by Gregg Olsen
“You here about the dead body?”
Kendall turned toward the voice. It came from a skateboarder in low-slung black jeans, a blue hoodie, and a chain that went from, presumably, his wallet to his belt loop. He had dark blue eyes and the faint tracings of a mustache that he’d obviously been nurturing to look older, and maybe a little tougher. She recognized Matt Gordon despite his attempt at facial hair.
Josh looked at Kendall. “You know that kid?”
“Shoplifter, but not a good one.”
“Officer Stark,” the teen said, “we all know.”
She didn’t correct him by pointing out that she now carried a detective’s shield.
“How’s that?”
Without saying a word, Matt Gordon poked at the keys on his phone and held it out.
On his iPhone screen was an image of the tragic scene they’d just left at Little Clam Bay. Kendall noted the time stamp: twenty minutes before the Sheriff’s Office had been notified.
“Devon and Brady need a lesson on priorities,” she said to Josh.
“Huh? Brady blasted it out this morning,” Matt said. “Let me show you another.” The kid was grinning nervously now. Kendall had cut him some slack on the shoplifting case, and he was trying to be a good citizen. “Here.”
This time it was a photo of Kendall and Josh leaning over the body.
“That’s how I knew it was you and why you were coming, Officer Stark.”
“Any more out there?” she asked, her tone flat to mask her anger.
“He texted everyone that he was putting up an animated slide show on his MySpace later. Kind of cool that someone died around here, and we can watch how you solve the case. Like CSI. My mom loves that show.”
Jesus, what’s with these kids around here? Is everything a joke? she thought.
“Thanks, Matt. And by the way, it isn’t cool that someone died around here. This is very serious and sad business. I’d appreciate it if you’d remind people of that. Okay?”
“Yes, Deputy. Will do.”
Josh spoke up. “It’s Detective Stark. She’s a detective now. Not a deputy.”
Kendall suppressed a smile. It was the first time that Josh had done that. For a man who was a relentless self-promoter, he simply didn’t believe in building up someone else, because if someone was his equal, it diminished him.
She turned to the boy. “By the way, I’ll need your phone.”
The Kitsap County detectives went past the hideous cement pillars and into the administrative offices, where they had a brief conversation with the school’s assistant principal, a nervous man with caterpillar eyebrows who was about to consume a limp chef’s salad. It was doubtful that anything but an inquiry from the Sheriff’s Office could have interrupted the meal.
Gil Fontana set down his plastic fork and verified that Devon and Brady were decent students, not overly prone to mischief.
“Those two are harmless,” Gil said, “given what we deal with around here.” He looked down at the contents of an open file folder to refresh a memory that couldn’t possibly have held any real awareness of those boys: there were hundreds like them at the school. “Let’s see, they’ve skipped school only twice before and never have been the subject of any major disciplinary action.”
“Any female students reported missing in the past few days?” Kendall asked, looking past Gil as he fidgeted in his leather office chair. A poster on the wall indicated that John Sedgwick Junior High “celebrated” tolerance, diversity, and sensitivity.
“No female students missing. A few out sick, but junior high girls take advantage of their cramps to miss school.”
Kendall thought of saying something like “cramps” were no laughing matter for a young girl and that he needed to rethink a few things.
The poster caught her eye again.
“I see that you celebrate sensitivity here,” she said.
Gil plastered on a smile. “That’s right. The state requires it.”
Kendall stood. “Good. Too bad it has to be required. By the way, you’ve got a problem here, Mr. Fontana. A young woman’s death is not something to be celebrated on MySpace or Facebook or Twitter, for goodness sake. Those boys—who you seem to feel are no problem—have some serious issues.”
The assistant principal’s face turned scarlet. “What are you getting at, Detective?”
“Aren’t you concerned that they broadcasted a photo of a dead body to everybody in this school?”
Josh followed Kendall to the door. He didn’t say a word, but he clearly was loving the exchange.
“These are the times we live in,” he said, a discernible smirk on his face.
Kendall masked her anger with a smile. “At least I doubt you’d want the school to be known for that kind of thing. Am I right?”
“What was that all about?” Josh asked as they got back in Kendall’s car.
“Seriously? You don’t think the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket? It’s like a school full of sociopaths.”
“I guess so,” he said. “I never thought of it that way.”
“Well, you should. How would you like it if someone took a photo of your son like that and sent it around for a bunch of gawkers?”
“I wouldn’t. You’re right, Kendall. I wouldn’t at all.”
Serenity Hutchins slid back behind her computer. Charlie Keller was stomping around the office like a beat reporter in one of those 1940s movies that glorified the “scoop.” She wondered for a minute if her boss could possibly be that old. Her archrival, Joy—whom she called “Joyless” behind her back—was fuming in the corner that she was stuck doing that season’s “Fall into Halloween” Web blitz, an assignment that reeked of getting under the covers with advertisers. The paper’s copyrighted Spooky McGee character, a pumpkin-headed seagull, implored shoppers to head for the sad little mall at the base of Mile Hill Road. Joy was stuck with coming up with content to support the program.
She had already used BUOYS AND GULLFRIENDS, HEAD OVER TO THE MALL as a headline, and she wanted to die.
Joy looked up, her face contorted in an unattractive grimace. “Serenity, you need any help?”
“No, thanks, I’ve got it handled. Besides, you’re up to your neck in work yourself.”
Joy sighed. “Not what I thought I’d be doing when I graduated from journalism school,” she said.
Charlie’s deep voice boomed from across the newsroom. “We all have to start somewhere.”
But we don’t have to end up here. Like you, Serenity thought, but didn’t say it.
“How’s the dead girl story?” he asked, now at her desk. “This is front-page, Hutchins. And as you know, we don’t get a lot of front-page stories around here.”
Serenity didn’t say so, but it troubled her that her mood had shifted from boredom to the rush of excitement that came with the discovery of the dead woman in Little Clam Bay.
“I’m on it. Nothing much yet.”
She’d tried to get the detectives to tell her something about the case. Was it even a homicide or just a boating accident? No one would say. She talked to the boys and their mothers for about ten minutes, but there really wasn’t much she could write about that. She stared at the empty window of her computer screen.
“We want to lead with the dead body,” Charlie said, now hovering. She could feel his hot coffee breath on the back of her neck.
“Figured that,” she said. She half expected him to give her some kind of lecture about how things were done “back in the day.” She liked Charlie all right. He was smart, was an excellent writer, and seemed compassionate enough. But he didn’t seem to get the irony that he’d landed a final gig at a paper that was one step above a shopper.
“It’ll be short. I took some photos of the kids who found her, but I didn’t get much out of them. The detectives—Stark and Anderson—gave me the brush-off, pending the coroner’s report. We might not have much in the way of any real info. No who, what, why, anyway.”
“Okay. Do your best. I need it in an hour.”
Serenity dialed Detective Anderson’s number, but it went to voice mail.
“Detective, it’s me, Serenity. I need whatever you’ve got. Keller’s riding me hard right now. Let me know something, okay? Call me on my cell. You’ve got the number.”
Serenity looked at her computer screen. The story for tomorrow’s front page was thin, but what more could she really say? She had agreed not to identify the boys. The detectives had given her next to nothing. A body was found. That was it. The subject was so tragic, there was no room for clever wordplay in the text. She had to stick with the facts.
Body Found Floating in Little Clam Bay
Two local boys found the body of an unidentified young woman floating on Little Clam Bay yesterday morning. The boys, both 14, were skipping school when they made the grisly discovery in the water fronting 1527 Shoreline Road.
“We weren’t sure if what we were seeing was really a dead person,” one of the boys said. “She was out there floating. It was pretty random that we discovered her. We, you know, shouldn’t have been there.”
Neither the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office nor the coroner’s office had any immediate comment.
After dropping the file into a folder on the server, Serenity swiveled in her chair and got up to leave. She decided she’d head across town to the Sheriff’s Office to find out what she could. More than anything, she hated being ignored.
What did it take to get a decent story around Port Orchard, anyway? She asked herself.
Later, the admonition “be careful for what you wish for” would come to mind and haunt her dreams.
Chapter Twenty-two
September 19, 10:15 a.m.
Port Orchard
The house at 704 Sidney Avenue had a history both mundane and macabre. It was a place that passersby and drivers skirted past, disinterested. Certainly, in its eight decades of existence it played out a thousand family dramas and joys. Most places that old have. Babies were born. Kids went to school. Teens went to the proms. Memories were made.
All of the things that make a house a living thing had transpired there.
Yet, this place was a little different. There was a touch of strangeness and darkness about the house as well.
One time in the 1990s, a woman who stopped by the house and spoke to the present occupants told a tale of her mother’s suffering with cancer.
“Dad couldn’t stand her constant crying all night,” said the visitor, who had once lived there. “So we set her up in a tent in the front yard. Dad put her out there so he could get some sleep. Seems a little cruel now when I think of it. But back then, it was a good solution.”
Not surprisingly, others who lived there reported that the house with an obscuring tree that had been lovingly planted by the first owners had a weird, sad vibe. Most who felt it did so only after learning that the place was the final stopping point for the dead of Kitsap County.
The house adjacent to the Sheriff’s Office back parking lot was the Kitsap County Morgue. It is doubtful that any other morgue in America was quite as homey.
The coroner’s offices were upstairs in what had been a dining room, living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a battered blue linoleum floor. Throughout the house, with its coved ceilings, pale gray paint, and thick-cut moldings, were the remnants of the dead. The staff stored formaldehyde-soaked tidbits of people in plastic bags set in large plastic tubs like the ones families use to store Christmas decorations. A built-in nook held teeth and a floating finger in small jars. Each body part was a clue to the unthinkable things that people did to each other. Despite the accoutrements of death, the upstairs was a staid, quiet office. Phones were answered, mail sorted, budgets balanced. If things were a little disordered, it was because the space was so small.
And body parts took up a lot of space.
Downstairs, however, was where the work that leaves a Rorschach pattern in crimson on a pristine white lab coat was done every time a stiff rolled in on a gurney. Early in the morning after the Little Clam Bay body was found, forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman put on her scrubs in the small dressing area in the converted garage that was a most unlikely autopsy suite. She checked the body logbook on a table next to a chiller that held six bodies at the time. It had only been full once or twice in the county’s history. While a couple of hundred bodies were autopsied every year, they were dispatched to funeral homes—mostly for cremation—within twenty-four hours of their arrival on Sidney Avenue.
“Move ’em in and move ’em out” was a phrase favored by the county coroner, an affable fellow named Kent Stewart who’d been elected to the position for a dozen years. He was more than an elected glad-hander. He was also a skilled manager of an ever-shrinking budget. The day before the dead body from Little Clam Bay had come in, Kent purchased four new office chairs from Boeing’s surplus store south of Seattle. The total cost was $28.
If Kent Stewart was the “face” of the coroner’s office, Birdy Waterman, a forensic pathologist, was the chief cook and bottle washer. Her hands were on everything. That was fine too. Kent only occasionally came downstairs to see what was happening in the morgue—mostly in the summer, when a decomposing body sent a stench up through the floorboards.
“Downstairs is your domain,” he said time after time. “Call me if you need me.”
With the exception of days that started with an autopsy, Kendall Stark never wore jeans to work. That morning as Steven organized Cody’s things for school, she packed an overnight bag. She moved around their bedroom, silently, gathering up a pair of slacks and sweater that she could wear while Dr. Waterman completed her examination.
Steven emerged from the bathroom and looked at the bag she’d filled.
“I was going to tell you to have a nice day,” he said, thinking better of it.
She pressed her lips into a slight smile. It was meant to acknowledge his support.
“I could barely sleep last night,” she said. “All I could think about was that dead young woman.”
“I know,” he said. He stepped closer and looked into her eyes as he held her hands.
“That’s what makes you good at your job, Kendall. You give a shit. Not everyone does. Some people sleepwalk through their lives, never really noticing why they’re here.”
She knew he was right, but she also wondered if he was talking about his own work. He’d been down about it, telling her not long ago that he “hadn’t dreamed of this life, this job” when he was a little boy. She’d tried to support him by reminding him that he was so good at selling ads.
“A trained chimp with half a personality could do what I do,” he’d shot back. His demeanor was slightly sardonic, but not so much that Kendall could be sure just how he really felt. She was left to wonder. When Steven talked about his disappointments in life, was he talking about her? About Cody?
She picked up her overnight bag.
“When I think of why I’m here,” she said, “I know it’s to help people, to bring the lost back home.”
Steven kissed her and playfully touched her hair. “You’ll find out what happened to the girl,” he said.
She didn’t say how she felt about Celesta Delgado and how she’d failed to find her killer. Mason and Kitsap counties postured over who owned the case: the jurisdiction in which she had gone missing or the one where her body was found. She didn’t tell Steven that she’d had an encounter with Tulio Pena at the Albertsons supermarket on Mile Hill and how he’d accused her of not caring, of giving up.
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “See you tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-three
September 21, 9:30 a.m.
Port Orchard
Birdy Waterman looked up as the frosted-glass door swung open.
“Morning, Detective,” she said, as Kendall let herself inside.
“Sorry I’m late,” Kendall said taking off her jacket and hanging it on a hook near the logbook.
“You’re not late. Just in time, in fact.” Birdy rolled on a pair of gloves. She looked at the overnight bag. “Oh, goody. Why didn’t you tell me we were having another sleepover?”
Kendall smiled back. “A surprise,” she said.
“Where’s Anderson?”
“Good question, Doctor. He said he might be late, so I waited for him at the office. Never showed up.”
Kendall went into the small dressing room and put on a set of scrubs, emerging a few moments later to ask the question that had haunted her after seeing the body.
“What happened to her face?”
She stopped a few paces behind the pathologist as Birdy unlatched the enormous refrigerator and rolled out a sheet-covered corpse to a space on the far side of the room.
“The catchall is ‘animal activity,’ and I suspect I’ll be able to pin it to a seal. There are some teeth marks where the nose was excised.”
She watched as Birdy gently peeled back the pale green sheet.
“See here?” Birdy said, pointing with her gloved index finger. “Those small tears form a pattern. Each is spaced two inches apart.”
Kendall leaned a little closer to get a better view. She took in the acrid scent of the corpse, which made her stomach roil only a little. Then it passed. She found it strange that the sight of the body had such a fleeting impact. Certainly, she’d already seen the woman at Little Clam Bay, but in the outside world the smell of the dead can be somewhat ignored on a cool damp day. Not possible, she knew, in the confines of the morgue, where bright light, sterile surfaces and the faint odor of cleaning supplies can’t completely foil the assault on a person’s olfactory senses.
“I’m thinking a sea lion pup,” Birdy said, barely glancing back at Kendall. “Humans aren’t really good eating, of course, and even an orca will pass one up. Sharks too. I think a pup did a little nibbling here and there and then gave up. Animal DNA could confirm, of course. Did I tell you about the body found in the woods by the golf course at Gold Mountain? Had to take bite impressions to the University of Washington. Turned out it was a bobcat, not a cougar.”