Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  Kendall was unsure if this mini-tirade was directed at her or at the fact that his wife had dated the sheriff a few times and he was uncomfortable with everyone in Port Orchard knowing that.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m here to help. I’m doing the show at the request of the sheriff and against my better judgment.”

  “My wife and I appreciate that. We know that it’s not the conventional route to go, but we’ve appealed to everyone, every goddamn TV show, magazine, and newspaper of any stature. We think that getting the word out is our only hope of finding Katy.”

  “I understand,” Kendall said. “But really, Spirit Hunters? Do you think they will come up with anything?”

  He shook his head. “Doubtful. But what I do know is that the publicity won’t hurt us.”

  Kendall wanted to tell him about the woman in Nova Scotia, but part of her figured none of that would matter. The Fraziers were looking for an answer, a shred of hope, and if it came from some psychic TV show it was probably good enough for them.

  “What do you think happened to Katy?”

  Roger Frazier folded his hands on the table. “I don’t know. Do I think she ran away? Absolutely not. Do I think she was abducted by a stranger? Possibly. Look, Detective, I’ve had four years to run every single scenario through my mind. My wife and I barely have a conversation in which Katy’s whereabouts isn’t mentioned.”

  “I’m sure it’s all-consuming,” Kendall said, hoping he wouldn’t challenge her on her feelings—not as his wife had done. She moved the subject quickly toward the reason why she was there. “I’m going to do the show,” she said, “but that’s not all. I’m going to look at the case and assess each bit of evidence. I’m going to reinterview all the witnesses who Nick Mayberry interviewed and we’ll see what fresh eyes can turn up.”

  The mention of Nick’s name brought a look of contempt to Roger’s face.

  “Your colleague muffed this one, badly,” he said.

  “He’s a good investigator,” Kendall said.

  “I hope you’re a better one.”

  “That remains to be seen,” she said. “Looking at the files, I noticed that Katy had a small circle of friends and each of them was interviewed.”

  “She was popular, but yes, she valued genuine relationships over numbers. Her best friends were Alyssa Woodley and Tami Overton. She also dated Scott Hilburn, but that had cooled months before she vanished.”

  “Are they in the area?”

  He shook his head. “Alyssa goes to the U and Tami, I’m not sure where she is. Poor kid. She’s had some trouble with drugs. I know she’s been in and out of rehab a couple of times. Brit did some outreach at a treatment center three years ago and saw her there. She was a mess.”

  “What about Scott?”

  “He’s at the U too.”

  Kendall looked at her phone. The afternoon was winding down. There wasn’t time to get over to Seattle and visit Alyssa and Scott at the University of Washington campus, but there was time to see if Tami Overton’s parents had any information on her whereabouts.

  “I’m having dinner with Juliana Robbins,” Kendall said. “I expect you’ve met her already.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s your take?”

  Roger pushed back his chair. “Nice girl. Just trying to make a living doing a tough job. Like the rest of us, I guess. She knows the story well and I think she’ll do a good job with it.”

  “You know the Internet is full of complaints about the show.”

  “Have you ever checked out the Yelp comments on your favorite restaurant?”

  “No,” she said.

  “We’ll, if you had, you’ll see that not everyone has the same experience as yours. That’s just the way it is. I’ll bet that Spirit Hunters has more supporters than haters, but that’s the way I live my life. I always expect the best of people. Maybe in your job, you’re trained to look in the opposite direction.”

  “Maybe,” Kendall said, though she hated to think that being a homicide investigator made her suspicious of everyone and everything. She sure didn’t feel like that was the case.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Brenda Nevins sat alone at the end of the bar while CNN replayed a capsule version of her story, the murders that sent her to prison, the escape, the missing prison superintendent Janie Thomas.

  “Another Bloody Mary?” the bartender, a middle-aged guy named Chaz, asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “But put some vodka in it this time.”

  Her tone was impatient, sharp. She caught his look of annoyance and amended it with a smile. Although she craved the spotlight, she didn’t want to stand out in a crowd. Not right then, anyway.

  “No problem,” he said. “You visiting the area?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Traveling alone?”

  A surge of adrenaline went through her body. He wanted her. All men did. She leaned forward so he could see more of her breasts. She watched as his blue eyes burrowed in her ample cleavage. Her breasts were magnets, she was sure. No man could resist them. When she walked, she imagined they were a pair of bouncing balls coercing men to sing along to her charms.

  He wasn’t young or rich. So she wasn’t interested.

  “With a friend,” she said.

  Chaz shrugged and set down the drink. “Some story,” he said, looking up at the TV. “Police were all over this place.”

  She kept her eyes on him and grabbed the celery stalk and proceeded to dip it in and out of the drink. Up and down. Up and down.

  “You don’t say,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Our local prison superintendent went lesbian on her husband, I guess. Fell in love with a serial killer and the two ran off together. Probably to Mexico or Canada.”

  “Went lesbian?” Brenda asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I feel sorry for her husband,” he said. “Although the prisoner is hot.”

  She rolled her shoulders and he followed the bouncing balls. She put the celery stalk in her mouth, wrapped her suddenly pouty lips around it, and crunched.

  “It sounds like a big to-do,” she said.

  Chaz was mesmerized. “Yeah, but it’s blown over. You know how things go. Front page, top story, then gone when something else happens.”

  Brenda stuck her now-shortened celery stalk into her drink.

  “You staying around here?” he asked.

  “I told you, I was with a friend. You shouldn’t hit on the customers. Your manager wouldn’t like that.”

  “I’m the owner,” he said.

  Brenda nodded and looked around. The Grey Gull was nice. He might have some money after all. She reeled in the impulse to pick him up right then. She was sure that he’d follow her to wherever she wanted him to go. He’d beg for more. He’d tell her that she was the best he’d ever had.

  They always did.

  It had been a long time since she’d had a man inside her. Not since Curt Gomez, a deputy who fell between her Venus flytrap thighs when she was held at the county jail in the Tri-Cities. He was an idiot. He was weak. He didn’t follow through with his promises to help her get out. He was lousy at sex too. She wanted to feel a man. She was sick of Sonicare sex. She had tired of luring some new inmate into a corner of the shower so that she could have something to hold over her so that she could get more cosmetics from the canteen. The girls who’d been set up on drug charges by manipulative boyfriends were the easiest prey. Weak. Scared. Malleable. Although she was absolutely sure that Curt would do whatever she wanted, she had let go of the opportunity. Doing everything she wanted when she wanted to do it was what stole her freedom in the first place.

  Janie had been a tougher mark. She literally held the keys to the prison. Brenda saw how she looked at her. Like all the others, Janie Thomas had coveted what Brenda possessed. Janie with her silver-helmet hairdo and her sensible oxfords and unflattering attire had never experienced the thrill of the catcall. The hunger of wandering eyes. Whenever a media req
uest was made, it was Janie who was required to tell Brenda in person.

  Each time, Brenda would reveal more of herself, pulling Janie in closer and closer.

  “My father pimped me out to my uncle when I was six,” Brenda had said during one of those conversations. “My uncle experimented on me like a frog pinned to a board in biology class. By the time I was ten I’d been passed around like a happy-hour appetizer at TGI Fridays.”

  She held Janie’s gaze and forced her tear ducts to do what biology and the human psyche meant them to do. It was something she could do on command and with remarkable precision. Just enough to show an observer that she was emotional, but not so much to appear hysterical or manipulative.

  Just enough.

  “I’m so sorry,” Janie said.

  “Sorry is for losers, superintendent.”

  “Maybe so, inmate.”

  The tear rolled.

  “Why do you hate me?” Brenda asked.

  “I don’t hate anyone. I hate what people do.”

  “This is my home now,” Brenda said. “And you are in charge of everything that I do.”

  “That’s how it works, inmate.”

  “See! You are doing it. You are treating me like I’m nothing. Like my father. My uncle. My husbands. You don’t even give me the courtesy of calling me by name. It’s dehumanizing.”

  Another tear.

  “Like I said, this is my job. This is the way it is.”

  “Can’t you call me Brenda? I’ve heard you call Marian Lockwood by her first name.

  Brenda was right. Everyone called Marian by her first name. She was seventy-four and had been incarcerated for forty-two years. She’d come into the institution as a thirty-two-year-old with a long rap sheet, the exclamation point of which was the murder of her two little boys. She’d thrown them off a bridge and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Over time, as she worked in the horticulture building, the chapel, and in the craft area, she became an example of kindness in a place that needed it. She was, in a very real sense, everyone’s grandmother.

  Everyone who had a grandmother who killed her children, that is.

  “All right, Brenda,” Janie Thomas said. “I will call you by your first name.”

  Brenda wiped her eyes. “Thank you. I’m going to be here for the rest of my life and I want to be another Marian, someone you can trust.”

  Janie smiled.

  “I’m sure you’ll get there. I see it in you.”

  Brenda felt a surge of satisfaction go through her body. The hook had been set. Fishing, she knew, took patience. She didn’t feel like she had a lot of time. She needed other options. At first, the guard Missy Carlyle seemed a better bet, but that one turned into a disaster. They’d started a sexual relationship, but were caught by records clerk Tess Moreau, who reported everything. Missy was let go, and with her, Brenda’s ticket to freedom. She thought of Kitsap County sheriff’s detective Kendall Stark and forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman and the mess they’d made of her plans. She seethed with anger as Chaz approached with another Bloody Mary.

  Janie was a big fish to hook.

  Brenda liked big. She also liked a challenge. If she couldn’t win Janie over with her sex appeal—which was almost laughable to her—she’d find another way.

  “When do you get off work?” Brenda asked.

  “Like I said, I’m the owner. I can get off any time I want.”

  “I’ll get you off,” she said, a line that made her skin crawl, but Chaz was dumb enough to enjoy the come-on. “Let me finish my drink.”

  “I thought you were here with a friend,” he said.

  “My friend’s tied up at the moment.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said before disappearing into the office behind the bar for a moment. When he returned to her he had a smile on his face. “Told Danielle that I’m heading out for my vacation a little early. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I have a place at the ocean,” he said. “No cell service, just waves and sand.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Cold and rainy,” he said with a smile. “But that’s Washington.”

  Chaz Masters lived in an A-frame in the middle of the forest. Brenda Nevins parked behind his blue Acura and followed him inside. The deer-head décor suggested a man who lived alone and the clutter of the place indicated that after she was done with him there might be some treasure to be found among the bric-a-brac. Chaz caught her when Brenda slipped on the step down to the sunken living room.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Feeling a little tipsy.”

  He smiled.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I was hoping to have a drink with you now that I’m off work.”

  “Start the vacation early,” she said. “I’ll join you.”

  “For a bar owner, I’m in short supply of offerings. Tequila okay?”

  “Love tequila.”

  “You haven’t told me much about yourself.”

  “Not much to say. I’ve been away for a few years.”

  “Oh yeah? Europe?”

  “No, nothing so glamorous,” she answered. “Out of state.”

  “For work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you do?”

  She hated all the questions, but that was part of his way of seducing her. It was silly because she’d already seduced him.

  “Paramedical sales.”

  He raised a brow. “I thought you’d say modeling.”

  She pretended to be embarrassed. “Thank you, but no. I mean, I tried. They said I was too busty for that.”

  He nodded. “They were wrong.”

  “May I use your bathroom?”

  He indicated the first door in the hallway.

  Brenda let the toilet seat drop. She opened the medicine cabinet and put her yeoman’s knowledge of drugs to the test, fishing through the prescription bottles. Excellent! A bottle of Percocet with ten tablets. She dumped them on the counter and ground them into a powder with the bottom of the bottle. She flushed the toilet and turned on the water. Next, she put the powder back in the bottle and turned off the water.

  “Sorry it was such a mess in there,” he said when she emerged.

  “I’m not picky,” Brenda said.

  “Margarita?” he asked, handing one to her.

  “Perfect. A bit more ice though?”

  He nodded. “Sure.” He set down his drink and took hers to the kitchen. She dumped the pulverized painkillers into his drink, swirled it with one of her red talons, and stuffed the bottle into the folds of the sofa.

  “Cheers,” she said. They clinked glasses.

  “I’m glad we met,” he said. “You’re just what I needed.”

  Brenda sipped her drink. “Me too. I’m a little drunk, but I feel the same way.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tami Overton’s mom, Lynn, opened the door to her house next to one of Port Orchard’s always-soggy golf courses. She was a small woman with a mass of curls that looked like a nest of boomerangs. She wore no makeup, but she didn’t really need any. She had the look of a woman who didn’t fuss much on herself so that she would always have the extra time to help others. Kendall passed a bronze-colored plaque of a pair of praying hands as she was led into the living room.

  “Tami’s not in trouble again,” she said. “Is she?”

  Kendall shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not at all. I’m just trying to find her so that I can ask her a few questions about a cold case.”

  “About Katy?” Lynn asked.

  “Yes, about Katy.”

  Lynn motioned for Kendall to sit on the gray velvet camelback sofa. “Want some coffee? Tea? A soft drink?”

  Kendall thanked her, but said she was fine on drinks right then.

  “Where is Tami?” she asked.

  “I used to really hate that question. I hated it more than anything because I never had a good answer. My ex told me Tami was messed up
because I was a bad mother and I just needed to accept that and, I don’t know, maybe shoot myself in the head.”

  Kendall winced. “That’s a pretty tough statement.”

  “Tough is not knowing where your daughter is, if she’s dead in some drug house, or turned into some kind of sex slave in Mexico.”

  “Did that happen?”

  “No. Not really. I mean, she lied to me one time when I wouldn’t give her any more money for drugs that she’d have to go sell herself to some Mexican drug lord and I’d never see her face again.”

  “That’s pretty dramatic stuff.”

  “Tami is all about drama. All the time. Twenty-four hours a day. That’s why I liked Katy so much. She was sensible. Calm. Alyssa was a little more over the top, but in a fun way.”

  Lynn got up. “I need that coffee. Sure you don’t want any?”

  “No. I’m good. You go right ahead.”

  When Lynn disappeared into the kitchen, Kendall got up and surveyed the contents of the room, looking for signs of Tami. There was a framed photo of a teenage girl on the credenza behind the sofa.

  “Is that her senior portrait?” she asked Lynn when she returned with a dalmatian-spotted mug from Disneyland.

  “No. I wish. It’s her sophomore portrait. Tami never finished high school. She dropped out the fall after Katy went missing. She actually disappeared for five days. I made a report. You probably have a file on that somewhere.”

  “What happened to her?” Kendall asked.

  Lynn tried to drink her coffee but it was too hot. She set it on the table in front of her.

  “Don’t know. Not really. I know what she told me happened. She said she was picked up in front of the school and held captive by some people in the woods somewhere. She wasn’t raped—a detail that I’ve doubted. Hell, I’ve doubted her whole story. She’d become a pathological liar by then. I only reported it to the police because I didn’t want anyone to think I didn’t love her if she was found dead somewhere.”