by Gregg Olsen
“You did good,” she says.
I’m gasping for air in the dirt and feeling as stupid as I’ve ever felt in my life.
Despite the seriousness of Joshua’s injury, it’s a set-up. She used Joshua as bait. And we fell for it.
We should have known.
I should have known.
Blood from Joshua’s wound puddles.
“We know you are Ellie Burbank,” I say. “By this time tomorrow, everyone will know your face and your name. So stop. Stop now. Stop before you lose everything.”
Ellie seethes. “You stupid bitch. I’d rather have the nothing I have now than anything I’d ever had before. I don’t care about anything that people like you think is precious. Even freedom.”
She finally locates the key.
“Get up, Josh. Get over here.”
He slithers in the dirt, making guttural sounds.
She twists to give him the key, and I know it’s my chance and I make a rookie move.
I grab at the knife. Stupid. My hand is cut, and I yell out in pain. I turn myself over with such ferocity that it pushes her up and over to Joshua, who lets out a gurgled scream.
And then, a staccato, guttural, “I didn’t kill her.”
Ellie slides off of Joshua. Her eyes appear frozen and empty.
“He raped me,” she cries. “He kept me prisoner. I thought he was a good guy. He’s a monster.”
I know who the monster is.
She’s young. Pretty. Evil.
“Nice try,” I say as Sheriff and the other officers converge around us, the blood oozing from my hand and Joshua’s body turning the dust into a red mud.
Sheriff, panic in his eyes, pulls me away and immediately stems the bleeding with a Miller Highlife graphic T found in the barn.
And as he does, I look down at Joshua.
He’s alive.
“Someone stop his bleeding,” I say.
The first ambulance roars away, its sirens and flashing red and white lights amplifying the horror of the scene as it careens toward the hospital.
I sit on the back of the second ambulance. I’m at once embarrassed and proud. I know I did good investigative work. My failure was in letting my guard down. I watch Mindy lead the others collecting evidence, securing the scene. They walk with precision, avoiding any area that might reveal additional evidence.
Sheriff pours some hot coffee from a thermos into a paper cup. I hold the cup in my now bandaged hand. I don’t need a cardboard sleeve to protect me from the heat. That’s about the only thing good about my injury.
“He’s going to make it,” he says.
“Good,” I answer. “Dying would be the easy way out.”
He knows my comment is about justice, not a bitter statement—a comment born of my own background.
“How are you, Megan?”
“Okay. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
I down the coffee. It tastes good and I know I need a boost of caffeine. I refused pain meds because I want to be here in this moment. Right now. The girl on the portrait posed with her brother is on my mind.
“Sarah Wheaton,” I say. “We need to find her.”
“Or her body?” he asks.
I study the car holding Ellie from my ambulance perch.
“Right. There was a third party’s blood, a female, on the evidence we processed. Joshua said he didn’t kill her. Was that her, Sarah?”
“All good questions,” he says.
I get up. “Excuse me, Sheriff.”
I walk over to the cruiser transporting Ellie for processing at the Jefferson County Jail. I tap on the window and ask the officer if I can have a minute or two with her.
“Alone.”
He tries to dissuade me from what he considers a dangerous situation.
“She tried to kill you.”
I want to tell him others have too, but I don’t. It would only add speculation from some of my peers that I come from a fucked-up situation. No parents. No family. Car wreck? Murder–suicide? I’ve heard the gossip.
And I know they couldn’t even imagine.
“But she failed,” I say instead. “Just a few minutes, okay?”
He gets out and I slide into the driver’s seat. I look at her only through the rearview mirror. Her face is a grid through the steel mesh that separates us. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence.
I pull the phone from my pocket and turn it on. Without turning around, I hold it so the screen faces her. The wallpaper is a picture of Joshua. Most of his face is hidden by the small tiles of her collection of apps. Near the center left of the screen is the unmistakable “M” from the beer logo shirt he wore the first day we were out here.
And she wore it the next time. It stuck in my mind and I might have figured out their relationship without the phone.
And without Bernie’s discovery.
Her eyes flicker a little, but she betrays no discernible emotion.
“Techs will unlock it and we’ll follow your text trail, Ellie. It will lead us to Josh, and you know where else it will go, don’t you?”
She’s stone.
“You killed your parents.”
“You don’t know anything, Detective. You’ll see.”
She’s defiant. She’s playing tough, but I see behind the mask. I see a sociopath who knows she’s undone. She knows that there will be no way to wriggle out of it.
“Where’s Sarah?”
Her eyes meet mine directly for the first time.
“I wouldn’t know. They were all gone when Joshua took me.”
“Took you?”
She releases an impatient sigh to let me know she’s frustrated.
“That’s what I said, Detective. He held me captive. He raped me. I was a prisoner.”
She’s sticking to her story. A flimsy one at best.
“The phone, Ellie. What you’re saying won’t hold up. You know that, right? We’ll follow the trail you left on this phone.”
She watches as Mindy’s van pulls away. Next, the ambulance pulls out.
The officer taps on the window.
“I really don’t care what you think or what you find,” she says as I turn around to face her. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“It’s far from over, Ellie. For you, this is only the beginning.”
Forty-One
My hand needed five stitches. I’m grateful that I wasn’t injured elsewhere. I don’t want the doctors at the hospital to see the other marks on my body, scars that were waypoints on my fight for survival. It’s the same reason I don’t go to the beach. I wonder if anyone has noticed that and assumes that I have some kind of body dysmorphia or am a cutter.
I would actually love for either of those to have been my problem.
At least those would have been options of my own doing.
Very little evidence was recovered from the Wheaton residence and outbuildings. Bernie’s belief that Joshua and Ellie were having sex, however, was backed up by DNA collected from Josh’s bed. It appeared that Ellie brought nothing from her old life when she arrived in Snow Creek. A burn barrel in the yard, however, was filled with some of the remains of Ida and Merritt’s clothing. The wedding photo that had been reframed was there too.
“Ellie’s got a lawyer from Bellevue,” Sheriff says as he scoots into my office with the daily paper and a couple of blueberry muffins his wife made.
“She says it’s the lemon that makes them.”
I smile. He’s probably eating his third muffin of the day.
“A lawyer from Bellevue,” I repeat. “Sounds pricey.”
“Rolex-type guy.”
“Aunt Laurna?”
He takes a big bite. “Yeah.”
I shake my head and put down the muffin. “Her niece killed her sister and brother-in-law.”
“The aunt refuses to believe it.”
“She’ll be in for a rude awakening when we unlock the phone.”
“Could be. Remember, it’s not our
case. It’s Clallam’s.”
Of course, I know that.
“Right. We’re opening the phone for our case, and if we stumble onto something that’ll help Clallam, we’re good with that, right?”
He eats the rest of his muffin.
I dial Laurna right away. She answers after several rings. I don’t even bother with a hello.
“Laurna, what’s going on? You know what Ellie did.”
“Look, Detective, I saw it was you and I wasn’t going to pick up. I am told by Ellie’s lawyer that I shouldn’t talk to any police. It could hurt her case.”
I’m exasperated, and my tone shows it. “What case? You know what she did, Laurna.”
She breathes into the phone.
She’s thinking. Deciding. Maybe preparing a lie.
“Yes, I do. I know. She said she was abused. I believe her. I have a way of connecting with her that allows me to see through the veil of any lies she might be telling.”
My heart sinks lower and lower. I don’t even know what to say. I hold my tongue and let her finish.
“She’s my sister’s child. I don’t have any of my own. Surely you can understand that every young person’s life is worth fighting for.”
I want to tell her she’s right, the kind of PC remark that fills Twitter when people are outraged.
I don’t.
“Take care, Laurna,” I say, hanging up.
Good luck with that, I think.
Forty-Two
At 11 p.m. my phone pings on my nightstand.
I think I was asleep, but I’m not sure. I’m in that state somewhere between thinking about the events of that day and revisiting old wounds by facing things that I thought better forgotten.
It’s Marley Yang from the crime lab.
“Detective Carpenter, my techs got the Burbank girl’s phone opened. Tons there. Sending what I have now. Want to go over it in person. More work to do. Need direction. I’ll be at your office at 7:30.”
I resist calling him back right then. He’s got small kids and a wife that can only be so understanding. Work at the crime lab is never a nine to five.
At least it shouldn’t be when there is so much at stake.
I open the first of several folders and plow through the content as quickly as I can. I read the texts between Ellie and Joshua as fast as possible. I’m no longer tired. I’m energized. Morning can’t come quick enough.
Finding out the truth is the shot of adrenalin that keeps detectives going where others never tread.
Truth, it turns out, is our drug of choice.
Marley Yang is sitting in a state vehicle in our parking lot when I arrive at seven. He swings open his door, lugs a big black briefcase and hurries to greet me. He’s short and compact, a wisp of facial hair on his chin and a head of hair that anyone—man or woman—would envy. Longish, black, luxurious, thick with bunched up locks in the back that indicates he wears it in a ponytail or, God forbid, a man bun.
He’s also carrying a tray of coffees.
I smile at the balancing act.
“Your files kept me up half the night. Coffee is not only appreciated, but desperately needed, Marley.”
He indicates a clear envelope nestled in the coffee tray. Inside, a flash drive.
“Champagne might be in order.”
“I like champagne. Sheriff does too.”
Sheriff meets us inside and we head to a darkened conference room while Marley sets up the zip and turns on the projector. He opens his briefcase and sets out a stack of printouts. It’s thick. More than three hundred pages. Details of what he’ll be showing. He told me one time that if he could do anything other than working for the state crime lab, he’d be a professional poker player.
He loves holding his cards to his vest before the big laydown.
I don’t mind.
“There are literally thousands of pages of content on the phone. Texts and photos. Also, the history of Ellie’s web search and downloads, too.”
“That sounds daunting,” Sheriff replies.
“It is, though I’ve organized the content to what would be most helpful right now. After we go through it, we’ll take your direction on how to proceed as you build your cases.”
“Cases?” Sheriff asks.
I know Marley dropped that on purpose, so I give him a nod as the screen lights up.
“Let’s start with the text messages first,” I say. “I was up all night reading them.”
Marley nods. “Yeah, Ellie was a practiced texter. Maybe world class. Hardly a day went by until three weeks ago that she didn’t text several hundred times.”
“My thumbs hurt just thinking about that,” I say. “Did you organize by date or recipient?”
He opens a folder on the screen.
“Both.”
Sheriff gives me a look of approval.
He likes where this is going too.
“I focused on the primaries that Detective Carpenter noted in her report. Tyra Whitcomb’s number was aligned with contact name Ty. She was a primary focus of Ellie’s attention on social media and texting for quite some time.”
He indicates the screen. “Most of the texts were of this nature.”
The screen is filled with a grouping of texts.
Hey girl what’s up? Want to hang out?
Want pizza?
Got new shoes.
“I call these mundane,” Marley says.
“I call them inane,” I reply.
“Right. So there are literally thousands of these. The girls chatting back and forth about clothes, podcasts, celebrities. They come at all hours of the day and night.”
“I thought you couldn’t text in class,” Sheriff says.
“You couldn’t smoke on school grounds back in the day either,” I say, a gentle nudge to his old habit. “Besides, Ellie was homeschooled. And Tyra didn’t strike me as a girl who cared much about her education anyway.”
“Right,” Marley says. “All of that’s true. And all of that changed early in the summer.”
Like a novel reader cheater, I’m skipping through the pages he’d handed out.
“How so?” Sheriff asks.
Marley opens the second folder on the screen.
“Again, all of these are between Tyra and Ellie. In the spring the subject of their parents comes up more frequently. Mostly from Tyra who complains about how her dad is always belittling her mother.”
He points to a group of messages on the screen from Tyra to Ellie.
It’s my job to be a bitch to her. Not his. Jesus! My dad won’t let up.
My dad’s the same way. My mom’s no better.
This isn’t about you. God, can’t you just shut up and let me vent. Seriously.
Sorry. I was just saying.
“It goes on and on like that for some time. Tyra going off on her mom being weak. Fat. A loser. Just every ugly thing she can come up with. And by the way, she’s skilled at trashing her mom.”
“That fifth one.” I walk to the screen and point. “This message from Tyra took my breath away last night.”
Dad hates her as much as I do. He wishes she’d just die. Last night she was so drunk and messed up on her pills when she passed out, we just left her on floor. She puked and everything.
I return to my seat. “Two weeks before the boating accident.”
Sheriff speaks up. “That’s not our case.”
“Right,” I say. “I know they are related.”
“She’s right,” Marley confirms.
“This text.” I run a yellow highlighter through the words on the printout in front of me.
Dad got Mom more meds. Maybe that will fix things.
“That’s a week before the accident. Troy Whitcomb got new meds. How? Clallam told me that she was only on Paxil and Ambien. They couldn’t account for the Oxy. Troy had a bad shoulder from golf. He had Oxy, but he barely used any.”
I’m flipping through the date sequences. Marley makes a face yet gives me what I need�
�room right then.
“And here,” I say, tapping my marker against the paper. “This one is two days before the accident.”
My dad wishes she’d just die. I told him that wishing for something is stupid. I told him to divorce her. He said that he’d lose half of what we have, and I’d have to live with her. Fuck that.
“She killed her own mother?” Sheriff says.
I shake my head and look at Marley.
“No,” I say, “her father did.”
“I can see that, I guess. But…”
“Right, not our case.”
Marley isn’t annoyed. He actually seems to be enjoying the exchange between me and Sheriff as we untangle what happened to Tyra’s mom and what happened to Ellie’s parents. It wasn’t as I’d thought. Tyra hadn’t hooked her friend into a let’s get rid of our parents’ murder scheme, after all.
“It inspired Ellie,” I say.
Marley runs his fingers through that amazing hair of his and nods.
“Let’s break down Ellie’s communication first with Tyra, then Josh,” he says, closing the Tyra folder and opening one named Ellie.
“Tyra wrote thousands of texts to all sorts of people, mostly during the period before her mother died, including to Ellie; Ellie, on the other hand, had only two main points of contact—Tyra and Josh. Ninety percent of Ellie’s communication with Tyra was in answer to a text from Tyra. In fact, many of her texts directly to Tyra were unanswered or only responded to with an emoji.”
“The lazy way to respond to someone,” I say, looking over at Sheriff who sends a thumbs up or a smiley face to most of what I text to him.
“Right,” Marley says, “but also passive. You see, Ellie was actually the alpha here. It was Ellie who encouraged Tyra, supported her. I expect a psychologist looking into their relationship would see what was really going on.”
Sheriff looks up from his papers, lowers his eyeglasses. “I don’t get it. Tyra was hating her mother all on her own.”