by T. R. Kelly
“I’ll talk to the sheriff,” Harvey said, “but it’s just another stolen car at an extremely busy time. Besides, it was dark. Navy blue could have easily been seen as black. Look, I know everybody loves that family and all, but I’ve got a couple of other rather pressing issues. The heat is coming down every which way for me to make some major progress, at least somewhere. We sure as hell aren’t getting inundated with useful material, especially in the Rice homicide.”
I pushed back in the booth and rested my head against the wall. “I’m surprised you didn’t mention Linn’s situation in that mix.”
Harvey leaned in over the table, reducing the distance between our faces. A shower of rain crashed against the window, but he ignored it.
“The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office called last night about eleven p.m.,” he said. “Some waterfront owner near Fort Ward State Park on Bainbridge Island was clearing driftwood after dinner. Afraid the stuff was going to get into his boathouse. He’s tossing limbs and kelp, comes across a vinyl bag with one handle. Zips it open and finds a leather basketball. The guy yanks the ball out and finds some loose change, a set of keys, and a wallet belonging to one Linnbert Oliver. Driver’s license, coupla credit cards, few bills. I sent one of our guys down to pick it up. He should be back by now.”
My shoulders tensed. “No body?” I said, bracing myself for the worst.
“No body.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
1:30 p.m., Tuesday, February 8, 1982
I was in no mood to preview property, but I’d known the potential buyer most of my life. Plus, I could use the drive to clear my head. The address was on a road that angled away from Highway 530, but I didn’t know how much of it was paved. Given the amount of water on the city’s streets, I figured it best to drive the old Travelall. As I reached the top of a grade overlooking the I-5 bridge, I could see an ominous storm front moving in from Puget Sound. Great call on the truck.
I headed east on I-530, past the three-mile stretch of dairy farms and corn mazes into downtown Arlington, then turned left at the Fountain Drive-In and followed the highway sign toward Trafton, Possum, and Darrington. The rain slowed momentarily, giving the sun a chance. The two combined to offer a brilliant arching rainbow whose pot of gold appeared to be securely planted on Mount Pilchuck’s northern shoulder.
Trafton, Washington, is a wide spot on I-530, just this side of a highway sign that reads Resume Speed. The burg is composed of two longtime establishments: Olson’s Saw Shop—not a bad place in Snohomish County to buy a seasoned cord of wood any time of the year—and the Trafton General Store. Just off the highway on the Jim Creek Road sits tiny Trafton Elementary and its century-old schoolhouse.
I passed aging double-wides, tight little Craftsmen houses, and a tiny brick Tudor on ten acres with a hand-painted Fill Dirt Wanted sign. Nails had rusted through the plywood, leaving brown streaks in the white paint as if dumped soil had creeped up the sign. Most structures were in better condition than I expected and a good distance from the noise of the highway and far enough out of the flood plain that the nearby Stilly rarely soaked their front yards.
The property for sale was a vacant, cute Lincoln-log structure on a couple of well-kept acres with raised flowers and more than a dozen mature alder and maple trees. The well-landscaped driveway zigzagged to a two-car garage, partially hiding the main entry from the road. A newer composition roof with two skylights topped the house. The heavily lacquered wooden door with two etched glass panes beamed as if framed by lights. I parked on a concrete slab adjacent to the garage that cried out for a basketball hoop and followed a stone-lined bark trail. It wound through a low, compact meadow until it ended near an old green bench littered with maple leaves overlooking a swirling creek. I imagined an older man teaching his son or grandson to cast from the bank below the bench in late autumn, a warm afternoon sun breaking through the yellow-turning alders. It certainly would be a setting my potential customer would enjoy seeing. It was the sort of spot I would’ve loved to have shared with Linn Oliver.
I found no key, but a walk around the house told me all I needed to know. It was beautiful and in move-in condition. All this place needed was groceries. I jumped back into the truck, eager to show the property to my dad’s friend, especially before other local agents found out about it. I rambled up to the payphone outside the Trafton General Store and called the office for the numbers of other possible prospective buyers.
“Say, have you spoken with Cookie?” Peggy said. “She was looking for you a little bit ago.”
“I’ll get back to her soon, but I need your help right now. Can you go over to my desk and grab the Sauk file and the Trafton file?”
She put me on hold and, when the music cut off, I was surprised to hear Cookie’s voice.
“Coach! Thank god you called. You’ve got to get up to Lake Wilhelmina right away.”
“Might have to wait. I’ve got somebody who’ll be really interested in this new Trafton listing. It’s a cute--...”
“Forget the frickin’ Trafton listing! The septic guy called from the Mountain Market. He was able to start the Dolan job today.”
“That’s great. I was hoping he could get up there today or tomorrow. Maybe we can get the deal to close early.”
“You might ... Coach ...”
“I might what? What’s the matter?”
“Might prepare yourself.” She snuffed and wept, struggling to gain enough breath to speak. The phone receiver seemed to be muffled by her hand, or periodically held to her chest. “I’m so ...’’
“What?” I yelled, wondering how much I was missing in the clamor of the passing logging trucks. The dirty spray from their trailer tires nearly hit the sides of the red Plexiglas booth. “Tell me what the hell’s going on!”
There was a moment when neither of us spoke.
“It’s Linn, Ernie,” Cookie whimpered. She took a short, staccato breath. “His clothes clogged the little pump truck’s line. The driver’s gotta go back, couldn’t finish the job because his tank was full from another stop. But ...”
“No way. How does he know it was Linn’s stuff? Could be anybody’s clothes.”
Cookie sniffled and continued in a barely audible whimper. “It’s his gas-station shirt. The one with Linn stitched on the lapel? Black work shoe, too. Harvey and the sheriff are headed up. But there’s ...”
“He’s been working at that Shell station for years,” I said, grasping for some level of calm and logic. “Those things could have been sitting in there for ages. Dumped in there a long time ago.”
There was another pause, this one long enough that I thought the call was lost. “Hey! I screamed. “Cookie, are you still there . . ?”
“There’s more, Coach,” she said. “They found ...”
“Speak up! I can hardly hear you. It’s loud, raining, and I’m on the side of the freaking road.”
“A FOOT ... Coach, they fished a man’s foot out of the septic tank. Apparently it’s been severed just above the ankle. It’s hard to tell.”
“What? Was there any more that would show ...”
“The pump trucker thought he had vacuumed up another shoe. He told me more than he was supposed to, but cops are going to somehow sift through his load up at the Whatcom County plant and go back tomorrow. Oh, Ernie, I am so sorry.”
I didn’t remember dropping the receiver, but the next thing I knew, it swung slowly beneath the Yellow Pages on its silver coiled line. I felt hauled from a warm and treasured place, disconnected from anything safe and tangible. There was no strength in my knees and thighs. I propped the top of my head and hands on the wall above the phone to stay upright.
**
In the truck, I yanked an old white towel from behind the seat and wiped the tears from my face and the rain from my hair. I sat silently behind the wheel, feeling the cloth’s cool softness on my cheeks and mouth while weighing the rugged possibilities of the late afternoon.
Moments later, I pulled
out onto Highway 530 and headed farther east into the Stillaguamish Valley toward Darrington, taking solace in the snow along the ridgelines of the Cascade Foothills. I remembered as a boy riding in my father’s woody station wagon, my wonderment of what could be found just beyond those ridges, the mirror-lakes, golden meadows and fort-like beaver dams on trickling creeks. Now, the naive awe had turned to a stark, unconscionable reality so foreign to any and every experience that I’d associated with the region. When I reached the Possum Road cutoff, that reality suddenly was just over the hill.
The going was brutal through the switchbacked roads, requiring all my attention. But as the truck rumbled up abend, I again lost my hold on the present. My cherished times with Linn—fishing the Stilly, critiquing opponents, downing pizza at Tony’s—surfaced like a string of consecutive baskets in a fourth-quarter comeback. I recalled the number of times Linn Oliver had come out of nowhere to bail our team out of nearly impossible situations. I yearned for just one more reprieve, but my gut filled with the familiar emptiness of loss.
Soon after, the lake was on my left, calm and deep blue. Covered boats sat on rusted trailers in driveways. Through the evergreens, I spied a lonely fisherman, hunched in green rain gear, one arm poking out under his hooded slicker. The sight made me shiver, despite the warm air blowing from the truck’s dashboard heater. As I approached the corner of the sandspit and the stretch of land where the community of Madrona once prospered, I was startled by the number of police and emergency vehicles, flashing lights, and the volume of yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the road.
Harvey Johnston huddled with two other detectives in the middle of the road, curiously out of place in trench coats and ties. The sun was long gone and the trio tried to warm themselves by wringing their hands and rubbing their sleeves. Harvey saw me approaching the barricade and motioned to the officer on duty to allow me to pass. As I walked closer, I overheard a cop speaking into a portable receiver.
“Yes, there was a crowbar in there, too. Yeah, what we saw was well-preserved because it had sunk to the bottom of the tank.”
Harvey looked into my eyes for a moment, then turned his face toward the ground, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his charcoal overcoat.
“Just tell me what happened, Harvey. From the start of the afternoon.”
He sighed and glanced toward the lake. “The pumper came up here with a pretty heavy load from another stop. Thought this was a small job. He couldn’t take all that’s here and he’s gotta come back and pump late tonight.” He turned and faced me. “He did suck up a bunch of clothes that apparently belong to Linn. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow, but there’s little doubt that they’re his. I can’t tell you how ...”
“What else, Harvey? Don’t string me along here. What else did they find?”
He leaned back on his heels and folded his arms. “Couple of body parts. They took a foot and what looked like a ring finger to the lab. White-coat boys just took them to town. I wished like hell the damn driver would have had the sense to call us first instead of Cookie. Said he felt obligated to contact both real estate brokers because they hired him..”
I could barely breathe and felt slightly dizzy. I finally managed to exhale. “You’re that certain it’s Linn?”
“Seems clear,” Harvey said, staring off over my shoulder. “But like I say, we’ll know more after the tech guys go through tests. Got his Shell Oil shirt.. Also a hoop jersey, some old black sweat pants. Stuff was pretty nasty comin’ out of there.”
“What tests will they do tonight, just to be sure?”
“Depends what time they can get back to the lab and get started. Once they filter through the material, we’ll see what we have and go from there. We’ll eventually get started on the radiographs and bring in the dentist–the forensic odontologist. Processing any teeth we get first can speed up the paperwork. Most of that stuff’s SOP.”
I shuffled my feet, the soft mud sucking at my boots. “Then what?”
“Our guys will also have to sort through the stuff he collects late tonight. It’s going to be a long evening for a lot of people.”
Arnold Dawson sloshed over to me and pulled the lid of his Smokey hat down closer to his nose. “Looks like we won’t be needing your investigative skills any longer, Coach,” he murmured. “As valuable as they were. Now, if you wouldn’t mind moving out of the way, this is an official crime scene. Tell you the truth, I never considered you even close to being official anyway.”
While I felt like breaking his nose, there was no reason to waste time and energy on the likes of Dawson. I turned and stepped toward a stand of evergreens on the other side of the road. I could feel the closeness of my old grief, like a massive swamp lingering just beyond the trees. Then I caught myself and turned and faced the growing turmoil of vehicles and officials. “Is there anything that I can do for you, Harvey?”
“Absolutely. You can get me a few minutes with Ronnie Garcia and Bart Knight. Nobody has seen either one of them for a few days. Drove down Knight’s lake driveway earlier, and a Doberman nearly jumped the fence and took my face off. Gate was padlocked. That family has so much property around here he could be anywhere.” He straightened up, narrowed his eyes. “And, that reminds me. Alberto Garcia said you were over there earlier this week asking questions about Ronnie?”
“He’s a former player. Thought I’d see how he was doing.”
“And when you found out he wasn’t there, you continued to interrogate his father?”
“It was a casual visit. We talked about my helping out.”
“You grilled his dad! In his own house! Not exactly on the casual scale.” He shrugged and lowered his voice. “Look, if you want to help, find Bart Knight and Ronnie Garcia and call me immediately. Other than that, I’ll see you in the morning.” He waved a police cruiser down the road and then continued. “I’d like to bring you back up here tomorrow but first I told Sheriff McCreedy we’d start with coffee in town at nine a.m. sharp. I’ll save the specifics for later.”
“Robert Oliver is going to want to come with us. He’s been chomping at the bit to become more involved.
Harvey was silent for a moment and looked around the crime scene. “I did speak with him after our lunch, before I came up here. All of this has really begun to get to him, to all of us.” He kicked at the mud and then stared at me. “I’m going to let him ride with us up here, but I’m not going to tell him what we found today until our guys break down that truck’s entire load. You got that, Ernie? I’m not going to ask a father to ID anything about a son until we know what else was in that tank.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
8 a.m., Wednesday, February 9, 1982
Anxious, restless, and not knowing how long we would be out with Harvey, I drove to the Red Apple Market for donuts and fruit. The banner headline of The Seattle Tribune in the box outside stopped me in my tracks.
Cheese Oliver: The Early Days
I crammed a quarter in the machine, yanked out the top copy, and sat on a pallet of charcoal briquette bags just outside the sliding glass doors. The two-page feature at the back of the sports section was the first of a three-part series on a “Northwest prep basketball legend” by Greg Smithson and contained old photographs of Linn when he was barely bigger than a basketball under the family’s driveway hoop. It also had interviews with elementary school classmates, coaches, and teachers, and it speculated about a secret bout with depression. I wondered when the material I gave him would surface and what he would choose to use. I would soon find out.
The one-paragraph introduction, set in large type, explained how Linnbert “Cheese” Oliver had been the most talked-about high school basketball player in Washington state history and now was missing for a week after his abandoned automobile was found on the Seattle-Bremerton ferry: The state patrol was expected to announce in the next 48 hours that the incident was officially a suicide.
I leaned against the market wall and read on.
By t
he time he was ten, Linnbert Oliver dribbled balls everywhere he went on the sidewalks of North Fork. He pestered his way into pickup games with boys twice his age at Hillcrest Park. On nights after the high school gym was swept and dark, he went home and fired Nerf balls at tiny hoops around the house till way past his bedtime.
As he grew older and stronger, he crafted imaginary championship games in the driveway. According to his siblings, Linn used the garage door as his give-and-go partner, flinging his ball against the wooden wall. Retrieving the ricochet, he would leap and snap off one of the dozens of jump shots he attempted every day. He mentally timed this sequence, first with bounce passes that hit the pavement before each attempt, then with rapid-fire chest passes that gave him little time to catch and shoot. He strove to better his time on every execution. When out of earshot of his siblings, he imitated the voice of veteran Seattle SuperSonics’ announcer Bob Blackburn to describe his exploits before a roaring capacity crowd at the Washington State High School championship game.
“This building has never seen a game like it folks, and the young kid from George Washington is puttin’ on a show! Oliver, on the dribble-drive, cuts off a blockbuster screen and takes the ball ALL THE WAY TO THE HOOP. . ! Just listen to that crowd! Oliver has brought the Fighting Crabs back from twenty-two points down to just three and has all of these people on their feet ...
“Oliver stops, elevates and lets fly with a twenty-four footer, that rattles home at the buzzer! Oh, Lordy! The crowd is going wild. They are mobbing the kid in the middle of the floor. I don’t think I have ever seen a comeback like this one. Whoa, Nellie! What a game folks, for the Washington State championship ... !
A four-column picture anchored the page. It showed Linn and his St. Brendan School teammates, beaming ear to ear, kneeling behind a Catholic Youth Organization championship trophy that was bigger than a few of the kids. Sister Mary St. Germaine, the St. Brendan principal, stood beside her triumphant team.