The Bone Box

by Gregg Olsen

  Holloway shook his head. “Worse than sick. He’s dying. Leukemia. He’ll be dead before Christmas. At least that’s what the docs tell him. Anyway, you need to know that.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Why didn’t he?”

  He stared into her eyes, searching. “He’s proud, Dr. Waterman.”

  The use of her name surprised her. “You know who I am?”

  He nodded. “Hell yeah, he’s bragged about you for years. I know all about you, your backstory, the crime that sent him here. I know stuff you don’t even know.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Like Tom Freeland didn’t kill that girl up in Neah Bay.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard claims of innocence before around here,” she said, looking at an inmate pushing a laundry cart down the hall.

  “Yeah. More times than you probably think. But Tommy’s different. He has honor. He’s never ratted on anyone and no one has ratted on him. He’s taught at least a hundred inmates how to read; sent money—and he don’t have much—to a cellmate’s family. He’s not perfect, but he’s as close to decent as I’ve seen in this hellhole,” he said, his eyes lingering over another guard and an inmate in belly chains down the corridor. A mother who’d moments before had been calmly playing cards with her son was now convulsing in tears as she moved toward the exit.

  “My boy is being raped by his cellie! Why don’t you people stop it?”

  It was hard not to look at the woman, but Birdy faced the sergeant. “He didn’t tell me he was dying,” she said.

  “Of course not. He’s not the type.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Tommy’s not one to make someone do something they don’t want to do. He could tell you he’s got months, weeks to live and you’d get all in a tizzy and try to help him because of that—not because you thought he was innocent.”

  “What kind of medical care is he getting?” she asked. “Maybe I can help.”

  Sgt. Holloway shook off her offer. “No offense, but don’t you deal with dead patients? No disrespect intended.”

  “None taken,” she said. “And yes, I do, but I also know doctors who actually deal with patients who are living. I know several very good oncologists in Seattle.”

  “Look, I’m sure you do,” he said. “If you think that because he’s a con, he’s not getting the benefit of a cancer doc, then you’d be wrong. The state legislature has made it sure these guys get the best care possible when it’s serious. Mantra around here is that medical care for cons is gold-plated. No more lawsuits coming at us because someone croaked before their time.”

  “I see,” she said. It made sense to her. The whole world seemed to spin on making sure no one got sued, or if they did, they couldn’t lose.

  “Do you?” he asked, a little pointedly.

  “Can I talk to him again?”

  “Too late for today. Next week though. You staying in town?

  Birdy shook her head.

  “I can give him your number and he can call you collect. Visiting hours are over until Tuesday.”

  “I don’t have my purse,” she said. “You don’t happen to have a paper and pen?”

  Holloway put his fingertips to his lips and smiled. “Don’t tell the other guards, but yes I do.” He pulled a scrap from his pocket and a stub of a pencil.

  Birdy took it and wrote as he called out his number.

  “Do me a favor,” he said.

  She stopped writing and looked up, her eyes locking on his. “What?”

  “Don’t let him down,” he said. “The guy deserves better than that.”

  “He’s in prison for killing a girl,” she said.

  “So the jury concluded. But do you think—even for a minute—that the man you sat with today killed someone? He’s a decent human being,” he said. “Better than most by far.”

  “He’s helped a lot of people,” she said, searching the guard’s eyes.

  “I know what you’re getting at and you’re right. I’m one of those. Your cousin has taught me more about being a compassionate person than anyone. I’m here as a guard because of him. Some are here to punish, but I’m here to help. So I’m asking you—for him, please, help him.”

  “You sent the letter to me,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  He looked down at the gleaming floor. “It was the only thing I could think of doing. He wasn’t going to ask you. But if you could have seen his face when he got word that you’d asked for a visit, you would know that I did the right thing. Man, he was so happy. And you know what else?”

  Birdy shook her head. “No, what?”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

  “I still don’t know what, exactly, I’m doing. I’ve looked over the evidence file. I didn’t see anything that can help him.”

  Ken Holloway looked around. “It isn’t for me to say,” he said finally. “But I will anyway. Your cousin once let it slip at a meeting that relationships sometimes aren’t all they seem. He said, sometimes you trust the wrong people.”

  “What does that mean? What wrong people?”

  “He said that the girl wasn’t all that he thought she was.”

  Birdy stood in the silent corridor. Was he referring to her? How she didn’t stand up for him? How could she? She had told the police what she’d seen even though her mother and father told her to keep quiet.

  Or was he talking about Anna Jo? And if it had been Anna Jo, then there was only one place to go. Back home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I know who you are why you are here.”

  Anna Jo Bonners’s mother stood on the front steps of her house and faced Birdy Waterman with ice-pellet eyes. Carmona Bonner was a woman who, as Birdy recalled, seldom smiled. She had the kind of humorless face that owed more to the fact that she’d lost one of her front teeth in a car accident than to what kind of person she really was. She simply never smiled. After Anna Jo’s murder, few thought she had many reasons to anyway.

  Birdy braced herself against the chill by wrapping her arms around her chest. “My cousin is dying and I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends,” she said.

  “My daughter is dead and there are no more loose ends,” Carmona said.

  Birdy persisted. “May I come inside? Chilly out here.”

  Mrs. Bonners stood her ground. “No,” she said. “You should have put on an extra sweater. Always cold up here this time of year. Maybe you’ve forgotten, living in the big city.”

  The remark was almost laughable. No one who visited Port Orchard would have considered it a big town, much less a major city.

  “Really is cold out here,” Birdy said, letting her teeth chatter for effect and because the chilly ocean air was pummeling her. A curl of wood smoke coming from the chimney indicated that there was no need to suffer on that stoop.

  Carmona Bonners sighed and reluctantly opened the door. “Come in,” she said. “But you can only stay a minute and you have to stay on the linoleum. I just cleaned the carpets.”

  She shut the door and the two stood in the miniscule foyer. A photograph of a group of Makahs huddled next to a whale carcass dominated the space. It wasn’t a particularly old image. Despite outcries from environmentalists and organizations like PETA, the Makahs had established their continuing right to hunt for whales off the coast of Washington. They had done so only once in modern times.

  “Mrs. Bonners, I really only want to know one thing and I think you might be able to help me. Something has troubled me over the years.”

  The woman regarded her visitor warily. “I guess you were probably traumatized too. Not as much as we were. But seeing Tommy Freeland right after he did what he did to our Anna Jo must have been bad. Like I said, not like us at all, but hard I guess.”

  “Yes, it was,” Birdy said. “I don’t even like bringing it up. Just thinking about it all these years makes my heart break for you and your family.”

  “Thank you, but that’s not why
you’re here. I heard it through the grapevine that you’re trying to clear his name.”

  The grapevine on the reservation was more powerful than a satellite receiver. “It isn’t so much that,” Birdy said. “I don’t know what happened, but one thing that troubles me is all the violence against Anna Jo. They called it a rage killing. I don’t know what Tommy would have been so mad about.”

  “Trust me,” Carmona said, “he was mad. Do you need me to spell out what he did to her?”

  There was no use suggesting that Tommy wasn’t the killer. The focus had to be on gathering information and understanding. Not promoting something she wasn’t even sure about.

  “I guess so,” Birdy said. “What was it?”

  Carmona glanced through the window as a pair of headlights slowly meandered by. “You better go now. Let’s just let sleeping dogs lie,” she said.

  Birdy wasn’t ready. She wanted, needed some answers. “Didn’t he love Anna Jo?”

  “He said he did,” she said, her words emphasizing the word “he” in a strange way. Birdy asked the victim’s mother what she meant.

  “Look, I know you have respect for our people,” Carmona said, her voice whistling a little through the gap in her front teeth. “I know you haven’t completely forgotten where you came from, so let’s just leave it at that. Let’s let Anna Jo be. Let her live in our memories as she was—not as you’d have her.”

  Carmona opened the door and held it for Birdy to pass. Birdy put her hand on the doorjamb to buy a moment more of conversation.

  “Anna Jo didn’t love Tommy, did she?”

  “Good-bye, Dr. Waterman. Let my daughter rest in peace.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It had been a quiet day in the Kitsap County Morgue, which meant it had been a good day. No one who worked there ever cursed their jobs because there was “nothing to do.” An empty chiller meant a day without carrying the hurt of someone else’s loss. A child. A wife. Even a friend. Birdy was in the midst of finishing up a supply order that needed to be filled when she looked up from her desk to see a woman in an orange North Face jacket and black jeans. The color combination was definitely on the Halloween side of the fashion wheel, which might have been intentional. The holiday was only a week away.

  “You don’t remember me, Dr. Waterman,” the woman said, her voice soft and nearly reverential. She was slightly built, with the facial features of a Makah—intense eyes slashed above with eyebrows that never needed any help from Maybelline, and, most strikingly, a pronounced nose.

  Birdy looked her over, racking her brain. Who is this? There was something familiar about her, but Birdy couldn’t come up with a name.

  “I’m Iris,” the woman said. “I used to be Iris Bonners. Married to Randall Rostov now.”

  Birdy nodded. “Of course, I remember you,” she said, a little unconvincingly, as she worked hard to reel in some kind of memory. She did recall Randall Rostov; he was the son of the first Makah to run a whale-watching business catering to the tourists from Seattle. If Iris hadn’t said her maiden name, she would never have guessed who she was.

  Iris was Anna Jo Bonners’s little sister. She had been three or four grades behind Birdy in school, a gap of enough measure to ensure that their paths seldom crossed. It didn’t matter how small a school was. And the reservation school was small by any standards. Only eighty students graduated with Birdy—and only three of those went on to college.

  “It’s okay if you don’t,” Iris said, taking off her jacket to reveal a cascade of black hair that had been tucked inside. “I was a lot younger than you.”

  Birdy smiled, a recollection finally coming to her. “I do,” she said. “I actually do. Weren’t you a dancer? I remember hearing that you went off to study dance back east. New York?”

  Iris nodded. “Yes, I was. Back then. Made it as far as Milwaukee. A far cry from New York, that’s for sure. Now I work in the bar at the casino. In the bar. So much for my brilliant career. But look at you.”

  Birdy deflected the compliment, if that’s what it had been. With some of the people on the reservation mad at her for getting a medical degree and not returning to work in the free clinic, it was hard to know if Iris really thought her career had been brilliant or a betrayal.

  “Coffee?” Birdy asked. “I was about to pour myself a cup.”

  Iris shook her head and declined. “Too late in the day for me. And really, I don’t have much time. The longer I wait to get to the point of it all, the greater the likelihood that I won’t be able to get up the nerve to tell you what I think you need to know.”

  Birdy scooted back into her chair, her eyes riveted on Iris. “Okay. No coffee. Sit down. Talk to me, Iris.” She motioned to Iris to take one of the chairs across her desk.

  “I’ll stand,” Iris said. “And first of all, before I say anything, I want you to know that as sorry as I am about everything, I’m also scared. Really scared. I have two kids. This can’t come back to me. Promise.”

  “Promise.”

  “I hope I can trust you, Birdy. I’m hoping that given your job and your education, you’ll be able to keep a confidence.”

  “I will,” she said.

  For the next twenty minutes, refusing to sit, Iris Bonners Rostov talked about her sister, how much she loved her, how she was sure they’d have been close.

  “Not like you and your sister,” the younger woman said.

  “That’s right, my sister and I aren’t close,” Birdy said, swallowing the sentence in one bitter gulp.

  Birdy wondered why Iris had needed to make the jab. People often needed to hurt someone as a way to take away their own pain. Putting the hurt on another person sometimes made them feel better, if only by comparison.

  “Iris, you came a long way to tell me something you think might be important,” Birdy said.

  “I did,” she said, “but really I’m scared.”

  “It’s about Tommy, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, but stayed quiet.

  Birdy pushed for an answer. “Iris, what?”

  Iris took a breath. “I don’t know that my sister really loved Tommy. I know it is wrong to talk bad about the dead, but it seems to me that Anna Jo has had a long enough time to adjust to what she did—wherever she is.”

  “I’m sure she’s at peace,” Birdy said.

  Iris looked away. “Not after what she did, maybe not.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She cheated on Tommy. She was seeing someone else. I think that’s why Tommy killed her. He must have found out.”

  The disclosure came out of nowhere. Birdy had thought that Iris was going to say something against Tommy, another reason why no one should forgive him, or that he’d gotten what he deserved.

  “I didn’t know she had another boyfriend,” Birdy said. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  Iris’s eyes were back on Birdy’s. “Well, she did,” Iris said. “She had two guys on a string. Tommy and the other guy.”

  Birdy got up. The intensity of what Iris was saying made her feel silly sitting in her chair while Iris stood, coat on, ready to drop the bomb and run away.

  “Do you know his name? Was it someone from home?”

  Iris shrugged a little. “I never saw him. She never said his name. Not to me. I don’t think he lived on the reservation, because I’d never seen him or his car. Whenever he came to get her, she had to walk all the way down the lane to be picked up. I don’t think she wanted our parents to meet him. Maybe he was black or something. I don’t know. My dad was kind of a racist and that wouldn’t go over real big with him.”

  Black?

  “What makes you think he was black?”

  Iris looked around the room. “Nothing really,” she said. “I was a kid and I just tried to figure out why it was that my sister hid him from everyone in the family.” Iris shifted in her chair. She was on a roll now and Birdy wasn’t about to stop her. “I thought we’d meet him after she died, you know, he’d come over and pay h
is respects at the house. That never happened. We never saw him. Not even one time.”

  “So you think Tommy killed her because he was jealous of this other man?”

  “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I remember my mom telling me that the police caught Tommy red-handed. He must have killed her for something. Anna Jo was hurt pretty bad. He must have been mad.”

  Twenty-seven-stab-wounds mad to be exact.

  “Did you ever see Tommy threaten her? Act jealous? Angry?”

  “That’s the hard part. I always got the impression that he loved her, was gentle with her. The other guy always made her cry. One time I remember going into her bedroom when she was on her bed crying. I asked her what was the matter and she said she was in big trouble. I asked her what kind, and she said, ‘boyfriend trouble.’ ”

  “What do you think she meant by that?”

  “I don’t know. That was the last time I saw her. The next day she was dead.”

  After Iris left, Birdy went home to the Bone Box.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next day Birdy Waterman got in her car to drive to the morgue. She hadn’t slept well. She’d been unable to shut down her thoughts about Tommy. Yet duty called.

  A car accident the night before had taken the lives of a middle-aged couple from Bremerton. They had left a party in Port Orchard and the women crashed their late-model Jeep just outside of Gorst, a tiny town clinging to a hairpin turn of highway populated by a strip club and coffee stands with half-naked baristas. Investigators theorized that the driver had been drunk. Birdy Waterman would examine the bodies, take the blood, look at stomach contents, and send tissue to the lab to determine if alcohol had been a factor.

  As she dressed for work, she kept thinking about Tommy. She’d called the prison to confirm his illness with the medical staff there—from one doctor to another. Just as Sgt. Holloway had, the doctor on call said how much everyone liked Tommy and how “it is a shame he never got out of here.”

  Instead of turning up Division Street and heading toward the morgue, Birdy did something she’d never done in her entire life.