The Girl in the Woods (13 page)

E
lan was waiting by the door when Birdy pulled her red Prius into the driveway. Actually, she almost
lurched
the eco-friendly car into the driveway. She’d been in a hurry. She carried a pizza from Round Table in Gig Harbor.

“I’m starving,” the sixteen-year-old said, pouncing on his aunt before the door shut. “Don’t you ever buy groceries?”

“I told you I was going to be late. Here’s a pizza,” she said, pushing the box at him like a lion tamer with a chair. “Cold, probably. I’m a very bad aunt. I hurried.”

Elan took the greasy cardboard box and flipped it open. A piece was missing.

“I was starving,” she said. “Hadn’t eaten all day.”

Elan shrugged. “Not that bad of an aunt,” he said, separating a congealed slice from the others. “I like pepperoni. How did you know that?”

Birdy shed her coat and it fell in a heap on the sofa. “You’ve told me that five times since you got here. And yes, I buy groceries. You, on the other hand, eat them at a rate to which I’m not accustomed.” She stopped and regarded Elan. “Looks like you like the pizza.”

He stuffed another bite in his mouth. “You want some? Some more?”

Birdy made an exaggerated expression of disapproval.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said, thinking that was the most motherly thing she’d ever said to a kid.
Maybe ever
. But certainly in a long, long while. “And yes, I want some more and I want
you
to sit at the table.”

That was a little motherly too.

Elan started to speak, but his mouth was still full. He led Birdy into the kitchen while she rummaged around for some napkins, ultimately giving up. She put a roll of paper towels on the table and took another slice of pizza for herself.

“Never said it would be fancy here,” she said. “If you wanted full service you’d have stayed with another favorite aunt.”

There was no favorite aunt. No other aunt period.

Elan smiled and continued to eat. “Hey, the police came to school today,” he said. “People were talking about that case you’re working on. You know, the one you won’t tell me anything about?”

Birdy swallowed. “Yes,
that
one,” she said. “What are they saying?”

Elan glowered a little, but it was a good-natured glower. “How come you get to ask me about it, but I can’t ask you anything? People know you’re my aunt. They think I could give them all the gory details about how that kid got butchered out in the woods. Like was it an ax or a machete?”

Birdy set down her pizza, her appetite quelled by his insensitivity. He was young. He had a lot to learn. He was of that generation that didn’t see the horror behind the spatter.

“Her name was Darby Moreau,” she said, keeping her voice even. “She wasn’t some kid who got butchered.”

He looked a little embarrassed. She’d made her point.

“I know that,” he said. “I also know her mom is a freak. And I know some stuff about her and our art teacher who’s been doing her.”

“Elan,” Birdy said, resuming her pizza, “please don’t talk like that.”

His eyes met hers. “Like what?”

Birdy selected another slice, her third. And yes, she was counting. Normally at this point, she’d have blotted the pepperoni with a napkin to save some calories, but this pie was too cold. She’d eat every fatty bit of it. “Like what happened is some video game and you don’t understand that we’re talking about real people,” she said.

He pulled an errant piece of pepperoni from the box and stuck it on his slice.

“I didn’t mean to be disrespectful or anything,” he said. “I was just repeating what I heard. The cop came and kids in art class starting talking about the girl.” He took another bite but waited until he’d swallowed before speaking again. Birdy doubted that he chewed it. She imagined the contents of his stomach just then, like she’d seen in other cases. It was random, but things like that happened. Determining the last meal of a kid like him would be easy.

“About Darby, and I thought maybe if you told me something,” he continued, “I’d be cooler. It isn’t easy to start over.”

“You aren’t starting over,” she said. “And you don’t need any cred. You are cool enough.”

“Why can’t you just talk to me about your work?”

She appreciated his interest, but he didn’t seem to understand the reasons for the very need for confidentiality in a criminal case. It wasn’t a reality TV show. It was real life.

“Because I’m part of the criminal justice system and we have rules, protocol, procedure. The whole process depends on it.”

“Whatever,” he said. “I guess you don’t want to know what I heard?”

Birdy was interested, but she played it cool—his word, not hers.

“You can tell me or not.”

“I choose not to,” he said.

In a way, that made Birdy feel a little better. Gossip was often hurtful and destructive. That Elan was enough of his own person to keep things to himself said something positive about his character. She liked that.

“Let’s change the subject,” she said. “Tell me about your mom and dad. Did you phone them today like you said you would? You don’t have to gulp.
Chew
. And
then
swallow.”

Birdy got up and retrieved a small bottle of water from the refrigerator for Elan and a beer for herself and returned to the table.

The teen looked at the beer, accusingly. Their family had a history of alcoholism. Birdy could see a flicker of judgment in his piercing brown eyes.

“I had a very hard, very sad day,” she said, offering up an explanation for something that didn’t need explaining. Being with Tess and hearing the dog-grooming table story was enough to drive anyone to drink. More than a beer was in order, but that’s all she had in the house.

“I don’t care,” he said. “And no, I didn’t talk to my mom or my dad. But I did leave them both texts. I talked to grandma though.”

Her mother
. Natalie Waterman managed to infiltrate Birdy’s world in some way every day. Just when Birdy thought her mother wouldn’t be on her mind for a single day, something pushed her there like a bird flu alert on Drudge. Like a tornado that rips apart a small town. Like a flash flood in the desert.

“Really?” she asked, playing it calm. “How did that go?”

He smiled. “She mostly complained about you.”

Birdy grinned back. That was very familiar.

“Did she say I was ungrateful?” she asked.

The kid was enjoying himself. “You really want to know?” he asked.

She cocked a brow.

Elan liked this little conversation. “Ungrateful bitch was what she said.”

Birdy rolled her eyes upward. “I miss my mother,” she said.

“I miss mine too.”

The two of them sat there at the table, both realizing for the first time, they had some genuine common ground. It wasn’t that they shared the same cultural history. That was a given. It wasn’t that they were related by blood. It was more than that. They were bonded by destructive and bitter relationships with their mothers.

“Have another slice, Elan. There isn’t going to be enough for lunch tomorrow.”

 

 

After Elan went to study or sulk in his bedroom, Birdy took a second beer and settled in her office. It was after 9 p.m. Too late to call. She texted Kendall on her personal cell phone.

As she shuffled a few things around, her mother coming in and out of her thoughts, she discovered Darby’s moleskin. That was a lapse, but it had only been collected for the possibility of DNA. Kendall had reviewed it and thought that it could be returned to Tess. Birdy thought about what she’d told her nephew—that Darby Moreau was a girl, not a victim of a butcher. That what she was in life was still all around, living in those who knew her.

She caressed the outside of the navy blue notebook and sipped her beer.

Inside was a mix of poetry, songs that Darby liked, lists of things she was going to do. Some of the pages contained sketches. Birdy wondered if they were preliminary to pieces she was doing in her art class.

Darby’s handwriting wasn’t like a teenage girl’s—or what Birdy recalled hers was like when she was sixteen. Birdy had been fascinated with calligraphy and for a time, never knew a curlicue that she didn’t think had its rightful place on every letterform. Darby’s was spare. It had a kind of heft and maturity. There were no real flourishes. It was all about order. Like her bedroom, it was an oasis in a stormy sea.

One seven-line free verse touched Birdy’s heart. She wondered if Darby was daydreaming or if she had someone in mind.

The book was only partly filled. It had been a work in progress, one that had been stopped by her killer. Her eyes dampened as she went through it page by page. It was a holy book—a girl’s heart in pencil, pen, and the occasional splash of watercolor.

Birdy wondered about the kind of person who could just come and steal someone’s life. Someone like Brenda Nevins, maybe? Someone bent on revenge? How was it that the earth could even host a parasite, an organism of evil like that at all? Tess was right. Those people who did evil to one another were always there—planning, hoping, and enjoying.

How was it that there were people walking among the innocent who had no idea they were at risk? Not even the slightest clue.

Birdy finished her beer and rejected the idea of another. She knew that in all of those cases—cases she consulted or studied in medical school, the innocent never had a warning. The innocent never had a second chance.

Tess Moreau had been warned. Darby didn’t have to die.

If Brenda had instigated the murder, she did so by remote control. She managed to keep her hands clean, her distance safely behind the razor wire of the prison.

The neighbor’s cat walked atop the fence that separated the two yards. She paused every few feet looking for a shrew or field mouse. Jinx was a hunter. A good mouser. She could spring from the fence top and pick off the unsuspecting rodent with precision and skill. She didn’t eat the mice, the shrews. Instead she left them at Birdy’s back door.

Had Darby been bundled in that plastic bag and deposited in Banner Forest in the same manner? Had someone killed her to fulfill a promise? Or to prove a point?

As she turned out the desk light, Birdy couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t be long until Tess Moreau returned to her office. Not as a visitor, but as the subject of an autopsy. She knew of no way that the woman who had lost everything could go on.

She padded down the hall past Elan’s room. A sliver of light slipped from under his door. It crossed her mind how quickly it had become
his
room, and no longer the guest room. Just having him there made it his. She could hear the teenager talking on the phone. It was late, but it was okay. He had friends. Maybe back in Neah Bay or maybe in Port Orchard. It didn’t matter. She worried about him. She wanted him to be happy.

She’d go grocery shopping
before
work. She was not going to be the aunt who never had food in the house.

B
irdy arrived a few minutes later than she’d hoped, but the line at the coffee stand at the Kitsap County Administration Building had been long and Kendall was just getting her drink.

“You look like crap,” the detective said.

“Thanks,” Birdy answered, knowing Kendall’s assessment was the undisputed truth. Her eyes were hollows and her normally luxurious black hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed. Or washed. “Didn’t sleep well. Got up early and, believe or not, went to Walmart to do some early-morning grocery shopping because, apparently, I’m starving Elan half to death.”

Kendall put her change in the tip jar. “Kids are great, aren’t they?”

Birdy nodded. “How did it go at the school? Is Cody making the kind of progress you were hoping for?”

Kendall’s eyes sparkled and she smiled. “Better, Birdy. He’s doing so much better. We’re so happy. When Steven and I count our blessings this year, we’ll add this to the top of the list.”

“That’s wonderful news,” Birdy said, her mood shifting back to the reason they were meeting so early. If it had been any other time, they’d have talked more about the specifics, but not now. Not with what had been weighing on her in the Darby Moreau case.

“We can’t talk here,” Kendall said. “And I have something for you too.”

The women walked across the broad plaza between the administration building and the venerable courthouse toward the ivy-clad entrance to the sheriff’s department. They passed by the security desk and wound their way to Kendall’s office via a circuitous route that was a result of too many add-ons to grow the size of the building to fit a growing county.

“Maybe we’ll get a new building someday, Birdy,” she said as they went into her small windowless office. A green banker’s lamp provided most of the light.

“Don’t be jealous. I’d rather stay here. I like being with the courthouse guys.”

Kendall checked her email while Birdy took off her coat and settled in one of the two visitors’ chairs—chairs like her own that were usually occupied by people who’d rather be anywhere but there.

“You sure you didn’t need any coffee?” the detective asked, looking up from the computer screen.

Birdy declined. “I’ve had three cups already,” she said. “My first cup was gas station coffee at five a.m.”

“Ouch,” Kendall said with some exaggerated irony in her voice. “That’s rough.”

“Right. That might be one of the reasons I look so good today.”

“Sorry about that. I was just saying.”

“No worries,” Birdy said. “This case has just gotten to me. Worse than many.”

Kendall understood. “You’re closer to the victim because you’ve been more involved. I get it. Not that you don’t feel the pain of others, I know you do. But it is different when you see where they lived, walked through their lives.”

Birdy had to admit that Kendall was right. A dead body could tell her a lot. A visit from a family member for more information, even more. But there was nothing quite like going into Darby’s bedroom, reading her journal. And nothing like taking Tess home after her visit the day before.

“Tess thinks Brenda Nevins could be involved.”

Kendall processed the name. It was so far out of left field.

“
The
Brenda Nevins?”

Birdy let Brenda’s name swing like a pendulum in the air.

“Thank God there’s only one,” she said.

Kendall’s eyes nearly popped. “That came out of nowhere, Birdy.”

The forensic pathologist couldn’t argue that point. Never in a million years. She told Kendall what Tess had confided to her at her office and on the ride to Amanda’s place in Gig Harbor. She covered it all—the altercation at the prison, the threats, the letters that Darby’s mom had received.

Kendall just sat there, taking it all in. Eyes still wide.

“A dog-grooming table?” she finally repeated.

Birdy looked upward and made a face that telegraphed everything she thought about that incident. “Yeah, I know. No comment on that.” Next, she handed over the envelope with the threatening message tucked inside.

“The lab might be able to get something off this, but I’m doubtful. Tess has handled it quite a bit. My guess is her friend Amanda did. I did too.”

Kendall slid it from the evidence envelope and pulled it from the one the note had been mailed in. She held it by its edges and read.

“We’ll try. Maybe there’s something there. Maybe we can determine the paper.” She held it to the light. “Nothing remarkable. No watermark. Might be able to find out what brand of toner it was printed on and, well, you know that’ll narrow it down to about a million possibilities.”

Birdy apologized again for touching it. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Kendall waved her hand, dismissing the concern. “Don’t worry about it. This paper’s been around a long time. We’ll process it regardless. You never know.”

“There’s something else,” Birdy said. “I think that Darby was seeing someone.”

“The teacher?”

“You know about her?” she asked.

“Yes, I talked to her.”

“How did you know?”

“Elan told me,” Birdy said. “Rumors going around South.”

“I don’t suppose the rumors indicate just why two women would need condoms,” Kendall said.

“I don’t suppose,” Kendall continued, looking over at a copy of the photograph of Darby that her mother had given them when they first saw her. By then the smile was haunting, the eyes familiar. It was as if the dead girl was there. “But it’s possible no one knows about the condoms.”

“Rumors are ugly,” Birdy said. “And they aren’t always true.”

“I know,” Kendall said. “Besides, I talked to the teacher. There’s nothing there. They had a personal bond. Nothing else. But you said you knew that the rumor was false. How did you know that?”

“Back to the condoms,” Birdy said.

“Her mom said they probably belonged to her friend. Katie denied it,” Kendall said. “Darby didn’t have a boyfriend. She said that neither of the girls did.”

Birdy opened the moleskin journal and tapped her fingertip on the verse that the dead girl had written.

“Darby had a boyfriend, Kendall. It’s right here. Right in her poetry. She talks about being ready.”

Kendall’s eyes ran over the verse, and then she looked up.

“Then who was he?”

Birdy’s phone buzzed and she looked down at a text message.

“Tox is back on Ted Roberts,” she said.

“What’s it say?”

“Encrypted. Just a notification. Have to go to my office to read. I’ll let you know.”