by Gregg Olsen
“Mother and father?”
Darlene nodded. “Yeah, Don and Muriel Robbins. Drove over from Olympia.”
“All right,” Birdy said, taking a deep breath before opening the door to the windowless conference room that had been set up as a family “grief” meeting area by the coroner. In the past, there was no place for the tears and loud cries that came with notifications. The sound of the wailing coming from a child’s mother was something that no one wanted to hear.
It just hurt so much.
Don and Muriel were in their fifties. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dental hygienist. He was completely bald, and she had a cocoon of brown hair that hugged her small head.
“I’m Dr. Waterman,” Birdy said.
Don got up and shook her hand, and introduced himself. Muriel just sat there, unable to say anything.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Birdy said.
Muriel muttered a thank-you.
“We’re really in shock,” Don said. “Are you sure? Is there a chance that you got it wrong? I saw on a TV show a few years back . . . can’t think of it now . . .”
“Dateline,” Muriel said. “It was Dateline.”
“Right, I saw on that show a story when they had the wrong body and that the girl was still alive, but had amnesia. Maybe that happened to our Juli?”
Birdy sat down. She’d seen the familiar machination of hope work its way through the occupants of that room more than a time or two. She’d seen how people grasp at straws, no matter how far-fetched, to give them the impossible.
That their baby is alive.
That this is all a mistake.
That this is just a nightmare.
She’s at work and doesn’t even know this is going on.
How they will laugh about it later, in that grim way people do when granted a reprieve from the all-too-true.
“I’m so sorry, but it is true. We’ve positively ID’d your daughter through dental records.”
Muriel looked up at Birdy. She took off her frameless glasses and folded them slowly, deliberately. It was as if she needed to eat up some time before she spoke, as if the words that would come from her mouth would kill her right then and there in that awful, sad conference room.
“She was burned up real bad?” Her voice was tremulous.
Birdy shook her head. “No. Very few burns.”
“Well, then how did she die?”
This was always the worst question. Only murderers never ask it. Because they already know.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Birdy said, letting a little out at a time.
“Not an accident?” Don repeated.
“Someone killed her?” Muriel said.
“I’m afraid that’s right,” Birdy said. “I’m so sorry to tell you that your daughter was a victim of homicide.”
“Homicide?” Don said.
Birdy thought of him as a “repeater,” the kind of person who echoes all the unpleasantness so that he or she can finally absorb what was so impossible to understand.
“Who would want to kill our baby?” Muriel said.
“How did she die?” Don asked. “The news said a fire.”
“Yes, a fire at that bed and breakfast she was staying at,” Muriel said.
Birdy was used to the endless questions and the stream of consciousness that came with notifications. She cleared her throat and changed her posture a little to let them know she’d answer their questions the best she could. It was akin to a teacher dragging her nails on a chalkboard to get the attention of the class.
“We’re investigating everything and everyone. I know that when you’re done here, you’ll need to talk to my colleague Kendall Stark. She’s the investigator in charge of Juliana’s case.”
“How did she die?”
“I’ve determined the cause of death to be strangulation.”
Mrs. Robbins put her hands up to her neck, a reflexive move.
“Did she suffer?” Juliana’s father asked.
“We don’t think the encounter with her killer was a long one,” Birdy said. “Your daughter put up a good fight, but she was not able to subdue her attacker.”
“She was a strong girl,” Don said.
“We never should have let her move to New York,” Muriel said.
“This didn’t happen in New York, babe. It happened right here at home.”
“I know that! I’m saying that those TV people were a terrible lot. She told me about their wild parties and how they made her do things she didn’t think was right.”
Birdy’s jaw dropped.
Seeing the forensic pathologist’s reaction, Don jumped into the conversation.
“Not at the parties. Right, Muriel?” He looked at her with pleading eyes.
“Of course not, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I meant that the producers and that awful Pandora. They put her up to a lot of stuff that she didn’t want to do.”
“Do you recall any specifics?” Birdy asked.
“Just things with the show. Pandora was all about . . . you know, ratings. She wanted Juliana basically to trick people into saying and doing stuff on TV so that she could look like an all-knowing psychic. It was rubbish and my daughter knew it.”
“A lot of people weren’t very happy with the show,” Don said.
Birdy already knew that and she could certainly understand why.
“Kendall will be here any moment,” she said. “She’ll want to get all of this down.”
“Are you going to show us our daughter’s body?” Don asked.
“Yes,” Muriel said. “We want to see her.”
Birdy hated when parents insisted, but it was their right.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” she asked.
They both nodded.
“We don’t have any other kids. I miscarried twice. She was our miracle baby and . . .” Muriel dissolved into tears.
Kendall knocked on the conference room door, and Birdy let her inside. After introducing Juliana’s parents to the Kitsap County detective, she left to prepare the body for viewing in the basement morgue. Kendall offered her condolences and promised that she’d do everything humanly possible to find out who had killed Juliana.
“I’m going to look at those closest to her, like you, to find out what was going on in her life and whether or not she had been targeted by anyone.”
“She might have been,” Don said. “People hated that show. I mean, the viewers didn’t hate it obviously, but anyone who was on it sure did. Some guy in Iowa threatened her after a show.”
“Do you know the man’s name?”
He shook his head. “No, but he was the man on the Iowa City haunted church episode.”
Kendall wrote that down.
Muriel spoke next. “I want to correct something Don just said. I don’t know if it’s important, but the night before the fire,” she said, her throat catching when she realized that it was the last time she spoke with Juliana, “she called me and said she had ended up staying an extra day because of some big exclusive she was going to get.”
“I talked to her too,” Don said. “She said it was something bigger than the show, something that would catapult her into stardom.”
“Right,” Muriel said, slightly irritated by her husband. “She was on speaker phone. She specifically said that she’d arranged an interview with a famous—”
“She said ‘infamous’ person who was in the headlines,” Don said, interrupting his wife.
“Did she say anything about who this was? Anything at all.”
The Robbinses shook their heads.
Don spoke next. “She said one other thing that I thought was interesting. She said that if Pandora found out that she’d crap in her pants. We laughed about that. Our daughter couldn’t stand Pandora. She thought she was so pushy, so fake. She said that the show was within a tenth of a ratings point to be canceled and that if Pandora knew what she was up to, she’d throttle her.”
“What’d she think of
Wyatt Ogilvie? Did she ever talk about him?” Kendall asked.
“She didn’t like him either,” Muriel said. “He tried to put the moves on her.”
“What, Muriel?” Don asked, his once ashen face turning a little red.
Muriel reached for his hand. “Sorry, she didn’t want you to worry. Besides, he moved on. Ended up sleeping with Pandora. Although from what I gather, most of the crew had a go with her a time or two.”
None of that surprised Kendall. She’d spent enough time with Pandora to spot a predatory user.
Don and Muriel stood like a pair of garden statues at the foot of the gurney covering their precious daughter’s body. Birdy had smoothed out Juliana’s hair, but there was no makeup and that meant the remains of the little girl they saw from diapers to a life in the big city would look the color of an unbaked pie shell.
Birdy calmly and haltingly told them what she was going to do.
“I’ll peel back the sheet to show you her face, but because of the autopsy and because she suffered some injuries I will not expose any more of her. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” they both said.
“You cannot touch her,” Birdy said. “She’s still in my custody and you will not be able to touch her until I release her to the funeral home employees. Do you understand that?”
They nodded.
Birdy could readily recall the time a mother lurched at the body, grabbing ahold of it while exposing the Y incision and other cuts made by the pathologist’s scalpel that made her son look akin to Frankenstein and not the Little Leaguer that they’d just lost in a joyride auto accident. It was a moment she’d never allow to happen again in her morgue. She doubted the mother ever got over it.
She certainly never did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Dean and Sonja Morrison arrived at the sheriff’s office in Port Orchard looking like a couple who had lost everything, which as far as their livelihood and cat were concerned, they had. They both wore jeans that would cost many locals a week’s pay. She carried a Burberry purse—the first one that had likely ever been inside the county building. He wore a dark blue Nautica jacket and shirt and boat shoes that had likely never seen the deck of a watercraft. Kendall led them (by a circuitous route that was a necessity because the building had been added on to so many times) to a conference room to make their investigative statement.
“We’re very sorry about what happened to Juliana,” Dean said.
Dean looked like he hadn’t slept; whether that was because his business was ruined or he felt sorrow for the dead guest was debatable.
“I know,” Kendall said, choosing to believe the best of the young couple from Seattle.
Sonja, a smear of pink lipstick on her lips that indicated a shaky hand or haste, slid into a chair next to her husband.
“She was a very nice person,” she said. “I thought she was, anyway.”
“Yes, I met her too,” Kendall said, “in conjunction with the show.”
Kendall offered the couple something to drink, but neither was thirsty.
“What can we do to help?” Dean asked. “I mean, we really don’t know anything about her, what might have happened, who, you know . . .”
His words lingered in the stuffy air of the conference room.
“Killed her,” Kendall said.
“Right,” Sonja said, fidgeting in her purse for an elusive breath mint. She found one and popped it into her mouth. “We don’t know anything.”
Kendall sat down. “In a homicide investigation,” she said, “we need to know every little detail about what happened before the victim was killed. What’s insignificant to the average person might play a key role in our solving the case.”
“I guess,” Sonja said, looking at her husband. “I don’t think we can tell you much.”
Kendall smiled. She wanted to tell Sonja that people often don’t know what they know until they are guided to think about it.
“Let’s start with the beginning. Did you have any personal conversations with Juliana?”
Dean spoke up. “Not much. She told us that she was from Seattle, but lived in New York.”
“She talked a lot about the show and the cast,” Sonja added.
“What did she say?”
Sonja answered again. “She didn’t really like either one of the people on the show.”
“Sonja, that isn’t very nice,” Dean said.
Sonja crunched on her breath mint. “Well, it’s true. She said that she was hoping that she could get a new job after the show was canceled. She thought it was a dead end.”
No one remarked on the irony of Sonja’s last two words.
Kendall was interested. “What did she say about the cast, specifically?”
Sonja looked at her husband. Dean shook his head slightly. “I’m going to tell her,” she said.
“She told us not to tell anyone,” he said.
“Juliana?” Kendall asked. “She asked you not to tell anyone something?”
A long silence.
“Yeah,” Dean said, finally giving in. “She said she could lose her job for saying so, but she was so angry after that long night of the taping at the dead girl’s house in Port Orchard that she didn’t even go to bed. I got up early to do some painting, and she and I talked for over an hour. Sonja too.”
“What was she so mad about?” Kendall asked.
“She said that she told Pandora and that cop that she was going to quit and that doing this kind of sleazy work was not something she was proud of. She felt like all they cared about were ratings and money and keeping the show going,” Dean said.
Sonja thought a second. “Was that what she said?”
Dean studied his wife. He remembered her exact words.
“She said that Pandora and the cop would stop at nothing to make sure that they stayed a viable production and if that meant being completely over the top with their so-called reality episodes then they’d be fine with that.”
As Kendall made a note of that, Sonja added more.
“She specifically said that it didn’t matter to them one bit if they ruined anyone’s life because theirs was more important,” she said.
“That remark made me want to puke,” Dean added. “That’s what she said. I believed her. I think she was probably the only one in the bunch who had anything close to a conscience.”
“She really hated those two. That’s why she stayed with us. She had friends in Seattle but she told everyone on the show she preferred staying closer to the set and closer to her parents in Olympia.”
“Did either Pandora or Wyatt come over to your place?”
“No, but she had a heated conversation with one of them,” Sonja said.
“Right,” Dean jumped in. “She was on the phone and she was yelling at them that they were charlatans and that if she hadn’t signed a confidentiality agreement she’d tell the world.”
“Tell the world what?” Kendall asked.
“That they were frauds making money off the heartbreak of others. That Pandora hadn’t been in touch with anyone from the other side—not once.”
“Most reasonable people already know that,” Kendall said.
“You would think so, but I looked at her Facebook page and it was full of people begging her to come help them find a missing loved one or something like that.”
“Did you overhear any other conversations? Did she share anything else?” Kendall asked.
They shook their heads in unison.
“She got a call from someone on our house phone. I think it was a job offer,” Dean said.
“Yes, she was very excited. She said that someone very important had seen her on the Seattle TV show that featured our house.”
“Did she say what the offer was?” Kendall asked.
“Not that I recall. Dean?”
“She said it was something exclusive and life changing.” He paused. “She called it a game changer. I didn’t press her for more information, because, well,
as nice as she was, she came with a lot of unwanted drama. I like things quiet. Juliana and her rant against Pandora were too much for me.”
“I heard that she was strangled to death,” Sonja said.
“I can’t comment on that,” Kendall said. “Anything more about the phone call? How long did it last?”
“A couple of minutes,” Dean said. “At the most. She was on, then off.”
“I remember something else about the call, Detective.”
“What’s that, Sonja?”
“That the caller was a woman. She said that she was a bigger bitch than Pandora could ever hope to be.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“You promised you’d let me go,” Janie Thomas
Ysaid.
“You said you cared about me, but I know that you don’t. People only care about themselves,” Brenda said.
The words hung in the air. Janie Thomas knew that there was no endgame for her. There was no escape. Brenda had told her over and over that she’d kill her husband and son if she didn’t do what she wanted. She’d sent her into the store to get the gas cans, to the service station to fill them up. She made love to her in the kind of way that was neither romantic or even remotely pleasurable. Whatever degrading thing Brenda had done to her, she told herself that she deserved it. Her life was in ruins. Shambles. There was no hope.
And it was all her fault.
It had started innocently. She knew that. She felt sorry for Brenda Nevins. She’d read her file, had seen what had happened to her in life to turn her into the creature that she was. Sympathy was the bridge that led them together. Janie had had it rough growing up too. Her uncle Jerry had raped her when she was seven. Repeatedly. Her first husband beat her. She loved Erwin, but she didn’t trust him completely. She thought that like the other men in her life, Erwin would do something to her. Hurt her.
All the men in Brenda’s life had hurt her.
Brenda tried to kill herself after the Missy Carlyle debacle. At least that’s what the prison doctor and psychologist had said when they examined her after she was found in her cell bleeding from a not-so-deep slice to her wrist. Brenda noticed the cat pendant that Janie was wearing.
