The Girl in the Woods

by Gregg Olsen

  She was already there.

  Just as Birdy got out of her rental car, a woman in a Lexus pulled in across the street. One of four garage doors went up, and the woman stepped out and went toward a garbage receptacle that stood near the curb like several others in the neighborhood.

  It had been trash day. And as lovely as the homes were, not everyone had domestic help or were retired.

  “Excuse me, is this Bobby Drysdale’s house?” Birdy said, indicating the house.

  The woman, in a chic black and white skirt and expensive heels, looked at her and then went about her business.

  “Excuse me,” Birdy said, raising her voice.

  Maybe the woman didn’t hear her?

  Again, no response.

  Maybe she had earbuds in or something and was listening to music.

  Birdy walked toward her. “I’m looking for Bobby Drysdale,” she said. “Where I come from, you answer a question when one is politely asked.”

  The woman slowed, then turned around and glared.

  “Then maybe you should go back to Nogales and ask your questions there,” she said, cruel sarcasm dripping from her lips.

  Birdy bristled. She’d been dismissed. That had never happened to her in her entire life. Yes, her complexion was dark and her hair black as a starless night.

  “I’m not from Mexico,” she said.

  The woman shrugged it off. “Sorry. Just thought you were looking for housekeeping work. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Birdy said, lying. The woman’s attitude couldn’t have been more purposefully rude.

  The waitress at the barbecue place had called the city Snobbsdale. Birdy understood that nickname completely.

  “Look, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care,” the woman went on, moving the receptacle to the open garage and dragging it between her BMW and some other fancy car that Birdy couldn’t identify. “But equally, I don’t know who lives across the street nor do I give it a second thought. We’re all very private people here in Mesquite Heights. That’s why we live here.”

  The garage door went down like a guillotine, hard and decisive.

  Birdy stood there.

  “Nice meeting you,” she said loud enough for anyone to hear.

  If only there was someone there to hear, that is.

  While all of the houses in the neighborhood were massive, low slung to blend in with the landscape, they resembled something else. She couldn’t quite place it as she walked up to a courtyard planted with prickly pear, agave, and ocotillo. Then it finally dawned on her. She turned around and scanned the neighborhood. All the homes were built like fortresses with thick rounded-edged walls. Only tiny gunner windows were poked into the front of the massive front exteriors. Walls shrouded the front doors from the street. Cactus protruded over walkways in a way that instant-messaged visitors to back off.

  She rang the bell and waited. Her hair stuck to the nape of her neck. A suit, even a lightweight one like the one she was wearing, was not the right attire for Arizona. She’d have given anything to be in shorts and a tank just then.

  The door opened and a man with close-cropped white hair and designer glasses stood there in a silky T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.

  Doesn’t anyone wear shoes down here?

  “No soliciting,” he said right away. “Can’t you read?”

  Birdy almost said, “si” but held her tongue.

  “Dr. Drysdale, I’m Dr. Waterman, a forensic pathologist from Washington looking into one of your cases.”

  He looked at her warily. “I’m no longer practicing medicine.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “May I come in?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

  “I’m not used to this heat,” the forensic pathologist said, adding a quick, “please.”

  Reluctantly, Bobby Drysdale led her inside. The room was enormous, cavernous really. Though the homeowner’s furnishings were massive, they still seemed dwarfed by the size of the space. There were dark leather couches, planked tables, and a kind of sterile look that indicated he lived alone.

  “I was having a drink,” he said, still not smiling. “Want one?”

  She shook her head. “Some water, please.”

  Bobby flip-flopped over to the bar.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said, handing her a glass of ice water with a lemon slice tucked between the cubes. “It’s about Jenny.”

  Birdy took the water and sipped. It tasted so good. The lemon was a nice touch.

  “I guess word travels fast,” she said.

  “I have friends,” he said, as he led her to the Mexican tiled patio that surrounded an oblong, irregularly shaped pool. Unlike the house, the pool was small. More for dipping in on a hot day like the one they were experiencing than doing laps.

  He indicated a couple of chairs and they both sat down.

  “Marrying Jenny Lake was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said.

  Birdy sipped her water as Bobby fidgeted a little.

  “Maybe not the biggest,” she said, not spelling it all out, but knowing without a doubt that he understood the meaning of her comment.

  Yet he let it pass.

  “You know she’s been arrested for the murder of her third husband,” Birdy said.

  Bobby swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he answered.

  Birdy was the one who was surprised. “Why not?”

  Bobby took off his glasses and put on a pair of sunglasses. “Jenny was nothing but trouble. That’s why I divorced her. I actually caught her forging some documents. Look, I went to the police and filed a report. Go check. I didn’t press charges because, well, I felt sorry for those kids of hers. They didn’t deserve to be orphans while their mother went to jail.”

  “What kind of documents?” Birdy asked. “What was she forging?”

  “Checks,” he said. “Life insurance. You name it. If there was a place for her to sign my name and get something out of it, she was right there with a cheap-ass Bic pen. Jenny was a scammer. I was stupid. I was in my late forties, going nowhere, and I was ripe for the pickings for a girl like her.”

  “A girl like her?”

  He looked over at Birdy and took off his shades for a second.

  “She was a total looker,” he said. “Hotter than a scotch bonnet chili. From what I can tell, she still is. I saw her picture on the Internet. Not bad for her age.”

  “You know that I took tissue samples from Donald Lake’s body today.”

  Sunglasses back on, Bobby Drysdale got up and went back to the bar inside the house. “I’m getting another drink,” he said. “And yes, I know.”

  A coyote lumbered by on the other side of the jail-bars of the fence that separated the pool area from the arid magnificence of the desert. The coyote limped and kept his head down, sniffing for something along the path that he’d worn along the other side of the fence.

  “You listed cause of death as a heart attack, Doctor,” she said when he returned to the chair next to hers.

  “Yes, I did,” he said. “I was actually there when he died. Golfing with him when it happened on the thirteenth hole. It wasn’t that I just made it up. I tried to save the man. I think I know cardiac arrest when I see one.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. “What was his medical history?”

  “He had high blood pressure, but nothing completely off the charts. I expect it was living with Jenny that gave him HBP.”

  Birdy was still on the hunt for answers, and she wasn’t getting many from the man who’d married Jennifer in Las Vegas.

  “Had he been ill?” she asked. “Before he went golfing. Do you know?”

  “Look, I wasn’t his doctor,” Drysdale said. “But, yeah, he’d been under the weather. Stress related. Jenny told me that he wasn’t taking care of himself and she was pretty sure that something like this would happen.”

  Birdy took that last line in.

  “Like she predict
ed it? Ahead of time?” she asked.

  He scratched his paint-bristle white hair. “I don’t remember. I was drinking heavy back then. It might have been after, might have been before. She was a really emotional girl. Needy like. Confident too. Kind of all over the map.”

  Birdy recalled the same description from the paramedic when they answered the call for help at the Roberts place.

  “Your report indicated an autopsy was conducted,” she said. “I saw no evidence of one today. You probably know that already.”

  Drysdale looked down at his glass. “That’s a mistake.”

  He returned his gaze to her. Despite the ruddy complexion of a drinker and the sun of the desert, it was clear that he looked embarrassed. His face went a shade darker.

  “Look, I was busy,” he said. “I had a lot of patients and I had what I thought was a grieving woman fighting over her husband’s body. She wanted everything expedited.”

  “She was in a hurry?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t want him buried in Star Valley. She said that he never, ever would want that. He hated where he’d come from. Just like Jenny. She did too.”

  Birdy kept at him. “But what about the autopsy?”

  “I had a friend do me a favor.”

  Birdy was incredulous. “A falsified document? Do you realize that will cost you your medical license?”

  “Dr. Waterman, you didn’t do all your homework before coming down here and digging up Don Lake.”

  “I have your paperwork,” she said. “Right here.”

  “That’s fine,” Drysdale said. “I expect you would. But you don’t have the rest of my story.”

  Birdy looked at him. “No, I guess not.”

  Over the next hour, Dr. Bobby Drysdale told the Kitsap County forensic pathologist that he’d willingly surrendered his medical license two years after Jenny Lake Drysdale left town. He was quietly let go for being drunk in the operating room.

  “I thank God every single day that I didn’t kill anyone on the table or on the road, for that matter,” he said, dumping his ice cubes into a potted agave next to his chair.

  “But you’re drinking now,” she said.

  “Tonic,” he said, a little defensively. “Diet tonic. I haven’t had a drink in ten years.”

  She looked around. “Somehow you’ve recovered. You must have had a major pension plan.”

  Drysdale blinked. “I’ll ignore your tone, Doctor, but I had some investments, yes. But like most of the people in this neighborhood, I’m up to my eyeballs in debt over this house. If the market ever returns, I’m out of here.”

  “Did you ever think Jennifer was capable of murder?”

  He looked down at his empty glass. The misters came on and sent a vapor moisture over the patio. It was like a steam curtain, but cooling.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I do know that we were seeing each other before Don died. I know she wanted to marry me—you know marry the doctor, it’s a big thing around here. Probably up there too.”

  “Not my kind of doctor,” she said.

  He smiled. “Yeah, I guess that’s probably true.”

  She pulled the report from her purse and shook her head. “I still don’t understand why you signed off on Donald’s death cert and indicated that an autopsy had confirmed the heart attack.”

  He sat mute as the cool mist fell on him. He closed his eyes.

  “Doctor, can you answer, please? It’s important.”

  Bobby Drysdale opened his eyes and looked off into the distance before turning back to face her.

  “In case you haven’t figured it out,” he said, his eyes locked on Birdy’s, “Jennifer had a way with guys. She could get what she wanted. She was good at it. She was, and I hope this doesn’t embarrass you, the best sex I ever had. I did it for her.”

  Birdy’s phone was dead. She looked around Sky Harbor for a charging station, but all the jacks were being used. She wanted to text Elan that she’d be home and to see if he needed anything. She felt warm and wondered if she had a fever. But it wasn’t that. She’d been sunburned. That almost never happened to her.

  She had a beer in the bar and waited for her flight, wondering about everyone back in Kitsap County. So many people were waiting for her to deliver the truth, to put them at rest—something that she wasn’t always able to do.

  The flat screen TV in the bar played the local news. The volume was down so low she couldn’t hear, but the imagery was plain enough.

  Local girl Jenny Lake Drysdale Roberts had made the news.

  The man next to Birdy leaned toward Birdy.

  “Pretty little thing like that couldn’t hurt a fly,” he said.

  Birdy kept her eyes on the screen. “She’d gobble the fly down in one messy gulp, sir.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “Me? Why me?”

  Birdy stood in Kendall’s office and shook her head in disbelief. She’d already had a bad day. Elan was mad that she came home so late, but the weather delay hadn’t been her fault. She barely had time to get a cup of coffee when Kendall told her to get over to her office.

  “Jennifer wants to see you because you’ve been poking around in the past with a sharp stick. She wants to find out what you know,” the detective said.

  “I don’t know,” Birdy said, feeling a little overwhelmed by the prospect. “She’s just going to stonewall with her attorney sitting there telling her what to answer and what to avoid.”

  Kendall dismissed that with a wag of a finger. “That’s the best part. If there could be a best part in the saga that has become the Jennifer Roberts Show. She said she doesn’t want her lawyer there. Just you.”

  “And you, right?” Birdy asked.

  Kendall shook her head slowly. “Nope. Just you.”

  “What if she says something incriminating?”

  “No worries. Everything is recorded.”

  Birdy allowed a smile to cross her lips. “Thank goodness for that. I thought you were going to make me wear a wire. What do you want me to say to her?”

  “Whatever you like. The point is, let’s see what she wants to say to you.”

  The Kitsap County jail was a knot of cells and offices that connected the sheriff’s department and the courthouse, which made it easy for officials to move prisoners from pickup to court to incarceration, a kind of assembly-line approach that suited the process well. Birdy had only been in the jail one time, when the coroner who hired her gave her the grand tour of the county facilities. It was a nice jail, as far as jails go.

  A guard named Tobey led her to an interview room that looked a little like the shell of a gas station lavatory, plain, stark. It was tiled with white linoleum squares. A table that was better than anything she had in her office commanded the center of the space. Two bistro-style chairs were placed at either end.

  “I’ll be outside,” Tobey said. “Just holler if you need me.”

  “Where’s Jennifer Roberts?”

  “Be down in a minute.”

  He looked at her with a funny expression on his face. “Have fun with that one,” he said.

  “How do you mean?” Birdy asked.

  “Piece of work. No kidding. We don’t get many like her around here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tobey rolled his eyes and opened the door.

  “One example,” he said. “It’s a good one too. She asked if we had any South Beach options for dinner. Like she was in some spa and not jail.”

  “I can see her doing that,” Birdy said. “From what I’ve heard.”

  “No offense because you’re a woman, Dr. Waterman, but she pitched a royal hissy fit when she didn’t get her way.”

  Birdy went inside and sat down. She didn’t like the way the chairs were positioned—at the opposite ends of the farthest points of the table. She shuffled them around so that she and Jennifer would be facing each other in a more intimate way. Jennifer would want it that way. She liked to be the focus of attention.

  The d
oor opened and Jennifer Roberts was led inside.

  “Do I have to wear these?” she asked, holding up the handcuffs and belly chain. “They hurt.”

  “Sorry,” Tobey said. “Procedure.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jennifer said with disgust as she sat down. For a woman who just lost her husband and was the subject of a criminal investigation, Jennifer Roberts held up pretty good. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, revealing not even the slightest darkened roots at her temples. Her skin was bronze and luminous. Whatever face lotion she’d used up to that moment was a winner—and probably wasn’t available at any cosmetics counter in Port Orchard.

  “Jennifer, I don’t know why I’m here,” Birdy said.

  “You’re here because no one is listening to me.”

  “That’s your lawyer’s job.”

  “Yes I know. And if I had a good lawyer, the kind that I should have, I’d do some talking to him. But I don’t. The guy they gave me has been out of law school about fifteen minutes and doesn’t know his ass from a torte.”

  “I know him,” Birdy said. “He’s young, but very capable. You could have done a lot worse.”

  Jennifer bristled. “Worse than being accused of doing something so horrible like Detective Stark and you think I’ve done?”

  “You’ll have your day in court.”

  “Right. In court. If I make it that far.”

  “Are you frightened of something?”

  Jennifer fidgeted with her chains. “No. Maybe. Yes,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because I know you talked to some people down in Scottsdale about me. I know that you’re trying to blame me for Donny’s death too.”

  “Who told you?” Birdy asked.

  “Ruby, my daughter. She came to see me. She told me about the exhumation. I think you’re a pretty sick woman, digging up Donny like that so you could try to come up with some dirt on me for Ted’s death.”

  “Who told her?” Birdy asked.

  Jennifer lowered her head so she could brush a strand of hair from her eyes. “She reads. She’s in high school. This is a big story. This tragedy shouldn’t be on the news, but you’ve gone stirring up a hornet’s nest.”