Victim Six

by Gregg Olsen

  “She obviously hasn’t put her son first. What kind of woman would work these hours when her little one is in such need? I know it isn’t PC, but it says a lot about a woman who doesn’t nurture her own.”

  Kendall pretended that she hadn’t heard a word.

  “Hi, ladies,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t be making popcorn, unless you make some for everyone.” Her smile was frozen.

  “Oh, hi, Detective,” said the one who’d been talking. She always said “detective” with a slight coating of sarcasm, as if Kendall should be behind a keyboard doing administrative work rather than out in the field dealing with the worst crimes committed against human beings.

  “Blame Deb,” the other chimed, her face suddenly scarlet. “I’m on Weight Watchers, and I can’t even have this stuff. Movie-butter style, no less!”

  Kendall took a Dr Pepper from the machine. “Tell me about it.”

  She left the women in the break room that afternoon and took the longest, most serpentine route back to her desk in her dank, windowless office. She needed every moment to compose herself, to deflect the intentional cruelty of the “Witches of Kitsap,” as her husband liked to call them. Kendall would fight for Cody’s future with all that she possessed, but ultimately she knew that there likely was no magical fix for her seven-year-old. It left a hole in her heart. She saw her detective’s gold star as a means to fill it by doing something worthwhile. To stop pain elsewhere. And in Kitsap County, there had been more than enough.

  Some cases never left her. The baby that had been dropped on his head by his Bremerton shipyard worker father, the little girl who’d been offered up for sex to an online predator by her Port Gamble mother. The young man from Seabeck who’d been in and out of the county jail so often he thought he’d be able to leave some belongings behind for his next stretch of incarceration.

  That Monday morning she’d resisted the urge to go home and tell Steven face-to-face what the teacher had said. Having their son in a regular classroom for most of the day had fueled hope that he’d be able to live as others did when he was grown, when they were gone. That had faded, and she couldn’t break the news to Steven in person and see in his eyes the pain of the loss of hope once more.

  Before collecting her things and locking her car, Kendall punched the speed-dial number for Steven. When he didn’t pick up, as she knew he wouldn’t, she left a message:

  “Honey, bad news. We’ll need to check out Inverness for Cody. Ms. Bertram was very nice, but they just can’t help him there. Not the kind of help he needs. I’m not angry. Just sad. See you tonight.”

  Rain started to fall. She looked up and regarded the crack in the gray sky. It was spring, and the weather had—in typical Pacific Northwest fashion—forgotten the season. The wind kicked up a little, sweeping maple-tree pollen in a pale orange swirl over car windshields and against the curb. Across the parking lot, under the overhang where a couple of corrections officers had left a pair of plastic office chairs, she saw Josh Anderson and the glow of a cigarette.

  “You really should quit, Detective,” she said as she approached him.

  He nodded. “I would if I could, but I blame the county. They used to let us smoke at our desks, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard. They used to let you shoot seagulls at the dump too.”

  Josh crushed out his smoke. “Those were the good old days.”

  Kendall smiled. “Let’s go inside.”

  At fifty, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Josh Anderson had turned the corner. Every day that he looked in the mirror he could see that he was no longer the man that he used to be. Lines now creased what had been an exceedingly interesting, if not handsome, face. It had been the kind of visage that telegraphed sexuality and vitality. A look. A wink. A smile. Yet that was fading, and fading fast. His black hair was snowy at the temples, and his hairline was marching backward. His nose seemed longer at the tip. The hooded eyelids that had once given women sighs of desire were now the slightly fleshy bags of a man growing older.

  Josh had been married and divorced three times. The last time, to a county deputy prosecutor, ended in a bitter and very public sideshow nine years earlier. Although Washington was a no-fault divorce state and his peccadilloes were therefore irrelevant, they did matter when his wife sued for sole custody of their son, Drew. Everyone in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office knew he couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, but the public soon found out. The local paper latched on to the story, and when Josh Anderson went down, it was with a resounding thud. He lost his position as president of the Deputy Sheriffs Guild, or union, and did a two-year stretch as a civil deputy before crawling back to detective. He acted as though he was unrepentant. His ex-wife was a “bitch and a ballbuster.” He used to joke that he was a serial philanderer or that women were like items on a buffet line just waiting for him to sample.

  “I can’t help myself…and, apparently, they can’t, either,” he once told Kendall in a revealing bit of introspection.

  This guy’s ego is ten times the size of the brain in his pants, she had thought, almost saying it aloud.

  As the years ticked by, Josh Anderson felt the kind of niggling self-loathing that told him he was a “three-time loser.”

  What a difference a decade made.

  Anyone passing by the adjacent offices occupied by Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson could see the distinct differences in the two detectives’ personalities and habits. There was a wall between them, but with Josh’s office first and Kendall’s next, it was almost like some bizarre “before and after” HGTV makeover show. Josh’s office was a maelstrom of paperwork and coffee cups—ceramic and paper. If he had a filing system of any kind, it was beyond the ability of anyone short of Einstein to figure it out. In reality, he figured that if Kendall had everything in order, why should he? He could saunter over anytime and pull a file or notebook without so much as a sigh from his exceedingly organized partner. His desk drawers were crammed with office supplies he didn’t need: He had more Post-it notes than the supply cabinet. He had a stress ball in the shape of a globe and loved “squeezing the life out of the world.” No houseplants, of course, unless the island of green mold floating in one of those cups counted as such.

  “Science project,” he laughed when Kendall once told him that if he didn’t watch it, “the blob you’re growing over there will overtake this office.”

  Next door, Kendall’s desk was in order. A framed photo of her husband and son, a ruffled pink and white African violet that defied the odds and never stopped blooming under a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade, and a small Roseville pottery vase that her mother had given her for a pen and pencil holder commanded a pristine work surface. Her notebooks were color coded and filed in alphabetical order. A desk drawer was stocked with PowerBars, green tea, and low-sodium ramen for the days when she was too busy, too absorbed with a case, to leave for a bite.

  “Missing brush picker?” Kendall said as she hung her coat on the hook behind the door.

  Josh nodded. “Yup. Only in Kitsap.”

  Kendall continued looking through a small stack of messages. “What’s the story?”

  “Missing since early yesterday. Boyfriend’s here. Let’s chat him up.”

  She’d been his favorite thus far. She’d been passive at first, as he commanded her to be.

  “Like you’re dead. Okay? No fight. Or I’ll kill you. Just that simple. Easy to understand, right?”

  “Please don’t hurt me. Please, I’ll do what you want.”

  “You’re a good girl,” he said as he tightened the leather straps around her wrists.

  “You’re hurting me!”

  “Are you going to keep talking? I told you to shut up.”

  “But it hurts.”

  He took a spool of duct tape and scraped at it with a pocketknife, searching for the start of the roll.

  “More than a thousand uses for this stuff,” he said, finally pulling a long piece. “Bet the makers don’
t know about this one.”

  Her eyes flooded with tears, and she struggled on the mattress that he’d offered her. Pinpricks in the wall allowed a sprinkling of light to fall over the room, the dank place where she was being held captive.

  On the floor next to the mattress were a green blouse, blue jeans, and a brand-new box cutter, still wrapped in its Home Depot cello bag. All ready to go.

  Chapter Four

  March 30, 1:40 p.m.

  Port Orchard

  With a jacket over his restaurant uniform, Tulio Pena sat quietly in the secured area adjacent to the detective’s offices, next to a pasty-faced young man holding a large plastic bag marked with his name in large letters. After seven months as a guest of the county jail, the man with the bag was waiting for his mother to take him home. Tulio, nervous and beside himself with worry, tried to make small talk with the just-released inmate.

  “My girlfriend’s missing. That’s why I’m here.”

  The young man fidgeted. “Bummer. I’m sorry.”

  Tulio nodded.

  “I’m starting over again.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  The Kitsap detectives emerged from the hallway.

  “Mr. Pena?” Kendall asked.

  Tulio jumped to his feet so quickly that it startled the young man on the seat next to him. He dropped his bag.

  “I’m Tulio Pena. Please help me.”

  Kendall nodded understandingly. “That’s why we’re here. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

  The trio found space in a small interview room. Kendall offered the young man coffee or a soda, but he declined. He only wanted one thing.

  Celesta.

  Tulio’s dark, almost-black eyes were bloodshot. It had been almost a full day since his Celesta vanished from the woods. When he first reported her missing, he was told that little could be done for twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem right, but he understood it. He and his brothers scoured the woods the rest of the day and that morning. When twenty-four hours had elapsed, on the dot, he was in the interview room.

  “Something has happened to my girlfriend Celesta,” he began.

  Kendall reviewed the reporting deputy’s report. “We’re here to help, Mr. Pena. It says she, you, and your brothers were harvesting brush out near Sunnyslope?”

  “Sí,” he said, before quickly correcting himself. “Yes.”

  “Were you licensed to pick there?” Josh asked. “You legal here?”

  Kendall wanted to kick Josh under the table. The question would have to be asked, of course, but not right then and not with an accusatory tone. It had nothing to do with the fact that a young woman was missing. At least, not in any way she could imagine.

  “Yes. Yes, we are, and yes, we had permits.” There was a flicker of indignation in the young man’s eyes.

  Kendall soothed him, or at least tried to. The last thing the county needed was a complaint that could spiral into a lawsuit.

  “I think what my colleague is getting at is, was Celesta familiar with the woods? The area?”

  Tulio focused on Kendall. “Oh. Yes. She had been there before. She didn’t get lost. She couldn’t have gotten lost. She made it back to the van. We found her stuff.”

  Again Josh pushed. “Your girlfriend and you, did you have a fight?”

  Tulio shook his head. “No, never.”

  “Was she angry about going out there to pick brush?”

  “No. She liked to help. We were sending the money back to her family in El Salvador. Here’s her picture, taken last month. You will put it on TV and in the papers, right?”

  He slid a photo across the table.

  “She’s very pretty,” Kendall said, looking at the image of a smiling Celesta Delgado. Glossy dark hair. White teeth. Lips that were generous and brown eyes that sparkled. Beguiling eyes, she thought.

  “Once we determine if she’s missing, we’ll do a media release. No guarantees that anyone will run her picture,” Josh said. “A dozen people go missing every day. Most come home when they are good and ready to.”

  The young man’s eyes pooled. “She’s missing. She’s in trouble.”

  The detectives took down Celesta’s description and noted that her brush bag was found just inside the trailhead, heavy with neatly bundled salal.

  “You go to work, now,” Josh said, his tone condescending. “We’ll call you at work if we need more information. Understand?”

  Tulio stood. His hands trembled a little, and he put them in his jacket pockets, in an attempt to steady himself. “I have a cell phone.”

  Kendall looked at Josh, a cold stare to indicate that he had stepped over the line.

  “Good,” she said. “Keep it with you. I’ll walk you out.”

  Kendall found Josh back behind his messy desk, sipping a cup of coffee and looking online at Craigslist.

  “I need a new pressure washer,” he said.

  She ignored him. “What was that all about? You treated that guy like garbage.”

  Josh set down his cup. “I’m just irritated. These brush pickers are scavengers. They come around the county stripping away whatever they think they can sell, and then they move on. They’re raping the woods, that’s what they’re doing.”

  “Don’t tell me that you’re now concerned about the environment,” she said.

  Josh turned back toward the computer. “No. I’m just sick of our resources being used up by transients. The whole goddamn county is being overrun by meth-heads, brush pickers, Navy pukes, and others who have no vested interest in doing things the way they ought to be done. This girl’s like the rest of them. She got what she wanted and split.”

  Kendall looked at her watch. “Awfully early for you to be in such a foul mood.”

  “I’m always in a foul mood.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Look, Kendall, you work the Delgado case. I’ll juggle the backlog.”

  The “backlog” was a stack of drug and gun cases that he could work in his sleep.

  “Fine,” she said, looking at her notes. “Maybe Celesta did leave for home, as you seem to think. But maybe something happened to her. Good luck with finding your pressure washer.”

  Kendall walked across Division Street into the new Kitsap County Administration Building, where a commanding view of the Olympic Mountains and Sinclair Inlet filled the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a luminous beauty of a building that looked as if it had been plucked out of Seattle or some other city of means and planted on the hill across from the courthouse. Kendall smiled to a records clerk she knew and continued across the gleaming floors to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. The barista waved at her and started making her usual midday pick-me-up, a Tuxedo Mocha: white and dark chocolate. Cup in hand, she returned to her SUV and drove out to Sunnyslope, to the pathway off the highway where Tulio Pena said he’d parked the van the day before.

  A jogger stopped to catch his breath as she got out of the SUV. “Hi,” he said, squatting a little, his elbows pinned to his sides.

  Kendall said hello and identified herself.

  “Looking for that renegade bear again?” the jogger asked. He was referring to an incident the prior month when a man riding his mountain bike through the woods had been attacked by a black bear. It seemed that his dogs had spooked the mom defending her cubs, and the man, hapless and ill-prepared, was caught in her crosshairs. She ripped off his ear and tore out his cheek. Local animal lovers sided with the bear, saying that the animal “was just doing what a mama bear does” and that “the bike rider shouldn’t have brought his dogs.”

  Kendall shook her head. “No bear. Looking for a missing brush picker.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s good. I mean, that it isn’t a bear. They can be pretty scary. Seen a couple around here in the past year.”

  The detective held out the photograph of Celesta Delgado.

  “She’s pretty,” the man said.

  “Yeah, she is. She went missing yesterday
. You live around here?”

  “Up the road in Sunnyslope.”

  “Seen her or her crew out here?”

  The man shook his head. “We get pickers around here all the time. I don’t pay ’em much attention. Sometimes they leave a bunch of trash in the woods, and that pisses me off.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Most of us who live out here live here for a reason. We don’t want to live in town next to Wal-Mart, and we don’t want people tramping around here with carts and bags thinking the forest is their personal convenience store.”

  Kendall had heard that sentiment a hundred if not a thousand times before on Kitsap County calls. Kidnap County, as some called it, could be the kind of place where people had gates, dogs, guns, and an attitude that said “back off!” in no uncertain terms.

  It was, she reflected, a good place to hide out and be alone.

  “If you see her, call us. Okay?”

  He took her business card and put it in his back pocket. “Sure. Will do.”

  Kendall looked around and noticed the weave of various car and truck wheel treads in the muddy parking area. She walked toward the woods, an archway of ocean spray marking its entrance. She found some remnants of salal cuttings, a bundle of rubber bands, and the muddy footprints of at least a dozen people and a few dogs. Sunlight sifted through the maples and cedars, sending globes of light to the damp forest floor. She walked about a hundred yards before something pink caught her eye: a cellophane wrapper emblazoned with a depiction of a smiling shrimp and Asian characters.

  Kendall bent down, her heels digging into the muddy soil, and wondered if it was evidence or carelessness. She bagged the wrapper, just in case, and got back into her car as a deer wandered into the parking lot. The scene was breathtaking in its incongruity.

  The forest is so beautiful, yet so dangerous.

  She got back in her car and started back to Port Orchard. The sky had darkened. She turned on her headlights and wipers as rain began to splatter on the windshield. Many of Kitsap County’s rural roads have no edges, no borders, as they wind through forests of Douglas fir and western red cedars.