by Gregg Olsen
Kendall took a call from an Azteca busboy named Scott Sawyer, looked at her watch, and decided she’d head north from Port Orchard and time it for lunch. Josh was out pursuing a lead on a drug dealer near Wye Lake, so she drove up alone.
“I have something important to tell you,” Scott had said in a voice that cracked in a way that suggested he was barely out of puberty. “It’s really important. About the case you’re working on.”
“Can you give me a hint?” she asked, wanting to find out before she left if the kid had anything worth telling.
“Celesta had something going on here with another waiter. Tulio was so mad I thought he was going to kill her.”
That was certainly enough for the drive up the highway to Bremerton.
Peeling off his apron, Scott Sawyer slid into an orange and brown vinyl booth in the back of the restaurant. He was blond, pale, and as lanky as an orchard ladder. He introduced himself and apologized for keeping her waiting. She’d had to tell the server twice she didn’t want any more chips, although she’d barely touched her basket. She wondered if anyone ate the red and green chips, a tip of the hat, or rather sombrero, to Mexico’s flag.
To Kendall, it always seemed more like a nod to Christmas.
“First off, I just want you to know that everyone here really likes Celesta. She’s our best hostess by far. She trained me.”
Kendall smiled. “I’ve heard nice things about her.”
“When the boss remodeled the restaurant in Port Orchard, she was the one he selected to hostess the grand reopening.”
The waitress brought a taco salad and silently set it in front of her. For a second, Kendall thought she detected the server rolling her eyes slightly. It was subtle and could have been a nervous tic.
“I made the dressing,” he said. “Good stuff. Not good for you, but good stuff.”
Kendall speared a piece of lettuce and dipped it into the spicy sour cream dressing.
“Anyway,” Scott went on, “Celesta liked me. I could tell. I knew that she was hooked up with Tulio, but she just, you know…”
“No, I don’t know.”
Scott rested his bony hands on the table. A tattoo across his knuckles spelled out ROCK AND ROLLA.
“She could do better,” he said. “Tulio wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t like the brush thing. She wanted to move forward here, not run around the woods with a clipper trying to make a buck.”
The server—who wore a name tag that said MARIA but, with her green eyes and blond highlights, looked more like a Mary—shook her head as she cleared the table on the other side of the restaurant. She caught Kendall’s eye, and the detective made a mental note to speak to her before leaving the restaurant.
“You said on the phone you had some information that could be helpful in finding her,” she said to Scott. “Do you know where she went? Did she say anything to you about leaving town?”
Though clearly enjoying the attention, Scott looked a little impatient. He wasn’t ready, it seemed, to cut to the chase.
“I’m getting there. I’m getting there, Detective Stark.”
“All right. We’re trying to find a missing person, Scott.”
“You’ll find her. But she’ll be dead when you do.” His words were delivered matter-of-factly.
Kendall felt a chill. “How do you know that?”
Scott flexed his tattooed knuckles and grinned. “Because I bet you money that Tulio killed her. I read the article in the paper. That’s why I called. Tulio and his brothers are big liars. They want to act all lovey-dovey and whatnot, but that’s a big fat lie.”
Now Kendall could see where this was going. “How do you know this, Scott? Is this an opinion or what?”
“No. One time Celesta and I were messing around in the back.”
“‘Messing around’?”
“Well, not like that. It wasn’t messing around. I had a tear in the strap of my apron,” he said, picking up the food-spattered white garment that he’d removed before sitting down. “See right here?” He pointed to some black thread. “That’s where Celesta sewed it up. I was wearing it at the time, and Tulio came in and saw us. He thought something was going on.”
“But nothing was, right?”
“Right, I mean, I wish. But no, nothing. He just lit into her, saying, ‘If I ever catch you touching another man, I’ll do what they do to whores back in El Salvador!’”
“And what did you take that to mean?” she said.
“I don’t know exactly. I went online and looked up what they do to cheats in El Salvador, and I found something about how a woman can go to prison for six years if she gets caught cheating on her husband.”
“But Tulio and Celesta weren’t married.”
His break over, Scott got up to return to the kitchen. “They acted like it. Or at least he did.”
Maria, who turned out to be Maryanne Jenner, a student at Olympic College in Bremerton, rang up the bill at the cash register by the front door. The recorded mariachi music blared from the bar, and Kendall had to strain to hear the young woman.
“I hope you don’t put much faith in what Scott says,” she said. “He’s had a thing for Celesta, and she wouldn’t give him two seconds of an hour.”
“Was Tulio the jealous type?”
“Look,” the young woman said, “I’ve never seen it. Not from him. Others, yeah.” She handed her the change, and Kendall pushed it back to her.
“Thanks. One more thing, Detective.”
“What’s that?
“I think she’s dead too. She’d never just run off. Celesta wasn’t that kind of girl.”
All cops know that if Oscars were handed out to workers in any profession other than moviemaking, it would be to homicide detectives, who must approach suspects with an unyielding poker face, or ratchet up sincerity to win over those on the brink, or feign anger to force a meltdown of defenses. Kendall had liked Tulio Pena and believed him. She did not believe or like Scott Sawyer, but it was her duty to follow up on what he had said.
It wasn’t going to be a good cop/bad cop scenario when Kendall and Josh met with Tulio for a follow-up interview based on the information provided by Scott Sawyer and Maryanne Jenner at the Azteca Restaurant. Josh remained disinterested in the case, sure that Celesta had ditched her boyfriend for greener pastures.
Or at least where she didn’t have to quite literally work greener pastures.
Kendall told Tulio that they found some evidence and he needed to come down as soon as possible. He was in the little room within thirty-five minutes of her call, still wearing the white Mexican wedding shirt that was his restaurant uniform.
“Tell us what you did with Celesta,” Kendall said, looking dead-eyed at Tulio as they sat across from one another in a small, windowless interrogation room in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office.
“What I did with her?”
Kendall forced all her emotions to flatline. “Yes. Did you fight?”
“I don’t know what you are saying.”
“Did you tell someone that you would make her pay if she ever left you for another man?”
“She would never.”
Josh was snapped back into the moment by the adrenaline coming from across the table. “We have a witness who says so.”
Tulio was caught completely off guard. He pushed back his chair. “Who? Your witness is a liar!”
“Look,” Kendall said, finding her way back into the interview, “we have a good idea what happened. You argued in the woods, didn’t you. She told you she wanted to leave you, correct?”
“She never.”
“Did you beat her? Did you choke her?”
His eyes were filling with tears. “I love her.” The compact man across from the detectives shrunk before her eyes. “No. I did not.”
Josh jabbed an accusing finger at him. “What did you and your brothers do with her body?”
By then Tulio had stood up. “We did nothing.”
“It is only a
matter of time,” Josh said. “We will find out what you’ve done with her.”
Kendall saw genuine emotion in Tulio’s eyes, and her instinct was to tell him that everything would be all right. That they’d find her. That they didn’t really think he killed her. Tulio got up and went toward the doorway, stopping before passing through.
“You don’t believe me. But I am not lying.”
Kendall felt a twinge of shame as Tulio made his way out of the building. She did believe him, but there was nothing else to go on. Something had happened to the young woman in the woods near Sunnyslope.
For the next two days an angry and confused Tulio did what he’d been told: he waited. He and his brothers returned to Sunnyslope and yelled out Celesta’s name. They called the police a couple times a day, but got the same response from the deputy who’d gone out to see them following that first call. So Tulio did what he’d seen others do in cases in which the police stonewalled.
He called the newspaper.
And while Tulio was seeking answers, the man who had them kicked back and enjoyed what made Washington such a lovely place in the spring.
Never too hot.
Never too cool.
He did all of the things that other men did. He drove to work. Drank beer. Barbecued. Went out on his boat in Puget Sound. Hauled in crab pots brimming with Dungeness beauties. He even took his boat up to Hood Canal during the short-lived shrimp season. He considered heading toward the Theler Wetlands in Belfair, where he’d dumped his victim, but he thought better of it.
Mostly, however, he reveled in what he’d done and what he’d do next. He knew the smartest killer would never kill in his own backyard. He likened it to how a dog wouldn’t defecate in his own kennel. How a drunk tries his best to get to a toilet rather than vomit anywhere where cleanup would be required. A smart killer doesn’t discard a victim too close to home. He’d researched what had been the downfall of others who’d aspired to the kind of greatness that he did. He wasn’t sick, just clever. The others hadn’t refined the rules as he had.
He wrote them down on a scrap of paper in his office at the shipyard.
Never kill someone who will be missed.
Never tell anyone.
Never kill in close proximity to another kill.
Never kill someone with a child.
Never kill someone in your family.
As he contemplated his next move, the man with the sharp blade knew that at least one of his rules would be violated, but he carelessly dismissed it. Clever as he was, he felt that set of laws he’d adopted served a mighty purpose.
They kept others in line.
Chapter Nine
April 3, 9 a.m.
Port Orchard
At twenty-four, Serenity Hutchins knew that her return to Port Orchard to work on the city’s weekly newspaper, the Lighthouse, was the necessary first step in her media career. A stepping-stone sunk into familiar ground. It wasn’t about being a failure when she wasn’t hired by a major Northwest daily. Starting at the Lighthouse was merely the best she could do for now, especially in an industry floundering in a failing economy. She’d come home, but she was not the same person who had graduated from South Kitsap High. She was no longer the girl who’d squandered her high school years dating a football player who’d claimed that she’d be his bride once he turned pro.
Which, of course, never happened.
Certainly, Rick Silas had a decent college career and was a third-round pick of the Seattle Seahawks, but after a lifetime of promises of undying love, he’d found a new love—a cheerleader, no less.
Life wasn’t fair, and Serenity Hutchins knew it. She probably always had.
She could have moved in with her mother in Bremerton; instead she chose to rent an apartment at Mariner’s Glen in Port Orchard, one of those hopelessly nautically themed apartments that saw great use for rusty anchors, ratty nets, and heaps of silvery driftwood at its entryway. She lived there with her cat, a black-and-white tabby named Mr. Smith.
Her editor, a heavyset fellow who’d worked at papers in Seattle and San Francisco but had come back to helm the tiny Port Orchard newspaper, lumbered toward her. Charlie Keller could have been Serenity’s idol. He’d interviewed a couple of presidents as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board. He had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice for spot news reporting. He’d even had a long-running column in the Seattle Times. He’d done it all, had it all, and then lost it to a gambling habit.
He’d come home to Port Orchard to finish out his career and die.
That will never happen to me, Serenity thought as she watched Charlie maneuver between the newsroom desks, his beefy frame pounding on the hollow flooring of the modular building that was the modest headquarters of the Lighthouse. I’m going to make a name for myself and stay on top for good.
She smiled at him.
“Hutchins,” he said. “Might have something for you.”
She liked it when he used her last name. It was so All the President’s Men. “What’s up?”
“Missing brush picker out in Sunnyslope. Probably nothing. Probably more about a homesick girl wanting to go back to El Salvador than anything. You want the story? Remember, nothing much happens around here, and that’s pretty much the way they like it.”
Serenity was finishing up an article about a beautification project that had languished for years as downtown Port Orchard merchants griped about the cost.
“What makes you say that?” she asked, dropping the story into an electronic file folder for the copydesk.
“Talked to Josh in the Sheriff’s Office.”
“I’ll run it down,” she said. “Details?”
Charlie looked over by the front door, where a clean-cut man in a blue sweatshirt and jeans was waiting. He had black hair and the faint tracings of a goatee that had either just started or, if it had been growing a while, he ought to abandon.
“That’s the boyfriend,” Charlie said. “Tulio Pena is his name. Let’s put something in the paper. Okay?”
Serenity took a notepad and pen and went toward Tulio.
“See if you can get a picture, okay?” Charlie called out. “We need art, you know.”
“I know,” she said, with the resignation that came with the realization that photos and coupons were the primary reason anyone bothered with the Lighthouse. Text—no matter how good—was needed only to fill the spaces between art and ads. She thought of it as “word mortar designed to keep the ads from falling off the sheet of newsprint.”
The Lighthouse’s conference room was furnished with seven ladder-back chairs and an antique mahogany table that, newsroom legend had it, was salvaged from a near-shipwreck around the Cape by one of Port Orchard’s first settlers, a sea captain who’d planned on retiring in Seattle but instead settled in Sidney, the forerunner of present-day Port Orchard. The back wall had the framed sheet-metal press plates of some of the biggest stories covered by the paper throughout its history: The stock market crash. World War II. Kennedy’s assassination. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. By the late seventies, not only had the Lighthouse switched to cold-type processing, but several purchases by out-of-state companies had stripped the paper of its pursuit of the big story. In a very real way, the display was a reminder that, outside of a small news hole, the Lighthouse was merely a shopper feeding a shrinking gob of income to an out-of-state owner. It was no longer a paper of daily record. It had gone weekly as a cost-cutting move not long after it changed hands.
“I heard what he said,” Tulio said, indicating Charlie Keller, as he took a seat across from Serenity. He opened an envelope carrying three photos and slid them across the deep, dark wood surface.
Serenity noticed a slight tremor in his hands.
This guy is scared, she thought.
The images were of Celesta Delgado. One had her in a raspberry cap and gown; another in a Mexican peasant blouse embroidered with holly and poinsettias. The last was of the two of them, taken wi
th a flash as the sun highlighted the tops of the Olympics. She was a lovely girl, not much younger than Serenity.
“She’s a high school graduate,” he said. “We both are.” His eyes fixed on the photo; then he looked up at the reporter, trying to detect a flicker of surprise. He’d met enough people who, because his skin was bronze and his accent could not be masked, assumed that he could not be anything but a migrant. One of the invisible who do the jobs no one else wants.
“South Kitsap?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“Any family here? You know, so I can talk to them about Celesta’s background.”
Tulio shook his head. “Her dad died, and her mom and sister moved back to El Salvador. She’s only got me. I am her family. We were going to be married in August.”
Serenity pointed to the photo of Celesta in the Christmas blouse, her hair thick and blue-black.
“Taken at work,” Tulio said. “She is a restaurant hostess at Azteca. She was employee of the month earlier this year.”
“You want us to publish these photos, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The police are doing nothing. We have to find her. I need help.”
Serenity understood. She didn’t blame the Sheriff’s Office. They were understaffed and overworked just like anyone else. Maybe a little story could help.
“Tell me everything about the day Celesta went missing.”
Tulio took a deep breath. “Okay. We left early….”
Within an hour of Tulio Pena’s departure, Serenity put the finishing touches on a short article about Celesta Delgado. The photo-imaging guy at the paper had done a reasonably decent job with the scans, holding the detail that would look beautiful online but surely would muddy up on the printing presses. She finished a bottled water with some leftover eggplant parmigiana that had at most one more day of survival in the refrigerator.
Brush Picker Vanishes Near Sunnyslope
A local woman disappeared while harvesting greens for a floral supply warehouse Sunday afternoon.