by Gregg Olsen
The answer was in Hawaii.
Kendall got online and booked a flight on Alaska Airlines using 45,000 frequent flier miles she and Steven had saved for the past six years. She’d call in sick, lie to her husband about where she was going, and pray to God that whatever she found out would set them all free.
Kendall returned home and packed a single carry-on bag. The one she always took whenever she went on a business trip. She pulled off the tag for SFO, the remnant of her last forensics conference the previous fall.
“Conference came up out of the blue,” Steven said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Kendall didn’t look at him. She just couldn’t. “I guess. When the other investigator couldn’t make it, I volunteered. Budgets are so tight these days, we’re lucky that we didn’t take a bath on the entire conference.”
“Yeah, that’s good.”
Her clothes were all lightweight and Steven noticed. “Hot weather in L.A., I gather.”
She nodded. “Scorching.”
“Sure you don’t want us to take you to the airport?”
“Too late, babe. I’ll park at Thrifty and take the shuttle.”
Kendall hated lying to Steven. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and tell him just why she was going, where she was going, and that she just couldn’t let Tori get away with murder.
Not again.
She got out of her car on the Southworth ferry for the crossing to West Seattle, and went upstairs to the passenger deck. She let the wind wash over her, blowing her hair, caressing her like the love of a lifetime ago.
I’m sorry, Steven. I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you everything.
The telephone conversation didn’t go well but Parker Connelly could have guessed that would be the case. He knew by his mother’s overwrought, and judgmental, reaction that he’d screwed up big-time. Murder was big, indeed. Pour a big heap of suspicion coming from the Kitsap detectives on top of that and he knew he was in deep trouble.
“You did what?” Tori repeated.
“It was a packet of money and I took it.”
“Are you stupid because you’re young or just plain stupid?”
“Don’t treat me like this,” he said, his voice low because he didn’t want his mom to hear him arguing with his lover.
His stepmother.
There was silence on the line and Parker pleaded a second time.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What did Kendall and her partner say?”
“They thought we were sleeping together, but I convinced them otherwise. They are going to get a warrant or something, at least that’s what Mom thinks.”
She seethed on the other end of the line, doing her best to maintain control.
Finally, Tori spoke. “We’re going to have to speed up our plans,” she said. “Use the ID I gave you and check in to a motel in South Tacoma. A rat hole. A place where no one is going to pay attention to you. I’ll come and get you,” she said, hanging up.
Parker grabbed his car keys, his laptop, and a jacket and climbed out the window. He was gone.
Tori rolled over and raked her fingernails down the chest of her lover.
“You have been working out,” she said.
“Yeah, I have,” he said.
“We have a problem,” she said.
“So I heard.”
She scooted closer. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Honolulu
As Kendall Stark sat on the overnight flight for Honolulu, she knew she was an anomaly among the other travelers. She wasn’t going to Hawaii to celebrate a wedding anniversary, a birthday, a honeymoon. She was going there to find out what, if anything, had been missed when Tori Connelly’s first husband died there. Of course, there’d been an investigation.
A cursory investigation at best, Kendall thought.
A retired Honolulu detective named Rikki Tyler had sent her a portion of a minuscule case file as a courtesy. It consisted of two witness statements. One was from a bystander who’d come across Tori on the beach as she screamed that something was wrong. It was to the point.
“The woman in pink was on her knees yelling about her husband. I saw the body in the surf and I pulled it ashore. I don’t know CPR. The lady was too upset to do anything. I think the man was already dead. I don’t know what happened. I am very sorry that the man died.”
Tori’s own statement was a little longer and it pretty much echoed what she’d told her sister when she called the evening of the accident. Lainie told Kendall how she was at the P-I working on an article about incorporating vegetables in the Northwest landscape—a very Seattle kind of story. The kind she never wanted to write in the first place. The kind she would kill to write if only the paper had not gone under and left her jobless and now consumed by what her sister might have done. Lainie told Kendall how the newsroom seemed to go silent and how the air thickened when her sister told her.
“Zach is dead! He died in an accident! I’m coming home.”
“Oh my God, Tori. What happened?”
Tori sobbed a story into the phone and, despite her being a reporter, Lainie asked no questions. It was so much of a shock that she could barely catch her breath and tell Tori that she’d be all right. Everything would be okay. She wrote down the flight number for Tori’s return the next day.
“I’ll pick you up,” Lainie said.
“I have to go now,” Tori said. “I have to make arrangements for Zach.”
Lainie wanted to ask if that meant she was shipping the body back, but it seemed too touchy, too painful a thing to bring up.
Yet Tori answered the question before her sister asked it.
“I’m having him cremated and his ashes spread over here. He loved Hawaii. I don’t want him to ever have to leave.”
The scenario played in her mind those many years later. This was a second dead husband and a second rush to the crematory.
Why the hurry? she wondered.
As the jet engines droned outside her window, Kendall finished her complimentary mai tai and looked down at Tori’s statement, given the day of the accident. A few things leaped off the pages.
“I told him that the surf was too rough. You’d think he’d listen to me. I’m an expert swimmer. I could have been on the Olympic team if I’d put my mind to it.”
It was true. Tori was a great swimmer. Maybe not Olympic material, but knowing Tori as Kendall did, there was nothing she couldn’t excel at—swimming included. She recalled how Lainie told her that she didn’t even try to compete in swimming at South Kitsap. She didn’t have Tori’s speed, but she was a better diver. That rankled her sister a little and she appeared to love it. It was always hard to get the best of her if she decided she was going to do something. Piano. Cooking. Public speaking. Kendall knew Tori as the one who showed the instructors how things were done. She didn’t care if they hated her for it. She never cared what anyone thought.
“We’d taken the boogie boards out after lunch. It was about 2 P.M. My husband was an experienced surfer, having summered with his grandmother in Huntington Beach, California. I’d been on a board a time or two myself. . . .”
Kendall wondered what “time or two” she was referring to? When she was younger?
Always bragging about something. So very Tori.
Also, Tori seemed to speak in a vocabulary that suggested the O’Neals were blue bloods from the East Coast. Summered? Did she really say that?
Kendall turned her attention back to the report.
“My husband proceeded to swim out about a quarter of a mile from the shore. It might not have been that far. The sun was bright in my eyes and I lost track of him. I was paddling around when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of an enormous rogue wave. It must have been twenty feet or maybe thirty. It is hard to tell with any certainty. It happened so fast. When the wave got to me, I hung on to my board for dear life. I didn’t see what happened to Zach. I found him ten minutes
later on the shore.”
That was her statement. The case was closed. The Hawaiian authorities wrote it off as a tragic accident. Detective Tyler, who’d agreed to meet with her on the island, had included a truncated version of the coroner’s findings: “Victim died from blunt force trauma to the head while surfing.”
There were four photos in the file. Only four, which in itself was surprising. There was a shot of the beach, the color of raw sugarcane, with barely a footprint to mar its smooth, broad nothingness. Off to one side of the image, she saw a paddle and a pair of sunglasses. Across the bottom of the scan was a notation that the photo had been taken at 4 P.M., “near the location of the accident.”
Two others came without any notation. One was the image of young man, Asian or Hawaiian. He wasn’t posing, but it was clear the image was taken near the beach. Coconut palms were visible in the background. The next also included the young man, this time in front of a car with a Hawaiian plate.
What does this have to do with Zach?
The final photo was a picture of Tori, her blue eyes caught in a frightened, terrified gaze. The shiny glaze of her tears streaked her lightly tanned face. It wasn’t a face that Kendall would have ascribed to Tori. The woman in the photograph was in complete anguish.
There was no way of faking that look.
Kendall finished her drink. She was tired but too stressed to sleep. She only had two appointments—the owner of the house where Zach had last been seen alive and the retired cop. It wasn’t much, she knew, but if there had been a pattern of murder, Zach Campbell had been in the middle of it. Women serial killers often killed for profit, for greed.
Greedy was Tori to a T.
Female serial killers often employed poison. They liked killing in a way that left their hands clean. A stabbing was too up close and personal.
Kendall knew that if Tori had killed Zach, she probably had help.
Just as she probably did back in Tacoma.
People are supposed to love the weather of the Hawaiian Islands. Kendall figured she’d love it, too, if her body temperature didn’t rise when she was stressed over something. From the moment she landed in Honolulu, she felt the characteristic blooms of sweat coming from her armpits and lower back. She stopped to pull the fabric of her too-tight shirt and knew why her mother had always sworn by the properties of natural fabrics. Her shirt, a light blue cotton-poly blend looked better on the hanger than it did after a five-hour flight from Seattle. She’d gone with the poly blend because she knew that she would never have to send it out to be cleaned and pressed. She liked saving time—and, given that this was not a Kitsap County junket—saving money.
She grabbed her ribbon-handled bag from the conveyor belt at the baggage claim as a group of tourists dove for their unfortunately identical black bags, the kind stewardesses used in the day when people still called them that. Now they were flight attendants, of course.
Kendall caught a shuttle bus to the car rental lot to pick up a Jeep for the short drive up to the North Shore town of Haleiwa. A Jeep sounded like fun, but it was noisy and rough driving. She wished she’d settled for a Honda Accord. She arrived at 11:30 A.M.—characteristically a little early. Early, she knew, was almost always a good thing. The address was a mile out of town, a secluded place with a large, heavy gate decorated with a family of sea turtles in bronze. They’d gone verdigris in the hot humid weather, making them look nearly lifelike in the way that metal sculpture artists can do. They know that the passage of time reveals new truths in their work.
She was hoping for the same thing.
Kiwana Morimoto met her outside on the driveway. She was an attractive woman, a fifth-generation islander with silver-streaked black hair, a broad freckled nose, and hands so tiny they’d have suited a child better than a grown woman of more than sixty.
She held out her hand and smiled warmly.
“I hope you didn’t have much of a problem finding Bali House.”
Kendall returned the smile. “No, no worries,” she said.
“Mai tai?”
“Too early,” she said. “Iced tea?”
“Sure. Follow me.”
Kiwana led Kendall around the house, an ’80s abode with a low roofline and a seamless bank of windows overlooking the basalt-studded shoreline. A fisherman with a pole that must have been fifteen feet long worked the current in hopes of a suppertime catch. Kendall had no idea what one would pull from those pristine waters, but with a pole like that, she expected it to be big. Really big.
They sat on a pair of bright blue lounge chairs under an almond tree that dropped green nuts and tangerine-colored leaves onto the brick patio.
A giant green sea turtle basked in the sun.
“I’ve never seen one,” Kendall said.
“Yesterday,” Kiwana said, “we counted eighty-seven here on the beach.”
“They bring good luck, right?” Kendall said. She already knew that they did because she’d flipped through the inflight magazine before takeoff.
“Yes, Bali House for the most part has been a blessed place.”
Kendall knew that when the hostess said “for the most part,” she was referring to the reason she’d come across the Pacific Ocean.
Tori O’Neal Campbell Connelly.
Kiwana disappeared into the house and Kendall watched the fisherman and the waves. When the homeowner returned, she carried a rattan tray of macadamia nut cookies and a pitcher of the pinkest iced tea the detective had ever seen.
“Guava syrup,” she said, catching Kendall’s eye on the pink drink.
Kendall sipped. “It’s good,” she said, stifling the gag reflex that kicked in as she swallowed the liquid cotton candy. “Let’s talk a little,” she said, swallowing hard. “Then maybe you can show me around the house.”
Kiwana looked out at the water, then at her glass before answering.
“As I told you,” she said, her black eyes suddenly flinty, “I’ve covered this ground a time or two with the police.”
“I know it must be boring for you to talk about it again. I’m sorry.”
The older woman let out a sigh. “It’s all right. I don’t have guests coming to the house until tomorrow. I have to warn you about something, however.”
Kendall rotated her glass, catching shards of the sparkle of the lowering sun. “What’s that?”
“There aren’t many people that I’ve met in my life—a pretty long one at that—whom I cannot stand. Your friend’s sister probably stands alone on the list, when I think about it.” Her words trailed off. It was clear that this woman, this host to strangers in her North Shore ocean home, didn’t like to speak ill of anyone.
“I can see that, but I still need you to help.” Kendall wiped the condensation from the tall glass onto her pant leg. She wished she’d worn shorts. “I understand.”
“Fine then. I couldn’t stand her. I’ve been renting out Bali House for twenty-seven years. I’ve never met anyone like her.”
Kendall urged Kiwana to continue without saying so. Truth be told, nothing could stop her, reticent or not. Tori had made an impression.
She always did.
Only one time did Lainie O’Neal find the courage to broach the subject of what had happened to her in juvenile detention when she switched places with Tori. It wasn’t that the images of that night in 7-Pod had faded completely from view. But it was not her experiences that haunted her. It was what she imagined her sister had gone through the months of her incarceration following the accident on Banner Road. She was working as an intern at the Whatcom Weekly during her senior year in college. The story she’d been assigned was what she considered an easy A as far as the instructors at the university were concerned. Students in her journalism major knew that their professors could never fault a story that touched on incest, rape, or child molestation.
“Pick one of those subjects and you’ve got yourself a guaranteed award winner.”
She dug into a story at the Whatcom Weekly that fit thos
e parameters. It centered on a young woman who had been raped by a guard at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy. The woman known in the media as “Inmate Nicola B” had filed a civil claim against the state—and it was clear that the state would have to pay. Her proof was the guard’s DNA match to her baby girl. After several weeks of constant but respectful requests, Lainie scored an interview with the former prisoner. It was more than the basis for a story; the meeting between the young reporter and the rape victim was life changing. Nicola, a small woman with penetrating brown eyes and a surprisingly sweet demeanor, said something that Lainie underlined four times after the interview as she built her courage to talk to Tori.
“I honestly felt that the guard owned me. I felt that I was powerless and to try to stop him from the rape was to say that my life was worth nothing. I knew that he would kill me. For the longest time, I thought that all that I’d done in life had brought me to that moment, like some sick payback from God or maybe the devil.”
A few days after the interview, Lainie drove I-5 to Seattle and took the ferry to Bremerton. Tori was living in a cheap apartment close to downtown with a peekaboo view of the Manette Bridge. It wasn’t a great place—ratty, dirty. A man was urinating around the corner as Lainie parked. She felt that her sister lived there because that was how she saw herself. She couldn’t shake what the guard had done to her. Tori was singing at the casino then. The only suggestion that her life had any promise was the sparkle of the sequins on the costumes that hung in her closet.
“Pretty,” Lainie said as Tori showed her a red sequined dress she planned on wearing that night.
“Better be, for what it costs.”
“I’d like to hear you sing sometime,” she said. “Dad would, too.”
“I’d be too nervous to have you two there. You understand, right?”
Lainie didn’t, not really. “I guess so.”