Victim Six (6 page)

April 3, 9 a.m.
Port Orchard

At twenty-four, Serenity Hutchins knew that her return to Port Orchard to work on the city’s weekly newspaper, the
Lighthouse
, was the necessary first step in her media career. A stepping-stone sunk into familiar ground. It wasn’t about being a failure when she wasn’t hired by a major Northwest daily. Starting at the
Lighthouse
was merely the best she could do for now, especially in an industry floundering in a failing economy. She’d come home, but she was not the same person who had graduated from South Kitsap High. She was no longer the girl who’d squandered her high school years dating a football player who’d claimed that she’d be his bride once he turned pro.

Which, of course, never happened.

Certainly, Rick Silas had a decent college career and was a third-round pick of the Seattle Seahawks, but after a lifetime of promises of undying love, he’d found a new love—a cheerleader, no less.

Life wasn’t fair, and Serenity Hutchins knew it. She probably always had.

She could have moved in with her mother in Bremerton; instead she chose to rent an apartment at Mariner’s Glen in Port Orchard, one of those hopelessly nautically themed apartments that saw great use for rusty anchors, ratty nets, and heaps of silvery driftwood at its entryway. She lived there with her cat, a black-and-white tabby named Mr. Smith.

Her editor, a heavyset fellow who’d worked at papers in Seattle and San Francisco but had come back to helm the tiny Port Orchard newspaper, lumbered toward her. Charlie Keller could have been Serenity’s idol. He’d interviewed a couple of presidents as a part of the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s editorial board. He had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice for spot news reporting. He’d even had a long-running column in the
Seattle Times
. He’d done it all,
had it all
, and then lost it to a gambling habit.

He’d come home to Port Orchard to finish out his career and die.

That will never happen to me
, Serenity thought as she watched Charlie maneuver between the newsroom desks, his beefy frame pounding on the hollow flooring of the modular building that was the modest headquarters of the
Lighthouse
.
I’m going to make a name for myself and stay on top for good
.

She smiled at him.

“Hutchins,” he said. “Might have something for you.”

She liked it when he used her last name. It was so
All the President’s Men
. “What’s up?”

“Missing brush picker out in Sunnyslope. Probably nothing. Probably more about a homesick girl wanting to go back to El Salvador than anything. You want the story? Remember, nothing much happens around here, and that’s pretty much the way they like it.”

Serenity was finishing up an article about a beautification project that had languished for years as downtown Port Orchard merchants griped about the cost.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, dropping the story into an electronic file folder for the copydesk.

“Talked to Josh in the Sheriff’s Office.”

“I’ll run it down,” she said. “Details?”

Charlie looked over by the front door, where a clean-cut man in a blue sweatshirt and jeans was waiting. He had black hair and the faint tracings of a goatee that had either just started or, if it had been growing a while, he ought to abandon.

“That’s the boyfriend,” Charlie said. “Tulio Pena is his name. Let’s put something in the paper. Okay?”

Serenity took a notepad and pen and went toward Tulio.

“See if you can get a picture, okay?” Charlie called out. “We need art, you know.”

“I know,” she said, with the resignation that came with the realization that photos and coupons were the primary reason anyone bothered with the
Lighthouse
. Text—no matter how good—was needed only to fill the spaces between art and ads. She thought of it as “word mortar designed to keep the ads from falling off the sheet of newsprint.”

The
Lighthouse
’s conference room was furnished with seven ladder-back chairs and an antique mahogany table that, newsroom legend had it, was salvaged from a near-shipwreck around the Cape by one of Port Orchard’s first settlers, a sea captain who’d planned on retiring in Seattle but instead settled in Sidney, the forerunner of present-day Port Orchard. The back wall had the framed sheet-metal press plates of some of the biggest stories covered by the paper throughout its history: The stock market crash. World War II. Kennedy’s assassination. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. By the late seventies, not only had the
Lighthouse
switched to cold-type processing, but several purchases by out-of-state companies had stripped the paper of its pursuit of the big story. In a very real way, the display was a reminder that, outside of a small news hole, the
Lighthouse
was merely a shopper feeding a shrinking gob of income to an out-of-state owner. It was no longer a paper of daily record. It had gone weekly as a cost-cutting move not long after it changed hands.

“I heard what he said,” Tulio said, indicating Charlie Keller, as he took a seat across from Serenity. He opened an envelope carrying three photos and slid them across the deep, dark wood surface.

Serenity noticed a slight tremor in his hands.

This guy is scared
, she thought.

The images were of Celesta Delgado. One had her in a raspberry cap and gown; another in a Mexican peasant blouse embroidered with holly and poinsettias. The last was of the two of them, taken with a flash as the sun highlighted the tops of the Olympics. She was a lovely girl, not much younger than Serenity.

“She’s a high school graduate,” he said. “We both are.” His eyes fixed on the photo; then he looked up at the reporter, trying to detect a flicker of surprise. He’d met enough people who, because his skin was bronze and his accent could not be masked, assumed that he could not be anything but a migrant. One of the invisible who do the jobs no one else wants.

“South Kitsap?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“Any family here? You know, so I can talk to them about Celesta’s background.”

Tulio shook his head. “Her dad died, and her mom and sister moved back to El Salvador. She’s only got me. I am her family. We were going to be married in August.”

Serenity pointed to the photo of Celesta in the Christmas blouse, her hair thick and blue-black.

“Taken at work,” Tulio said. “She is a restaurant hostess at Azteca. She was employee of the month earlier this year.”

“You want us to publish these photos, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The police are doing nothing. We have to find her. I need help.”

Serenity understood. She didn’t blame the Sheriff’s Office. They were understaffed and overworked just like anyone else. Maybe a little story could help.

“Tell me everything about the day Celesta went missing.”

Tulio took a deep breath. “Okay. We left early….”

Within an hour of Tulio Pena’s departure, Serenity put the finishing touches on a short article about Celesta Delgado. The photo-imaging guy at the paper had done a reasonably decent job with the scans, holding the detail that would look beautiful online but surely would muddy up on the printing presses. She finished a bottled water with some leftover eggplant parmigiana that had at most one more day of survival in the refrigerator.

Serenity finished the article by writing extensive captions to accompany the photos. By providing the text with the images of Celesta, it would ensure that the overburdened copydesk would publish the pictures, at least online. She’d made a few calls to the numbers that Tulio provided. It seemed that everyone—the police, her employer, and her friends—believed that it was possible she left the country for her mother’s home in El Salvador

Everyone considered it an option but Tulio Pena. He complained to his brothers when he read the paper the next morning: “They are treating Celesta like she doesn’t matter. Like we don’t know her. It is not right. She’s lost, or she’s been taken.”

Or, as he was about to find out, something far worse.

He looked at the article that Serenity Hutchins had published in the paper. Sure, it was only a small-town paper, but in time he’d see his hobby find a place in the pages of newspapers far bigger.
More important
. Serenity would get something out of that too, and she’d have him to thank for that, of course.

He ran his fingertip over her byline, smudging it into oblivion.

The blood flowed from his heart to his genitals, and his erection throbbed until he could take it no more. He slipped his hand under the waistband of his underwear.

He knew what he liked.

He pulled up Facebook, logged on with a bogus name and e-mail address, and went to the group called “Girls Who Want Adventure.”

The young woman who’d posted the day before had taken the bait and answered his e-mail offering a job on a boat in Seattle. She was blond, blue-eyed. She had the kind of all-American-girl good looks that advertisers selling cornflakes and diet soda love to feature. He leaned close to the screen as he ejaculated.

Both a methodical hunt and a surprise ambush had their distinct appeal, but this one would be different.

He’d set a trap.

He reached for a Kleenex to mop up the evidence of his arousal.

Yes, she’d be just fine. But when? Timing, as he knew, was everything.

April 4, 10 p.m.
Port Orchard

Serenity Hutchins set down her phone and looked at her notepad. She noticed for the first time that she’d been crying as she wrote down an anonymous caller’s deluge of cruelty. Everything he had said in a flat, barely audible voice had revolted her. She was sick to her stomach. Tears had spattered the top sheet of her reporter’s notebook, sending the blue ink into a swirling bloom. She took a sheet of paper towel and blotted it. The transfer of ink and tears reminded her of blood.

She dialed her editor’s home number.

Charlie Keller was in the middle of a model of a steamship,
Virginia V,
one of the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that flitted from Sinclair Inlet east to Seattle and points southward too. He’d painstakingly created the model himself, out of balsa and fir. His dining room table had been converted to a mini-shipbuilder’s workspace since he’d returned to Port Orchard. It was the only hobby that kept his attention and kept him out of the Indian casinos. His house was a modest one tucked in the ivy-infested woods off Pottery Avenue. It was a three-bedroom with dinged-up wooden floors, a cracked tile countertop in the kitchen, and not a window treatment to be had. Mrs. Keller was missed for many reasons, and the lack of window treatments was somewhere near the bottom on the list of a lonely man. His dog, Andy, a smooth-coated and very overweight dachshund, was curled up on a sofa cushion that Charlie had removed and placed on the floor.

The phone rang, Andy lifted his head, and Charlie got up to answer. It was after ten. As he ambled over to his cell phone on the kitchen counter, he wondered who’d be calling him at this late hour.

It was Serenity.

“Kind of late for a call,” Charlie said somewhat gruffly. He slumped back into his chair and rubbed his socked foot over Andy’s protruding belly.

“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to know what to do here.”

Her voice was shaky. Charlie Keller’s annoyance at the intrusion turned to concern.

“You sound stressed. You okay?”

“No. I’m not. I’m scared. Charlie, I just got off the phone with some freak who says he’s a killer. He said he killed Celesta Delgado. He also said he had plans for another girl.”

Charlie sat down next his model of the Virginia. “Probably a crank. Don’t sweat it. I talked to five Zodiac wannabes when I was down in San Francisco.”

Serenity didn’t think so. “He was so direct about what he did to her. He told me things that he did to the body. Disgusting things.”

“I see,” Charlie said, adjusting some line that he’d coiled on the deck of the boat model. “I’m not saying, Serenity, that he’s absolutely not the killer. But I’d bet this house that it was a crank caller. What exactly did he say?”

“He started by telling me how he subdued her, how she begged him to let her go.”

“Who?”

“Celesta, I guess. Maybe another girl. I don’t know. He says he held her for three days. He…” Serenity looked down at her notes as if she needed to see the words in order to repeat what the caller had said.
As if his words could be erased from her mind.
“He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”

Serenity stopped. She was sobbing, and she hated that she’d fallen apart, even if it was just on the phone.

Charlie wanted to say something gruff and inappropriate about the caller being a Martha Stewart hater or something, but he held his tongue. The young reporter was crumbling.

“Kid, it’ll be all right,” he said, trying to comfort Serenity, and yet glad that he was on the phone with her and not searching for a tissue in his office.

“I guess so,” she said, regaining a measure of composure. “What should I do? Call the sheriff?”

“You
could
. But let’s hold off until tomorrow. First, you don’t know if his info is genuine. Chances are, like I said, it isn’t. Let’s run down the story tomorrow, first thing.”

“I don’t know. I mean, are you sure we shouldn’t call Detective Stark?”

“Look,” he said, “we all have jobs to do. We’ll work the story tomorrow.”

Serenity didn’t want to argue. “If you say so.”

“That I do. Now, are you going to be all right?”

“I think so. Good night, Charlie.”

“Good night, Hutchins.”

He hung up, a slight smile on his face. It wasn’t that he was happy about the fear in her voice. It was the memory of his experiences as a young reporter.

Those days were long gone.

Serenity thought of calling someone else just then, maybe her sister. But she dropped the notion. She was still unnerved by the creepy caller, but her editor was probably right. It had been a crank call. Part of her reasoning was that killers don’t often call to brag about what they’d done. But why
her
? There were far bigger newspapers serving the region: Bremerton had one, Seattle had one, Tacoma too. She could understand why he wouldn’t call a TV or radio station; those would require audio and video for a story.

But why her?

She decided to make a cup of decaffeinated Market Spice tea and take a book to read in bed. While she set a mug of water in the microwave, she walked through the apartment, checking the windows, the front door, and the slider that led to the small balcony. Everything was locked. The microwave dinged, and she took her drink and the novel she was reading to her bedroom.

Yes, she thought, the caller had to be a fake.

As the crow flies, the man who’d called wasn’t far from the Mariner’s Glen apartments, where the reporter lived. He emerged from the seldom-used bank of phones in the back of the bar at the China West Restaurant and ordered another beer.

A plump man in his late fifties, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki vest that he couldn’t have buttoned if he’d tried, sat on his right, staring straight ahead as the bartender went about her business.

He slipped the prepaid phone card inside his wallet.

“Old lady pissing you off?” the man in the vest asked.

“Huh?”

“You were on the phone. Just figured your old lady was bitching at you like mine does.”

The bartender sent down a beer.

“Yeah. Never stops.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m in the same boat with you and every other guy. I’d like to shut that bitch up.”

The man sipped his beer. He wasn’t thinking of his wife just then. He had his mind on another woman.

“Yeah, shutting her up is good,” he said. “Sometimes I’d like to shut her up permanently.”

“Tell me about it.”

The man just smiled. He’d already told someone about it. And that felt really good.

Trey Vedder’s father, a prominent Bremerton dentist, thought his son’s lack of drive and tepid enthusiasm meant that he’d been given too much too soon. The nineteen-year-old college dropout didn’t seem to mind one whit when his grades from Washington State University dipped low enough for the academic watch list. His father thought otherwise and yanked him out “faster than an abscessed tooth” and told him he’d work a year. He had one caveat: “It’ll be with your hands and back instead of your brain. You need to see what’s out there for those who miss the boat.”

Trey took “the boat” literally: he took a job at a Port Orchard marina cleaning the dock, helping the harbormaster, doing whatever needed to get done.

It was late afternoon, and Sinclair Inlet was darkening as the sun moved west toward the Olympics. The foothills faded behind some feathery clouds.

“Need any help?” Trey said, more out of boredom than the desire to be genuinely helpful.

The captain of a thirty-five-foot Sea Ray, the
Saltshaker
, shook his head. “Got it handled, kid,” he said.

The teenager held his hand out to catch the line anyway, and the captain gave in and tossed it in his direction.

“How’s the fishin’?” Trey asked, securing the blue nylon rope.

The captain cut the motor. “Wasn’t fishing.”

Trey looked over at a white plastic bucket on the deck. He thought it contained chum used as bait. Inside, red liquid swirled to conceal what, with a little more scrutiny, he made out as a pair of gloves.

“Nope. Just a little redwood stain job in the galley,” he said. “I’ll dispose of the bucket at the transfer station.”

Trey nodded as the man snatched up the bucket. The remark, however, struck him as a little odd. A lot of boats in the harbor had redwood-stained woodwork. But he’d been inside the
Saltshaker
.

It was fiberglass, aluminum, and vinyl.