by Gregg Olsen
“It doesn’t mean anything, you know,” Al says.
I am without words.
Carter picks up the interview. “Did Luke like being a dad?”
His tone is neutral. Not accusing. Just matter-of-fact. It doesn’t sit well with Al, who knows that their friend is in big trouble. He gets up.
“I’m done here,” he says. “You got it all wrong.” He glances at his friend, his eyes urging him to make a break too. Gavin springs to his feet.
“Yeah,” Gavin says. “He loved his kid. Kept a picture of her at his desk.”
On the way out, we catch up with the manager, Darren.
“Gavin and Al tell us that Luke parked out back, by the river. Do you have cameras back there?”
Darren answers right away.
“You bet your ass we do,” he says. “We have cameras all over this place. Got no choice about that. Shrinkage is our number one problem.”
We walk toward the exit as shoppers push overloaded grocery carts past us.
“Can we get the recordings from yesterday?” I ask.
“You’ll need a warrant,” Darren says. “But yeah. Of course. I’ll have everything ready.”
We’re outside in the oven air. I can feel the sweat start to collect on my brow as Carter and I walk around the perimeter of the building to the back lot along the Chehalis River. It’s empty except for a pair of enormous dumpsters and a couple of seagulls. I spot a trio of cameras mounted in a configuration that allots maximum coverage over the parking space.
I feel sick inside. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I ask my partner.
Carter studies the mostly empty expanse of the sticky blacktopped parking lot. The seagulls screech as they fight over a fast-food wrapper.
“If you are thinking that he went out here to see if his daughter was dead yet, then, yes, that’s what I’m thinking,” he says.
I swallow hard. My throat feels constricted, and it takes some effort.
“He planned this,” I say.
Our eyes meet. “Researched it,” Carter says, pulling a cigarette pack from the breast pocket of his hopelessly dated jacket.
“Yeah,” I say, “that too. I wonder if Ally was still alive when he came out here. You know, like if he’d had a change of heart.”
I still want to see some good in everyone. I’ve done that my whole life. It’s gotten me into trouble in the past, no doubt, but seeing the good is the part of me that lets me know that there is a reason for my struggles. That there is a bright side to every dire situation.
At least, I think there’s good in almost everyone.
“People who cook their kids in a car don’t have a heart,” Carter says. “So there’s no change of heart. There doesn’t have to be a real reason for it, either. He might have been pissed off that she cried all night. He might have decided that it was too much of a hassle juggling her, day care, and going to see a movie.”
We start walking back around the WinCo to Carter’s car.
“As long as I’ve done this job, as much as I’ve read about the criminal mind,” he says, “I’ve come to believe that we are the ones looking for a reason. We are the ones who want to know why. Killers like Luke? They don’t even go that deep into it. Killing your little girl? Could be something he just decided to do spur of the moment.”
Carter is right about some killers. However, not this one.
“He searched on the Internet to learn more about hot-car deaths a few days prior to Ally’s death,” I remind him as we get inside the car and he turns on the air-conditioning.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know. I just don’t know why he had to take the car from WinCo to Starbucks.”
“We might never know. Part of me thinks he just wasn’t ready to make the big scene at work—or maybe since he parked in back there was no one to see him? You know, react?”
I tilt the AC vent away from my face. The air coming at me feels like November.
Carter puts the car in gear.
“Seems like he should have thought about that ahead of time,” he says.
CHAPTER NINE
Wednesday, August 16
The day has been long. Interviews. Database searches. Warrants to seek. I’m beat. I say goodbye to Carter in the parking lot and pick up Emma. She is as chatty as ever, and I relish just listening for a change, as we go home to the house that had been my childhood home. We open the door, and, for the first time, Shelby doesn’t come running. She’s been slowing down a little lately, and the heat has been hard on her, zapping her energy. Dachshund owners sometimes joke that the breed sleeps twenty-three hours a day. With Shelby, I was sure it was only twenty-two.
“Go wake up that silly dog of ours,” I tell Emma, who immediately takes up the cause while I fish through the refrigerator for the evening meal. I turn on the kitchen TV and listen to a reporter on a Seattle news station going on about the plight of the homeless. I think of the women I met in the shelter when I was homeless and wonder what became of them. I hope that the young girl who was abused by her boyfriend has moved on, that the woman who had a job interview the next day landed the position. I hope that and more. For a brief time we were bound together in a circumstance that seemed at once hopeless and punitive.
“Critics say that homeless camps draw more people to a lifestyle . . .”
The words of the reporter are a knife in my heart. Being homeless is not a lifestyle. It is a harsh reality, a last resort.
I find the hamburger and check the pull date. It’s today. Good, I think. Just in time.
The meat goes into a hot skillet with a little olive oil, a chopped onion, and a clove of garlic.
Emma likes garlic.
Tonight, we’re having her favorite: sauceless spaghetti.
I take out a juice box for Emma and a bottle of wine for myself. Not the whole bottle, of course. I pour a generous glass while the old hood over the stove does its best to suck in the steam from the browning meat. The moment reminds me of my mother just then. It was her recipe. She didn’t like tomatoes because red sauce stained the fabric of Dad’s T-shirts. Mom didn’t like anything but perfection.
She must have hated me and Dad so much.
Stacy was her number one.
“Emma?” I call out. “Want some juice? It’s strawberry kiwi.”
I stir the meat with an old wooden spoon and think more of my sister and how I’m going to tell Emma that her mother is alive. I don’t even allow myself to think just what it is that Stacy wants when she sends missives to Dad. There’s a reason for that. Stacy’s motives are always hidden. I know whatever she is planning on doing is for her benefit. I just never know the truth of what drives her.
The wine tastes wonderful. If I were single and didn’t have a child to care for, I wonder if I’d become an alcoholic. Several people in my support group traded one addiction for another. Noreen A. attends GA, NA, and AA, the trifecta of addiction groups.
She told me one time that she had a host of food allergies that prevented her from overeating. “Otherwise, I’d likely be able to add OA to my weekly spate of meetings. Lucky me.”
Emma calls to me from the living room. “Auntie Mommy!”
“Juice box is in here,” I say.
“Something’s wrong with Shelby!”
Emma’s voice is charged with so much fear, I nearly drop my wine glass. I slide the meat from the burner. In a second I’m in the living room. Emma is on the floor next to Shelby.
“Honey,” I say, joining her. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Emma says, her eyes huge with fear. “She won’t wake up.”
I scoop Shelby into my arms. She’s limp, an expanded accordion. I feel her chest contract as she breathes. White spittle collects on one side of her mouth.
“Shelby, wake up!” I say.
Emma echoes my words. “Wake up!”
She looks at me. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” I say, opening Shelby�
��s eyes to find them rolled backward. “She was fine this morning.”
With Emma trailing, I carry Shelby to the kitchen. I turn off the stove and grab my car keys. We rush outside.
The sidewalk rolls under my feet. I can barely stand. She’s dying. My dog is dying. This can’t be.
I put Shelby in Emma’s lap and get into the driver’s seat and start the car.
That dog has been through everything with me. She knows all my secrets, because she’s the only one I could ever really trust. She listens. She loves me unconditionally. I would do anything for Shelby.
In five minutes we’re at Dr. Kohl’s office. I breathe a sigh of relief. The vet’s lights are still on.
Emma and I sit in the waiting room next to the giant scale used to weigh pets. We’re quiet. The poster of dog breeds from around the world would have consumed our attention in another more routine visit. We barely glance at it.
I pray that everything will be all right. I promise God that I will spend the rest of my life doing good things for others. I will never fail again. If only Shelby can live. Before Emma, she was all I had.
Dr. Kohl emerges from the back room. His face is full of concern, and I think I’m going to let loose the tears that I have tried to banish from my eyes.
“How’s Shelby?” I ask.
“We need to keep her overnight,” he says. “You got here just in time.”
I am so lost in my own thoughts that I don’t even catch the significance of his words.
“What happened to her?”
Dr. Kohl looks at both of us.
“Poison,” he says. “Maybe antifreeze? Rat poison? Hard to say without some blood work. I think she’ll be okay. Not sure about any long-term damage, though.”
Those tears flood anyway. Emma hugs me.
I’m shaking. “She’s an inside dog,” I say. “We don’t have any rat poison. There’s no antifreeze.”
“She got into something,” he says. “Or maybe someone gave her something.”
His disclosure causes a jolt so strong that it stops my cascading tears. I pull myself together.
“Is she a barker?” he asks. “Not long ago I had a poisoning case. Seems like a neighbor who worked the night shift couldn’t take the dog’s barking during the day when he was trying to sleep. Fed the dog antifreeze to shut him up.”
“Shelby is quiet,” I say. “Everyone loves her.”
“She got into something,” he says. “We’re lucky. She’ll make it. Take a look around the house and see if you can find what it was that made her sick.”
I take Emma’s hand. “Can we see her now?”
“Sure,” Dr. Kohl says. “She’s sleeping. Come on back.”
Shelby is curled into a tight ball on a dark blue cushion on a table in the back room. Emma and I stroke her as softly as we can. She stirs and whimpers a little, and my heart lifts. I thank God right then and there. I lean close and nuzzle her. She smells like Shelby, and that calms me. She is my family.
She and Emma.
“You’re going to be all right,” I say. “We’re coming back to get you tomorrow.” I look up at Dr. Kohl.
“Yes, tomorrow,” he says. “Be sure to check around the house. No repeat of this, okay?”
Back home, Emma and I turn the house upside down as we search for the culprit. I put Shelby’s ceramic water and food bowls into the kitchen sink and run hot water over them. In a complete frenzy I scrub them with a steel wool pad until my fingers bleed. How did this happen? I check the backyard for a sign that Shelby found a stash of weed killer or something. Nothing. There isn’t a single clue as to what might have poisoned her.
CHAPTER TEN
Thursday, August 17
Though it is morning, a stack of mail on the passenger seat next to me is like the afternoon sun: I know shouldn’t look directly at it. Doing so will only have dire consequences. Make me blind, for instance. And yet it’s there, and I have no choice. I don’t even have to see all of it to know that the sliver of blue showing between the power and cable bills is another postcard from my sister to our father. I’ve received more than a half dozen over the past few months. All from Mexico, where my sister is enjoying the Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous or some approximation of living high without a conscience.
I think of the last one. It comes at me vividly. Hard. Like a bullet. The card portrayed a Mexican sugar beach with slender, tanned figures laid out like hot dogs on that rolling grill at 7-Eleven. My decidedly much lower-rent frame of reference in the years since I returned home to Hoquiam.
Like a magician’s assistant, I flipped over the card with an abruptness that startled me.
There, in her trademark purple ink, was my sister’s handwriting, with heart-shaped dots atop the i’s:
Daddy,
Having fun, I hope? I am. I have a problem, though. I’m a little miffed at Nicole. She’s being a real b-i-t-c-h. She won’t let me know how Emma is doing. Should I be worried? Has she gotten herself into that gambling mess again? Don’t tell her that I said that. She’s always been unstable. I don’t want to rock the boat and send her off the deep end.
Love,
Stacy
My blood was on a slow simmer when I read that particular missive. No rapid boil needed. When it comes to my sister, I’m a slow cooker. Stacy knows that our father has Alzheimer’s and could scarcely understand the slip of paper in a fortune cookie. At least, on most days, that is. She knows that I’m going to read it. That’s why she sends a postcard and not a letter inside a peek-proof envelope. She barely mentions Emma to our father because she is focused on me. It’s a game. She’s reminding me that she’s out there, and that despite everything she has done, she has something over me. Sociopaths like my sister—there, I said it—might not be able to understand emotion or to empathize with others, but they do know love when they see it. She knows that Emma means everything to me. I wonder how she processes that. Like I’m a curiosity? Like I’m some kind of caged animal and she’s in a perfectly pressed lab coat, pen poised and ready to jot down whatever it is I do—the manifestations of what love for someone looks like?
I tug at the postcard sandwiched between other pieces of mail. It’s not another Mexican sky. It’s a vintage image of a dachshund with his muzzle deep into a beer stein. Underneath the dog are the words “AT HIS MASTER’S BIER.” It’s a cute drawing, though I know that even thinking so would get me in trouble with the ASPCA.
Dogs shouldn’t drink beer.
I know. I know. I’m sorry I smiled.
When I turn over the card, I confirm it’s definitely not from Stacy. It’s postmarked Bellevue, Washington. She’s thousands of miles south of there. Although the distance between me and where I used to live is a little over a hundred miles, it is a world away and might as well be Mexico.
Five words fill the message space. And, very oddly for a postcard, they are typed.
I know who you are.
My relief ebbs. My heart sinks. I almost wish that it were another of my sister’s poison-pen postcards. I can never laugh those off, but I know who my tormentor is. This is faceless. Others out there know that I fell from grace. It isn’t that I can hide my failures. It is the idea that someone feels a compulsion to remind me of them. To remind someone of their darkest moment is to show teeth in a smile, to insert a knife into a heart and spin it like a drill. Stacy is a game player, and she likes to remind me of her status in our family and in the world. Certainly she likes to hurt and inflict pain, but at least she is direct about it. This other person, not so much.
I take the postcard and turn it into confetti and stick it in the little plastic AAA trash bag that hangs over the console of my car. I try to put the postcard out of my mind. My anonymous hater is downshifted to a blip in my list of concerns at the moment. Right now, as I start to drive, all I really want to think about is Ally Tomlinson and how she ended up in that hot car in the back of WinCo. I see her little face so clearly, and when I do, I’m relieved that the ima
ge that comes to mind shows her happy, alive. That is a gift, and I’m grateful for it.
I head to the coroner’s office with the knowledge that whatever he has to tell me will supplant that picture.
It always does.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thursday, August 17
Grays Harbor Community Hospital plays double duty in the Ally Tomlinson investigation. Not only does the deceased child’s mother, Mia, work there as a nurse’s aide on the pediatrics floor, but two floors below are the morgue and offices of Dr. Nigel Beakman, the longtime county coroner. His office is basement cool. A fan with a pale pink ribbon showing its jet engine–like velocity roars from the other side of the room.
Dr. Beakman is in his early sixties and by his own count has conducted more than two thousand autopsies. Though he works in a veritable backwater county, the doctor’s reputation for being thorough and compassionate is widely known.
His most famous case involved the death of three men over a twenty-year period. Candace Derringer had gotten away with the murders of her first two husbands in Idaho, where medical examiners in Boise and Pocatello missed heavy metals—the marker left by arsenic—in their tox screens. When husband number three, a dentist from Montesano, succumbed after a long, debilitating, and painful illness, it was Dr. Beakman who figured out not only what Candace had done to him, but what she’d done to the other two men. She’d done what so many do. She’d spent all the insurance money and needed more. Since she hadn’t been stopped in Idaho, there was no reason for her to think someone in Grays Harbor County would catch her.
Candace didn’t know how methodical a coroner could be until her path crossed with Nigel Beakman’s.
The coroner took it in folksy stride.
“Stopping a serial killer,” he told People magazine, “is about the best thing a fella could do on a slow Monday afternoon.”
When he sees me, Dr. Beakman nods through the window of the autopsy suite. He holds up a finger to indicate he’ll be right out. Behind him, I can see the small figure of a child draped with a pale green sheet. Through the fabric covering, I can see the shape of Ally’s little head, the slight bulge of her stomach and her feet. Tools of his grisly but completely necessary trade—Stryker saw, rib spreader—glisten next to her. He’s done with Ally. She’s been examined in every way possible. Her tiny body had become a puzzle that had been reassembled and stitched back together.