Victim Six (21 page)

December 10, 5:30 p.m.
Key Center

The voice on the phone spoke in husky, quiet notes. Serenity Hutchins had to strain to hear as she swiveled away from the TV playing in her apartment kitchen. She might have even hung up out of annoyance like she had with other callers to the paper.

She didn’t this time.

“Too bad you don’t have all the facts about my latest little project.”

“You again? Just who are you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I think you should tell me who I’m talking to.” With the phone pressed against her ear, she undid the latch to the dishwasher. The washing cycle stopped. But the damned TV was still playing in the background.

“Can you speak louder?” she asked.

“I could, but I don’t want to wake the baby,” he said, his voice still very low.

“Who are you?”

“I’m the one who knows the truth about the body in Little Clam Bay.”

Serenity hadn’t been on the job long, but she knew the ring of truth when she heard it. She popped the phone from her ear and looked at the Caller ID window. The code, like the other calls, indicated a calling card, not a phone number and a name.

“How is it that you know?” she asked.

“Do you need me to spell it out? Are you really as stupid of a bitch as you come across in the paper?”

She ignored the personal insult, and as far as insults go, it wasn’t the worst aimed at her by a reader of the pages of the
Lighthouse
.

“I guess I am,” she said. “I do need you to spell it out.”

“I put her there.”

Serenity felt the downy hairs on the back of her neck rise up. The man’s voice was utterly emotionless. There was no reason to believe him, but neither was there any reason to dismiss what he was saying.

“Who are you?”

A short pause.

“Seriously, you think I’m going to tell you that?”

“What are you going to tell me?”

“I’m going to tell you how much the girl begged for mercy. I’m going to feed your nightmares for the rest of your life. Or I’m going to hang up and tell someone else. You choose.”

Serenity reached for some paper in the drawer under the phone. She moved the ballpoint pen in cyclone curlicues over its surface, but it only scratched the paper. She reached for another, a red pen, and found success.

“Tell me.”

Another short delay. She thought she heard someone talking in the background, but she was unsure if that was the caller’s radio or TV.

“You’ll ask no questions,” he said.

“But that’s my job.”

“Or I’ll tell someone else.”

Serenity felt the flutter of fear, the kind that comes when making a deal with the devil. She didn’t know it, but in a way that was exactly what she was doing.

Steven Stark strung the lights on eaves of their home. He’d used a combination of blue-and-white LED lights that seemed too dim to really do the job.

“Interesting, in a subtle kind of way,” Kendall said. She had joined Steven and Cody on the driveway to get a better view.

“I know what you mean,” Steven said. “I actually like the gigantic bulbs that my folks used to put up. Energy hogs, but they at least told the world that you’d bothered to decorate.”

Cody’s eyes traced the string of lights that his father had hung with the taut precision of a perfectionist.

“Pretty,” he said, a broad smile over his face.

“I think so, too, baby,” Kendall said.

The three went back inside the house with the promise of hot chocolate. The moment outside had been a welcome escape from the Christmas card that she’d received that day at the office. She hadn’t opened it. She hadn’t wanted to.

Now it was time.

The address was from Vancouver, British Columbia. Hornbeck was the last name.

While Steven poured milk into a saucepan, Kendall pulled the envelope from her purse and opened it.

The front was a picture of a Madonna and child. Inside was a message signed by Cullen Hornbeck. Two photographs were also enclosed. She read the message first:

The first photo was a picture of Skye with her father at some kind of sporting event. They appeared to be laughing. Her hand rested on his shoulder. On the back of the photo, Cullen had written:

The second photo was one of the images taken by the teenage boys who’d found Skye’s body while skipping school that September. He wrote:

Kendall set down the card and photos, her eyes damp with emotion.

“What is it, babe?” Steven asked.

She turned to Cody. “How about you get your jammies on?”

Cody spun around and went down the hall to his bedroom.

“Skye’s father,” Kendall said, indicating the card. “But it is more than Cullen. Tulio Pena. Donna Solomon. All of them. All of them are facing the holiday without their loved ones and no answers to let them rest in peace. This isn’t right. We
have
let them down.”

“You haven’t.” He put his arms around her.

“I don’t know what more we can do. The FBI has taken its sweet time to tell us what we already know. We have a serial killer somewhere around here. He’s a sexual sadist. We know he lives somewhere in a fifty-mile radius, which means Kitsap, King, Mason, and Pierce counties.”

“And he’s stopped killing,” he said.

She shrugged slightly. “The last profiler we talked with said it was likely that he has moved from the area or…get this…is
taking a break
. Or it is possible that he’s killed and we just haven’t found the next body.”

Cody came into the kitchen. He’d changed into his pajamas. Green tree frogs ran up and down his flannel legs.

“Hot chocolate is about ready,” she said, looking at first at Steven, then at her son. “Let’s find a book, and I’ll read to you.”

She tucked the photos back into the card and slid it under her purse.

What next?
she asked herself.

Despite her best efforts, Kendall had come to grips with what most seasoned investigators of serial killers learn, piece by bloody piece. The perpetrator is only caught when he makes a stupid mistake.

It was only a matter of time. And yet, at the same time, that meant that someone else would have to die. Someone else would be made to suffer.

The voice on the end of the line was hauntingly familiar. It was husky, slightly modulated in a way that sounded as if he had been out for a run and was trying to rest up as he spoke.

“You fixing dinner for someone special tonight, Ms. Hutchins?”

She looked at her caller ID. The screen indicated:
OUT OF AREA, PRIVATE
.

“Who is this?” she asked. She was in her car about to unload her groceries when she picked up the phone. She turned off the engine and looked around.

“You know who it is,” he said.

It was him.

“I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“You mean that cop you’ve been screwing? Good for you. Call him, and you’ll miss what I have to say to you.”

Serenity rolled down her window and looked around the apartment complex parking lot. A little boy and his brother rolled past her on skateboards toward the play area. A girl walked her dog. There was no one else around. She looked in the backseat of her car, even though it was packed with groceries.

“What do you want?”

“Like all good boys, I want to play.”

“You’re sick.”

He laughed. “That’s what I’m told.”

“I’m hanging up,” Serenity said, although she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Silence on the other end.

“You still there?” she asked.

He laughed again. “I knew you’d want to hear more.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up, that’s all.”

The phone went dead.

January 15, 1:25 p.m.
Olalla, Washington

It was a running joke in rural Kitsap County that if you ever wanted to get rid of something, just stick it off to the side of the road with a
FREE
sign: No matter what it was—hideous couch, broken lawn mower, TV console turned into an approximation of a minibar—it would be gone in the blink of an eye. It seemed that the southern end of the county was blessed with a good portion of the population who just couldn’t pass up a bargain without tapping the brakes. Indeed, it was a kind of protocol to the disbursement of the unwanted. No one ever dumped anything at the makeshift free-for-all. People only took.

On the morning of January 15, Ken Saterlee set out two boxes of half-used interior paint and a few other odds and ends from a construction site that he’d worked the previous month as a “punch man.” His wife hated the Sunshine Yellow color that he’d thought was a major score. By 10
A.M
., after he returned from coffee, he noticed that there were
three
boxes next to his driveway off Willock Road, just south of Port Orchard near Olalla. The first two were the boxes he’d set out; the third was a medium-sized wooden container with a weathered brass fastener and hinges. It looked more decorative than functional, the kind of thing one might pick up at an import store. It was about ten inches tall and a foot wide.

He picked it up. It had something inside. Not expecting much of a treasure, Ken Saterlee figured someone had dropped off the box to take advantage of his
FREE
sign.

He opened the box and nearly vomited. Twenty minutes later, detectives from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office were on the scene.

Inside the box was a human head.

Medical Examiner Birdy Waterman had hoped that the head would show up in her basement office sooner rather than later. She rescheduled the autopsy of a car-crash victim the minute she heard the missing piece of the Marissa Cassava case would be arriving. When it did, she took the box that the deputy coroner had ferried into the autopsy suite and set it on the smaller of the two stainless steel tables.

She was alone: her assistant was out with a bad sprain, and homicide detectives Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson were still combing the scene around Willock Road in search of anything they could turn up to help with the investigation. That morning, Dr. Waterman wore her hair up, twisting her thick black locks into a French braid. She planned on meeting a man she had once dated for drinks right after work. He was in Seattle on business. Birdy always considered him one of the good ones, one of the men she wished she’d tried harder to find a way to share her life with. But she hadn’t back then. It was probably too late now. She’d never know. Judging by the hour, the head on the table would eat up the rest of the day and then some.

There would be no dinner that night with an old friend.

With nimble gloved fingertips, she opened the lid on the box. The reporting deputy had been correct when he said that it was an “antique-looking” container, not a real antique by any means. She fully expected that when she flipped it over it would say,
MADE IN INDONESIA
or
MADE IN CHINA
.

She looked down. “Hello, Marissa,” she said. “What in the world did he do to you?”

Gently, she lifted the head and set it on the table. The woman’s brown eyes were staring upward, open, blank in their gaze. Her hair had broken off in patches on the side of her head. The pathologist rotated the head almost sweetly, the way a person might pick up a small animal. Not wanting to hurt it. The eyes looked right at her.

Dr. Waterman ran her light over the face, looking for signs of trauma, fibers, fingerprints, anything that might help tell the story of the Kitsap Cutter’s third victim. She swabbed the mouth for semen and other biologicals.

Everything looked so clean. So pristine. She wondered how the head could have stayed so preserved, so perfect. Her answer came when she used her temperature probe to record the temperature of the head. It was a routine task in any autopsy, although usually the coroner took the liver temp to determine how long the victim had been dead.

“Forty-four degrees,” she said to herself, recording the information on a chart. The temperature outside exceeded that by five degrees.

Next, she took a closer look at the neck, paying particular attention to the condition of the vertebra. The head had been removed from the body with surgical precision. A clean slice that matched perfectly with the body that she’d processed the previous year.

She had hoped to find some tool marks cut into the bone that might indicate what had been used for the decapitation. Serrated blade? Hunting knife? A piece of evidence that might point to the killer had eluded her when she examined the body.

Again, nothing. So very clean.

A butcher? A skilled hunter? A doctor?
she wondered.
Or someone just quick, strong, and maybe lucky enough to sever the head from the body in a clean, swift hack?

The tissue where the head had been severed was clean, like a piece of washed meat. No blood. No fluids whatsoever. It was dry, the way human flesh can sometimes resemble beef jerky.

Birdy Waterman knew the head had been stored somewhere, cared for, maybe even used in some ritualistic manner. It had been a trophy, but ultimately it was discarded with some junk.

She lifted the covering over Marissa Cassava’s body—frozen since its recovery at Anderson Point—and reunited it with her head. It took her back to the reservation when she and her friends would swap Barbie doll heads, ditching the blonde for the one with the dark hair, the one that somewhat resembled them. She inched up the fabric, thinking about the young woman with a baby waiting at home, and how someone,
something
, undeniably evil had done this to her.

Her mask on, goggles in place, she turned on the Stryker saw she used to cut into the skull. Despite the saw’s superb air filter, bone dust blew through the air and onto the pathologist’s protective gear. To some, the noise was the most hideous sound imaginable, but to Dr. Waterman it was the sound of getting to the truth.

Inside the cranium, blood sparkled like tiny shards of rubies. Still frozen.

As she wrapped things up, she returned her attention to the wooden box. She flipped it over and smiled:
A WAL-MART EXCLUSIVE MADE IN CHINA
.

She pulled off her gloves and washed up. A quick phone call later, and the homicide detectives were on their way.