Now That She's Gone (2 page)

P
ROLOGUE

J
anie Thomas studied the blue betta fish that her son had given her for Christmas the year before. In many ways she was surprised that the creature was still alive. She never changed the water, though it would have been so simple to do with the water dispenser ten feet outside her office. She'd forgotten to feed him for days at a time. Especially lately. Her mind was not on things like a pet. Her eyes darted to the scene outside her office doorway as workers collected their things for the night and departed one by one.

All were going home. All but her.

She observed the fish as it swam under the desk lamp next to her office computer. It had dark, iridescent fins and a penchant for hovering just below the surface.

Tears puddled in her eyes.

It struck her how that fish she unoriginally dubbed Sam was trapped in a tiny water prison. A small glass. It was no larger than the vessel that contained orange juice at the pricy Los Angeles Hilton where she and her husband had celebrated their wedding anniversary.

She wondered who would feed the fish when she was gone.

The irony of it all was that Janie was the superintendent of the only women's prison in Washington State. The boss. The warden. The keeper of the keys. She was all of those things, but like her neglected little fish, she was also trapped. There was nothing new about that. Not really. She had felt that way all her life. Every single second she'd lived had been a web of lies wrapped around her keeping her from really being able to breathe.

The fish puffed another bubble to the surface.

Janie refused to allow any tears to fall. She took a tissue from the box on her desk and dried her eyes. Her heart rate had quickened with the realization that she was about to change not only her own life, but her husband's, her son's. They might never fully understand why she was about to do what she had given herself over to. That would be a problem for them, a nasty gift that she was giving.

And yet, she felt she owed them something.

With no cell phones allowed inside the prison for security reasons, there was no way she could text a private message. She looked at her computer screen. Email was a possibility, but it would leave a trail on the institution's secure network.

Janie didn't want to leave any breadcrumbs. With all the uncertainty looming over her, she was at least steadfast in her conviction that she didn't want to be found. A fresh start would mean no loose ends. A fresh start would mean no more contact with her family.

To be truly free meant to accept that the beginning could start only with an ending.

She looked up from the fish, who was blowing bubbles to the surface of its prison.

“Good night, Karen,” she called over to the last of the support staff as the woman who worked in the records department left for the night.

“Any big plans?” asked Karen, a tall woman with soft eyes and a smile that never knew when to quit. Even on the worst days ever.

“Same old, same old,” Janie said, swallowing her lie in a big gulp.

Karen shrugged. “See you on Monday, Janie,” she said.

“Right,” Janie said, again another lie. “Monday.”

Completely alone, Janie reached for a pen. Old school was the answer. She'd write a note and deal with the dilemma of having to deliver it later. Surely there would be time for that, right? The world would settle down and forget about her and what she was about to do.

She didn't use her husband's or son's name in her salutation. While the sentiment would be true, it just seemed too personal to lay those letters on the paper.

Just a teeny bit removed from things is how she used to live her life.

She thought for a beat that those words might come off overly dramatic, but they were true. She was being dramatic because, well, what she was about to do was completely out of left field.

Just then another woman entered the office and Janie stopped what she was doing. The woman's long dark hair hung around her face like a curtain as she kept her head down. She spoke in a quiet, sweet tone. And yet, her words commanded genuine urgency.

“It's time now,” she said.

“I'm ready,” Janie said. “Just writing a note.”

“A note?” the woman asked, her head still down.

Janie looked up. “To my family.”

The woman let out a sigh. It was the sound of a tire slowly leaking air. It was the sound of a parent disappointed in the words of a child. It was the sound of judgment and disappointment all in one.

“Not a good idea, Janie.”

Janie felt her heart rate pulse again. “I know,” she said, trying to find the part of her that could stand up to anyone—the part of her that got her to the top of her criminal justice profession. It was gone. Long gone. “I just felt that I owed them an explanation.”

“Let me see it,” the other said.

Janie handed over the little slip of paper and the woman scanned the paper, then trained her gaze on Janie's now dry, but on-the-brink-of-tears again, eyes.

“Forget it. Forget everything.” Her tone was icy and final. Her words were so brittle that if they shattered they'd be sharp splinters. Lethal.

Janie winced. “Don't be like that.”

The woman dismissed her with a flick of an outstretched hand. “You don't get it at all. You'd make apologies to God for breathing. Such a pathetic thing. I don't know why I even bothered with you.”

“Stop it, please. That's not fair. That's not who I am.”

“Really, Janie? You're going to try that out on me? I know who you are to the last shred of tissue on your bones. You can never fool me. I see you for the weak creature you are.”

Janie stood and reached out to the woman. “You can't mean that. You can't mean that at all. You and I. We've been through so much. Not together. Not at the same time. But we share a history.” She stopped herself, thinking, before adding, “Not the same history, but elements of it all.”

The woman rolled her shoulder and shook her head. Disgust turned her pretty mouth into an angry gash.

“There you go again,” she said. “Trying to make yourself seem like you are better than me. Judging me for what I did. Hiding behind what was done to you. What made you the shell of a human being that you are.”

The woman spun around to leave.

Janie stood. “Don't. Don't do this to me!”

The other kept going, letting Janie twist in the wind for just the right amount of time. Ten seconds that felt like ten minutes. Suddenly she stopped and turned around.

Janie went to her, dropping the note in the shredder. The blades whirled to turn her goodbye letter into confetti.

For the celebration that was about to begin. The new. The future. The chance to breathe it all in.

She put her arms around the woman and kissed her.

“I'm stronger now because of you,” she said. “I'm not going to hide anymore. I'm not going to run from what I've been through. From what we've been through.”

The woman embraced her and held Janie tight. She no longer kept the curtain of hair around her face. This was the moment she wanted to be seen. She looked up at the camera recording every second of the encounter.

Then she puckered her lips and sent a kiss in the direction of the lens.

T
AMI

C
HAPTER
O
NE

I
t had been eight days since his wife went missing. Erwin Thomas took down all of Janie's photos and loaded her things in large plastic totes that he'd purchased en masse from the Gig Harbor Target store three days after she vanished. The first day, he could barely breathe, and he certainly didn't believe anything that the authorities had told him. Janie would never, ever do
that.
Janie, he told himself over and over, loved him.

That same day, the news vans with their ten-foot-high satellite antennas planted themselves like a high-tech forest along the roadside in front of the Thomases' South Kitsap home. One reporter, a woman from CNN, complained that she had bladder issues and asked to use his bathroom. He let her do that only one time.

That evening he watched the news and the reporter showed video that she'd taken of the inside of his house—an “exclusive” that she'd bragged about.

The second day, Erwin, jittery from too much coffee and an overdose of worry, slumped on the gray leather sofa that had been clawed by their beloved cat, Luanne. He could barely look Kitsap County sheriff's detective Kendall Stark in the eye as she offered proof that Janie had done what she did of her own volition.

“She couldn't, she wouldn't,” he said, his tone just a little too insistent to be genuine. “She would never have fallen in love with that monster.”

Kendall nodded.
Monster
was a good name for Brenda Nevins, a serial killer who cajoled, seduced, blackmailed, and left a trail of bodies all over Washington State.

Dealing with strangers in situations like the one occupying the detective and the shell-shocked husband was so much easier. Emotions were always part of the process, but with a stranger they simply didn't carry the same pain.

Kendall leaned forward. “We have proof, Mr. Thomas,” she said.

Erwin blinked and slumped deeper into the sofa. “What kind of proof?” His dark eyes flashed a little anger, a little resentment. He turned away and watched Luanne as she rubbed tortoiseshell fur on the raw edges of a cat-scratching post. The distraction was like an extra breath of air. He needed it. Though he'd known Kendall since she was a student at South Kitsap High, he just couldn't believe her right then.

“A video,” she answered.

Erwin looked right at Kendall, a kind of penetrating look that challenged her.

“What kind of video?” he asked.

Kendall thought about her words very carefully. The man across from her had the bottom fall out of his world and he didn't need to know specifically what was held in the less-than-hi-def images on the flash drive that had been recovered from his wife's bottom desk drawer at the prison where she'd served as superintendent. Someday, in a courtroom, she knew others would see the clip. Erwin, she had no doubt, would beg her to view it. He'd say it was his right to watch it . . . and ultimately that would be true.

But not right then.

“An intimate video,” she said.

Janie Thomas's husband looked in the direction of the console behind the detective. A row of family photos played out like a tribute to their lives with their son, Joseph, a student at Boise State, who was now on his way home.

Erwin stayed mute for a very long time.

“Mr. Thomas,” Kendall said. “I'm so sorry about all of this.”

Erwin made a face, the kind that telegraphs one of those ambivalent emotions, but is really much more than that. Hurt pride? Embarrassment? Worry?

“I don't mean to be disrespectful, Detective,” he said, “but sorry isn't going to help me much right now. So let's not be sorry. Let's find Janie.”

Kendall stood to leave. “We're on it,” she said. “I promise you, Mr. Thomas, we'll do everything to bring her home.”

Erwin kept his eyes on Kendall. But he didn't get up. He stayed planted on the sofa.

“She's not coming back here, Detective,” he said, his tone very firm. Very final. “I hope you find her and put her where she belongs, and that isn't here with me.”

And that was it. Silence filled the room and Erwin Thomas indicated the way out with a quick nod. Kendall started for the door—with Janie's old laptop and iPad. She hoped that when and if they found Janie she'd plead guilty for what she'd done. She hoped that when Janie and Brenda were captured that justice would be swift.

That Brenda would go back to prison right away.

That Janie would join her.

Kendall Stark didn't want Erwin Thomas to ever see the contents of that video.

Indeed, she wished
she
hadn't seen it. It was one of those things that was unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons. It was like stumbling onto some site on the Internet and having it start playing vile images from which the click of a mouse cannot offer an escape.

 

 

When he first started the process of erasing Janie from his life after the detective left that afternoon, Erwin did so with a sad tenderness. He packed her clothes neatly. He carefully folded a lace top that she'd worn on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary two months before. The high school guidance counselor who'd devoted his life to trying to help kids at South Kitsap had been utterly clueless that his wife had become involved with one of the inmates at the prison. He'd been trained to see when people were covering up, lying, trying to hide something. That she'd committed this terrible crime and facilitated a prison break for a serial killer was almost beside the point.

She'd made him into a fool. A laughingstock.

Over the next few hours, his tenderness turned to rage. Clothes, jewelry, papers—anything that belonged clearly to Janie—was dumped into those clear tubs. When he ran out of the containers, he started to pour Janie's belongings into black garden-leaf bags. He was going to erase every trace of her from that house. She would never, ever worm her way back inside.

Just after nine p.m., Joe Thomas, twenty, pulled into the driveway in front of the family home on Long Lake and he hurried inside.

“Dad!” he called out, stepping past the tubs and bags of his mother's belongings. “What's going on here? What's happened to Mom?”

Erwin emerged from the bedroom and embraced his son. He did something that Joe had seen his father do only one other time—when his own father had died after lingering for days following a car accident on the interstate near Seattle.

Erwin started to cry.