Emily Rudd’s parents seem like practical people. Determined, eager to be helpful, motivated to get to the answer in the most efficient way possible. Kaiser decides it’s time to be honest with them.
“I want to be straight with you here,” he says. “When we found Emily, we found another victim as well. A woman.”
The parents exchange a look.
“You think it’s Sasha,” Daniel says flatly. “You must, or else you wouldn’t have asked all those questions. Look, like I told you, Sasha had zero relationship with Emily. Any contact we had with her was between us—”
“Is it okay if I show you a picture?” Kaiser asks, pulling out his phone. “It’s of the female victim.”
Lara shakes her head. Sighing, Daniel holds his hand out for the phone. Kaiser figured out how to use the censor-bar app Kim downloaded for Claire Toliver, and he’d cropped the photo to show only the victim’s face. He doesn’t plan to tell Emily’s parents that the woman was dismembered, and that the head isn’t actually attached to a body.
The man looks at the photo. His expression doesn’t change. Again, Kaiser figures it must be his surgeon’s poker face. “Well, it certainly resembles Sasha. Same nose, same chin. What’s with the black bar?”
“There’s significant damage to the eye area.”
Daniel rolls his eyes. “I’m a trauma surgeon, Detective. I had a teenager come in the other week with a detached eyeball due to head trauma. Popped out during a football game and was dangling from his goddamned eye socket. I see things like that, and much worse, every day. If you show me the uncensored version, I can probably verify that it’s her.”
Kaiser sighs. Swipes to change the photo. The uncensored photo causes Daniel Rudd to blink exactly once, but that’s it. The man is unshakeable.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s Sasha.” Short and to the point.
Lara makes no move to look at the phone, so Kaiser slips it back into his pocket.
“How was she killed?” Daniel asks, standing up. He begins to pace. The calm demeanor is beginning to fade.
“Strangulation, we think,” Kaiser says, and stops there. “We’ll confirm cause of death later today.”
“Why did you want to know about Emily’s biological father?” From the tone of Daniel’s voice, it’s clear he’s growing agitated. “Do you think he had something to do with this?” When Kaiser doesn’t respond right away, he stops pacing. “My god. You do.”
“We’re looking at him as a suspect, yes.”
“But you don’t know his name,” Daniel says. He exchanges another look with his wife. “Oh, hell. You do.”
“I can’t believe this.” Lara’s voice cracks, and she buries her face in her hands. The grief, pushed away earlier, is beginning to surge back, and her breathing is becoming shallow. “You think Emily’s own biological father killed her, and Sasha. What kind of depraved—” She stops, then gasps, as if hearing what she just said. “It was genetic.” Her breathing becomes more rapid, and a light sheen of sweat appears above her brow. “That’s where Emily got it from. Oh god. Oh god, I don’t understand any of this. Why would he kill his own child?”
“Deep breaths,” Daniel says, looking over at his wife with concern, pacing once again.
“I know what to do,” Lara snaps. It’s the first time she’s spoken sharply to her husband. She takes several deep breaths, her chest expanding and contracting in an exaggerated way, and after a half-dozen or so breaths, she calms down. “You should talk to Sasha’s grandmother. She mentioned they were close, that her grandmother was the only person who stood by her through the drugs and the drinking. She might be able to confirm whether the person who murdered our daughter is the person you’re thinking it is.”
“What’s his name?” Daniel asks. He’s sitting beside his wife, but they’re inches apart, not touching, not looking at each other. “The killer?”
“I’d rather not say until I know for sure,” Kaiser says.
“Well, I hope you catch the sonofabitch,” the man says. “And I hope he tries to attack you, so you can kill him.”
“Dan,” his wife says, but her voice is weak. She’s not disagreeing.
At this point, secretly, Kaiser doesn’t disagree, either.
26
The Willows is a pretty name for a group of run-down trailers in a clearing off Highway 99. There are about four dozen of them in various sizes, all white, all dirty, propped up on two-by-fours. In the middle of the trailer park are a handful of wood picnic tables and a run-down play center for kids, complete with a broken swing set and a cracked slide. The place is depressing, and despite the name, there’s not a willow tree in sight.
Emily Rudd’s biological great-grandmother lives in a trailer at the back of the park, indistinguishable from the rest, save for four rose bushes not currently in bloom. Kaiser imagines they’ll look quite beautiful in the spring. Stepping up onto the cracked wood porch, he knocks on the door.
An elderly woman answers. Round and bosomy, she appraises him through the chipped screen. Her fluffy hair is mostly white with a few specks of black, her blue floral-print housedress clean and pressed. Reading glasses hang around her neck, attached to a string of tiny seashells.
“Can I help you?” she says through the screen.
Kaiser holds up his badge. “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I’m looking for Caroline Robinson.”
“You’ve found her.”
He blinks, surprised. Emily Rudd appeared to be white, as did her biological mother, so Kaiser assumed that Sasha’s grandmother would be white, too. But the woman standing in front of him is black, her skin the color of coffee with a few drops of cream. Serves him right for making assumptions.
“I’m Detective Kaiser Brody, Seattle PD. I’m here to talk to you about Sasha.”
The woman’s eyes narrow. She has to be in her mid-eighties, but he has the feeling that she’s sharp as a tack. “What are you accusing her of now?”
It’s an interesting way to phrase the question. As the grandmother of a drug addict, Kaiser might have expected a more weary response. But the woman is on already on Sasha’s side. Which will make the death notification even harder.
“Not a thing, ma’am,” he says. “Can I come in?”
“Then she’s dead?” Caroline Robinson’s voice is steady, but the screen door jiggles a bit.
He would have preferred to tell her inside, but she’s not giving him a choice. “Yes, ma’am, she is. I’m so sorry.”
“Come in.” She opens the screen door.
Kaiser steps into the trailer, which turns out to be larger than it looks from the outside. The entryway is between the kitchen and the living room, marked by a colorful doormat that reads WELCOME in bold letters. The kitchen is light blue, the cabinets painted white with clear plastic knobs. Floral curtains hang at the window, and potted wildflowers brighten up the small round table, which could comfortably seat three; four if you squished. Appliances are circa the early 1980s, but pristine. The living room is pale yellow, the brown carpet frayed but spotless. It’s sparsely decorated with a plaid sofa bed and wooden coffee table, a thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV on the console. Ellen is on, but the volume’s been muted. At the back of the trailer are two bedrooms.
It’s as nice a trailer as Kaiser has ever seen. The smell of fresh coffee permeates the space, and he spies a fresh pot on the counter.
“Would you like a cup?” Mrs. Robinson asks, following his gaze. “I know it’s the afternoon, but it’s my one vice.”
“We have that in common,” Kaiser says. “And I would love one, thank you.”
She pours for them both, then gestures to the counter where she’s laid out cream and sugar. He declines both, and waits while she fixes her coffee and then settles herself at the small table.
“What happened to my granddaughter?” she asks after they’ve both taken a sip.
Kaiser senses Caroline Robinson is the kind of woman who’s been through a lot, and can handle a lot, and would
prefer no sugarcoating, only the truth. He won’t insult her by giving her anything less.
“Sasha’s body was found early this morning, buried in a shallow grave in the woods behind St. Martin’s High School.”
“Buried?” She frowns. “I don’t understand. I assumed it was an overdose. She’s been clean for over six months, but drug addiction is a wicked thing, Detective.”
Kaiser nods. “We’ll be checking for drugs in her system, but for now, it looks like she was murdered.”
A sharp intake of breath. “How?”
“Strangled.” He pauses, then says, “Her biological daughter was found with her. Also strangled.”
Caroline Robinson’s head snaps up. “Emily’s dead?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m deeply sorry.”
“Lord help me,” the woman whispers. Her lip quivers, and for a moment Kaiser thinks she’s going to cry. But she doesn’t. The quiver passes, and she straightens up again, fixing him with those sharp eyes. “Do Emily’s parents know?”
“I was just with them.”
“Sasha didn’t have a relationship with Emily,” Mrs. Robinson says, her forehead creasing. “I wanted her to when Emily was older, but Sasha thought it was a bad idea. She didn’t want her baby to know who she was. She wanted a better life for her. What were they even doing together?”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.”
The woman looks at him closely. “I can spot a liar from a hundred feet, Detective. Comes with living with drug addicts my whole life. What aren’t you telling me? You’re deliberately leaving something out, and I would very much like to know what it is.”
If it were appropriate, Kaiser would smile, but it isn’t. “Sasha was … we found her body dismembered, ma’am. It likely happened after her death,” he adds, as if that makes it better. “There was a similar murder not long ago. A woman and her biological child were killed and buried the same way.”
“Lord help me,” the old woman says again. Her coffee cup shakes, and she sets it down on top of a coaster made of cork. She cries for a few moments, and Kaiser looks away in an effort to give her some privacy. Then she pulls a handkerchief from her dress pocket and dabs her eyes, calming herself. “I’ve been through a lot, but this takes the cake. Someone cut my baby girl up? Why?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he says, and it’s the truth. “I’m so sorry.”
It’s the one piece he hasn’t figured out yet. Other than Angela, none of Calvin James’s other victims were dismembered, and Kaiser’s best guess is that the Sweetbay Strangler is somehow trying to recapture how it felt that first time with Angela Wong.
“You said this is similar to another crime. Is it a serial killer?”
“We have a theory that it might be, yes,” he says.
Caroline Robinson lets out a long breath. “I’ve expected someone like you to show up for years now to tell me Sasha was dead, but not quite like this.” She speaks plainly. “My granddaughter’s been an addict since she was fourteen, treated her body like a garbage can. Started by smoking weed in the woods behind the trailer park with the other kids. Almost an impossible thing to prevent, when it’s the parents’ stashes they’re helping themselves to. Eventually she graduated to painkillers—mine, mostly—and when she ran out of those, she started on heroin. That was the beginning of the end. In and out of drug treatment for three years. She was living here when she got pregnant, and I actually thought it might have been the best thing that happened to her, because it forced her to get clean. I didn’t even have to ask her. When she got the positive pregnancy test, she just stopped, cold turkey. And I said to myself, thank the lord. Maybe the dark days are over. I assumed she was keeping the baby, and that we’d raise the child together.”
Kaiser nods.
“Three months into her pregnancy, it hit her what she was in for. She asked me what I thought about adoption, and I told her I’d support whatever she wanted to do. She went back and forth for a bit.” The crease between the woman’s brows deepens, and she looks away, remembering. “One day she wanted it, the next day she didn’t. She was terrified the baby would grow up to be like her. Despite my best efforts, Sasha had very little self-esteem. Her mother—my daughter—was a junkie, too, got stabbed in the neck fighting with another junkie when Sasha was only two. She never knew her father. He died of an overdose the year she was born. Sasha never finished high school, but she was far from stupid. She recognized the pattern, knew that if she raised her baby here, the chances that the same thing that happened to her parents and to her would happen to her little girl. She wanted better for her baby.”
Kaiser offered a small smile. “You seem to be doing well.”
“I don’t have the gene,” Mrs. Robinson said flatly. “Whatever thing it is that makes a person an addict, I don’t have it. My father was a raging alcoholic, but my mother never touched a drop. Oh, I tried it once. Took a shot of my father’s whiskey when he wasn’t looking, found it disgusting. Smoked once, too, and felt physically ill for a whole day after. They say addiction’s genetic, and I believe it. I grew up surrounded by it my whole life and was never tempted.”
Kaiser nods again, and they sip their coffee in silence for a moment. Then, “Did Sasha tell you anything about Emily’s father?”
“Not much. It didn’t last long, and she mentioned he was a bit transient, always moving from place to place. I met him once. I didn’t like that he was older, but he seemed nice enough.”
“You met him?” Kaiser says, surprised.
“He dropped her off one evening while I was taking the garbage out. Forced him to talk to me.” A small smile. “He got out of the car. Handsome.”
“Can I show you a photo?” When she nods, Kaiser pulls out his phone. “Is this the father?”
Caroline Robinson puts her glasses on, the seashells around her neck dangling. “Yes,” she says after a few seconds, peering at the screen. The photo was Calvin James’s mug shot. “He looked a lot different when we met, but that’s him. I think his name was Kevin. Wait, no, that’s not right. It was Calvin. Like the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.”
Kaiser lets out a breath. “I know this was four years ago, but do you remember anything distinctive about him? Was his hair dark like in this picture?”
“No, it was a lighter brown, longer, a bit shaggy. He had a scruffy beard and glasses. I also remember he had a tattoo on his wrist. Here, on the inside,” she says, tapping the spot two inches below her palm.
Calvin James had not had a single tattoo when Kaiser arrested him, so he’d have to have gotten inked in prison, or soon after he escaped. “What did it look like?”
“It was a heart,” Mrs. Robinson says. “Red. But just the outline. I think there were initials inside, but I don’t remember what they were. I only caught a glimpse of it when he shook my hand.”
Kaiser has a pretty good guess what the initials are. He thinks back to the sheet of paper Calvin doodled on during the trial. He’d drawn a heart. And inside it, GS. For Georgina Shaw.
“Do you remember the car he was driving?”
She shakes her head. “Oh, lord, I don’t know much about cars. It was nice, though, like a muscle car. American.”
“Washington plates?”
“I didn’t look.”
“Color?” Kaiser couldn’t imagine Calvin would still be driving the red Trans Am he’d had back in the day.
“Black,” she says. “I think.”
Not the same car, then. But Calvin James did like his American muscle cars. He’d been driving a blue Mustang the day Kaiser had arrested him near the Canadian border.
Caroline Robinson stands, heading into the living room. She motions for Kaiser to follow her, and he does. On the living room end table is a framed photo, and she hands it to him.
“I know you saw Sasha dead,” she says. “This is what she looked like in life. She was only eighteen here, in her second trimester, and completely clean. She was beautiful.” There are tea
rs in the woman’s eyes, and her hands shake. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any recent photos of her.”
She isn’t exaggerating; if anything, she’s understating. Sasha Robinson was gorgeous. Tall, maddeningly curvy, her tawny skin tone the only hint of her black ancestry. Her eyes were dark, her hair long and brown. She appears to be sitting on one of the picnic tables in the courtyard outside the trailer, long legs crossed, her flowy dress disguising whatever pregnancy bump she might have had. Kaiser stares at the photo, his breath catching in his throat.
Sasha Robinson is a dead ringer for Georgina as a teenager. The resemblance is not only striking, it’s … uncanny.
Come to think of it, Claire Toliver resembled Sasha, too. Long dark hair, golden complexion, voluptuous. Lush was the word Kaiser remembered thinking to himself. Like Sasha Robinson.
Like Georgina Shaw.
“She was beautiful,” Kaiser finally says, and he means it. “Again, I’m so sorry for your loss. I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs. Robinson. Thanks for your time.”
He heads back to the kitchen, finishes his coffee in one gulp, then quickly washes his mug in the sink, placing it on the dish rack to dry. When he turns back toward Mrs. Robinson, she’s smiling.
“Your mama raised you right.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He smiles back.
“You’re a lot more polite than the other person who came around the other day, asking questions about Sasha. Actually, when you knocked on the door, at first I thought you were him.”
Kaiser frowns. “What other person?”
“Oh, it was a week ago, maybe a little longer,” she says. “Some young man knocked on the door, said he worked for social services and was doing a follow-up on Sasha and how she was doing. She’d been to state-sponsored rehab twice and had recently reapplied for welfare, so I wasn’t overly surprised at the visit. He got a bit rude when I told him she wasn’t home, and when I refused to tell him where she was, he acted like I was personally trying to inconvenience him. I didn’t like his attitude and told him so. These millennials, I tell you. They don’t know how to move in the world, if that makes any sense.”
Jar of Hearts Page 24
