Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  Lainie knew what she was talking about.

  There was the matter of that other dead husband of hers.

  Their food arrived and Tori brightened.

  “God, I’m so hungry!” She pierced her chicken with her fork. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks!”

  Lainie nodded. She wanted to say something about how it was so nice that her sister had gotten back her appetite.

  “You know, since your husband has barely been dead a few days.”

  But she didn’t.

  She didn’t dare.

  Tori Connelly didn’t look like the kind of woman who would need to use a twenty-four-hour Kinko’s copy machine or computer, but she was. She made her way into the copier center off South Nineteenth Street. She carried with her a notebook and a purse. She needed neither. She had no intention of using cash or a credit card, and she certainly didn’t need to refer to any notes.

  She pretended to peruse the stationery section and paper samples while she waited for a caffeine-buzzed student to leave his rented PC for the bathroom. It took her about a minute to pull up a phony Hotmail account.

  Stupid idiot, don’t you know about computing security?

  She typed in an e-mail address and tapped out a message that included a bank account number in the Bahamas. It was typed in reverse order as she’d been advised to do.

  The subject line was: You Better Not Screw This Up.

  “Hey, I was working there.”

  The voice belonged to the student-idiot.

  She looked up at him and smiled.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! I thought you were gone for the night.”

  “You can see I’m not. I left all my stuff here while I went to take a leak. Do you mind?” He glared at her and waited for her to give up. He looked down at the screen to read what she was doing, but she’d minimized the screen.

  She pushed the send button and closed the window.

  “Sorry. No harm. No foul.”

  She couldn’t blame it on the food at Bite that evening. But once more Lainie couldn’t sleep. Her eyelids popped up like pulled window shades with broken springs. Lainie O’Neal shifted under the covers and lamented how the drama of the past days had beaten her back to the familiar point of exhaustion and sleeplessness. She still had not renewed her sleeping pill prescription, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Her doctor had said that her inability to sleep might be rooted in some unchecked psychological problem. It wasn’t the first time that she’d heard that.

  “A pill will only mask the problem, Lainie. You need to address what is eating at you day and night,” he said.

  She would change doctors again.

  In the meantime, she knew the pattern of the past few nights would play out again. Sleep would come after 3 A.M. and so would the nightmares. By 4 A.M. she’d be awake, shivering, and alone to try to come to terms with what she’d seen in her dreams, dreams that always included her sister.

  Finally, darkness and slumber came.

  She followed the sound of angry voices down the hallway of the house in Port Orchard. She was in a pale pink nightgown, following the sound into her parents’ room. She stood there in front of her mother, her fists balled up and tears streaming down her face. As she took it all in, her mind floated to the ceiling where she looked down at the scene playing underneath her. A curtain fluttered. Her blond head from above. Her mother in the bed looking at her, her head propped up on a satin pillow.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “You looked at me like I did. That’s enough.”

  “A look isn’t the same as an accusation, Tori.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Mom.”

  “No, you don’t. I told you what I thought, and you seem to think that I’ve said something otherwise.”

  “I hate you. I hate her. I hate him.”

  “Hate is an ugly word.”

  “You are ugly. You are stupid. You are boring.”

  The insults were the trifecta of teenager insults at anyone, especially mothers.

  “I’m not having this conversation. If you can’t be nice now, come back when you can. We’re done here. Leave.”

  “I wish you were dead.”

  Their mother closed her eyes and exhaled a sigh.

  “I will be someday. I might even be dead now.”

  The scene stalled, and then crackled like an old 1960s TV clip as the imagery went from color to black-and-white. Lainie watched from above, her back pressed against the popcorn ceiling.

  A male’s voice interrupted the single moment of quiet.

  “What’s going on here?”

  It was the familiar voice of their father.

  “Nothing. She’s being mean.”

  “I’m being truthful and she knows it.”

  As the images faded and she began to wake, her body drenched in sweat, Lainie could not be sure who had said what. She got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She looked down at her hands, still balled up in a rage for which she had no control.

  Slowly and deliberately she unfurled her fingers. There was nothing inside but lozenge- and circular-shaped indentations.

  Lainie wondered if she was awake or asleep. If she’d seen herself or her sister. More than anything, she wondered if there was a message coming from Tori at that very moment as she slept and dreamed in the bedroom down the hall.

  “Tori,” she said aloud, “what is this all about? Tell me. What did you do?”

  Tori sat straight up in the big Rice bed. The clock was ticking toward a deadline that mattered. Not like the seemingly arbitrary IRS deadline of April 15, or the kind of line in the sand that someone adheres to when they insist something has to be done by a certain time. This deadline wasn’t like that at all. In fact, some might see it as a time of celebration. A rite of passage.

  It was only a few days until Saturday. Once the clock struck midnight, everything would be exactly as she’d wanted.

  As they dreamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Port Orchard

  Kendall looked over reports from the night of the shooting in Tacoma and the preliminary report Birdy Waterman had completed on the stabbing of homicide victim Mikey Walsh in Kingston. They were not related by methods of homicide, by geography or socioeconomic status.

  Yet Kendall didn’t believe in the concept of coincidences. Certainly there was a random order to the universe, but when it came to evil there often was a connection.

  Evil is rare and not that random.

  In instances in which a crime had been staged by a perpetrator, items were often scattered willy-nilly. In fact, overscattered . If Tori Connelly had fabricated the events of the evening, she’d exercised considerable restraint in her coverup. That very little in the house was disturbed bolstered her contention that an intruder had entered the residence and panicked after coming across Alex watching TV. Any killer who makes the mistake of doing the deed in their own home usually stages every aspect of the crime to ensure that even the greenest detective or crime-scene investigator sees each clue as it is hurtled at them.

  Drawers pulled out.

  Coffee table overturned.

  Jewelry littering the floor like bread crumbs to the front door.

  All of those things were right out of the mostly caught killer’s playbook of greatest mistakes. Yet very little of that, aside from a single pulled-out drawer and an overturned potted fern, had been found at the scene of the Connelly murder.

  Alex Connelly was killed execution-style. But if so . . . who? And why?

  Mikey Walsh had been on the scene of a fatal traffic accident fifteen years ago. Within days of the body of the victim being exhumed, he’s stabbed to death. Susan Piccolo, the church secretary, indicated that some money was missing.

  But was that merely staging, too?

  Liver temperature put Mikey’s death on Monday. The report also noted that he’d been stabbed five times, though Birdy considered two of t
he wounds as “tentative” in nature.

  Afraid? Weak? Uncertain?

  Josh appeared in the hallway and Kendall called out to him.

  “I think the cases are related,” she said.

  “Of course you do,” he answered. “You like that sort of thing.”

  Just when she thought he’d be a decent person, the old Josh was back. “Why are you being dismissive?”

  “Look, I know a big conspiracy theory is a lot of fun. But there’s no way your Tori stabbed that preacher.”

  Kendall shook her head. “I didn’t say she stabbed him. What if someone is helping her?”

  “Why would that be? And who?” It was clear that Josh was only playing along.

  “I don’t know, but Tori is in the thick of this. I can feel it.”

  Josh picked up the autopsy report and turned toward the door. “What if we look for a meth head that needed some dough and the preacher was a good target?”

  Kendall didn’t agree at all.

  “You’re the lead on this one,” she said. “You figure it out.”

  “Tracked down the source of the red tape. It’s nothing professional, like I hoped. It’s sold only in craft stores. Our killer might be Martha Stewart.”

  Kendall didn’t say a word.

  “That was a joke,” he said.

  “I just forgot to laugh,” she said. “It might be because there isn’t anything funny about a minister who’d been gutted, Josh.”

  “I’m afraid.” Parker Connelly’s adolescent voice came over the phone like a leaky bicycle tire, soft, fading. He was in his bed, the covers thrown over his head like an army-issue pup tent. He had called Tori to pledge his love, to tell her that he missed her. He’d hoped that they’d share a little phone sex. His hand was in the waistband of his Diesel boxers when he dialed, but as the conversation moved from pleasure to murder, he vacated that idea.

  “You should be,” she said, her voice cool and direct, “afraid that you will never, never have my legs wrapped around you again.”

  Parker’s muscles tensed a little and he rolled over toward the wall, his body wrapped in a cocoon of fabric. It was the kind of position that suggested a desire for protection. He could feel his stomach churn in the way that it did when he had to give a speech in front of the class—times one million.

  “That’s not what I was talking about, Tori,” he said.

  “I don’t know why we’re even talking. Period. Every day that this goes on you prove to me that you’re not the man that I thought you were.” She paused a moment as if to reconsider her statement. “Not the man I thought you would be.”

  “That’s not fair and you know it.”

  “This isn’t about fair, Parker. It is about whether or not you love me enough to find a way to protect our relationship and ensure our future. I know you’re young, but honestly, you’re not that young.”

  The last part was a slam. It was meant to remind him once and for all that while they had played at being lovers and had talked about a lifetime commitment and a future together, he wasn’t quite her equal. He was younger. Immature . He was but a boy.

  He hated it when she played that way. It wasn’t fun. It was cruel and demeaning. It made him feel weak and insignificant. It made him feel like he imagined his mother might have felt when his father kicked her to the curb. Laura tearfully told her son that she wasn’t sure exactly why Alex had chosen Tori over her, but that she felt it had more to do with what she no longer possessed—and Tori still did.

  The air under the covers was thinning. He couldn’t really make sense of what she was asking him to do. Maybe there was no sense needed. It was about love, after all. Love, she had told him over and over, cannot be rationalized or explained.

  “By killing someone?” He finally asked. “Killing another person is how we protect our love?”

  “Oh, Parker,” she said. “I have made a mistake. I’ve let you love me and I’ve fallen in love with you. But you don’t seem to understand. This is a war we’re in right now. We are going to have to do things that no one would want to do unless they were in for the fight of their lives. History is full of examples. Think about the Donner party . . . did you study that in school?”

  Her tone was slightly condescending, but he ignored it.

  “Yeah, the pioneers who ate each other in California.”

  “Right. They did what they had to do to survive.”

  “We’re not stuck on a mountain in a blizzard,” he said.

  She laughed. “No, but we’re in a war, and you and I are the only people who can defend our futures. The world will try to stop us. They won’t understand. Your dad. Your mom. Whoever.”

  “My mom isn’t a part of this,” he said.

  “No, she’s not. But you have to understand, Parker, if she tried to get in our way we’d have to do something about it.”

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t talk that way. I don’t know if I can do that last thing you want me to do.”

  “You have to.”

  “It would be like killing you. She looks just like you.”

  “That’s right. And that’s why we need her gone.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “It’s time to grow a pair, Parker. I need a man in my bed, not a boy.”

  “I am a man.”

  “Then you’ll prove it to me, babe.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, Parker, killing isn’t as hard as you seem to think. I think I’ve proven that. I wish you would have sucked it up and paid attention. I need you.”

  They’d had a plan. Or at least Tori thought they had one. Killing Alex was going to be a team effort because she knew that in order for her to succeed that time, she’d need a partner. The subject was first broached as she and Parker sat in her car overlooking an empty expanse of Puget Sound one summer afternoon. They’d found a place for sex at the end of a long beachfront parking lot. She finished him off quickly—which was a pretty easy mission to accomplish with a seventeen-year-old boy—because there had been so much more to do.

  “I want you to shoot him in the head,” she said.

  “I hate him as much as you do, but, Tori, he is my dad.”

  She reapplied her lipstick and turned to face the boy, head-on. “Biology didn’t make him a father. You know that. Tell me you know that.”

  “I know it,” he said, repeating her words.

  “You’re not getting cold feet on me.”

  “No, it isn’t that. I don’t want to let you down.”

  “It isn’t about me. It doesn’t matter to me that he’s screwing that bitch at the office and getting ready to throw me away ... like he did your poor mother.” She leaned closer and touched his chin with her soft, gentle hands. “Getting rid of him is the price he will have to pay for our freedom.”

  The logic was peculiar. But somehow Parker understood. “You mean the money,” he said.

  “Yes. It is about the money. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot and a liar. I can’t tolerate either of those, can you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You will need to be the shooter,” she said. “I can’t risk it.”

  “I thought you said there was no risk.”

  “Parker, there’s always a risk. Making love to you just now was a risk. A cop could have come by. Some do-gooder with an overactive moral compass could see us and turn me in for stealing your youth. That is, if they could tell that I was older than you. You look so mature.”

  She kissed him and he felt that tingling feeling run through his body.

  “Do you want me to go over the plan again?”

  She let her tongue slip between his lips. They kissed again, this time with more passion.

  “I just want you inside of me again. I want us to be able to be together forever. I want us to enjoy each other whenever we want.”

  “I want that, too.”

  “As far as the plan goes, no need to cover that again. You know what to do.”


  Parker had never seen Tori look like that before. Her eyes were cold, almost devoid of life. She stood next to his bed in the guest room and spoke in a scary, quiet whisper.

  “You little shit,” she said. “You are backing out on me?”

  He sat there mute for a moment, before finally speaking. “I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Sorry? Goddamn you, Parker. We agreed to this. You promised me. You said you loved me and would do anything for us to be together.”

  “I want to kill him. I want to.”

  “I want things, too. Wanting you to live up to your promises was at the top of my list. But you’ve really let me down. You’re like every other man I’ve ever fallen for. They want what I have, they take it, and then when I want something in return, they shove me aside. I expected better of you, Parker.”

  He stood up. The teenager was taller than she was, but somehow he shrank in her presence.

  The carriage house adjacent to the Victorian held the updated mechanical plant that supported the house, including the water heater, the AC unit, and the redone electrical panel. Huddled on a sleeping bag behind the Lexus and a disconnected coal-fired kitchen stove—a relic from two or three remodels ago—was the shaking frame of a teenage boy.

  He held a gun stolen from the house across the street.

  Tori’s voice came at Parker with the sweetness of honey. “Baby, you have to pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t do this, Tori.”

  “You can and you will. You have to do this. It is the only way we can be together.”

  He’d been crying and he detested that she knew it, but he looked directly at her.

  “You mean, it is the only way we can get the money. If it was just about being together, we could just run off. You and me. Away from here.”

  She dropped to her knees. She was wearing nothing but a nightgown and the icy air hardened her nipples to eraser points poking at his face.

  “Look, I can’t stay here and try to build you up,” she said. “Try to convince you. You need to pull yourself together.”