by Gregg Olsen
Me: He found out my mom was pregnant. He kidnapped her, held her like a toy, raped and tortured her, but she escaped. And she had me. My aunt said he’d made it known that he felt I belonged to him. That my mom still belonged to him. I felt a rush of bile. I could never belong to that rapist. That monster. I belonged to the dad that raised me. The dad that creep of a bio father murdered. My hands were shaking, and my aunt looked me right in the eyes and said, “Rylee, I was there when he came for her . . . and for you.”
Dr. A: Go on. What happened?
Me: I asked my aunt what she meant. Was she there when I was born? I was a little angry that she knew me and I didn’t know about her. Aunt Ginger said I was born in the hospital there in Idaho. She had volunteered to be Mom’s birthing coach. Mom was just sixteen when I was born. The same age I was when I found out all of this. My mom didn’t want to look at me, then she said she was glad she had a girl. I found out she said that because if it—if I—had been a boy, she was afraid she’d see her kidnapper’s likeness. Aunt Ginger told her I didn’t look like him. I wondered how Aunt Ginger could know that, but she told me later that a policeman had showed up at the hospital and brought flowers. He was my biological dad. The serial killer. A cop.
The tape player shuts off. My mind instantly switches back to the case—a defense mechanism, I’m sure. I need to send a full-face photo and physical description to all the surrounding law enforcement agencies to see if they have any record, had any contact, with my Jane Doe.
I hate calling her that. Depersonalizes her. I’ll give her a name and decide to call the victim Jane Snow.
I get on the phone and call Dispatch. Someone new answers the phone and I don’t want to talk with someone new. I finally get Susie.
“Susie, I need you to put out an all-points bulletin.”
“Nice to hear from you, Megan. I don’t think you’ve called me lately. How am I? I’m fine. What has been going on in my life? Well, you don’t want to know.”
“Susie,” I say. “Please don’t make me come over there and get nasty.”
Susie chuckles. “I’m teasing, Megan. What can I do you for?”
This is another slang cop line that never made any sense. She couldn’t do me for anything. I play along. “You heard about the woman we found on Marrowstone this morning?”
“We were just talking about that,” she says. “Do you have a name?”
“No. That’s why I want you to use whatever you have at your disposal to get her description out to every law enforcement agency in our county and the surrounding ones. If we don’t get a response, I may want to go wider.”
Susie’s all in. “What should the message say?”
I give her a complete description of the body and add the possibility the victim might have had a child. I don’t want to give out too much information, but I want to get some serious responses. Washington has the fourth-highest missing person rate in the country. A study was funded by taxpayers called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. Now every law enforcement agency uses it, including those in Oregon and Washington. I have the app on my computer and had run the description that afternoon. I got forty-two possibles, but none were close to the dates I wanted except two. I found nothing else on those two. Not even a Facebook page. I give Susie the names and other information on those two just in case something was entered since I last checked.
Susie says she’ll call me if she gets anything. I ask her to send me an email instead. It’ll be faster. And I want to listen to the rest of the tape. I disconnect and drink some Cutty.
The tumbler has somehow emptied itself. The Scotch is doing its job. I take the tape out of the player, put it back in its case, and return the case to the box. I put the tape player in with them and put the box back on the top shelf of my closet and crawl under the covers.
My eyes closed, I breathe in and exhale. Each deliberate breath is meant to calm, soothe me to sleep. Scare away the bad dreams.
It never works.
Nothing does.
It’s her.
She comes to me like a scorpion crawling up the stairs. Her eyes are red. Red, like an albino bunny. But not cute. Horrible. Full of terror. I turn from her eyes to the sound of cutting, gnawing into the wood of the steps. It’s her, of course. I don’t scream. I just get ready. Lifting herself by her muscled arms, she reminds me of Wyeth’s Christina’s World. I hate that painting.
I hate helplessness.
I will myself to wake up. I sit up shivering, staring at the darkness outside my window. I hold the feeling I had in my dream and I wonder if it is anything like how the victims in my case felt when confronted with their killer’s eyes. Did they fight or accede?
Twelve
A light rain mists the trees and grass this morning, sending dewy diamonds into my view as I make the drive to the office. A pair of deer stand in the roadway, taking their sweet time to cross. I live in a beautiful part of the country. Mountains. Lakes. Salt water. Sometimes I wonder if the beauty of the Northwest is a mask covering the ugly that lurks inside. Peel back the image. See the dead girl. Seal it back up.
Go on a picnic.
When I arrive at work, the sheriff has his door closed and I can hear laughter inside. A woman. Her laughter is penetrating. Forced.
Ronnie.
I don’t knock on the door, although I am tempted to break up whatever she is trying to do. No way am I going to be stuck with her again. I know Sheriff Gray wants me to take her to the autopsy today, but when she starts talking, the corpse will get up and run. I pick up my files on the case, check the basket for new reports from Crime Scene or the Marine Patrol, then head for the door.
I don’t make it very far.
Sheriff Gray calls to me from his doorway.
“Megan. I heard your car pull in.”
“You did?” I purposely parked in the farthest parking spot.
“It’s about time we upgraded you. The mufflers on that Taurus sound like they belong on a diesel truck.”
“I hadn’t noticed. The Taurus is fine. I’ll talk to you when I come back.”
“Not so fast.” He reaches in and brings Reserve Deputy Ronnie Marsh out by one arm. She doesn’t look excited. She’s not laughing anymore.
“Sorry. I forgot, Sheriff.” I nod at Ronnie. “Coming?”
She looks at the sheriff and he gives her a serious look.
“You’ve got to get the whole experience, Deputy Marsh,” he tells her. “You might want to work with Megan one day. Not that Motor Patrol’s not important. Or the jail. You could always work with the corrections officers at the jail. Have you rotated through there yet?”
Ronnie snatches her coat off a peg by the sheriff’s door and hurries over to me.
“We should get going,” she says. “Wouldn’t want to miss the autopsy.”
Ronnie looks pale. Sheriff Gray grins. She doesn’t see it, but I do.
The sly dog.
Outside the Taurus we go through the same routine. Me trying the key fob, remembering the fob doesn’t work, using the key. When we get settled, I see that Ronnie is wearing her uniform. Brown twill pants with a light brown stripe down the legs. A light brown shirt with a sparkling new gold sheriff’s badge. New brown lace-up boots too.
She sees me appraising her.
“I thought I should wear something I could work in today,” she says. “I hope it’s all right.”
I wonder if vomit will come out of the shirt very easily. Where we are headed, she may need a hooded raincoat.
“Perfect,” I say. “It will give you more authority until people get to know who you are.”
Ronnie adjusts the shiny badge on the left front of her shirt. Most of the deputies have opted for the embroidered badges. The shiny steel badges make for a good target, and they tear your expensive uniform shirt when they are ripped off during an arrest.
She’ll learn the hard way.
“I see you have your hair pinned up,” I say.
/> “Yeah,” she says. “I took the self-defense classes at the academy and the instructor kept harping on not having long hair.”
I wonder if she thinks I’ve been harping on her as well. I don’t care.
“Oh. I forgot to give you this.” She opens her purse and takes out an envelope with my name printed on it.
It is already opened. It’s the crime scene report I’ve been waiting for. I read the report and it more or less backs up what Larsen said last night. It also indicates they checked the cliff for one hundred yards and found no evidence of someone scaling down besides us. It documents every soda and beer can they’d found. The all-seeing eye is in the report and they collected the rock. I may want to keep it after this case is over.
“This envelope was sealed,” I say. “It had my name on it. Did anyone else see what’s in here?”
Ronnie says nothing. She just sits and looks out the passenger-side window. I prefer the silence but I don’t want to start the day out pissed off at her. Besides, there was nothing new in there that she didn’t know.
“Okay, Detective Marsh,” I say. “What did you make of the report?”
Ronnie straightens in the seat and turns to me. “We didn’t find any clothing except what she was wearing. I don’t know if you noticed, but the panties were put on inside out.”
I didn’t.
I urge her to continue.
And she does.
“No purse. No identification. No jewelry. Not even those white bands you get on your fingers when a ring has been on there for a while. Her face wasn’t messed up to the point someone wouldn’t recognize her. All the bruises and cuts show she was beaten. I think this killer has done this before. It was too thought-out. Except for the panties being inside out.”
“Why do you think the killer put the panties and bra back on her?”
“Maybe he didn’t want her to be found naked.”
Seriously. That’s the best you’ve got?
“Okay,” I finally say. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
“One other thing,” Ronnie goes on. “We’re convinced the killer brought her body in by boat. But what if he lowered her over the cliff in a sling?”
I jerk my head toward her. Sling. But who would bring a sling? How much planning would that take? To get the body over those rocks would take an enormous effort. It took two crime scene guys to put her in the boat.
“Robbie Boyd said he’s a rock climber,” Ronnie says. “He might have been able to do it.”
“He’s not as big as we are.” I say it but know not to discount the possibility completely. “Keep talking.”
She nods. “Okay. Then there’s the rock with the symbol on it. Robbie struck me as a little bit of a freak. He immediately wanted to know if he was a suspect. He brought up the criminal justice stuff. I just have a bad feeling about him.”
“All good thinking,” I tell her.
The truth is, I have a bad feeling about him too.
Ronnie beams at me and faces front again, placing her hands in her lap like an excited child. She has totally forgotten where we are headed and I hate to spoil her mood, but we have to go.
I put the crime scene report in the folder with the coroner’s preliminary report and my own summation of yesterday’s events. The sheriff has copies of everything except the crime scene report.
“Did you give the sheriff a copy of the crime scene report?” I ask.
She looks confused. “Should I have?”
“I’ll give it to him when we get back.” I start the engine and pull out of the parking lot.
Ronnie is quiet until we reach the turnoff for the highway south to Bremerton, Kitsap County’s largest city and the location of the morgue shared by three counties. “I’ve never traveled.”
“Where do you want to go?” I ask.
Ronnie lets out a sigh. “Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere, I guess. I’ve never even been to half the places around here. Yesterday was the first time I was on Marrowstone Island. I’ve been to some of the state parks, camping and boating. I guess I’m not adventurous like you.”
I wonder what she means by that. What does she know? I think of how my mom used to say that our midnight moves from one place to the next were a big adventure. How we’d renamed ourselves so many times that I probably couldn’t remember them all. How we had a code word that would ignite our most unexpected adventure. RUN. The word that told me life as we knew it was over. I stay quiet. I’m good at quiet until I get really pissed off.
Ronnie carries on.“I mean, you’ve probably traveled all over the United States. The world, even. You seem so…”
She stops and I press her.
“So what, Ronnie?”
“I don’t know. So worldly, I guess. You’re not afraid of anything. You told that state patrol guy what to do and he didn’t argue. And you made detective pretty quick. I heard you’re the youngest detective with the Sheriff’s Office. Guys are jealous of you.”
My thoughts go back to the beauty of the Northwest and how I was musing that morning that the pretty mountains and thick forests of evergreens is a mask.
Peel back the layer. See what’s underneath.
I’m a lot like that. Underneath the veneer of my tough personality is a girl who would rather strike at a compliment than take it and be grateful for it.
“No one should ever be jealous of me,” I say.
My tone is final. Not harsh. But it plants a big period between the two us, and Ronnie stays quiet for the rest of the ride to the autopsy.
Thirteen
A pickup basketball game is going on in the lot behind the morgue and I recognize Dr. Andrade dribbling across the court and pulling off a perfect layup. I notice him because he is so out of place surrounded by the twenty- and thirty-something lab and comm center workers. Dr. Andrade is wearing scrubs and lace-up shoes where everyone else has stripped off their shirts and are in shorts or sweats with tennis shoes. He is kicking their young asses by the looks of disbelief on some of the faces.
Good for him.
I park near the door to his office. He sees me and comes over. Not a drop of sweat on his brow.
“Detective Carpenter.”
“This is Reserve Deputy Ronnie Marsh,” I tell him. He and Ronnie shake hands.
“Nice to meet you,” she says.
“That’s some grip you have there, Deputy,” he jokes, then grins at me. “Are you attending?”
Ronnie looks nervous, then draws herself up. “Yes. I am.”
Dr. Andrade begins walking and talking as he leads us inside the building. “Have you ever attended a post before?” Ronnie stays quiet. “I see,” he says. “Well this will be quite the experience. I hope you haven’t eaten this morning.”
Again he grins and gives me a conspiratorial wink.
“I don’t think you’ve attended one yourself, have you, Detective Carpenter?”
“Not here.”
I leave the answer vague, so he won’t pry.
I don’t know Dr. Andrade all that well except from phone conversations and trading emails. One thing I do know about him: he’s very thorough in the actual autopsies but not as thorough in his reports. I’ve caught him on a couple of occasions leaving out pertinent information. In one case a victim was missing her little toe. That didn’t make it into his report. It would have helped identify the body we found, because the toe wasn’t the only thing missing. The victim had been missing the little toe for a few years, but when I found her, her face was completely burnt off. I don’t generally handle the bodies at the scene enough to count their toes.
The door to the autopsy suite opens and my sinuses are immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of disinfectants. This part of the building is painted that color of green I like to refer to as puke green. The hue is fitting for what we are about to view. A long hall, also that stomach-turning shade, opens in front of me and is dotted intermittently with doors. One door is marked with the likeness of a gingerbread man and his gingerbread wif
e. Under that it reads, “His and Hers.” I don’t find that amusing but apparently the doc does.
“This is the most popular room with visitors.”
Very funny.
A continuous row of naked fluorescent bulbs runs the length of the hallway and buzz overhead like a hundred dragonflies. I follow Andrade to a door marked “Examination Room 1.”
Ronnie leans over to me and whispers, “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You’ll be okay. If you think you need to leave, you can go. Just give it a try.”
She tries to smile. I feel some compassion for her. If she can’t, she can’t. It’s that simple. You never know what you can do if you don’t try. Rolland, my stepfather, taught me that. Myself. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. Some in not as good shape as Jane Snow.
I should be fine.
Dr. Andrade hands us paper masks, caps, booties and latex gloves, all in fashionable green.
“Put these on and we’ll get started.”
I look across the room to where the victim’s naked body is laid out on a stainless steel table, arms at her sides, a wooden block propping up her head. An operating room light on a swivel arm spotlights the body to the point where even the pores in the face can be seen. There is a reddish tint on one cheek that looks like smeared-on blush makeup. The nose isn’t straight. An assistant wearing a white Tyvek suit with a hoodie and goggles is washing the body down, removing what detritus remains.
Her eyes are still open and fixed.
“I’ve taken X-rays of the victim,” the pathologist says. “She has several broken ribs and broken bones in both of her hands.”
I walk with him to the table. He turns one of the victim’s hands palm down on the table.
“See this semicircular mark here?” He points to the top of the hand, and I can see what looks to me like the impression of the heel of a shoe or boot.
“Heel mark?” I ask.
“Look closer,” he says. “See the little intermittent spaces in the mark? It’s some kind of lug-soled boot. I can’t see it as well-defined on the other hand, but this one also has a broken metacarpal and a bone in the wrist.”