by Gregg Olsen
There were dozens of photos pasted on a board in the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case room. Grace Alexander wasn’t officially part of the cold case unit. But she found herself in that space whenever a conference was called on a major case.
Her eyes always landed on the board, first on her sister’s high school portrait, and then up two rows to the picture of the little girl who was the first of the many unsolved cases that would forever hold the attention of the department.
Ann Marie Burr was her name. Ann was just nine. She vanished in the night from her Tacoma home a half century ago and was never seen again. Just gone. It was as if the little girl had gone to answer the door and just followed her abductor into oblivion willingly.
Grace didn’t want to be the sister of a Bundy Girl—the cop with something to prove. Though that’s just what she was. She never said a word and she never allowed her eyes to linger on that scoreboard of unsolved homicide. She refused to remark upon the juxtaposition of Tricia’s photo and little Ann’s.
CHAPTER 10
Catalina Sanchez was a lovely teenager with a cascade of black hair that she let wave down her back, never constricted by a ponytail. She was only nineteen when her body was found alongside a riverbank near Selah, an eastern Washington farming community known for apple, pear, and cherry orchards. The police did a poor job investigating the case. Not so much because she was an illegal migrant worker, but because they were so short staffed. Catalina had the misfortune to die when budgets were so tight that if cases weren’t solved within say a week, they were shuttled off to a file room and into oblivion.
What police detectives did know was that Catalina had been raped before she was bludgeoned with a river rock and left for dead. They swabbed her vagina for semen and took scrapings of the skin caught under her red-painted fingernails. All was tagged as evidence. The detectives also noted how she had defensive wounds on her wrists from being pinned down. Her skull was fractured. Blunt-force trauma was the cause of death. Homicide was the manner of death.
The Navarros knew Catalina. She was a girl from their village who had come to the United States with her family about a year after they did. She was just a kid then, of course, but even so, it was plain to see that Catalina Maria Sanchez was a true beauty in the making. Michael Navarro fixated on her. He pestered her over and over for a date, and finally, she said yes. He was giddy with excitement over the prospect of going out with her. He’d planned to take her to a nice place for dinner in Yakima and on a moonlight walk along the river. For the occasion, he bought a bottle of tequila and a brand-new shirt—pale blue fabric with mother-of-pearl buttons. It was western style, something that Michael knew Catalina had admired whenever she saw a ranch hand wearing that kind of garment.
“Handsome cowboy,” she’d say. “Not a pretender, but a real one. That’s what I like.”
It had rained hard the night of Catalina’s disappearance. Precipitation was scarce on the Eastern side of the Cascades in Washington state. Later, when he thought of what happened that night, Tavio Navarro would remember two things more than anything else. The sound of the rain hammering the tin roof of the migrant workers’ bunkhouse was almost like a lullaby, soothing him to sleep. It had never rained that hard in his life. So sudden. So much water. The other memory was the sound of Michael as he lay whimpering in the bed next to him.
It was after 3 AM when Tavio went over to his younger brother to stop him from making that awful, annoying noise. When he stood next to Michael’s bed, Tavio noticed a series of muddy footprints from the door ending at the foot of the bed next to a heap of sopping clothes.
“Shhh!” he said, tapping Michael on the shoulder.
“Mistake,” the younger brother said, his voice falling into whimpered shards. “I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to.”
Tavio leaned closer, as if the proximity would keep his brother from being so embarrassingly loud. “What mistake, Michael?” His eyes landed on a pair of parallel scratches across his brother’s cheek. “What happened? Did you get into an accident? You are hurt.”
Michael, who up to that point seemed coiled into a ball, sat up. He did not want the others on the other side of the bunkhouse to hear. He motioned for Tavio to follow him to the small porch by the door.
“Something bad happened, Tavio. It was an accident.”
“Was it my car?” he asked referring to the old Chevy that he’d been driving for the past year.
Michael shook his head, violently so. “No. No. Your car is fine.”
“What then?”
“Mi Catalina.”
Tavio lowered his eyes and touched his mouth, signaling to his brother to be very, very quiet. “What about Catalina?” he asked in a whisper.
“She . . .” Michael stood in the dank light of a soggy early morning and started to cry. It was not a soft cry, but a guttural sound that Tavio thought would wake up everyone in Yakima.
“Stop!” he said, his voice growing louder than he’d wanted. “Do not cry! It cannot be so bad.”
Michael started shaking. He no longer looked up at his brother. It seemed he didn’t want to face him at all. The words, like the rain, like muddy footprints, would never be forgotten.
“You have to help me, Tavio. Catalina is dead. I killed her. I didn’t mean to. I am sorry. I thought she wanted me to make love to her.”
Tavio’s eyes widened to such a degree that it seemed it was very possible that they would pop out and fall to the floor. “What are you saying, Michael?”
“I’m saying the truth. I’m sorry. Do you want me to show you?”
Tavio was stunned. “This has to be a mistake!”
“No mistake. They will kill me. They will hang me. Cut off my head. Do something terrible. I did not mean to kill her. I loved her. You know that, right?”
Tavio nodded. He would have thought so, but killing someone was too hard to forgive.
“They will cut off my head,” Michael repeated.
Tavio shook his head. “No. No they will not.”
“There is no forgiveness in this country,” Michael said as he pulled on a dry pair of pants and a clean T-shirt.
“Bring those clothes,” Tavio said, not even sure why. “Let’s go. Show me.”
They drove mostly in silence. Tavio tried to get his brother to tell him exactly what had happened, but Michael was inconsolable by then. He managed to sputter out a few words as he directed Tavio to the turnoff by the river where he’d last seen Catalina. The ground was muddy and the sun had started to light the weeds with the morning light that would forever seem hideous instead of lovely.
Catalina Sanchez was sprawled out next to the riverbank. Her beautiful dark hair swirled in the mud and her brown eyes gazed upward into nothingness.
Tavio dropped to his knees and frantically began shaking her. It was a futile effort and he knew it. Her eyes confirmed what his brother had told him. She was dead.
“Who saw you tonight?” Tavio asked.
“Here?”
“Anywhere. Yes, here. Yes, the restaurant.”
Michael shook his head. “No one. We were alone.”
“The restaurant! Who saw you there?”
“We did not go to the restaurant. She brought tamales. She made. I think, I thought she liked me and wanted to be with me here.”
“Tell me, are you sure no one saw you?”
“No one. I know of no one.”
“Good.” Tavio got up from the body and looked around. “We have to hide her.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if we should.”
“Do you want your head cut off?”
He shook his head. “No. But shouldn’t I just tell the police what happened?”
Tavio looked down at the body. Catalina’s blouse was torn and her pretty blue and white skirt was pushed up in front. It was obvious what happened. The scratches on his brother’s face had made it so very clear. And yet, he had to ask one more time.
“No. Tell me. Tell me what ha
ppened.”
Michael slumped on the hood of the car.
“She let me kiss her. She did. She let me put my hand on her. She liked it. She did. She told me to keep going, to make love to her.”
He stopped for a moment as a car, out of view, passed by on the main road.
“What happened?”
Michael looked away. “I don’t know. She didn’t seem to want me anymore. I told her it wasn’t good for me to get all excited and not make love to her, but she laughed at me. She said that she didn’t want me. She wanted some other guy. I tried to kiss her some more and she slapped me . . . laughing at me. I told her, ‘No, don’t laugh. I love you.’ But she kept laughing so I grabbed her and well . . .”
“Did you rape her? Did you do that to her?” Tavio could scarcely believe that his brother could do such a thing to a woman, a girl. It was disgusting. Vile. Against everything that their parents had taught them.
Michael locked eyes with his brother. “I didn’t rape her. I made love to her. She just got so mad at me. So embarrassed.”
Tavio looked directly at the scratch marks on his brother’s face, but said nothing about them.
“How did she die, Michael? What did you do to her to kill her?”
“It was an accident. It was. I was making love to her and her head hit a rock and I didn’t know it. I thought she was just finally, you know, relaxing.”
There was something insane about what Michael was saying, but Tavio saw no way out of it. He did not want his brother’s head cut off . . . or whatever they did in Washington.
“Let’s hide her now.”
Catalina weighed no more than ninety-five pounds, but her dead body felt like a ton. The Navarro brothers dragged her to the edge of the riverbank where there was a shallow pool—a place marked by candy wrappers and pop cans—where young kids liked to swim. The morning light had brightened considerably and anyone close by could easily see that they were not a couple of kids swimming, but two grown men and a dead girl. Tavio held her feet; Michael had hooked his hands under her armpits. Her head, at once bloody and pale, hung limply from her slender neck. With each step, it swung, like a bell counting off the moment of her final good-bye.
“I’m sorry, mi corazón,” Michael said.
Tavio just looked at his brother with disbelieving eyes. The words meant nothing. He meant nothing just then. It was hollow. Empty. Just words to soothe his own guilty heart.
Straddling the rocks, they waded out and gave the body a decisive shove, sending it down the lazy waters of the river to a place where someone would find it. Not soon, they hoped. But they didn’t want her to never be found. She was a girl from their village. She’d given up everything to start over in the United States.
She’d given her life.
Neither brother knew a thing about DNA right then. Later, they would wonder if the police who found her body would have thought to have taken a sample. If they did, would they somehow find Michael Navarro?
And if they did find him, would they cut off his head?
CHAPTER 11
It was early the next afternoon, that time of day when nothing happens, the so-called dead shift. Snickers bar in hand from her trip to the employee vending machines, 911 dispatcher Luna Demetrio was barely in her chair when she picked the next call from the console that fed calls from all over Tacoma and Pierce County, one desperate caller at a time.
LUNA: What’s your emergency?
CALLER: I need to tell somebody something bad happened.
LUNA: All right, sir. Can you tell me your name?
CALLER: (muffled noise, no answer)
LUNA: You there? I hear you breathing, are you all right?
CALLER: I’m not going to give my name. I’m calling from a pay phone. I’m going to leave the second I’m done with you so don’t send someone.
LUNA: I can barely hear you. Please speak louder. What’s your emergency?
CALLER: I think, I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s a dead body by the river. I saw it.
LUNA: What river?
CALLER: I didn’t know we had more than one. The Puyallup. Off River Road. Over by the bridge there’s a gravel lot.
LUNA: Sir, please tell me your name.
CALLER: No. Good-bye.
The call ended one minute and twenty seconds after it started. Luna typed up a message that was transmitted to the first responders for calls of an urgent nature. Luna was a very thorough operator, one who’d been honored for her attention to detail with two Starbucks cards and a potted hibiscus from her manager.
She typed the details of the call into the report and added: Caller was almost inaudible. Not sure if male or female. When I asked for an ID, which he/she refused, there was a long pause. During that pause I heard the sound of someone else talking. Maybe the radio. Not sure. That’s all.
The tip from the informant or witness had yielded a grisly discovery as a team of CSIs, Pierce County Sheriff’s Department officers, and two homicide detectives from Tacoma gathered around the edge of the lazy Puyallup River, just east of Tacoma’s gritty downtown. Three-foot-tall grass and a noxious weed called tansy ragwort had drawn a partial curtain around where the body had been put to rest. As a cacophony of crows hurled their calls through the air, the group of men and women went about their tasks. Some took photos. Some ran the length of a tape measure. Others merely secured the scene. There was no question when Grace Alexander laid eyes on the figure that they were looking at the remains of Lisa Lancaster.
Or rather, most of Lisa.
While the sum of her body parts had been laid out in a hellish repose, they were in pieces. Lisa was all there, but she’d been butchered with the kind of hideous brutality that could only be the work of a madman.
And not a very skillful one at that.
Grace kneeled down next the victim. Her eyes carefully tracing the tentative cuts that had severed her right arm.
“Look,” she said, “he hesitated a little.”
“Yeah, I see that.” It was Paul Bateman, who had joined her while the medical examiner pushed everyone else away from the scene.
“Found some cigarette butts. Bagged and tagged.”
“Saw it,” she said. “Did you get the fishing bait bag?”
“Yeah, but I doubt anyone would kill someone here and go on fishing.”
Grace’s eyes stayed on the body. “Probably not. But maybe this is a favorite place. A good place he thought to hide her. I mean, it is a good place in a way. It isn’t that far off River Road. Anyone could just go by and miss her.”
It was true. More than a thousand cars passed that spot per hour, as people commuted to jobs in Tacoma or the Puyallup Valley. The only thing that brought any solace to the tragic scene was the fact that, however long Lisa had lain there, she had not been alive. She had not been one of those victims who were stashed alongside the road trying to summon the strength to call for help. Grace thought of the case of the California woman who’d crawled to the roadside after being left for dead—her arms severed from her body, but her will indomitable. Lisa Lancaster hadn’t had that chance.
Lisa had never said a word. Her final words, her final screams, had likely been given in a place where no one could see her, hear her. There was very little blood around the body. It was obvious that she’d bled out somewhere else.
Grace could feel the bile in her stomach rise. A sick person like the one who’d done this had probably savored her last breath as though it was something to enjoy. To revel in. What lay in pieces in the tangle of weeds just above the muddy riverbank had been brought there and reassembled.
“Hey!” a Pierce County deputy called from a tangle of brambles. “Got something over here.”
Grace stayed with the body, while Paul went in the direction of the deputy. He was a young officer, a total newbie. It was easy to spot those. They still allowed the excitement of finding a piece of evidence come to their faces.
“Plastic garbage bag,” the kid said. “Looks like blood on
it.”
Paul nodded. “Good work. Now, please step back.”
It was a black Hefty bag, the heavy-duty kind that Paul had used when his ex, Lynnette, threw him out and told him to get his stuff out of the house. He shook his head. He hated how thoughts of Lynnette infiltrated his mind all the time. Having to see her every day at work was bad enough, but having even the most common objects recall some incident with her was beyond cruel.
The black bag had been carried out into the water and tossed into the brambles about twenty-five yards from where the killer had deposited Lisa, bit by bit. It was hard to tell in the flat light among the Himalayan blackberries if there was blood on the bag, but from where Paul Bateman stood it appeared that there could be. If so, the bag was a monumental discovery and a major mistake by the perpetrator. Plastic bags held latent prints. Trace evidence from the killer’s vehicle could easily adhere to the sticky, bloody plastic. If this was the bag he’d brought ninety-five-pound Lisa Lancaster in to reassemble on the riverbank then it also had topped its manufacture’s promise of holding “up to seventy-five pounds without tearing.”
Grace joined Paul by the thorny vines.
“They’re transporting her now,” she said.
Paul pointed to the bag. “Techs will process this and the cigarette butts. Are you sure it’s Lisa?” he asked, his eyes unblinking.
“Sure enough that we better get over to Ms. Lancaster’s before the press does.”
CHAPTER 12
It was almost dark when the detectives arrived at the Lancaster house. Grace scanned the street for any of the usual suspects—the press, that is. Thankfully, there weren’t any. One vehicle did catch her eye. Marty Keillor’s souped-up Honda Accord was parked behind Ms. Lancaster’s car.
“Marty’s here,” Paul said. “Hope we don’t wake ’em up.”
“Enough of that,” Grace said, though she’d thought the same thing.
“Just saying,” he said.
Catherine Lancaster opened the door. She was wearing a white cotton blouse and jeans. It didn’t escape Grace’s eyes that the second button from the bottom was unfastened.