The Bone Box

by Gregg Olsen

  “What are you doing?” Anna Jo said, grabbing at Lydia and the knife as she sank to the floor. Blood splattered over her bra as she moved her hand over her breast to stop the bleeding.

  “You’re getting what you deserve!” Lydia said as she stared down at the girl fighting for her life.

  “Stop! You’re killing me!” Anna Jo said, as she tried to regain her footing. Halfway up, she slipped on her own pooling blood.

  The scene was beyond frenetic. Lydia stood over Anna Jo, working the knife like a piston. Over and over. Twenty-seven times. Later, when she spoke of what she’d done, she was unsure if Anna Jo’s last words were really as she remembered them or if they had melded into some twisted fantasy of what had happened in Ponder’s cabin all those years ago.

  “Finally, got some passion,” Anna Jo said.

  Or maybe she didn’t say anything at all. She died after the second or third stab into her carotid artery.

  Lydia looked up as her husband entered the cabin.

  “Good God, what did you do, Lydia?” Jim Derby asked, his eyes terror-filled as he dropped down next to his lover.

  “I fixed your mess. Now you clean it up,” she said.

  Jim reached for Anna Jo’s blood-soaked neck for a pulse.

  “Anna Jo?” came a voice outside the cabin.

  It was Tommy.

  Jim led his now silent, almost catatonic, wife toward the back door.

  “I’ll clean up your mess, Lydia. I guess I owe you.”

  In a beat, he’d returned, pretending to see Anna Jo’s body for the first time. Tommy was crying and trying to give his girlfriend mouth to mouth. His whole body was shaking. He picked up the knife and looked at it like it was some kind of mysterious object.

  “Get out of here, and get rid of the knife. I’ll clean this up.”

  “Who did this?” Tommy said.

  The detective hooked his hand under Tommy’s armpit and lifted him to his feet.

  “Just keep your mouth shut. I’ll help you,” Jim said. “Get rid of the knife and get out of here.”

  “My husband later told me how he rearranged the crime scene. How he’d wiped away my footprints. Blamed his own on an uncharacteristic lapse in detective protocol. He called Tommy’s appearance at the cabin a gift,” Lydia said, looking at Jim. “I believe you said he was the ‘perfect patsy,’ ” she said.

  With Birdy looking on in the expansive comfort of the Derbys’ magnificent living room, Lydia was crying her heart out as she confessed to what she’d done. She was literally crumbling into pieces, but Jim “Mr. Family Man for All People” just sat there. He didn’t even try to calm his wife. Birdy wondered what he was thinking about—his political career diving into oblivion? He certainly wasn’t thinking about Lydia.

  Or Tommy.

  Or Anna Jo.

  He got up went for a desk drawer and got his gun.

  “I’ll say I thought you were an intruder,” he said, coming toward Birdy.

  “No, you won’t,” she said. She held up her cell phone. “I’ve had this on speaker. Your old friend Pat-Stan—the one you said was dead—is listening and recording this entire conversation.”

  “You asshole, Jim Derby,” came Pat-Stan’s voice over the cell phone. “I’ve already called the police—and not your bunch of deputies. The state patrol is outside now. Let’s see who has a leg to stand on in court.”

  Tommy Benjamin Freeland took his last breath a week after getting word in his Spokane hospital bed that his cousin Birdy had cleared his name. The medical staff said their patient was unable to respond verbally, but he nodded slightly and managed the briefest of smiles. They were sure he understood.

  Birdy had wanted to go see him, but a homicide case involving a high school boy in Port Orchard kept her planted in the autopsy suite. She left work when she got word of Tommy’s passing.

  Birdy wasn’t a crier, but she couldn’t stop just then. She hurried to her car and drove down the steep hill toward the water. Her mind rolled back to the boy she’d known—the one who had taught her how to fish a creek at night with a flashlight and, in one of her more disgusting lessons, how to dress a deer with only a pocket knife and a whetstone.

  She parked the Prius behind the old abandoned Beachcomber restaurant and looked out at the icy, rippling water of Sinclair Inlet. She knew that she’d done all she could. She had been so late to come to the realization that Tommy had needed her all those years. It made her sick and sad.

  Tommy, we let you down. I let you down....

  A young bald eagle, its feathers still a root beer float of brown and white, swooped down to the water and grabbed the silvery sliver of a fish. Its wings pounded the air like the loudest heartbeat imaginable as the bird lifted a small salmon and carried it upward to the cloud-shrouded sun.

  Birdy Waterman was a scientist, a doctor. But she was a Makah and that meant a millennium of tradition and lore had been woven into her soul. Her connection to the water, the air, and the creatures that inhabited the natural world was different from that of people who didn’t depend directly on it for their very existence. She watched the eagle as it screeched skyward, its talons skewering the now motionless fish.

  Birdy felt a whisper come to her ears. It was gentle, like a breath of a lover.

  “I’m free,” the wind said.

  She cradled her eyes in the crook of her elbow and then looked out the windshield as she watched the young eagle fly away.

  Tommy was at rest. He, finally, was free. And so was Kenny Holloway. The prison guard from Walla Walla who’d set all the events in motion called her after his mother and stepfather’s arrest for murder and conspiracy. He wasn’t celebratory, just grateful for the outcome.

  “You meet all kinds of people in prison,” he said. “Some bad with no possibility of redemption. And then sometimes you meet someone like your cousin. If he’d given the slightest reason to continue the cover-up, I would have done so. My mother did what she thought she had to do and that monster she’s married to made it all happen. I wrote the letter to you, because I knew you’d be the one to help fix the big ugly mess.”

  “Why didn’t you just come out and tell me?” she asked.

  “Telling something to someone gets you nowhere. Your cousin had been saying all these years that he was innocent, yet no one listened. Someone like you had to find out what happened.”

  Kenny Holloway ended the call with a thank-you.

  “You did more for me than just about anyone,” he said. “Anyone but Tommy, that is.”

  Inside her house, the Bone Box was lighter than it had been. Tommy’s case file would not be thrown away, but no longer did it feel right to keep it there. There were the cases of a little girl found drowned off the fishing pier in Manchester; the two teenage boys from Bainbridge Island who had supposedly killed themselves in a secret pact; and so many others. It surprised her how many there were. How many times she second-guessed the results of the cases in which things just didn’t add up. All the cases were different. All deserved another look.

  Birdy turned off the light and slid under the covers. Her mother was right about one thing. She was never satisfied. That night as she went to sleep she remembered how she and Tommy had picked huckleberries and foraged for firewood. She imagined his laugh.

  She’d fish through that box again. If all else had failed, if someone had gotten away with murder, maybe she could put her intuition and forensic science to good use. For Tommy and the others whose voices were never heard—some living, some dead.

  Keep reading for more excitement from Gregg Olsen!

  We hope you will enjoy this chapter from

  Fear Collector

  Coming from Pinnacle in August 2012 in both print and e-book formats

  Lisa Lancaster could not make up her mind. A willowy brunette with wavy shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes stood outside of the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do. With
her hair. Her major. Her life.

  Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had more to do with the wide breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in student loans.

  And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

  Lisa was talking to her best friend of the moment, Naomi, when she first noticed a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.

  Lisa rolled her eyes and turned away.

  “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

  “This campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

  “Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

  “Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good.”

  “Mine neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents too.”

  The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

  “God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”

  “Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

  Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored.

  “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm droop a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

  “You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

  “Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

  Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

  Unlike the woman walking toward him, Jeremy Howell had a singular focus. Once he’d found out who he was, he’d known that it was his birthright to follow in footsteps marked with his own DNA.

  And that of his father.

  He bent over and fell to the pavement. He pretended that one of the crutches was just out of reach.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Lisa said.

  He looked up at her with an embarrassed half smile.

  “No,” he said, trying to get on his feet. “I can manage.”

  She stood there, a hand on her hip. She was pretty. Prettier up close than she’d been when he first spotted her. She was smaller than he thought too. That, like her looks, was also a good surprise.

  Smaller bones, likely meant—though he was inexperienced and unsure—an easier go of it in the basement when he went about the business of butchering her. Butchering her, by the way, was as far as Jeremy would ever go.

  The idea of sex with a corpse sickened him. The idea of visiting human remains in the woods of the Pacific Northwest was wholly unappealing. This wasn’t about some psycho sexual conquest, like it had been with his dad, but about control and technique.

  He wanted to take what had been done before and improve it. As if he were revising code on a slow-moving, jagged-looking, computer game. That was cool. It was all about the cool factor and the fame that came with being the best.

  Being better than his father, a man he had never even met, but one he’d admired and fantasized about from the time his mother told him the truth. He’d been cheated a little and he knew it. Other serial killers had unwittingly or purposefully involved their family members. When Jeremy read about Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s proclivity for bringing his little boy while hunting prostitutes along the SeaTac strip, he felt a pang of jealousy. He’d never had that time with his dad.

  That had been taken from him when Jeremy was but a child and his father was strapped into Florida’s Old Sparky. The flip was switched. Human flesh burned and his dad was electrocuted to death. That moment, as much as anything, set things in motion. Not right away, of course. Jeremy was a sleeper cell and it was that night on the Pacific Lutheran University campus that he was awakened.

  The dark-haired girl with the pretty blue eyes had done that. She was a shot of adrenaline. She was a ringer for the others.

  “Let me help you,” Lisa said, bending down and hooking her hands under Jeremy’s arms. He stood wobbly on one leg, like a flamingo at the zoo. A good wind would knock him over. Lisa handed him his other crutch and picked up the backpack.

  “You must be taking some heavy courses,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed about the unintended pun. She got a good look at his face. He actually was a handsome dork, dark hair, large brown eyes, and stylish stubble above his upper lip and on the tip of his chin.

  A goatee in the works?

  Lisa grinned, not outwardly, but inside. The breed existed after all. She’ll tell Naomi the minute she helped him to his car.

  “Where are you parked?” she said.

  “Over there,” he said. “I’m Jeremy, by the way. Jeremy Howell.”

  So sure he was about what he was about to do that he didn’t think twice about using his own name.

  Lisa glanced over at the burnished orange Honda Element, a boxy mini-SUV that was destined to be the VW Bus of the new millennium.

  “Fun car,” she said.

  He shrugged, although with crutches under each arm, shrugging was hard to do. “Good for outdoors stuff. If you go hiking and get mud in the car you can literally hose it out.”

  “I guess that’s good. You like to hike?”

  “I do. Sometimes I like to drive out to the middle of nowhere, pull off the road and just find something cool to look at. A lake. A forest. Someplace where no one goes to.”

  “I’m Lisa, by the way. What are you taking?” she asked, moving the heavy back pack to her other shoulder

  “Biology. Pre-med,” he said, though it was a lie. Inside his backpack were the A, B, and C volumes of old, outdated encyclopedias from his mother’s basement recreation room.

  He’s looking even more handsome, she thought.

  When they got to his car, he directed her to the passenger side.

  “Can you put my books there?” Jeremy asked. “Easier to get to later.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  Jeremy pushed the electronic door lock button on his key fob and Lisa swung open the door.

  “Did some other good Samaritan take a nap in here?” she said, setting the backpack on a seat that had been completely reclined to form a bed.

  Jeremy didn’t answer and Lisa turned to look over her shoulder.

  The young man was standing without crutches, framed by a lamp partially blocked by an oak hanging on to the last of its crinkly, brown leaves. Braided shadows crisscrossed his face like a spiderweb. He was holding one of the crutches like a baseball bat.

  “What the—” she started to say, but her words cut were cut short.

  He’d filled the aluminum tube of the crutch with his grandfather’s lead fishing weights, thinking that a little more heft would be helpful when he swung it at his victim’s head.

  Which he did.

  And it was.

  Lisa’s shoulder bag fell into the gutter and her cell phone cartwheeled on the pavement and broke into pieces. The college student offered no final scream. No real
sound but the slumping of her body against the doorjamb of the Element. In a moment marked by a blur of swift movements and a gasp of air from the victim’s lungs, Jeremy had her inside.

  He looked at her through the passenger window, satisfied and excited. He fixed the image in his memory like a photograph that he’d retrieve later.

  Lisa Lancaster was so beautiful. Sleeping. Like a doll with a swirl of pretty dark hair and perfect little features. Jeremy owned her right then, and a broad and unexpected smile came to his face. Not fear. Not a thumping heart sequestered behind a rib cage somewhere in his body. None of that.

  At that moment, Jeremy Howell understood something about the power of the hunt that had eluded him as he’d planned and stalked his first kill. The rush. The excitement of doing something few dared to do.

  And doing it better than the father he’d admired, though never known. He climbed behind the wheel and twisted the key in the car’s ignition. He let out a little laugh at the pun that came to him just then.

  He really was in his element. In every way.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Throughout his career, Gregg Olsen has demonstrated an ability to create a detailed narrative that offers readers fascinating insights into the lives of people caught in extraordinary circumstances.

  A New York Times bestselling author, Olsen has written eight nonfiction books and five novels, and contributed a short story to a collection edited by Lee Child.

  The award-winning author has been a guest on dozens of national and local television shows, including educational programs for the History Channel, Learning Channel, and Discovery Channel. He has also appeared on Dateline NBC, William Shatner’s Aftermath, Deadly Women on Investigation Discovery, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Today Show, FOX News; CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, MSNBC, Entertainment Tonight, CBS 48 Hours, Oxygen’s Snapped, Court TV’s Catherine Crier Live, Inside Edition, Extra, Access Hollywood, and A&E’s Biography.