Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  That same day, the news vans with their ten-foot-high satellite antennas planted themselves like a high-tech forest along the roadside in front of the Thomases’ South Kitsap home. One reporter, a woman from CNN, complained that she had bladder issues and asked to use his bathroom. He let her do that only one time.

  That evening he watched the news and the reporter showed video that she’d taken of the inside of his house—an “exclusive” that she’d bragged about.

  The second day, Erwin, jittery from too much coffee and an overdose of worry, slumped on the gray leather sofa that had been clawed by their beloved cat, Luanne. He could barely look Kitsap County sheriff’s detective Kendall Stark in the eye as she offered proof that Janie had done what she did of her own volition.

  “She couldn’t, she wouldn’t,” he said, his tone just a little too insistent to be genuine. “She would never have fallen in love with that monster.”

  Kendall nodded. Monster was a good name for Brenda Nevins, a serial killer who cajoled, seduced, blackmailed, and left a trail of bodies all over Washington State.

  Dealing with strangers in situations like the one occupying the detective and the shell-shocked husband was so much easier. Emotions were always part of the process, but with a stranger they simply didn’t carry the same pain.

  Kendall leaned forward. “We have proof, Mr. Thomas,” she said.

  Erwin blinked and slumped deeper into the sofa. “What kind of proof?” His dark eyes flashed a little anger, a little resentment. He turned away and watched Luanne as she rubbed tortoiseshell fur on the raw edges of a cat-scratching post. The distraction was like an extra breath of air. He needed it. Though he’d known Kendall since she was a student at South Kitsap High, he just couldn’t believe her right then.

  “A video,” she answered.

  Erwin looked right at Kendall, a kind of penetrating look that challenged her.

  “What kind of video?” he asked.

  Kendall thought about her words very carefully. The man across from her had the bottom fall out of his world and he didn’t need to know specifically what was held in the less-than-hi-def images on the flash drive that had been recovered from his wife’s bottom desk drawer at the prison where she’d served as superintendent. Someday, in a courtroom, she knew others would see the clip. Erwin, she had no doubt, would beg her to view it. He’d say it was his right to watch it . . . and ultimately that would be true.

  But not right then.

  “An intimate video,” she said.

  Janie Thomas’s husband looked in the direction of the console behind the detective. A row of family photos played out like a tribute to their lives with their son, Joseph, a student at Boise State, who was now on his way home.

  Erwin stayed mute for a very long time.

  “Mr. Thomas,” Kendall said. “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

  Erwin made a face, the kind that telegraphs one of those ambivalent emotions, but is really much more than that. Hurt pride? Embarrassment? Worry?

  “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Detective,” he said, “but sorry isn’t going to help me much right now. So let’s not be sorry. Let’s find Janie.”

  Kendall stood to leave. “We’re on it,” she said. “I promise you, Mr. Thomas, we’ll do everything to bring her home.”

  Erwin kept his eyes on Kendall. But he didn’t get up. He stayed planted on the sofa.

  “She’s not coming back here, Detective,” he said, his tone very firm. Very final. “I hope you find her and put her where she belongs, and that isn’t here with me.”

  And that was it. Silence filled the room and Erwin Thomas indicated the way out with a quick nod. Kendall started for the door—with Janie’s old laptop and iPad. She hoped that when and if they found Janie she’d plead guilty for what she’d done. She hoped that when Janie and Brenda were captured that justice would be swift.

  That Brenda would go back to prison right away.

  That Janie would join her.

  Kendall Stark didn’t want Erwin Thomas to ever see the contents of that video.

  Indeed, she wished she hadn’t seen it. It was one of those things that was unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons. It was like stumbling onto some site on the Internet and having it start playing vile images from which the click of a mouse cannot offer an escape.

  When he first started the process of erasing Janie from his life after the detective left that afternoon, Erwin did so with a sad tenderness. He packed her clothes neatly. He carefully folded a lace top that she’d worn on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary two months before. The high school guidance counselor who’d devoted his life to trying to help kids at South Kitsap had been utterly clueless that his wife had become involved with one of the inmates at the prison. He’d been trained to see when people were covering up, lying, trying to hide something. That she’d committed this terrible crime and facilitated a prison break for a serial killer was almost beside the point.

  She’d made him into a fool. A laughingstock.

  Over the next few hours, his tenderness turned to rage. Clothes, jewelry, papers—anything that belonged clearly to Janie—was dumped into those clear tubs. When he ran out of the containers, he started to pour Janie’s belongings into black garden-leaf bags. He was going to erase every trace of her from that house. She would never, ever worm her way back inside.

  Just after nine p.m., Joe Thomas, twenty, pulled into the driveway in front of the family home on Long Lake and he hurried inside.

  “Dad!” he called out, stepping past the tubs and bags of his mother’s belongings. “What’s going on here? What’s happened to Mom?”

  Erwin emerged from the bedroom and embraced his son. He did something that Joe had seen his father do only one other time—when his own father had died after lingering for days following a car accident on the interstate near Seattle.

  Erwin started to cry.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kendall Stark’s world had unraveled and the last thing she needed was the constant calling, hassling, she was getting from a producer from Spirit Hunters, a television show that—according to the producer—“boldly searched for answers to unsolved crimes by going to the other side.”

  Or something along those lines.

  The Kitsap County detective wanted only to focus on her problems, ones rooted in the very real world. Her husband, Steven, had taken a new job in the Bay Area developing an advertising program that was going to change the way the world shops.

  Or something along those lines.

  But there was more than a thousand miles of geographic distance between them. Something else, something more hurtful and deeper than what had undermined their now tenuous relationship. Kendall would call Steven and get his voice mail all too often. She dialed the direct line at the software company and an associate there said that Steven was gone and wouldn’t be back for two days. He’d never told her he was going on a business trip. Cell phones are always with the person, not like the days when people had landlines, and if they answered the call one knew exactly where they were.

  As Kendall sat at her desk in her small but neat office at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department, she could not help but let her mind wander to the potential that this short-term estrangement—for all the right reasons—was more problematic than she’d allowed herself to believe.

  She looked at a silver-framed photo on the wall behind her computer screen. Tears moistened her blue eyes, but she fought hard to contain the flood that would come later when she got home. The picture showed Steven and Cody, then five, as they sat on the edge of a dock at Kitsap Lake. The sun beamed through the little boy’s hair, almost suggesting a halo. There was no such glow around the boy’s father. Steven had his arm around his son’s shoulder, pulling him in tight with the kind of protective sweetness that Kendall had never doubted would ebb. No matter whatever happened. They were solid, a family. A family that would be together forever.

  What are we going to do? Kendall thou
ght. This can’t be happening. Not to us. Not now.

  “Detective?”

  She looked up. Brad James, the department’s new public information officer, stood in the doorway. Brad was all of twenty-five. He had a kind of earnest face, one that conveyed sincerity when speaking with the media. Those in the office knew he was probably a better actor than a genuinely caring person. He pushed the edges of the department’s dress and appearance code too. He had at least a three-day scruffy stubble and black hair that he sometimes gelled up so much that Kendall was convinced he’d leave a mark on a pillowcase.

  “Hi, Brad,” she said, knowing why he was there.

  “Get my messages?” he asked.

  “Yours and a dozen from Juliana Robbins.”

  “Did you call her back?”

  “No,” she said.

  Brad slid into a chair and leaned forward. The light from her desk lamp played off his oversized and over-whitened teeth.

  “Look, you have to do this show,” he said.

  “I don’t want to, Brad.”

  “What’s your objection?”

  “Besides the fact that we have a major case to contend with, I think that shows like this prey on people’s hopes in a demonstrable and cruel way.”

  He snapped his eyes shut, then opened them. “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “The girl’s been missing for four years and more than likely she’s never coming back.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked, rubbing the scruffy edge of his chin.

  Kendall knew what he was getting at. There really wasn’t a lot to know for sure when it came to the case of Katy Frazier’s disappearance. The South Kitsap High School student had simply vanished from her family’s home. There was some evidence to suggest a potential abduction, but as far as Kendall knew there were other possibilities too. She hadn’t actually worked the case. It was before her time as an investigator.

  “I feel sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Frazier,” she said. “Really, I do. But I don’t think being part of some kind of psychic TV freak show is going to help anyone.”

  Brad leaned forward. “They’ve solved several cases, Detective. It’s all on their website. Have you even been through the press kit I provided you?”

  She glanced at the deep blue folder Brad had ceremoniously put on her desk three days after the producers started their relentless attack to get her on the show.

  “I’ve been busy,” she said.

  “We’re all busy, Detective,” he said. “Sheriff wants the department to participate.”

  Brad was pushy and Kendall didn’t like that. Not at all.

  “Why don’t you do it, Brad?” she asked. “You seem to be so eager to get someone on some cable show. Why not yourself?”

  He made a face. “I’m not a detective,” he said.

  Kendall didn’t balk. “I’m not a TV personality.”

  “Sheriff says you have to do it.” A sly smile came with his second mention of the trump card that he wielded like it was some kind of checkmate move. Which, in a very real way, it was.

  Kendall sighed. “What do the Fraziers say about the show featuring their daughter’s case?”

  “All for it,” Brad said. “They want answers, Detective.”

  “I doubt they will get answers from Spirit Hunters.”

  “Well, they never got any answers from us now, did they?”

  Kendall never had liked Brad James. She really didn’t like him now.

  “Just so you know, Brad, while it was before my time, I can assure you this department did everything humanly possible to find out what happened to Katy Frazier.”

  Her face was a little hot, but she hadn’t raised her voice. Maybe just a little. But not so much that Brad could trot off to the sheriff and say she’d been uncooperative and belligerent.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Ancient history. I’m all about helping this family and this is what Sheriff wants us to do. Read the kit. Check out the website. Dig through the old file. Bone up. Call Juliana Robbins and let her know you’re going to be involved.”

  With that, he got up and left, leaving only a trace of the scent of his hair gel and an uneasy feeling in the pit of Kendall’s stomach.

  Kendall reached for the midnight blue folder. Stamped in the center was a gilt logo that indicated the production company and its flagship show.

  PATHFINDERS PRODUCTIONS, INC.

  Spirit Hunters

  Starring PANDORA and WYATT OGILVIE

  Kendall didn’t know Pandora, the purported psychic, but the other half of the duo was well known by most in law enforcement. Wyatt was the retired—in disgrace—San Francisco homicide detective who’d had an affair with a juror during a major double-homicide case that had riveted the nation the decade before. Wyatt married the woman after sullying his career—and just about everyone else’s involved in the case.

  He gamely had tried to talk himself out of the mess, saying that he’d been a substance abuser and had fallen in love against his better judgment. In a way it worked. After the furor over what he’d done, he wrote a book, and started to make the rounds on TV shows—starting at the lowest rung, and with his undeniable charm, working his way up to the morning network shows. Finally, after writing a couple of flop novels, he ended up being paired with a psychic on an Investigation Discovery show called Spirit Hunters.

  Kendall flipped through the press materials. A substantially Photoshopped image of Ogilvie faced her. He was in his fifties, but the electronic airbrushing of some photo geek at Pathfinders had turned him into a thirty-five-year-old. Gone were the red rims of his eyes, the bags underscoring them so majorly when Kendall had seen him on Good Morning America. Or maybe The View. In any case, for a purveyor of the unvarnished truth, he certainly had been varnished.

  Pandora—no last name—was a strawberry blonde with green eyes and freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her hair was fashioned into a long braid that almost looked like a horsewhip. While Wyatt Ogilvie stood in the hero pose, arms folded over his barrel chest, his partner in psychic crime solving struck a more pensive, moody pose. She stood next to an angel statue in a cemetery, the wind tousling her braided mane, with a far-off look in her eyes.

  Kendall skimmed through the rest of the pages, finding her eyes rolling enough to give her awareness that she was doing so. The format of the series was simple and, Kendall thought, utterly stupid. Wyatt would come to the location of the unsolved crime, camera crew in tow, to “seek the truth, to turn the stones that had been left unturned by those who should have done a better job.”

  Great, Kendall thought, this show is all about making law enforcement look stupid and Wyatt Ogilvie is supposed to be the second coming of Sherlock Holmes.

  After the former cop now TV star turned said stones, Pandora would arrive on the scene and do what she did best.

  “Seeing dead people is one thing, but talking to them is an entirely different matter. Pandora has the ability to enlist her guides in the quest for the truth. Viewers will have the opportunity to dial in to the other side as Pandora reaches over the spirit zone to unearth buried secrets and, more importantly, to provide closure to the loved ones of the dead and missing.”

  Kendall felt the urge to do one of two things—strangle that twit PR guy or throw up. Spirit Hunters was the very worst thing to do to a family, turning their tragedy into a spectacle.

  Her phone flashed. It was Pathfinders.

  “Detective Stark?”

  “Yes,” she said to the chirpy voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hold for Juliana Robbins.”

  Before Kendall could say she didn’t want to hold for anyone and should never have picked up the line, the call went to music. A few beats later, the producer spoke.

  “Detective, this is Juliana. I thought I’d never have the chance to get ahold of you. You really had me worried.”

  The comment caught Kendall off guard.

  “Worried?”

  “Well, yes. I thought that you
might miss the opportunity to do the show.”

  Kendall almost laughed. Opportunity. That was funny. More like nightmare.

  “About the show,” Kendall said, before being cut off again.

  “Yes, I’m so excited that you’ll be participating. I talked to both your PIO and the sheriff just now. Such nice men. And they both sound so handsome. Are they?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Of course, you can’t say. Wouldn’t be professional.”

  There was nothing professional about any of this, least of all whether Brad James and the Kitsap County sheriff were good-looking or not.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the show,” Kendall said. “I’m in the middle of some major things right now.”

  “You mean the Brenda Nevins case?” Juliana let the words trail off a little, as though she was fishing for a little information. Maybe an upcoming episode in which Pandora could find the elusive serial killer by the use of her at-the-ready spirit guides.

  While Brenda was certainly among the top items on Kendall’s list, she wasn’t higher up than what was going on with Steven.

  “Among other things, yes,” she said.

  Juliana switched to a more understanding tone. It was swift and decisive. Like a light switch.

  “No worries,” she said. “I’ll only need a little bit of your time. I told your boss that you’d only be on camera for a few minutes, but we need you there. Our show doesn’t work if we don’t have local law enforcement involved. Pandora and Wyatt insist.”

  We wouldn’t want to disappoint them, Kendall thought—loud enough in her head that she was almost certain Juliana Robbins could hear it.

  But she couldn’t.

  “What exactly do you need from me?” she asked. “And when?”

  “I can tell you are less than enthusiastic,” Juliana said.

  Maybe you’re the psychic, Kendall thought.

  “We find resistance every now and then. I get it. Some cops act like if they can’t find the answers, no one else can. But that’s not true. And if you think about it, you’ll have to agree with me on that.”