Victim Six (12 page)

September 18, 9:02 a.m.
Port Orchard

Kendall Stark has just eased into her preferred parking slot—close to the overhang that kept renegade smokers from the Sheriff’s Office and jail dry during the long drippy Northwest autumns and winters, when she saw Josh Anderson grind out a cigarette and approach. He had his cell phone stuck to his ear. The morning had been a difficult one, following one of Cody’s restless nights. After a week in his new school, there were doubts that he was adjusting, and she and Steven argued over it. Cody, who usually did not betray emotion, was always aware when his parents were at odds. Words or tears were not the barometer of trouble in the Stark family. A night without sleep was.

Cody, what do we do? How do we help you?
she’d asked over and over inside her head as she sat in his room, by his bedside.

She rolled down her window.

“Some kids found a dead body in Little Clam Bay,” Josh said. “Female, they think. Didn’t want to get too close. Body’s still out in the water. Coroner’s en route.”

“Nice way to start the day, Josh,” she said, realizing that any hope for a better morning had been jettisoned.

“For the kids or us?”

“I was thinking of the woman,” she said.

“Well, the kid who called CENCOM was crying. Worried not only about the body but about the fact that he’d skipped school today.”

“Nice,” she said. “That’ll teach him a lesson.”

“Take your car?” he asked. “Mine’s in the shop again. BMWs are so damn touchy.”

“Get in,” she said. Josh never missed an opportunity to remind someone—anyone—that he drove an expensive car. Expensive, but always in the shop or the detail center. Josh Anderson practically needed a bus pass to get to work.

Kendall unlocked the passenger door and scooted aside some papers from Cody’s school, and Josh slid inside. He immediately cracked the window to let the air come in and suck away the condensation. Kendall always seemed to keep the inside too warm for his liking.

“Hey,” he said. “Did I say good morning?”

Kendall glanced at him as she backed out and turned onto Sidney Avenue. Rain pecked at the windshield, and she turned the wipers to the intermittent setting. “If we’ve got a dead woman, I’d say the morning’s not so good,” she said.

“You’re right.” His tone was utterly unconvincing.

Kendall Stark wasn’t one of the detectives who got an adrenaline rush from the news of death. She’d tracked killers before. Catching them was the rush. Never the pursuit. And never the start of a case. The beginning of a case only seemed to remind her how fragile life was and how, in an instant of someone’s choosing, it could all be taken away. She felt awash with sadness. Not Josh, though. He was nearly giddy. Kendall had seen that look on his face before. It was as if real life kicked in and stirred him only when it came with a measure of tragedy.

“Jesus, Josh, you don’t have to be so happy about this.”

He looked at her but avoided her eyes.

“Not happy. Just ready to get a little action going. We could use some around here. A homicide gets my juices flowing. Been boring around here all summer.”

If she hadn’t been driving, Kendall would have slapped him just then. “You don’t even know if it’s a homicide.”

“It is.”

“How can you be so sure without even seeing the body?”

“Because we’ve had no reports of anyone falling off a boat or off a dock. The only floaters we ever have in Puget Sound are drunk swimmers or kids who were left unattended. We know about those. This isn’t the season for that. If the floater fell off a boat, someone would have called it in. She’s a murder vic. Betcha a beer.”

Kendall didn’t bet.

“We’ll see,” she said.

In a very real way, the boys, the sheriff’s detectives, and the dead body were bound forever. The five of them would always be connected by what had transpired that morning.
Forever.
In the summers when he would finally have a girlfriend, Devon would lie out on the dock and think of the dead body. Whenever Brady came over, they’d probably relive the morning they found it. Kendall would never drive by Little Clam Bay without recalling what had been discovered there.

Even Josh Anderson would point it out to those he sought to impress—a lover or even a young officer.

A van with a deputy from the Kitsap County Coroner’s Office pulled in behind them and started to unload with the kind of speed that might have indicated a rescue rather than a recovery effort.

“You’re the police, right?” Devon asked Kendall and Josh after they’d parked in the driveway. “The 911 operator said for us to stay put until you got here. Are we in trouble?”

Brady spoke before either detective could answer.

“We’re supposed to be in school,” he stammered, although it was unclear whether it was due to the chill in the air or the dire circumstances of their meeting.

“We leave that to your folks,” Josh said as he watched a diver emerge from the black waters of the glassy bay. “You boys sit tight for a second, all right?”

“Where?” Devon said.

“Just stay here.”

“Yes, sir. Will do,” Brady said. The boys took a seat on a metal garden bench.

Kendall retrieved a pair of rubber boots from the back of her SUV and bent down to fasten them.

“Shoes are going to get ruined,” she said, drawing her gaze down the wet lawn and glancing back at Anderson’s black leather lace-ups.

He shrugged. “No kidding. I might have to expense them. They’re almost new too.”

Kendall doubted that. Josh was many things, but despite his oversized ego and reputation as God’s gift to women, he was no trendsetter. He’d worn the same pair of shoes for the past two years. However, he never missed a chance to fatten his wallet at the county’s expense.

A shiny red Volvo lurched into the driveway, and Belinda Taylor scurried from the car to the water’s edge.

“What’s happening here?” she called out. She was a tall woman clad in a Burberry raincoat and leather boots that sank into the damp lawn like a gardener’s aerating tool.

Step. Squish. Pull. Step. Squish. Pull.

“Mom!”

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me!” she said. “You are so grounded for skipping school!”

She turned to Kendall. “What’s going on here? The boys are truant. They’re not felons. What gives with the entire Sheriff’s Office camped out on my front yard?”

“Mrs. Taylor,” Kendall said, “I’m afraid the boys have made a frightening discovery.”

She looked over to where Josh Anderson was crouched next to a body. Ms. Taylor instantly knew what she was seeing, even at fifty yards away. She worked in a hospital. She’d seen her share of stiffs, though not in her own backyard.

“They found a body floating in the bay,” Kendall said.

Belinda Taylor’s face went a shade paler. She reached for her son and pulled him close. Ordinarily, with his best friend present, Devon would have resisted. Right then, despite his age, a little motherly reassurance felt pretty good.

“Mom, I’m sorry we skipped school.”

“Ms. Taylor, it was my idea,” Brady said.

She shook her head. “That’s not important. What’s important is that you need to tell the detective what you boys saw. We’ll deal with the other issue later.”

A black Tercel in need of a new muffler pulled in behind the coroner’s van. The detectives looked up and offered a slight nod to Serenity Hutchins as she stepped out of her car.

“The reporter is here,” Josh said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll handle her.”

Kendall made a face. “Be nice.”

Serenity started toward them, but Josh intercepted her before she got close enough to see what was going on.

The teens told Kendall that they had no idea who the victim was. In fact, they were a little embarrassed to admit they really hadn’t gotten close enough to see her features clearly.

“It kind of creeped us out,” Devon said.

“Big-time,” Brady said.

Even if they had found the courage to get a closer view, it was apparent to everyone within ten feet of the body that there was one major obstacle.

The victim had no face.

Kendall made a few notes and looked back at Josh and Serenity, who were still talking.

Jeesh,
she thought,
we’ve got a dead woman down here. Can’t you give a quick quote and tell the reporter to back off?

She left the boys and Ms. Taylor and joined a pair of coroner’s assistants as they hoisted the corpse into a body bag.

The woman was about twenty. She was white, with small hands and thin ankles. She wore no shoes. Her blue jeans were tiger-striped on the crotch, markedly visible even with the fabric sodden with seawater. Too perfect to be the casual striping of an expensive pair of jeans that had been crafted to look old. She wore a pale green top that had been carelessly buttoned: the top button had been fastened to the hole in the second position. The blouse was cotton and had absorbed blood in two patches aligned with the dead woman’s breasts. A cursory examination of the body indicated nothing out of the ordinary that might help ID her quickly. No special jewelry. No tattoos were visible. No purse and no wallet.

No nothing.

Whoever the young woman was, whatever she’d been in life, it would be up to an autopsy to tell her story.

“Tell Dr. Waterman I’ll be around for the autopsy in the morning,” Kendall said to one of the assistants. Dr. Waterman’s place was the county morgue.

“Jesus,” Josh said, “and I was beginning to think our dry spell would last into the holidays.”

The summer had only brought one other murder: a Port Orchard teenager had been stabbed by his brother over a twenty-dollar bill. Before that was the springtime murder of Celesta Delgado, the Salvadoran brush picker who had apparently been killed by a rival over salal and huckleberry.

“Yeah,” Kendall said, “you were wishing yesterday for something other than a gun or drug case. Looks like your prayers have been answered.”

September 18, noon
South of Port Orchard

The drive from Little Clam Bay took longer than the trip there. The county evidently had some money in its coffers, because a couple of flaggers in orange vests were planted on Little Clam Bay Road as a yellow backhoe prepared to cut into the ditch. A row of twenty-four-inch drainpipes sat on a flatbed truck parked off to the side; at least, it was supposed to be off to the side. It jutted out into the roadway just enough to turn a two-lane into a one-lane.

Kendall rolled down her window and addressed the flagger, a woman of about twenty.

“Can’t we just scoot by? I think I can make it.”

“Sorry, but no. Yesterday’s rain did a number on the shoulder. Be about five minutes, max.”

Kendall pushed the button to raise her window. Rain had sprayed over her left side. As the car idled, she looked over at Josh, who was lamenting his ruined shoes and how he was sure to catch a cold. He’d unlaced his shoes in an effort to speed up the drying process.

“Turn the heat up, will you?”

Kendall obliged.

“She looked young,” she said. “Maybe a teenager.”

“The flagger?”

“The victim,” she said, knowing that he was just playing with her.

“Yeah. She was.”

“What do you make of the boys, Josh?”

“Young and dumb and full of…you know the rest,” he said. “Just unlucky enough to skip school and more scared that their parents would find out they’d been smoking cigars than they were about getting in trouble for cutting class.”

“Devon made a big point of saying that we’d find his DNA on the cigar he dropped in the bay.” The flagger waved them on, and Kendall put the car in gear. “Maybe she was a student at their school,” she said.

“Doubtful. They go to junior high. That girl looked older. But we can check it out. Let’s get back and run the missing-persons database and see what pops up.”

“I’ll be surprised if she’s from around here,” Kendall said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because she looked like a girl who’d be missed, that’s why. The people around here call us if their kids are an hour late from the movies.”

A sly grin broke out over his face. “That they do.”

Kendall nodded without remarking.

“Let’s run by Sedgwick,” Josh said. “We ought to check out the boys’ story, and it’s on the way.”

John Sedgwick Junior High was one of those immense edifices that looked authoritative and utilitarian at the same time. Its chief bits of architectural interest were the four pillars that flanked the front of the building: they were massive tubes of painted concrete. That was it. Form, no style. When Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson made their way toward the front door, a kid called out.

“You here about the dead body?”

Kendall turned toward the voice. It came from a skateboarder in low-slung black jeans, a blue hoodie, and a chain that went from, presumably, his wallet to his belt loop. He had dark blue eyes and the faint tracings of a mustache that he’d obviously been nurturing to look older, and maybe a little tougher. She recognized Matt Gordon despite his attempt at facial hair.

Josh looked at Kendall. “You know that kid?”

“Shoplifter, but not a good one.”

“Officer Stark,” the teen said, “we all know.”

She didn’t correct him by pointing out that she now carried a detective’s shield.

“How’s that?”

Without saying a word, Matt Gordon poked at the keys on his phone and held it out.

On his iPhone screen was an image of the tragic scene they’d just left at Little Clam Bay. Kendall noted the time stamp: twenty minutes
before
the Sheriff’s Office had been notified.

“Devon and Brady need a lesson on priorities,” she said to Josh.

“Huh? Brady blasted it out this morning,” Matt said. “Let me show you another.” The kid was grinning nervously now. Kendall had cut him some slack on the shoplifting case, and he was trying to be a good citizen. “Here.”

This time it was a photo of Kendall and Josh leaning over the body.

“That’s how I knew it was you and why you were coming, Officer Stark.”

“Any more out there?” she asked, her tone flat to mask her anger.

“He texted everyone that he was putting up an animated slide show on his MySpace later. Kind of cool that someone died around here, and we can watch how you solve the case. Like
CSI
. My mom loves that show.”

Jesus, what’s with these kids around here? Is everything a joke?
she thought.

“Thanks, Matt. And by the way, it isn’t
cool
that someone died around here. This is very serious and sad business. I’d appreciate it if you’d remind people of that. Okay?”

“Yes, Deputy. Will do.”

Josh spoke up. “It’s
Detective
Stark. She’s a
detective
now. Not a deputy.”

Kendall suppressed a smile. It was the first time that Josh had done that. For a man who was a relentless self-promoter, he simply didn’t believe in building up someone else, because if someone was his equal, it diminished him.

She turned to the boy. “By the way, I’ll need your phone.”

The Kitsap County detectives went past the hideous cement pillars and into the administrative offices, where they had a brief conversation with the school’s assistant principal, a nervous man with caterpillar eyebrows who was about to consume a limp chef’s salad. It was doubtful that anything but an inquiry from the Sheriff’s Office could have interrupted the meal.

Gil Fontana set down his plastic fork and verified that Devon and Brady were decent students, not overly prone to mischief.

“Those two are harmless,” Gil said, “given what we deal with around here.” He looked down at the contents of an open file folder to refresh a memory that couldn’t possibly have held any real awareness of those boys: there were hundreds like them at the school. “Let’s see, they’ve skipped school only twice before and never have been the subject of any major disciplinary action.”

“Any female students reported missing in the past few days?” Kendall asked, looking past Gil as he fidgeted in his leather office chair. A poster on the wall indicated that John Sedgwick Junior High “celebrated” tolerance, diversity, and sensitivity.

“No female students missing. A few out sick, but junior high girls take advantage of their cramps to miss school.”

Kendall thought of saying something like “cramps” were no laughing matter for a young girl and that he needed to rethink a few things.

The poster caught her eye again.

“I see that you celebrate sensitivity here,” she said.

Gil plastered on a smile. “That’s right. The state requires it.”

Kendall stood. “Good. Too bad it has to be required. By the way, you’ve got a problem here, Mr. Fontana. A young woman’s death is not something to be
celebrated
on MySpace or Facebook or Twitter, for goodness sake. Those boys—who you seem to feel are no problem—have some serious issues.”

The assistant principal’s face turned scarlet. “What are you getting at, Detective?”

“Aren’t you concerned that they broadcasted a photo of a dead body to everybody in this school?”

Josh followed Kendall to the door. He didn’t say a word, but he clearly was loving the exchange.

“These are the times we live in,” he said, a discernible smirk on his face.

Kendall masked her anger with a smile. “At least I doubt you’d want the school to be known for that kind of thing. Am I right?”

“What was that all about?” Josh asked as they got back in Kendall’s car.

“Seriously? You don’t think the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket? It’s like a school full of sociopaths.”

“I guess so,” he said. “I never thought of it that way.”

“Well, you should. How would you like it if someone took a photo of your son like that and sent it around for a bunch of gawkers?”

“I wouldn’t. You’re right, Kendall. I wouldn’t at all.”

Serenity Hutchins slid back behind her computer. Charlie Keller was stomping around the office like a beat reporter in one of those 1940s movies that glorified the “scoop.” She wondered for a minute if her boss could possibly be
that
old. Her archrival, Joy—whom she called “Joyless” behind her back—was fuming in the corner that she was stuck doing that season’s “Fall into Halloween” Web blitz, an assignment that reeked of getting under the covers with advertisers. The paper’s copyrighted Spooky McGee character, a pumpkin-headed seagull, implored shoppers to head for the sad little mall at the base of Mile Hill Road. Joy was stuck with coming up with content to support the program.

She had already used B
UOYS AND
G
ULLFRIENDS
, H
EAD
O
VER TO THE
M
ALL
as a headline, and she wanted to die.

Joy looked up, her face contorted in an unattractive grimace. “Serenity, you need any help?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got it handled. Besides, you’re up to your neck in work yourself.”

Joy sighed. “Not what I thought I’d be doing when I graduated from journalism school,” she said.

Charlie’s deep voice boomed from across the newsroom. “We all have to start somewhere.”

But we don’t have to end up here. Like you
, Serenity thought, but didn’t say it.

“How’s the dead girl story?” he asked, now at her desk. “This is front-page, Hutchins. And as you know, we don’t get a lot of front-page stories around here.”

Serenity didn’t say so, but it troubled her that her mood had shifted from boredom to the rush of excitement that came with the discovery of the dead woman in Little Clam Bay.

“I’m on it. Nothing much yet.”

She’d tried to get the detectives to tell her something about the case. Was it even a homicide or just a boating accident? No one would say. She talked to the boys and their mothers for about ten minutes, but there really wasn’t much she could write about that. She stared at the empty window of her computer screen.

“We want to lead with the dead body,” Charlie said, now hovering. She could feel his hot coffee breath on the back of her neck.

“Figured that,” she said. She half expected him to give her some kind of lecture about how things were done “back in the day.” She liked Charlie all right. He was smart, was an excellent writer, and seemed compassionate enough. But he didn’t seem to get the irony that he’d landed a final gig at a paper that was one step above a shopper.

“It’ll be short. I took some photos of the kids who found her, but I didn’t get much out of them. The detectives—Stark and Anderson—gave me the brush-off, pending the coroner’s report. We might not have much in the way of any real info. No who, what, why, anyway.”

“Okay. Do your best. I need it in an hour.”

Serenity dialed Detective Anderson’s number, but it went to voice mail.

“Detective, it’s me, Serenity. I need whatever you’ve got. Keller’s riding me hard right now. Let me know something, okay? Call me on my cell. You’ve got the number.”

Serenity looked at her computer screen. The story for tomorrow’s front page was thin, but what more could she really say? She had agreed not to identify the boys. The detectives had given her next to nothing. A body was found.
That was it
. The subject was so tragic, there was no room for clever wordplay in the text. She had to stick with the facts.

After dropping the file into a folder on the server, Serenity swiveled in her chair and got up to leave. She decided she’d head across town to the Sheriff’s Office to find out what she could. More than anything, she hated being ignored.

What did it take to get a decent story around Port Orchard, anyway?
She asked herself.

Later, the admonition “be careful for what you wish for” would come to mind and haunt her dreams.