by Gregg Olsen
“That sounds like a guilty man speaking, Roger,” she said, using his first name.
“A realistic man. I wish I had died. I wish that the embarrassment that has been foisted on my wife and daughter had never happened. I wanted to do the show because I thought it would give me some national exposure. What kind of father would do that? Would trade his missing daughter’s memory for a spot on a show because he might sell a condo project?”
“You’re being too hard on yourself now.”
“Am I? I don’t think so. I think I got what I deserved and there’s no amount of spinning that can bring back what I was before I let Pandora into my house. She screwed me over. She ruined my life.”
Kendall knew that much of what he said was completely, unequivocally true. Pandora’s box and its contents had been dumped all around Port Orchard, wreaking havoc wherever she’d been.
Juliana was dead.
Tami Overton was dead.
Roger had tried to kill himself.
It was not a Greek tragedy, but one with a distinct local flavor. At the center of it all was the psychic from Spokane. She might not have had real psychic powers, but a maelstrom of tragedy enveloped everything and everyone that came in her path.
The nurse with the driftwood hair returned and poked her head into the room. She wore an impatient look on her face.
“I’m going to need to take the patient’s vitals in a moment,” she said.
“Patient wishes you’d put him out of his misery,” Roger said.
“One more minute, nurse,” Kendall said.
“This note isn’t an admission of guilt in your daughter’s molestation and murder?” Kendall asked, pointing to the piece of Hotel Murano stationery.
“It was an admission that I am weak and that losing everything precious to me means more to me than living in this world. I’d rather be dead than be a nobody, Detective. Wouldn’t you?”
Kendall didn’t answer. She didn’t want to tell him that she understood, even a little. She opened the door and told the nurse to keep an eye on him.
“He’s pretty despondent,” she said.
“I’m surprised,” the nurse said. “Most of those pedophiles aren’t. They don’t seem to give a care that they’ve ruined some poor girl or boy’s life. At least this guy has a conscience.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Kendall was adept at seeing the tiniest fissures in a person’s facade. She’d seen it in Scott Hilburn when she interviewed him at the apartment he’d shared with Alyssa. Alyssa had shut him down a couple of times during the visit . . . and she didn’t even have to use words. It was out of her way, but Kendall didn’t mind. The ferry to Seattle gave her time to process what was happening in her personal life and what she needed to do to ensure justice for Katy, Juliana, and Tami. Steven had left a brief message that morning—more for Cody than for her. It was better than nothing. At that point they were so far apart that she didn’t know exactly where things would go. She waited her turn and rolled off the ferry, feeling the bump, bump of the ramp.
She parked in the oil-stained parking lot across from Happy Teriyaki, where Scott had indicated he worked most evenings. It was hot and she rolled down the window, taking in the smells and sights of the University District, affectionately nicknamed the U-District by the grab-bag mix of old, but mostly new, people who prowled the bars, bookstores, and ramen shops there.
Some of the old had started their love affair with the neighborhood when they were young, of course. Kendall had never seen so many gray ponytails in her life. She counted fourteen as she waited in the car.
When she saw Scott head for his car, Kendall got out of her SUV and hurried over.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said before she crossed the parking lot.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
He looked around.
Kendall could see the same little fissures she’d seen before. He did want to talk, he just needed a little push.
“I know that you had something to do with Katy’s disappearance.”
“You’re blowing smoke, Detective.”
“Scott, you know I’m not. I can tell that you have been carrying the weight of the world for some time. Talk to me. Let me help you do what’s right. I know there’s a part of you that can grab ahold of some goodness and do the right thing. I know that’s not true of Alyssa.”
“Don’t you talk about her,” he said, his tone shifting a little.
It was as if the words were said by rote. Without feeling. Without true conviction. Kendall saw another little chip fall.
“Talk to me, Scott. I can see there’s still some good in you. I know that you didn’t want things to go as far as they did.”
“You don’t know anything, Detective Stark.”
“I think I do. I’ve been doing this awhile, Scott. You get a sixth sense about people after a time. When you see true evil like I have a time or two, you know that some people are powerless to stop it.”
“You’re BS’ing me. I’m not talking to you.”
“I can help you, Scott. If you didn’t kill Katy, I can go to the prosecutor’s office. You just have to tell me what happened. Tell me that I’m right.”
“About what? Right about what?”
“That you loved Katy. That you didn’t want her to die.”
“I can’t do this. I can’t do this,” he said over and over, a monologue that he’d probably practiced in his head the minute he saw Kendall in front of Happy Teriyaki.
“You can. I know that you can.”
“You can’t tell her I told you.”
Another fragment.
“Come sit in my car. I can turn the AC on. It’s hot out here.”
“She’ll kill me. Katy’s not the only one.”
That wasn’t a chip, but a boulder-sized fragment. “Talk to me. Let’s make things right. Don’t you know what’s happened to that family? Don’t you know that Katy’s family deserves to rest too? You liked them. You used be a part of the family, didn’t you?”
“One of them was part of it,” he said.
Mt. Everest.
“Come on. Sit.” She swung the door open and Scott Hilburn lingered a little before sliding into the passenger seat.
“You have to protect my family from Alyssa. She said she’d kill Mom and my little brother.”
“I’ll protect them. I’m going to take you to the sheriff’s office where you’ll be safe. I’ll call ahead to have someone watch your family’s house. On Colchester?”
He was crying then and couldn’t speak. He nodded.
Kendall decided to take the long drive home, through Tacoma and across the Narrows Bridge—the bridge that had once buckled in a major windstorm and dropped into the deep waters of Puget Sound. It was a lot like Scott Hilburn was just then, bending, breaking, and falling into pieces.
He looked out the window as they passed the Tacoma Dome.
“Katy and I went there to see Britney Spears,” he said. “That was one of the really great times we had. I knew she wanted other things. I knew she didn’t want me anymore. It crushed me. It hurt so bad.”
“Bad enough to make her pay?”
He looked over at Kendall. “Pay, yes, but not die. Alyssa took things too far. She really did. After it was over, I wanted to die. I really did. I even took a bottle of aspirin. Just made me hurl like I drank a fifth of whiskey.”
“You said she killed before,” Kendall said.
He nodded and returned to the window. “Yeah. But not before. Afterword. She killed Tami. She thought Tami was going to tell that TV show. She said we had to stop her . . . that no one would miss her.”
Kendall didn’t say anything about Tami’s little boy. Her husband. Her mother. There were probably plenty of other people who would miss Tami Overton.
“Killing Katy, that was wrong. I know that. I felt sick about it. But killing Tami, that was just too much. I thought to myself, who was this woman? She could just off anyone. Like a j
unior Brenda Nevins. She’d kill anyone who got in her way. When she told me that she’d kill my family I saw it as a promise, not a threat. A promise she could make good on and then go to the mall to buy a new outfit.”
“You said someone from Katy’s family was there.”
He didn’t answer for a long time.
“Yeah,” he finally said, “but she really didn’t want any part of what happened.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Naomi looked up. Alyssa was hovering over her bed. Naomi had never noticed that Alyssa’s eyes were so devoid of emotion. Tears fell at all the right moments, but it was more mechanical than emotional. Alyssa sat down on the bed and rested her hand on Naomi’s shaking shoulders. Her fingernails dug in a little.
“I have to tell my dad,” Naomi said.
“You have to tell him what?” Alyssa said, kneading her nails into Naomi’s flesh like a purring cat.
“What we did. What happened to Katy.”
“That would be pretty stupid, now, wouldn’t it?”
Naomi had cried for two days. She’d gone along with everything. She’d done what Alyssa and Scott had demanded she’d do. She lured her sister to meet up with them. Everything they’d told her made sense. Katy was full of herself. Every time she walked into a room people scurried toward her like she was the brightest light and they were moths drawn to her. Naomi had hated being a moth.
“I don’t think I can live with this, Alyssa,” Naomi said.
Alyssa clenched her grip and leaned in close. Naomi could feel the older girl’s warm breath. Her rapid heartbeat. The moisture of her nervousness.
“Really? That’s funny, Naomi. We did this for you. We did what you wanted. And now you’re saying that you can’t live with it? Forgive me if I laugh out loud right now.”
“I didn’t want her gone,” Naomi said.
Alyssa loosed her grip and pressed her face closer to Naomi. “Sometimes things go farther than you like when you set them in motion,” she said.
Naomi knew this wasn’t a game anymore. She knew that whatever she said she’d get some kind of verbal punch to the gut. She could lie. She could avoid saying anything to provoke Alyssa. And yet, when she weighed what had happened and what she’d done she knew that only the truth would work.
“I’m going to tell my dad,” she said, averting her eyes for the onslaught she knew was about to come at her.
Alyssa didn’t disappoint. “You stupid little bitch,” she said, seething. “You aren’t going to do that. If you do, you’ll have hell to pay.”
Naomi lifted her head from the pillow and pushed Alyssa away. “I’m not afraid of you and Scott.”
Alyssa stayed cool, but those lifeless eyes were now full of rage. “That’s fine,” she said. “I didn’t say anything would happen to you. But I can certainly take care of your do-gooder parents.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me, Naomi. Just try me. I’m sick of being second best and I feel a whole lot better now that your sister is out of the way. Scott loves me. I’m empowered. I’m in control and everyone else needs to get out of the way.”
Naomi looked away. Alyssa was a monster and she’d never even seen a glimpse of that side of her. She’d played her. She’d made her feel that what she was doing to her sister was something that Naomi needed. Wanted. Couldn’t live without.
“Your sister makes me puke,” Alyssa said earlier that year. “I can’t stand her stomping in and out and getting what she wants.”
“She’s your best friend,” Naomi said.
Alyssa shook her head. “Best friend? She’s all about her own self. She doesn’t give a crap about anyone but Katy. You know that’s true.”
Naomi was jealous of Katy, but it wasn’t because Katy didn’t deserve her accolades. It was simply because Naomi had been relegated to being background sister. She was the one who every teacher felt compelled to tell that the other sibling was going to be a tough act to follow. She was the daughter who tried so hard to get the attention of her parents, but the glow, the noise, the aura that surrounded her competition was too, too fierce.
“I love her and hate her, Alyssa,” Naomi had said.
“I know the feeling,” Alyssa answered as she pretended to be distracted by a text message.
This was all very casual. Not real. Just a game, right?
“That’s why we need to get her out of the way. I mean, she treats Scott like crap and that’s not right. Scott’s the greatest guy in the world. If he were my boyfriend I’d never treat him the way she does. He told me some of the crap she pulls on him, how she just can’t help that all the other guys want to be with her. Poor me. Not my fault. Such a load. Scott is the best.”
Naomi nodded. She liked Scott too. He was always nice to her. Other boyfriends didn’t even pretend to be kind to her. Scott was different. One time he brought her a package of black licorice because he knew she liked it—and he liked it too. Katy didn’t.
“I guess so,” Naomi said, thinking back at the list of wrongs her sister either willingly or unwittingly had done to her over the last couple of years. “I guess she needs to be put in her place. We aren’t going to hurt her, right?”
Alyssa shook her head. “Oh no. We’re just going to teach her a very important lesson.”
“What lesson? How?”
“That she’s not all that. That the world wasn’t created for her exclusive use and that the rest of us have a place in it. You know that I didn’t get to try out for the cheerleading team because Katy said she might and that she’d ‘feel bad’ if I didn’t get on it and she did.”
“She’s such a bitch,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, and remember that time she said that it made her feel bad for you because you looked like your mother’s side of the family and that you’d probably never really be pretty.”
Naomi recalled the incident and what her sister had said, though Alyssa had twisted it. The words had been offered to her as a kind of pep talk when the two of them were in the bathroom getting ready for school.
“You look like Mom. Mom’s beautiful, but what I’ve always liked about her is how she looks smarter than pretty. Pretty fades. Smart is forever. I think you have that look.”
When Naomi first told this to Alyssa while they were waiting for Katy to get off the phone one afternoon, she brought it up because she thought it was kind of funny. That even when her sister was saying something that others might perceive as mean, it was offered as a pep talk.
“She said that?” Alyssa said, acting outraged, and reaching out to hug Naomi. “Sometimes your sister is a real bitch!”
“Well,” Naomi said, “I just thought it was funny.”
“What is this? The Stockholm syndrome around here?”
Naomi shrugged a little. Maybe she was stupid too?
“I don’t know what that is,” she finally said.
“It’s when a bitch like your sister makes everyone else suffer and feel like they should suffer because she’s so great and they are a piece of crap. Sometimes I can’t stand her.”
Naomi started to think. Alyssa was kind of right. Her sister did have a way of making her feel about two inches tall.
Roger Frazier had talked about the house he’d designed on Hood Canal as being the pinnacle of his career. The county planners had moved slowly on its approval and his daughters had taken to using the model he’d built as a place for their Barbie dolls to hang out while they weren’t in the pink plastic RV that Katy had been given for her tenth birthday, and which she’d passed on to her sister. The Donaldson place was a postmodern palace conceived for a Microsoft executive who cashed in millions of dollars of stock, flitted about the world funding various causes, and yet still had time to build a monument to his own humble self. It was 5,500 square feet of shiny clean excess with an enormous flagstone terrace adjoining a cozy 2,000-square-foot guest cottage. The neighbors hated what the proposed structure was going to do to their colorful collection of old beach cabins.
“It looks like a godawful alien spacecraft, albeit a clunky one, has set down in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting,” one particularly unhappy local resident said in front of the county review board two summers before the groundbreaking.
“Yeah, and if you ask me, the architect is trying to ruin our community with a design that pushes all boundaries of scale and decency,” said another, in a quote that never left Roger’s brain.
At the time of Katy’s disappearance, the only thing that was under construction was the foundation for the guesthouse and its accompanying six-car garage.
Scott Hilburn, in belly chains and shackles, barely said a word as deputies led him to the edge of the driveway. A backhoe and two teams of searchers waited closer to the garage area. The owner, Calvin Donaldson, approached Kendall.
“She’s been here the whole time?” he asked.
Kendall had expected the man, now in his forties, to be worried about the quarried slabs that made up the driveway. She was prepared to tell him that there was a fund for people of lesser means in the event that police work damaged their property, but that he wouldn’t qualify. But, she thought, by the look on his face he didn’t care.
“We don’t know for sure,” Kendall said.
“Do whatever you need to do,” he said as she handed him the search warrant. “I feel sorry for Brit and Roger. And their girls too. Is Roger still in the hospital?”
Kendall nodded. “Released tomorrow.”
“This has been a tragedy all the way around.”
“Agreed.”
Scott led the searchers to the far corner of the driveway next to the garage doors. He kept his eyes low, ashamed and embarrassed for his role in what happened to a girl he’d once loved—but who’d told him that they were not a forever couple.
“Right around here,” he said, touching his toe to the slab of stone that had been installed a few days after Katy had been murdered.
A deputy nodded and another climbed into the backhoe.
A voice called out. “Have you found her?”
Kendall looked up. It was Brit.
“Have you found my baby? Pandora was right, wasn’t she?”
