by Gregg Olsen
“I’m sorry about your cat,” the captain said.
Sonja, too upset to speak, nodded appreciatively.
“There wasn’t anyone else inside?” the captain asked.
Dean spoke up. “No. No. Our last guest checked out this morning.”
“Do you have any idea how it started?”
“It’s an old house built in 1920s. We rewired most of it during the reno but maybe we missed something,” Dean said, looking nervously over at Sonja. “I don’t know. We did a lot of the work ourselves. God, I hate to think we screwed up somewhere. We were very, very careful,” Dean said.
“We’ll get to that. I promise.”
“We were just on TV last night,” Sonja said, now able to speak.
“Come again?”
“Our place was featured on TV last night. One of the producers from Spirit Hunters gave an interview. The place looked so pretty on camera. I got four calls for reservations this a.m. I guess I’ll have to cancel those,” she said.
Dean tugged at his wife. She was in shock.
“It’s all right. We’ll rebuild.”
“When can we go inside? No one is letting us get any closer.”
“Not today. We’ll watch for hot spots. We’ll make sure the structure is secure.”
“All right,” Dean said. “We’ll go back to our condo in Seattle.”
“I hate that place,” Sonja said.
“I know. But we’re lucky we have it.”
The captain nodded in the direction of a firefighter who’d called over to get his attention.
“Just a minute,” he said, heading toward the smoldering house. “I’ll be right back.”
Sonja nodded and looked over at the tufts of lavender, not yet in bloom.
“At least we still have something.”
“We also have the condo.”
“Don’t keep reminding me of that. Our dream just went up in smoke.”
“We’ll get it fixed.”
A lieutenant with the fire department stood next the back door and motioned for the captain.
“Looks like accelerant was used,” he said. He indicated a large gas can. It was brand new.
The captain nudged it with the tip of his toe.
“Empty,” he said.
“Price code is from Walmart, Captain.”
The captain smiled. “You used to be a greeter there, didn’t you?”
“Everyone starts somewhere. I wonder if those kids got tired of the bed-and-breakfast business. Maybe Swallow Haven was too much for them.”
“Maybe. Seemed like they really loved the place. But then again, here’s a gas can,” he said, stopping and breathing in. “And I can smell an accelerant burn better than anyone.”
A fireman emerged from inside.
“Better call the sheriff.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” the former Walmart greeter said. “Arson.”
“Not just that. There’s a dead body in there, too.”
“Holy crap,” the captain said, looking over at the young couple. “They said no one was inside.”
“Looks to be a woman. Pretty bad. She wasn’t completely burned up, but singed pretty good. Smoke probably got her.”
The captain went inside to assess the scene and then went back over to the Morrisons.
“Did I hear you correctly when you said no one was home?”
“Right,” Dean said. “Just Seasons, our cat.”
“Did you find her?”
The captain shook his head. “No, but we found the body of a woman.”
“Wait a minute. That can’t be. Juliana checked out this morning. She was going over to Seattle to meet with friends or something. Isn’t that right, Sonja?”
Sonja, now crying, nodded.
“Yes. I told her to turn off the coffeepot and let herself out. I had early errands to run up in Poulsbo. You don’t think the coffeepot started the fire?”
“No, we don’t. We think it was arson.”
“Arson?” Dean said. “That’s kind of a relief. That wouldn’t be our fault then.”
The captain wanted to shake some sense into those ninnies. All they cared about was their cat and whether or not they’d be blamed for the fire.
No one cared about the dead guest.
“What was Juliana’s last name?”
“Juliana Robbins. She was a producer for Spirit Hunters. She was here to do a show on the disappearance of Katy Frazier. I think she’s from Seattle, but now lives . . . I mean lived . . . in New York.”
“Sorry I’m late,” Kendall said as she joined forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman and crime scene tech Sarah Dorman inside the burned-out kitchen of Swallow Haven.
“Just got here too,” Birdy said, kneeling next to the victim.
“Hi, Detective,” Sarah said.
“Sarah.”
“I had a bad feeling about all of this from the very beginning, but I never thought we’d be at a crime scene with the producer of the freak show I taped.”
“Media’s camped outside,” Sarah said.
“Saw,” Kendall answered. “I’ll go and make a statement and get them out of here.”
“Pandora the magnificent is out there too,” Birdy said.
“Ugh. All right. I’ll be right back.”
Kendall went back outside and the cameras from the Seattle TV stations were pointed at her. A satellite truck was pulling in the gravel driveway, tearing off the limb of an ancient Winesap apple tree in the process. Kendall took a deep breath. She almost wished that PIO twit Brad James was there, but after the debacle at the Frazier place, the Energizer Bunny of PR hacks was suddenly missing in action. If he was sick, then maybe he had a conscience after all.
Kendall identified herself.
“We really don’t have much to share tonight beyond the basics,” she said.
“Can you say that again, but look over this way? I missed the shot,” a cameraman, actually a woman, from KIRO, said.
“Sure. Sorry.”
“No problem. We don’t want to miss a thing.”
There wasn’t much to miss, but Kendall didn’t say that.
“We have found the body of a female victim in the kitchen of the residence here known as Swallow Haven. We have not identified the victim, nor do we know how she died.”
“She died in the fire, right?” a reporter asked.
“Her remains were found in the fire, but we don’t yet know how she died. Dr. Waterman will be conducting an autopsy tomorrow and we’ll advise the media when the determination of cause is made at that time.”
“The victim was the producer of the hit TV show, Spirit Hunters, wasn’t she?”
It was interesting that the reporter would call the show a “hit” when as far as Kendall knew it was struggling in the ratings. Maybe when you work in Seattle TV everything emanating from New York was a hit.
“I can’t comment on that right now.”
Just then, Pandora appeared, her hair loose and swirling about her head like red satin ropes. She wore a black tunic with a giant—almost too large to imagine its weight around her neck—medallion of a moon and two stars.
“I’d like to make a statement,” she said, the cameras dropping Kendall from the frame like she had typhoid.
“Of course you would,” Kendall said, not loud enough for anyone to hear.
The female camera operator did.
“I know the type. My sister works for NBC. How anyone on TV can fit in the same room with another human being is beyond me.”
“Cassie,” the reporter called out, “get the camera on Pandora.”
Pandora gathered herself. Or at least pretended she needed a moment to do so. As Kendall watched her, it passed through her mind that Pandora might be a better actress than she was a psychic.
“As some of you know I was called to the area by the family of Katy Frazier, missing now for more than four years. I was called here because the sheriff’s department botched the investigation from the sta
rt.” She glanced at Kendall as if to say “no offense, just doing my job.” And then she started up. “I knew the minute that I got here that something terrible would unfold, that another tragedy would be visited on those connected to Katy’s disappearance. I had no idea that it would be my very own producer, Ms. Juliana Robbins. I can’t say for sure what happened here today, I’ll need to consult my guides for that and that’s not something I can do right now. I’m too upset. I’m human too.”
“Human too,” Kendall repeated.
The cameras parted and Pandora approached Kendall.
“Look,” she said, “I didn’t mean that you were personally responsible for the botched investigation.”
Kendall didn’t say anything.
“I will say that I hope you find out what happened to Juliana. I’ll be watching and so will my guides.”
“Thanks for that, Pandora,” Kendall said, choking on her words, but trying to remain civil in front of the news media.
“I’m here to help,” Pandora said.
“That’s all right. We’ve got it covered.”
With that, she turned, waved away the cameras.
“That’s all for now. Coroner’s office will issue the report tomorrow.”
Kendall was fuming when she returned to the kitchen.
“Pandora Whatshername is a monster! A fame-seeking media whore.”
Birdy looked up from a drawing of the scene she’d created. Sarah was clicking away on her camera, documenting everything. “I like it when you hold your feelings in.”
“Very funny. Sorry. I just had to vent.”
“Venting is good.”
“What have you got for me?”
“Not much I’m afraid. The victim—”
“Whom Pandora identified on camera.”
Birdy shook her head. “I hate her too. Now let’s get on with this. According to the fire responders, the homeowners were both away this morning. Their guest Juliana Robbins was going to check out a bit later. She was told to feed the cat and lock the door. Her bags were packed, so that part checks out. Cat bowl is empty, so she never got that far.”
“Unless the cat was very hungry,” Sarah said. “My cats gobble everything the minute I set down the dish.”
“That’s because you have six cats, Sarah,” Birdy said.
“I have four.”
“They are eating as fast as they can because if they don’t they’ll starve.”
“I was just offering an alternate view,” Sarah said, a bit defensively.
Kendall leaned over the body. “Looks like she was dressed to go somewhere important. That’s a Kate Spade suit. So not Port Orchard.”
“That’s right. See the bruising around her neck?”
Kendall nodded.
“Someone choked her.”
“Then lit a fire.”
“Right,” Birdy said. “To cover his or her tracks.”
Kendall stepped back as two assistants from the coroner’s office maneuvered Juliana’s remains into a body bag. The noise from the zipper sounded a little like a row of firecrackers going off along the shore, as they did every Fourth of July, in front of her house. The sound was unsettling.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
With Stan Getz playing his lonely saxophone over the speaker, Birdy Waterman stepped out of her street clothes and put on pale green scrubs. While there was important work at hand, she still thought of the night before. She hated disappointing Elan. The teenager had been upset about her coming home so late from the scene at Swallow Haven. Maybe even irritated. It was hard to read him sometimes. That probably came with the territory. Teenagers, she knew, were almost another species. She unwittingly had let him down. He’d made her dinner and there was no getting over the fact that her tardiness ruined something that he’d planned to be special. It was supposed to be a surprise celebration. He’d earned the highest score in his English class, an essay about the person he admired above all others—her.
“You should have told me,” Birdy had said. “I would have hurried home.” It wasn’t exactly the truth and she knew it. She couldn’t just leave a dead body at a crime scene to have dinner with him—or anyone. No matter how special the occasion. No matter how much she loved the teenager who had come into her life when she thought she’d forever be alone.
“It wouldn’t have been much of a surprise,” he said, looking down at the ruins of his meal. “You know that’s the thing about surprises, the other person has no idea about what’s in store.”
Birdy put her hand on his shoulder. “I get that,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I’m not much of one for surprises, but I love you and I love that you thought about me as the most admired person you could write about.”
Elan met her eyes. “Well, you are.”
“There are lots of people more deserving than me. The Pope, for example.”
He rolled his eyes upward. “I’m not Catholic,” he said.
She looked at him deadpan. “You’re not?”
That made him laugh, which broke the tension in the kitchen. “Besides, I don’t know the Pope and the assignment was to write about people who were really, really special in your life.”
Birdy was touched and she couldn’t hide it. It wasn’t like one of those departmental tributes that she always had a good excuse to avoid. This was real, personal, and meaningful.
“Okay,” she said, “why me?”
“The obvious answer is that you cut up dead bodies all day and that’s pretty cool,” he said.
“That got you the highest score?” she asked, teasingly.
“That’s not what I wrote. I wrote about how you try to find the answers so that both the living and the dead can be at peace. I called you a bridge from life to death. It’s a metaphor.”
Birdy smiled.
The dinner was burned, but that morning all she could think about was how it tasted wonderful.
She wheeled Juliana’s body from its companion in the chiller—a Jane Doe from Bremerton who’d died of a drug overdose. Birdy’s heart went out to all the Janes she’d met in the course of her job as Kitsap County’s forensic pathologist. There had been too many. Despite her fractured relationship with her mother and sister, there was no way she’d ever lose track of them. She’d always know right where they were—safe or not.
She muted the music a little and went about the business at hand—the measuring, the cataloging, the recording of every detail that would be used to assess exactly what happened, then, hopefully, forensic evidence that would indicate at whose hands the murder had occurred. There would be the sawing of the ribs, the skull, the buzz saw sound that sent shivers down the spine of most medical students—and some seasoned doctors too. And then the removal, examination, the flash of her camera’s strobe on each of the deceased’s vital organs. Weighed, measured.
In the even light of her autopsy suite, Birdy could see the distinct bruising around Juliana’s slender neck. The marks were made by two hands, throttling the life out of her. Some abrasions indicated that the perpetrator had struggled some, and more than likely left the scene with some of the victim’s DNA under his or her nails. Juliana’s own fingernails were chipped. Birdy removed some tiny tissue samples from under six of them. They were coded and bagged for the lab.
Juliana’s lungs were clear, devoid of smoke, which only reaffirmed what Birdy and Kendall had discussed at the scene. The fire was meant to cover up the murder.
Birdy recorded some notes for the transcriptionist.
“Victim is in her late twenties, Caucasian, normal weight and slight build, she appears to have been in excellent health . . .”
She stopped. She hadn’t checked Juliana’s teeth. She didn’t need to take dental impressions for ID—that wasn’t going to be necessary. She was all but certain who the victim was. She did need to check off the box. She opened Juliana’s mouth and a flash of iridescence caught her eye.
“What’s that?”
She bent closer and swung the light over.
It splashed a beam into Juliana’s gaping mouth.
“What?”
With a pair of tweezers the forensic pathologist retrieved the intact body of a very tiny bird.
What in the world? Is this some kind of joke?
She set the bird down onto the tray and prepared to bag it as evidence. Birdy, not surprisingly given her name, was a bit of an ornithologist. She knew immediately what the bird was. Everybody’s grandmother with a honeysuckle vine could probably identify it. It was an Anna’s hummingbird, an all-year resident of the Pacific Northwest. As far as she could tell, the only explanation for the bird being there was some kind of message from Juliana’s killer.
Birdy reassembled Juliana and wheeled her back into the walk-in chiller. Five minutes later, she was over at Kendall’s office.
“You look sick,” Kendall said.
“I feel sick. I just finished the autopsy.”
“What we expected?”
“More.”
“All right. But before you tell me, I want to show you something.”
Birdy let out a sigh. Kendall could sometimes be exasperating like that. She was always so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t always see the urgency that others were presenting.
“Okay. Fine. But you really need to know what I found.”
“It can’t be weirder than this.”
Kendall turned her computer screen around so Birdy could see it.
“What are we watching?”
“The surveillance video from Walmart.”
“The gas cans?” Birdy asked.
Kendall nodded. She tapped her fingertip to a figure on the screen. It was a woman with a shopping cart with three gas cans and a pair of disposable cellphones. Nothing else.
“Does that look like anyone in particular?”
“Diane Keaton?”
“No,” Kendall said. “Look closer.”
Birdy was stumped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It doesn’t look like Pandora if that’s what you’re getting at.”
