Water's Edge: A totally gripping crime thriller (Detective Megan Carpenter Book 2)

by Gregg Olsen

  He refuses to take it.

  “That’s her.”

  I realize that I am being a bit cruel, but I am determined to get some kind of human response from him.

  “That’s your daughter. Leann Truitt?”

  He nods.

  I know people process grief in different ways. This isn’t one of those. This is almost relief. I want to smack him.

  But I don’t.

  “Can you tell me where she works?” I ask.

  He shrugs a little, indicating he’s not interested. He says, “I heard she was tending bar in Port Townsend. I don’t know the name of the place.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “I can find out where.” I motion for Ronnie to sit. I take a place on the couch, leaving room for him. Hoping he will sit and not clam up. “Did your daughter go to college around here?”

  He sinks into the other end of the couch and thinks for a minute.

  “She was brilliant, Detective. Had a future ahead of her. Then something happened. I don’t know what. She wouldn’t say. She came home. I guess law school wasn’t for her. She said she couldn’t see being a lawyer and called them all assholes. She had never used that kind of language in her life. She was angry all the time. And needy. Always needy. I knew something had hurt her, but…”

  I wait. He isn’t really talking to me. More like he is replaying a tape of the past. A memory that he had to speak to make it real, or to let it go.

  “I didn’t have a close relationship with Leann. Her mother could get her to open up. That was their thing. But her mother was gone by the time she came back. Left. That was when Leann gave college up for good. I blamed my ex. I didn’t know the problem wasn’t school or her mother. It was here with her. Honestly, she never made good choices.”

  “Did you have a disagreement?” Ronnie asks, and I shoot her a look. A rule in investigations is that only one person does the questioning. I don’t want him to get defensive and stop talking.

  Ronnie gets the hint and becomes invisible.

  “Oh, we had a disagreement, I can tell you. Before she left for school, she bummed around the party circuit. There were strong words. On both sides. I convinced her she needed a career. Something substantial to make her mark in life. She wasn’t interested in making anything of herself. Then, when things got bad between her mother and me, she agreed to go to college. I had to pull some strings. Expensive strings. But she got accepted and left for school. I don’t know if she agreed to get away from the arguments or if she actually saw reason.”

  He puts his hands together and grips them, closes his eyes, and seems to be repeating some mantra or something, but he’s just moving his lips. No sound. He stays like that for a while. Long enough for me and Ronnie to exchange a quick WTF? look.

  He opens his eyes and notices I’m watching him. “I was making contact. Asking for guidance.”

  Oh, please, I think.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I say.

  His face takes on a smug expression. “Do you know what a soul contract is, Detective Carpenter?”

  I shake my head, not remembering if religious confusion is one of the stages of grieving.

  “A soul contract,” he says patiently, “is an agreement we have made with other souls before we are born.”

  I blink. I have no idea where this is going.

  “The contracts have a purpose. They teach us important lessons that we choose to learn before we can reach reincarnation. I don’t suppose you believe in reincarnation?”

  This is all crazy talk to me, but I want to keep him talking.

  “I do.”

  I look at Ronnie and she’s nodding her head also.

  I’m all but certain he doesn’t believe me, but he continues anyway.

  “Leann was so much like her mother. They didn’t believe in anything spiritual. Anything good that happened was pure luck. Not the result of making a soul contract. They could have looked around at all the things I’ve provided for them and seen they were wrong. This wasn’t all my doing. I was merely a conduit for my future transition.”

  This kind of nonsense is beyond the pale, but I listen to be polite and to encourage something of use to come out of his mouth. I just want to get some facts about his daughter so I can make a soul contract with her killer and prepare them for reincarnation.

  “I can see you don’t believe,” he says. “It’s okay. Not many do.”

  All of this likely has something to do with the purple Warrior Priestess T-shirt. Maybe he feels guilty about being wealthy. Maybe his will stipulates he’s to be buried with his yacht and a gold guard dog. He’s just lost the only part of his family that hasn’t divorced him. Doesn’t appear to matter to him. It does to me.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” I tell him.

  That is the correct answer. He smiles. “That’s right. It only matters what I believe and what I do.”

  I use that pause to get back on track before he starts talking to the other side again.

  “What were the specific arguments about? Between you and Leann. Money? Religion? The pending divorce?”

  Your being a jerk?

  “Let me show you something,” he says, then gets up and leaves the room. Ronnie is stifling a giggle and I flash her a stern look. He comes right back carrying a folder stuffed with papers. He takes a set of papers out and hands them to me. It’s a rental agreement signed by Joe Bohleber and Leann Truitt going back a year. Jim Truitt is listed as her reference and it clearly states he is her father.

  Bohleber lied. He said he wasn’t sure of their relationship.

  There are copies of money orders made out to Steve Bohleber in the amount of eight hundred dollars. Ronnie didn’t say whom the money order they found in Leann’s rental was written for. Maybe these were something else?

  “You’re paying your daughter’s rent?” I ask.

  “I paid more than that. I may not have approved of her decisions—destructive as they were—but she was my daughter. Mr. Bohleber is a cheat. He wanted to keep the baby so he could get more money out of me. I paid what he asked, and he convinced her to give it up for adoption. I wanted it to go to a good family and not a dysfunctional wreck of one. In the end I wasn’t told what happened.”

  Dr. Andrade said she’d had a child recently. Truitt just confirmed it.

  “You’re talking about Leann’s baby?”

  “Of course,” he says, narrowing his brow. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “Bohleber is the father of Leann’s child.”

  I didn’t say it like a question, and I hoped he wouldn’t realize how little I knew.

  “He called and warned me that you would be coming. He said the police were coming for a copy of this rental agreement. He offered to make it disappear for a price. I told him to go to hell. He gets nothing else from me. Leann’s gone. The baby’s gone. My wife is gone. But I still have a purpose. I can connect. I can…”

  His words trail off and he stares out of the windows at the water. I’m afraid he will ask us to leave. I’m afraid for his sake that he won’t ask. It amazes me that he still hasn’t yet asked how his daughter died.

  It’s even more amazing that I can control my temper.

  “I just want to confirm that Joe Bohleber is the father of Leann’s baby,” I say.

  He looks confused. “No,” he says. “Not that one. His twin. Steve. Steve is the father. At least, he got her pregnant. He would never have made a good father.”

  He looks down and shakes his head, and for the first time I see what I believe is real emotion.

  “She should never have come home.”

  Twenty

  Ronnie is busy unpacking the interview with Jim Truitt as we make our way back to the office. Nonstop. To be fair, there is plenty to unpack.

  I need a Scotch. Make that two.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she says. “Her father was paying her rent to Joe Bohleber to bribe Steve, the father of her baby, to
convince Leann to give the baby up?”

  That was too many words, but that was about it. Truitt had convinced himself that he was serving a higher purpose as dictated by his secret soul. He might have loved his daughter, but he couldn’t stand the shame of her becoming pregnant by a lowlife farmer turned handyman turned landlord.

  “The whole thing makes me sick,” I say.

  Leann had left school and given up her chance at a career that would have made her father proud—one he could brag about at the yacht club or when he was moored off a private island. Yet he failed to recognize that he had ruined his daughter’s life with his holier-than-thou expectations and interference. And his money too. When his wife and then his daughter didn’t live up to his standards, he paid them both off. The wife got a divorce and a beachfront property in St. Lucia. His daughter got pregnant and wanted nothing from him but money.

  “To top it off,” I add, “his so-called soul contract spirit instructed him to do it so he could be reincarnated.”

  “Remind me not to join his club,” Ronnie says.

  I give her a smile.

  As far as useful information goes, Jim Truitt knew only that she had tended bar in Port Townsend. He didn’t know which one. He didn’t know any of her friends. He didn’t know where she banked. He sent her money orders each month to tide her over, maybe to her post office box or maybe delivered by Bohleber. He didn’t want word of his disappointing daughter to spread around the yacht club.

  “Deputy Davis picked up the rental agreement from Bohleber,” Ronnie says, reading a text. “I guess we’ll be working late again tonight?”

  I want to see if it was the same one that Truitt gave us. And I want to find Joe Bobbsey and squeeze the truth out of him. But I’m tired. I know Ronnie is tired. I need a drink. I surprise myself by telling her it can wait until morning.

  “Do you want to get a drink?” I ask.

  Ronnie brightens. “Absolutely. Where are we going?”

  “I’m buying, so don’t ask.”

  We get to The Tides and I’m hoping Mindy will be there; if she’s anywhere, it’s at The Tides. I spot her white van at the corner. She is sitting in a booth by the windows.

  “I saw you pull up. I was hoping you’d stop by.”

  “How did you know I would come here? More importantly, if you saw me pull up, why isn’t my drink on the table?”

  She laughs. “Because I saw Deputy Marsh with you. I don’t know what she drinks. I knew if you stopped anywhere, it would be here.”

  We sit in the booth. I order Scotch, neat, doubles, all around. The waiter asks if I prefer a particular brand. I tell him anything named Glen will do. Mindy starts to object but sees my mood. Mindy is a white wine drinker. I want to expand her horizons. And I don’t want to be seen drinking hard liquor alone. I have a reputation to uphold.

  “What did Leann’s father tell you?” Mindy asks.

  I shake my head. “He’s part of a New Age movement. His spirit guide told him to abandon his daughter and pay the father of her baby to convince her to give it away.”

  She doesn’t act surprised. “That explains why there were no baby things in the cabin. But I did find a partial bottle of multivitamins in the medicine cabinet. So who is the baby’s father?”

  “Steve Bohleber,” I tell her. “He of Bobbsey Twin fame.”

  Mindy looks confused, so I explain about the twins and the locals giving them the nickname. I now know why Steve wasn’t anywhere to be found. I hope he was paid well for betraying his baby mama and child. I wonder if he knew his brother, Joe, was still shaking Truitt down. Truitt isn’t the sort of man to part with money easy. He’s saving it for his next life. And Joe is a mercenary type. He wouldn’t let a rich guy like Truitt off the hook easily. Hence the call to Truitt to warn him I was coming. The offer to destroy the rental agreement. He’ll regret that the next time I see him.

  “I went over every inch of that cabin,” Mindy says. “She wasn’t killed there. There would have been some sign from all the cuts and injuries on the body. Plus there weren’t any rub marks or scrapes on any surface where she could have been chained. No chain. No rope. No broken furniture. The only thing I found interesting was the clothing on the bed. Ronnie probably told you.”

  Our drinks come and Ronnie downs half of hers without making a face. She’s tougher than she looks. She’s beginning to grow on me and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  “Tell me about the clothes again,” I ask, although I really don’t need to know. I just want to drink my Scotch and not talk.

  “There were three sets of clothes laid out on the mattress,” Mindy goes on. “I couldn’t tell if anything was missing from the closet. It looked to me like she had a date, left, and didn’t come back. That’s another reason I don’t think she was killed in her cabin.”

  “Do you remember the locket, Mindy?” Ronnie asks.

  Mindy sets down her glass and nods. “Vintage. Solid gold. Heart-shaped. The latch was broken.”

  “Tell her about the pictures inside the locket,” Ronnie puts in.

  Mindy takes a sip of the Scotch and mulls it over. “Black-and-white photo of a white male, a full-face shot. Late thirties. And a color picture of a baby. Newborn. No way to tell the gender.”

  Ronnie goes back to the screen on her phone. She’s found something. She uses her fingers to widen the screen and turns it for me to see.

  “This is the picture of the man in the locket.”

  It’s a black-and-white photo but the hair is some dark color, not black. It’s worn down on the shoulders. The man does appear to be in his late thirties. His jaw is angular, the cheekbones sharp. The lips are full, almost puffy. The mouth is set in a scowl.

  “That’s Jim Truitt,” I say.

  Ronnie nods. “Now look at the baby,” she says. The lips are full, like inner tubes. The ears stick out, and the too-wide nose… “Is it possible…?”

  Ronnie then replaces the baby’s photo with one of Jim Truitt that she found on the Internet. Then one of Joe Bohleber. The baby looks nothing like a Bohleber.

  It looks like a Truitt.

  I don’t need a photo to remember Leann’s face. Her nose was petite. She got her looks from her mother, perhaps, like I did. The baby resembles Jim Truitt’s line.

  “Maybe Jim Truitt is the father,” I say.

  We sit there silently. Ronnie downs the last of her Scotch like a pro. She flips from one screen to the next.

  “What do you think, Ronnie?” I ask.

  I let her give her thoughts on it. It was, after all, her eye that caught this.

  “Jim Truitt is the father,” she says, holding out her empty glass. “I’ve earned another I think.”

  Ronnie matches me drink for drink and neither of us is better for it. Mindy doesn’t finish her Scotch and switches back to wine. I switch to coffee. Ronnie, still drinking, wants to go somewhere to sing karaoke. That’s never going to happen.

  Mindy leaves, and Ronnie and I sit there while I practically force-feed her coffee. She prattles on about how much fun karaoke would be and finally sobers up enough to drive, and I follow her home to make sure she gets in her door.

  Twenty-One

  Ronnie Marsh lives in an Airbnb rental called the Big Red Barn. It had actually been a barn at one time. The owner remodeled, put a small wooden footbridge over a narrow man-made stream, new tin roof and black barn hinges on the two sets of double doors at the front, and voilà: a city person’s dream of life in the country.

  I coax her from her car, take her inside, and pour her into her bed.

  While she’s asleep I take the opportunity to look around. I’m sure she would have given me the tour anyway.

  The rooms aren’t deep but the bedroom and living room have a walk-out view of Port Townsend Bay along the ferry routes. There’s a huge garden tub in the bathroom and a kitchen area off to the side of the living room. A door from the bedroom leads to an outside deck, nicely decorated with Adirondack chairs, potted
flowers, and a small charcoal grill. A dirt footpath looks as though it winds all the way down to the waterfront. I’m tempted to go down to the water.

  I look out and a passing ferry stirs memories of my brother, Hayden. Our estrangement is never far from my mind. He’s in Afghanistan. I look across the bay at the lights and speak to him in my mind. I tell him all the things I wish I could say in person.

  Come home.

  Forgive me.

  I love you.

  I pull myself back. The lingering Scotch is talking. I take one last look around, draw in a deep, cleansing breath, let it out, and go back inside.

  I shut and lock the door to the deck, then go through the place, making sure the doors and windows are locked. I remember Ronnie’s firearm. I return to the bedroom and unhitch her gun belt. She stirs but doesn’t wake. I put the gun belt and gun in her closet, where two more uniforms hang, neat, pressed, in lint-free dry cleaner bags. She has an impressive amount of nice clothes in her closet. A cache of designer purses are lined up on the top shelf above the clothes.

  Satisfied that all is well in Ronnie Land, I drive home and park in my usual spot. I didn’t leave any lights on and I carefully feel my way to the front door, almost tripping once, and let myself in, then promptly trip on the uneven maple floor.

  I go into my home office and sit at my desk. Thoughts of the case fly through my mind. Jim Truitt is a world-class creep. Bohleber is a world-class creep. In my book all are suspects. The idea that Truitt fathered a child with his daughter is repulsive but possible. It happens. It says everything about what kind of man he is—and to drive the point home, he not only abandoned her and his grandchild, child, whatever, but he paid a stranger to convince Leann to give up her baby. He didn’t even have the backbone to do it himself. He was a zealot, or maybe just pretending to be one as an excuse to himself for his deplorable behavior. He claimed to be connecting with another soul that gave him instructions. While I can’t be completely certain, his decision seemed to have ruined three lives and possibly cost his daughter hers.