by Gregg Olsen
Sissy Crowley, a wealthy woman from Stonybrook, Connecticut, would have been the seventh victim, but she managed to extricate herself from the dungeon by creating a small fire and sending smoke into the restaurant. Fire investigators found her, weak, nearly dead from smoke inhalation. After a lengthy trial, Sissy became a kind of spokesperson for victims. Cecil Reed emerged as one of the most evil killers of modern times. The lead investigator for the Provo police said they suspected he had killed more than the six who’d hit the slopes and landed in an underground dungeon.
“They were getting the messages out with the paroled inmates,” Kendall said. “How?”
Deirdre offered a grim smile. “She called it ‘where the sun don’t shine’ and I took that to mean a couple of places.”
Kendall didn’t need a picture sketched out, the sordid mental image came readily.
“I see,” she said.
“Yeah, she said that no one ever does a cavity search when someone goes out of the institution. Why would they? My daughter was always smart. Smart and devious.”
“What was she saying to Reed and Connors?”
“That I don’t know. Not really. The FBI didn’t tell me anything. I don’t really care. That’s not why I came here.”
“Why did you come?” Kendall asked.
Those familiar eyes stared hard at the detective.
“Because of what she said about you,” Deirdre said.
For the second time, Kendall kept her feelings in check. Inside, she felt a chill, but she didn’t disclose it.
“And what was that? What did she say?” she asked.
“Words of anger,” Deirdre said.
“What was she mad about? I barely spent any time with her.”
“Like I said, you don’t know my daughter. She was angry because your interview came at the worst possible time. She blamed you for killing her TV special.”
The words gave Kendall another reason to hate TV even more.
“What TV special? I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Ms. Holloway.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that she blamed you and she blamed your partner, Dr. Waterman.”
“What did Birdy Waterman have to do with anything?”
“You are expecting my daughter to make sense, Detective. I expect that you’ve researched the deviant mind before. In fact, I’m sure you have.”
“Yes,” Kendall said. “I’ve taken some training.”
“Thought so. Then you should know there’s no way to understand a girl like my daughter. You have to watch her, hopefully from a distance, like a wild animal, with the assumption that if given the chance, she’d chew your arm off. Maybe your face.”
After Deirdre Holloway left, Kendall phoned Birdy, who immediately took charge of the conversation by telling Kendall the day was one of the worst ever.
“Husband and wife died in a wreck over by Sunny-slope,” the forensic pathologist explained. “Baby in the other car hanging on by a thread at Harrison. Thank God the little one didn’t take the brunt of the hit. I can’t take another baby in the chiller.”
“Alcohol?” Kendall asked.
“Oh yes,” Birdy said, letting out a sharp and pronounced sigh. “Off the charts.”
“I have something else for you that’s a little off the charts,” Kendall said, thinking that her segue was not as facile as she’d thought just before it came out of her mouth. Birdy had a way of taking over a conversation and Kendall needed to say what she needed to say.
“What’s that?” Birdy asked. “Was it a bomb dropped by Brenda’s mother?”
“Indeed. Seems that Brenda is mad at us,” Kendall said. “Really mad at me, but your name came up too.”
“Mad at us, Kendall?” Birdy asked. “What’d we do?”
Kendall looked down at some decidedly chicken-scratch notes she’d made while talking to Brenda’s mother, Deirdre.
“Interviewing her about Missy Carlyle evidently cost her some privileges,” she said. “That ultimately cost her some TV gig she was hoping for.”
“That’s not entirely a bad thing. I hate the fact that TV puts those people on for entertainment practically every night of the week. The worst. I hate TV.”
“Me too,” Kendall said. “Always have. Give me a book any day.”
“A beer and a sunny day for me,” Birdy said. “Maybe some jazz playing on my stereo.”
“That sounds good too,” Kendall said. “Anyway, I don’t know that any of this truly matters. I do, however, find it interesting seeing how the special agents who interviewed me made no mention of it.”
“Neither did my trio,” Birdy said. “Guess they held that back for some reason.”
“Guess so,” Kendall said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Birdy Waterman looked up from her stack of paperwork. She smiled at Kendall. Birdy was a Makah Indian with dark hair and eyes—the opposite of Kendall’s blond hair and blue eyes. And while they were nearly the same age, Birdy definitely had the edge when it came to hard-fought wisdom. She’d grown up very poor on the reservation at Neah Bay in the very western corner of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.
Birdy’s mother would be perfect fodder for any number of sleazy reality shows. She was cruel. She was jealous. She thought that there were limits on how much love to give and what should be given in return. She was everything that Birdy wasn’t. Birdy was single. Since her nephew Elan had had shown up in Port Orchard to get away from his mom—Birdy’s sister, Summer—she was doing her best to make a home for him.
Kendall’s own parents were dead. Her sister lived in Portland. Her husband was presently in Sunnyvale, California, and she was raising an autistic son, Cody, temporarily on her own. So as different as they were, they found a connection that was deeper than finding out who’d killed whom.
“It’s official. I’m stuck doing that Spirit Hunters show,” Kendall said.
Birdy slid her reading glasses down the bridge of her nose. Her silver earrings dangled.
“I figured. I take it that you don’t want to.”
“No. I don’t. There isn’t time for it.”
“Have you heard from Steven?” Birdy asked, taking the conversation where she thought Kendall needed it to go.
“Not since last night. It’s not about that, Birdy. It’s about taking advantage of people who don’t know they are being taken advantage of.”
“Katy’s parents? Her sister?”
“Right. Them.”
“I know the Fraziers, Kendall. They have been stuck in limbo for years. This might help them in some small way.”
Kendall didn’t know Birdy knew Roger and Brit, and she asked about it.
“They go to my church. I can’t say that I’m close with them, but we’ve talked about Katy a few times. They aren’t any different than other parents whose kids have gone missing. Sad. Heartbroken. Hopeful.”
“No one knows what happened to Katy. I understand that. But, Birdy, Pandora and that cretin of a cop are never going to do anything more than exploit their grief for the cameras.”
Birdy nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”
“You don’t believe in that crap.”
Birdy didn’t answer.
“Tell me you don’t believe in that crap, Birdy.”
Birdy paused, took off her glasses, and folded them into a black leather case. “I’m Native American, born on a reservation, and raised to believe that the spirit lives in all of us, in all things. Do I know for sure that Pandora can find out something the county missed? No. Is she probably a fake? Yes. But if there is a slightest shred of hope for a family who can barely hang on, I’m willing to take the chance.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” Kendall said.
Birdy rolled her shoulder a little. She’d played tennis with Elan the week before and it was still bothering her. “Chalk it up to one of our cultural differences. It’s part of who I am. It’s the reason I sometimes sing quietly to the people
who end up on my table downstairs. It’s why I still pray for them. It’s why I promise them that I’ll do all I can to find out what happened.”
Kendall knew Birdy did all of that. That didn’t bother her at all. Birdy was sincere. It wasn’t trumped up for the cameras.
“I know all of that,” Kendall finally said. “I just don’t believe Pandora is going to do anything good here, and I’m really mad at the sheriff for forcing me to be a part of it.”
“He picked you for two reasons, Kendall.”
“And what might those be?”
“You won’t make the department look bad—and you weren’t here when the girl went missing.”
Birdy picked up a folder and handed it Kendall.
“This is all we have from the labs from the Katy Frazier case. Some blood work was done on samples from the scene. Some hair and fibers recovered. You need to do your homework.”
Kendall made a face. She wasn’t happy about that at all. She took Birdy’s paperwork and folded it into the slender file she’d printed out from the department’s computer system.
“Any Brenda sightings?” Birdy asked.
Kendall shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Maybe Pandora will be able to find her too,” Birdy said, offering a wry smile.
Kendall didn’t return the smile. “Don’t even say that, Birdy. That’s the last thing we need right now.”
“Talk to you tomorrow, Kendall.”
Kendall started for the door.
“Wait,” Birdy called out.
Kendall turned. “What is it?”
“Just wanted to tell you to break a leg. I’ve always wanted to say that to someone.”
“I hope I do,” Kendall said, this time smiling. “Then I won’t have to do Spirit Hunters.”
“I don’t see that happening.”
“So you’re psychic now too.”
“Everyone is.”
Later that day, like a scratched CD that skipped without mercy, the interview with Brenda Nevins’s mother came back to her. She wondered what it was that had piqued the FBI’s interest in her single interview with the serial killer. What were they getting at when they kept trying to get information out of her?
There wasn’t any.
CHAPTER SIX
The stark house in Harper, Washington, was as still as a slack tide. The old waterfront home was perched on a rolling hill overlooking the black waters of Puget Sound. It was after nine. Cody Stark was quiet as always when Kendall put him to bed that evening. The little boy was verbal, but often existed within his own world. He showed affection to his mother and father—there was none of the distance that other parents at the school complained about. Before Steven took the new job, Kendall thought that there was no one luckier than she. Certainly, her son had challenges that were beyond what some other parents could see themselves handling. But in reality, as far as the various shades of autism were concerned, Cody’s problems were light. He didn’t bang his head against the wall. He didn’t let his frustration with the world manifest itself in destructive behavior. He was sweet and compliant. A pleaser.
Kendall poured herself a glass of sauvignon blanc, a wine that she had enjoyed immensely since Steven left. The only benefit of his departure. He’d always insisted that serious wine drinkers preferred only red. She didn’t like that about him at all. It was like he was judging her for what she liked, as if her choices were not in line with what he wanted his wife to be.
There were other things on the list too.
She was too involved in her job.
Try telling a dead boy’s mother that you don’t have time to take her call.
She was too concerned with her appearance.
Only because he made such an issue of it.
She wasn’t interested in his work.
What work? He was unemployed half the time. Selling ads for the magazine was a dead-end career and he should have seen it sooner.
She sipped the glass of wine and settled in at the kitchen table. A couple of raccoons scratched at the window.
And you should never have started to feed them.
Kendall hated what she was doing right then. She loved her husband. Steven Stark, she knew, was the love of her life. She didn’t want to start to think of reasons why she shouldn’t love him anymore. She didn’t have the facts. She didn’t know why he was dodging her. It might not have been a dodge after all. It might just be that he was busy in a new job trying to prove himself against some twenty-year-olds in a business that required around-the-clock devotion.
It was a new world, after all.
Kendall refused to get up to give the raccoons any marshmallows. Steven was definitely right about that. Wrong about the sauvignon blanc. She loved that wine and it didn’t stain her teeth. Oh, wait a second, maybe he was right? Maybe she was too concerned about her appearance after all.
She shook her head, sending all those distractions to the far corners of the kitchen, and opened the file. Inside, she found interviews, one conducted by a detective long since gone to a new position in Idaho. She’d always considered Nick Mayberry a good deputy, and later a sergeant—one who peeled back every layer of a case. But this file was woefully thin in content. The interviews, Birdy’s just-added forensic report, and some photographs taken at the scene. Kendall remembered the case. Everyone in Port Orchard did. A genuine mystery lingers forever.
Katy Frazier was co-captain of the South Kitsap tennis team—no small feat for a sixteen-year-old. She was a straight-A student. She was pretty with long dark hair and hazel eyes that looked almost too large for her heart-shaped face. Her parents were Roger, a former Navy commander who ran a small architectural firm in Port Orchard, and Brit, a school guidance counselor who at the time of her daughter’s vanishing had just quit her job with the South Kitsap district to run a coffee shop that supported a clientele of homeless and at-risk teens. Second Cup, Second Chance was in a storefront in downtown Port Orchard. Katy had a sister, Naomi, four years younger, who started acting out and ended up in an alternative school—a blow to her mother, for sure.
The interviews with the parents indicated that both had been away on a trip to Portland, leaving Katy in charge. While Kendall knew others had chimed in about the inappropriateness of leaving a sixteen-year-old alone with her younger sister, Katy was hardly just any kid. She was mature, bright, and highly capable. When the couple arrived home late, Katy was nowhere to be found. Naomi was home, mad about her sister being gone, but seemingly unconcerned.
Parents notified law enforcement when they arrived home. Ms. Frazier indicated that Katy had never disobeyed any family rules in “her entire life” and that “she would never leave Naomi alone, not even for an hour.”
In Nick’s report, there was a complete description of what he’d seen at the house, a glass cube that Roger had designed to take full advantage of the views of Seattle’s skyline across Puget Sound.
There is absolutely no evidence of a struggle, but two small drops of blood were photographed, collected, and sent to the lab for analysis. The drops were a quarter inch long, oblong disks.
They were found on the bathroom floor. Also recovered from the scene were a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and some of the missing girls’ clothing in case a canine unit will be deployed later and DNA analysis is needed.
Along with her sister, who really didn’t know anything other than the fact that her sister wasn’t home where she was supposed to be, Nick Mayberry also interviewed two of her closest girlfriends, Alyssa Woodley and Tami Overton, along with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Scott Hilburn. There were transcripts for those interviews.
NICK MAYBERRY: When was the last time you saw Katy?
ALYSSA WOODLEY: At lunch. We were going to hang out after school, but she never called me. I’m still a little mad at her. I mean, now I’m sad. But at the time, I was mad.
NM: Was there anything going on in her life that would make you think she might be in danger?
AW: No. She has a
perfect life. Everyone—including me—thinks so.
NM: If she had a perfect life, then why would she walk away from it? You mentioned before we started recording that you thought she just packed it in and left—your words.
AW: Being perfect isn’t easy. I don’t know how difficult, but I think it would be.
NM: Did Katy get along with her parents? AW: I guess so. She and her mom went at it every now and then. Nothing outrageous. Her mom was always telling her, pushing her, trying to get her to be the best she could be. That kind of crap.
NM: You think that’s crap?
AW: I don’t know. It’s always hard to live up to someone else’s image of what you ought to be in life. I think that bugged Katy, but not so much she’d leave. At least I doubt it. She never said anything to me about it.
NM: All right. What about her relationship with Scott?
AW: Scott is hot and Katy and he made a cute couple. Probably would be prom king and queen if they weren’t sophomores. They have that kind of cred around here. Golden couple. You know.
Kendall paused and let another sip of wine slide down her throat. She had once been one half of that golden couple. Everyone thinks that the so-called lucky ones—those with good hair and teeth—have it made. That everything will be easy for them and that their lives will glitter to the end. Fast-forward a decade or more and all of those things mean nothing. Gold tarnishes just like tin.
