by Gregg Olsen
“Okay,” Marley says. “Look here, at this exchange, where Ellie’s replies are all emojis.”
I wish my mom would die.
:)
She treats me like crap.
>:(
I wish she would just die.
Happy Dance.
“Throughout all this time, Ellie was encouraging her,” I say. “Feeding Tyra what she needed to hear. I suspect she was living in her own fantasy world of wanting to see how far someone could go. How far with a gentle and persistent nudge?”
“Okay, but what does it have to do with our case?” Sheriff asks.
“Turn to page 245,” Marley says.
“Already there,” I answer.
“First,” he goes on, “the highlight reel.” He opens the folder marked Joshua. “This one has photos too. Let’s start with the timeline. Joshua and Ellie meet online two months before the murder of her parents, overlapping what happened to Tyra’s mom.”
“How did they meet?” Sheriff asks.
I take this one. “On a social media site for kids whose parents don’t understand them.”
He rolls his eyes. “What? Does it have 100 million members?”
“Make that 2.5 million,” Marley says.
“I thought he was forbidden to be online. Her too.”
“You don’t have teenagers, Sheriff,” Marley replies. “Kids find a way.”
“So they connect on the site and start talking,” I go on. “His parents are too controlling. His dad is a religious freak. Her dad is the same. Her mom is clueless. And so forth. Innocuous at first as they try to one-up each other on how bad their dads and moms are. Then the relationship started to move to a romantic vibe.”
Ellie: I feel so lonely. So trapped.
Josh: Hate that you feel that way.
Ellie: Wish I could be with you.
Josh: Rents won’t let me date until I’m 21.
Ellie: Oh God. Mine are the same way!
“She makes a mention of Tyra’s mother’s purported accident a couple days after the incident,” I note, pointing out the text.
Ellie: Sorry so quiet. BF’s mom drowned.
Josh: Wow. That’s terrible.
Ellie: I don’t know.
Josh: What?
Ellie: You’ll think bad of me.
Josh: Never.
Ellie: She was a very cruel woman. I’m not sorry. My friend is better off.
Josh: I don’t know what to say.
Ellie: I shouldn’t have said that, babe.
Josh: I wish my parents were dead.
Ellie: If mine were gone, we’d be together, wouldn’t we?
Josh: Forever.
I indicate the timeline. “Two weeks later her parents were dead, and Ellie was presumed drowned.”
Sheriff narrows his brow as he thumbs through the pages.
“They don’t plot to kill their folks?”
“Not online,” I answer. “The phone was used only for another few days. The last call, however, was between Joshua and Ellie. We don’t know what they said. At some point after they talked, it was tossed into the neighbor’s yard where I recovered it.”
I look at my phone.
“Joshua has been released from the hospital, arraigned on first-degree murder charges for his mother’s homicide. He’s not talking.”
“I wonder why,” Sheriff says.
Marley nods.
“The interesting ones never talk until they’ve been in custody for a few years.”
I smile.
“Yeah, it’s kind of lonely there.”
Forty-Three
Aunt Laurna, Ellie and her lawyer—resplendent in an Italian suit that I’m immediately convinced the likes of which have never crossed our county line—sit in a row behind a table in the jail’s visiting room. Ellie’s youthful beauty has been eclipsed by her jail-issue jumpsuit. She wears no makeup. Laurna, the foolish do-gooder, is dressed in a smart suit of her own, a thick gold chain around her neck, equally costly, and garish gold earrings dangle like wind chimes.
As I sit down, I can’t help but label each of the three.
Denier.
Killer.
Mercedes.
Mercedes introduces himself. His name is Clifton Scott; he’s a partner with blah, blah, blah.
“I’m representing Ellie here,” he says.
I change his name to Obvious.
Laurna nods at me but doesn’t say a word. I wonder if she’s hired the high-priced attorney out of guilt for coming forward after seeing Ellie’s picture. Her loyalties are a mystery. The girl sitting to her left killed her sister and brother-in-law. I’m thinking now that their family album is a book of horrors.
Ellie just sits there, smugly and silently. It passes through my mind that this might be a new role for her. No longer the one pushing buttons herself but enlisting a lawyer to do so. I set that aside straight away. She had Joshua do her bidding.
“Why are we here?” I ask.
“I’ve negotiated a deal with the prosecutor’s office.”
“I’ve heard you were trying.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here, Detective.”
I know that the deal is contingent on Ellie’s disclosure on a matter related to the case. I also know that she’s going to do time in our system for the assault on her accomplice, Joshua Wheaton, and threatening an officer. And yes, the murders of the Wheatons. She’s tangled up in that too.
“We have evidence that proves she wasn’t there when the Wheatons were killed, but that’s not what we need to tell you.”
“You don’t need to tell me anything, Mr. Scott.”
“No. I don’t. But in exchange for the information I’m going to tell you, the prosecutor has agreed to lesser charges and an immediate extradition to Clallam County, where they will charge my client with the second-degree murder of her parents.”
None of this surprises me. Girls like Ellie always manage to land on their feet.
“Okay, fine,” I say through slightly clenched teeth. “Testifying against Joshua Wheaton isn’t exactly a surprise to me. I figured she’d flip the second she had her fingers and palms scanned and had a mug shot taken.”
Clifton Scott gives me a condescending half smile manifested out of reasonably natural veneers. Laurna pats Ellie on the shoulder, wind chimes tinkling. Ellie shrugs and her belly chains rattle the table.
The lawyer speaks up. “Ellie has agreed to give you the name of Mrs. Wheaton’s killer.”
I crinkle my brow. “We know who that is already. What we don’t know is the location of Sarah’s body.”
“I’m prepared to tell you both, Detective.”
The drive to Leavenworth, Washington, is among the most beautiful in a state known for its scenery. The highway cuts up and through the Cascades, with drifts of snow and conifers stunted by altitude and ice.
Before leaving, Sheriff told me to contact local law enforcement and asked if I needed backup from here. I told him I’d already made the call and that I was fine.
“Bring me back a murderer,” he said.
“Will do.”
“And one of those German pretzels too.”
“That goes without saying.”
Leavenworth is distinctly an American oddity. Nestled in the Cascades along tumbling Icicle Creek, it bills itself as a Bavarian village, a gamble to save the town from dying by mandating a makeover. It worked. It’s a town dripping in gingerbread, beer steins; women in dirndls and men in lederhosen. Every business from the grocer to one of the countless cuckoo clock purveyors is required to adopt the Bavarian theme in signage and architecture. Whether it makes sense or not.
Hence, Der Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I find a spot in the parking lot at Chelan County Sheriff’s Office. Before going inside, I make a call to the school that Ellie had offered as part of her arrangement with the prosecutor’s office. I speak briefly with the head administrator, Paul Singer, asking if the subject is there. I tell him only ver
y little, but I can easily sense his distress. I text him a photo.
“Yeah,” he says, “that’s her. Can you come after the kids are out? Staff stay an extra hour or so to plan the next day.”
“That would be perfect. I’m at the sheriff’s now and will be there no earlier than four.”
“Okay,” he replies.
Forty-Four
Paul Singer sits silently in his bleak, impersonal office, a whiteboard, some drawings his dad had made when he was in college, a poster of the private school’s mascot, a falcon. The call from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Detective Carpenter has rattled him big time. She’d indicated that his most recent hire was in major trouble. Criminal trouble. Sweat begins to bloom under his arms. He’s made a mistake, something he was loath to do.
A big one too.
He thinks back to the new teacher’s interview at tiny Orchard School. Becky Webster was everything the kids between Leavenworth and Cashmere had hoped for in a small school. Young, kind and beautiful. She wore her hair shoulder length and dressed in stylish clothes. The kids at the school were a lively mix of disadvantaged locals and seasonal agricultural workers who toiled up and down the West Coast. Teachers worked there for the love of what they did, certainly not for money.
While the detective didn’t specifically say what trouble Becky was in, he knew the fallout would not be pretty. He was worried for himself, of course, but also for the school. The work they were doing was important.
He reaches for the tissue box to capture the excess moisture under his arms.
Becky told him that her paperwork was in her luggage that had been lost on the train, but her credentials were solid.
She was so damn beautiful.
No problem, he’d told her, smiling. It was a lingering smile.
His jaws tighten, then relax.
He looks down at her application, remembering.
Sorry about your folks.
Car accident. Went off into a ravine in the mountains out West.
That’s awful. No emergency contact? Sibling, maybe?
None.
Forty-Five
I check my rearview mirror: two deputies follow my Taurus as we speed past row upon row of apple, cherry, peach and plum trees. Ripening fruit dangles from propped up branches and I crack my window. I’m not sure but I think I can smell the Honey Crisps that are my go-to apple. I peek at my phone, noting new texts from Mindy and Dan. I don’t read either. My focus right now is to bring home a killer.
Orchard School is at the end of a long, narrow gravel lane, bordered by farmland and homes that appear, sad and slumped into the landscape. It’s a world just barely getting by. It reminds me of Snow Creek and how the lottery of where you’re born directs much of one’s life. The main building has a cinderblock façade that’s been painted with what I expect are school colors: bus yellow and midnight blue. A school flag of a bird of prey flutters under the American flag on a pole adjacent to the entrance. A dozen cars are parked to the west of the building; beyond those are a playfield and two large trailers, which I presume are used as classrooms when enrollment is up.
I tell the deputies to keep back.
“Guys,” I remind them, “let’s keep it low key. I’ll park and go in. I want you to stay back and come in five minutes later. Set a timer or something. Alarming her in a place like this could make all three of us famous for all the wrong reasons.”
I check in at the front desk and am quickly escorted to the administrator’s office.
Paul Singer looks up from the job application.
“You wouldn’t come this far if this wasn’t bad.”
I slide into a seat across from his blank, hospital-clean desk. I want to ask how long he’s been there, if his clean office is an indication that he’s ready to bolt if he gets a better offer. But I don’t. He’s sweating, and I find it hard to keep my eyes off the leakage oozing out from his armpits.
“It’s serious. But this will go down easy.”
I show him the photo I’d sent over.
“You sure this is her?”
He takes my phone and studies the photograph.
“Yeah. I’m positive. She seems so nice. So normal.”
He reminds me of the neighbor of a just-discovered serial killer.
“Want me to buzz her now?”
“Tell her you need to go over some paperwork or something.”
He looks wary as he presses an intercom button.
A woman answers.
“Ms. Cathy, is Ms. Webster there?”
“Yep. I’ll get her.”
“Tell her to come down to my office. One of her students is moving away and her mom is here to thank her for the extra help she gave her in reading.”
“Nice,” she says. “On her way now.”
Forty-Six
The clacking of heels announces Becky Webster’s arrival even before she knocks on the door to the administrator’s blank little office.
“Come on in, Becky.”
The door opens to reveal a lithe blond with blue eyes and only a touch of eye shadow.
She looks at me, then at her boss. A confused expression comes across her pretty face.
“Cathy said there was a parent here. I don’t recognize you. I’m sorry.”
I tell her to sit.
“I recognize you, Sarah.”
Her neck grows taut, like rubber bands nearly stretched to snapping.
“My name is Becky, not Sarah.”
I hold out my phone and show her the same family portrait that had hung on the wall in the Wheaton living room.
Her hands grip the arms of the chair.
“That’s not me. I mean, it looks like me. It’s definitely not me.”
She’s pulling herself under. Inside she’s clawing at the surface and trying with all she can to find a way out.
There is no way out.
“I know what you did,” I tell her. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do anything.”
In a flash she bolts for the door. She’s unsteady. She’s a blinded deer on an icy road. My new best friends from Chelan County are right there to stop her. She sinks to the shiny linoleum floor, splayed out like a broken doll.
Her face is flushed and she’s sobbing.
“Sarah Wheaton, you’re under arrest for the murder of your parents, Merritt and Ida Wheaton.”
I finish reading her rights while cuffing her on the way to the car, thanking the Chelan deputies for their help and promise to follow up when I get back to the office.
Sarah is a sad, broken record.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she cries, taking her place in the back seat. “I didn’t want my brother to do it. I told him that it was wrong. That he could go to jail.”
She’s been following the news.
“Remember,” I caution, “anything you say can and will be used against you in court.”
I tell her she can have a lawyer appointed free of charge.
“I know,” she says. “But I really didn’t do anything wrong.”
I merge on Highway 2 and head west. I didn’t get the pretzel, but I did bring home a killer. Sheriff will be both elated and disappointed. I want to call in with an update. But I don’t.
Sarah wants to talk.
“My mom and I came into the workshop. Joshua had just killed our father.” She stops to remember or to fabricate her story.
I’ll know in a moment which.
“My dad was molesting me, Detective Carpenter. He had been for years. When Joshua found out he told me he was going to put a stop to it. I thought he was going to call the sheriff. He didn’t. When my mom and I went into his workshop that night it was because we heard them fighting. Fighting more than normal.”
As she speaks my eyes leave the road longer than they should as I watch her in the mirror.
“Your father was molesting you.”
She senses my sympathy and pounces on
it as some kind of common ground that will work some magic and somehow save her where her brother had failed.
“Yes. It was terrible.”
“And no one knew.”
“Not until I told my brother.”
While I’m an accomplished liar, I sometimes hate the game. This is one of those times. She’s young and out of her league. What she’ll tell me next, I think, will be a lie.
“Your mom didn’t know.”
She shakes her head.
“Really,” I say.
“Yes. She had no idea.”
“What happened to her in the hut that night, when the two of you went inside to find Joshua killing your father?”
She stays quiet for a long time. I’m hopeful that what she’ll say next will correct the record.
No such luck.
“My mother ran to help my dad, and Joshua went crazy. He hit her with the hammer. She went down to the floor. Blood everywhere.”
“Ellie told me another story.”
“Ellie wasn’t there.”
“You’re right. But she knows things, doesn’t she?”
“She couldn’t know anything, Detective. I was gone before she got there.”
“I said I believe you were molested. Don’t screw things up by lying to me, Sarah.”
She looks out the window. Tears flow from both eyes. She’s being pulled under again.
This time, for real.
“Okay. I’ll tell you.”
Sarah Wheaton promised herself that she’d been violated by her father for the last time. She lay still in her bed as he passed by her room. She prayed that he wouldn’t return for a second visit that night. Sometimes he did. Other times, weeks would pass, and she’d tried to convince herself that what he’d been doing to her since she was four was over. She told herself that, at sixteen, whatever had attracted him to her as a little girl, had finally outgrown him.
Wishful thinking, she found out, takes the mind on a journey to false hope.
What Sarah told Joshua the year before, though, had made it sound as if it had been only one time, and it hadn’t been full-on intercourse, but merely fondling her while she slept. Her story was sketchy on purpose. She wanted Joshua to draw more out of her, help her. False hope. He said that he’d stick around until she was eighteen and then both of them would get out of there.
