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

by Gregg Olsen

  “You think Boyd’s our guy?” he asks.

  “He’s a suspect.”

  “I guess you didn’t detain him,” Larry asks.

  It comes across as a dig. I understand: What if I had the killer and let him leave? I should have taken the statement myself.

  Clay reads my expression.

  “No way you could have known he was lying about who he was,” he says. “Some of these fake IDs are damn good. Jimmy told me last year that someone on campus was making and selling them.”

  My face feels warm. Probably red too. I should have caught that. I am a veritable expert at procuring fake driver’s licenses, bogus birth certificates, made-up business cards, anything one would need to disappear or become someone else.

  I’ve done it many, many times.

  Clay gets Jimmy on the phone. He puts it on speakerphone and tells him who’s in the room.

  “What can I do for you, Clay?” Jimmy asks.

  “You remember that clown I asked about? Robbie Boyd?”

  “Aloysius? Yeah.”

  “The guy we’re looking for is a white guy—” he says, interrupting himself as he catches my eye. “Wait a minute. I’ll have Detective Carpenter give you a description.”

  I offer up a complete description and he repeats it back to me. I also provide the license plate of the car.

  “You got all that, Jimmy?” Clay asks.

  “What?” he asks, his tone suddenly more playful. “You think I’m just here for my good looks?”

  “Nah,” Clay says. “If you were there for your looks, they would have fired you by now.”

  “What do you want me to do if I find him?”

  “Hold him and call me.”

  “Arrest?” Jimmy asks. “Or just detain?”

  “Break his legs,” Clay snaps back. “I don’t care. Just call me.”

  “Okay,” he says right away. “You don’t have to get sore. I’ll call you.”

  Clay returns the phone to its cradle. “Jimmy’s a good security cop but he’s not a hard worker, if you catch my drift.”

  That’s what worries me.

  “Will he look for Boyd?” I finally ask.

  Clay gives it a little thought, leaning back in his chair. “He will. But not too hard. He used to be with Kitsap Sheriff’s. He got passed up for a detective position and pulled the pin, quit and went on to work for Port Townsend PD and on to be a campus cop. He says he’s happy doing his shift and working off duty. I guess to each his own.”

  “My gal, Margie Benton, was hard to get to,” Larry says, speaking up. “She was hung up on some rocks on San Juan Island. Almost in Canadian waters. You could see D’Arcy Island from where she was found.”

  Larry starts digging through the accordion folder.

  “I got some shots from the scene, but go ahead.”

  “My victim was wearing a bra and panties,” I say. “We didn’t find any other clothing.”

  I look over at Clay.

  Larry is still digging.

  “Dina Knowles only had panties on,” Clay says. “We didn’t find her clothing, either.”

  Larry finally finds what he is searching for. He puts a couple of pictures on the desk and points with a fingernail that needs some serious clipping. “This was taken beside the body and out across the strait. You can see D’Arcy Island right over there.”

  I wonder what is so important about that tiny island that he’s going to so much trouble to find the picture and point it out. So I ask: “What about D’Arcy?”

  Larry leans back again and spreads his hands out like a bishop giving a blessing. “Well, you see what I’m saying.”

  I don’t. Not at all. Clay does and covers a grin with his hand. Ronnie is clueless by her expression.

  “It’s simple,” Larry says. “If she’d been across the strait, she’d have been the Mounties’ problem.”

  “Poor you.” Clay pats Larry on the hand. “Always overworked and underpaid. You have the worst luck of anyone I’ve ever known.”

  Larry waves him off. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “No,” he says. “I mean it. I think the killer only dumped the body there to piss you off.”

  “Okay. I get it. No one sees what I mean.”

  I still didn’t see it.

  Larry taps the picture again with that fingernail. “Whoever killed this girl had his pick of islands and beaches and inlets. He had to get there by boat, so if he’d dumped my girl anywhere in the Haro Strait, it would have been the same to him. We don’t know where the murder took place. It could be any one of a couple dozen islands, but he dumps her on San Juan Island. The killer could be Canadian for all we know.”

  I wasn’t familiar with every island, especially along the Canadian border.

  “Larry,” Clay says, “all three of these women could have been killed anywhere and dumped in our jurisdictions. The facts are—and correct me if I’m wrong—they all lived alone, all looked alike, all are around the same age, all had babies or were pregnant, and all worked at bars near some type of waterway.”

  That sums it up nicely, I think.

  “Mine was staged to look like she’d drowned there,” Larry adds.

  I raise my eyebrows. None of that is in the reports I’ve been given.

  “Staged?” I ask.

  He taps the pictures again. “No one in their right mind would want to be swimming in the icy water in their birthday suit.” With his eyes still on mine, he extracts another picture from the folder. This is one of the victims at the scene. She is on her back, arms splayed out to her sides, legs shoulder-width apart. It is a very unnatural position for a body to have washed up on the beach. For that matter, it is not the way a body would come to rest if it was dumped out of a boat or dragged onto the beach.

  It was just like the way Leann Truitt was staged.

  “Did you think she drowned?” I ask.

  “It’s what one of the Marine Patrol guys said. Anyway, Benton was two years ago. Somehow it got leaked to the news that my girl was strangled with a belt. Had been tortured. You two might have a copycat killer. Someone that got wind of Margie Benton’s case.”

  “Was it in the news?” I ask.

  “’Course,” he sneers. “Those bloodsuckers posted pictures and everything. I don’t know where they got them.”

  Ben Franklin once said three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. So true. Nothing is secret when it involves law enforcement if more than one person knows about it. Larry himself might have leaked to a reporter.

  Clay laughs a little. “Larry, I don’t believe it’s a copycat and neither do you. This guy is proud of his killings. He marks them.”

  I turn and face him. “What do you mean?”

  Before he can explain, my phone buzzes with a call from Marley Yang. I excuse myself and take it outside. I know that Marley is going ballistic if he’s gotten the DNA sample from Lonigan. Lonigan doesn’t even know whose samples they were, so he couldn’t have told Marley. I thought he would run them as unknown subjects. I told Cass to mark the bags with a B and a T. I didn’t want Lonigan to know what I was up to.

  Thirty

  I find a space next to the copier. Above it, a sign with four figures bent over laughing: “You want it when?” Nan has the same sign on her desk. She makes a habit of pointing to it whenever the task—or the individual who asks for it to be done—annoys her.

  “You should have given me a call, Megan,” Marley says. He’s angry and he’s right.

  Lonigan made out an evidence collection form signed by Cass as giving it to Lonigan and he made Marley sign it. Marley wasn’t happy about being forced to sign a form for evidence with no proof it was collected properly. It wasn’t an official request from the Sheriff’s Department and there was no other record giving him permission to even have it, much less test it.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asks, still fuming.

  I don’t blame him for being angry. That’s fine. On the other hand, I don’t rea
lly care. I only care about the case.

  “I’m truly sorry,” I say, feebly trying to soothe him. “You’re right, Marley. It’ll never happen again.”

  I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that’s a lie.

  My words do little to placate him, but I keep going.

  “You’re doing so much for me already, I feel bad about asking you to run the new samples against what you have from Leann Truitt, Margie Benton, and Dina Knowles.”

  I sound thoroughly chastened.

  I think.

  Marley lets out a little puff of a sigh. “Megan, you only asked if I would see if there was DNA in Truitt’s rape kit. That’s all.”

  He’s weakening. Good. All I need is one more thing.

  “Ronnie said to tell you hello,” I say. “She’s the one who told me you would help out.”

  A slight pause on the other end of the line.

  “I know what you’re doing, Megan.”

  Maybe I’ve overdone my act. It’s happened a time or two.

  “You’re trying to fix me and Ronnie up.”

  I relax. He isn’t as smart as he thinks.

  “Caught me. She really does think you’re cute.”

  Now all I have to do is convince Ronnie that she thinks Marley is cute. Might not be so hard. Marley is attractive, fit, and not completely geeky. That’s rare in a crime lab.

  “I’ll do it this one time, Megan,” he says, “but you need to send a report to me as quick as possible. I can’t just run tests on a whim of yours. If I did that, do you know how many people would want me to do it?”

  I want to say no. “A gazillion, I imagine. I won’t say a word. Promise.”

  “I’ll call you, but don’t expect me to drop everything else to do this.”

  “I don’t.”

  “The samples are marked B and T. Is that all you have? No names?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Okay,” he says. “As long as you know where they came from and put it in the report you’ve just promised me.”

  “I do.”

  “Tell Ronnie hello for me.”

  I smile to myself. “I will.”

  I hang up and go back to find Clay and Larry sitting back, listening to Ronnie vent about her tough life, and how she always wanted to be a detective, and how the earth cooled, and the dinosaurs evolved, et cetera. I can tell they are trapped when their pained expressions turn to hope as I come back into view.

  Ronnie has been at it the entire time I’ve been on the phone. I don’t feel sorry for them. Better them than me.

  I interrupt Ronnie’s monologue. “That was the crime lab. Marley’s doing the comparisons as we speak. And I guess I should tell you that I have two other DNA samples he’s going to check against them. By the way, he says hello, Ronnie.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” is all she says.

  I’ll have to work on her.

  Clay leans forward in his chair. “What samples?”

  “Oh, no you don’t. You said our killer was proud of his work and leaving his mark. You explain that first. Then I’ll tell you about the samples. Deal?”

  Clay looks from face to face. “Okay. Somewhere near the dump sites he leaves a symbol. A triangle with an eye. Larry’s was scratched into the rock beside the body. Mine was scratched onto a log near Dina’s body. You don’t have one listed in your report.”

  I didn’t put it in my report. I thought it might be nothing. Now I know better.

  Larry scoffs. “Hell, we have a lot of little freaks around the islands that believe in all kinds of shit. Voodoo, even. We had a house fire last year. It was an abandoned place. The fire started in the kitchen. I thought it might be homeless, squatters, but then they found the real cause. Some kids were burning a bird’s skeleton. I talked to the boys and they saw it on television and were summoning a demon. I gave them demon. Right on their little rears. What I’m getting at is those things could have already been there. They weren’t carved into the body, were they? No. It don’t mean nothing.”

  Ronnie speaks up. “I read both of your reports and there’s no mention of an all-seeing eye in either of them.”

  “She’s right,” I say.

  “I guess we all had the same thought: leaks. I wanted to keep something back in case we caught the killer. If he told me about the drawing, I’d know I had the right guy.” It’s a lie, but it sounds good to me.

  Ronnie hands her legal pad to Clay. “Can you draw it for me?”

  He does and gives the pad back. It was what Deputy Davis found scratched into the bottom of a rock at Leann’s dump site.

  Ronnie draws in a breath. “I just remembered: I saw this on the website.”

  “What website?” I ask.

  “Remember the ‘Warrior Priestess’ shirt Leann’s dad was wearing and how strange he talked?”

  I did. I thought he was putting it on.

  “I looked it up,” she goes on. “There’s a website. I found this symbol on one of the pages.”

  I’m thinking Jim Truitt.

  Ronnie shoots me an embarrassed look. She didn’t tell me about this, and she knows she should have. In her defense, I didn’t ask. It was my fault for not looking into it myself. I’ve been slipping. Remember this moment, I tell myself. This is another good reason not to work with a partner—or quasi-partner. I remind myself that I’m only at this meeting to get information. I don’t need their help. Or hers. I will use them, however. That’s fair game.

  My mother taught me that.

  Larry scoffs a second time. “Let’s not go jumping to conclusions here, little missy. Kids. Vandals. Aspiring taggers. Hell, it’s not even a coincidence. Half the religions around here have similar symbols if that’s even what it is. This land has always had Native tribes. Lots of superstition around the Salish. Gods of this and that. Some believe in witches up in my section.”

  “Pagan symbols,” Ronnie adds, pulling herself out of the quicksand of her embarrassment. “Wiccan. It’s Egyptian, the Eye of Horus. It means protection and health for the royals. It’s also a Masonic symbol.”

  “It’s on the back of the dollar bill too,” Clay says.

  Larry pulls a crumpled bill from his jean’s pocket. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere. See? It don’t mean nothing.”

  “I don’t think we can read too much into the symbol,” Clay says, “except it was found at each of our crime scenes. It must mean something to the killer. I agree with Megan. If we find him, he can tell us what it means.”

  I don’t want to get pulled into this line of thought. And I’m not over the “little missy” comment, either. I still have to eliminate several suspects before I start looking into Native myths or religious sects of every variety that dot the state. Yet, to be safe, I’ll have Ronnie keep digging into it. She is the computer wizard. I’ll find subjects to interview.

  I give them a copy of the pathologist’s report. Ronnie made several. She has her uses. They both skim it and I watch them nod as they read.

  Larry puts the report down on his lap. “I agree this all seems very similar,” he says, “but I still think it could be a copycat. We’ve had this sort of thing here in Washington and other places before. Remember Robert Berdella, ‘the Kansas City Butcher,’ ‘the Collector’? He looked like Rob Reiner, the actor. They don’t all look or act crazy. He did a lot of these things to his kidnapping victims before he murdered them. Maybe this guy’s a fan of his.”

  Clay speaks next, looking at me and Ronnie. “I remember Berdella, of course, but these two are barely old enough to even know who Rob Reiner is, much less Berdella. So you’re saying someone is imitating Berdella’s murders?”

  Larry shrugs a little. “Berdella is dead but books have been written about him. There are a million ways to kill someone. And a good chance someone is using the same methods of killing as someone else without even knowing it.”

  Clay rocks back in his chair and pauses while he thinks. “Now all we have to do is find a Catholic that
believes in witchcraft, kidnaps young men, has anal sex with them, and hates women. Come on, Larry. Why are you trying to make this more difficult than it already is?”

  “I’m just throwing out ideas,” Larry says. “If you don’t look at a case from every angle, you’re going to have a hard time in court later. A defense attorney will bring all this shit up and you’re going to have to say you didn’t even consider it. The jury will think you have something against the scumbag you’ve arrested.”

  Clay fixes his steely gaze on me.

  “Your turn,” he says. “What DNA samples?”

  Thirty-One

  Make that a frog pinned down to a dissecting board in a high school science class. I can’t move. I can’t wriggle out of it. The truth is, I made a deal with Clay. I agreed that if he told me about the killer’s mark, I’d tell him about the DNA samples I asked Marley to compare. I intended to honor the agreement but not tell him any more than absolutely necessary. “Keep your cards close to your vest” is a motto of mine. In all things. Not just a case. I don’t think he particularly needs to know who had obtained the samples for me. I can hear Larry finding legal reasons that a defense attorney would rip the results to shreds. And Larry may be onto something. At the same time, I don’t care about taking this to court and putting it in front of a jury, where the killer can sit in his white clothes and white buck shoes, holding a Bible and looking sad and wrongly accused.

  He is going to pay for what he’s done.

  My way.

  “I always keep my promises,” I lie. “Before our discussion led away from my case, I was going to tell you that I interviewed Leann Truitt’s landlord. Her picture was shown around, as you know, and a state patrol officer out on Marrowstone Island identified her.”

  That is partially true. Actually, Cass identified her, but Lonigan called me about it.

  “The landlord is Joe or Joseph Bohleber,” I continue. “He rents out fishing cabins for a living.”

  And blackmails people.

  “He was hesitant to tell me the truth about her rental agreement, and flat out lied about knowing the victim’s father, Jim Truitt.”