by Gregg Olsen
Beneath Her Skin
A completely unputdownable mystery thriller
Gregg Olsen
Books by Gregg Olsen
Port Gamble Chronicles
Beneath Her Skin
Dying to Be Her
Detective Megan Carpenter series
Snow Creek
Water’s Edge
Silent Ridge
Lying Next to Me
The Last Thing She Ever Did
The Sound of Rain (Nicola Foster Thriller Book 1)
The Weight of Silence (Nicola Foster Thriller Book 2)
Available in audio
Detective Megan Carpenter series
Snow Creek (Available in the UK and the US)
Water’s Edge (Available in the UK and the US)
Silent Ridge (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Postmortem
Dying to Be Her
Hear More from Gregg
Books by Gregg Olsen
A Letter from Gregg
Snow Creek
Water’s Edge
Silent Ridge
Acknowledgments
*
For Rebecca, who is neither Vicky nor Cristina,
but her own amazing person.—G.O.
Author’s Note
Some of this story is completely true. And some of it isn’t. Like truth, evil comes in all sorts of flavors. Some bitter. Some deceptively sweet. Sometimes it comes with a heavy price. While most people don’t invite evil into their lives, the dirty little secret is that an invitation isn’t necessary. Locked doors don’t matter. Neither do fancy security systems. Evil is kind of amazing when you think about it. She knows how to get inside.
—Gregg Olsen
Chapter One
Water gushed out of the corroded faucet into the chipped, porcelain tub, pooling at the bottom with a few tangled strands of long, brown hair. The water was easily 120 degrees—so hot that Katelyn Berkley could hardly stand to dip her painted green toenails into it. The scalding water instantly turned her pale skin mottled shades of crimson. Perched on the edge of the tub with her right leg dangling in the water, Katelyn smiled. It was a hurt that felt good.
At fifteen, Katelyn knew something about hurt.
Promises had been made… and broken. Things change. People let you down—even those closest to you. Promises, she realized, were very, very hard to keep.
As a blast of icy air blew in from her open bedroom window, the silver razor blade next to the half-empty bottle of tea tree shampoo glinted, beckoning her. Katelyn fantasized about taking control of the situation—of her pitiful excuse for a life—the only way she could.
She looked in the full-length mirror across the room. The glass was starting to fog as the steam billowed from the tub’s rippling surface, but she could see that her eyes were red. There wasn’t enough Smashbox on earth to cover the splotches that came with her tears.
“Merry Christmas, loser,” she said.
She pulled inside of herself, into that place where there was only a little relief.
The bathtub was nearly full. Steaming. Just waiting.
Katelyn had no idea that, not far away, someone else was doing the exact same thing—just waiting for the right time to make a move.
As fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, Katelyn took off the rest of her clothes, threw them on the floor, and plunged herself into the tub.
Downstairs, her mother, Sandra, stood in the kitchen and poked at the congealing remains of a prime rib roast. She yanked at her blue sweater as she pulled it tighter on her shoulders and fumed. She was cold and mad. Mad and cold. She searched her kitchen counters for the espresso maker.
Where is it?
Sandra had a bottle of Bacardi Spiced rum at the ready and a small pitcher of eggnog that she wanted to foam. It would be the last time she took a drink for the rest of the year. The promise was a feeble one, like many of Sandra’s. There was only a week left until the New Year. All night Sandra had been watching the bottle’s amber liquid drop like the thermometer outside the frost-etched window—single paned because the Berkleys’ was a historic home and could not be altered.
Last drink. Promise. Where is that machine?
Her parents, Nancy and Paul, had finally left after their holiday visit, and Sandra needed the calming effect of the alcohol. They always dropped a bomb at every social occasion, and the one they had offered up earlier that evening was a doozy, even by their standards. They’d rescinded their promise to fund Katelyn’s college expenses, a promise made when their granddaughter was born. That night at dinner, Nancy had let it slip that they were no longer in the position to do so.
“Sandra, my kitchen counters were Corian, for goodness’ sake. I deserved granite. And, well, one thing led to another. A $10,000 remodel, you know, kind of ballooned into that $100,000 new wing. I really do love it. I know you will too.”
Katelyn, suddenly in need of better grades, stellar athleticism or richer parents, had left the table in tears and mouthed to her mother behind her grandmother’s back, “I hate her.”
“Me too, Katie,” Sandra had said.
“What?” Nancy asked.
“Just telling Katelyn I love her too.”
Sandra had acted as though everything was fine, the way that moms sometimes do. But inside she seethed. Her husband, Harper, had left just after dinner to check on a faulty freezer at the Timberline restaurant they owned next door.
Every single day, even on Christmas, Harper has to find a reason to go to work.
“Katelyn?” she called up the narrow wooden staircase that led to the second-floor bedrooms. “Have you seen the espresso machine?”
There was no answer.
Sandra returned to her outdated, worn-out kitchen and downed two fingers of spiced rum from a Disneyland shot glass. She screwed on the bottle cap, pretending she hadn’t had a drink. After all, it was almost like medicine.
To steady my nerves. Yes, that’s it.
Katelyn had been taking the espresso machine upstairs to make Americanos the week before Christmas. Sandra had scolded her for that.
“It isn’t sanitary, Katie. We don’t bring food upstairs.”
Katelyn had rolled her eyes at her mother. “Only a restaurant owner would call milk and sugar ‘food,’ Mom.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“Yeah. I get it,” Katelyn said, feeling it unnece
ssary to point out that she’d been forced to have a food worker’s permit since she was nine and could recite safe temperatures for meat, poultry, milk and vegetables in her sleep.
The lights flickered and the breakers in the kitchen popped.
Another reason to hate this old house, even if it does have an extra upstairs bathroom.
Sandra started up the darkened stairs and made her way down the hallway. She could hear the sound of water running.
She called out to Katelyn and knocked on her bedroom door.
No answer.
Sandra twisted the knob and, at once, a wall of icy air blasted her face. Katelyn had left the window open. The lights were out too. Sandra flipped the switch up and down more times than she needed to, to prove the obvious. The room stayed dark.
Lights from the neighbor’s house next door spilled onto the wooden floor.
Sandra gripped the sill and pulled the window closed, shaking her head at her daughter’s escalating carelessness. It had to be forty degrees in that room. It would take all night to warm it up. She wondered how any teenager managed to survive to adulthood.
“Katelyn Melissa, you’re going to catch a cold!”
Sandra walked past the unmade bed—the one that looked good only on Sundays when she changed the sheets. Katelyn’s jeans and black Penney’s top—a Marc Jacobs knockoff—were heaped on the floor.
What a colossal mess.
The bathroom door was open a sliver and Sandra, still freezing, pushed it aside. Aromatherapy candles flickered.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, her tone harsh and demanding. Katelyn wasn’t thinking at all.
The fifteen-year-old was slumped over the edge of the old clawfoot tub, her eyes tiny shards of broken glass, her expression void of anything. Her long, wet hair dripped onto the floor.
Instinct took over and Sandra lunged in the direction of her daughter, slipping on the wet floor and falling. As she reached for the rim of the tub, she yelled, “I could have broken my neck! What’s going on with you?”
No answer, to a very stupid question.
Sandra, her heart racing and the rum now gnawing at the walls of her stomach, tried to steady herself in the candlelight. She tasted blood. Her own. She’d cut her lip when she’d fallen, and several red drops trickled to the floor. She felt tears, fear and panic as she looked at Katelyn in the faint candlelight. Her lifeless daughter. It was so very hard to see with the lights out. Katelyn’s dark-brown hair, highlighted by a home kit, hung limp, curling over the edge of the tub. One arm was askew, as if flailing at something unseen.
The other was hidden in the sudsy water.
“Katie. Katie. Katie!” With each repetition of her daughter’s name, Sandra’s voice grew louder. By the third utterance, it was a scream that probably could be heard all over Port Gamble.
Katelyn Melissa Berkley, just fifteen, was dead.
“It can’t be,” Sandra said, tears now streaming down her face. She was woozy. Sick. Scared. She wanted to call for Harper, but she knew he had gone. She was alone in the house where the unthinkable had occurred. She slipped again as she pulled at Katelyn’s shoulders, white where the cold air had cooled them, pinkish in the still-hot bathwater. Two-tone. Like a strawberry dipped in white chocolate.
Katelyn loved white chocolate. Even though Sandra insisted it wasn’t really chocolate at all.
“Baby, what happened?” Instinctively, Sandra turned off the slowly rising water. “Tell me you’re going to be all right!”
At first, Sandra only heard dead silence. Then the quiet drip, drip, drip of the tub’s leaky faucet. There was no answer to her question. There never could be. Never again.
Sandra shook her daughter violently, a reflex that she hadn’t had since Katelyn was a little girl and had lied about something so inconsequential that the terrified mother couldn’t retrieve the full memory of what had made her so angry.
As she spun around to go for a phone, Sandra Berkley noticed there was something else in the tub. It was hard to see. It was so dark in that bathroom. Through her thickening veil of tears, she leaned over and scooted the suds away.
The mini espresso machine.
Her eyes followed the electrical cord. Like a cobra that had recoiled, ready to strike, the plug sat upright, still firmly snug in the wall outlet at the side of the tub.
In small towns like Port Gamble, Washington, news travels fast. Within moments of the reverberating echoes of Sandra Berkley’s anguished screams, residents had begun to gather outside the tidy red house with white trim and pineapple shutters. Christmas lights of white, green and red sparkled in the icy night air. A passerby might have mistaken the gathering for a large group of carolers.
Port Gamble was that kind of place. At least, it tried to be.
An ambulance siren wailed down the highway from Kingston, growing louder with each second.
That the teenager had died was known by everyone. What exactly happened, no one was certain.
Someone in the crowd whispered that Katelyn had fallen in the tub and split her head open. Another suggested that the girl had “issues” of some sort and had taken her own life.
“Maybe she offed herself? Kids do that a lot these days. You know, one final grasp for attention.”
“I dunno. She didn’t seem the type.”
“Kids are hard to read.”
“True enough, but even so, I don’t think she was the kind of girl who would hurt herself.”
Scenes of sudden tragedy have their macabre pecking order when it comes to who stands where. Closest to the doorway were those who knew and loved the dead girl: her mother, father, a cousin or two. In the next wave were the friends, the church pastor and a police deputy, who was there to make sure that the scene stayed orderly. Beyond that were casual acquaintances, neighbors, even the occasional rubbernecker who was on the scene because it was better than a rerun of one of the various incarnations of Real Housewives.
There was a time when Hayley and Taylor Ryan might have been in the grouping closest to the Berkleys’ front door. Though they were no longer that close, the twins had grown up with Katelyn. As it often seems to be, middle school became the great divider. What had once been a deep bond shared by three girls had been shattered by jealousy and the petty gossip that predictably turns friends into enemies.
What happened among the trio was nothing that couldn’t have faded by the end of middle school. The girls could have reclaimed the friendship they’d had back in the days when they used to joke about Colton James’s stupid sports T-shirts, which he wore every single day in fifth grade.
“Only a loser would support the Mariners,” Katelyn had once said, looking over at Colton as he stood in defiance, his scrawny arms wrapped around his small chest, nodding as if he were defending his team.
But that was then. A million years ago, it seemed. Since then, Port Gamble’s kids had grown into pubescent teenagers. Taylor and Hayley, still mirror images of each other, had blonde hair, blue eyes and the occasional pimple. Colton had traded in sports T-shirts for ’80s relic rock bands’ insignias and was dating Hayley. And Katelyn was dead.
“When was the last time you actually talked to her?” Hayley asked, already trying to piece together what had happened.
Taylor brushed aside her annoying bangs and shook her head.
“Not sure.” A puff of white vapor came with Taylor’s warm breath. “Last month, I guess.”
“Do you think she was depressed? I read somewhere that suicide rates are highest at Christmas.”
Taylor shook her head. “Depressed? How would I know?”
“You have a better pulse on the social scene than I do,” Hayley said matter-of-factly. “They’re saying she killed herself because she was upset about something.”
“Was Katelyn still cutting?”
Hayley looked surprised. “You knew about that too?”
“Duh,” Taylor said, wishing that she’d brought gloves like her sister had. Taylor’s fingertips
were numb. “Everyone knew. Dylan, that sophomore with a shaved head and earlobes he’s been gouging since Halloween, called her Cut-lin last week.”
Hayley looked down at the icy pavement and said quietly, “Oh… I was under the impression she had stopped.”
Taylor shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. “I remember her telling people that she liked cutting. Liked how it made her feel in control.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Cutting made her feel in control of what?”
“She never said.”
The crowd contracted to make room for a gurney. Covered from head to toe was the figure of the dead girl. Some people could scarcely bear the sight and they turned away. It felt invasive. Sad. Wrong to even look.
The ambulance, its lights rotating red flashes over the bystanders, pulled away. There was no real urgency in its departure. No sirens. Nothing. Just the quiet slinking away like the tide.
A few moments later, the crowd surged a little as the door opened and Port Gamble Police Chief Annie Garnett’s imposing frame loomed in the doorway. She wore a dark wool skirt and jacket, with a knitted scarf around her thick neck. She had long, dark hair that was pulled back. In a voice that cracked a little, Chief Garnett told everyone they should go home.