Victim Six (11 page)

April 20, 1:30 p.m.
Shelton, Washington

Word traveled fast. Alarmingly so. Tulio Pena stood outside the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office smoking the stub of his last cigarette. The second he saw Kendall Stark, he dropped it and twisted the butt into the sidewalk.

“Detective Stark,” he said, “was it Celesta? I heard they found someone, a woman’s body.” He was shaking and wrapped his arms around his torso, steadying himself.

Preparing for the worst.

Kendall shook her head. “No, Tulio. We don’t know anything.”

“The reporter called me. She says it was Celesta.”

“We don’t know who Mason County found. We’ll have to run tests.”

His black eyes were wet. “I want to see her. To make sure.”

She moved closer and put her hand on Tulio’s sagging shoulder. “Look, I know you’re hurting. But trust me, please, you don’t want to do that.”

“Trust you?” he repeated. “Trust
you
? I trusted that you’d find Celesta.”

Kendall ignored the blame in his anguished voice. “Tulio, go home. I will call you when we know something.”

“Detective, please. Please, if it is her, promise you will find out who did this. You will find him, right?”

Kendall wanted to give him the answer that he deserved, that all loved ones do. She wanted to tell Tulio that she would do whatever she could. She wasn’t alone in her desire to figure out what had happened. The Mason County Sheriff’s Office was working the case too. There was no way of knowing where exactly the crime had been committed, let alone by whom. Josh had insisted it was a turf war between rival brush pickers and that Celesta was a casualty. The missing hands bolstered his theory. Kendall, however, wasn’t so sure. While it was possible that Celesta had been sexually violated as a part of some ritualistic torture, it seemed unlikely.

“Whoever tortured her and cut off her hands did it because he enjoyed it. Rape and that kind of behavior are incongruent with your idea that she was killed over a bunch of floral greens. Get real.” she’d said to Josh.

Josh Anderson hadn’t argued, because he had no convincing counterpoint. Instead, he’d just dismissed what had happened out in Sunnyslope on that warm afternoon.

“Whoever did it has moved on to harvest somewhere else. They don’t have a green card. They don’t leave a trail. They just fade into the woods. That’s what happened with whoever killed Delgado.”

It passed through her thoughts, but Kendall didn’t want to say it aloud. At least not to Josh Anderson. By the time Celesta’s body had been found in the Theler Wetlands, she already doubted busboy Scott Sawyer’s story of trouble between Tulio and Celesta. And yet, there had been the purported threat. If Celesta ever touched another man, Scott said, Tulio would make her pay. Kendall had talked with others at the restaurant, friends of both, and none thought Tulio would ever hurt Celesta. He was incapable of harming her in any way, let alone mutilating the body in such a grotesque manner.

As spring gave way to summer, a flotilla of boats gathered in Sinclair Inlet, and beach fires on the shores of Bainbridge Island sent a spray of orange light across the water. Summertime in Kitsap County was a mix of hot days tempered by rain on the occasions that most often count: Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day.

There were no more calls to Serenity from the man who’d proclaimed the vilest of pastimes. Charlie Keller had told her to keep on the story, but there was nothing more to do unless there was some kind of break. Midnight Cassava’s case went ignored, the assumption made by Port Orchard and Kitsap County law enforcement being that she’d run away. A third jurisdiction, the Bremerton Police, filed a report about a bloodied purse being found near the Parkade.

No one said much more about Celesta.

Except Tulio. He and the others who wanted to know what had happened out in the woods leveled charges of class and racial bias.

“If she were a white girl,” Tulio said in one of his weekly visits to Kendall or Josh at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office, “you’d know who did this to her.”

Kendall was offended by the remark and told him so.

“Look, Tulio, don’t ever say that to me. I want to know what happened to her as much as you do. I don’t care if she’s from El Salvador or Seattle.”

Tulio balled up his fists as though he was going to pound the desk, but thought better of it. He relaxed his hand. “Then why haven’t you caught who did this?”

Kendall didn’t want to tell him that her partner still believed Tulio had killed his girlfriend.

“Sometimes these things take time. We’ll find out.”

“If you don’t, then I will,” he said.

Kendall didn’t know exactly what Tulio meant, so she didn’t push as hard as she might.

“We’ll do our job. Leave it to us.”

September 18, 8:45 a.m.
Port Orchard

Serenity Hutchins looked at the newroom’s old clock and let out a sigh. It was almost 9
A.M
. She glanced around to make sure no one noticed her overt boredom, especially since only a single hour of the workday had passed. She checked her notes, hoping that there was something stimulating there, something that didn’t require a jolt of caffeine to get her going. There wasn’t. She had a half hour to finish her story on the delay of the road improvements that the city of Port Orchard had promised to downtown merchants in time for the holiday shopping season.

She faced her computer screen head-on and tried to come up with a headline for her article. Then she typed:

County Shortfall Means Grinchy Holiday

It seemed a little over-the-top, but in her job as a reporter, writing humorous or subversive headlines was one of the few things with which she could amuse herself. Sometimes she slipped in a little inside joke. Now and then she purposely misspelled the name of an individual who’d rubbed her the wrong way.

“Sorry, sir,” she’d recently said to an angry man she’d tussled with at a community meeting, “I have no idea how that happened.”

The man’s first name was Bob, not
Boob
, of course.

“I have an idea,” he said, irritated and puffing into his phone on the other end of the line. “I don’t like your attitude. I’d like to talk to your editor.”

“It was an unfortunate typo,” she said, loving every minute, her fingertip hovering over the button of her editor’s extension. “Transferring you to the boss now.”

She didn’t wait for his response: she just clicked, and away he went. Mission accomplished.

Charlie Keller liked her, and she knew it. He’d chide her but back her up. He always did; he was that kind of editor. Once, after a heated confrontation with a churchgoer who objected to the paper’s coverage of a South Kitsap High club for teen moms, he famously told his staff, “Newspapers would be a great business if we didn’t have readers to consider.”

Serenity didn’t want to go to the county animal shelter to do an article on the dog or cat of the week. She didn’t want to stop by St. Vincent de Paul on Bay Street to find a heartwarming story that showcased the “caring nature of our community.” Growing up she’d read so many thousands of stories in the
Lighthouse
that she had scarcely given a thought to the fact that real people had to compile that information. Tedious facts. Boring. So mundane and appearing so regularly, Serenity wondered if they could just retype the same old papers and send them out the door.

From her desk, she watched Charlie set down the phone. The editor in chief was wearing his hopelessly out-of-date brown wide-wale cords and a cream-colored turtleneck that molded to his beefy chest. Unflattering as it was, it was his fall look.

He looked more excited than angry when he glanced over the newsroom. Good. Bob, or Boob, hadn’t made him mad. He fixed his eyes on the two other reporters. One was playing solitaire on her PC, and the other was struggling with the school lunch menu: apparently, it changed just enough from week to week that it could not be cut and pasted. It had to be retyped, word for word.

“Get your butt over to Little Clam Bay out by Manchester,” he said, approaching Serenity. “Some kids found a floater.”

Her phone buzzed with a text message, and she looked distracted.

“A body, Hutchins,” Charlie said, his eyes studying hers, seeing the glimmer of excitement that bad news always elicited in die-hard reporters. “A dead girl.”

She glanced at her phone. “Going now,” she said, taking her rust-colored cardigan draped over the back of her chair, her purse, a reporter’s notebook from the office supply cabinet, and her camera. Her heart started to beat a little faster with each step. She’d heard the term
floater
before, of course, but the very idea that there could be a dead body bobbing in the waters of Little Clam Bay seemed—she hated herself a tiny bit for the thought—too good to be true.

Nothing ever happens here
, she thought.
Except maybe today.

Serenity took a cigarette from her grandmother’s antique case and lit up as she dodged a few light raindrops in the parking lot. Her new boyfriend smoked, so she had taken up the habit in self-defense: to protect herself from the ashtray-kiss syndrome.

She noticed she’d left on the lights of her black 1999 Toyota Tercel, a temperamental car if ever there was one. She’d dubbed it “Hiroshima’s Revenge.”

You better start! We’ve got a floater today!

She turned the key, a slow grind, and then…
success
!

Her phone vibrated with the unanswered text message.

DEAD GIRL LITTLE CLAM BAY
.

Seven miles out of town, the Little Clam Bay neighborhood was a Northwest crazy quilt of housing. Expensive custom homes were perched on the water’s edge and backfilled with double-wide trailers skirted in plywood and kept dry with a patchwork of blue and silver plastic tarps. The bay was a narrow little inlet the shape of a shepherd’s hook that reached in from Puget Sound and jutted through a cedar- and fir-trimmed landscape. At high tide it was a body of blue dotted with floating rafts, docks, and seagulls. On the flip side of the tidal schedule, the bay drained nearly dry. In summer, with the sun bearing down on the soggy bay bottom, the neighborhood smelled of rotting fish, seaweed, and the garbage that had been sucked in through the narrow channel and left scattered on the muddy floor. Sometimes careless boaters dumped garbage overboard in Puget Sound, and if their deposits hit the currents just so, Little Clam Bay, with its sluggish water flow, became a saltwater dump.

On the morning of September 18, Devon Taylor and Brady Waite decided that they’d skip school rather than force themselves through another state-required language assessment test conducted at Sedgwick Junior High. At fourteen, Brady and Devon were on the edge of trouble whenever the mood struck, which was often. It was nothing big—mostly skipping school and acting out in class when they bothered to slide behind back-row desks. They’d smoked some pot now and then and tried coke once, but ultimately the pair preferred video games and skateboarding to drugs.

Girls were also of great interest, but neither had plucked up the courage to ask one out.

They’d set up a kind of private clubhouse at Devon’s, in a garden shed on the Taylors’ lawn, which undulated down to the water’s slimy edge. While they waited for Devon’s mom to leave for her nursing administrator’s job at the naval hospital in Bremerton, they smoked a couple of cigars they’d stolen from Brady’s stepfather’s secret stash.

“Even if I get in trouble for taking his stogies,” Brady said between hacking coughs, “my mom won’t be too mad. He’s not supposed to smoke anyway.”

“Your mom’s a bitch,” Devon said.

Brady’s eyes puddled, and he let the smoke curl from his lips.

“Everyone’s mom is a bitch. That’s just the way it is, dude.”

Devon didn’t argue. “Speaking of moms. I wish mine would get her ass out the door. Cold out here this morning.”

“Yeah, it is.” Brady looked out the greenhouse window at the water. “Does this swamp ever freeze up?”

“It isn’t a swamp, though it smells like one half the time. Only around the edges and not very much. Maybe froze twice since my dad moved us to Port Zero from Tacoma.”

Brady seldom mentioned his father, and Devon took the opportunity to pounce on the subject.

“Ever hear from him?” he asked.

Brady took another puff before answering. “He calls Mom and she puts me on with him, but I can tell he’s only talking to me because he has to. He doesn’t give a shit about me.”

“My dad’s an asshole, but I guess having him around is better than nothing,” Devon said.

Brady filled his mouth with more smoke and held it a second before attempting a smoke ring.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right, dude,” he said.

A beat later, the boys turned in the direction of the sound of a car’s ignition turning over.

“Finally!” Brady said. “She’s leaving. Let’s go inside.”

Devon flipped the latch on the door to the garden shed, sending a layer of smoky air outside. He looked over at Brady—alarm had suddenly filled his eyes.

“Jesus, someone is going to see the smoke.”

Brady ignored his friend; his eyes stayed fixed on Little Clam Bay.

“You sick or something?” When he didn’t answer right away, Devon followed his best friend’s sight line to the water. “What is it?”

Brady didn’t say so, but he wished right then that he hadn’t skipped school that day. He pointed at the water.

Devon’s eyes widened. “Jesus, is that what I think it is?”

The boys walked closer, stepping on the frosty planks of the dock, their white and red Skechers slipping a little under their feet. Devon let his cigar fall into the water, making a sizzling sound as its hot cherry tip went black.

“We better call 911,” Brady said.

Devon tugged at his buddy’s hooded sweatshirt. “We’re going to be in big trouble, you know.”

“No shit.”

“Maybe we should just pretend we didn’t see it and just go inside and watch TV or something.”

Brady shook his head. “But we did. And we have to tell.”

His buddy was correct. In a morning of doing all the wrong things, they had to do what was right.