Snow Creek: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller (Detective Megan Carpenter Book 1)

by Gregg Olsen

  “No. Boating accident,” he replies. “Please don’t bring it up. Tyra was on the boat with her mom when it happened.”

  I nod, but inside all I can think about is the similarity between these two best friends.

  One is a liar.

  The other could be a killer.

  Tyra Whitcomb is gorgeous. Her dark hair has obviously been the work of a stylist. I remember cutting my own hair. I had to. She has bright blue eyes and clear, pale pink skin. She’d be a lovely girl.

  If she ever smiled.

  I introduce myself.

  “My dad says you want to ask me about Ellie.”

  “That’s right. I understand you were close, and I know that my coming here might seem like an unwanted intrusion.”

  Tyra shrugs her perfect shoulders. “It’s fine. I was a wreck when it first happened, but now I’m feeling okay about it. She’s in a better place.”

  She shoots a look of palpable annoyance at her father.

  “Dad, do you need to be here? She wants to talk to me.”

  Troy begins to shuffle into what I presume is the kitchen.

  “All right, but watch your tone, missy,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re getting too big for your britches.”

  “Ah,” Tyra snaps behind her father’s back. “No one says that anymore, just so you know.”

  We finds seats in the living room. It’s decorated in the matchy-matchy style of a bad interior designer or a woman who feasted on every home design and improvement magazine.

  “This room is lovely,” I say.

  “Mom’s work,” Tyra replies, rolling her eyes dismissively. “She never saw an animal print or polka dot she couldn’t live without. I hate it.”

  “Your dad told me about your mom. I’m so sorry.”

  Tyra’s blue eyes go from crystalline to chipped ice. She shifts her body on a zebra-striped armchair. Her fingers quietly gouge at the row of silver studs embedded the length of the armrest.

  “Yes, what happened to her mom, happened to me.”

  She’s cold and defensive.

  “I’ve already told you people that. It’s a coincidence. That’s all.”

  I give her some space. “I’m sure it was,” I say. “And really that’s not why I’m here, Tyra. I’m here to learn more about Ellie. It’s possible that she could be alive.”

  She shakes her head. “She would have called me. We were best friends. In fact, I was her only friend. Her parents kept her practically locked up. She used to be able to go out, and then, bam, her dad gets all weird and he makes her a prisoner.”

  “All weird?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Like all of a sudden, he was in charge of the world. Told her what to wear. That makeup was only for sluts. That kind of thing.”

  “I heard he was strict,” I say, leaving plenty of room for her to continue.

  Tyra’s fingers pick at the studs. I notice now that several are missing.

  “Strict are my parents. Mom was the worst. Dad, I don’t know. He tries to be a friend, but he’s just another know-it-all. Ellie’s mom, Carrie, went along with everything that Hudson wanted. She was weak, like she wasn’t even a person.”

  I’ve decided I really don’t like this girl. I don’t show it.

  “But she was a person, Tyra.”

  She makes a dismissive face. “You know what I mean, Detective. She couldn’t stand on her own. Never stood up for Ellie.”

  I give her a nod. “Tell me more about Ellie.”

  “She was awesome. We used to talk every night. She wasn’t allowed to have a phone, but I got her one and stuck her on our family plan. Told my dad that I needed two phones, one for social and one for school assignments. He never questioned me.”

  “What did she talk about? Did she say anything that gave you cause to worry?”

  Tyra shakes her head. “No. She was fine. I talked to her the night before they went to Lake Crescent.”

  “Did you text or talk?”

  “She’d lost her phone a week or so before, and my dad was being a real prick about getting a replacement. Said I had to learn a lesson or something dumb.”

  I think of the night Ellie argued with Hudson and tossed her phone into the Potters’ backyard.

  That was a week before the lake.

  “Did she say anything about the upcoming trip to the lake?”

  “Like did she say, ‘I’m going to kill my parents and swim away’? No.”

  She’s dug out a stud and is rolling it around her fingertips.

  “Look, Tyra,” I say, losing my patience a little. “This isn’t a joke here. Your friend might be in harm’s way.”

  “I actually don’t care. If she did swim away, she never came back here. Some best friend. It wasn’t exactly as though I didn’t need some support. After what happened to my mom.”

  This girl is unbelievable. I don’t want to start an altercation, but I would like to call her bluff. Instead, I press on.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” I ask, taking it down a notch. “Someone else she’d confide in?”

  “None of us have boyfriends. Yeah, we see boys when we can. We just don’t cling to anyone.”

  “Right,” I say.

  Wrong, I think.

  Tyra tells me that she has to get back to what she was doing.

  “I don’t really have anything else to tell you about Ellie.”

  Her father appears and leads me to the door.

  Just like that.

  Over.

  It’s too dark to look for Ellie’s phone. Ms. Potter would definitely call the Seattle police if she caught me poking around her yard with a flashlight. I look at the time. If I hurry, I can make the ferry. Or I could take the scenic route and cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and get home that way.

  Or I could do what I know I’m going to do.

  Texting is an easier way to lie than leaving a voice message.

  Sheriff Gray is in bed now anyway. I don’t want to wake him.

  I sit in my car and type.

  Missed the last boat and don’t feel like driving around.

  Be in tomorrow late. Will give update then.

  Thirty-Six

  My room at the SeaTac Red Roof Inn has a view of a cemetery and traffic on the busy Pacific Highway, most notorious as the hunting ground of one of our many local serial killers. Gary Ridgway cruised the stretch of highway looking for dates. Dates that he would strangle and pitch in clusters, most notably along the nearby Green River.

  I barely slept, and my face shows it. I’m too young to look this beat-up, tired. I don’t feel tired. In fact, I’m energized by the case. I shower, brush my teeth with a courtesy toothbrush that leaves bristles in my mouth and I dress in the same clothes I wore yesterday.

  It’s the walk-of-shame look, though I’m fifteen years too old for that. And unprepared. I decide to put a change of clothes in the back of the Taurus in future.

  Just in case.

  I don’t imagine that Chantelle Potter is a shift worker and needs to be in the office by seven. I don’t have a warrant and I need her permission to search for the missing phone. It’s 7:30 when I arrive.

  The drapes are open. That means, at least to me, that she’s up.

  As I park, the garage door opens and a Mercedes—of course, what else?—backs out of the driveway. It’s Mr. Potter. He’s older than his wife with a neatly trimmed gray beard and eyes that are golden brown.

  I think of a goat.

  When he sees me, he lowers the driver’s window.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Megan Carpenter. The detective who talked with Chantelle last night.”

  He gives me a nod. “Yeah, very sad about the Burbanks. Nice people. Terrible tragedy.”

  I don’t tell him that I doubt it was a tragedy.

  “Is she home?”

  “She’s always home,” he says, with a touch of irritation. “She’s on her third cup of coffee.”

  I thank him and go to the front door
, as the sound of the garage as it rolls downward plays in the background.

  Chantelle answers right away. She’s dressed to the nines in a sleeveless emerald green dress and shoes on that I know cost more than a week’s pay in Jefferson County. She smiles with recognition.

  “Just like TV,” she says. “You came back for one more thing.”

  “Kind of like that,” I answer.

  She invites me inside and I’m almost certain that none of the midcentury modern furnishings are replicas. Leather, wood, chrome. Mixed with the old are new pieces of steel and glass, electronics too. It’s like a showroom of what people with money covet today.

  We sit in one of those leather and chrome sofas that never look inviting but are very comfortable, and talk over French press coffee.

  I tell her that I came back to look for Ellie’s phone.

  “If that’s okay with you?”

  Chantelle nods while sipping her coffee.

  “No problem,” she says, setting down her cup. “I’d help you look, but I have to meet my friends this morning. It’s something we do once a week.”

  She continues to prattle on about her obligations.

  I continue to covet her shoes.

  “I’ll get out of your way,” I say. “You have things to do.”

  She lets out a sigh. “I do. I don’t know how it is that I’m able to go on, with the loss of my friend and all. I took an extra pill last night. Just so awful to think of Carrie and Ellie that way. Even Hudson. So damn sad.”

  She doesn’t seem sad. She wants to show me she’s grief-stricken as a way of letting me know she’s a very real person. None of her furnishings are fake. But her feelings might be.

  “Very sad,” I say. “Again, I’m sorry for the loss of your friends.”

  I add the “s”, so she won’t correct me and remind me how much she misses Ellie and Hudson.

  “Thank you, Detective.”

  She leads me out to the backyard and points to the bushes.

  “Somewhere over there. I’m sure of it.”

  “Thank you. I’ll let you know if I find it.”

  And off she goes.

  The yard is just like Chantelle. Perfect. The low hedge framing the expansive slate patio is so green and so square-trimmed that, at first, I mistake it for a painted wall. Shrubs are perfectly shaped and there isn’t a weed to be had. Not anywhere. She even has a table displaying a collection of bonsai. As I make my way closer to the fence between the Burbanks and the Potters, I hear Chantelle call out to me.

  I turn around. “Yes?”

  “I dug this out of the garage,” she says. “My son’s. Like just about everything we give Matt, barely used.”

  It’s a metal detector.

  “Sprinklers come on in fifteen. Sorry. I don’t know how to disable them. Good luck, Detective.”

  Wonderful, I think.

  “Thanks,” I call back as she waves goodbye.

  It takes me only a few minutes and I start scanning the landscaping along the fence, first with my eyes, then with the ungrateful Potter boy’s metal detector. I’m sweeping left to right and hoping that the sprinkler system goes off after I find what I’m here for.

  The metal detector is a high-tech magic wand. I will it to help me.

  And it does as I work under an Alaskan cedar along the fence. It buzzes with such ferocity that I nearly let go of it.

  With latex gloves now on, I crouch down, my knees pressing into the moist soil and wicking water to my skin. I’m going to look like a candidate for a detergent commercial, I think. I start crawling under the branches to the spot where the detector alerted. It’s dark under the tree next to the fence. A fortress. I really can’t see. My fingertips find a couple of pinecones before they touch the rectangular edge of what I know before seeing is Ellie’s phone.

  I crawl out with my prize and put it in an evidence bag.

  My heart is pounding.

  And I absolutely look like a candidate for a detergent commercial.

  Just as the sprinklers start hissing, I’m back in my car for the ride home. While the phone from under the bushes is undoubtedly locked, I open the evidence bag and see if I can power it up. Just in case.

  I catch my image in the rearview mirror.

  I have a smile on my face.

  I’m alive.

  I’m doing what I was meant to do.

  My phone pings with a text. I reach for it, knocking Ellie’s between the seat and the console. It’s a message from Dan. I don’t care that he’ll know I’ve read it. I want to see what he has to say.

  I’d be a worse liar than I am if I denied he’d been on my mind.

  Superstar detective. Saw you on the tube.

  Would like to see you. If you don’t answer, that’ll be your answer. Dan.

  I pull over right away.

  Would like to see you too.

  Meeting some friends at Hops @7. Come.

  Nervously, I push SEND. I don’t want to screw up my life by potentially ignoring anything that might be actually good for me. Next I text Mindy and tell her to meet me.

  Safety in numbers.

  She answers back right away and tells me to call her. So I do.

  “I like him,” I say before Mindy says a word.

  “I know you do, but it’s not about that, Megan. It’s about the Torrance case. Not something we’d want to bring up tonight. But wow.”

  She is in full Mindy mode. I miss that. She is a consummate pro but couldn’t mask her sometimes gleeful interest in the macabre. She loves flowers and blood spatter with equal abandon. She wanted to name her shop Pushing Up Daisies though thought better of it.

  “What have you got?” I ask.

  She takes a deep breath and then unloads.

  “The Torrance case is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s reminiscent of the Carl Tanzler case out of Florida in the 1930s.”

  Of course, Florida.

  She goes on to tell me about the obsessive radiology assistant and how he preserved the body object of his affection, Elena Milagro de Hoyos.

  “He kept her in his bed for seven years, like a dead sex slave.”

  “Okay, that’s degusting.”

  “I know,” she says, a little too emphatically, before continuing.

  “Regina Torrance did something very similar to Amy. Her corpse was stuffed with activated charcoal and excelsior and stitched up by, get this, cat gut from an old tennis racket. She removed Amy’s knee and elbow joints and managed to replace them with springs and wire.”

  I think of the wires and how Regina manipulated her wife’s body, but I don’t say anything. I let Mindy wind down, punctuating her stream of information with some wows and terribles of my own.

  “You’re right,” I say. “We can’t talk about that in front of Dan.”

  “Nope,” she replies. “See you tonight.”

  Thirty-Seven

  The office is quiet. Sheriff has been away on school visits out in the county. He loves talking to young people about responsibility and the law. Lately, he told me the other day, it’s been getting tougher to reach kids. In the past couple of years, he’s felt a shift from the police are your friends to distrust and skepticism. Even in places like uber liberal Port Townsend where very little violent crime takes place and where there is no racial profiling—at least none that I’ve heard about—there is a change in the air. Fewer acknowledgments, our blues say, when walking into a store for something after a shift.

  I think of incorrigible and smug Tyra and how she cut me off. I wonder now if she saw me as the “other side” or if she had something to hide herself.

  I sift through the court docket and telephone messages before I write up my interview reports—one for Tyra and one for Chantelle. Sheriff will read them later tonight, and I’ll hit him up with additional details tomorrow morning.

  It’s almost six.

  I look like I’ve slept in my clothes.

  Which I sort of did.

  Out t
he back door and home in sixteen minutes, I turn on the noisy old shower, so it will heat up. I tear off my clothes and let the barely hot water spray over me. Old Victorians are charming only on the outside. Unless one has an endless bank account to remodel. That includes plumbing that doesn’t clang. My mind touches on the last few days and how my old life has melded with the new. The tapes. The case. I can’t stop drawing out the similarities between the Wheaton kids and my own situation at that age.

  I twist the knob and towel off as quickly as I can.

  That my wardrobe isn’t extensive is the understatement of the century—this or the last one. My closet and drawers look like a waiter’s supply outlet. Black and blue cotton slacks, white shirts. Blazers that complete my daily work attire hang like a rogue’s gallery of what not to wear.

  I consider a dress but decide against it. Mindy will be there, and she’ll give me grief later.

  I can hear her now.

  Gee, I forgot you had legs, Megan.

  I put on my most flattering jeans, a white top that at least gives me a tiny bit of sex appeal. Lipstick, and eye makeup and I’m out the door.

  Originally called Hops Ahoy, the bar was supposed to be for the tourist trade. It was all done up with nets, ship’s wheels and enormous black and white blowups of our Victorian seaport. It turned out that the tourists who came here were looking for an authentic experience, one that didn’t try too hard to be a destination but was a worthy one on its own.

  My heart sinks a little when I spy only Mindy sitting at a table in the bar. She brightens the minute she sees me, and I do the same. I know I’m mimicking her reaction right now. But it isn’t as though I’m not thrilled to see her.

  It’s that Dan isn’t there.

  “Am I your chaperone or your excuse to leave?” Mindy asks as she indicates for the waiter to come.

  “Neither.”

  I want a Scotch on the rocks, but I order a chardonnay.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t been interested in a guy for a long time. Dan intrigues me.”

  She sips her wine. “Is it the beard?”