Now That She's Gone (27 page)

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-SIX

I
f one didn't look at what was on the table. Didn't smell it. Just took in the music that Birdy Waterman played on low volume in the background. The slightly gnawing sounds of knives as they cut into flesh. One, quite possibly, could imagine he or she were attending a dinner party of sorts. A dark one of course. But the kind of party that with each moment, each cut, each visual dissected, a little discovery makes itself known.

The forensic pathologist rotated the beam of her light over Chaz Masters's naked body. She'd collected the dry-cleaning bag that had shrouded his face and deposited it into an evidence bag. Bags were often a good source of latent prints—and indeed they'd helped identify the killer in the Moreau girl's case just months before.

It was probably too much to hope for a second time.

Chaz Masters had been dead several days and some of his features were distended in a cruel manner that death does to the former living. In cases in which a body has been disfigured by nature in that way, often a casual friend or distant relative is able to see the remnants of who they are viewing on a coroner's gurney. Someone close to the deceased is frequently so shocked, so disturbed by the visage they cannot readily identify who they've loved and lost. Add murder to the mix and the combination is even more difficult.

Ligature marks on the Grey Gull owner's wrists and ankles indicated what the responding deputies had suggested when they'd collected his remains from his hideaway home. He'd been tied up.

“Sex crime,” the deputy suggested.

“Man?” the other asked. “Woman?”

The first deputy shrugged. “Hard to say these days.”

“Yeah. Pretty much anything goes now.”

Marks left by the bare hands of Chaz's killer indicated a woman or maybe a boy.

“Rough sex,” the first one said. “I'd be into it, if I knew this wouldn't happen.”

Birdy looked closely at the marks on the neck. She held a ruler to the deceased's neck and took four photographs, each from different angles. While a tox screen would determine if there was any other probable cause—poison, drug overdose—it was a pretty good bet that he had been asphyxiated.

Birdy was about to reach for her older-than-the-hills Stryker saw when she noticed a black triangular piece of plastic protruding from under the dead man's scrotum.

What now?
She asked almost out loud.

She lifted Chaz's testes, took a photo, and tugged gently on the black plastic triangle. It came with little resistance.

When she saw it, she was unsure of exactly what it meant. One thing she didn't doubt at all was that a killer with a boob job and a lethal, twisted sense of humor had left it behind.

If that's what she meant.

She draped a sheet over the body.

 

 

Kendall looked down at the black plastic shark that Birdy had retrieved and deposited into a plastic evidence bag.

“I don't get it,” Kendall said.

“You know it's her work,” Birdy said.

“I suspect that it is, but what the hell is this supposed to mean?”

Birdy stared at her. “Really?”

Kendall blinked. “Yeah, what?”

“God, Kendall, don't you know you have a nickname around here?”

“Honestly. no.”

“Kendall
Shark.
”

“Oh, that. I guess I did know that. How would Brenda know that? And why would she do this?”

“You weren't this upset when we found the hummingbird.”

Kendall had been upset, but Birdy was right. Not this upset. “Fine. Fair enough.”

“Google yourself sometime. There's a prisoners-and-families website in which they rate and review various members of law enforcement.”

“Like Yelp?”

“Sort of,” Birdy said. “Anyway, you're the only one from Kitsap who's made the cut. Some drug offender from Poulsbo posted about you. Called you a ball-buster and a shark.”

Kendall lifted her eyes from the toy shark. “I guess that's a compliment of sorts.”

Birdy smiled grimly. “Guess so,” she said.

“After you called,” Kendall said, “I thought of someone else who left calling cards like this.”

Birdy nodded. “Cecil Reed,” she answered.

“Yeah,” Kendall said, stepping back from the table. “Reed left a ski lift ticket inside one victim, a watch in another . . . let me see.”

Birdy finished the litany of objects hidden from view, only to be discovered by the Provo medical examiner at autopsy. “A lipstick, a tablespoon, the head of a Barbie doll, and . . .”

“The last one was his undoing,” Kendall said.

“Right,” Birdy said. “The book of matches from his restaurant.”

“Uh-huh. Led them right to him.”

“Guess we know why Brenda was corresponding with Reed. Maybe she thought of him as a kind of mentor.”

“He did get a lot of media,” Kendall said. “Don't forget the movie.”

“The movie was terrible.”

“I don't know. I kind of liked that they shot it in black-and-white. Gave it a kind of noirish vibe, which is right in my wheelhouse.”

“Brenda was no Roger Ebert. Any film about her life and crimes would be okay with her.”

“Right. Maybe she was hoping for someone like Charlize Theron to play her.”

“Charlize has already played the serial killer part in
Monster.
But, yeah, someone like her, but without the ugly makeover.”

After Kendall left the autopsy suite, Birdy went about her business. Music playing. Every detail of the dead man's body recorded and ready for the transcriptionist. She had autopsied hundreds from her medical school days and onward through her career at the county. She knew the exact number, though she never thought of any as merely a number. She knew that Chaz Masters was a proud man. Proud of his military service. Proud of his business. Proud of his body. He'd been in excellent health at the time that he'd been bound to his bed and strangled to death. She wondered if Brenda Nevins had brought the shark toy with her or if she'd merely found it at the scene and seized the moment. Either was plausible. It was patently obvious that she was a facile murderer. One who was clever and always at the ready. One, as they liked to say, at the conclusion of those Investigation Discovery reenactment shows that she watched as a college student, but no longer could tolerate:
She'd stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

That was Brenda Nevins. Through and through. But just what was it that she was truly after? Fame? Revenge?

More than likely, a murky combination of the two.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-SEVEN

R
oger Frazier sat at the desk of a hotel room in Tacoma and finished the letter that had taken him five shots of whiskey and four attempts with the hotel stationery to complete. There was no fixing his life. The walls had come crashing in. His clients had turned their backs on him. He was a braggart on the surface, the kind of man who boasted about his accomplishments at dinner parties and conventions. He'd won awards for his architectural designs, but there was no way he could fix what hung over him like a blackening thunderhead.

Molester.

Murderer.

Killer of his own daughter.

He folded the note, left it on the desk, and went to the bed where he'd put a glass of water and a party mix of pills. He swallowed each one at a time. He was stoic. Full of resolve. There was nothing he could do to undo what had been done to him. There was no way back after being branded a pedophile, a killer.

He shut his eyes and waited for the relief that would come in the next lifetime.

Melanie Martin pushed her cart to the door of room 457 at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma. She been working part-time as a maid and taking classes in the afternoons at Tacoma Community College. The hotel was the nicest in Tacoma, but she hated opening the room doors to find out what disgusting little present the guest had left for her. She'd been working there six months and she had serious doubts about the fate of humanity, having seen what people left behind for others to clean up.

She knocked three times.

“Housekeeping!”

No answer.

She knocked again, and repeated her warning.

And no answer.

Satisfied, she used her pass card and went inside, leaving her cart in the hallway. The blinds and curtains were pulled so the room was dark. She flipped on the lights. The bathroom right by the door looked barely used, if at all.

Good, she thought. That's the worst place to clean. Worse than a bus station lavatory at times, she was sure.

The bed was a tangle of blankets and sheets and she made her way to the curtains to let more light in.

Then she saw him. On the floor on the opposite side of the bed from the entranceway. It was a man. The room guest. He was dressed. His eyes were closed.

My first dead guest, she thought, her heart now racing. She picked up the house phone, noticing the note, but not reading it.

“This is Melanie. I'm in 457. I think we have a suicide. Pill bottles. A note.”

Her voice was suddenly shaky and it surprised her. She prided herself on being unflappable, but she'd never been confronted by something like this. Not once in her life. Others who worked on the housekeeping staff talked about finding couples in the middle of sex, or a suicide such as this. They talked like it was no big deal, just part of the job.

But it didn't feel that way. The man looked neat, clean. Successful. His clothes were Nordstrom, not Penney's. He was the same age, she thought, as her own father. He had on a wedding ring. He was someone's husband. Maybe a dad too. And he'd killed himself for some reason in the Hotel Murano. It was hard for Melanie to comprehend.

Very hard.

“Security is on its way,” the operator said.

As she was taking it all in, Melanie heard a gurgling sound and looked back down at the man who'd fallen off the bed and onto the floor.

His hand moved.

“He's alive! I think the man's still alive.”

“Calling 911.”

 

 

Roger Frazier was taken by ambulance to Tacoma General just a few blocks away. He was there within four minutes of the 911 call from the hotel. Conscious, but unable to speak, he was going to make it. Doctors and nurses there regarded the suicide note and the empty pill bottles that accompanied him in the ambulance and immediately pumped his stomach for its contents. Roger Frazier was wheeled into a private room where a nurse would be on hand to monitor his every move.

Suicide risk
was added to his chart.

From his phone, the primary care physician assigned to Katy's father searched the Internet for his name from his driver's license and learned about
Spirit Hunters
and the allegations that the show had made against him in an article published by the
Kitsap Sun
.

The doctor reread the suicide note and called the Kitsap County Sheriff's Department.

Kendall took the call.

“That architect Roger Frazier who molested his daughter and killed her is here at Tacoma General,” he said after identifying himself.

“We don't know he molested anyone, let alone killed.”

“Well, if you read his suicide note,” the doctor said, with an unmistakable air of inflated ego, “you'll be as certain as I am that he did.”

“Suicide?” Kendall asked.

“Right. Attempted. Half-assed, if you want nonmedical verbiage, Detective. We got him in time and I know I should never say something like this, but I wouldn't have shed a tear if he arrived here too late. These guys make me sick. We patch 'em up and they go out to do more of the same.”

“We don't know he molested his daughter,” Kendall said.

“Once you read his goodbye-I'm-really-sorry note then I'm pretty sure you will change your mind. He bled guilt all over the paper.”

Kendall took a breath and reached for a pen.

“Bled? Did he cut himself?”

“No, figure of speech. He was a pill popper.”

“All right. Tacoma General? What room?”

“Yeah. He's here just off emergency in a room we use for suicide attempts.”

“He's stable?”

“Yes.”

“Has he said anything?”

“No, his note pretty much says it all.

“I'll be there as soon as I can. Have you notified his wife?”

“No,” the doctor said. “I'll leave that up to you. I figured you'd want a crack at him before the media and family—not necessarily in that order—find out.”