A Perfect Grave (10 page)

Chapter Ninteen

“
N
o—I’ve—No! You’ve already connected me to that department—”

Rhonda Boland failed to get the receptionist at the insurance company to understand Brady’s situation.

“Would you just listen to me? Please. He’s just been diagnosed. Please, don’t put me on hold again, just listen, please—”

The line clicked. Elevator music flowed into her ear. “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Rhonda squeezed the phone and stared at the mound of papers growing on her kitchen table. She’d circled the help-wanted ads in her search for a second job. They needed bartenders at the Pacific Eden Rose Hotel, which wasn’t far.

Still holding, she considered her bank statements, employee benefit handbooks, forms, and insurance policies with fine print that only a lawyer could decipher. Even her late husband’s papers were on the table. Even though there was no chance that
anything
regarding Jack Boland could ever help her at this stage, Rhonda had dug them out anyway.

Whatever it took to save Brady.

There was nothing in Jack’s material. She pushed it all to the extreme end of the table and saw the booklet again. The one left by Gail, the volunteer from the support group, who’d visited earlier that morning.

“The information here will help you, Rhonda. It’ll guide your decision on what and when to tell Brady,” Gail said.

Still on hold, Rhonda took in the cover again. Beams of brilliant light parted the clouds over the title:
Will I Go to Heaven?

The line clicked. The receptionist had returned.

“Yes I’m still holding,” Rhonda said. “Please, let me explain, I’ve got special circumstances and need to know—”

More “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Rhonda shut her eyes and cursed, letting anger and fear roll through her.
Hope no one you love ever gets sick.
She reached for the booklet, then glanced at the clock over her sink. Brady would be home from school soon.

That’s when she’d planned to tell him. Everything. She’d intended to tell him the moment they’d left the doctor’s office but couldn’t do it.

“So am I kinda sick, or something, Mom?” he’d asked as they walked to the car.

How do you tell your son that death is waiting for him? She couldn’t do it. Not there, in the parking lot.

“The doctor’s not sure. He needs to check some things. Want some ice cream?”

“Okay.”

Rhonda had stalled for time. Gail at the support group said it was a normal reaction, part of “the parental need to process the information.”

Oh God, Brady would be home this afternoon.

Rhonda stifled a sob, glanced at her fridge door. The story of their lives was there in a cluttered patch-work of odds and ends.

Brady’s last report card. He had been doing so well before all this started. His gold certificate for his science project. He wanted to build passenger space jets. The birthday card he’d made for her.
“My Mom Is The Best Mom In The World.”
The Mariners calendar, marked with home and away games, her shifts at the supermarket, Brady’s appointments with Dr. Hillier. And the new specialist, Dr. Choy.

The calendar was also marked with “D-Days.” Those were the days when payment was due for the debts Jack had left her. When he died suddenly, Rhonda was shocked to learn that his small business was on the verge of bankruptcy; she had no legal protection and next to no life insurance. It meant she had to close his business and slowly pay off his outstanding bills with her job as a supermarket cashier.

Some days she hated Jack.

Some days she missed him and mourned the time in her life when she had believed that Jack Boland was her salvation.

Rhonda had grown up in the middle of nowhere in Utah, where her stepfather would beat her and her mother. Her mother seemed to just accept it. Her stepfather was an unemployed food inspector and a self-pitying bastard who blamed his life on “the goddamn government.” When he reached for a claw hammer to use on them, Rhonda packed her bags and bought a bus ticket to Las Vegas.

She got a job at a bar off the Strip serving drinks to rollers, saved her tips, and took dance lessons because she wanted to be a showgirl, then an actress. She’d been in Vegas, dreaming her dream for some six years, thinking of leaving, when she met Jack Boland after serving him rum and Coke at the black-jack table. He was a quiet player who’d given her sad, warm smiles and huge tips for about a week before asking her out.

Jack was a gentleman. A good-looking guy, in a dark mysterious way. Rhonda was not bothered by the fact he was about twenty years older than she was. He was a charmer, a professional gambler and pretty much a loner, who’d lived all over the country. He said that once he’d set his eyes on her, it was time to settle down.

She told him she’d had enough of Vegas and wanted to start a family. Take a shot at the white-picket-fence dream with a good-hearted man.

Jack smiled, said it was a good dream.

“What do you say you and me roll the dice on dreams, Rhonda?”

They got married and moved to Jack’s old hometown, Seattle, where he started a small landscaping business. He took out a loan for a big new truck, a couple of riding mowers, tillers, and all sorts of new equipment. He even subcontracted jobs to other small companies, creating the impression his one-man operation was larger than it was.

They lived modestly.

Jack stopped gambling and remained a private man. They didn’t go out much. After they were married, he told Rhonda he’d always been alone since he’d lost his family in a fire when he was a boy growing up in the midwest. It was something that haunted him and he never really talked about it. She soon found out that he was prone to brood, drink, lose his temper, punch a wall.

But he never laid a hand on her.

Still, it broke her heart because she’d thought she’d escaped Utah.

Rhonda was no quitter. In the years after Brady was born, things changed. Jack appeared to find some peace. As Brady got older, Jack would take him along on landscaping jobs. But money got tight and Rhonda got a job at the supermarket to help with the bills.

Every now and then, Jack would find a few bucks when things were dire. He’d say a big job had paid off. In her heart, Rhonda suspected Jack was gambling again but she never questioned him because his payoffs had always saved them.

Still, Jack’s temper seethed near the surface as he complained about his business and not having the freedom to live the way a man should. He seemed to be battling something.

Rhonda begged him to talk to her, but he refused and went off by himself, which made things worse because his rage seemed to be growing.

One ugly night, Jack, in drunken fury, raised his hand to Rhonda. She seized it.

“If you ever hit me, it’ll be the last time you see me and Brady.”

Jack stared right through her like she wasn’t even there.

Then one day she came home from a bad shift at work. That’s when she’d noticed Brady had a fresh bruise on his head. She asked about it at dinner.

“What happened, sweetie?”

Brady looked to Jack for the answer.

“He banged it on my workbench helping me.”

“Banged it on the bench? How the heck did that happen?”

“That’s how it happened. So drop it,” Jack sucked air through his teeth while gnawing on a chicken wing.

That night after Brady got into bed, Rhonda softly pressed him for more details.

“Brady, what really happened?”

“Mom, I was clumsy.”

“You’re not clumsy. Tell me what happened.”

“Dad said that I—Mom. I’m clumsy. I dropped a tool on Dad’s foot. Okay?”

Her blood bubbled.

“Did he hit you?”

Brady turned to the wall.

Rhonda marched from Brady’s room. Jack was on his sixth, or seventh, beer and still gnawing on chicken wings when she lit into him.

“Did you hit him?”

Jack glared at her while still chewing, his jaw muscles tightening.

“He dropped a drill on my foot. I hardly touched him.”

“You bastard!”

“Don’t make this a big deal, Rhonda,” Jack gnawed on his chicken bone. “I’m warning you.”

“You stupid coward.”

Jack ground into the chicken, sprang to his feet, swung at her head, missed, shifted his weight to swing again, and suddenly his eyes widened and he clawed at his throat.

He was choking.

Rhonda thudded his back, wrapped her arms around him, put her hands together and tried to press into his upper chest. Jack fell to his knees, collapsing on their living room floor, gasped for several minutes, then stopped breathing.

Right there.

With Brady watching.

Rhonda tried mouth-to-mouth and CPR while Brady called 911.

There was nothing they could’ve done, the doctors said later.

A chicken bone had become wedged in his throat.

Rhonda was suddenly a young widowed mother, trapped in a maelstrom of horrible emotions that lasted for months. So when the doctor had asked if Brady had ever had a head injury, she couldn’t tell him the whole truth because she believed it had been all her fault.

She feared that the doctor would call social services and—
they could take Brady.

There had been a point in her life when she truly believed Jack was her salvation. But it was so long ago it seemed like a distant, dying star. Little by little as each day passed, Jack had become a hard man to love. In fact, all the love she’d ever had for him evaporated the day she buried him.

Brady was the only good thing to come out of her marriage.

The only good thing in her life.

And now, after all she’d been through, God has somehow seen fit to take Brady away from her.
And now
, as she tried to fight back tears, the line in her hand clicked and this woman at the insurance company was going to put her on hold—

“No!
Damn it!
Don’t put me on hold again you, stupid, stupid—!”

Rhonda slammed the phone down, drove her face into her hands in time to muffle her scream.

Helpless. She was utterly helpless.

Rhonda sat in her kitchen letting her anger ebb until she heard a noise.

What was that?

She stopped breathing to listen.

Chapter Twenty

I
t sounded as if something had fallen over in the garage.

Rhonda waited and listened.

Nothing.

Strange.

Was she so stressed that her mind was playing tricks on her? Maybe it was the echo of her own sob.

No. She definitely heard something.

It came from the garage. Maybe it was Brady and his friends? She glanced at the clock. It was a bit early for him to be home from school just yet. Besides, he didn’t like going in the garage much.

Neither did she.

It was like a mausoleum. That’s where Jack spent a lot of time. A lot of his stuff was still out there. Stuff she had trouble selling, or giving away. She’d better go check because, if she didn’t, it would trouble her tonight.

She took the key from the peg.

It was a two-car garage connected to the house with a breezeway. Rhonda hardly used it. This is silly. She was probably hearing things, she told herself, sliding the key in the side door.

Dust motes swirled in the columns of late-afternoon sunlight shooting through the side window. Standing in the doorway, with her hand on the handle, Rhonda looked around.

Three broken lawn mowers that he used to cannibalize for parts lined one wall. Two ladders were suspended on hooks on the opposite wall. Extra sheets of drywall and scrap pieces of plywood stood in one corner. The tall refrigerator was in another corner. Brady’s wading pool, his old tricycle, and baby things cluttered one area. Old baby toys and broken lawn furniture. The barbeque.

Reminders of happier days.

It was odd.

She could feel a presence.

Jack’s workbench was still cluttered with old tools. Junk, really. And such a mess. She should just toss everything. Next to the bench stood the row of his old mismatched file cabinets where he kept God knows what. Landscaper stuff. Not the important papers. Those all went to the accountant and lawyers.

Nothing seemed out of place.

Maybe the neighbor’s cat got in through a vent? Or a squirrel? Hopefully not a mouse.

No. It was nothing.

Rhonda tightened her hold on the door handle and prepared to leave. As she took a last look around, something caught her eye. The way the light reflected on the file cabinet. The middle drawer of the second cabinet was open.

Now that’s strange.

They’re all supposed to be locked. There’s nothing important in there but she distinctly remembered locking them all. She looked at the stuff in the drawer. Just useless files on lawns and maintenance. But how could that drawer be open?

How could that be?

Maybe she’d forgotten?

Maybe she’d been out here looking through Jack’s papers and had forgotten? She stood there thinking until she heard Brady’s voice, faint, from the house.

“Hi, Mom, I’m home.”

“I’m coming!” she called back.

This was silly.

She snapped the file drawer closed, then left, pulling the garage door closed behind her without seeing the stranger standing in the darkened corner next to the refrigerator.

He was holding a large knife.

And he was skilled at using it.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
t was relentless.

Something familiar gnawed at Chuck DePew, something he felt could break this case wide open.

But what was it?

At the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab in Seattle, DePew studied an enlarged photograph on his oversized computer monitor. He’d seen this before. But when? He thrust his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and ground his teeth; a lifelong habit signaling his Zen-like style of problem solving.

The image looked like a TV weather map, a confusion of isobaric contours, troughs, and radiating temperature patterns.

DePew then typed several commands. As the new data loaded, he took stock of his worktable with the evidence collected in and around the scene where Sister Anne Braxton was murdered.

The key item was a cast of a partial shoe impression taken from the alley behind her apartment, near the blackberry bush where the killer had tossed the knife. The cast was collected by Kay Cataldo’s crew with the Seattle Police CSI unit. They’d done a nice job, producing a little work of art in dental stone that offered a three-dimensional copy of the partial.

A right shoe impression was the first thing DePew thought when Kay first showed it to him earlier. “Any chance you could help us out here, Chuck?” Kay’s SPD unit was smaller than the WSP team and constantly overwhelmed. But then again, so was DePew.

“There’s not much to go on here,” he said.

“I’ll give you my Sonics tickets if you guys can do anything with this and the lift of the partials we took from her apartment.”

“Are they good?”

“The impressions?”

“The tickets.”

“Center court, fifteenth row.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” DePew winked.

He was a senior forensic scientist and a certified court expert. After setting aside his own file, he set to work on Cataldo’s case. The nun’s murder had profile and everyone in the building knew the pressure that came with a high-profile case. DePew photographed the cast of the partial shoe impression, then he loaded clean, clear images into his computer.

Next, he analyzed the information from the alley, comparing it with the cast—the soil, the depth, weather condition, the pressure and stress points of the partial impression.

Now, where things got tricky was with the partial impressions Kay’s people took from the hardwood floor of the apartment. They’d found impressions in the blood that had pooled around her, but they were smeared, the quality virtually unusable. The curious thing was they were not indicative of a set of exit tracks. The killer likely removed his shoes until he was out of the building.

Very smart.

But he never thought about his entrance because beyond the blood, they got lucky. Invisible to the naked eye in the microscopic layer of dust on the hardwood floor, he left something. Something they could work with. Using an electrostatic lifter they got a couple of partials on the clear floor a few feet from Sister Anne’s body.

A right shoe impression.

DePew analyzed the sharpest one, along with the field notes, photographed it, loaded it into his computer. And here we are: DePew’s computer screen split and he set to work configuring the two photographs to the identical scale and attitude.

Good, he thought.

Then he transposed one image over the other and began looking for points of comparison the same way he would examine fingerprints because DePew knew that shoe impressions can be as unique as fingerprints. The shape of the outsole, its size, its design, the material used to manufacture it, the wear patterns, the weight and gait of the wearer, all serve to create a unique impression.

And here, DePew thought as his computer beeped, we have a very consistent pattern of these right partials.

One taken from the murder scene. One taken from the alley where the murder weapon was found. He enlarged the transposed image dramatically, until it felt like the impressions had swallowed him.

The partials lacked any manufacturer’s logo, lettering, or numbering, but that was no problem. DePew focused on the wear and cut characteristics. The edges had channeling, with an array of lugs and polygons; there was a waffle pattern, but here was the clincher: this mark on the fifth ridge, indicating a stone, or foreign object was wedged into it with this nice little “x” cut.

It is in both exhibits. DePew was getting ahead of himself but he would duly swear on the Holy Bible that this is the shoe of Sister Anne’s killer.

Beautiful.

Now, why was that sense of familiarity gnawing at him even more?

By his calculations, DePew figured the shoe was a men’s size 11, a North American sports shoe. DePew moved quickly to check the reference books of brands and manufacturers’ designs and outsole producers, importers, and exporters who might know this impression.

But he stopped cold.

He had it.

DePew went to his file cabinet, flipped through case files until he found one in particular, pulled out a computer disk. Inserted it. He clicked through attachments and notes from the earlier case until he found images of shoe impressions.

He captured the outsole, configured it, then transposed it with the shoe impression from the nun’s homicide. DePew assessed the characteristics. There was no way this was the same shoe. The earlier case was a male size 9, taken from a burglary at a gas station near Tacoma. They’d cleared that one and the offender was back in prison.

DePew was not concerned. In fact, he almost smiled.

The style and brand were definitely similar. In fact, DePew had a photograph of the type of shoe.

It was a sports shoe, a men’s tennis shoe.

Standard state clothing that was issued only by the Washington Department of Corrections.

Whoever killed Sister Anne had done time.