Victim Six (29 page)

April 2, 9 a.m.
Port Orchard

The nude corpse on Birdy Waterman’s stainless-steel table was not like the others who had been defiled by the Cutter. In fact, even those who profile such things would have discounted Carol Godding as a possible victim of the same man who had murdered Celesta, Skye, and Midnight. At forty-five, Carol was no ingénue. She might have been a lovely woman in life, but the waters of Puget Sound, the knotted fury of the fishermen’s nets, and, of course, what the killer had done to her had stolen that all away. However, the forensic pathologist also noticed two small scars behind Carol’s ears, indications that she had likely had a face-lift. There were also several tiny and recent scars running along her abdomen, the telltale signs of a tumescent liposuction procedure.

Birdy knew that Carol had recently gotten divorced. Birdy had never married herself, but she understood the reaction to aging. The need to halt it all before it was too late. Some women didn’t see themselves for the greatness they held but as a package, a vessel, that had been coveted by men. Carol Godding had likely spent the last few months of her life pulling out all the stops to get herself back in the game before a ruthless killer stopped her.

Birdy noted how Carol’s wrists and ankles were striated by wounds exactly like those of the other victims. She hated to use the gimmicky name for the perpetrator, but in seeing the teasing injuries made by a blade on Carol’s torso, Birdy had to admit that the Kitsap Cutter had struck again.

She took out the camera and started documenting the body as found. There was an indignity to the process, and Birdy knew it. A woman like the one on the table had been consumed with how she looked, how she was progressing in her personal makeover.

The one that would put her life back on track.

“You’re late,” Birdy said as the Kitsap County detectives entered the room.

“You started early,” Josh said.

“Reset your watch. I started on time.”

“Sorry, Doctor,” Kendall said, setting down her things and disappearing into the changing room. She kept talking through the cracked doorway. “We got held up by some media calls. Word is out about Ms. Godding being victim four.”

Birdy looked up from the body.

“Word is about right, I’d say,” she said.

As Kendall emerged in her pale green scrubs, Josh went to change. Again the door was kept open.

“This gal’s no spring chicken,” he called out. “What would a sexual sadist want with her?”

The two women looked at each other and shook their heads.

“This isn’t necessarily about sex but about the feeling that the killer gets from the pain that he’s causing,” Kendall said.

She also wanted to say something about how the victim on the table was younger than Josh was, by about six years, and he still considered himself hot stuff.

Yet, she didn’t.

As the three hovered over Carol’s remains, there was an unplanned moment of silence. Each took in what could not be ignored. The body had been pierced by a knife a total of fourteen times. The wounds had not been deep, no more than a quarter inch at best.

The stabbing had been part of the game.

“Did she bleed to death?” Kendall finally asked.

Birdy stopped taking pictures. “No. Look here.” She tilted the head slightly as she opened Carol’s blue eyes.

“Patriotic, this gal. Red, white, and blue,” Josh said, clever and cruel at the same time.

Neither woman commented on Josh’s second inappropriate comment of the hour.

“Petechial hemorrhaging,” Birdy said. “I expect the hyoid has been crushed too. This victim was manually strangled. No ligature marks.” The pathologist pointed at some bruising on the neck. “Look, you can see the fingertips here.”

“Looks like dirt,” Josh said.

Kendall peered at the skin. “I see them.”

Josh took a step closer. “Yeah, I guess so. But if she was strangled, that doesn’t fit the MO of the killer.”

“She was raped, wasn’t she?” Kendall said.

The pathologist made a nod of resignation. “I’ve swabbed. This perpetrator is careful, smart.”

She reached for her scalpel to do what the killer had done. The blade of her knife was not so different from the one that had tortured Carol Godding. Birdy performed a zipper pull, opening up the battered body.

Dr. Waterman fixed her eyes on Josh. “Just so you know,” she said, “if I see any of this report in the paper tomorrow, I’ll go to the sheriff and have you bounced off this case for good. You understand?”

Josh Anderson’s face went a little pink. “Look, Birdy, I’ve never compromised a case.
Ever.
I resent what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything, Detective. I’m stating a fact. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Look,” he said. “I’ve never compromised a case for any reason, and you know that.” He looked at Kendall, maybe for support. She stayed mute.

“Josh, I end up with the result of what these maniacs do,” Dr. Waterman said. She looked over at Carol. “We have a serial killer working in our own backyard, and some of the things that have been in the paper could compromise what I think we both want: an end to this.”

“You know something, Doctor,” Josh said, dispensing with familiarity, “you couldn’t be more wrong.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I actually don’t mind being wrong now and then. I learn from it.” She was thinking of Celesta just then and how the early discounting of her disappearance as an abduction had delayed an effective investigation. She wished she could turn back the clock for all of them—Celesta, Skye, Marissa, Carol, and in all likelihood Paige.

With the skill that comes with practice, Birdy rolled Carol’s body over so that she could view the wounds on her back. She’d been sliced in four places, not deeply but teasingly shallow. She noted the locations on the body chart that accompanied every autopsy. It was a bald, alien-like figure that reduced the person to nothing more than an outline.

Carol’s skin was slightly gray, with the exception of the wound areas and some postmortem bruising on her shoulder blades. There, a couple of shiny specks glinted. Birdy looked closer.

Something was adhering to Carol’s back.

In the arsenal of equipment in her Rubbermaid tote, Birdy found a UV light. Turning it on, she ran the bluish beam over the body. Tiny particles pulsed under the glow.

What were they?

Painstakingly, the forensic pathologist collected each minute fleck, fifteen in total. They looked like pieces of fiberglass.

Kendall and Josh walked across the parking lot without speaking. Kendall couldn’t take her mind off the victim, and Josh couldn’t stop brooding over the lashing that Dr. Waterman had given him over his relationship with Serenity Hutchins.

Josh broke the silence. “She’s a good reporter,” he said.

“No one’s
that
good, Josh. Birdy is right. If you’re not blabbing case facts to her directly, then she’s digging into your stuff when you’re not around.”

“She’d never do that.”

Kendall lingered by the door. She wasn’t ready to go inside without telling Josh what everyone in the Sheriff’s Office was already saying.

“This is the biggest case we’ve ever had, and you’ve compromised it. Get it together, Josh. Someone out there is torturing and killing innocent victims. Your ego is of no consequence in the grand scheme of things.”

He didn’t reply. He knew she was right.

Josh Anderson dialed Serenity the first chance he had. She was at her desk, working on an article. The newsroom was mostly silent, and she almost resisted answering. Personal calls were allowed, of course, but things hadn’t been going well with Josh lately.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“I’m in the middle of something,” she said.

“This is serious, Serenity. Meet me.”

She looked at her computer screen and let out a sigh. “I guess so. Tonight?”

“No. Now.”

“Now?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes. See you out front.”

“Where are we going?” Serenity asked after getting into Josh’s idling BMW in the customer parking spot in front of the
Lighthouse
editorial and advertising offices.

“Nowhere. We just need to talk. But not here and not on the phone.”

He drove down Mile Hill and pulled into the mostly empty parking lot at the South Kitsap Mall behind the A&W.

He turned off the engine and turned to Serenity.

“Where in the world are you getting the information that you’ve been putting into the paper?”

“I’ve told you,” she said, coolly. “I have my sources.”

“I know. Who?”

“I can’t—or, rather, I won’t—say.”

“Damn it, Serenity. I got ripped a new one by Dr. Waterman today at the Godding autopsy. She thinks—
everyone
thinks—that I’m your goddamn source.”

“You know you’re not.”

“It doesn’t matter. Perception is everything. So tell me: Who is your source?”

Serenity looked out the window. She paused, considering. “I can’t say. Not for sure. But I think the guy who’s been calling me is the Kitsap Cutter. I mean, I really do think he is, Josh.”

“Jesus, are you sure?”

She looked back at him; this time her eyes flooded with tears. “I am. I really am. It scares the hell out of me too.”

Josh leaned closer and put his hand on her shoulder. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not finished. He told me that much. He says he won’t stop until he’s caught.”

To the right of her desk, Kendall had hung photographs of the Kitsap Cutter’s victims. While the brutality that each had endured indicated a specific type of sexually sadistic serial killer, the women themselves were a diverse bunch. They weren’t a collection of “throwaways,” as some media people characterize a victim like Midnight Cassava. Carol was an accomplished professional woman; Skye, a recent college graduate.

Kendall wondered if there was some similarity in their backgrounds that had attracted the Cutter to them, or if their selection had been completely random. She looked at Paige’s photo and retrieved her file. Why her? What had made her stand out? She read the article in the paper about her being crowned Fathoms o’ Fun Queen and how she was going to use her achievement to feed the homeless and embark on a career in the entertainment industry.

Her eyes wandered over Celesta Delgado, victim one, and then to her file. She studied the witness statements and Dr. Waterman’s autopsy report. Her hands had been expertly removed. Was the killer a butcher? Chef? An ardent hunter? She perused the article Serenity Hutchins had written when the partially clad body was found in Mason County. She recalled what she had learned about brush picking and saw the photo that had been published the previous summer showing Celesta as the hostess at the grand opening for the remodeled Azteca.

Victim two, Marissa, had also been profiled by the
Lighthouse
reporter, although less sympathetically than Celesta. Marissa’s mother had conceded that her daughter had had a “troubled” past, including arrests and convictions for prostitution and check kiting. Her head had been removed and the two parts of her body discarded in two different places, at two different times. The head in the box was meant to shock, which it did. She was found nude.

Skye Hornbeck, victim three, had been an adventure seeker—the opposite of Celesta, who had merely aspired to a cozy middle-class life with her future husband. Skye had been strangled and stabbed and was missing a necklace, but there was no way to tell if the other victims had had any personal effects taken by the killer.

Celesta’s engagement ring was presumably somewhere with her hand.

Marissa couldn’t hang on to any jewelry, hence the wrist tattoo of her daughter’s name.

All had been dumped in water. The killer surely had a boat. But so did a hundred thousand other people in the Seattle Tacoma area. Finding the right boat was like finding a needle stuck in the muddy bottom of Puget Sound.

Impossible.

There was no way she could stop herself. There was a kind of rush that came with reporting the news of a serial killer’s latest victims. Serenity Hutchins knew that some kind of evil being had anointed her to be the messenger of his deeds. The afternoon that Carol Godding’s body was snagged in the fishermen’s nets, she posted an entry on the
Lighthouse
news blog—there was no waiting for the print edition.

The posting was headlined:

CAROL GODDING’S BODY FOUND IS PAIGE WILSON THE KILLER’S NEXT VICTIM?

She wrote that while the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office had not made an official statement that the missing beauty queen was a victim of the Kitsap Cutter, she had it on “good authority” that they suspected as much.

A source close to the investigation indicated that Wilson is the fifth victim, and there likely will be others.

She didn’t say that the source was the killer himself.

Sam Castile read the blog and grinned.

“‘Close to the case?’ She has no idea just how close she is,” he said to himself.

April 2, 8:35 p.m.
Key Peninsula

Kendall looked at the map pinned to her office wall. A casual visitor would not have understood the meaning of the red dots marking Little Clam Bay, Anderson Point, Lisabeula, and the Mary E. Theler Wetlands.

She and Josh had canvassed marinas all over Kitsap County and Gig Harbor in Pierce County. Each of those was marked with a gold star. The detectives knew that the person dumping the bodies was doing it from a boat. A lot of good that did them. Puget Sound was often referred to as the “Boating Capital of the United States.”

“You look intense,” Josh said after sauntering into her office, looking as if he were on vacation or about to climb onto a bar stool.

Without a care in the world.

Kendall was stressed and made no attempt to hide it. “Why wouldn’t I be, Josh? There’s a maniac out there, and everyone from the FBI to the Seattle PD thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” he said.

“Not good enough.” Kendall let it go. She didn’t want to get into it with Josh just now. It seemed that he’d let his personal life cloud his occasional good sense, and it irritated her. “Look, the killer is a boater. We know that. He has to moor his boat somewhere around here.”

“He could trailer it and launch it from a boat-ramp too.”

Kendall disagreed: “I don’t see how he’d have time to haul it in and out, dump a body, and get back to whatever rock he lives under.”

Josh sat down with his long legs stretched out. “People like that always find the time,” he said.

Again the noise beckoned. Max Castile thought he’d heard a small animal bawl from behind the mobile home, shrouded from view by a stand of native cedar and a hedge of black bamboo his parents had planted. He’d been admonished to stay away from the mobile “for safety reasons,” and he was the kind of obedient child who knew that when his parents said something, they meant business. From his bedroom window, Max could see into the detached garage. His father was crouched over his workbench, silhouetted by the fluorescent tubes that hung overhead on a pair of galvanized chains. As he looked into the garage, Max imagined that he had become a character in a video game and that his dad was some kind of metallic scorpion that he could take out with a blast of his laser. Sometimes he wanted to do just that. He tiptoed past the master bedroom, where his mother had fallen asleep holding a novel in her lap. The book rested in her hand as if she were about to turn the page.

The boy decided to go through the kitchen to get a flashlight. If his mom caught him there, he’d say something about needing a glass of water or being scared. Something she’d believe. The light was in the utility drawer next to the fridge. He slid it open slowly, quietly. Max fished out the flashlight and started to follow the noise across the darkened yard. It faded in the wind, and he stopped to listen.

Where is it coming from? What is it?

Nothing.

He picked up a large stick and waited for the noise again.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

Just as he thought: it was coming from the direction of the old mobile home.

Max checked behind him. No one was watching. His father had never bothered to skirt the trailer, so he crouched down low and looked to see if there was something caught under the structure.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

It was coming from
inside
the mobile home.

As Max reached for the door handle, a hand pulled at his shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground.

“What are you doing here?”

Max spun around and faced his mother. Melody Castile’s eyes were fierce with anger. It was a mom’s usual look of disapproval multiplied by a thousand.

Max blinked back tears.

“Mom, I thought I heard something.”

She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “What did your dad and I tell you? This place is not for you!”

“I’m sorry. I just thought…”

Without another word, she yanked her son back toward the house.

Paige Wilson had heard shards of the confrontation between mother and son as she lay on the mattress in her own filth. The duct tape that had been applied to her mouth had slipped off, allowing her to call out for help. As she rolled her head back on the mattress, Paige felt the familiar pressure of the bobby pins that held her crown to her head.

How had all of this happened?
she wondered, retracing the text messages, the promises of a modeling contract, the meeting in the parking lot at the Poplars…and finally the smelly cloth going over her face before falling into darkness.

She tried to burn into her memory the last thing she had seen: a Department of Defense parking decal, silver and blue, with a beginning sequence of identifiers: D7D. She’d seen the familiar stickers her whole life. Whoever owned the car had been employed at the shipyard or maybe the submarine base at Bangor. Rental cars don’t come with DOD decals.

Whoever had her was not some modeling agent and his assistant from California. Lying on that mattress, in the middle of nowhere, she knew she was a long way from
Top Model
. A long way from anywhere at all.

She whimpered helplessly in the dark and tried to come to grips with her situation and think of how to get out of there.

Paige had been a virgin before she was captured and violated. She had told her friends otherwise, as if bragging about having had sex made her seem adult. She didn’t want to be called “the Virgin Queen,” so she’d made up a lie about a boyfriend at a prep school in Tacoma. Paige had been all talk. She’d let the float driver fondle her breasts once, but that was the sole extent of her experience with men.

Now she was cut, bleeding, and all but certain she was going to die.

After returning to the house and putting Max in his room for the rest of the night, Melody went to the garage, where Sam was washing out the inside of Paige Wilson’s car. He wore gloves and used a chamois that she’d purchased from a late-night TV pitchman. They’d laughed at how the pitchman could tout the uses they’d devised for his product. Certainly it could soak up soda pop from the floor, but it also did a good job obliterating fingerprints.

Sam stopped what he was doing. “What’s with you?”

“What’s with me? That’s a good one.”

“Are we playing games here, Mel? Because if we are, I’m missing something.”

Melody was tense, her arms folded across her chest, her hair matted against her sweating forehead.

“Max almost went into the Fun House. That little bitch we picked up was making some noise. You need to make her quiet.”

Her tone was indignant—she expected him to do something.
Now
.

“Oh,
I
need to?” Sam set down his dripping chamois. His eyes were ice, and the veins in his neck plumped with blood. “What’s the matter with you?
You
go shut her up. For good.”

“I don’t do that,” she said.

He jabbed a finger at her.

“You do as I
tell
you. That’s our deal, babe.”

Bernardo Reardon, the detective with the Mason County Sheriff’s Office who’d met with Kendall and Josh when Celesta’s body was a heap of waterlogged flesh the previous March, looked down at the report submitted by the state crime lab in Olympia. It had been among a batch of documents found in the trunk of a fired lab worker’s car.

It was unremarkable except for one small notation.

He got Kendall on the phone in her office and told her what he knew.

“Basically, whoever dumped the body had an older boat,” he said. “All have been water dump sites, so I guess that’s no real news.”

Kendall thumbed through Birdy’s autopsy report on Carol Godding.

“Godding also had particles recovered from her shoulder blades,” she said.

“Maybe they’ll match.”

Kendall was thinking about the age of the boat.

“Almost thirty years old,” she said. “Can’t be too many of those around here.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Bernardo said. “I mean, a boat that old is not exactly a classic, you know, like a Chris-Craft.”

“Old, but not a classic,” she repeated.

Serenity allowed the thought to come to her, though she’d resisted it before. Sam Castile had a boat. An old one. Sam had a proclivity for bizarre, controlling behavior. Even Melody had said so. Serenity recalled the clues she’d seen at the log house when she and her parents had visited there. Something was strange. She’d recalled how Josh had asked her about the rolling pin and how she’d dismissed it out of hand.

Her heart pounding, she called her sister.

No answer.

“I’m sorry for bugging you about this, Melody. Don’t take it the wrong way. But I’m worried about Sam. He might be involved in something. Something bad.”

She thought better of leaving such a message and waited for the prompt so she could erase it. It felt good to have it out of her system. But no such prompt came.

Sam Castile held his wife’s phone to his ear and stared at her.

“We’re going to need to take care of the little bitch,” he said. “You hate Serenity.”

“Yes, I hate her,” she repeated.

“She’s always had everything that you wanted.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“I need to remind you, bitch, because you’re so goddamn stupid, you wouldn’t know how to do
anything
if I didn’t tell you how.”

It soothed her a little when he treated her like she was nothing.

“Your parents never understood you the way I do,” he said, turning around to measure her reaction. “They underestimated what you are and who you are.”

“I know. I know.”

He started toward the Fun House. “Taking care of her will not only stop her from asking stupid questions, it will be payback for everyone for what they did to you. Best of all, we’ll have a hot time doing it.”

He didn’t seem to care that in killing Serenity he was breaking one of his rules. Rules, he knew, were never meant for him.