Authors: Gregg Olsen

Closer Than Blood (11 page)

BOOK: Closer Than Blood

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kitsap County

Kendall hadn't suggested any real urgency, but Birdy Waterman was never the type to hear a request made more than once. She found the 1994 Jason Reed file in the attic in a plastic tub of other files that had never been converted to microfilm or destroyed as a matter of disposal protocol. That wasn't unusual, given the cost of the conversion process, but it was fortuitous. She went into the coroner's office kitchen with its view of the county's administrative buildings, courthouse, and always-jammed parking lots. At one time the homeowners who lived there when the house was new probably had views of the Olympics and Sinclair Inlet. She poured some coffee from a formerly white, then brown Mr. Coffee machine that had been there longer than she had.

The file folder was thin: a single X-ray film, a death certificate, and a partial police report covering the basics of the accident. Tori O'Neal had been the driver, with the victim Jason Reed in the passenger seat. Her sister, Lainie, had been in the backseat. The twins' statements were identical. They'd been to a party where there had been drinking. The roadway was wet. Tori was driving at least ten miles an hour too fastâbut, she insisted, not much more than that. The file was interesting for what it didn't containâan autopsy report. Yet, a death certificate had been issued. A predecessor had signed off on itâinternal injuries the result of impact in a car accident.

Birdy set the film against the light box and flipped the switch. It was an X-ray of Jason Reed's chest, indicating several broken ribs. The fractures were consistent with the crash described in the report. She looked closer, fumbling for glasses she still was not used to wearing. The fractures did not indicate that they'd splintered and pierced any organs. Nor was there any pooling of blood.

She looked closer yet. Although the previous pathologist had likely meant only to cover only the dead boy's chest, at the top of the frame Birdy's dark eyes fastened on the horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone. It had been broken. In a boy the age of Jason Reed, that particular bone was not likely to have broken in the impact of the crashâit was known for its flexibility as it hadn't completed the process of ossification.

Yet Jason's was broken, crushed,
smashed
.

She set down the film and called Kendall.

“You in your office?” she asked.

“I am.”

“Good. I feel like taking a walk. I've got something to show you.”

Birdy Waterman smiled at the photo of Cody and Steven on Kendall's desk. It was an image Kendall had taken of the two of them crabbing off the dock in Harper. Though they hadn't caught anything of consequence, it was clear that father and son were enjoying the sunny weather, the water, and the pleasure of just hanging out and having a good time.

“Cody looks happy,” she said, taking a seat.

“That was a great day. We're having a lot of those lately,” Kendall said, not wanting to jinx it, but happy to acknowledge that life had become better, more joyous, over the past months. Hers was not like anyone else's family, but she was feeling a lot better about their lives and the road that they'd been on since Cody's autism diagnosis.

“I have something to show you,” Birdy said, turning the banker's lamp on Kendall's desk upward. She pulled the film from an oversize envelope.

“Jason Reed,” she said.

Kendall nodded and looked on. “I knew you'd find him.”

“I don't want to lie and tell you it was difficult. There seems to be a method to the madness in the attic.”

“Sounds like a horror movie,” Kendall said.

Birdy missed the reference and looked unsure.

“
The Madness in the Attic
starring some TV actor.”

“Yes, Tony Danza.”

Kendall laughed. “I like it. Random, but I like it.”

The forensic pathologist held the film to the light, darkening the room. She pointed out her discovery.

“Is this conclusive?” Kendall asked.

Birdy didn't think so. “Not at all. But given what we know about Tori O'Neal now, it might be wise to take another look.”

“Why didn't they catch that the first time?” Kendall asked.

Birdy shook her head. “I'd like to say that I'm a lot better at my job than any of my predecessors, but I won't. Mistakes happen.”

“Are you thinking, what, a second autopsy?”

Birdy's dark eyes flashed. “Yes. And sadly, you know what that means.”

Kendall's eyes landed on Cody's photo, his halo of blond hair, his blue eyes, and the smile that spoke of a cherished moment and the promise of more to come.

“No mother should ever have to go through that twice,” she said.

Mary Reed knew that the rhythm of her life had been interrupted. At fifty-nine, she was a woman who had always liked order. She'd found comfort in ensuring that everything lined up in ways that it ought to. She did that for more than twenty-five years as a custodian at the Kitsap County Courthouse. All of her cleaning supplies were set on her swiveling-caster cart in a sequence that made perfect sense. She always worked from top to bottom: glass and mirror cleaner (no streaks), counter surface cleanser (disinfects, too), and the industrial floor cleaner that she was sure would give her lung cancer someday, despite assurances that it was not toxic to humans. Mary, a woman of some girth and muscle, considered the sequence of things in everything she did. And yet, she knew there was a great failure to her theory that one thing should always follow the other.

A child should never die before his or her parents.

Never should a mother watch her baby's coloring move from the pink of life to the blue of death.

Never. Ever.

As she rubbed out the spitty spray above the sinks in the second floor's women's bathroom, she saw her own reflection for the first time in a long while. She was no longer a young woman. New creases bolted from the corners of her pale blue eyes.

The same color as Jason's.

She pulled back a fallen strand of her dark-from-the-bottle brown hair.

The color of her hair belonged to no one, not anyone on earth.

She rubbed at the streaks with greater vigor, first with her fingertips, then with the heel of her palm.
Harder. Faster
. The streak was getting worse, not better. The damn mirror cleaner was no good.

Probably eco-friendly. Damn!

She stopped for a moment and turned around.

“Are you all right, Mary?”

It was Grace, another custodian.

Mary shook off the intrusion.

“I'm fine.”

Grace, a Korean woman of about twenty-five with too-short bangs and overwhitened teeth, stepped a little closer. Her brown eyes were intense with concern.

“But you're crying,” she said.

Mary dropped her cloth and blotted her eyes with the inside of her elbow.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Give me a second, Grace.”

The younger woman, not really convinced whatsoever, nodded and backed away.

Mary wasn't fine, of course. She'd been thinking of Jason and how he'd be in his thirties had he lived. A husband maybe? A father? A police officer? A lawyer? A TV star? She would never know what he would have been because he was gone, a tight, sad slipknot in the sequence of what she knew to be the proper progression of things in an ordered, fair world. There was no one to talk to about it anymore. It had been nearly fifteen years. Mary's husband, Doug, had specifically told her on more than one occasion, maybe a hundred occasions, their son's untimely death was no longer a subject he'd consider for conversation.

“I feel as you do, babe,” he said. “But we have a daughter. We have a marriage. Our lives can't be about the loss we've suffered. Our lives should be about the joy we had with Jason and the future that Sarah brings to our lives.”

She knew Doug's sentiments came from the survivor's part of his heart, the little place that somehow recognized that with each beat of life, a person must go on. With a daughter at home there was no other option.

No curl up and die. No way she could pour a handful of pills down her throat and pray that God would forgive her for what she'd done.

Mary Reed studied her image in the mirror once more. The whites of her eyes were now braided with the tiny fissures of red that come from crying. She wrapped her arms around herself. It was as if she could pull herself together in a way that felt as though someone, Jason maybe, had given her a hug. She took a deep breath into her former smoker's lungs and conjured the memories of her baby.

The one taken from her in a bloody crash Tori O'Neal caused on Banner Road.

Kendall Stark knew where to find Jason Reed's mother. She'd seen Mary Reed at least once or twice a week at the courthouse when she was chatting with deputies working the security detail by the main entry, or when she was headed into court to testify.

It was just before her shift when Kendall found Mary in the locker room in the courthouse basement.

Mary smiled when she saw the detective.

“Great minds think alike,” she said.

“Hi, Mary,” Kendall said. “How so?”

“I've been thinking about you lately, wondering if we'd be talking.”

“You've been following Tori O'Neal's case, have you?”

Mary nodded. “Like everyone else.” She pulled on a deep-pocketed smock and stuffed a cleaning rag and a small squeegee into the front panel.

“Let's sit,” Kendall said, indicating the bench. Mary complied.

“I used to feel sorry for Tori, so young, so pretty. Her whole life ruined by an accident. Not anymore. I never thought she was that sorry. She seemed sorrier about missing senior prom than the fact that she killed my boy.”

“I was only a teenager then,” Kendall said. “I remember things about the accident, how sad we were about losing Jason. I don't know if I ever told you how sorry we were. I was at his funeral, but I just didn't know how to tell you.”

“That's all right, Kendall. I know you care about people. I know that's why you do what you do. Me, I've spent my life cleaning up the mess. Maybe it's because I could never clean up,
make right
, what happened to Jason.”

Kendall didn't completely understand, but she put her hand on Mary's. It was a gesture that was meant to comfort, and it did.

“I know. I wanted to talk to you about something very important, but it is also very difficult.”

Mary fixed her eyes on the detective's, but she stayed quiet, letting Kendall speak without interruption.

“We're looking at Jason's death with fresh eyes. It isn't that we think that there is anything there other than a tragic accident, we just want to make sure.”

“Because of Tori's husbands?”

“Something like that.”

“I wasn't there that night, and I don't know what happened.”

“I know. But I need your help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Dr. Waterman wants to do a full review of Jason's case.”

“All right. That's fine. You mean reinterviewing people?”

Kendall narrowed her focus and looked Mary in the eyes.

“More than that,” she said. “We want to conduct a second autopsy on Jason.”

Mary's eyes started to flood, but she didn't cry.

“How can you do that?” she asked.

“That's the hard part and that's why I'm here. I want to ask you something that no mother would ever want to be asked. And I don't take it lightly,” Kendall said. “I want to ask you for permission to exhume his body.”

Mary shook her head. “I don't know about that.”

“I know this is hard, Mary,” Kendall said.

“No, I won't allow it.”

“You want to know the truth, don't you?”

“We know the truth, don't we?”

“I'm going to tell you something very important and something very confidential.”

“What is it?”

“The file on Jason is very, very scant on information. We have the accident report and a single X-ray. No photos. No nothing.”

“Yes.”

“The X-ray shows a slight irregularity,” Kendall said. “It appears that Jason's hyoid was compressed, broken.”

Mary looked confused. “Hyoid?”

“A bone in his neck,” Kendall said.