Victim Six

by Gregg Olsen

  Kendall learned from Josh that Paige Wilson’s laptop was missing, along with her cell phone and car. Skye’s cell phone had been missing too. She wondered if there was some connection.

  Or if she was merely grasping at straws.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  March 31, 1 p.m.

  Vashon Island, Washington

  The water was corduroy as bands of blue and gray etched the surface of Colvos Passage, the mile-wide stretch of Puget Sound that separates Kitsap County from Vashon Island. The island’s western side is a sparse mix of beachfront cottages and farmhouses facing an equally rural southern Kitsap County. Robert Carmichael and his sister, Leah, were bored out of their minds as they took a break from their grandparents’ place up the hill from Lisabeula, a park that had once been a campsite for Scouts and Native Americans long before Scouting was anyone’s idea of fun. The teens hiked down the steep road along a creek to the five-acre park. Fifteen-year-old Robert was hoping to get a glimpse of a pod of whales, as he had during the dull visit the year before. Leah, almost fourteen, didn’t care what they did. Their grandmother had been on Leah’s case for text messaging when she should be “engaging” with human beings.

  Grandma didn’t get it.

  They followed a trail to a madrona tree that had slipped down the hillside, its red bark rubbed off, leaving a green and brown indentation where others had tied a rope swing. During a hot summer’s high tide, it was the perfect setup for swinging and jumping into the water. The tide was out, and the wind coming down from the south brought a brisk chill. March was a far cry from summer weather.

  Robert grabbed the rope, stepped up on the big knot at its base, and gripped another knot above his shoulders.

  “Watch this,” he said, looking over at his sister, who was frustrated with her Sidekick.

  “There’s no signal here. This sucks,” she said.

  “So what? Engage with people, remember,” Robert said as he started to move over the beach toward the water.

  “If you were a person, I might.”

  Robert kept going as his sister dug her feet into the rocky beach, a disinterested gaze on her face that she’d perfected. He caught a glimpse of something red next to a silvery and gray remnant of a fir.

  “Over by that driftwood,” he said, “someone left a backpack. Check it out.”

  “Last time we found a dead harbor seal here,” Leah said. “Anything would be a step up from that stinky thing.”

  She got up, put her phone in her back pocket, and walked over to the log. She bent at the knees to get a closer look.

  “Hey, it’s a purse. It’s been out in the water. Not as gross as a dead seal, but not so great, either.”

  Robert jumped off the rope swing and landed with a thud, his feet digging two deep holes in the gritty beach.

  “Let me see. Could be some money in it.”

  “If there is any, you better split it with me.”

  Robert shot his sister a dirty look. “If there is any money, we’re going to give it back to the owner, stupid.”

  “I hate you, Mr. Perfect. Whatever.” Her eyes widened all of a sudden. “That’s a Dooney,” she said as her brother picked up the soggy red leather purse.

  “A what?”

  “Dooney & Bourke.” Leah squatted next to Robert, who hadn’t a clue as to what she was saying. “An expensive purse. Too bad it’s ruined.”

  He undid the clasp and dumped the contents of the purse onto a flat space atop the driftwood. A makeup brush; a lipstick; a pair of sunglasses; a set of car keys on a circular key fob with the DB logotype on it; a soggy packet of tissues; a tampon that had done what it was supposed to do—absorb liquid; a hairbrush; a tin of Altoids; a Mont Blanc pen; and a wallet that matched the red leather of the purse.

  Leah didn’t bother telling her brother that the pen was expensive too.

  “Not much here,” Robert said, opening the soggy wallet. “No money.”

  Leah started to put her earbuds back in place. “That sucks too.”

  From behind a clear plastic shield, fogged from the elements, the teenage boy retrieved a driver’s license. Although the photo had flaked off, the name was still legible: CAROL GODDING.

  “Let’s head back to Grandma’s,” Robert said. He scooped up the contents of the soggy purse and put everything back inside.

  Leah scrunched her nose in an exaggerated manner. “You’re bringing that?”

  Robert shrugged as they started up the hill. “You said it was expensive.”

  “When it wasn’t waterlogged. Now it’s a piece of crap. But if you’re going to keep it, can I have the pen?”

  Melody rubbed the interior of the freezer with a rag soaked in diluted bleach. There had been so much to do to get the place ready for the new girl—the new toy. She could hear her husband laugh as the girl in the next room begged for her life. She hated the sounds the playthings made. It wasn’t because she felt sorry for them; it was more out of embarrassment. She knew that no amount of pleading or begging could set any of them free.

  Not until Sam had done what he wanted.

  Not until she’d done what Sam commanded her to do.

  The freezer gleamed, and she noticed that she had missed a spot of blood. She wiped it again. Gone…then back.

  She noticed for the first time that her knuckles were bleeding.

  “Damn you, bitch!” she called out. “You made me bleed. Daddy! She made me bleed!”

  The moaning in the other room stopped.

  Good, Melody thought. She shut up. Good girl.

  The freezer sparkling clean, Melody set down her cloth and took a pair of brand-new steak knives from the Fun House’s kitchen drawer. She hooked her fingers through a spool of fence wire and started toward the bedroom door.

  Sam summoned her from another room.

  “Coming!” she called out.

  Elizabeth Carmichael studied the kids’ find. A concerned look pinched her normally tranquil face as she considered the sodden purse, the pen, and the wallet her grandchildren had found on the beach near her Vashon Island home.

  “Did you see anything else down there?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing to see, Grandma. Just some water and seagulls. Real exciting.” Leah wanted nothing more than to have her grandmother send her to her room so she could listen to music and text her friends at home in Seattle’s North End.

  “Leah, this is serious. We need to call the police about this,” Elizabeth Carmichael said, going for her kitchen telephone. “I’ve heard this woman’s name on the news.”

  Before she shrugged it all off and plugged her iPod earbuds back in, Leah couldn’t resist getting one more comment in. “Can’t we just take it to a lost and found somewhere on the island? You must have a lost and found around here somewhere.”

  “We have no such thing,” Elizabeth said as she dialed the number for the King County Sheriff’s Office, which served the island with a small station and a couple of patrol cars.

  “My grandchildren unearthed something on the beach at Lisabeula,” she said. “I think it belonged to that woman missing from Port Orchard. She was on the news. Carol Godding.”

  After her grandmother hung up, Leah eyed the pen one more time.

  “You’re not keeping that,” Robert said. “Get real, Leah. This stuff belonged to a woman who might have been killed by the Kitsap Cutter.”

  Robert Carmichael watched the news too.

  Kendall stood on the rocky shore and looked west across Colvos Passage to Kitsap County. A dog barked. Gulls swooped down into the wake of a green and white Foss tugboat towing a two-block-long boom of peeled logs toward Olympia or Tacoma. A deckhand tossed a cigarette into the water. Kendall had never been on that side of Vashon Island before. The view of the southern- and easternmost part of the county was somewhat deceptive. Million-dollar residences that aspired to look like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard shored up the frontage along the passage. Those were the homes of the people of means; seldom w
ere they visited by the likes of her and her badge.

  A young King County deputy with a buzz cut pointed to the location where Robert Carmichael had indicated he’d found the purse.

  “See that fan of roots?” he asked Kendall, pointing to a mighty old fir that had succumbed to the crumbling cliffs on one side of the passage or the other.

  She nodded.

  “Near the base of that.”

  Kendall sighed. There was no chance that there was any more evidence. The tide was high. Everything that might have been a clue was submerged.

  The deputy handed her the Dooney, sealed in a large clear-plastic bag.

  “Anyhow, I hope this helps,” he said.

  “Of course I do too,” she said, knowing Carol Godding was more than merely missing. In all likelihood she was, indeed, victim four.

  The day after the quarreling brother and sister found Carol Godding’s purse, a Native American fishing crew dropped their nets in Colvos Passage near Olalla Bay, about a mile south of Lisabeula. The water, rippled shiny like corroded shellac on an old tabletop, accepted the weighted nets, and the men on the boat took a moment to kick back and pass the time. Fishing was always about waiting; and in the case of Native Americans, it was also about putting up with the glares and hostile looks of the fisherman on the causeway bridge who cannot match the catch of a net dropped into the blue. At about 4 P.M, it was time to reel in the curtain of nets.

  “Pretty heavy,” one of the younger men said as the winch strained to lift a load of salmon.

  “Maybe you snagged a deadhead,” another said.

  “Not that bad,” the first fisherman shot back. “Just a good haul.”

  Yet, it wasn’t a good haul. As the net broke the rippled surface of the passage, first a hand appeared, then the arm, and finally, the remainder of a nude and battered body.

  Carol Godding had risen to the surface.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  April 2, 9 a.m.

  Port Orchard

  The nude corpse on Birdy Waterman’s stainless-steel table was not like the others who had been defiled by the Cutter. In fact, even those who profile such things would have discounted Carol Godding as a possible victim of the same man who had murdered Celesta, Skye, and Midnight. At forty-five, Carol was no ingénue. She might have been a lovely woman in life, but the waters of Puget Sound, the knotted fury of the fishermen’s nets, and, of course, what the killer had done to her had stolen that all away. However, the forensic pathologist also noticed two small scars behind Carol’s ears, indications that she had likely had a face-lift. There were also several tiny and recent scars running along her abdomen, the telltale signs of a tumescent liposuction procedure.

  Birdy knew that Carol had recently gotten divorced. Birdy had never married herself, but she understood the reaction to aging. The need to halt it all before it was too late. Some women didn’t see themselves for the greatness they held but as a package, a vessel, that had been coveted by men. Carol Godding had likely spent the last few months of her life pulling out all the stops to get herself back in the game before a ruthless killer stopped her.

  Birdy noted how Carol’s wrists and ankles were striated by wounds exactly like those of the other victims. She hated to use the gimmicky name for the perpetrator, but in seeing the teasing injuries made by a blade on Carol’s torso, Birdy had to admit that the Kitsap Cutter had struck again.

  She took out the camera and started documenting the body as found. There was an indignity to the process, and Birdy knew it. A woman like the one on the table had been consumed with how she looked, how she was progressing in her personal makeover.

  The one that would put her life back on track.

  “You’re late,” Birdy said as the Kitsap County detectives entered the room.

  “You started early,” Josh said.

  “Reset your watch. I started on time.”

  “Sorry, Doctor,” Kendall said, setting down her things and disappearing into the changing room. She kept talking through the cracked doorway. “We got held up by some media calls. Word is out about Ms. Godding being victim four.”

  Birdy looked up from the body.

  “Word is about right, I’d say,” she said.

  As Kendall emerged in her pale green scrubs, Josh went to change. Again the door was kept open.

  “This gal’s no spring chicken,” he called out. “What would a sexual sadist want with her?”

  The two women looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “This isn’t necessarily about sex but about the feeling that the killer gets from the pain that he’s causing,” Kendall said.

  She also wanted to say something about how the victim on the table was younger than Josh was, by about six years, and he still considered himself hot stuff.

  Yet, she didn’t.

  As the three hovered over Carol’s remains, there was an unplanned moment of silence. Each took in what could not be ignored. The body had been pierced by a knife a total of fourteen times. The wounds had not been deep, no more than a quarter inch at best.

  The stabbing had been part of the game.

  “Did she bleed to death?” Kendall finally asked.

  Birdy stopped taking pictures. “No. Look here.” She tilted the head slightly as she opened Carol’s blue eyes.

  “Patriotic, this gal. Red, white, and blue,” Josh said, clever and cruel at the same time.

  Neither woman commented on Josh’s second inappropriate comment of the hour.

  “Petechial hemorrhaging,” Birdy said. “I expect the hyoid has been crushed too. This victim was manually strangled. No ligature marks.” The pathologist pointed at some bruising on the neck. “Look, you can see the fingertips here.”

  “Looks like dirt,” Josh said.

  Kendall peered at the skin. “I see them.”

  Josh took a step closer. “Yeah, I guess so. But if she was strangled, that doesn’t fit the MO of the killer.”

  “She was raped, wasn’t she?” Kendall said.

  The pathologist made a nod of resignation. “I’ve swabbed. This perpetrator is careful, smart.”

  She reached for her scalpel to do what the killer had done. The blade of her knife was not so different from the one that had tortured Carol Godding. Birdy performed a zipper pull, opening up the battered body.

  Dr. Waterman fixed her eyes on Josh. “Just so you know,” she said, “if I see any of this report in the paper tomorrow, I’ll go to the sheriff and have you bounced off this case for good. You understand?”

  Josh Anderson’s face went a little pink. “Look, Birdy, I’ve never compromised a case. Ever. I resent what you’re implying.”

  “I’m not implying anything, Detective. I’m stating a fact. That’s what I’ll do.”

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve never compromised a case for any reason, and you know that.” He looked at Kendall, maybe for support. She stayed mute.

  “Josh, I end up with the result of what these maniacs do,” Dr. Waterman said. She looked over at Carol. “We have a serial killer working in our own backyard, and some of the things that have been in the paper could compromise what I think we both want: an end to this.”

  “You know something, Doctor,” Josh said, dispensing with familiarity, “you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I actually don’t mind being wrong now and then. I learn from it.” She was thinking of Celesta just then and how the early discounting of her disappearance as an abduction had delayed an effective investigation. She wished she could turn back the clock for all of them—Celesta, Skye, Marissa, Carol, and in all likelihood Paige.

  With the skill that comes with practice, Birdy rolled Carol’s body over so that she could view the wounds on her back. She’d been sliced in four places, not deeply but teasingly shallow. She noted the locations on the body chart that accompanied every autopsy. It was a bald, alien-like figure that reduced the person to nothing more than an outline.

  Carol’s skin
was slightly gray, with the exception of the wound areas and some postmortem bruising on her shoulder blades. There, a couple of shiny specks glinted. Birdy looked closer.

  Something was adhering to Carol’s back.

  In the arsenal of equipment in her Rubbermaid tote, Birdy found a UV light. Turning it on, she ran the bluish beam over the body. Tiny particles pulsed under the glow.

  What were they?

  Painstakingly, the forensic pathologist collected each minute fleck, fifteen in total. They looked like pieces of fiberglass.

  Kendall and Josh walked across the parking lot without speaking. Kendall couldn’t take her mind off the victim, and Josh couldn’t stop brooding over the lashing that Dr. Waterman had given him over his relationship with Serenity Hutchins.

  Josh broke the silence. “She’s a good reporter,” he said.

  “No one’s that good, Josh. Birdy is right. If you’re not blabbing case facts to her directly, then she’s digging into your stuff when you’re not around.”

  “She’d never do that.”

  Kendall lingered by the door. She wasn’t ready to go inside without telling Josh what everyone in the Sheriff’s Office was already saying.

  “This is the biggest case we’ve ever had, and you’ve compromised it. Get it together, Josh. Someone out there is torturing and killing innocent victims. Your ego is of no consequence in the grand scheme of things.”

  He didn’t reply. He knew she was right.

  Josh Anderson dialed Serenity the first chance he had. She was at her desk, working on an article. The newsroom was mostly silent, and she almost resisted answering. Personal calls were allowed, of course, but things hadn’t been going well with Josh lately.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” she said.

  “This is serious, Serenity. Meet me.”

  She looked at her computer screen and let out a sigh. “I guess so. Tonight?”

  “No. Now.”

  “Now?”