The Girl in the Woods (23 page)

B
irdy Waterman would have bet money on a different outcome than what appeared on the lab report of the organ tissue samples she’d removed from Donald Lake’s body.

No sign of any poisoning.
None
. No heavy metals. No arsenic. No strychnine. The chemists did pick up traces of an HBP medicine, warfarin, which had been used by killers in the past. That might have given her a little satisfaction, but the concentrations were so light that it couldn’t have been fatal.

Ethylene glycol degrades rapidly. Birdy knew that going in, but she thought it was doubtful that a woman living in Scottsdale could easily get her hands on antifreeze. She figured that Jennifer must have selected a different poison for the deed down there. Arsenic and other heavy metal poisons stay in the tissues for years.

Danny Lake was sure that Jennifer was his brother’s killer. Bobby Drysdale ruined his life over her, and yet, as a parting shot had told Birdy that he was all but certain that he’d been the lucky one.

“I’m the one who got away alive,” he said.

But as she sat in her cozy home office, poring over the report, she knew there was nothing but a cloud of suspicion hovering over Jennifer Roberts. A photograph of Birdy’s father holding a massive king crab on a boat in the Bering Sea hung above her desk. It was rendered in black and white, which only served to make his dark eyes sparkle more. His smile was wide and there was a little anxiousness on his face.

That was one giant crab.

She called Kendall.

“Nothing turned up in the tox report on Donald Lake,” she said when the detective answered.

“No antifreeze? No poisons?” Kendall asked.

“None,” Birdy said. “A big fat zero. There is nothing here to indicate that she killed Donald. But she
might
have.”

“Don’t feel bad. You did your best.”

“We can only go where the evidence takes us. No matter how we feel inside.”

“Right. If Jennifer hadn’t hooked up with that doctor down there, maybe things would have been different.”

“Yeah, maybe a proper autopsy would have been conducted. And if it had, Ted Roberts would never have met her. He’d be alive kayaking or running laps.”

“We can’t change any of that, Birdy.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. By the time a case gets to my office, I’m pretty much the end of the line. In fact, my office really is the literal end of the line.”

“The papers down there in Arizona—and our own
Kitsap Sun
here—sure are loving the story,” Kendall said, changing the subject.

“I guess nothing beats a ‘black widow’ case.”

“I know. A guy can kill his wife—and they do all the time—and unless they’re super rich or super handsome no one gives it much of a thought. But put a flashy woman at the defense table and you’ve got a winner, media-wise.”

Birdy asked Kendall what her next step was.

“I’ve been thinking about that. We have motive. We have opportunity. We have a history of a person who doesn’t stop at anything to get what she wants.”

“Prejudicial, detective.”

Kendall laughed. “I know. The defense will fight tooth and nail to keep all of that Arizona crap out, but the bell will have rung louder than St. Gabriel’s. Everyone knows what kind of person she is. The prosecutor wants more evidence, but I don’t know where we can get it.”

“Her son and daughter,” Birdy said. “Lean on them. Elan tells me that they’re the talk of the school. They think you and I have been mean to their mom. Especially you.”

“Great, Birdy. Well, they’ve been on my list. How’s your tan holding up?”

“I’m Native American, remember? Tan
is
my skin color.”

“Oh I was thinking maybe you’d like to go visit Desert Enchantment with me. I’m thinking of signing up.”

Birdy looked up at her father’s portrait. She always favored his coffee-with-cream skin tones. “Come to think of it, I am looking a little peaked.”

“Be there in five.”

Ruby Lake stood behind the counter; the Ocean Scene suntan product line’s endless commercial on the big screen in the lobby was on mute. Jennifer’s daughter, her blond hair artfully tangled, looked up and her nirvana of sun, fun, and piped-in music was over. A grim look came over her pretty, but surprisingly not overly, tan face.

“What do you want now?” she asked, clearly irritated. “Haven’t you done enough? Because of you and what that bitch Molly accused her of doing, mom is in jail. She’s going to have to fight to stay out of the gas chamber.”

“We don’t have the gas chamber in Washington,” Birdy said. She didn’t add, “but we do have death by hanging.”

Ruby glared at Birdy. Her phone sounded indicating a new text, but she didn’t take her eyes off the forensic pathologist.

“I know all about what you’ve been up to,” she said. “My uncle Danny called me. He said that you think that my mom killed my dad.”

It was interesting that Danny would do that, but Birdy didn’t remark on it. She had thought Danny and his nephew and niece were estranged and that she’d been tapped as the messenger for a reunion with his ailing mother.

“I do, but so does he,” Birdy said. It was a tit-for-tat answer, but that’s the way Ruby seemed to like to deal with things. She was a know-it-all-button pusher. A mini-version of her mother, except she hadn’t killed anyone. And that along with the fact that she almost eighteen, as Birdy knew, was a pretty big difference.

Ruby glanced at her text and made a face. Whatever it was it wasn’t important.

“I hope you called your grandmother,” Birdy said.

Ruby rolled her eyes upward. “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you lecturing me? My brother knows Elan. I know a few things about you. So don’t go telling me what to do or who to call. People like you are always trying to act all perfect and making sure that others do what you want them to do. What you think is right. My mom hates my grandma and I hate her too. So stay out of it. Fix up your own issues.”

Though she was sort of enjoying the give and take between her colleague and the teen, Kendall circled back to the reason they were there.

“We are here for the truth about what happened the night Ted died, Ruby,” the detective said.

Ruby picked up her phone and texted a short message.

“I don’t know anything,” she said, finished with what was so much more important.

Kendall pushed. “Ruby. You
do
.”

“You wish I did, because your case is weak and you know it.”

“We wouldn’t have arrested your mother if we didn’t think we could prove our case in court, but I admit that it would be helpful if you told us the truth.”

The dryer made a pinging sound that signaled the end of the cycle.

“Excuse me, I have work to do,” Ruby said, leaving the counter for the hallway of desert photos. She tapped the mute button on the TV, and the commercial with its oiled and bronzed bodies frolicking in the surf had sound again.

“Looks like Fiji,” Kendall said. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“It’s all right,” Birdy said.

“You’ve been there?”

“No but I’ve been to Scottsdale and I’ve seen enough of the beautiful people. At least for a while.”

“What’s taking her so long?”

“Search me.”

Birdy smiled. “I love it when cops say that without irony.”

Ruby had been gone at least four minutes and the looping commercial started to repeat.

“Let’s go find her,” Birdy said.

The two women went down the hall toward the room with the bank of dryers. As they approached they heard sobbing. It was soft and then hard, like popping corn against the aluminum lid of a pot on the stove. A cry. Then quiet. Then a cry, cry, cry.

Ruby was on the floor holding a handful of towels to her face.

“Honey,” Kendall said, the mother in her rising to the surface, “what is it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ruby sputtered out, “but I don’t think I can hold it inside anymore.”

Kendall bent down and put her arm on the teen’s shoulder, but Ruby pulled back and sobbed some more. More like wailed. Her mascara smudged the snowy white of a towel.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have a mother like mine,” she said, looking up at Kendall, then over at Birdy who moved in closer but still stayed behind the detective. “My mom. My mom,” Ruby said, struggling to string her words together. “She’s not like other moms. She’s not like other people.”

Kendall looked deep into the girl’s eyes. The hardness that had been there when she was telling them to get lost at the counter was completely gone.

“Your mom does have a big personality,” Kendall said, choosing her words carefully.

Ruby sat there, crumpled in a little ball. She rocked back and forth a little and she cried some more. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or my brother. I really don’t know what to do.”

“We’ll help you, Ruby,” Kendall said.

“I’m afraid of her.”

“Who? Your mother?”

“Yes, my mom. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I do.”

“I think we have a pretty good idea. That’s why she’s been arrested.”

“Do you know more, something you haven’t told us?” Kendall asked.

Ruby started crying some more.

A tone sounded that a customer was there.

“I have to get that,” she said.

“No, I’ll do it,” Birdy said, leaving for the front door. A young woman stood there.

“I’ve been like waiting a long time,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but we’re closed.”

“Nah-ah. I have a Sundowners Pass and I can come anytime without an appointment. And you don’t close until late.”

“We’re closed,” Birdy said with complete authority. “You have to leave.”

“I paid a lot of money for my unlimited.”

“I know. You can come back tomorrow.”

“I’m really mad. You have to give me something for my inconvenience.”

Birdy handed her a bottle of lotion marked
TESTER
.

“Thanks!”

“No problem.”

The girl left. Birdy pulled the string cord on the
OPEN
sign and turned the deadbolt. When she returned to the dryer room, Ruby was just pulling herself together again.

“You know what happened to Ted, don’t you?” Kendall said, her eyes barely grazing Birdy’s as she resumed her place in the toasty warm laundry room.

“Uh-huh. I do.”

“Can you tell us?”

“You don’t understand. She’s my mom. I love her. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”

“She’s already in trouble. You know that.”

“I know that she killed Ted,” Ruby said.

“How do you know?”

“I saw her do it.”

“Do what?”

Ruby paused while one of the dryers let out its melodic chime.

“Poison him,” she said. “That’s what. She put the poison in his drinks. Sometimes she added it to the spaghetti sauce. That was easy because he liked meat sauce and my brother and me didn’t.”

“Did you know what the poison was?” Kendall asked.

“No,” Ruby said. “Not at
first
. She kept the stuff under the sink in the kitchen. I looked at it. It wasn’t really poison, I mean not like rat poison with a Mr. Yuck sticker on it. It was some stuff she bought in the automotive section at Fred Meyer.”

“What was the product?” Kendall asked. “Do you know?”

The teenager nodded. “Yes, Prestone.”

“You just let her do it? You didn’t say, ‘Hey, Mom, why are you doing this?’ ”

“Honestly, I am not going to lie. There is no reason to. I didn’t say anything at first, because I thought it was medicine or something. She even told me one time that it was something that would ‘make him feel better’ and I guess at first I just wanted to believe her.”

Birdy spoke up. “But something changed and you began to suspect something wasn’t right.”

Ruby looked down, struggling for the words. “Yeah, she told me that he didn’t love her and was going to divorce her. And she said something like ‘I’ve been on that merry-go-round before and I’m not going to do it again.’ ”

“What symptoms did he have?” Birdy asked. This was her area.

“Throwing up mostly,” Ruby answered. “I mean, he was always heaving his guts out. One time when he passed out, my mom held his mouth open and poured it right down his throat. Another time—and this was only one time—she took a can of Raid and sprayed it in his eyes.”

Birdy and Kendall exchanged quick looks.

“You said she didn’t want to lose everything?” Kendall asked. “What did she think she’d lose?”

Ruby was clearly uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to stop now.

“Well, when they first got married, Mom got some extra life insurance and she was afraid that he’d find out before, you know, he, like, died.”