by Gregg Olsen
He looks at Ronnie. “Do you want to see an autopsy?”
“Sure,” she says with her mouth, but her face says no.
“Take Deputy Marsh with you. She needs the experience.”
I’ve seen my share of dead bodies and death, but I haven’t attended a post mortem. I haven’t been required to attend one yet and I am sure Ronnie hasn’t, either. I’m not sure how I feel about doing so now. I only know I need answers.
A little later Ronnie is behind me, looking over my shoulder at the screen of my laptop. I must have been so deep in thought I didn’t notice she was there. I’d forgotten that I pulled up a Google search for Marrowstone Island.
“Why are you researching the island?”
“I was thinking I’d buy it. Build a casino. Retire somewhere warm where it doesn’t rain all winter. Buy a yacht.”
She giggles. Really. “I’m not a big water person. I’ll go out on bigger boats, like your yacht. But I don’t get in the water unless it’s a hot tub or a spa.”
Of course not.
“I just want to see how Boyd was able to find the cliff. There wasn’t a path to it.”
Boyd claimed to have experience climbing, but he didn’t seem built for it. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I was just reading something into his behavior at the scene. He willingly volunteered that he was a criminal justice major in college and immediately asked if he was a suspect. Why would he think that from being asked why he had gone down the cliff? It is a fact that some criminals will insert themselves into a police investigation in order to get the full effect of their kill, a second rush, information. And he was right. The person to report the crime was always the first in line to be a suspect. Then on to someone close to the victim. Spouse, significant other, friends, kids, coworkers, and the like.
I tune back in. Ronnie is saying something, and I have been only half listening.
“Do you want me to call Captain Martin and see if he’s found anything?”
She is single-minded. But I haven’t checked in with Captain Marvel, nor has he checked in with me. I guess I assume if he finds something, he will call.
“Call him.”
Ronnie already has his number punched into her phone and hits the dial button.
“Ask him his opinion on how the body got there.”
I think I already know, but he’s got more time on the water than I do. My water travel is all by ferry.
“And ask him about the all-seeing eye. See if he’s ever seen that on any other beaches before. Maybe it’s kids doing that.”
“Do you think it was left by the killer?” Ronnie asks, and I’m saved from answering when Captain Marvel answers his phone. I mouth “Speakerphone.” Ronnie taps the screen and I can hear voices in the background and then Captain Marvel says, “Ronnie. Good to hear from you.”
Oh, please. He has her number in his contacts.
“I’m at the Sheriff’s Office with Detective Carpenter on speakerphone.”
“Hi, Megan,” he says.
“Where are you, Captain?” I ask.
“Still at the scene. We’re using the Humminbird—that’s for underwater imaging—and radar to see if there’s something out here we missed. It’s slow going.”
“Oh, be careful. You have the other deputy there, don’t you?”
“Don’t you worry about me, Ronnie. Tell Detective Carpenter that I found something.”
I take the phone from Ronnie. “This is Carpenter. What do you have?”
“I don’t know if it’s important, but you said to let you know if we found anything no matter how insignificant.”
I am losing it. “And?”
“I found a couple of light sticks about ten feet out in the water from where the body was. They were floating but they were used up. Like I said, it may not mean a thing. Could have come from anywhere. I’ve got a box of the same brand on the Integrity for nighttime illumination in an emergency. I just thought you should know.”
“Actually, I have a couple of questions,” I say. “Honest opinion. How do you think the body got there?”
“Had to be by boat. Why?”
“Just confirming. Another question: Deputy Davis found a symbol scratched into—”
“A rock,” he finishes for me. “I saw it.”
“Have you seen any graffiti or markings like it before?”
He’s quiet for a few seconds. “Can’t say that I have. Maybe. Is it important?”
“Just covering bases. Would you think of a symbol like that as a cult thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. But it’s odd finding something like that near a dead body.”
I agree.
“Thanks, Captain.”
“You bet. And, Ronnie, you did a good job out there today.”
“Thanks, Captain,” she says. Her cheeks are pink. I hand her phone back.
“You did good today,” I add.
It doesn’t thrill her as much.
I’m thinking about the light sticks. There would be no chance of fingerprints or anything else and I doubt if Captain Marvel protected them as evidence. He would have told me.
Ten
Ronnie is sitting in the visitor’s chair by my desk. Even though she isn’t a detective, she witnessed everything that I had seen today. “Find an unoccupied desk. You need to type up your report before you go home.”
“But you have a secretary. Can’t I just send the audio file of Boyd’s statement to Nan?”
I almost laugh. Nan? I’d like to see that. Actually I wouldn’t. I don’t want Nan in on the little details. Some things are not meant to be leaked. Nan is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
“You should type it yourself,” I say. “And don’t talk about any of this with anyone. That means you give your finished report to either me or the sheriff. No one else unless you get permission.”
Nan chimes in from around the corner. “I’ll be happy to type the statement, Ronnie.”
She has sonar-like hearing.
Nan has never offered to type anything for me. Half the time she doesn’t even tell me when I’ve had a call. Of course, I’ve never asked her to type anything because she’s the queen of gossip. “We’ve got it, Nan. Thanks.”
“Anything else?” Ronnie asks.
I’m thinking of her skill in researching on the Internet. “Start out with the date and time we got the case, when we arrived, who we talked to, and what you did at the scene. You can get our dispatch and arrival time from our dispatcher.”
I give her the number.
“But I really didn’t do much besides take Boyd’s statement,” she says.
“That’s not true. You were a big help.”
Now write a big report. I hope to keep her busy and out of my hair.
“Okay.” She gets up and looks around for a computer. “I’ll have to call Roy and find out when he and Deputy Floyd arrived.”
Roy? “You don’t need that in your report. The captain will do his own report.” She just stands there. I don’t have time to hold her hand. “When you’re finished, let me read it before we give it to the sheriff. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I pick up the desk phone and start to dial Jerry Larsen’s number. Ronnie is trying to get my attention.
“What?”
“What time do I get off today?”
We get off when I say we get off.
“Whenever your shift is over, you can leave. If it’s important, you can leave whenever.”
Deputy Marsh is not going to make it as a detective. She may not make it as a deputy. But that is her problem. I didn’t want to take her on this morning and my gut feelings on her were right on target. Her shift ended an hour ago, but I would have thought she’d show a little interest in this. She sulks off and I get on the phone and call Larsen.
No answer.
I finish my report and collect what Ronnie has typed up. It’s actually pretty concise; I have to give her that. We have to wait for Crime Scene’s report. They wil
l be working on it for a while. Crime Scene will run the victim’s fingerprints through our database and IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—the national fingerprint and criminal history system kept by the FBI. I have a thought just then. Maybe she isn’t in IAFIS or the local and state database. If she commits a crime that is minor enough, some jurisdictions don’t enter fingerprints. In Jefferson County, if we arrest someone for a minor vandalism, for instance, we don’t require the suspect’s prints be put in any database. We keep them in our records, but that’s as far as it goes.
I check a few things on the missing persons database and get nowhere. I tell Ronnie she can go home, and she bolts. I check in with Sheriff Gray. He’s playing solitaire on his computer.
“I want to catch you up.”
“Do you have a suspect?”
“No.”
“Have you identified the victim?”
“No.”
“Have you done everything you can for the night?”
“Yes.”
“Go home and leave me to my solitary pursuits.”
I smile politely at his pun and head for home thinking I should have asked Ronnie to get a drink with me. On the other hand I was hoping that I’d seen the last of her. If Sheriff Gray sees us getting close, he will keep us paired.
Not going to happen.
Eleven
I sit, engine running, in front of my place in Port Townsend, lost in thought. The thing about being a detective is that you never stop detecting. You don’t write a traffic citation or make an arrest and then go home knowing tomorrow will be different. What’s on my mind is the preliminary coroner’s report. He faxed it over, but I need to clarify what he found. Her hand was broken. There were scrape marks on the wrist and bruising on the heel of her right hand. The trapezium and metacarpal bones were dislocated. The metacarpals are the bones in the palm of the hand, which the fingers are connected to, and the trapezium is the bone that connects the thumb’s metacarpal to the wrist. He said my hunch about handcuffs was the most likely cause. She had pulled or tried to pull her hand out of one of the cuffs. The bruising down the side of the hand, from wrist to little finger, indicated she was successful. As if that weren’t enough, the metacarpals of both hands were broken, and half-moon-shaped bruising suggested someone stomped on them. He also saw scuff marks on the backs of both elbows. He didn’t touch them but indicated it in his preliminary for the pathologist to confirm. To him it looked like she’d crawled on elbows and knees across a rough surface. He didn’t see fiber but didn’t rule it out.
I figure this is punishment for trying to get out of the handcuffs. He stomped both hands to be sure she wouldn’t be able to do it again. She crawled on her elbows because her hands were broken. A pathologist can determine how long ago the bones were broken. That may give me an idea how long she was held captive and possibly when she was murdered. Jerry Larsen isn’t a forensic pathologist. He doesn’t cut the bodies up to see what made them stop ticking. But he has spent more than half of his sixty years of age doing the job, and with that he’s developed some damn fine instincts. Still, I need to talk to Dr. Andrade.
Crime Scene wouldn’t have collected a rape kit. That will be Andrade’s job in the morning. The rape kit is important for DNA, but the turnaround time for DNA testing and comparison is weeks. The sheriff can request the rape kit be expedited, but it will only tell me if the victim had sex and not with whom. DNA may do that. I know what the crime lab will say. They are always backed up and busy.
It is only one case. For now. I worry that it’s not a lone murder. Tomorrow I’ll attend the autopsy. Dr. Andrade will be expecting me. Depending on how late Crime Scene works tonight, I don’t expect her fingerprints to be run through the local and national database before late morning. If that doesn’t give me an identification, I’ll just have to continue poring over missing person reports. There are an average of about three hundred murders each year in Washington. Unless I can spotlight this case, the sheriff’s request for expedited DNA analysis will go to the back of the line or not see daylight at all, and she will just be a Jane Doe.
I shut off the engine and head up the walk to the historic Victorian. Historic usually equals quaint, but there’s nothing quaint about this place. It’s a big house divided into two units. At the moment I’m the sole tenant and I like it that way. The other unit is currently, and probably always will be, unoccupied. The last renter gave up because of unreliable heat in the winter and sweltering heat in the summer. The ancient wood floors are dangerously uneven, causing me to trip some nights on my way to the bathroom.
I drop my purse and keys on the table by the leaded glass door to my bedroom, the only part of the house that has any style from the bygone era. I expect someday the place will be razed and the door will end up in some fancy home in Seattle. I have a little office area tucked in one corner and a gun safe in the closet. I lock my gun in the safe and sit at my desk, staring at the blank screen of my laptop.
I think about the dead woman. The nameless woman. The woman who was tortured, probably raped, chained up somewhere like a dog, then dumped on a beach to be found.
I get up and take down a box from the top of my closet. The box contains dozens of mini-cassette tapes of my sessions with Dr. Karen Albright, my psychologist. I place the box on the desk. It’s heavy. Who knew words could weigh so much? I sit down, pick out a tape, and put it in the little recorder. I get up and go to the fridge to get a glass of wine and bring the box and a plastic tumbler from an Idaho motel back to the desk. I twist the knob on the wine box and white zinfandel fills the tumbler.
Sipping wine, I think about how Dr. Albright brought me back from the precipice that had been my world since I was born.
I recollect how her blue eyes scared me at first. Such a pale blue. Almost otherworldly. How her office smelled of microwave popcorn. How much I grew to trust her. I was twenty when I first saw her. Defensive. Closed off like a street barricade. I had never let anyone inside, but I was smart enough to know that everything inside of me—from my experiences to the bloodline of my birth—had to be exorcized somehow. I’d been traumatized, and while I couldn’t see it in the mirror, others did. Night terrors in a college dorm are traumatic and uniquely embarrassing. You don’t know what you said, if anything. You don’t know if anyone heard your screams.
I open the windows and drink the wine. The box is calling me.
“You’ll want these someday,” Dr. Albright said.
I refused the gift at first. “I can’t see that happening.”
She smiled, a warm calming smile. “Trust me. You will. The day will come and listening to the tapes will make you even stronger.” She put her arms around me. We both cried. We held each other for a long time. I knew it wasn’t goodbye forever, but it was the end of therapy that had spanned a year and a half. At that time I was graduating from college with a degree in criminology and had plans for the police academy in suburban Seattle.
I draw a breath and peer inside. A boxful of cassettes, each numbered with the dates on which they were recorded. I switch to Scotch. I’ve taken to keeping a bottle of Cutty Sark in a drawer in the desk. It’s cheap but fair. I used to buy a more expensive single malt. One of the “Glens”: Glenfiddich, Glenmorangie, Glenlivet. Then I discovered that after the first drink it all tasted the same. I order the real stuff only when I’m in public.
I know I’m stalling. I was drawn to listen to the tapes of my sessions with Dr. Albright, but this case brought the anguish from the past back with a vengeance. Still, I’m curious. I turn on the player.
I hear a short hiss while the audio begins.
Karen Albright starts off with a reminder that I’m not alone on the journey. She tells me I’m strong. This is the path to healing. I remember I wanted to believe that, but my gut told me it was complete and utter bullshit. Deep inside, I knew beyond any doubt, I’d never heal.
Dr. A: Close your eyes, Rylee. Tell me about meeting Aunt Ginger.
She calls me by the only name she knew. Her voice is full of concern and sincerity. I know, or I feel, that she is a good person. She believes she can help. I didn’t want to close my eyes, but I did.
And I close them now. Thinking about the tortured body of the woman who is now a piece of evidence on the stainless steel table. Being dissected by a pathologist after being bound and beaten, abused, like an animal. Her life was taken, but, worse, her dignity and worth as a human being was stripped away by force. Helpless, becoming hollow, drawing into the mind to escape the horror of what was and what was to come. I think of my mother and how she lived this nightmare.
I stop the tape. I punch the “play” button and force myself to concentrate on the words. I can hear myself take a deep breath.
Me: There was no air in the room. I let out a gasp and Aunt Ginger is all over me. I don’t need CPR. I push her away. I understand what she said but I feel like the room is spinning and I’m unable to grab ahold of the meaning of her words.
I think about the autopsy tomorrow. I push it down deep and listen to my words.
Me: Aunt Ginger asks me, “Honey are you all right? Put your head between your knees.” Of course I’m not all right. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve lost my mom, pulled a knife from my dead stepfather’s chest, found out that my biological dad is a serial killer. And not only did he want my mom, he wants me. Upset doesn’t cover it.
Dr. A: You’re safe here, Rylee.
Me: Am I? Am I really ever safe anywhere?
I can hear myself let out a breath. I’m calming down. I don’t know this woman, Ginger, the sister of my mom, the aunt I never knew I had, but I knew she meant well. I remember she had lines around her eyes that underscored the anxiety she’s held inside since her sister, my mom, disappeared.
Dr. A: What did you mean when you said your biological father wanted you?