by G. M. Ford
He’d heard it all before. More times than he could count. Something about Vietnam had poisoned half a generation. Taken their visions of heroic charges across open ground and mutated them into long-drawn-out, duck-and-cover jungle skirmishes, around bends in the road and across the rivers, up the sides of slippery hills, which they were ordered to “take” in the face of snipers and mines and machine guns. As if the ground really mattered and they weren’t just going to walk back down later, fewer than before.
“You could see…as soon as he got back. He was different. Angry. Like somebody I’d never seen before.” She set the cup in the saucer in her lap and stared off into space. “I remember once…right after he got back. We went to a dance in Volunteer Park and this man said something—maybe to me, maybe to Roddy, I don’t remember—and Roddy just went off on him. I can still see the man covering his head and trying to crawl under a car while Roddy kicked him and spit on him and called him a son of a bitch. I can still see the blood on the man’s yellow shirt and his pocket change spilled out on the pavement where he lay.” She sighed. “Just like it was yesterday.”
“How old was he when he…” Corso let it hang.
“He was thirty-nine. Kelly was fourteen.” Her eyes clouded over. “He took his revolver, went out by the compost heap, and shot himself in the head. No note. No good-bye of any kind. No anything. We got half his pension. The station house took up a collection. Paid off the house for us.”
“How did Kelly take it?”
She set her cup and saucer on the table. Sighed. “Like girls that age take things like that, Mr. Corso. They blame themselves. She grew up too fast. Got a lot wilder. For about five years there, I hardly knew my own daughter. It was the only time in our lives we weren’t close.”
“So…at the end…you and Kelly were close again?”
“Like sisters,” she said.
“She’d never been married?”
She shook her head and smiled. Started reciting the lines she’d said so many times before. “She was so demanding. She knew just what she wanted and wasn’t going to settle for anything less. My Kelly was a girl who knew where she was going.”
Corso took another sip. “At the time of her death, was Kelly involved with anyone?”
She shook her head. “She’d been between boyfriends for months. She said she was fed up with relationships that weren’t going anywhere.”
“You sure?” he asked gently. “You know, sometimes…” He waggled a hand. “Sometimes people don’t always share everything with their parents.”
She cast Corso a pitying glance and began to clean up. “There was no reason for Kelly to keep anything from me. I didn’t try to run her life for her. She was a grown woman.” She put Corso’s cup and saucer on the tray and got to her feet. “I didn’t care who she dated, as long as she was happy.” She headed for the kitchen. “She always knew she could have brought home a doctor, a lawyer, or an Indian chief and I’d be happy as long as she was.” She turned around to back through the swinging door. She cocked an amused eyebrow at Corso. “As long as it wasn’t a cop. There’s nothing but sorrow being married to a cop. Ask me. I know.”
She came back through the door wiping her hands on a black-and-white dish towel.
“You’ve let me prattle on for over an hour. You’re quite a listener.”
Corso smiled.
“In your business, that must be quite an asset. So tell me, Mr. Corso, do you mind if I ask a question?” He said he didn’t. “So why…at this late date…what interest is any of this to you now? The story’s over, isn’t it?”
“I thought I might write a book about it,” Corso lied.
She brought a hand to her throat. “Lord knows it had enough twists and turns.”
“It sure did,” he agreed. “A few more than anybody needed,” he added.
She had a faraway look in her eyes. “A book would be good,” she said. “When it’s written down, people don’t forget so easily.”
“Did she have a best girlfriend? Somebody her own age she was close to?”
Alice Doyle took a deep breath. “Paula Ziller…I suppose. They’d known each other since middle school.”
“You know where I might be able to find her?”
“She’s moved away,” she answered absently. “Down to Portland somewhere.”
“That’s Ziller.” He spelled it. She nodded.
“Ah,” she said softly and left the room.
When she returned, she carried a Ziplock freezer bag full of greeting cards. Lots of snowflakes and mangers. Alice Doyle sat in the chair opposite Corso, the bag in her lap. “She sent me a card last year,” she said, pawing through the bag. “Paula’s a nice girl. The kind who remembers to send cards,” she mused.
She pulled an oversize red card from the bag and handed it to Corso. The return address sticker had been snipped from the envelope and scotch-taped to the front of the card. Paula Ziller—1840 Harrison Street, Portland, Oregon. Noel.
“You used to be a journalist,” Alice Doyle said suddenly.
“At one time, yes.”
“Did you ever cover a war?”
“Yes, ma’am. The Gulf War.”
She paused to collect herself. “What was it about that Vietnam War that sent them all home so damaged?” she asked finally. “So damaged.”
“I think all wars are like that,” Corso said. He looked up into the woman’s liquid brown eyes. “My family talks about how whatever was kind or decent about my father must have gotten lost in some Korean foxhole. About how the only thing the army shipped home was his whiskey thirst and his mean streak.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice Doyle said.
“Don’t be,” Corso said. “He wasn’t worth it.”
Chapter 35
Tuesday, September 25
6:36 P.M. Day 6 + 3
Maybe losing a friend to a monster permanently heightens the senses. Or maybe she was merely prudent by nature. Either way, Paula Ziller was an exceptionally careful young woman. She stopped the red Ford Taurus well back in the driveway, pushed the garage-door opener, and waited, allowing first the low and then the high beams to play over the empty interior of the garage before easing slowly forward.
Once parked inside, she took her time. Corso watched her eyes play over the rearview mirror as the garage door slid down behind her. A full minute passed before the side yard lit up like a ballpark. Only then did she scurry from the side door of the garage to the back steps, her purse clutched in one hand and her keys at the ready in the other. Little white Mace canister dangling from the key chain. In door. Out lights.
The radio in the rented Ford Explorer had already been tuned to the Portland NPR jazz station when Corso got it from the airport. He’d left it that way. Tuesday-night blues program. Hank Crawford and Jimmy McGriff jamming on “The Glory of Love.”
Corso groaned as he stretched. His back was tight. He thought of Dougherty. Remembered the taste of her mouth. And again felt the imaginary draft he’d felt all day on the back of his neck, as if he’d left a door ajar somewhere and the wind had suddenly found access.
Corso checked his watch: 7:40. Two hours since he’d knocked on the front door and then peeked in the side window of the garage and found it empty. He counted to a hundred. And then again. Enough time for a careful girl to get settled and maybe take a leak. Not enough to climb into bed.
1840 Harrison Street was a small, postwar starter home. One story, probably two bedrooms, with a detached garage. The kind of no-frills home once intended to shelter returning GIs and their expectant families.
Corso stepped up onto the front porch and knocked twice on the screen door. He heard the padding of feet and then suddenly the front porch lit up like a runway. He remembered the Mace and moved as far back from the door as possible without stepping off the porch. Held his press credential out in front of him. Winced.
He hadn’t noticed the intercom speaker mounted over the front door. The electronic “What do you want?” s
tartled him.
“I’m Frank Corso, from the Seattle Sun. I got your name and address from Alice Doyle.” He waited, holding the card in front of him like a supplicant and squinting into the spotlights.
A series of snaps and pops and then the inside door opened on a security chain. She was short and had at least one brown eye. Maybe five foot three in her stocking feet. Red hair the color of an orangutan. “What do you want?” she said again.
“I’d like to talk to you about Kelly Doyle.”
“Put your ID up against the door so I can see it,” she said.
Corso stepped forward and pressed the card against the glass of the screen door.
“I’m going to call Mrs. Doyle,” she said and closed the door.
Corso could sense that she hadn’t walked away. A minute passed; the interior door opened. She reached out and flipped the lock on the screen door.
“If that didn’t send you scurrying off, you must be who you say you are. Come in,” she said. Corso stepped into the vestibule.
She was built like a gymnast. Not quite stocky, but hard all over. Big close-set ears, big brown eyes, little tiny nose. Maybe a little surgery, Corso figured.
She picked apologetically at her battered flannel nightgown. “Sorry about the frumpy,” she said. “I had a bad day at work. I was going to nuke something to eat and then get in bed and read.”
“It’s stunning,” he assured her.
She looked down at the orange sweat socks on her feet. “Especially the socks,” she said. “Very haute.”
“My thoughts precisely,” he said.
She looked him over. “Are you always this easy to please?” she asked with a teasing twinkle in her eyes.
“I’m a prince,” Corso said. “Ask anybody.”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “I’ll just bet you are. Come on.”
She led him down a central hall to the brightly lit kitchen at the back of the house. Yellow fifties dinette set. Bright blue dishes and glasses inside four-pane kitchen cabinets. New appliances and sink, old linoleum and light fixtures. Ethan Allen meets Ikea.
She gestured toward one of the chairs. Corso said he’d rather stand.
She leaned back against the counter. “You said you wanted to talk about Kelly.”
“If you don’t mind.”
“But…I saw on the news that…the police killed the guy.”
“They did.”
“Then what’s to talk about?”
“It’s pretty complicated…but to make a long story short, I’m not altogether sure I think Kelly was killed by the same person who killed the rest of the girls.”
Her dark eyes flashed. “They said there was no doubt about it.”
“Who said?”
“The Seattle police.”
“You spoke with them?”
“I sure did.”
“When was this?”
“Over three years ago. As soon as I heard Kelly was dead. I called to tell them what I knew, but they said they had evidence that made it certain Kelly was killed by the same person who’d killed all those other poor girls.”
Corso spread his hands. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“Neither was I,” she said. “That’s why I called and sent the letter.”
“What letter?”
“About Kelly’s mystery man.”
“Maybe you better start at the beginning.”
“Coffee?” she asked.
He said no.
She poured herself a cup, and again leaned back against the counter. “You have to understand Kelly, Mr. Corso.” Paula Ziller sighed. “Kelly had a knack for losers. I never understood why. She was beautiful and smart and vivacious and everything most girls wish they were and yet…if you put her in a room with a dozen men, she’d always pick the loser. The guy who hadn’t had a job in five years…the guy with five kids who claimed he wasn’t married. Every time.” She waved her coffee cup. “Like on some level or other she was looking for something she just couldn’t find.”
“Like a father, maybe,” Corso suggested.
She nodded. “I never thought of it that way. But…yeah…maybe,” she said.
“So anyway.”
“So…it was right at the time I was in the process of moving from Seattle down here to Portland. Kelly had this hot and heavy romance going on with some guy.” She made a wry face. “Very hush-hush. Her mother couldn’t know about it or anything. I figured the guy must be married. One of those ‘My wife doesn’t understand me, we’ll be divorcing soon’ types.”
“Mrs. Doyle says her daughter shared everything with her.”
“That was one of the weird things about the whole deal. Usually she did. Kelly dated African Americans. She was engaged to a Chinese guy for a while.” She made a face. “All of which was okay with her mom. But not this one. For some reason, this one was strictly off-limits to everybody…even me.”
“Then how come you know?”
“Because it started to get ugly.”
“Ugly how?”
“Ugly like all of a sudden, out of the blue, he says he’s going to marry somebody else. He says it was some sort of family obligation or something. Like he had no choice. Like he had to do it or else.”
“And?”
“Kelly was crazy about him. Desperate.”
“So?”
She raised her eyebrows. “She told him she was pregnant.”
“She wasn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve read the autopsy report.”
She looked away for a moment and then took a long sip from her cup.
“Then she told him she was going to his girlfriend. When she told him that, I guess he came unglued and threatened her. Said he wasn’t going to let her ruin his life. Said he’d put a stop to her if she tried.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. That’s all she said.”
“And you have no idea who this guy was?”
She shook her head. “A name…no…but I think I may have seen him once,” she said. “Right before I moved. I stopped in some little hole-in-the-wall deli in Wallingford. Inside that old school they renovated into a shopping center.”
Corso said he knew the place.
“She was sitting at a table with this guy I’d never seen before. A fox. They were arguing. You could feel it in the air. The other people in the place were embarrassed for them.” She let a hand drop noisily to her side. “I backed right out the door. I felt like I was intruding on something.”
“And you never mentioned it to her?”
Her eyes clouded over. “That was the last time I even saw her alive.” She turned and emptied the dregs of her cup down the drain. “I’ll tell you though, Mr.…”
“Corso,” he filled in.
“I’ve carried Kelly and what happened to her with me every day of my life since then.” She searched him with her eyes. “I’ve never quite felt safe since.”
Corso knew the feeling. The moment when the last remnants of childhood optimism finally disappear down the drain like tepid coffee.
“So when she turned up dead, you notified the police.”
“I called and sent a letter.”
“You have a copy of the letter?”
“Somewhere.”
Corso reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a handful of newspaper. Folded both the headlines and the captions over, so only the photographs remained visible.
“The guy in the deli. Was it any of these guys?” he asked, turning the first picture her way. She shook her head. He showed her another picture. Same result. Then the third. She nearly put her nose on the paper. Pointed.
“Second guy from the left,” she said.
Chapter 36
Wednesday, September 26
11:11 A.M. Day 6 + 4
Wald slipped onto the stool next to Corso. Ordered a cup of coffee and an English muffin from the gold-toothed counterman.
“What? There weren’t enough
shit-hole eateries downtown? You had to drag me all the way out to hell and gone?”
“I figured you might not want to be seen with me.”
“At last,” Wald said, “an area of agreement.” He took in the place. Sighed. “Nice ambience. Kind of retro-industrial waste.”
Hector’s Lunch was nestled in the shadow of the West Seattle Highway. Catering to the longshoremen of pier eighteen, it opened at five and closed at two. At 11 A.M. on a Wednesday, they were too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. Except for a bearded senior citizen snoring in a booth over by the men’s room, they had the place to themselves.
The counterman set Wald’s order on the counter and disappeared through the door to the kitchen. “So…you and your girlfriend decide you don’t want to go along with the program anymore?”
“Nope,” said Corso. “A deal’s a deal.”
Wald took a bite out of his English muffin. Washed it down with coffee.
Corso slid the picture across the counter at Wald. Crime-scene photo. Head shot.
“Kate Mitchell. Victim number two.”
Wald gave it a cursory glance. Bit off another piece of muffin. “So?”
“Notice the lovely ear tag.”
“The accessory no girl should be without.”
“Here’s the SPD list of what’s supposed to be in the bag: ‘one watch, Timex; one gold bracelet; one gold cross and chain; two toe rings; one plastic ear tag, ovine.’ Here’s Dougherty’s picture of what’s actually still in Kate Mitchell’s evidence file. Day before yesterday. Two toe rings. A gold cross and chain, and a gold bracelet, and a wristwatch.” He waited. “No ear tag.”
More muffin, more coffee. “She musta missed it,” the cop insisted.
Corso plopped two more pictures on top of the first. “Here’s two other angles. No ear tag. She didn’t miss it.”
This time Wald studied all three photos, then turned them upside down on the counter. “Anything could have happened. Maybe it got sent for testing and never got returned. Maybe it’s in somebody else’s file. Who the fuck knows?”
“Whoever took it out of the file knows.”