn’t but Mr. Turner was acting like the biggest ass in the Gem State. Maybe the whole Pacific Northwest.
“It’s not the way we do things in Idaho, miss.”
“Detective, please.”
There’s a slight pause. He says something under his breath, but the refrigerator hum cancels his epithet.
“Ruth, get over here. Some detective in Washington is on my phone. Be quick about it. Someone might be calling for me.”
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Turner,” I say, “there is no easy way to give news like this to anyone.”
“Yes.”
“Is there someone there to be with you?” I purposely act like Mr. Turner isn’t even an option, because honestly, in my heart I doubt that he is.
“My husband and my oldest daughter are here.”
Her voice is cracking. She knows part of what’s coming. The other part, I doubt she could even conceive of it.
“Ruth…” I say.
She starts crying before I can say any more, and I hear a young woman hurrying to her, asking what’s wrong. I also hear Mr. Turner telling her to lower her volume. It’s interfering with whatever he’s watching on TV.
Her questions come in bursts between guttural sobs.
“What happened? Is Merritt in the hospital?”
I wish with all my heart that I was there with her.
“I’m sorry, Ruth. The evidence is that she was murdered. Merritt is still missing.”
Silence.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she says, trying to pull herself together. “I am. I am. This is such a shock.”
The phone drops to the floor.
“I’m here, Mother.”
It’s the girl’s voice.
“Oh Eve,” Ruth answers as she gets back on the phone.
“Do you think Merritt has something to do with her… her… death?”
“We’re searching for him now. Yes, we do.”
I let that soak in a moment and she doesn’t react to it. The walls around the Wheatons and Turners are high and seemingly impenetrable.
“Joshua and Sarah?”
“A social worker is with them now. They are in a world of hurt, but they are being looked after until things get sorted out with the judge.”
She doesn’t ask about any of that.
Again silence.
I fill the pause with a change in topic.
“They’re arranging a green burial for your sister.”
“I don’t know what that is,” she says.
I tell her, seeming like an expert, when I knew nothing much about it until a few hours ago.
“Oh,” she says. “My sister,” she says, before letting out a cry, “would have liked that. She loved nature and all of God’s wonderments.”
It is an odd response; however, these are odd people.
“All right then,” I say.
“Eve and I will be there. Nothing—and no one—could stop me. She was everything to me.”
I say goodbye and hang up.
No one. She meant her husband, of course. Everything to her? And she hadn’t seen her in years?
I haven’t seen my brother in years. It’s not for lack of trying. Maybe Ruth’s husband forbade it, and only now did she have the courage to break away.
Good for her.
The county plat map of the Snow Creek area stares up at me from my desk. I take a yellow marker and circle where the body was found on the logging road. I put an X through the locations of the various neighbors’ land holdings. I find a pink marker and I draw the only way that Merritt Turner could have taken his truck to dump his wife’s body. The properties are not that far apart as the crow flies. In reality, they bunch up at the logging road. I ponder that. I’d been thinking that he had brought a bike or something to ride away from the scene. Or had another vehicle stashed up there.
The kids said there was no car missing other than the pickup.
He easily could have walked out of that remote area and worked his way down through the forest and even into town. The plat map shows that, if he did, he passed through property owned by Dan Anderson or Amy and Regina Torrance.
I weight that for a moment. Dan never mentioned anything. So I scratch him off the list. But the women. No one has seen either Amy or Regina for awhile.
I take a deep breath. Having done what he did to his wife, literally from head to toe, I doubt there’s nothing Merritt Wheaton wouldn’t do.
Steal a car.
Break in a house to hide out.
Or maybe something worse.
As I’m pondering all this, a news alert from the Leader appears on my phone. I click the link.
Murder Mystery in the Woods of Snow Creek
A woman’s body was found by two Bigfoot hunters in the vicinity of the abandoned Puget Logging tract north of Snow Creek.
She has been identified as Ida Wheaton, 40, of Snow Creek Rd. Ms. Wheaton was reported missing by a relative earlier this week, according to sources.
Her husband, Merritt Wheaton, 53, is missing.
The couple left Snow Creek more than a month ago to volunteer at an orphanage in Mexico. They told their two children that they would be gone several weeks, taking time to drive down the West Coast.
A search was made of the Wheaton family farm and property earlier today. Several items were seized as possible evidence.
Bernadine Chesterfield, Jefferson County victim’s advocate, spoke on behalf of the family tonight.
“These kids have been traumatized,” Chesterfield said. “They are dealing with an unimaginable amount of pain. Please respect their privacy as they conduct a memorial service tomorrow afternoon.”
I roll my eyes upward. Of course, Bernadine is the source. She’s always on the edge of violating county privacy rules. I don’t even have to call her to find out what tactic she employed to get in the news, so she could send the link to her Coast Guard son and candlemaker daughter.
“The kids wanted me to let the community know of their loss and memorial service. You know how misleading social media can be.”
She’s always thinking of others.
Twenty-Five
I take the tape recorder with the next tape to bed. I’m too tired to sit at the kitchen table. Its proximity to my room-temp wine hasn’t been helping matters. I undress and put on my Portland State University T-shirt. I haven’t donned it for quite some time, and I wonder if my subconscious is working on everything I do.
Portland State University is where I was treated by Dr. Albright, of course. The shirt is pulling me back there in its own way.
I don’t make friends because I was trained not to trust people.
I don’t cook because my mother used me like a slave.
I don’t even own a TV because, when I did, certain things triggered me a little. All right, a lot. Hair dye, for one. A KitKat candy bar commercial. It’s the little things that add up. Those things treat my body like a voodoo doll, poking me un
til I cry out.
Silently, of course.
I know the work that I do is a kind of life-long atonement for the sum of what I did. Who I really am.
The poison that circulates in my blood.
I lay my head on the pillow and look around; my eyes scrape past the recorder. The room is pale blue, kind of a soothing robin’s egg hue. The ceiling is high and every time I look up, I make a mental note to get a broom and stepladder, so I can swipe away the cobwebs. On my dresser there are two pictures of my brother, one taken at our aunt’s place in Idaho. Another when he graduated from high school. On the back is a note that was meant to wound me.
Rylee, I’m graduating today. You are not here (as always). My foster parents are nice people, but they don’t replace my family. Thanks for taking all of that away from me.
Hayden
I don’t even have to pop the photograph from the frame to read it anymore. I’ve memorized every single word of it.
He hates me.
I don’t doubt that I deserve it.
And still I check my email twice a day to see if he’s written back.
On the wall next to the door with its vintage crystal knob is a painting of a sailboat. It came with the place. Sometimes I imagine myself on that boat, sailing away, never to return.
I press Play and I turn off the light next to my bed. I lie there, like a child listening to a scary story. My story.
Dr. Albright starts things off with a reminder that she is on this journey with me. That I’m strong and that I’m on a pathway to healing. I remember wanting to believe her so much, but also thinking it was complete bullshit. That I’d never be fully healed. She tells me to close my eyes and bring her with me. Hearing her voice so full of concern makes me think of the Wheaton kids and how alone they must be feeling. How huge their tragedy is and how it will forever be etched on their minds. How I hope they will find someone like Karen Albright to help them move through life.
Dr. A: Tell me about finding Aunt Ginger.
Me: It was flat-out weird. I’d never even heard of her and Hayden and I were about to knock on her door. I didn’t know how we’d feel. How she would feel. Or even if she knew about me and Hayden. So much of our lives had been compartmentalized. I remember standing outside, looking at her gray and blue two-story. It was tucked into the base of a ridge down from the mountains. It was old. But in decent repair. I’d seen an episode of Dr. Phil in which some kids went looking for their birth parents only to find out they were living in a rusted-out trailer on some riverbank somewhere. The kids on the show had decided that their adoptive parents weren’t so bad after all.