The Bone Box

by Gregg Olsen

  Highest Praise for Gregg Olsen

  Closer Than Blood

  “Olsen, a skilled true-crime writer and novelist, brings back Kitsap County sheriff’s detective Kendall Stark in his fleet-footed novel Closer than Blood.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A cat-and-mouse hunt for an individual who is motivated in equal parts by bloodlust and greed... . Olsen keeps his readers Velcroed to the edge of their seats from first page to last.... By far Olsen’s best work to date.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “An exciting tale ... surprising twists and suspenseful spins ... Olsen keeps the reader hooked.”

  —Genre Go Round

  “Fantastic, awesome ... exciting twists and turns and an explosive, unexpected ending ... the best suspense thriller I’ve read all year!”

  —Friday Fiction

  Victim Six

  “A rapid-fire page-turner.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Olsen knows how to write a terrifying story.”

  —The Daily Vanguard

  “Victim Six is a bloody thriller with a nonstop, page-turning pace.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Olsen is a master of writing about crime—both real and imagined.”

  —Kitsap Sun

  “Thrilling suspense.”

  —Peninsula Gateway

  “Well written and exciting from start to finish, with a slick final twist ... a super serial killer thriller.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  “Gregg Olsen is as good as any writer of serial killer thrillers writing now—this includes James Patterson’s Alex Cross, Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhymes and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter... . Victim Six hooks the reader.... Finely written and edge-of-seat suspense from start to finish ... fast-paced ... a super serial killer thriller.”

  —The News Guard

  Heart of Ice

  “Gregg Olsen will scare you—and you’ll love every moment of it.”

  —Lee Child

  “Olsen deftly juggles multiple plot lines.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fiercely entertaining, fascinating.... Olsen offers a unique background view into the very real world of crime ... and that makes his novels ring true and accurate.”

  —Dark Scribe

  A Cold Dark Place

  “A great thriller that grabs you by the throat and takes you into the dark, scary places of the heart and soul.”

  —Kay Hooper

  “You’ll sleep with the lights on after reading Gregg Olsen’s dark, atmospheric, page-turning suspense ... if you can sleep at all.”

  —Allison Brennan

  “A stunning thriller—a brutally dark story with a compelling, intricate plot.”

  —Alex Kava

  “This stunning thriller is the love child of Thomas Harris and Laura Lippman, with all the thrills and the sheer glued-to-the-page artistry of both.”

  —Ken Bruen

  “Olsen keeps the tension taut and pages turning.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Wicked Snow

  “Real narrative drive, a great setup, a gruesome crime, fine characters.”

  —Lee Child

  “A taut thriller.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Wickedly clever! A finely crafted, genuinely twisted tale of one mother’s capacity for murder and one daughter’s search for the truth.”

  —Lisa Gardner

  “An irresistible page-turner.”

  —Kevin O’Brien

  “Complex mystery, crackling authenticity ... will keep fans of crime fiction hooked.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Vivid, powerful, action-packed ... a terrific, tense thriller that grips the reader.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Tight plotting, nerve-racking suspense, and a wonderful climax make this debut a winner.”

  —Crimespree magazine

  “A Wicked Snow’s plot—about a CSI investigator who’s repressed a horrific crime from her childhood until it comes back to haunt her—moves at a satisfyingly fast clip.”

  —Seattle Times

  ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN

  Fear Collector

  Envy*

  Closer Than Blood*

  Victim Six*

  Heart of Ice

  A Cold Dark Place

  A Wicked Snow

  A Twisted Faith

  The Deep Dark

  If Loving You Is Wrong

  Abandoned Prayers

  Bitter Almonds

  Mockingbird (Cruel Deception)

  Starvation Heights

  Confessions of an American Black Widow

  *featuring Birdy Waterman

  THE BONE BOX

  Gregg Olsen

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Highest Praise for Gregg Olsen

  ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  Fear Collector

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Lori Jones,

  who loves being just a little bit scared

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was an irony in the return address that never failed to elicit a sheepish wince from most anyone who received something postmarked there. Maybe even a sardonic smile. A reaction.

  The town from which the letter had been mailed was Walla Walla, a southeast Washington city with the somewhat ironic nickname “a place so nice they named it twice.” While Walla Walla might be nice—it had a burgeoning wine industry, vistas of ruggedly beautiful landforms, and a state champion youth basketball team—it was known mostly because it was home to the state’s oldest and toughest penitentiary. The most notorious killers and rapists, violent offenders of any kind, were housed in a razor-wire-and-sharpshooter-rimmed complex that was all about doing time, paying for their crimes.

  In her modest Beach Drive rental in Port Orchard, Washington, Kitsap County Forensic Pathologist Birdy Waterman kicked off her sensible shoes, turned the CD player to a Stan Getz track, and rummaged through her refrigerator—a cache of zombie food that indicated a life too busy with things other than cooking. Selecting a Coors Light, she looked out at the water of Puget Sound and watched as something under its shimmery gray surface caught the attention of a flock of gulls. Birdy had seen the address on the envelope dozens of times, of course. But this was a first. It was a letter addressed to her, not one she’d put in the mail to the prison each November when Tommy Freeland’s birthday came around. She instinctively wiped the rim of the beer bottle and took a gulp as Getz’s sax glided through the chilly air of the drafty old beach cottage.

  It was Friday. She had no plans but to eat, go to bed, maybe dream about one of the cases she’d been working—a three-year-old girl whose mother claimed she’d been abducted from the bedroom of their Chico, Washington, home. Tulip Lawson’s remains had been discovered by clam diggers ten days after she’d been reported missing. Little Tulip’s body was now stored in the chiller at the morgue, Birdy’s grim domain.

  The letter sent from the ditto-named town in the southeast corner of the state beckoned. Birdy slid into her new sofa, a Pottery Barn camelback that she’d ordered to fit the smaller space of the old house’s living room. She’d never ordered furniture from
a catalog before—now she was hooked. No more endless browsing. Just click and order.

  She swallowed some more beer and reached for the letter. In a very real way, she’d long hoped to hear from Tommy one day. It was one of the reasons she sent those birthday cards, year after year. Her other reason was deeper—and one she never gave voice to. It was to assuage her guilt a little. It wasn’t that she had done anything wrong. She had told the truth.

  The truth. She’d learned then, at a very young age, that sometimes the consequences of telling the truth are too difficult to bear. Her testimony at her cousin’s trial was one of the key points that had helped send Tommy Freeland to the land of inmates, wineries, and basketball hoops.

  A place so nice they named it twice.

  The letter was typed, which surprised Birdy. She hadn’t known Tommy knew how to type. She really didn’t know much about him at all. He had been a nineteen-year-old high school dropout when he was sent to prison.

  As the sax soared and the gulls circled, Birdy read.

  Birdy, I bet you are surprised to hear from me. Yeah, I got all of your birthday cards and the notes. At first I thought maybe you’d been required by someone to send them. I also thought that maybe you were being cruel and ironic. After a while, I figured you were just being you. I’ve had twenty years to think about what happened to Anna Jo and how it was that I ended up here. I would like to say I’m sorry for all of it, but I can’t because I know I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it. I don’t blame you for what you did. I don’t really blame anyone. I’ve learned a lot about life here in prison and one of the biggest things is knowing that forgiveness is the only way through salvation. You might not be religious, but sometimes forgiveness is something different than God stuff. Anyway, I am not a liar. I am not a murderer. I guess you know that I’ve been up for parole and all they want me to do is admit to killing Anna Jo. I can’t do it. I can’t admit to something I didn’t do. So, I’ve never asked you this. I don’t have any money to ask anyone else. Will you help me? Will you come down here?—I know we’ve never really talked since before the trial. I want to talk to you. I put your name on my visit list. All you have to do is fill out this form and you can come.

  He signed it: Yours, Tommy.

  As Birdy looked down at the visitor’s registration form, two things struck her. One, her eyes were slightly moist. She was no crier. She never had been. There was something about continually seeing the worst that human beings do to each other that forced a person to wall up their emotions. Protection mode, she called it. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt to see a strangled child, a mangled car crash teenager, or a woman beaten to death by her boyfriend. All of those things hurt like hell, but Birdy never cried about them. Not her job to cry, she told herself. Her job was about making sure that the prosecutors had all the evidence they needed to stop the perpetrators from doing it again.

  Birdy dried her eyes.

  The next thing she knew was she was reaching for a pen to fill out the form. It was as if Birdy’s response was completely automatic. There was no dissecting the pros and cons of seeing him. No need to analyze his invitation. And, she knew, it was more than curiosity that would take her there.

  She simply had to see him.

  The rental house on Beach Drive had been built in 1951 and it looked every bit of its vintage—asphalt shingles, aluminum-frame windows, and a screen door that couldn’t stop a sparrow. It was, in the kindest possible terms, cozy. It would take a coin toss to determine which of the two bedrooms was larger. The closets were miniscule. The kitchen had been built at the time when people gathered around a table in a little nook to discuss their days.

  Birdy, at thirty-four, lived alone. She had no one to gather around the built-in nook. While others considered her too smart, too pretty, too wonderful to be single, being single was just fine with her.

  She’d rented the bungalow with the idea that it was a temporary residence and she’d find something bigger, better, and more in keeping with her desires for privacy. She worked with a real estate agent to find a more permanent residence, but didn’t find what she wanted. The gray and white house facing Sinclair Inlet and Bainbridge Island was home. She’d clipped a few ideas from home-decorating magazines in hopes the Seattle owner would eventually decide to sell the house to her. She’d be ready.

  That night before she tucked in, Birdy went into the second bedroom. It was ceiling-high with boxes, books, and furniture that she still hadn’t found a place for since her move from Seattle. She’d planned on setting it up as a guest room, but the need for guests seldom materialized.

  Birdy flipped on the switch and scanned the overstuffed room for the box that held the odds and ends of cases that troubled her. Her father had made the box to hold the tools he used for carving toy figures he sold to tourists for extra money. The container was precious, but so were its contents. She looked inside at the file folders that filled a third of the box, the manila folders protruding like the spine of a dead animal.

  Not all these cases had been failures insofar as the courts were concerned, but something about each of them troubled her. There was the young woman who drowned in a boating accident off Agate Pass—her best friend and husband reportedly had done all they could to save her. The case troubled Birdy not for the facts as presented at the inquest, but for what happened two years later. The best friend and the distraught husband got married, left town, and used insurance proceeds to buy a ranch in Arizona. There had been no evidence to suggest that the woman who drowned had been murdered—at least not at the time of the inquest. Drownings without bruising to show a struggle or wounds to show a major fight were frequently difficult cases for prosecutors. It was never about the drowning, but about what happened before and after.

  Sometimes after was too late.

  Another case that had found its way into the cardboard box involved a teenage girl who was the purported victim of a serial killer. Tara Hanson fit the victimology of the three women who had been killed by a sexual sadist rapist and murderer named Percy Bosworth. She had been the right physical type (slender, blond, short hair). And like the other two victims, Tara had been a bit of a party girl, had lived alone, and had been abducted from a mini-mart—as all of Bosworth’s victims had been.

  And yet Tara didn’t quite fit in. She was like the jigsaw puzzle piece that is just close enough go in a particular spot, even when the imagery—the hot air balloon, the kitten with the ball of yarn, or whatever—doesn’t mesh accurately. Victims one and two were employed by Kitsap mini-marts—Shellee Casper in Silverdale, LeeAnn Tomm at one in Olalla. While Tara’s car was recovered from a convenience store in Navy Yard City, she didn’t work there. Further, Tara lived in Kingston, far north of the location of her purported abduction. All victims had been strangled and posed after they were dumped, but only Tara had been strangled manually. The others were killed with the application of a two kinds of ligature—the first victim was strangled with a bungee cord and the second victim had been murdered with the tie from a hoodie. While the spread of the fingertip bruising left on Tara’s throat was a close match for Bosworth’s, it was troubling that Tara’s case—as Birdy famously and regrettably told a Kitsap Sun reporter “stood out like a sore thumb.” The headline put up by a copy editor with a decidedly wicked streak took the comment further:

  Pathologist Still Coming to Grips With Hanson Case

  There were other cases in the box too, more than twenty. The case that she’d first put into that sad little file was the one involving her cousin Tommy and the murder of Anna Jo Bonners on the Makah Indian Reservation, where Birdy had been raised. At first, the Tommy/Anna file had been there just because Birdy’s own personal history was tied up with that particular crime. Later, as she added cases to the box, she’d wondered if it had been unsettling for another reason—a deeper one.

  Though she never said it out loud, Birdy Waterman had a name for her little cardboard repository of the unsettling, the unfinished. She called it the
Bone Box. Not to anyone else, just herself. That night, she pulled the Bone Box out from the would-be guest room and brought it to her bedside. She lifted the lid and looked down at the neat row of file folders, some thick, some thin. She knew that after doing so she wouldn’t have a decent night’s sleep. There were a lot of reasons why visiting those files was unnerving. But one above the others niggled at her subconscious. Guilt is like a dripping faucet that can never be tightened or turned off. Even when the guilt is undeserved. More so, rightly, when it is.

  Birdy just wasn’t sure where she fit in that spectrum.

  There were only three clippings in the Port Angeles Daily News about Anna Jo’s murder. The lack of media coverage was a sad but powerful indicator about how easily crime on the reservation was accepted, ignored by the press. It was as if Native Americans were only the subject of some kind of charity profile written in a patronizing manner. Or, Birdy thought, there were the articles that made her people seem as though they’d never been able to make lives for themselves and were mired in social problems like alcohol and drugs. Those were the stories that seemed to find their way onto the pages of the Seattle papers. A murder of one Makah by another, apparently, was not so newsworthy.