Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  “No,” Kendall said. “Not Pandora. I can’t really say for sure, but I think it looks a little like Janie Thomas.”

  Birdy stared at the image on the screen, but didn’t say another word.

  “Well?” Kendall asked.

  “Kendall, I’m not sure what’s happening here,” she said, her face suddenly pinched in worry. She stood. “I got a phone call yesterday. I didn’t get it, but the office did. I thought it was a crank. Someone playing a joke. But after what I found in Juliana, I’m not so sure.”

  “In Juliana?”

  “Yes, in her mouth. I pulled out a Calypte anna.”

  “A what?” Kendall asked.

  “A hummingbird.”

  “A hummingbird,” Kendall repeated. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does now with the tape and the message.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Peg took it. I saved it. Birdy fished a pink slip of paper from her pocket. Underneath the block letters of the slip, WHILE YOU WERE OUT, Peg had written:

  Brenda says hi. Will contact you later.

  Birdy and Kendall stared at each other in silence. Brenda Nevins hadn’t left Kitsap County at all. She hadn’t fled to Canada or Venezuela as the tabloids had screamed from the supermarket checkout aisles. Even Drudge had blared one of her so-called sightings with his police siren logo on his mega-clicked-through web page.

  “Janie’s still alive,” Kendall said. “We thought she was dead. I have to tell her husband.”

  “What are you going to tell him? That his wife is now helping a serial killer?”

  Kendall nodded. Birdy was right. She hadn’t thought that through. Not at all. What was she going to say to Erwin Thomas?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Erwin Thomas answered the door. He looked haggard. Bags hung under his eyes. Stubble covered his chin. He looked thinner than when they first met. Kendall could clearly see that Erwin Thomas was yet another of Brenda Nevins’s victims.

  “I’ve already talked to the FBI,” he said, letting her inside, “if that’s why you’re here.” He shut the door behind her.

  “I’m here because I care about you and Joe.”

  “I read the papers, Detective. I know you’re caught up in this confluence of murder stories. My wife. Brenda. Pandora. Katy Frazier.”

  “I’m not like that, Mr. Thomas.”

  “I know you don’t mean to be, but I guess it happens.”

  Kendall wasn’t there to defend herself. She was there because she did care.

  “What exactly did the FBI tell you?” she said.

  “Don’t you talk to them?”

  “Not really. It isn’t our case.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I’ve just made a pot.”

  “All right, then. I guess I could use a cup.”

  Erwin had stripped the house of any trace of his wife. The house looked like a short-term rental, not a family home with history and personal effects.

  “Where’s Joe?”

  “I told him to go back to school. There’s nothing to be done here,” he said, handing her a steaming cup. “Black, right?”

  Kendall nodded. “Thanks.”

  They stood in the kitchen and looked out over the placid water of Long Lake.

  “The FBI says that Janie and Brenda were involved for months. I honestly didn’t see it. I didn’t see any of this.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thomas,” Kendall said. “I really am.”

  “No one is sorrier than me. Not for myself, but for Joe. This has been a nightmare for our son. My son,” he said correcting himself.

  Janie had been erased. Obliterated. In every way that her husband could devise. Not just her belongings, but even the fact that they shared a son.

  “Did they tell you they believe Janie is alive?”

  He nodded, but stayed mute for a moment.

  “I wish she was dead, but, yes, I understand that she and Brenda are alive. That my wife has been helping Brenda. Did you know she withdrew three thousand dollars from our bank account the day before she ran off with her?”

  Kendall didn’t know that. Communication with the FBI had been firmly engineered as a one-way street.

  “No,” she admitted. “I didn’t.”

  “I noticed it when my statement came. I’ve really been played, haven’t I?”

  Kendall set her cup down. “There’s something you need to know. It’s very, very bad.”

  “It isn’t like I haven’t heard the worst already.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Well, out with it.”

  “All right. I think that Brenda has been using your wife to do her bidding.”

  “What do you mean, bidding?”

  “I think that Janie may have killed someone.”

  The color went from Erwin’s already pale face.

  “Who?” he asked. “Who did she kill?”

  “A producer from a TV show,” Kendall said.

  Erwin, whose life had been made miserable by the cameras and the reporters who had stalked his every move, shrugged.

  “I guess I’m not sorry about that,” he said. “I hate those people.”

  Kendall did too, but she didn’t say so.

  “What show?”

  “Spirit Hunters,” she said.

  “That’s the one that was bugging Joey over that Katy thing.”

  “They’ve been bugging everyone,” Kendall said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Roger Frazier didn’t even try to hide his anger at Kendall. She didn’t blame him for that. In fact, she didn’t think of any reason to pretend that everything was all right, either. The architect had, indeed, been backstabbed by a TV psychic who was in his presence at least partially because she had been sanctioned by the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department. It wasn’t just any backstabbing, either. It was the mother of all accusations that could be made to a father.

  Pandora pointed a finger at him and called him a child molester and a killer—and she did it while the cameras caught every ugly nuance of what she was saying.

  “Are you here to ruin my reputation some more? Believe it or not, word’s already gotten around Port Orchard that I offer candy to little girls when I’m out designing their playhouses.”

  Kendall approached slowly. The offices were beautifully appointed; the furnishings were the best that money could buy. Leather, chrome, modern. On the walls were renderings of many of Frazier’s greatest architectural hits, including a residence that made the cover of Sunset magazine, one of the West Coast’s premier home and garden glossies.

  One rendering was of a church. No doubt a client that would not be calling for remodeling contracts any time soon.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” Kendall said.

  He turned away, toward the rendering of the church. “Sorry doesn’t begin to repair what you’ve done to me,” he finally said. His face was completely red and it was clear he didn’t want to lose composure. Not like he had during the taping. He’d hoped most of that footage wouldn’t make the final edit—though he knew that was the kind of thing reality TV hoped for—the unguarded, the angry, the moment in which the viewer will pause and rewind because they just have to see it happen one more time.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Kendall said.

  “Not you personally. But that PIO Bradley James, he’s the one I’ll name in the lawsuit, along with the sheriff. I’ll keep you out of it. Seems to me like you were just as shocked at what she had to say as I was.”

  “To put it mildly, yes.”

  “Fine then. Let’s sit down and figure out what we’re going to do here.” He led her into a conference room that overlooked a ravine blanketed with salal and sword ferns.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by we,” Kendall said, sitting in a chair that probably cost more than her car. “I’m here to do a job. The job deals with your daughter’s disappearance. I’m not here about what a
psychic did or didn’t say.”

  “That’s not true, Detective,” he said, staring her down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My daughter told me you paid her a visit. She told me that you asked all sorts of questions about me and Katy and whether or not I’d been inappropriate with her.”

  Kendall had been caught. At least it felt something like that.

  “I’m just doing my job, Mr. Frazier. That’s all.”

  “Your job is to follow up the made-up rants of a TV psychic?” His face was getting red, but Roger Frazier didn’t want to blow his top just then. He didn’t want to give Kendall Stark any more reason to think he was anything but a decent man. Not one suspected of being a molester. Of murdering his daughter. Of having anger-management issues.

  “Your wife told me a few things,” she said, knowing that she was walking on thin ice. “I was following up on those.”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them with a small cloth before sliding them back on.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  Kendall went for it. There was no way to step into the subject delicately.

  “Like a special secret that only you and Katy could know,” she said.

  Roger drummed the table and looked out at the ravine. A maple tree dripping with ferns filled most of the frame.

  “That?” He sighed, still looking at the tree. “Brit’s still hung up on that, is she? It was private. Personal.”

  Kendall nodded. She could see that Roger Frazier was in a tight spot. His wife had betrayed him; now a homicide investigator was asking him to betray his daughter.

  “Tell me the secret,” she said, prodding gently.

  He was vulnerable just then. She didn’t think he was being defensive. It was a different approach to a tough subject and Kendall thought that it might indicate he hadn’t been the monster Pandora had made him to be.

  And his wife.

  “I promised I never would,” he said.

  “But she’s gone now, Mr. Frazier. Maybe it’s important.”

  He waved her away. “No. It has nothing to do with any of whatever it was that happened to her.”

  “I need to be the one who decides that,” Kendall said. “It’s my job. You really need to tell me.”

  The architect with the perfect office and the perfect house began to crumble.

  “She was so embarrassed,” he said, his words tentative and almost inaudible. “She made me promise never to tell.”

  A long pause filled the room.

  “Was she pregnant?” Kendall asked.

  “Oh God, no,” Roger said, coming back to the moment. “It wasn’t that at all. She was bulimic. My perfect little girl was making herself throw up every night. I caught her one time. I promised never to tell anyone, not even her mom, if she got treatment.”

  “Lots of girls have that problem,” Kendall said, thinking back to a time when she did it a few times to lose weight in college.

  “I told her that,” Roger said. “But she insisted. She trusted me. I never let her down. That was our little secret.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  In the first days following Brenda and Janie’s vanishing from the prison, the media circus moved from the prison perimeter to the Kitsap County Courthouse. A garden of satellite antennae and their accompanying trucks sprung up on Division Street. By the time Spirit Hunters came to town, all but one had gone away. Not without the trial by fire of media training that Brad James has pushed both Kendall and Birdy into.

  “You are the face of this case,” Brad told Kendall as he stood in her office doorway like he knew better than to plop himself on the chair. “You had the last contact with Brenda by anyone in law enforcement.”

  “It wasn’t this case,” Kendall said, looking down at her computer screen to give Brad a not-so-subtle hint that she was not at all interested in what he was selling.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said, before attempting to play her a little. “Look, you are smart and you’re easy on the eyes. We need you right now. We’re going through a lot of challenges and if we can get your face on Good Morning America or something, we’re going to really be able to move the needle on our image problem.”

  “I don’t think I’m the right person,” Kendall said, though she wanted to call him a complete suck-up. “I don’t have anything unique to contribute.”

  Brad was relentless. Annoyingly so.

  “No one is looking for unique, Kendall,” he said. “They are looking for somebody to throw some quotes out there so they have an excuse to put up sound bites of Brenda, her case, Janie’s husband crying. That kind of thing. It’s called news.”

  “It’s called sleazy,” Kendall said, now meeting his gaze.

  You’re sleazy too.

  “That may well be,” he said. “But get off your high horse. We need to do some things that move the needle.”

  Kendall tapped on her computer again.

  “You’ve said that,” she said.

  Kendall didn’t want him to sit down. Sitting down meant she’d be stuck with him like a fly on flypaper.

  “I’m saying it again,” he said, inching toward one of the visitor’s chairs adjacent to her desk. “It’s called repeating your talking points so that the other party leaves understanding what you’re talking about and what you want them to know.”

  Kendall rolled her eyes. She didn’t care if Brad saw her. And, truth be known, he didn’t care. She stood up to indicate that she had somewhere to go.

  “I’ll do one or two interviews,” she said.

  He backed off.

  Good.

  “You’ll do Good Morning America and Inside Edition,” he said without giving her a second to say anything. “You want to know when?”

  “When?” Kendall asked, a little startled that he was able to move the needle so quickly.

  Brad flashed an excited smile. It was as if he was unveiling some big prize. Maybe a cake for little kid’s birthday. A drink of water for a desert traveler. Something wonderful and appreciated.

  “GMA is tomorrow,” he said, looking particularly pleased with himself, a look he’d perfected over his time with the sheriff’s office. “Inside E is this afternoon. Just be yourself. Talk about the victims. Act like you care.”

  Kendall could have socked Brad James right then. She did care. She cared too much. He was a bonehead. Through and through.

  Inside Edition focused on Erwin and Janie and what was happening there. Kendall was swimming upstream on that one. She’d seen him only a couple of times and there really wasn’t any news to report.

  “He’s devastated,” she said during the interview, which was conducted in a senior deputy’s office with a commodity that was tough to come by in the warren of offices at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department—a view of some trees. “He wants his wife back. He wants his life back.”

  The field producer, a pretty twentysomething who teetered in her pumps, nodded approvingly.

  “It must be awful for him to know that his wife was cheating on him with an inmate. A female inmate,” the producer said.

  Kendall didn’t take the bait that time, though it was hard to resist. She did her best to flip it all around on where she thought it needed to be—back to Brenda Nevins.

  “Look, he’s a victim. His wife is a victim. We don’t know why Janie Thomas went off with Brenda Nevins, but I can tell you I seriously doubt that it was willingly. Brenda has a way of getting what she wants and using every means at her disposal in order to do so. She’s a facile liar, a trickster.”

  The producer seemed to like what Kendall was saying, and the detective fell into a trap that engulfs many new to the media. She kept talking. She kept the words coming to keep the head nods going, the uh-huhs of approval.

  “She’s some kind of lucky evil,” Kendall said.

  That evening the show put out a press release touting the interview with Kendall and the Brenda Nevins story. The Seattle Times, which almost never took such
headline bait, did.

  KITSAP DETECTIVE SAYS NEVINS IS “LUCKY”

  Kendall gulped her tuxedo mocha while Birdy read the article the next morning. The detective’s eyes were bleary. The GMA interview had been brief, by satellite at 5:30 that morning.

  “You really didn’t call her lucky,” the forensic pathologist said.

  “I know. But honestly, I don’t think I’m cut out for this media crap.”

  “I think you’re pretty good at it.”

  Kendall set down her cup. “I don’t know,” she said. “They just look at me and I feel compelled to keep talking. It’s stupid. I should just let them stew.”

  “You were better on GMA today. Much better. You really hit that interview out of the park. Honestly.”

  Kendall nodded even though Birdy was being over the top, effusive. She was trying to be supportive and that was appreciated. Even if it wasn’t so.

  “Thanks,” she said, “if better is being stiff as a board, I guess I was. I didn’t say anything truly stupid, did I?”

  Birdy didn’t answer right away.

  Kendall narrowed her gaze. “Birdy, did I?” she asked.

  Birdy grinned and patted Kendall’s hand. “Not really stupid. In fact, I thought you did a very good job when you called Brenda a master manipulator.”

  Kendall shrugged her shoulders a little. “Real original, huh?” she said, smiling at the stupidity of all of it.

  “Better than lucky.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was Birdy Waterman’s least favorite part of the job, but there was seldom any way of getting around it. Sometimes when such encounters didn’t occur she found herself wishing they had. To her way of thinking, as awful as parental notifications were, the idea that someone could die and that there was no one out there with enough of a connection to care was far worse.

  “They’re in the conference room,” the coroner’s secretary, Darlene, said. “Super upset.”

  “Thanks, Darlene,” Birdy thought, wanting to tell her that saying “super upset” might be fine if you were a tween, but it certainly didn’t fit the decorum of such a sad occasion.