Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  Cody Stark grinned up from the breakfast table. Kendall caught her husband’s expression in the little boy’s face and it made her miss what had become of their now very fractured family.

  Birdy called.

  “Turn on the TV. Channel five. Pandora’s about to go on Today. They are promoting it as an exclusive interview about her close friend and producer Juliana Robbins’s murder. Call me back when it’s over.”

  Kendall set her phone down and turned on the small television that sat next to the toaster. She’d purchased it so she could follow along on a cooking show, but that was before she got a tablet.

  The toothy but earnest host, Savannah, introduced Pandora, who was on satellite from Seattle.

  Kendall wondered when the woman was going to go home. Maybe a trip to see her mother in Spokane would do her some good.

  “What I have to say is very disturbing, Savannah. But I’ve never seen the need to hold back when the dead want me to speak for them. It just isn’t right. Keeping them silent would be evil.”

  “What is it that you’re hearing?” asked Savannah, who by then was already looking uncomfortable. “And who are you hearing it from?”

  “Juliana Robbins, my producer on my hit show, Spirit Hunters.”

  “All right. Fine then. What is her spirit telling you?”

  “She told me that serial killer Brenda Nevins murdered her. She strangled her and tried to cover it all up with a fire.”

  “Brenda Nevins is the serial killer who escaped with the superintendent of the women’s prison in Washington State,” Savannah said, cluing her viewers in on a saga that had gripped the nation.

  “That’s right,” Pandora said. “The famed serial killer.”

  “I don’t know if famed is the right word,” Savannah said. “What else, if anything, did you learn about what happened to Juliana? How was it that she crossed paths with Brenda? It seems a little random.”

  “I deal with things that most people don’t understand. I can assure you nothing in this universe is random.”

  “Do you know the whereabouts of Janie Thomas?”

  “No, but I expect she’ll turn up dead. Brenda hasn’t stopped killing. She’s a mighty and evil force. She’s killed at least two people since she escaped.”

  “Ms. Robbins and Mrs. Thomas?”

  “I’m not sure about Mrs. Thomas, but she’s killed Juliana and a man named Chaz. I didn’t get a last name. A bar owner. Someone who has gone missing not far from the women’s prison.”

  Savannah, who usually was a nimble interviewer, didn’t know what else she could say to the medium with the message. Instead, she focused her attention on a statement issued in the wee hours of the morning by the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department’s public information officer.

  Kendall set down her coffee cup. Brad James’s picture appeared on the screen.

  The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department can’t confirm anything Pandora has said. Nor do we intend to. This is an open investigation and we’re supporting the FBI as they search for the missing superintendent.

  And that was it. An awkward segue to the local weather followed.

  Birdy was on the phone right away.

  “Did you catch that? Tell me you caught that, Kendall!”

  “Every last word,” Kendall said. “I smell a rat.”

  “Me too. The rat’s name is Brad James.”

  “Our investigative files were compromised, Birdy. If Brad’s ass wasn’t going to be booted out the door for his botched Spirit Hunters ‘opportunity’ then he’s as good as gone now.”

  “He didn’t mention the hummingbird,” Birdy said.

  “But he did say a few things only the killer would have known.”

  “Except one thing, Kendall.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “We never said that Brenda was the killer. Her name isn’t in the file. Not anywhere.”

  “Then how did he know?”

  “I honestly don’t know. But I intend to find out.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  If one didn’t look at what was on the table. Didn’t smell it. Just took in the music that Birdy Waterman played on low volume in the background. The slightly gnawing sounds of knives as they cut into flesh. One, quite possibly, could imagine he or she were attending a dinner party of sorts. A dark one of course. But the kind of party that with each moment, each cut, each visual dissected, a little discovery makes itself known.

  The forensic pathologist rotated the beam of her light over Chaz Masters’s naked body. She’d collected the dry-cleaning bag that had shrouded his face and deposited it into an evidence bag. Bags were often a good source of latent prints—and indeed they’d helped identify the killer in the Moreau girl’s case just months before.

  It was probably too much to hope for a second time.

  Chaz Masters had been dead several days and some of his features were distended in a cruel manner that death does to the former living. In cases in which a body has been disfigured by nature in that way, often a casual friend or distant relative is able to see the remnants of who they are viewing on a coroner’s gurney. Someone close to the deceased is frequently so shocked, so disturbed by the visage they cannot readily identify who they’ve loved and lost. Add murder to the mix and the combination is even more difficult.

  Ligature marks on the Grey Gull owner’s wrists and ankles indicated what the responding deputies had suggested when they’d collected his remains from his hideaway home. He’d been tied up.

  “Sex crime,” the deputy suggested.

  “Man?” the other asked. “Woman?”

  The first deputy shrugged. “Hard to say these days.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much anything goes now.”

  Marks left by the bare hands of Chaz’s killer indicated a woman or maybe a boy.

  “Rough sex,” the first one said. “I’d be into it, if I knew this wouldn’t happen.”

  Birdy looked closely at the marks on the neck. She held a ruler to the deceased’s neck and took four photographs, each from different angles. While a tox screen would determine if there was any other probable cause—poison, drug overdose—it was a pretty good bet that he had been asphyxiated.

  Birdy was about to reach for her older-than-the-hills Stryker saw when she noticed a black triangular piece of plastic protruding from under the dead man’s scrotum.

  What now? She asked almost out loud.

  She lifted Chaz’s testes, took a photo, and tugged gently on the black plastic triangle. It came with little resistance.

  When she saw it, she was unsure of exactly what it meant. One thing she didn’t doubt at all was that a killer with a boob job and a lethal, twisted sense of humor had left it behind.

  If that’s what she meant.

  She draped a sheet over the body.

  Kendall looked down at the black plastic shark that Birdy had retrieved and deposited into a plastic evidence bag.

  “I don’t get it,” Kendall said.

  “You know it’s her work,” Birdy said.

  “I suspect that it is, but what the hell is this supposed to mean?”

  Birdy stared at her. “Really?”

  Kendall blinked. “Yeah, what?”

  “God, Kendall, don’t you know you have a nickname around here?”

  “Honestly. no.”

  “Kendall Shark.”

  “Oh, that. I guess I did know that. How would Brenda know that? And why would she do this?”

  “You weren’t this upset when we found the hummingbird.”

  Kendall had been upset, but Birdy was right. Not this upset. “Fine. Fair enough.”

  “Google yourself sometime. There’s a prisoners-and-families website in which they rate and review various members of law enforcement.”

  “Like Yelp?”

  “Sort of,” Birdy said. “Anyway, you’re the only one from Kitsap who’s made the cut. Some drug offender from Poulsbo posted about you. Called you a ball-buster and a shark.�
��

  Kendall lifted her eyes from the toy shark. “I guess that’s a compliment of sorts.”

  Birdy smiled grimly. “Guess so,” she said.

  “After you called,” Kendall said, “I thought of someone else who left calling cards like this.”

  Birdy nodded. “Cecil Reed,” she answered.

  “Yeah,” Kendall said, stepping back from the table. “Reed left a ski lift ticket inside one victim, a watch in another . . . let me see.”

  Birdy finished the litany of objects hidden from view, only to be discovered by the Provo medical examiner at autopsy. “A lipstick, a tablespoon, the head of a Barbie doll, and . . .”

  “The last one was his undoing,” Kendall said.

  “Right,” Birdy said. “The book of matches from his restaurant.”

  “Uh-huh. Led them right to him.”

  “Guess we know why Brenda was corresponding with Reed. Maybe she thought of him as a kind of mentor.”

  “He did get a lot of media,” Kendall said. “Don’t forget the movie.”

  “The movie was terrible.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of liked that they shot it in black-and-white. Gave it a kind of noirish vibe, which is right in my wheelhouse.”

  “Brenda was no Roger Ebert. Any film about her life and crimes would be okay with her.”

  “Right. Maybe she was hoping for someone like Charlize Theron to play her.”

  “Charlize has already played the serial killer part in Monster. But, yeah, someone like her, but without the ugly makeover.”

  After Kendall left the autopsy suite, Birdy went about her business. Music playing. Every detail of the dead man’s body recorded and ready for the transcriptionist. She had autopsied hundreds from her medical school days and onward through her career at the county. She knew the exact number, though she never thought of any as merely a number. She knew that Chaz Masters was a proud man. Proud of his military service. Proud of his business. Proud of his body. He’d been in excellent health at the time that he’d been bound to his bed and strangled to death. She wondered if Brenda Nevins had brought the shark toy with her or if she’d merely found it at the scene and seized the moment. Either was plausible. It was patently obvious that she was a facile murderer. One who was clever and always at the ready. One, as they liked to say, at the conclusion of those Investigation Discovery reenactment shows that she watched as a college student, but no longer could tolerate: She’d stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

  That was Brenda Nevins. Through and through. But just what was it that she was truly after? Fame? Revenge?

  More than likely, a murky combination of the two.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Roger Frazier sat at the desk of a hotel room in Tacoma and finished the letter that had taken him five shots of whiskey and four attempts with the hotel stationery to complete. There was no fixing his life. The walls had come crashing in. His clients had turned their backs on him. He was a braggart on the surface, the kind of man who boasted about his accomplishments at dinner parties and conventions. He’d won awards for his architectural designs, but there was no way he could fix what hung over him like a blackening thunderhead.

  Molester.

  Murderer.

  Killer of his own daughter.

  He folded the note, left it on the desk, and went to the bed where he’d put a glass of water and a party mix of pills. He swallowed each one at a time. He was stoic. Full of resolve. There was nothing he could do to undo what had been done to him. There was no way back after being branded a pedophile, a killer.

  He shut his eyes and waited for the relief that would come in the next lifetime.

  To Brit and Naomi:

  I don’t blame you, Brit, for what happened. I know that if the world had conspired to tell me that you were the worst kind of fiend and there was no other option but to believe it, then I would have done so too. I would like to think that I could stand on my own principles and beliefs, but that’s a pipe dream. I am so sorry that the turn of events has led me to this point and I know that what I’ve done will haunt you forever. I’m sorry about that. Sorry is a word that I’d never said to anyone in my life. About anything. But I’m saying it now to you. And Naomi, I am weak. I am not worthy of being called your father. Forgive me for taking the coward’s way out of things, but I see no upside to this situation. Both of you are better off without me. I have left all of our financial records in the safe deposit box. Before deciding that this was my best and final option, I made sure that the life insurance that I purchased five years ago was still valid—even in the face of suicide. It is. Both of you will be well taken care of and will not have to worry about money. While the bulk of our assets go automatically to you, Brit, I did name Naomi as beneficiary on the policy so that in the event that you remarry or whatever she will have already had the money she needs to go to college and start a life. And, by the way, that’s what I want both of you to do. Don’t think about me, but if you do, remember me for the good man that I was before the circus came to town. And forgive me. I love you as I loved Katy. Now and forever.

  Daddy and Roger

  Melanie Martin pushed her cart to the door of room 457 at the Hotel Murano in Tacoma. She been working part-time as a maid and taking classes in the afternoons at Tacoma Community College. The hotel was the nicest in Tacoma, but she hated opening the room doors to find out what disgusting little present the guest had left for her. She’d been working there six months and she had serious doubts about the fate of humanity, having seen what people left behind for others to clean up.

  She knocked three times.

  “Housekeeping!”

  No answer.

  She knocked again, and repeated her warning.

  And no answer.

  Satisfied, she used her pass card and went inside, leaving her cart in the hallway. The blinds and curtains were pulled so the room was dark. She flipped on the lights. The bathroom right by the door looked barely used, if at all.

  Good, she thought. That’s the worst place to clean. Worse than a bus station lavatory at times, she was sure.

  The bed was a tangle of blankets and sheets and she made her way to the curtains to let more light in.

  Then she saw him. On the floor on the opposite side of the bed from the entranceway. It was a man. The room guest. He was dressed. His eyes were closed.

  My first dead guest, she thought, her heart now racing. She picked up the house phone, noticing the note, but not reading it.

  “This is Melanie. I’m in 457. I think we have a suicide. Pill bottles. A note.”

  Her voice was suddenly shaky and it surprised her. She prided herself on being unflappable, but she’d never been confronted by something like this. Not once in her life. Others who worked on the housekeeping staff talked about finding couples in the middle of sex, or a suicide such as this. They talked like it was no big deal, just part of the job.

  But it didn’t feel that way. The man looked neat, clean. Successful. His clothes were Nordstrom, not Penney’s. He was the same age, she thought, as her own father. He had on a wedding ring. He was someone’s husband. Maybe a dad too. And he’d killed himself for some reason in the Hotel Murano. It was hard for Melanie to comprehend.

  Very hard.

  “Security is on its way,” the operator said.

  As she was taking it all in, Melanie heard a gurgling sound and looked back down at the man who’d fallen off the bed and onto the floor.

  His hand moved.

  “He’s alive! I think the man’s still alive.”

  “Calling 911.”

  Roger Frazier was taken by ambulance to Tacoma General just a few blocks away. He was there within four minutes of the 911 call from the hotel. Conscious, but unable to speak, he was going to make it. Doctors and nurses there regarded the suicide note and the empty pill bottles that accompanied him in the ambulance and immediately pumped his stomach for its contents. Roger Frazier was wheeled into a private room where a nurse w
ould be on hand to monitor his every move.

  Suicide risk was added to his chart.

  From his phone, the primary care physician assigned to Katy’s father searched the Internet for his name from his driver’s license and learned about Spirit Hunters and the allegations that the show had made against him in an article published by the Kitsap Sun.

  The doctor reread the suicide note and called the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department.

  Kendall took the call.

  “That architect Roger Frazier who molested his daughter and killed her is here at Tacoma General,” he said after identifying himself.

  “We don’t know he molested anyone, let alone killed.”

  “Well, if you read his suicide note,” the doctor said, with an unmistakable air of inflated ego, “you’ll be as certain as I am that he did.”

  “Suicide?” Kendall asked.

  “Right. Attempted. Half-assed, if you want nonmedical verbiage, Detective. We got him in time and I know I should never say something like this, but I wouldn’t have shed a tear if he arrived here too late. These guys make me sick. We patch ’em up and they go out to do more of the same.”

  “We don’t know he molested his daughter,” Kendall said.

  “Once you read his goodbye-I’m-really-sorry note then I’m pretty sure you will change your mind. He bled guilt all over the paper.”

  Kendall took a breath and reached for a pen.

  “Bled? Did he cut himself?”

  “No, figure of speech. He was a pill popper.”

  “All right. Tacoma General? What room?”

  “Yeah. He’s here just off emergency in a room we use for suicide attempts.”