Victim Six

by Gregg Olsen

  The Kitsap County Sheriff responded to a call from Celesta Delgado’s boyfriend, Tulio Pena, at 3 p.m. just off the Sunnyslope highway fronting DNR land.

  Delgado, 22, and Pena, 27, were working as brush pickers, along with Pena’s two brothers. All carried permits issued by the state.

  “We were having a good day,” Pena said in an interview with the Lighthouse. “Celesta was taking a bag of salal back to the van, and the next thing we knew, she was gone. Something is wrong.”

  Kitsap Sheriff Jim McCray says that his office is investigating.

  “We are putting resources on it,” he said, “but we are concerned that this might be the case of a young woman who got tired of things here, or missed her family and went back home. She did the same thing three months ago.”

  McCray was referring to reports that Delgado left her job as a hostess at the East Bremerton Azteca Mexican Restaurant without giving any reason. However, a check by the Lighthouse indicated that the departure was a misunderstanding. Delgado was rehired by Azteca following a three-week absence.

  “Her sister in El Salvador was ill. She did not leave without warning that time,” Pena said.

  But this time, Pena says, is different.

  “Something has happened to Celesta,” Pena said. “Please help me find her. I am—we are—very, very worried.”

  If you’ve seen Celesta Delgado, please contact the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark this newspaper.

  Serenity finished the article by writing extensive captions to accompany the photos. By providing the text with the images of Celesta, it would ensure that the overburdened copydesk would publish the pictures, at least online. She’d made a few calls to the numbers that Tulio provided. It seemed that everyone—the police, her employer, and her friends—believed that it was possible she left the country for her mother’s home in El Salvador

  Everyone considered it an option but Tulio Pena. He complained to his brothers when he read the paper the next morning: “They are treating Celesta like she doesn’t matter. Like we don’t know her. It is not right. She’s lost, or she’s been taken.”

  Or, as he was about to find out, something far worse.

  He looked at the article that Serenity Hutchins had published in the paper. Sure, it was only a small-town paper, but in time he’d see his hobby find a place in the pages of newspapers far bigger. More important. Serenity would get something out of that too, and she’d have him to thank for that, of course.

  He ran his fingertip over her byline, smudging it into oblivion.

  The blood flowed from his heart to his genitals, and his erection throbbed until he could take it no more. He slipped his hand under the waistband of his underwear.

  He knew what he liked.

  He pulled up Facebook, logged on with a bogus name and e-mail address, and went to the group called “Girls Who Want Adventure.”

  The young woman who’d posted the day before had taken the bait and answered his e-mail offering a job on a boat in Seattle. She was blond, blue-eyed. She had the kind of all-American-girl good looks that advertisers selling cornflakes and diet soda love to feature. He leaned close to the screen as he ejaculated.

  Both a methodical hunt and a surprise ambush had their distinct appeal, but this one would be different.

  He’d set a trap.

  He reached for a Kleenex to mop up the evidence of his arousal.

  Yes, she’d be just fine. But when? Timing, as he knew, was everything.

  Chapter Ten

  April 4, 10 p.m.

  Port Orchard

  Serenity Hutchins set down her phone and looked at her notepad. She noticed for the first time that she’d been crying as she wrote down an anonymous caller’s deluge of cruelty. Everything he had said in a flat, barely audible voice had revolted her. She was sick to her stomach. Tears had spattered the top sheet of her reporter’s notebook, sending the blue ink into a swirling bloom. She took a sheet of paper towel and blotted it. The transfer of ink and tears reminded her of blood.

  She dialed her editor’s home number.

  Charlie Keller was in the middle of a model of a steamship, Virginia V, one of the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that flitted from Sinclair Inlet east to Seattle and points southward too. He’d painstakingly created the model himself, out of balsa and fir. His dining room table had been converted to a mini-shipbuilder’s workspace since he’d returned to Port Orchard. It was the only hobby that kept his attention and kept him out of the Indian casinos. His house was a modest one tucked in the ivy-infested woods off Pottery Avenue. It was a three-bedroom with dinged-up wooden floors, a cracked tile countertop in the kitchen, and not a window treatment to be had. Mrs. Keller was missed for many reasons, and the lack of window treatments was somewhere near the bottom on the list of a lonely man. His dog, Andy, a smooth-coated and very overweight dachshund, was curled up on a sofa cushion that Charlie had removed and placed on the floor.

  The phone rang, Andy lifted his head, and Charlie got up to answer. It was after ten. As he ambled over to his cell phone on the kitchen counter, he wondered who’d be calling him at this late hour.

  It was Serenity.

  “Kind of late for a call,” Charlie said somewhat gruffly. He slumped back into his chair and rubbed his socked foot over Andy’s protruding belly.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to know what to do here.”

  Her voice was shaky. Charlie Keller’s annoyance at the intrusion turned to concern.

  “You sound stressed. You okay?”

  “No. I’m not. I’m scared. Charlie, I just got off the phone with some freak who says he’s a killer. He said he killed Celesta Delgado. He also said he had plans for another girl.”

  Charlie sat down next his model of the Virginia. “Probably a crank. Don’t sweat it. I talked to five Zodiac wannabes when I was down in San Francisco.”

  Serenity didn’t think so. “He was so direct about what he did to her. He told me things that he did to the body. Disgusting things.”

  “I see,” Charlie said, adjusting some line that he’d coiled on the deck of the boat model. “I’m not saying, Serenity, that he’s absolutely not the killer. But I’d bet this house that it was a crank caller. What exactly did he say?”

  “He started by telling me how he subdued her, how she begged him to let her go.”

  “Who?”

  “Celesta, I guess. Maybe another girl. I don’t know. He says he held her for three days. He…” Serenity looked down at her notes as if she needed to see the words in order to repeat what the caller had said. As if his words could be erased from her mind. “He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”

  Serenity stopped. She was sobbing, and she hated that she’d fallen apart, even if it was just on the phone.

  Charlie wanted to say something gruff and inappropriate about the caller being a Martha Stewart hater or something, but he held his tongue. The young reporter was crumbling.

  “Kid, it’ll be all right,” he said, trying to comfort Serenity, and yet glad that he was on the phone with her and not searching for a tissue in his office.

  “I guess so,” she said, regaining a measure of composure. “What should I do? Call the sheriff?”

  “You could. But let’s hold off until tomorrow. First, you don’t know if his info is genuine. Chances are, like I said, it isn’t. Let’s run down the story tomorrow, first thing.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, are you sure we shouldn’t call Detective Stark?”

  “Look,” he said, “we all have jobs to do. We’ll work the story tomorrow.”

  Serenity didn’t want to argue. “If you say so.”

  “That I do. Now, are you going to be all right?”

  “I think so. Good night, Charlie.”

  “Good night, Hutchins.”

  He hung up, a slight smil
e on his face. It wasn’t that he was happy about the fear in her voice. It was the memory of his experiences as a young reporter.

  Those days were long gone.

  Serenity thought of calling someone else just then, maybe her sister. But she dropped the notion. She was still unnerved by the creepy caller, but her editor was probably right. It had been a crank call. Part of her reasoning was that killers don’t often call to brag about what they’d done. But why her? There were far bigger newspapers serving the region: Bremerton had one, Seattle had one, Tacoma too. She could understand why he wouldn’t call a TV or radio station; those would require audio and video for a story.

  But why her?

  She decided to make a cup of decaffeinated Market Spice tea and take a book to read in bed. While she set a mug of water in the microwave, she walked through the apartment, checking the windows, the front door, and the slider that led to the small balcony. Everything was locked. The microwave dinged, and she took her drink and the novel she was reading to her bedroom.

  Yes, she thought, the caller had to be a fake.

  As the crow flies, the man who’d called wasn’t far from the Mariner’s Glen apartments, where the reporter lived. He emerged from the seldom-used bank of phones in the back of the bar at the China West Restaurant and ordered another beer.

  A plump man in his late fifties, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki vest that he couldn’t have buttoned if he’d tried, sat on his right, staring straight ahead as the bartender went about her business.

  He slipped the prepaid phone card inside his wallet.

  “Old lady pissing you off?” the man in the vest asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You were on the phone. Just figured your old lady was bitching at you like mine does.”

  The bartender sent down a beer.

  “Yeah. Never stops.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m in the same boat with you and every other guy. I’d like to shut that bitch up.”

  The man sipped his beer. He wasn’t thinking of his wife just then. He had his mind on another woman.

  “Yeah, shutting her up is good,” he said. “Sometimes I’d like to shut her up permanently.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The man just smiled. He’d already told someone about it. And that felt really good.

  Trey Vedder’s father, a prominent Bremerton dentist, thought his son’s lack of drive and tepid enthusiasm meant that he’d been given too much too soon. The nineteen-year-old college dropout didn’t seem to mind one whit when his grades from Washington State University dipped low enough for the academic watch list. His father thought otherwise and yanked him out “faster than an abscessed tooth” and told him he’d work a year. He had one caveat: “It’ll be with your hands and back instead of your brain. You need to see what’s out there for those who miss the boat.”

  Trey took “the boat” literally: he took a job at a Port Orchard marina cleaning the dock, helping the harbormaster, doing whatever needed to get done.

  It was late afternoon, and Sinclair Inlet was darkening as the sun moved west toward the Olympics. The foothills faded behind some feathery clouds.

  “Need any help?” Trey said, more out of boredom than the desire to be genuinely helpful.

  The captain of a thirty-five-foot Sea Ray, the Saltshaker, shook his head. “Got it handled, kid,” he said.

  The teenager held his hand out to catch the line anyway, and the captain gave in and tossed it in his direction.

  “How’s the fishin’?” Trey asked, securing the blue nylon rope.

  The captain cut the motor. “Wasn’t fishing.”

  Trey looked over at a white plastic bucket on the deck. He thought it contained chum used as bait. Inside, red liquid swirled to conceal what, with a little more scrutiny, he made out as a pair of gloves.

  “Nope. Just a little redwood stain job in the galley,” he said. “I’ll dispose of the bucket at the transfer station.”

  Trey nodded as the man snatched up the bucket. The remark, however, struck him as a little odd. A lot of boats in the harbor had redwood-stained woodwork. But he’d been inside the Saltshaker.

  It was fiberglass, aluminum, and vinyl.

  PART TWO

  Marissa

  Job interview, Tuesday, shipyard clerk. Daycare poss.

  —FOUND IN THE VICTIM’S PURSE, RECOVERED FROM A DUMPSTER

  Chapter Eleven

  April 9, afternoon

  Bremerton

  The car sped along the back roads of Kitsap County, faster than it should. The driver didn’t care. Speed on a slippery pavement only ratcheted up the excitement of the hunt. It was as if what he sought to do weren’t dangerous enough. It wasn’t enough of a rush without the added risk of being stopped by a cop and assuming the affect of a concerned driver pulled over for a routine traffic stop—and not the look of a killer about to be apprehended. That, he was sure, would never happen as long as he paid attention to the rules.

  He got on Highway 16 at Tremont Avenue and drove toward Bremerton. He slowed the vehicle in Gorst, the little burg at the tip of Sinclair Inlet. Gorst was always a possibility for what he had in mind. A topless bar and an espresso stand with baristas in pink leather hot pants was the chief draw for those who just might fit what he was looking for.

  Something a little different. A little dangerous. Something pretty.

  Nothing caught his eye. No need to brake, just keep going. Around the inlet and the off-ramp that led traffic past the row of Navy destroyers, aircraft carriers, and assorted ships awaiting their turn in the scrap heap. It was known as the Mothball Fleet—or, by those who disdained all things military, “tax dollars at work.”

  It amused him how Bremerton, a decaying Navy town always on the cusp of a renaissance, had never been able to shake the vestiges of seedy tattoo parlors, hookers on the stroll, and druggies lurking in the garages of three-story parking lots. Half-million-dollar condos along a revamped waterfront and a horde of fine restaurants did little to ease the reality that places might change, but people’s habits don’t.

  Except for some daydreaming, he’d never hunted in the place that, out of the entire Kitsap Peninsula, afforded the most chance for success.

  The ferry landing was like raw bait swirling in a bucket and cast overboard. It was surefire. It attracted both people with a place to go and those who had no schedule, no clue, no interest in anything but loitering.

  Or maybe scoring some heroin or the warm mouth of a hooker.

  Before the enormous steel-hulled car ferries were deployed to shuttle people from one side of Puget Sound to the other, a veritable swarm of wooden steamers plowed the cold blue waters. The flotilla, aptly and lovingly called the Mosquito Fleet, had long since gone by the wayside in favor of so-called “superferries.” Yet, Port Orchard, a town that never really got the hang of redevelopment, held on to the good idea that had come and gone. The old wooden Carlisle II served as a link from Port Orchard’s ferry landing to Bremerton’s just across Sinclair Inlet.

  It was afternoon, and Sunday’s second shift of shipyard commuters had long since gone to work. The boat was empty, save for Midnight Cassava and a couple of beleaguered out-of-towners heading over to walk the deck of the USS Turner Joy, a retired navy destroyer that had been playing host to tourists and war buffs for more than a decade.

  “You know of any good places to eat?” a ruddy-faced fellow with gold chains coiled in the neck of his shirt asked her.

  Midnight smiled. “I wish I did.” She latched on to the disappointed look on the visitor’s face. “Kidding. If you like seafood, try Anthony’s. A little pricey but good. There’s also a great Belgian beer and fry place not far from the ferry landing.”

  The man smiled and then looked over at his wife. “A beer sounds good….”

  “In a couple of hours it might,” snapped the tall woman with close-cropped silver hair that was either stylish or unflattering; Midnight couldn’t be sure.

  As she looked out a
cross the water pondering her future, tide lines of flotsam and jetsam arced along the steely, flat surface. She knew the job she was doing was a young woman’s game and she had responsibilities.

  Soon she’d start over.

  Midnight Cassava had spent part of the day riding the boat back and forth from Seattle to Bremerton. She was a slim woman, with olive skin, a full mouth, and eyes that were skilled at never registering much interest in anything. Or anyone. She was twenty-seven on her birth certificate, but the miles on her life’s odometer put her closer to forty. She didn’t like to work late at night: Feeling the chill of the air between her legs in some man’s car was far from a pleasant experience. She’d thought that those days of “lingering and loitering” were behind her. She thought she could score the money she needed by using Craigslist to troll for johns. That, however, was before her computer was stolen and her drug habit escalated. Her plans for becoming a dental assistant or a lawyer had vanished. Midnight wanted out. Anything would do. Even a shipyard clerk’s position, a job she planned to interview for, would be fine. Until then, she was merely hoping to get through the day.

  Working the Washington State Ferries system was a tough gig, but with a little one at home, Midnight needed to be able to turn a trick, get off the boat, feed Tasha, and get back to work. The two-hour ferry ride back and forth worked into a schedule that she could manage.

  Morning runs from Seattle to Bremerton were useless for her particular endeavor. Most of the men and women (Midnight would perform a sex act with a woman on rare occasions, and preferred it to having sex with men: it was less invasive) were in too much of a hurry to get to where they were headed. They had jobs to get to. Meetings to prep for. No one was in the mood for sex. That was fine. Midnight liked to sleep in as late as Tasha allowed her. She usually started up the ramp to the car deck around 4 P.M. That ensured she’d catch a couple of blue-collar guys looking for a blow job in the bathroom. She even had a regular, a physician who had a Lexus with black tinted windows. He’d invite her down to his car, and they’d have “around the world” in the backseat. With the noise of the ferry’s enormous engines a perfect cover, the doctor would cut loose with the most vile epithets that a woman could ever hear. But he paid well, never coming up short like some of the others who “swore” they had another fifty, but could produce only a twenty-dollar bill.