Authors: Gregg Olsen

Closer Than Blood (4 page)

BOOK: Closer Than Blood

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If a person visiting an open house was required to wear disposable booties, then no one should argue the need for initial criminal responders to suit up.

Kaminski caught the attention of forensics specialist Cal Herzog, hunched over the area by the sofa where the body had been found.

Cal, a balding man of about fifty, who began working in the forensics unit at the Tacoma Police Department after a reasonably distinguished career in the military, was crouched over the dead man.

“Evening, Cal.”

“Just in time. Medical examiner's about ready to bag him,” Cal said.

Kaminski stepped closer. “Let me have a look.”

“Point-blank,” Cal said, indicating the wound on the back of Alex Connelly's head. The place of entry for the bullet was like a bloody borehole that cut through the man's skull and into his brain. Death, no doubt, was instantaneous. Alex Connelly, sitting in his robe, facing the television, might not even have had an inkling that the gun was going to fire.

“SOB didn't struggle,” Cal said. “Didn't even
know
this was going to happen.”

Kaminski crouched behind the camelback sofa and looked up at the TV over the mantel.

“I don't know about that,” he said. “Pretty good reflection off that plasma. Almost like a mirror.”

Cal looked up. The TV had been on when the blues arrived and secured the scene, but it had been loud and one of the cops shut it off.

Kaminski fixed his eyes on the victim. He wore a blue and gold robe. It was a flimsy, silky fabric that he wouldn't be caught dead in.

Which, of course, Alex Connelly had just been.

He had slippers on his feet. Nothing else.

“What does the vic do for a living?”

“Works for an investment firm downtown. About middle on the high-up scale, if you ask me. You know, makes enough dough for a lease on this place, but not enough to buy it.”

“Lexus, actually a his and hers, in the garage, er,
carriage
house,” one of the cops said, correcting himself. “Not a Porsche.”

“Almost feel sorry for him,” Kaminski said. “You know, not being able to get a Porsche.”

It took three men to move the body to the split-open bag. In doing so, the robe slipped to reveal the victim's chest. A tattoo of an eagle with artillery and olive branches in its talons soared over his right pec, which, given his age, was well defined.

“Nice ink,” Kaminski said. “Looks like navy.”

While the techs and cops worked together to process the scene for evidence, Kaminski took a tour of the house. It was late by then, but the place seemed as if it had been ready for a Realtor's open house. Nothing was out of place. The kitchen, small by the standards of what modern people wanted, was nicely redone to include the niceties that big-bucked folks wanted. A Sub-Zero refrigerator was clad in white cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen. A Viking range was another giveaway that the place had been redone. Nothing was out of place on the plane of soapstone that served as the counter.

Upstairs, Kaminski entered the master bedroom. A Rice bed that in someone else's house would have been ridiculously oversize commanded the large room. The bed had been turned down. All perfect.

The dead guy was in a silky robe and slippers.

Where were his clothes?

The bathroom was also show-ready. He went inside and a flash of red caught his eye. On a hook on the back of the door, a woman's teddy.

Nice
, he thought.

As he moved the door, the fabric fluttered, like a red flag.

He opened the shower door and caught a whiff of cleaner. The marble surface was slick,
dripping
wet.

Cal appeared in the doorway.

“Everything diagrammed, photographed. ME is taking the body now. Some blood in the hallway, fair amount of spatter on the wall behind the couch. We're dusting everything. Place is pretty clean. Must have a maid.”

“All right. I'm going to the hospital to see Mrs. Connelly.”

“Techs are there now.”

“Gunshot residue?”

“Hands have been swabbed.”

Kaminski nodded. “Prelim?”

“Clean.”

The two started down the stairs as the body was being carried out, bagged and tagged, on a gurney. A breeze from Commencement Bay filled the air with marine smells, a welcome reprieve from the odor of blood and gunfire.

“She talk?”

“Not on the way to St. Joe's. Didn't say a word. Told the neighbor that a guy broke in, shot her and her old man. Nobody's seen anything to approximate a break-in.”

“Security system?”

Cal watched the ambulance doors as they closed on Alex Connelly.

“Looks like it was turned off,” he said.

The sirens started and about ten onlookers started to head back to their homes.

“Show over,” Kaminski said. “At least for now. I'm going to the hospital.”

Most who inhabit such a fine street as North Junett would consider the most dominating piece of artwork that hung in the Connelly living room as something incongruent with the home's stature or the place in society that its inhabitants surely held. It was a bourgeois depiction of a stone cottage in the midst of a snowstorm. The artist, Thomas Kinkade, was known for a popular, albeit kitschy, style that stoked memories of a long-ago time when skaters wore fuzzy earmuffs and free-flowing scarves as they skimmed over the surface of a frozen pond.

This Kinkade print on canvas was called
Evening Glow
. Besides its stone cottage, it featured an illuminated gas lamp that appeared to emit an orange red glow. In fact, such a feature was the hallmark of Kinkade's paintings. He was, his aficionados insisted, “not an artist, but a painter of light.”

None of the men and women from the Tacoma Police and the Pierce County Coroner's offices at the crime scene paid the lush accoutrements of the Connelly household much mind as they went about tagging and bagging the victim and the assorted evidence they'd need to run through the lab.

If they'd have looked closer, they would have noticed that Thomas Kinkade's ability to trick the eye with illumination techniques was in better-than-average form. The light on the top of the lamp standard twinkled.

As it did so, the discourse among the interlopers on the scene continued.

“What do you make of the lady of the house?” a cop asked a forensics tech.

“Meaning?” a woman's voice answered.

“A lot younger than the husband,” the man's voice said. “Better looking, too.”

The same woman's voice responded. “I guess.”

“I'll tell you what I guess,” the man said. “I guess that when they do a GSR test on the missus they'll find that she was the shooter. Honestly, the wound on her leg was a graze. Self-inflicted. Betcha a beer.”

“I don't know,” the woman said. “I don't like beer.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Kitsap County

The Lord's Grace Community Church was a converted metal Quonset hut in Kingston, Washington, that had once been used to store floral greens for a long-since-closed brush-cutting operation. The structure was so close to the edge of the road, it had been the frequent and unfortunate recipient of more than one car's broadside. In fact, a makeshift memorial of a cross marked the location, adorned with faded photos kept mostly dry inside Ziploc bags, a red plastic lei, and stenciled letters that read C-A-N-D-Y. The tribute's central featureâthe crossâwas so solid and substantial that a passerby unfamiliar with the events might assume that the cross belonged to the church. It had been seven years since Candy Turner slid on the pavement and crashed her cherry red '69 El Camino pickup truck.

Locals who didn't attend there called it the Candy Church, the home of “My Sweet Lord.”

Inside, Pastor Mike Walsh got on his knees and looked up at the big Douglas-fir cross. He'd been contacted weeks ago and the conversation stayed with him. Like a leaky pipe tucked away in the ceiling, quietly, steadily doing damage.

It was a woman, a crying woman, who'd contacted him. She recalled a traffic accident that he'd happened upon a decade and a half ago.

“You could have told the truth,” she said. “But you didn't.”

“I was scared. I wasn't the man that I am now.”

“I'm sure the passage of time has made you a better person.”

“A better person, but not a perfect one,” he said.

There was a short pause before the woman made her point.

“It is never too late to do what's right.”

Pastor Mike couldn't help but agree. “But I made a promise,” he said.

“That was a long time ago. Things change. The
truth
, Mikey. The truth is all that matters.”

It was a troubling, haunting conversation, as if the woman on the other end of the line was merely testing his resolve. He wondered if she'd taken Jesus into her heart so that she'd be free of what had happened. Forgiveness was so powerful. He prayed for guidance and the strength to do what was right.

He remembered what happened that night.

As he knelt down to help the girl who had been driving, he watched the other one hurry over to where the boy was sprawled out on the gravel. He was saying something to her, though Mikey couldn't hear a word of it.

He heard the sirens coming from the end of Banner, a good four minutes away.

The girl standing over the boy was yelling at him.

“I hate you. I wish I'd never met you,” she said.

“Help me,” said the girl in his arms. “Help my sister. My boyfriend.”

Mikey tried to soothe her. His brain was fried and it was so hard to concentrate on what was happening. The smoke. The headlights still on, punching through the blackness of the night. The sirens getting louder and louder.

“They're okay.”

“It's all my fault,” she said.

He patted her hand. “It was an accident. You were probably going too fast for the Jump. It happens.”

“Are you sure they are okay?”

He looked over at the other girl. She was yelling at the boy.

“Goddamn you! I hate you!”

What he saw next would haunt him forever. The other girl clenched her hands around the boy's neck.

“You're a piece of shit, Jason!”

“What's happening?” the first girl said.

“I don't know. Nothing!”

The lights of the sirens came down the hill like fireflies on steroids.

He looked over and the boy had stopped moving. The other girl's eyes locked on Mikey's and she came toward him.

“You say anything and you're dead. I'll make sure the sheriff blames you for all of this. That you crossed the center line and forced us into the ditch.”

“You're a crazy little bitch,” he said.

“I've seen you around. You're Mikey Walsh. You're trailer trash, a drug addict. A loser. No one would ever believe you over me.”

The girl went over to her twin, leaned close to her ear, and whispered something. A moment later, a deputy sheriff and the commotion that comes with the sirens and lights arrived.

It was late evening and the silhouette of Blake Island was outlined by a halo of lights from Seattle on the other side of Puget Sound. Kendall tightened her frame to stay warm as she sat on the old madrona stump with a glass of wine. She'd been quiet since coming home from the sheriff's office. In fact, she'd been quiet the last few days. Steven brought the bottle and a glass outside in search of his wife. It was a cool night, but late spring in the Northwest guaranteed such weather. A sweater and a blanket were kept in a storage bin by the back door.

“I haven't seen you like this in a long time,” he said.

Kendall looked up and smiled.

“I'm sorry. I guess I'm not good company.”

“You're always good company, honey. But sometimes you're very quiet company. What's going on with you? Is it the case?”

The case.

Those words were often volleyed among the spouses of those in law enforcement when they tried to dig into the source of whatever it was that had stolen all the attention. Steven didn't mean it in that way, of course. He'd long accepted that Kendall had a purpose in life nearly as great as mother and wifeâputting away monsters so they'd never hurt or kill again. It was that simple. It didn't matter one bit if the victim was a child, an old man, a person of wealth or not. All were equal in her mind.

He sat next to her and poured himself a glass. “Want more?” He extended the bottle and Kendall nodded.

“I'm trying to sort things out.”

“Can I help?”

“Not really.”

She wanted to say something more; she wanted to tell her husband that she was wrapped in lead-lined clothing and she could barely breathe. But she didn't. She just couldn't.

“Make a wish,” he said, looking at the quilt of stars over the inky-black island. “A falling star.”

Kendall looked skyward and did just that. She wished that she didn't have to say anything to Steven, ever. Not the truth. It just hurt too much.

BOOK: Closer Than Blood

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