by Gregg Olsen
“You don’t trust Detective Osborne?” she asks.
“It’s not a matter of trust,” I tell Ronnie. “If we cover the exact same ground he did, we’ll get the same answers.” Or not. “I want to see if there’s anyone he should have talked to.”
That’s a nice way of saying I want to see if he’s been hiding something from us like Larry did.
Instead of going in the front door, we go to the back where I know there is a fenced seating area. We stop a waitress and I show her my badge. Ronnie pulls the picture of Dina Knowles out and shows it to her.
“This is my first week,” she says, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen that girl.”
She directs us to the manager inside.
I ask, “Is there another waitress that’s been here a year or so? I don’t want to disturb your manager.”
She says to wait and goes inside. A short, squat woman of about forty comes out wiping her hands on a short apron.
“Can I help you?”
I identify myself, and Ronnie shows her the photograph.
“Dina,” she says. “She’s dead.”
“I know. That’s why we’re here.”
“I thought that Clay was investigating her murder,” she asks.
“We’re a team,” I said. Clay’s words, not mine.
“What do you need to know? We’re pretty busy right now, so I can’t talk but a second.”
“I just need a few minutes. Did you give a statement to Detective Osborne?” If she did, Clay didn’t mention her in his file.
“You don’t have it?”
She’s the kind of person who answers a question with a question. I dislike that very much. I do that when I don’t want to answer a question.
I look at her name tag. “Bonnie, I need to ask some questions. If you don’t want to talk here, we can do it back at our office in Port Hadlock.”
She looks uncertain. I don’t have the authority to take her to Port Hadlock, but she doesn’t know that.
She decides to play it safe. “She was a good kid. Kind of messed up, but who isn’t these days?”
“What do you mean ‘messed up’?” Ronnie asks.
Bonnie leads us to the corner of the deck where no one is close and lowers her voice.
“I actually did talk to the detective, but he only asked my name and when I was off work. He never tried to find me, so I thought this was all over.”
We wait. Ronnie doesn’t ask a question. She has picked up one of my tricks.
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.” She looks from one of us to the other and realizes we are going to keep at her. “Okay. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. I heard from one of the other girls that Dina had been stealing.”
“Explain, please,” I say.
“She was taking down credit card numbers,” Bonnie says, keeping her eyes on us. “I’m sure she was running the credit card twice and pocketing the money. I liked her, but that’s a big no-no in this business. Customers don’t always complain, but they don’t come back. That’s for sure.”
“That’s not what you’re worried about, though, is it?” I ask.
Sometimes it helps to push.
She closes her mouth, a true sign that she’s afraid she’ll let something slip.
“You’re going to find out anyway,” she finally says. “I heard that the manager told Clay about some other times she’d done it. Timmy—that’s the manager—warned her a couple of times but felt sorry for her because she’d just had a baby. Then we found out that she gave the baby up. That didn’t sit so good with most of us, especially the manager. Very religious. Dina didn’t steal again that I know of, but I know the manager talked to some cop about it.”
“Do you know who the cop was?”
“No,” she says. “Then that detective came in and we found out she’d been killed. We were all feeling guilty about the way we’d been treating her. I didn’t want to talk about Dina, so I took off early. I should have told the detective what I knew, but what good would it do? She was dead.”
“You sure you don’t know who the cop was?” I ask. “The one the manager talked to about her stealing?”
“He’s not in here much unless he’s at the bar. Good-looking guy. I mean, movie star handsome, if you can believe that. I knew he was a cop only because they always give him his meals and drinks for free.”
Forty-Nine
Ronnie is quiet in the car as I drive back to the Sheriff’s Office. It feels strange, as her incessant prattling has become background noise that I’ve become accustomed to. But now she’s thinking. That’s good. She’s putting together the pieces.
A lot of pieces.
She’s also wondering whether or not this is the job for her.
We talked to the manager, another waitress, and a bartender. They all verified what Bonnie had disclosed. It all fit now. I am sure if we got a DNA sample it would match all the victims but Margie. I am sure Larry screwed up the DNA on that one, but I don’t know how he could have gotten his hands on it. Normally those things are collected by Crime Scene, the coroner, or a pathologist. Larry might have had friends who helped him out. Especially if he convinced them that Margie had gotten what she deserved. Larry couldn’t be the only cop who felt like the end justified the means. I wasn’t one to talk. I hadn’t planned on taking the killer alive. But at least I was doing it for a better reason than to cover up an affair.
The cop whom Timmy, the manager, had talked to was Captain Marvel. I didn’t know exactly what his reason would have been for killing these women. For torturing them. Was it trauma from the death of his wife and baby? PTSD? I didn’t know his past. I wondered if there were more victims than we knew about.
Ronnie is quietly holding her phone. Not flipping screens like crazy. We pull into the Sheriff’s Office parking lot next to her Smart car. I can see she is crushed. She gave up a more lucrative life to take a job in law enforcement. Right about now she’s questioning that decision and, worse, she’s thinking maybe her father was right all along.
I turn off the engine.
“Ronnie, there’s bad in every job. Bad on the streets. Bad in every home. It’s just when it’s close to you, like a family member or a coworker or a best friend, that you don’t see it. Maybe you ignore it. Maybe the bad is good at hiding among us?”
I’m an expert at being deceived. My mother, my father, my aunt. But I’m on the lookout all the time. Ronnie still has some innocence. She’ll lose that if she stays in this job long enough. She’ll look for the bad before she lets her guard down and trusts anyone. Even a little.
She doesn’t respond or look at me. Then she lets out a sigh. A big sigh.
“I guess so. I need to write a report.” She opens the car door and I reach across and stop her.
“We can do that tomorrow. We still have no real evidence. I don’t want to tell the sheriff our suspects are cops. I sure as hell don’t want Nan to hear what we’ve found. Why don’t you go home, and we’ll start again in the morning if you’re up to it?”
“I want to finish this.” She’s lost the hurt look.
“I’ve got an idea.” I’ll probably hate myself for doing this. “Follow me to The Tides. We’ll have a stiff drink before we go home. Try not to think about this tonight.”
Like I wouldn’t.
She smiles tentatively. “I’ve got a better idea,” she says. “You follow me to my place, and we’ll have several drinks. I’ve got room for a guest and we can go through that hospital video—maybe come up with a plan for getting the evidence. I don’t want to work with a killer. I don’t want him getting away with this. I want to end this.”
“You’re on,” I say.
I follow Ronnie’s improbably little car to the Big Red Barn and park on the street while she finds a spot in a short gravel driveway. We walk across the footbridge and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to live in a place like this.
“I had to pour you on your bed the last time I was here,”
I say.
She laughs. Some color is coming back into her cheeks. I hope someone won’t have to carry me into the office tomorrow. She opens the front door without a key. That’s a demerit.
She sees me frown slightly.
“Nothing ever happens here. My neighbors are great and there’s never been a problem before.”
“I can’t tell you how to live, but you do remember what we’re working on? Who we suspect?”
“Oops. I’ll start locking up. I just don’t want to get paranoid.”
Better paranoid than dead, I think. Scotch eases paranoia a bit, but it does nothing if you’re dead. I don’t tell her this. She is, after all, providing the drinks.
“Let me give you the tour.”
I don’t tell her I took the tour while she was passed out.
She shows me the two most important places in any house: where the bathroom is and where the liquor is kept. She points to the door leading out onto the deck. “Go on out and have a seat. I’ll get the drinks. Scotch with some ice, right?” I nod and she leaves.
I sit in one of the Adirondack chairs and look at the magnificent view of the Port Townsend Bay.
Hayden comes to my mind and I feel ice form in the pit of my stomach. I can’t shake the feeling there is something wrong. I wonder for the umpteenth time if he’s okay. Maybe he’s been in a battle. Or an IED has blown him up. I don’t even know if he listed me as his next of kin. How would they know to notify me? I’d made myself hard to find. At least, by normal standards. Yet my stalker has found me.
The last time I stood out here, Ronnie was unconscious on her bed. I looked out over the bay and made a promise to Hayden. When this was over—when I took care of my stalker—I would get us a place like this. Two bedrooms. Two bathrooms, because he is probably still a slob. We’ll be a family once more. I’ll never do anything to push him away again. I’d try to live like a normal person and put the past behind me. Dr. Albright is convinced I can do it. I just have to convince myself. Switching gears to normal scares me more than killers.
Ronnie returns, hands me a drink, and takes a seat.
“Did you ever wonder why it is we chose this kind of work?” she asks.
I sip and ice rattles in my glass. “No. I’m driven to do what I do.”
“Well,” she says, a little too quickly, “I am too. But where do you think it comes from?”
I give Ronnie a look, then a smile.
“A good place, Ronnie. It comes from inside.”
She nods and we drink. The sun will set in an hour and I want to stay right here and watch it, but the case calls to me. I don’t want to talk about the elephant in the room, Captain Marvel, and Ronnie doesn’t bring him up. I could get used to her. Not for long periods. Not like a friend.
A coworker that I didn’t hate would be okay.
We sit quietly like two old friends, comfortable with silence, watching the water, interrupted only by the refreshing of our drinks until the sun goes down. I stand and say, “Want to watch a movie?” I don’t look forward to viewing hours of videotape of people wandering up and down hallways and in and out of doors. It needs to be done. It might turn up the needle in the haystack I’m looking for.
We are looking for.
We go back inside, and I put my duty weapon on the kitchen counter next to Ronnie’s. It has been pressing into my side and I’ll probably be bruised. We get another drink and I sit on the giant leather couch. Ronnie puts the thumb drive in a port on her big-screen television and sits on the other end with the remote. She fires up the TV and the screen splits into four views. Each is a different camera and they rotate every four seconds. Each quadrant has the date and time in the upper left corner with the camera number. One is of the emergency door from inside looking out. Another is the front entrance from the receptionist desk. Others show hallways and elevators.
The view we want is of the labor and delivery hallway and the nursery, but they aren’t marked as such.
“I called the hospital and talked to the switchboard operator,” Ronnie says. “She has these cameras in her office. She said the elevators on the first and second floors would cover anyone going to or coming from labor and delivery and the nursery on the second floor. And she gave me the camera numbers to watch.”
“Good job.” I’m not excited about doing this now that Captain Marvel is the main suspect. I don’t think the babies were involved except for the fact they were given up by their mothers. He probably wasn’t the father. We may never know who the fathers were. Larry would be more likely than Clay. He lied a lot. This might turn into a drinking session of disappointment, but investigations are like that. If something doesn’t work out, you don’t just give up. Television has promoted the false idea that if a murder isn’t solved in the first twenty-four hours, it’s not likely ever to be solved. That’s bullshit. If I ever gave up that easy, I might as well quit.
We sit back on her comfortable leather couch and I’m almost hypnotized by the camera’s changing vantage point every few seconds. This could give some people seizures. But the time flies by, and when I look at the time on my phone, it’s two o’clock in the morning. I hear Ronnie’s soft snoring. I use the remote and stop the video. I really need to pee. I get up quietly and go to the bathroom. We haven’t seen anything strange or anyone familiar. Jimmy from Little Italy has been at the ER desk or the reception area in a couple of the shots, but he was working. I didn’t see him in any of the hallways or on the second floor. That kind of bugs me. If I were the hospital and had a policeman working security, I would want him taking an occasional stroll, checking all the floors. Jimmy seemed to have his ass glued to the chair. In most of the shots he was on the phone.
I turn the light on in the bathroom and am preparing to sit down. Suddenly I hear a knock at the front door. A chill runs down my spine, and as I hurry to pull my pants up, I hear Ronnie say, “I’ll get it.”
“Ronnie, no!” I try to yell, but the words freeze in my throat. My hand is on the doorknob when I hear her scream.
Fifty
I come to face down on something hard and cold. I try to move but it feels like an elephant on my chest. I lie still and try to sense the rest of my body. My arms are stretched straight out from my sides. My legs are spread apart. Everything seems to be where it should be. I can wiggle my fingers and toes but my head and neck ache like I’ve run into a wall.
My eyes slowly focus, and I see I’m on the floor.
“What the hell?”
I can still speak, but the effort hurts from the center of my chest all the way to my throat. I feel the smooth finish of the hardwood. I lower my arm and feel for my weapon. The gun is gone. Panic rises. My heart is beating hard in my throat. And then I remember the kitchen counter. I put my gun with Ronnie’s on the counter.
Ronnie? Memory starts flooding back. I was in the bathroom. There was a knock at the door. Ronnie screamed. I stepped out in the room. The front door was open. A figure filled it. Ronnie was being pulled up by her hair. A blow landed on her face, and I could feel the air being squeezed out of my lungs. It felt like an elephant slamming into me, rocking me back. And again. Then nothing. I’ve been shot. At least twice.
I listen. He may still be here. Waiting for me. To break my neck like the others. I’m not able to get to my feet anyway. I’m still wearing my clothes. I’m alone.
Ronnie?
I slide my arms up and try to push myself from the floor. Bolts of pain shoot through my chest and stars explode behind my eyes. The pain subsides. I pull my legs together and try again. This time I get to my knees, put one hand on the counter, and pull myself up. I don’t know how long I’ve been down. My thoughts are jumbled. I keep seeing Ronnie being yanked from the floor by her hair. My breathing becomes steadier now that my weight isn’t pressing against the floor.
There are two perfectly round holes to the left of center in my blazer, just over my heart. Unbuttoning my shirt, I find two mushroomed bullets embedded in my body armor. The stee
l plate I’d shoved in the front pocket protected my heart. Saved my life. It didn’t protect me from the impact force of two large caliber bullets, but I’m alive.
I’m worried about Ronnie.
Looking behind the kitchen counter, I find both duty weapons. He has taken her but left the handguns behind. That was a mistake. I holster my .45 and tuck Ronnie’s under my blazer and into my waistband before looking around the room. The television screen has been smashed. A pool of blood is on the floor. There is more blood on the edge of the door and on the doorframe. A bloody handprint is on the wall by the door.
There’s more blood on the threshold.
I check for the thumb drive. It’s gone. I’m sure now who I saw in the instant he shot me. I know where to look for him and I will find him. I will find Ronnie. If anything has been done to her, God can’t help him.
Fifty-One
Ronnie’s car keys are in the kitchen. Her Smart car is tiny, less noticeable, quieter. I’ll apologize for taking her car after I save her.
I drive to the bay. The Integrity is moored right where I knew it would be. The Port Townsend police car is tucked in between two boat trailers. He’s here.
I drive down the pier with the headlights off and park. The Integrity’s cabin light is on and I can see movement. Just shadows. I try to take a deep breath before I get out, but it’s impossible, as I’ve tightened the armored vest so much. At least it holds my ribs and chest together so I can finish what I have to do.
I get out and wince when the damn car’s dome light comes on. The car is far enough away from the boat that I hope the light wasn’t noticed. I shut the door as quickly and quietly as I can and extinguish it. Moving bent over is excruciating, but I make it to the ramp and from the ramp to the boat. Lights along the deck play on the water. I can hear the soft beat of music coming from somewhere. Maybe one of the other boats nearby. The Sheriff’s Office has a separate mooring area for the Marine Patrol. A smaller boat I don’t recognize is docked right next to the Integrity. No one is aboard it, but the cabin light of the Integrity is still glowing.