Victim Six

by Gregg Olsen

  “I guess that would make a difference,” Kendall said, somewhat tentatively.

  Birdy looked at the detective. “Actually, you’re right. It did. Bobcats are aggressive only to a degree and can be fended off with a well-placed poke of a nine iron. An angry cougar, however, is another matter.”

  Birdy lowered an overhead lamp and took a pair of chrome Fiskars, sliced off the woman’s clothing, and deposited it into clear plastic evidence bags. While trace evidence was always possible, it was highly unlikely on the outside of the clothing. The body had been in the water for a while, at least a couple of days. Sometimes hairs and fibers were protected in the interior of a garment. That, both women knew, was a long shot. The choppy waters of Puget Sound were like a Kenmore washer on a heavy-load cycle.

  The pathologist took a succession of digital photos, some with flash, and others without.

  Kendall used a Sharpie to mark the bag for the sliced jeans, then another for the now-shredded green blouse. She’d take them back over to the crime lab for drying before any additional examination. Drying would preserve evidence and make the stink of the clothing somewhat bearable.

  Feeling strands of her long black hair fall from the band of her disposable head covering, Dr. Waterman stepped back from the autopsy table. She took off a glove and tucked in the stray locks.

  “There will be no contamination on my table,” she said, putting on a clean glove.

  Kendall nodded, although the remark seemed more for the pathologist than her audience.

  As she worked in her basement autopsy suite, Birdy Waterman spoke in measured tones, her voice betraying no emotion. It didn’t matter. She’d conducted hundreds of autopsies and knew that each one was a professional obligation and a personal burden: each one broke the doctor’s heart.

  “…the victim, a well-nourished female age seventeen to twenty-five, five feet, two inches in height, 110 pounds, dark blond hair, blue eyes…”

  She hesitated as she thought of a way to clinically describe the horror of what she was seeing. “There are no facial features, likely due to animal activity, postmortem…”

  She noted that there were no distinguishing marks on the woman’s body.

  She didn’t get the tattoo urge that so many of her age had, she thought.

  The condition of the victim’s teeth indicated reasonable if not excellent dental care. The dead woman or girl was not a meth-head. She was clean, well cared for. Dr. Waterman swabbed the dead woman’s mouth and clipped her soft, unpainted fingernails, and Kendall collected each snip into poly bags.

  “I don’t see anything under the nails, but you never know what your guys can find in the lab,” she said.

  Kendall nodded. “I’m always amazed at—and appreciative of—how the smallest things can point to a killer.”

  Next, Dr. Waterman focused the beam on the victim’s ears, then cheeks, a part of the face that still remained relatively intact. She swabbed again. Fibers and hair had adhered in a couple of places on the cheeks. She swabbed more.

  Adhesive, she thought, before catching Kendall’s eyes. “Our victim might have been restrained or gagged by some kind of tape.”

  “Photo?”

  The pathologist stepped back to allow Kendall to get closer for more photos, macro views of faint gummy striations.

  “Okay, now for the reason she’s here on my table,” she said as she flexed the woman’s wrists and noted the dark bands of contusions that encircled them.

  “Victim shows evidence of ligature on both right and left wrists.”

  For the first time Kendall noticed parallel lines of dirt and bruising. Faint, yet there nonetheless. Her camera’s shutter sounded six times in rapid succession.

  “She was tortured. Held captive. This is too brutal for some sex game gone bad.”

  She was referring the case of Sheila Wax, who had died the year before when a so-called breathing game went too far. Kendall had worked that case.

  Birdy ran a stream of water over the nude torso. Dark, congealed blood ran along the drainage gutter of the table.

  “This is far more than torture,” she said, locking her eyes on Kendall. “Victim’s areolae on both breasts have been excised,” she said.

  Kendall felt the familiar shudder of sickness that sometimes came in the basement autopsy suite, no matter how seasoned she believed herself to be or how prepared for the aftermath of murder. She steadied herself while Dr. Waterman pointed to the edges of the wounds.

  “See this?” she asked, taking the tip of a scalpel and lifting the pale skin. “A cut, not a tear. Definitely not animal activity, like the face.”

  Kendall studied the wounds. “Postmortem, like the animal activity?”

  “Hard to know for sure, but when I see things like this, I pray to God that the victim was dead before whoever it was took it upon himself to cut her. We had a case a few years back in which a man hacked off his wife’s hand and then drove her to the hospital.”

  “How thoughtful.” Kendall took some more photos.

  Birdy turned her attention back to the corpse. “This is the work of a sexual sadist. He bound, gagged, defiled, tortured, and cut her, and kept part of her body for a souvenir.”

  Kendall knew what the pathologist was getting at. “Someone who commits this kind of crime doesn’t just stop.”

  “That’s right, Kendall. Someone who does this has to be stopped.”

  Finally, the beam of the pathologist’s handheld light found the woman’s vagina. It was just another invasion of the dead woman’s privacy that had begun when the two boys skipping school had found her and sent out photos to their friends at school. For Dr. Waterman, probing in a woman’s most private area was the necessary evil of finding out what had happened, and it always felt like a violation, no matter how many bodies she’d autopsied.

  More photos. Flash!

  Next she bent her knees slightly, bore down, and rolled the body onto its side, then onto its stomach. She walked to the end of the autopsy table and gently spread the woman’s legs apart.

  “Indications of trauma in both anal and vaginal cavities…”

  Dr. Waterman winced a little and amended words: “Severe anal trauma…”

  The exterior exam complete, Dr. Waterman went for the garden loppers that she’d purchased on her expense account at the local Ace Hardware off Mile Hill Road. The bright-green-handled loppers were the ideal tool for cutting through the ribs. While Kendall looked on, the doctor made her Y-incision from shoulder to shoulder and down between the mutilated breasts. Then she reached for the loppers.

  Kendall watched, listened, and wondered.

  Who did this to you? Who are you?

  Kendall always thought of the dryer in the Kitsap County property processing room as a “clothesline of death.” She carefully logged in the victim’s clothes and hung them in the dryer. It was a bulky piece of equipment that functioned more like a warming oven than a spin dryer. Clothing hung limply until it dried to crispness. Body fluids and, in the case of the Little Clam Bay victim, seawater would provide a stiffness like starch.

  Heavy starch.

  “How’s our girl in the morgue?”

  It was Josh.

  “She’s still dead,” Kendall said, a little irritated that he’d missed the autopsy. While it wasn’t required to have two investigators there, murders were so infrequent in Kitsap County that an extra pair of eyes and hands would have been useful.

  “Anything out of the ordinary?”

  Kendall closed the glass-fronted door. “You mean like the fact that some freak cut off her nipples, raped her, and tortured her? That kind of out of the ordinary?”

  “You seem pissed off at me.”

  Kendall peeled off her latex gloves and threw them in a receptacle.

  “I could have used you there, Josh.”

  Josh murmured something about being sorry before he made his excuse.

  “I had an interview with the paper that I couldn’t get out of. They’ve been
hounding me. I’m getting a feature story. Probably front page.”

  “I doubt that,” she said, heading toward the door.

  “Huh?”

  “A dead woman trumps a self-centered cop any day.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  September 21, 1:30 p.m.

  Port Orchard

  Later that afternoon, Kendall Stark fixed her eyes on the autopsy report as Birdy Waterman went about her business going through the department’s supply manifest for new orders. She was low on blades and the heavy needles used for the sometimes hasty and careless suturing of a victim, post-autopsy. Birdy wasn’t like many of her contemporaries who had graduated from medical and law school with the full acceptance that the dead they’d see in the course of their careers should only be viewed as evidence, nothing more. She had gone to medical school at the University of Washington on a scholarship for Native Americans. She never said so, but she was more concerned about helping the spirits of the dead find their way home. A clean autopsy, given with love and respect, was preferred over the crime-fighting approach of so many. She was a scientist, to be sure, but a compassionate one who knew that life was a continuum and death was not the end. For that reason Birdy always ordered the finest-size needles she could, even when the medical supplier didn’t see the need for the tiny stitch.

  Kendall looked up from the sheaf of papers. “You’re certain that missing tissue from the victim’s face was postmortem?”

  Birdy stopped making hash marks on the supply list. “There are some indicators that she’d been battered on her face, but it’s hard to say with complete certainty.”

  Kendall locked her eyes on the pathologist. “Cause of death?”

  “Manner of death: homicide, for sure,” she said. “But she’s been in the water for some time, and it’s hard to say if she was suffocated or strangled. I’m concluding asphyxiation. Found adhesive around her cheek area, indicating she was gagged with tape, most likely good old duct tape.”

  “Tortured?” Kendall asked, although she knew the answer.

  “Raped vaginally and anally. No semen. My guess is the perp wore a condom.”

  “Considerate of the bastard.”

  “More likely careful. At any convention of my ilk you’ll find a symposium on the CSI effect. Perps are boning up by watching forensic TV shows to find out how to avoid detection.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Kendall said. “We can thank Hollywood for that.”

  Birdy nodded, and Kendall followed her into the chiller, indicating she had something she wanted to show her. She held up the dead body’s right arm. “See the discoloration there?”

  Kendall noted the faint purple and black striations that ringed the thin, delicate wrists.

  They’d discussed them at the autopsy.

  “Wire, not rope. You can see how the binding dug into the skin, nearly slicing it?” She flexed the wrist and nodded for Kendall to come closer. “You don’t even need a scope to see that despite the fact that the water plumped her skin up a bit and softened the grooves, there are several rows of indents.”

  “I see. Bound with wire. Postmortem too?”

  Birdy let the wrist rest on the stainless table. She set it down gently, as though the body could still feel the chill of the metal.

  “Not at all. My guess is that she was bound with wire for a time, and then the wire was removed. There was some tissue healing. Then, of course, she was put out of her misery by the perp.”

  Kendall felt a chill and pulled her sweater tighter around her torso. She let her hands retract tortoiselike into her garment’s long sleeves.

  “Are you saying she was held captive?”

  “Stomach is empty. In fact, I have no indication that our victim has eaten anything for at least five days. Nothing.”

  “Anything that will help ID her?”

  Birdy shook her head. “Not really. No tattoos, decent dental work, no nothing that would give us a leg up to run any kind of check in the system. Anyone matching her in your missing-person’s database?”

  Kendall shook her head. “Not so far.”

  “There’s also this,” Birdy said, pointing to some tiny specks lifted from the victim’s vaginal walls. It was hard to say exactly what they were. Dr. Waterman narrowed her focus as she twisted a swab into the light next to her autopsy table. There were six small flecks. They appeared opaque, not transparent or translucent. It was hard to say what color they were. One side seemed off-white; the other a reddish hue. She deposited the swab into a plastic bag and secured it.

  “This one’s for the lab team in Olympia,” she said. “Who knows where this will lead, but in the meantime you might need some extra help to ID this one. Help of the artistic kind. Who is this girl?”

  In the basement of the tidy white house on Sidney Avenue, Birdy Waterman covered up the morgue’s sole dead body while Kendall Stark looked on. The two of them silently pushed her into the chiller.

  Neither woman spoke, although both were thinking the same thing.

  You were someone’s daughter, sister, maybe even a wife. You are being missed by someone. Someone out there—besides the killer—is wondering where you are right now.

  If no one claimed the body in a week, they’d bury her in a Port Orchard cemetery, in the no-man’s-land that local law enforcement from Seattle to New York called Potter’s Field.

  PART THREE

  Skye

  The only games that matter are the ones that I want to play. Shut up and enjoy the ride.

  —SOME OF THE LAST WORDS SHE EVER HEARD

  Chapter Twenty-five

  September 26, 7:45 p.m.

  Vancouver, British Columbia.

  Cullen Hornbeck picked up his phone and looked at the number to call his ex-wife, Sydney, at her home in Sedona, Arizona. He hated making the call, but he had no choice. Cullen had hoped that his own phone would ring with a call from Skye telling him that she’d hitched to Arizona. She’d grown tired of Vancouver’s rain, the overabundance of blue and green as mountains and trees conspired to hem in British Columbia’s largest city. Skye was twenty-four, a young woman who was the curious mix of her mother, a silversmith and jewelry designer, and her father, the chief financial officer of an import/export business that procured Asian antiquities. Cullen was drawn to the arts, but his emphasis had been on the business side of things. Sydney was the proverbial free spirit, the kind of woman who seemed both buoyant with her flair for fashion and design yet weighed down by the realities of an artist’s life. She had left Cullen and Skye, a fourth-grader then, with no plans other than to “find her center” and the life that the creator had devised only for her.

  Although he followed strict process flow for his import business and knew his way from Point A to Point B on most matters, Cullen was left to raise his daughter without a road map. A girl, he quickly learned, required a completely different set of skills. A young girl was not a commodity. When Skye had her first period three years later, Cullen drove to a drugstore at breakneck speed and visited the male’s most unfamiliar aisle, only to return home to his amused daughter with a box of Kotex supers.

  “I think I need to get some pads, Dad,” she’d said, allowing a smile to cross her face. “I don’t think what you’ve picked up will work for me. But I’m new to this, so what do I really know?”

  Cullen felt his face go hot. The errand had been embarrassing, of course. This was his daughter, a young woman, at least biologically. He’d miscalculated. He’d failed where Sydney would have succeeded.

  He wondered if this was one of those times too. Skye had been restless in the past few months. She’d graduated with a degree in art restoration from the University of British Columbia. She’d thought she could straddle her parents’ worlds, perhaps. Maybe bring them together in some way. Yet, over and over, she let it slip that she wanted adventure.

  “I want to do something off-the-wall, Dad,” she said, looking at him intently. “Something fun—dangerous, even.”

  “You�
�ve backpacked across Europe and the U.S. Isn’t that dangerous enough?”

  Skye laughed. “No. I’m looking for a life experience, Dad. I don’t want to…” She hesitated. “You know…end up like Mom at thirty-five or you, sorry, at fifty.”

  He furrowed his brow, feeling a little stung. “Exactly, Skye, what do you mean?”

  She knew she’d hurt him. Her eyes pleaded for understanding. Her choices were her own. She was trying to be the woman she wanted to be.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out a little harshly.”

  “You can say that again.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “What I can tell you, Dad, is that I want an adventure. I want to do something that I can remember always. You know, something that doesn’t fit within the prescribed boxes that you’ve followed in your life.”

  Cullen put his arms around his daughter. “You and your mom were always the boxes that I could never checkmark cleanly.”

  So there he sat, replaying that conversation, staring at his phone. He’d gone to work the previous Friday, and she was gone when he returned.

  There was a note, of course.

  Dad, I’ve left on my adventure. I’m not sure when I’ll return, but I’ll call you soon. Don’t tell Mom.

  Skye never called. Cullen was unsure when he should start to panic. Was it after three days? Or four? By the sixth, he’d made inquiries with the Vancouver police. He notified the hospitals.

  “Were you and your daughter getting along all right?” the cop in the Missing-Persons Unit had asked, in a tone suggesting boredom more than concern.

  “Yes, we were,” Cullen shot back, a tad defensively. “We’ve had our moments, but this wasn’t a running-away-from-home situation. She’s twenty-four.”