by Gregg Olsen
I take in a deep breath and then slowly exhale.
“I love you too, Dad.”
His eyes flicker.
As I push his chair toward the hallway to the bistro, I wonder if, by doing the right thing, I’ve done something very wrong.
I need a moment to decompress every time I see my father. It isn’t just him, and I know it. It’s everything. Me. My sister. My niece, Emma. It’s everything that brought me back to Hoquiam, an often-dismal mill town on the edge of the Pacific. I can’t think of a worse place to call home. And yet, sometimes I can’t think of a better one. It’s the town that made me who I am. For what it’s worth, Hoquiam taught me that only with hard work and extreme fortitude could one escape the road map created by where they are born, whom they are born to.
I’ve boomeranged for sure. At least I’d gotten out and lived in the world. I tell myself that when I see the faces of the women and men I knew when we were young. Danielle works at the Stop ’n’ Go. She’d been a cheerleader. Her boyfriend, Ricky, was captain of the football team and now works as a maintenance man for a resort development up the coast near Moclips. Many of those who stayed in my town look older than their years. A few proved that there was something better beyond the Hoquiam, Wishkah, and Chehalis Rivers that wriggle through my hometown and Aberdeen, the town next door. Some now live in the same houses their parents had owned.
Like me.
High-paying mill jobs have evaporated as technology has replaced workers and resources have dwindled. Cashiering is an inescapable and soul-crushing fallback for some. A few have turned to drugs. Even more have just given up. I can never give up. I have my seven-year-old niece, Emma, to think about. I have a job to do.
My silver Honda Accord’s AC pours over me, a river of cool. I sit in the parking lot of Ocean View and lament that there is no view of the ocean there. Not by a long shot. Maybe from the roof someone could see the vast horizon over the Pacific, but that person would require a telescope and a very clear day.
My phone buzzes.
It’s my partner at the Aberdeen Police Department, Carter Hanson.
“Still with your dad?” he says, his husky voice filling my ear.
“No, leaving now.”
“Got a situation at the mall. Can you meet me there?”
“I’m five minutes away,” I say. “What’s going on?”
“Unresponsive kid. Left in the car.”
My heart drops. “Oh, no. Not on a day like today.”
“Not on any day,” he says. “But, yeah, this heat wave is no joke.”
“Where at the mall?”
“By the Starbucks.”
“All right,” I say, putting the car into gear and starting across the parking lot to the exit. “Be there in a few.”
The last ten days have been sticky, egg-on-asphalt searing. Grays Harbor County hasn’t seen temperatures in the mid- to upper nineties like that for more than a decade. The marine layer shrouding the area most of the season keeps late-summer temperatures in the eighties on the warmest of days. But in the week approaching the Grays Harbor County Kite Festival, the mercury has risen to the unbearable. Most residents in Hoquiam and Aberdeen don’t have AC in their homes, so they sleep on sheets with fans blowing and windows open. The Daily World and the local radio have admonished locals to stay hydrated, to make sure their pets have water. No one has reminded anyone that leaving children in a hot car is not only dangerous but also illegal.
I think of Carter as I drive to the scene. I trust him. He trusts me. I know he’s one of the good ones and has been through a lot. He is the divorced father of three. His ex-wife and children live in Kent, Washington, where she is a schoolteacher. Carter is a big guy with an even bigger heart. We met at the police academy when I was a new officer and he was back for training. After my fall—plummet, really—from grace, it was Carter who helped me get back into police work. He convinced his captain that I was worth a second chance.
I know it couldn’t have been easy. I was on the periphery of a police scandal in Bellevue brought on by bad choices in men and a gambling addiction. Both are under control.
I’d vowed that I’d never date again. I’d never gamble.
In a way, both things were the same.
Carter didn’t push. I know that he wanted more, but over time we developed a close personal relationship, an even stronger work dynamic. Not that he didn’t try to ask me out. Which is all kinds of wrong, considering my record in the relationship department.
One time, not long after I was hired on, he suggested a dinner date.
“Carter, I owe you everything right now,” I said. “Emma does too. You’ve given me a chance to do what I’m good at—and what I’m compelled to do. I can’t mess that up again.”
My tone was final, and I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
“Not everyone is a bad choice, Nic,” he said.
“You’re right,” I answered. “But my experience tells me that when I’m doing the picking, the chances are that something terrible will happen. I’m a good judge of some things. Clueless about matters of the heart.”
He left it there, and when he did, I knew that he wouldn’t have been a wrong pick. If I could pick, that is.
The parking lot of the Wishkah Mall is packed. Out-of-towners circle in shiny late-model cars for an empty spot near the entrance. It is easy to spot them. Their cars are newer, rust free, and packed to the gills with beach supplies. Flip-flops stick to the freshly tarred surface of the asphalt as people hurry for air-conditioning and the beer, burgers, and snack chips that will ensure their Kite Festival adventure will be Instagram and Facebook perfect.
I ease my Accord toward the Starbucks. An aid car and two patrol cars strobe the area with competing blue and red lights. I park next to Carter and get out. Over by what appears to be the victim’s car, a red Subaru Forester, stand my partner and a young man. The man, I assume, is the child’s father. He wears dark slacks, a white long-sleeved shirt, and lace-up shoes. His sandy hair is straight and appears to be recently cut. He has no facial hair. While he is young, his less-than-ideal posture reveals a slight potbelly. Silver wire-frame glasses with clip-on shades perch on his stub of a nose. He shifts his weight from foot to foot.
Spinning. Rocking. Barely staying on balance.
A woman clutching her sack of groceries stands next to one of the responding officers. Tears track through her makeup. A younger woman is talking with another officer. She’s wearing a uniform from Wendy’s.
Carter nods at me as I approach. He leans in.
“Girl DOA at the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “How old?”
“One,” he says.
“Baby,” I say, scanning the crowd that’s traded the cool of their cars or the stores to watch something that will fill conversations over the next few hours as people judge and lament what happened.
“Says he forgot he had the girl in the car.”
I don’t say it. I think it. Carter says it, leaning into my ear. “Who forgets a kid in the backseat?”
He turns to the young man, whom he’s identified as Luke Tomlinson. “This is Detective Foster,” he says. “She’s here to help with the investigation.”
“It was an accident,” Luke says right away. “Oh my God. Someone has to get my wife. She’s at work.”
I notice he’s holding his phone.
“Have you tried to reach her?” I ask.
Luke looks around at the crowd, his eyes landing on the young woman from Wendy’s for a second.
“Yeah,” he says. “But she works at the hospital. She can’t have her phone with her except at break time. She needs to know that something happened to Ally.”
“Ally’s your little girl?” I ask.
Luke wipes away sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His white shirt is soaked, and the outline of a full-sleeve tattoo ghosts a shadow through the fabric.
“I’m very sorry about your daughter,” I say.
Luke doesn’t respond. He just looks around, his eyes ping-ponging from the crowd to his car and back at Carter and me.
“Are you all right?” Carter asks.
Luke snaps. “No! My fucking kid just died.”
I glance at Carter. Temperature and tragedy have converged. “We need to take this inside. Can’t have a heatstroke victim out here.”
Carter nods. “Let’s go down to the department and take your statement, all right? An officer will go to the hospital and get your wife.”
“I need to get her,” he says, his voice louder than it needs to be. “I have to tell her it was an accident.”
His words hang in the hot, thick air.
What else could it be?
“I have to tell her,” Luke says. “I have to be the one. I’ve called. She’s not answering.”
Carter takes a step closer, and out of the blue, Luke takes a swing at him. “You fucking moron! My kid’s dead. I need to get out of here.”
Luke’s fist doesn’t connect with Carter, but he shouldn’t have done that, of course. No one would have thought it was possible, but he’s just made a dire situation far worse.
“I’m going to need to put you under arrest,” Carter says, bulldozing the younger man, who now blinks back a mix of fear and annoyance. “Should keep your cool. Assaulting an officer is a serious offense.”
A second later a patrol officer cuffs him. Luke is red-faced, and it’s clear by the look behind his steamed-up lenses that he knows he made a very big mistake.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says.
It’s too late. He’s in the backseat of a patrol car. Carter and I talk with the crime scene techs who have taped off the scene. A reporter from the Daily World is hustling other officers, trying to get someone in authority to tell her something, but there’s nothing we can say. It is tragic. It is horrific.
But is it negligent or a criminal act?
“After you process the scene,” I tell an officer, “impound the car and get it to the lot.”
“Car stinks like holy hell,” the officer says.
I know the odor. All homicide detectives do.
“Yeah,” I say. “Nothing worse on the planet.”
Carter gives a quick nod. “You got that right, Nic.”
I call Emma’s day care on my way back to the police department and say that I’ll be late.
“Carrie Anne, I hate to do it to you,” I say, meaning every word. “I have a hot case right now.” I cringe at my unintended pun. “Can you watch Emma until seven or so?”
She indicates without hesitation there’s no problem.
“I heard about the baby on Facebook,” she says.
Nothing escapes social media. It’s omnipresent. It’s like air. It’s almost as if there is live coverage for every single crime these days. It used to annoy me to see a phone held up to capture everything I was doing, but now I barely notice it.
“Right,” I say.
“Awful. No worries with Emma. We’re having a great day in the pool. Made snow cones too. She made one for you that’s turned into a purple patch of stickiness. See you at seven or so.”
“Tell her I love her,” I say before hanging up and dialing Carter to talk about what he knows as we drive separately to the office. He tells me that the hothead—again, I hate the pun—works at the grocery chain WinCo, in the office.
“That’s less than a mile from Starbucks,” I say.
“Yeah. He says he got off work a little early and was going to catch a movie. Said that he didn’t know his daughter was in the car. He was supposed to drop her at day care this morning but forgot.”
“Unbelievable,” I say. “Forgot his little girl and left her in the car all day? In this heat?”
Carter doesn’t answer right way. He’s drawing on a cigarette. When we get to the office, he’ll have consumed a couple of breath mints. “Yeah,” he says, exhaling. “I know. ‘Unbelievable’ is right. Says that he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the top of her head and pulled over right away. He freaked out. You saw him. Freaked out big-time.”
“So he says he went to work, forgetting his child,” I repeat.
“Yeah. Worked seven hours.”
“Where did he park?”
“He said WinCo’s lot was full, so he parked in back, along the Chehalis River.”
“Not his normal parking place?”
“No,” Carter says after another puff. “With the festival and all, says that the place was jammed.”
“At nine in the morning?”
“Kind of doubtful.”
“Or maybe something worse.”
We arrive at the same time as the patrol officer who brought in Luke Tomlinson.
“He wants to talk,” the officer says. “He says he’s sorry for his outburst, Detectives.”
I imagine he is.
“All right. He’s waiving his rights, then?” I ask as I peer into the back of the patrol car and see the young father of the dead baby give a quick nod.
The officer speaks up. “Wife is on her way.”
“Book him and we’ll have a little chat,” Carter says.
“Hey, I said I was sorry,” Luke says through the glass, leaning in my direction and blinking his eyes as if there were tears to fall. But there aren’t.
“‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it right now,” I say. “Maybe after our interview, but not at the moment. Understood?”
Luke nods. The look on his face is proof positive. He knows that his bad, bad day is going to be even worse.
Later, when Jordan Conway attempts to tell her roommate, Charlotte, what had happened in the Starbucks parking lot, she finds she can’t really talk about it. Not at first. It’s as if the words are stuck in her throat.
“And after you did CPR, what happened?” Charlotte pushes.
“Nothing.”
“Are you in shock or something? What’s the matter with you?”
Jordan reaches for a peach wine cooler inside the refrigerator door.
“I guess I am,” she says.
“Well, it’s high drama, that’s for sure,” Charlotte says. “A kid dying in your arms.”
Jordan opens the bottle and guzzles. “It wasn’t that. I mean, of course the little girl not making it is the worst thing ever, but it wasn’t the weirdest thing about what just happened.”
Charlotte seems knee-deep in curiosity.
“What was the weirdest thing?” she asks.
Jordan slumps into a chair at the kitchen table. She runs her fingers over the surface, sending a drift of crumbs to the floor. “I feel like an idiot for saying anything.”
“Say it,” her roommate asks. “What?”
Jordan puts down the half-empty wine cooler. “While the dad was yelling about how it was all his fault—I mean, really yelling about it—he never once looked at his little girl. He kept his eyes . . .” Her words trail off and she decides she needs another good drink. The bottle is at her lips again.
Charlotte continues. “Where? What?”
Jordan looks at roommate, her eyes now wet. “I feel like an idiot even thinking this. But when I was trying to save his little girl, I swear to God all he did was look at my tits.”
The other young woman’s eyes pop. “No,” she says.
Jordan nods. “Seriously. I know the look. I know when guys do that. I swear it. He was taking a peek for sure.”
“While his kid was dying?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Whoa,” says Charlotte.
Jordan realizes then what the weird feeling she experienced was when she was trying to perform CPR in the backseat of that Subaru. She felt uncomfortable. The man was leering at her.
“The dad was a total creeper,” Jordan finally says, wiping a tear that had zigzagged down her face. In doing so, she catches a whiff of the dead baby on her hands. The odor sends her rushing to the bathroom to turn on the shower. Her work clothes are shed in record time. She doesn’t even pause for the w
ater to warm. As the cold water pours over her face, she can’t breathe. She lets the tears fall. What happened in that parking lot was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to her.
And the baby. The baby couldn’t be saved.
CHAPTER THREE
Tuesday, August 15
As we wait for booking, Luke seesaws in his desire to talk to us.
“Let’s move this along while we wait,” I say. “Car’s in impound.”
The lot is next door to the police department.
“All right,” Carter says. “Have a quick call to make. See you there.”
It’s at the start of the case, and his distraction is a little annoying, but I know it’s a call to his divorce lawyer. It’s about his children. That’s who he is.
Carter arrives at the lot shortly after I do. He’s carrying two Dutch Bros. coffees. The weather has cooled by more than thirty degrees. He’s wearing dark gray slacks, a tan sport coat, and a blue shirt. He needs Bombfell in the worst way.
“Starbucks parking lot is full of lookie-loos,” he says, handing me a white cup with a blue windmill. “I guess around here a dead kid in a parking lot passes for a new tourist attraction.”
I make a face, and he backtracks right away.
“No offense,” he says.
I nod. He knows I made the connection to the Kelsey Chase case that had started in a Target parking lot, though it was not his intention.
“No problem,” I say.
The guard lets us into the impound yard. Most of the cars there are drug-money cars, but this being Grays Harbor, they aren’t luxury makes, like Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus. While we have our drug trade along the Washington coast, we’re decidedly much lower-rent than where I’d worked as a detective in Bellevue, Seattle’s moneyed neighbor to the east. Here the vehicles are mostly pickups and Toyotas, with one lone Escalade.