Victim Six (23 page)

February 4, 1 p.m.
Port Orchard

Kendall Stark ate alone at a small café in downtown Port Orchard. She’d brought a salad Steven had made the night before but had left it in the car. Now it was a soggy mess. The café was no great shakes, but it gave her a moment to think. She watched a woman across the room cut her daughter’s hamburger into small pieces while she talked on a cell phone. The girl was about fifteen and obviously impaired. She sat hunched over her plate while her mother did her duty.

Poor girl. Maybe cerebral palsy?
Kendall was unsure. But what struck her was how the mother just went on and on with her phone conversation, cutting the food as if her child were not present. She was grateful for Cody, happy that despite her son’s problems they were connected. They had a bond. He might not be the son of her dreams, but she’d learned to love every minute they shared. The realization had come slowly.

Her phone vibrated. She set down her fork and answered a call from Josh. It soon became clear that the apple pie she had ordered, which the waitress had said was the best in the county, was going to go uneaten.

“I’m way up north in Kingston,” he said. “We’ve got a deputy out at McCormick Woods on a call, Kendall, but since you’re not far, can you check it out?”

She took down an address in McCormick Woods.

Kendall Stark surveyed the interior of the Godding garage. There was a pegboard with outlines of various tools, most of which were missing. Carol’s car, a dark blue Lexus, was in perfect condition. In the space next to the car was what had caught Kirsten Potts’s attention. In the middle of the concrete floor was Carol’s dog, a Doberman named Dolly.

Someone had taken hedge loppers and sheared off the dog’s head.

A pool of dried blood fanned out over the concrete floor. The dog’s decomposing head was separated from its body by about four feet. A rope apparently had been used to choke the dog before it was decapitated. Kendall recorded the scene with pictures and measurements. She sketched out what she was seeing and phoned Animal Control to come get the dog.

A few neighbors had gathered in the driveway, a self-satisfied Kirsten Potts in the center of the group. They seemed to seize the moment to do some neighborhood kibitzing. One woman brought up the subject of the new menu at Mary Mac’s, the clubhouse restaurant, and how it didn’t offer enough vegetarian options.

“Honestly,” said the woman, whose earlobes were stretched into pendulums of flesh by a pair of too-heavy earrings, “the management there seems more focused on cutesy golf-inspired names for their menu items than what they serve there. A Par Four Omelet—come on!”

Kirsten didn’t appreciate that the conversation was being diverted from her, so she ignored the vegetarian complaint.

“I was worried about the condition of her yard,” she told a woman in black stretch pants and a red plaid jacket. “I never thought their dog was much of a problem.”

Kendall approached the group, and they fell silent.

“Here comes the detective,” Kirsten said.

“Does anyone know how we can reach Ms. Godding?” she asked. “Do you know where she works?”

Plaid Jacket shrugged. “I heard that she looked for a job after her husband left her. Couldn’t find anything in her field, whatever it was. I didn’t know her well.”

A truck from animal control pulled up, and the group watched two men go inside the garage.

“She was selling a lot of stuff online,” said Kirsten, proving herself to be the neighborhood know-it-all.

A retired commander from the Navy who lived next door spoke up.

“She told me that she was going to visit friends or relatives down south. She wasn’t too explicit, and I didn’t ask. She traveled a lot.”

Kendall took down the man’s name and phone number.

“So the consensus here is that Ms. Godding is on vacation.”

Kirsten piped up. “If you’re leaving for more than three days, you’re required to alert the HOA.”

“Her ex never followed the rules, either,” Big Earrings said.

The animal control officers emerged a moment later carrying the dog’s corpse in a thick plastic wrapping.

Kendall made sure the garage door was locked. She noticed a large water bowl on the patio. It was elevated in a metal frame, a glossy white ceramic dish decorated with coal-black paw prints and Dolly’s name. Wind chimes in the shape of silvery dog bones spun on a chain from the eaves. That dog was loved, Kendall thought. If Carol Godding was going out of town for more than three hours, she likely wouldn’t have left Dolly alone. She got in her car and drove back to the office, leaving a group of deputies to cordon off the site.

Josh had been working the case from another angle, and Kendall needed to know what he had found out.

Carol Godding had been dumped by her husband, and by all accounts she’d gotten over it—at least, as much as any woman can when the man she loves with all her heart drops the bomb. Until that moment Carol had fooled herself into thinking that she was happy. She was middle-aged and facing the prospect of starting over.

Kendall’s examination of the Godding residence pretty much told the story. The refrigerator was stocked with flavored waters and diet salad dressings. The guest bedroom had been heaped with things that her husband had left behind: engineering books, workout clothes, and CDs by rock bands that hadn’t been relevant for two decades. The front room was mostly empty of furniture, which had been replaced by a dozen cardboard boxes that held housewares, linens, and books. The boxes weren’t completely full.

When Josh told Kendall that he’d learned from the neighbors that Carol had participated in the McCormick Woods neighborhood garage sale, the state of the home’s disarray made sense.

“Did you see the stack of garage sale signs by the back door?”

Kendall nodded.

“She was on the committee for last week’s big sale. Her job was to put up and take down the signage. One of the neighbors asked for them, and I didn’t see any harm, so I let her take them.”

“I thought the neighbors didn’t care for Carol.”

“Her husband. They hated
him
.”

“I see.”

“Seriously, I don’t think the woman who asked for the signs cared much about anything other than getting the signs back. She’s having her own sale next door on Saturday. She’s worried that our missing-persons case will bring out the lookie loos.”

Kendall shook her head. “Kill me before I ever move into one of those subdivisions. Promise me, okay?”

Josh grinned. “Deal.”

Steven Stark had used the afternoon to split wood from a cherished madrona that had died two summers before. Madronas were red-barked trees native to the Northwest that were striking in form and color. Anyone who had one growing in his yard felt lucky. The Starks had only one, and Kendall had cried when it started to die limb by limb, all of its characteristic waxy green leaves turning bronze. The wood had cured, making it easier to split. Easier, but not easy: Madronas are a dense hardwood, known to bend a penny nail.

Sweat bloomed under Steven’s arms and ran from his temples as he hoisted and swung a sharpened ax into the heart of each piece of wood. Cody sat on the swing in the backyard not really watching his father but seemingly captivated by thoughts in his head that he’d never be able to share.

“Hi, you two,” Kendall said, emerging from inside the house. She was wearing dark gray slacks with a blouse of sea-foam green that she had put on that morning. Despite the long day, she looked lovely. Her cropped blond hair caught the late-afternoon light, almost making it glow. She kissed Cody and gave his swing a gentle push before planting a kiss on Steven’s sweaty lips.

“You taste like salt,” she said.

Steven smiled at her. Their eyes locked.

“You taste like honey.” He set the ax down. Behind him was a mountain of evidence that he’d been hard at work.

“Long day,” he said. “For you too.”

Kendall sat down on the swing next to their son. “An incident out at McCormick Woods today.” She looked at Cody; his gaze was fixed on a small flock of Canada geese overhead. She wouldn’t give any details.

“I’m worried,” was all she could say.

Steven knew what that meant. Kendall could be completely poker-faced during an interrogation, but not with those she loved. She had a face that invited those who loved her to see the need for comfort. Later that night, with Cody asleep, she would tell her husband about the dead dog and the missing woman.

She’d even use the words that had been the invention of the
Lighthouse
news staff:

Has the Cutter struck again?

Ultimately she dismissed it. Carol was not a young woman. She didn’t have anything in common with the others. On the surface, she was a professional woman of some means. Skye was a free-spirit wannabe; Celesta was a food service worker and brush picker; Marissa was a prostitute.

There was very little reason to carry on without his daughter, and Cullen Hornbeck had considered becoming one of those tragic statistics that make the TV news now and then: the one that sadly reminds the world that it is too painful for many parents to outlive their children, that when the rhythm of life is disrupted to such a degree, only death, it seems, can salve the wounds.

Skye had been dead and buried for months, and there was no getting over it. When Cullen logged on to his computer to compose a suicide note, he ran through some of the old e-mails that she had sent him. His heart ached with the loss and memory of his beautiful little girl.

He hadn’t told anyone they had argued the day before she left. Skye had told him in no uncertain terms that her life was her own and that her college degree would always be there for her, like a savings plan for rainy day.

“But I won’t always be young, Dad. I want to do something other than what you and Mom see for me. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

He had told her she was ungrateful. The next day she was gone.

As he rolled though his e-mails, he noticed that his spam filter was full. He opened the file and, one by one, started deleting the unwanted offers of sex, larger breasts, and a bigger penis. Near the list’s end was a two-meg file—too large for the settings of his free e-mail account.

It was from Skye, sent the day
after
she disappeared.

He clicked on it.

The message was brief.

The e-mail included a large, uncompressed photograph. Cullen clicked on the image, and slowly the pixels found focus and a picture filled his computer screen. It showed Skye standing on the deck of a Washington State Ferry, the cloud-laden Seattle skyline in the background. She had a big smile on her face and a backpack slung over her shoulder. She was wearing a red hoodie, halfway unzipped. Around her neck was the sterling silver yin-and-yang necklace that her mother had made for her when she graduated from high school. Not only did the sight of his daughter looking at the lens with a smile on her face bring tears to his eyes, it brought him newfound resolve. There would be time to be together in heaven. But not yet.

He forwarded the e-mail to the two women who seemed to care most about his daughter’s fate; neither woman was Skye’s mother.

Cullen tapped out a short note:

Kendall Stark opened Cullen Hornbeck’s e-mail on an office computer and deliberated on the photograph while Josh looked over her shoulder.

“She was a beautiful girl,” Josh said, as if such a remark had anything to do with the reason they were viewing the last known image of the Cutter’s second victim.

“Notice something?” Kendall asked.

“One thing jumps out, for sure.” He pointed to the name of the vessel, visible on a flotation device in the foreground. It was familiar to most native western Washingtonians. “She was on the
Walla Walla
, which means she made it to Bremerton.”

Kendall nodded. “Also, look: she’s not wearing the green blouse she had on when we found her body in Little Clam Bay. That can only mean she either changed her outfit that day—not likely—or she was picked up by someone after she got off the boat.”

Josh processed what Kendall had said. “Not only that,” he said. “She promised to call her dad the next day, which we know she never did. Look at the time stamp on the photo. It was Sunday.”

It was not a night for eighties music. Her cat, Mr. Smith, at her feet and the sounds of a Seattle classical music station filling the apartment, Serenity Hutchins went about the task of checking her e-mail before calling it a night. She resisted the urge to Twitter, or log on to Facebook. Those were extras after a long day. E-mail, however, was just part of staying connected with those friends and family members who really mattered.

She had twenty messages in her in-box, but skipped the others in favor of Cullen Hornbeck’s. She talked to him at least once a week, and for a while, early on in the case, they had traded e-mails daily. But their contact had dwindled, and it pained her.

The picture of Skye on the ferry appeared, and she felt a lump in her throat. Skye was such a beautiful girl, and if Cullen was correct, this image had to have been taken not long—hours, maybe—before she died. She wanted to write back with a request to publish the photograph in the paper. She stopped herself. Partly because it was opportunistic and she knew it. But there was another reason. The pendant around the dead girl’s neck jolted her a little.

She’d seen someone wearing one just like it.

She clicked on the zoom feature and expanded her view. Around Skye’s neck was a silver charm. It was a familiar design, the ancient Chinese symbol of the connection between opposing forces. Good and evil. Light and dark. Laughter and tears. And while its design was common, its construction was unique.