by Gregg Olsen
“That’s right,” the cop said. “She’s an adult. If she wants to disappear for a little while, she’s entitled. Lord knows, I’d like to vanish sometimes myself.”
Cullen wanted to snap at the man: This isn’t about you. This is about my daughter and the fact that I’m a complete failure as a father. This is about the fact that she might be at her mother’s, and I hate calling up the bitch to concede said failure.
Cullen said none of that. He thanked the man and dialed his ex-wife. Before he could even get to the point of his call, Sydney cut to the chase.
As she always did.
“Is Skye all right?”
He wondered for a split second how she’d known the reason for his call. Then he remembered: Skye was all they had in common anymore.
“I was hoping you would be able to tell me,” he said.
“Me? How am I supposed to know how she’s doing? I haven’t heard from her for a couple of weeks.”
Cullen could feel the air drain from the room. “I thought you two were talking again.”
“That’s beside the point.” Her tone was sharp. “Are you calling me because you don’t know where our daughter is?”
He hated how Sydney occasionally deigned to use the modifier our when referring to the little girl she’d left behind. On a whim. A selfish whim!
She’s my daughter. And I don’t know where she is!
Instead, he swallowed hard and let the bile drop back down his throat. “Look, Sydney, I’m calling to let you know that I’m a little concerned about Skye. She’s been gone for about a week. I was half hoping she was headed down your way.”
“Gone? Like missing?”
Cullen gulped. He hated the woman on the other end of the line. He imagined her in a house swimming in crystals, diaphanous fabrics, and beaded curtains that she tied back with a string of bells from an import store.
“Like missing, yes.”
The sound of wind chimes clattered in the background. “Of course, you thought I had something to do with her finally getting out of that rain gutter, Vancouver, right?”
“No, it wasn’t that at all. I just thought…” He let his words trail off to silence.
“Cullen?” Again her tone was ice, as it had been since the day she left him.
“Yes, Sydney, I had hoped she’d gone to see you. She was seeking an adventure somewhere, and you wrote the book on that one, didn’t you?”
His words were meant to punish. It was as if Skye’s words about the reason Sydney left them were a double-edged blade. She’d pierced him with it, and he’d shoved it right back at his former wife.
Syndey was silent for a moment.
Was she remembering? Was she sorry? Was she only angry that every call—every call spaced out over a fourteen-year period—had ended just the same?
“Good-bye, Cullen. I’ll let you know if I hear from her. You do the same.”
Click. The call was over. Cullen Hornbeck felt sick to his stomach. If his grown daughter had any friends, he didn’t know them. If she had any real connection to another human being besides himself and her mother, he didn’t know who it would be. The police had said she was an adult and could damn well do what she wanted. He felt like screaming into the phone at the officer, who didn’t seem to care.
“She is all I have! She might be an adult, but she’s fragile. She’s dear. She’s headstrong. She would tell me where she would go. Not disappear for a week! She loved me.”
Still carrying his phone, remembering the seven minutes he’d spent on the phone with Sydney, he flipped on the light in his daughter’s bedroom. At her urging, he’d redecorated the room after she went to college. Yet, there were remnants from her childhood. In the corner by a window there was a hammock that was brimming with Beanie Babies she had collected in grade school. He remembered how thrilled she’d been when she found the purple Princess Diana teddy bear at a Surrey five-and-dime. He picked up the bear and looked at it for a moment before setting it back among its cadre of animal friends. There was also a poster of Justin Timberlake on the back side of the door.
He’d kidded her about all of those things when she left for college. He’d threatened to redo the room into an exercise room.
“Like you’ll ever exercise,” she’d said.
He recalled how he patted his slightly doughy abdomen and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Next time you come home, I might have a hard body.”
“Ugh. That’s the last thing a daughter wants to hear about her dad,” she said.
They had both laughed. And he’d vowed right then not to change a thing.
She didn’t seem to see a need for it, either. It was a shrine to a time that had come and gone.
Cullen snapped his phone shut and sat at her desk. Her laptop was gone. There was nothing to rifle through. No papers in the trash. Skye had vanished.
Sydney Hornbeck Glyndon put down the phone and looked at the photo of her daughter staring from the art niche that she’d had specially created when she and her new husband, Brannon, built their Arizona dream house. Originally she had it in her mind as a place to spotlight one of her bronze sculptures of children. She’d always loved children, although she’d never quite been able to put aside her own needs for the one child who really mattered. She felt a chill in the air despite the heat that oppressed the valley that time of day. She knew that Cullen was more than concerned. He was scared. She could remember the last time she’d heard that in his voice.
“You’re leaving us forever,” he’d said when he saw her bags packed and lined up like a row of mismatched sentinels at the front door of their Vancouver home.
“I don’t know,” she’d answered, not looking at him.
“What am I supposed to tell Skye?”
Still refusing to meet his gaze, she replied, “Tell her what she should already know. I love her.”
“You have a great way of showing it.”
“She’ll understand someday. Sometimes a woman needs freedom. You’re a kind man, Cullen, but I need to be me. Not someone’s wife.”
“And not someone’s mother,” he’d said as the door shut.
Chapter Twenty-six
September 26, 10:44 p.m.
Key Peninsula
There was something comforting about speaking to a machine, if comfort had ever really been a concern. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Sam Castile had never done a thing in his life other than find ways to feel good. Sometimes he wondered if his desires worked on some other plane, in a world far from those of other men. Other men seemed to strive. They seemed to seek to protect. It seemed that other men just wanted to ensure that they were always at the top of the heap, the winners of the competition. Control. What gave him a charge—both sexual and intellectual—were the hunt, the capture, the destruction of someone weaker than he was. It was primal. When he watched those other men with their pretty salon-cut hair and Macy’s clothes lament the challenges of their jobs, he wanted to laugh. They were playing a game that they could never really win. They’d been told by women how it was to be a man.
How they should be. Feel. Do.
By doing so they’d lost any real semblance of manhood. Sam saw the ruse for what it was and almost pitied those who didn’t understand that, in the case of domination and submission, there could only be one victor.
Sam loved the fight, the moment in which his prey acquiesced, fell limp, gave up. He loved the screams for mercy, the promises to do whatever he wanted, when he wanted.
Before he could tell her how dark his thoughts were, he talked into the machine. No judgments. No assessments about what he was doing. Just the cool sound of his voice as he recounted how things operated in his universe.
Where he was king.
“Me again,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about Number Three the past few days. How her skin felt, all wet, warm, soft. She was the prettiest one. She was the one teenage boys would dream about boning. Not all of them have been as hot, as weak. She was compliant. She did what
I commanded. She was mine, like a pet. Like a toy.”
He could feel the bulge in his leather underwear grow with the recollection of what she’d been like. He slipped his right hand into his waistband, feeling the warmth of his own body. Liking what he felt. Rubbing his penis. The shaft, the head, his testicles.
All of it was feeling so good.
“She could have been my pet longer. She could have done what I wanted her to do. But no, she had to get some ideas of her own. Stupid bitch. She hurt me. She found a goddamn screwdriver and actually tried to kill me. Kill me! That stupid bitch!”
Sam opened his desk drawer and retrieved two black metal binder clips. He clamped one on his right nipple, the other on his left. He winced and gulped. The hurt was good, what he imagined it felt like for his victims when he brought them to the edge of passing out with pain.
He was nearing climax as the images of her surrender came faster and faster. He worked his right hand faster and faster, leaning back in his brown leather office chair. Thinking of how he had snuffed out her life, and the relief that came with it.
“Oh, you stupid bitch. You shouldn’t make me mad. I’ll goddamn slice you up like a deli sandwich.”
His mind conjured up the brutal images of his own hands, his hairy knuckles, white with tension as his fingers squeezed her slender neck. The struggle. The quiet, coughing scream that ended with her falling limp. He’d started to roll her over, determined to put himself inside her in a way that he was sure she’d like. If she were alive. To his disappointment, she’d soiled herself.
“Jesus,” he’d said, “you piss me off. You could have been such a good bitch. A clean bitch. I don’t like a dirty whore. You shouldn’t have tried to hurt me. I’m the boss. You belonged to me.”
As he remembered her, how she had been, he thought how much he might enjoy it if he could tell a living person what he’d done.
He spoke into his recorder.
“No one really knows what it takes to be me.”
Once he’d finished all he needed to do, he clicked on the Web site for the Lighthouse newspaper. How he loved seeing his work, reliving the glory of the last moments of another’s life. It excited him once more.
Here I go again, he thought, feeling another erection swell.
Kendall Stark tucked Cody into bed as Steven looked on. The nighttime ritual was as it had always been, quiet and peaceful. She kissed him on his forehead, still warm from his bath after dinner. Cody’s eyes fluttered, his lids heavy with sleep.
“Good night, my baby,” she said.
She imagined a smile, yet there really wasn’t one.
“He had a good day,” Steven said. “He seems happy in the new school.”
“He’s adjusting,” she said. “We all are.”
Steven put his arms around her waist as they left their son’s bedroom for their own.
Kendall looked at her husband and nodded, although she was unsure what he had said. She hated more than anything that she wasn’t living in the moment. She was far away on the shores of Little Clam Bay with a dead girl, a girl without a face.
Chapter Twenty-seven
September 27, 10:45 a.m.
Portland, Oregon
Not surprisingly, a number of forensic artists find their way to the profession because of an interest in criminology. These were the kind who stayed up late watching crime and cop shows, feasting on criminology. They had artistic skills, of course, but artistry wasn’t the driving force for their careers.
Margo Titus, a good-looking brunette who always wore her hair up in a messy bun, with frameless glasses on a gold chain around her slender neck, was from the other camp. She’d been an artist first. She drew Sparky in the margin of a magazine reader response card when she was eleven years old, waiting for her mother in an Idaho doctor’s office. She wore all sixty-four of her prized Crayolas to nubs, even the ugly flesh-toned one. She won two school competitions for her artwork by the time she was in junior high. One was a sculpture of a woman walking a dog that landed her in a coffee-table book, KID ART!
There was no mistaking it. Margo Titus was going to be a fine artist, a sculptor. She was going to sell her pieces in galleries in New York. She was so talented that if she stuck with it, she was told by all her teachers, she could be the artist that generations would remember.
“You are the kind of student that teachers dream of having but once in a lifetime,” said her high school mentor, a woman who wore knee-length skirts and copper bangle bracelets. “You are going to do all the things I dreamed about when I was your age.”
Dreams, Margo learned, do die. Her pieces never caught fire like she and others had hoped. They were dismissed as too provincial. Sweet but forgettable. She ended up moving back to Boise and waitressing at a downtown martini bar for a couple of years before going to Boise State for classes in forensic science, inspired by a TV show spotlighting how artists could put their skills to use in helping others.
“The most important thing in the world isn’t how a piece of art goes with your couch and love-seat set,” she told an artist friend when she made up her mind.
Three years later she was doing facial reconstruction out of a studio she called The Face Lab Inc., in Portland.
Kendall Stark contacted Margo to work the Little Clam Bay case. They’d met at a Seattle conference several years earlier. When Margo answered the call and the two women exchanged some personal updates, Kendall was very direct on two key points.
“We have a limited budget up here, but we also have a case that needs solving.”
“I’m sure I can work within your parameters, Kendall. What’s the case?”
“A young woman, early twenties, found floating in one of our local estuaries. We’ve put the word out, but, you know, sometimes a description isn’t enough.”
“Decomp?”
“No. Not too bad.”
Margo knew that sometimes a morgue photo required a little help too. Facial expressions, the way a person’s mouth and eyes work together to form a true representation of what he or she looked like in life, were sometimes crucial to finding out just who they were.
“There is some tissue damage. The coroner thinks it was animal activity.”
“How bad?”
“Parts of the mouth and nose.”
“Eyes in place? Brows?”
“Yes. Barely.”
“That’s fine. I’ve worked with a lot less.”
“I know that they closed the case on Ridgway’s ‘last victim’ because of you,” Kendall said, indicating the case profiled in a police journal that featured Margo’s work. The article had recounted the discovery of a small skull near Star Lake in south King County, Washington. Over time, seven more bodies had been found in the vicinity, most together in a single cluster of grisly mayhem that shocked the Pacific Northwest nearly as much as the Ted Bundy murders had over the previous decade.
The article had concerned the skull of a young African American woman—or maybe even only a girl. No other personal effects. No bones. No nothing. Just the dark gray skull found by hikers among the sword and bracken ferns that fill in the lush undergrowth. The “last victim” went unnamed until six months after the trial, when Margo took up the challenge because, according to the article, “every mother deserves to know what happened to her daughter, no matter what. I don’t care if this girl was a prostitute or a gangbanger. At one time she was someone’s precious baby girl.”
It turned out that the Star Lake location was Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s body dump site. Margo’s work gave the victim back her name: Tammy Whitman.
Kendall admired the humanity and respect for the victim that was an essential part of Margo’s work. Being murdered was heartbreaking enough. To be a victim with a Jane or John Doe bracelet in some Podunk morgue was an insult to whatever life that person had led.
Or to those loved ones or friends who were out there, wondering just where he or she had gone.
“I’m assuming that a 2-D ima
ge is acceptable,” Margo said. “How soon can you send me facial measurements? Photos?”
“How does this afternoon suit you?”
Margo laughed. “This is one of those you-need-it-yesterday requests, isn’t it, Kendall?”
“Not really. Sooner is better than later.”
“All right. Get me the material, the coroner’s contact info, and I’ll see what I can have for you in, let’s see…a day or two?”
“Next time you’re in town, martinis on me,” Kendall said.
After she hung up, Kendall went looking for Josh Anderson. Help was on the way. Without knowing who the victim was, there was no way they’d catch the killer.
Everything always started with the ID.
Most of her contemporaries worked solely on the computer, but Margo Titus still loved the way colored pencils and Conté crayons felt against the smooth surface of high-quality rag paper. She found greater success in bringing the material to life by using the old-school methods that she’d first picked up to make her reputation, her legacy, as a fine artist. After working to specific measurements on a transparency atop the photographs, she’d draw, color, and then scan the image for manipulation in Photoshop.
On a row of shelves above her worktable were three sculpted heads that she called the “Janes.” Although they’d been found in three different states, they shared the unique bond of being Jane Does. All three were crafted with such realism even Margo thought their eyes followed her about the room. Sometimes she wondered if their vigilant gazes were meant to remind her that she’d failed to determine who they were.
Who is missing you three?
Next to the Janes was a framed portrait of Margo’s husband, Dan, and their sons, Jacob and Eli. Below the shelves was a corkboard decorated with the whimsically macabre drawings of her boys, depicting their mother at work in her studio. Heads on the table. Morgue photos scattered like confetti. A paintbrush in hand.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the boys are talking about my work at school, she’d thought more than once.