by Gregg Olsen
“Detective Stark, do you have news?” His voice was full of hesitation and hope.
Kendall locked her eyes on Celesta’s photo and spoke into the handset. “I’m afraid not.” She refrained from reminding him that they’d only had the case a day, but she knew that even an less than savvy observer who watched any TV whatsoever knew that missing-persons cases were solved in hours, not days. Days of searching usually meant someone was dead or had run away.
“Tulio, have you had any problems out there with other pickers?”
“Problems? What do you mean?”
“Did anyone threaten you or cause problems with you where you were picking?”
There was a short pause. “No. No, Detective. We did not want any trouble. We heard some Asians out there that day, but we never saw them. We never talked to them.”
“All right. I have one other question, Tulio. This is touchy, difficult….”
She could almost hear him gulp on the other end of the line. She wanted to let him down easy, if there was any possibility that Celesta Delgado had left him for another man, no matter how unlikely the scenario.
“How were you and Celesta getting along? Did you argue?”
“We were in love.”
“In love, yes,” she said, repeating his words. “But was she happy? Do you think she might have been seeing anyone?”
“No. She loved me. Only me.”
Only you, she thought. Of course, only you.
She told Tulio that she’d continue working the case and that if she had any more questions she’d call. As she hung up, Josh Anderson appeared in the doorway. For the first time Kendall noticed he was wearing a new suit, a gray chalk-striped outfit with a crisp blue shirt and a raspberry tie.
“How’s your day going?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “In court today or going to your homecoming dance?”
“Funny,” he said, sliding into a chair across from her. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”
“Okay.” Kendall looked back down at her work.
“Aren’t you going to ask what it is?”
She took out a highlighter and made a yellow trail through some text on the printout. “Nope.” She could feel his agitation percolate inside his brand-new suit, and she loved it. She knew that Josh Anderson was the type of man who never missed an opportunity to tell someone—particularly a woman—how smart, how successful, and just how in demand he was. She silently counted to three.
“I’m speaking at Burien today.”
Burien was the location of the state’s police training facility.
“Really, Josh? I guess you forgot to mention it.” She glanced at the whiteboard hanging on the wall adjacent to her desk. In block letters, it read:
JOSH SPEAKING ON INVESTIGATIVE RESOURCES IN MID-SIZE JURISDICTIONS
She waited a beat. “Of course I remember. Break a leg, Josh. I want to hear all about it. I’ll work the Delgado case while you’re basking in the glow of your admirers.”
He smiled at her. She had his number. And that’s why he liked her most of the time.
Those who worked in it called it a brush shed, but Every-Greens of Washington called their processing offices next to the Old Belfair Highway a “dream factory.” The sheet-metal-sided building was the size of a mid-century high school gymnasium with faded panels depicting bouquets that celebrated the major holidays: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. Kendall parked next to a row of old cars, many mud-caked with cracked windows and backseats containing baby blankets and Wendy’s food wrappers. She figured they were the cars of the processors, mothers who worked there part-time during the week and possibly up in the woods on the weekends as pickers.
Karl Hudson was a round-faced fellow of about sixty, with heavy bags under his eyes, protruding ears, and hairy knuckles that gave him a distinctly simian appearance. He introduced himself to Kendall as the president and chief operating officer of the company that his father and mother had founded in the 1950s. Every-Greens was one of the oldest purveyors of floral greens in the state.
“You said you’re here about Celesta Delgado.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I don’t like surprises,” he said. “So I checked. Her residency status was good. She was a good picker. Always had a permit. All our pickers do.”
Kendall followed him into a large room with about twenty massive tables. Young and middle-aged women were busy sorting the raw bundles, trimming the stems of leaves that appeared bug-eaten or torn by the move from the forest to the bag.
“That’s the moneymaker,” he said, indicating a bunch of salal, its dark green, almost leathery leaves glossy with water from a quick rinse. “Lasts for months in cold storage. Can’t keep up with the demand. Bet you’ve had your share of bouquets.”
Kendall nodded. “A few.”
“When you think about it,” he said, “we are dream makers here. Our team creates the foundation for wedding arrangements, new baby bouquets, and, yes, even memorial wreaths. Every moment marked by flowers carries a little bit of Kitsap County.”
“Was Celesta ever a processor here?”
Karl motioned for Kendall to take a seat in his office, which she did.
“She was here for about a month, until she got the restaurant job. She was a good processor. She figured she could make more waiting tables. I didn’t stand in her way. Was glad to have her out in the woods with the Penas. Good people. Good workers.”
She knew that was the bottom line for Mr. Hudson.
“Any problems that you know of between Tulio and Celesta?”
“I wouldn’t really know. They seemed happy.” He looked down at her file.
“You seem hesitant, Mr. Hudson.”
“Look, I am concerned. We’ve had some turf wars. Demand is huge, and we’ve got people coming up from Mexico and other points south canvassing the woods for any scrap of green they can find. A few years ago, it was impossible to get pickers. Now the woods are overrun with them.”
Kendall didn’t say so, but she could feel the ugly undercurrent of racism in the way the man referred to those who worked for him—those who made him enough money to buy the Lexus she saw parked out front—as them.
She noticed the CELEBRATING 50 YEARS gold sticker that was affixed to the outgoing mail on his desk.
“A lot has changed in fifty years,” she said.
“Yes. My father-in-law started this place. He’s dead now, and a good thing—he’d go apoplectic if he had to deal with what I do these days. Between you and me, these people don’t really want to work. At least, not hard. Not like they did back in the day.”
“I see,” Kendall said, deciding she’d never buy a supermarket bouquet again.
“I pay the processors a dollar more an hour than minimum wage, and benefits to boot,” he said, glancing through his office window, which overlooked the women hovering over tables, sorting salal.
“Celesta and the Delgado brothers at least had the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great. You know, when it actually was great.”
When they were finished, the Every-Greens president escorted Kendall back through the work area.
A Mexican woman of no more than twenty-five handed her a single rose flanked by a fan of huckleberry.
“Celesta is a nice girl. I hope you find her,” she said.
Before Kendall could say anything, Karl Hudson shot the young woman a cold look.
“Break time isn’t for another forty-five, Carmina. Let’s get back to work, ladies.”
Chapter Seven
March 31, 10 a.m.
Port Orchard
Instinct and intuition often play an important function in police work. Those who deny their crucial roles are likely those who don’t possess that something extra that allows an interrogator to home in on the truth when the facts don’t always add up: how the flutter of an eyelash indicates a lie, the curl of an upper lip says more than the words coming from the subj
ect. Truth, Kendall Stark knew, was more than the sum of available facts. There was nothing to really back up the belief that Celesta Delgado simply ditched her boyfriend in the middle of cutting brush in Sunnyslope. Nor did she think that the gentle man who’d come into the Sheriff’s Office was involved with her disappearance. She drove out to Kitsap West, the ramshackle mobile home park that was best known for a dead baby that had been found the previous year on the other side of the rusted eight-foot wire fence that cordoned off the single- and double-wide mobiles, along with a smattering of travel trailers and fifth wheels.
She parked her SUV in front of space 223, a single-wide Aloha with new steps and decking, and knocked.
A woman of about sixty answered. Although it was past ten, she was still wearing slippers and a bathrobe. As she spoke, the remnants of the cigarette she’d been smoking curled in the still air. And while she had a pleasant face and reasonably warm eyes, everything else about her told Kendall that she was going to be of no help. She barely opened the door, for starters.
A sure sign that the person is hiding something inside: a messy house, maybe a dead body…
“I don’t need a vacuum or aromatherapy if that’s what you’re here for,” she said.
Kendall offered a smile. “I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office. I’m Kendall Stark.”
“I don’t know anything about my nephew.”
Kendall suppressed a smile. She could never begin to count the times that someone misunderstood why she was on their front doorstep and offered up a relative or a neighbor as a quick means to save themselves from some hidden concern.
“Ma’am, I’m not here about your nephew. I’m here about the missing woman who lived next door.”
The woman widened the door a bit more. “You mean the Mexican?”
“I think they are Salvadoran.”
“Same to me.” She motioned for Kendall to come inside. “I liked Celesta. Nice girl. What she was doing with those rowdies, I’ll never know.”
A four-foot patch of linoleum served as the entryway to a living room that was papered in a cheery orange poppy print. A brown sofa, two small chairs, and a TV playing a shopping channel that sold only gems completed the milieu of a person of big dreams and modest means.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Kendall said, scooting a sheaf of newspapers to one side of the sofa before taking a seat.
“Sally Todd,” she said. “Coffee?”
Kendall politely declined. “No, thanks. I’m here about Celesta. You seem to think there was trouble at home. Am I getting that right?”
Sally Todd tightened the knotted belt on her robe, a pale blue flannel garment that needed laundering, and took a seat facing her visitor.
“Look, these days there is always trouble with young people. I know the girl. I know Tulio and his brothers too. They had their music playing at all hours. I called the sheriff on them five times last summer. You can check on that, if you don’t believe me.”
“Did Celesta ever indicate to you that she wanted out of the relationship? That maybe she wanted to return to El Salvador?”
The older woman looked for her cigarette case and pulled out a More. She flicked on her lighter and pulled air through the slender dark brown cigarette.
“She said that Tulio was no good and she wanted to get away from him. He was too controlling.”
This interested Kendall, although she wasn’t sure if she believed anything this woman had to say. “Really?” she asked.
“I’m talking out of school,” she said, “but I don’t care. The girl needed to get away from the lot of them. The Pena brothers have turned this quiet mobile home park into party central. I think one of the boys stole my leaf blower. They denied it. But that’s what I think. I called the sheriff on them too.”
“I see.”
“Yes, and you can verify all of this. The girl finally got some sense. Really, picking brush? What kind of life is that? She could do better than that. Who couldn’t?”
Kendall thanked her. She didn’t tell her that the county was rife with desperate people who would do just about anything to survive—and stay out of the reach of the law. Picking brush was far from the worst endeavor she could imagine.
With Josh Anderson away at the academy speaking about his experiences investigating rural crimes, detectives’ row in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s office was far quieter than usual. Almost pin-drop hushed. Two were out in the field, running down drug cases, and a third was working the third murder of the year, the case of a Seabeck woman who’d been arrested for the killing of a woman she and her husband had picked up after a night of partying at the Bethel Saloon. The tavern was a Kitsap classic, a rough-around-the-edges biker-type bar that shared a parking strip with a butcher, Farmer George’s, frequently prompting a retort about the two establishments’ close proximity:
“Wonder which is the bigger meat market?”
“Judging by the looks of some of those biker babes hanging around the pool tables, I’d say there’s more gristle at the Bethel than at Farmer George’s.”
Kendall Stark had felt genuine concern coming from Tulio Pena when he spoke about Celesta. She’d seen the way a husband or boyfriend can try to emulate devotion or worry by saying the right words. Sometimes they even eke out a tear to punctuate the moment with a display of emotion that is supposed to support their position as a loving partner.
“I don’t know why she did this to me.”
“I had no idea she was unhappy.”
“All I ever did was love her.”
Kendall just didn’t see a false note when Tulio gave his statement. Even so, something troubled her greatly, and there was no way to really dismiss it. The reporting deputy noted in the initial missing-person report that Celesta Delgado’s purse had been left behind in the van.
Inside the purse were the three main indicators of an abduction or a homicide: Celesta’s cell phone, keys, and wallet.
No woman running away leaves those things, she thought.
It was around five when Kendall found her husband and son in the plaza of the Kitsap County Administration Building. Steven had a client meeting that evening, and they’d planned on an early dinner. A few clouds had rolled in, obscuring the Olympics and turning what had been a lovely afternoon into what promised to be a cool spring evening.
Cody’s face lit up when his mother emerged from the Sheriff’s Office walkway. “Mommy! I see you!” he said.
Kendall beamed and ran toward her son with outstretched arms. Some days there were no words, just the rocking of a small body as he looked at her with eyes that seemed empty of recognition.
“Hi, you two,” she said.
“Ready for a dinner out?” Steven asked, his broad white smile another salvo to her heart.
“Yes, I am,” she said, scooping up Cody. “Pancakes, everyone?”
Cody smiled.
Whenever they went out, they’d have pancakes at the same restaurant, in the same booth.
“Make mine banana pecan,” Steven said with a wink.
“Strawberry for me.” Kendall shot back.
It was always banana pecan, strawberry, and blueberry. Each member of the Stark family had a prescribed meal, time, and place. To deviate was to cause unease and ruin what was a pleasant dinner—or, in this case, breakfast—out.
“How’s your day going?” Steven asked.
“Oh, you know.” She set Cody down and gave her husband a quick peck. “Kind of slow.”
“Any sign of the missing girl?”
Kendall and Steven talked shop only on the most cursory level. He’d tell her if he closed a big ad sale; she’d mention if a perp had been nailed or a case stymied. But she didn’t like to bring her work into their personal lives. They’d agreed to take his car to eat, then drive back to the Sheriff’s Office parking lot so Kendall could take Cody home.
“I’m worried about her,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat of the nine-year-old red Jeep Wrangler that they’d p
urchased just slightly used a couple of years after Cody was born. Despite his age and size, Cody was secured in a car seat, behind his parents.
“I thought she bolted. I mean, Jesus, she was working two jobs. I’d leave town too.” Steven glanced at Cody in the rearview mirror. He was watching the world slip by his window.
“Josh talked to Celesta’s sister in El Salvador. She’s as worried as Tulio is.”
“Boyfriend troubles, maybe?” he asked, turning onto Sidney Avenue and heading south to Tremont.
Kendall turned on a CD, a Raffi recording that Cody loved. She turned around, hoping to catch a smile, but the little boy just stared out the side window.
“I really don’t know. Can we talk about something else?”
“I drove over to Inverness this afternoon,” Steven said. “Just to check it out.”
Kendall felt his words stab at her, although she knew Steven meant no harm. The idea of the alternative school for their son hadn’t really set in yet. She wasn’t ready for it to set in.
“I thought we’d do that together,” she said.
Steven let a sigh pass from his lips. He took his eyes off the road and looked at her.
“I was making a run up to Bainbridge to meet with an advertiser. It was on the way home.”
“I see. I guess that makes sense,” Kendall said, looking away.
Why are you pushing this? she thought. Putting him there is one step closer to saying he’s never going to get better.
As much as she loved Steven, there was no doubt there was a wall between them. She knew that some walls can never be scaled. Not even with all the love in the world.
Chapter Eight
April 1, 10 a.m.
East Bremerton, Washington
The Azteca was a quintessential cookie-cutter Mexican restaurant, one of the type that sprouted all over America around the time that salsa overtook ketchup as the country’s bestselling condiment. Frothy frozen margaritas in flavors that God (or a decent bartender) had never intended—peach mint, cantaloupe, and blackberry—and tortilla chips warm from the deep fat fryer, served until the meal itself becomes an afterthought.
