Victim Six

by Gregg Olsen

  “I’ll be there in five minutes. See you out front.”

  “Where are we going?” Serenity asked after getting into Josh’s idling BMW in the customer parking spot in front of the Lighthouse editorial and advertising offices.

  “Nowhere. We just need to talk. But not here and not on the phone.”

  He drove down Mile Hill and pulled into the mostly empty parking lot at the South Kitsap Mall behind the A&W.

  He turned off the engine and turned to Serenity.

  “Where in the world are you getting the information that you’ve been putting into the paper?”

  “I’ve told you,” she said, coolly. “I have my sources.”

  “I know. Who?”

  “I can’t—or, rather, I won’t—say.”

  “Damn it, Serenity. I got ripped a new one by Dr. Waterman today at the Godding autopsy. She thinks—everyone thinks—that I’m your goddamn source.”

  “You know you’re not.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Perception is everything. So tell me: Who is your source?”

  Serenity looked out the window. She paused, considering. “I can’t say. Not for sure. But I think the guy who’s been calling me is the Kitsap Cutter. I mean, I really do think he is, Josh.”

  “Jesus, are you sure?”

  She looked back at him; this time her eyes flooded with tears. “I am. I really am. It scares the hell out of me too.”

  Josh leaned closer and put his hand on her shoulder. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not finished. He told me that much. He says he won’t stop until he’s caught.”

  To the right of her desk, Kendall had hung photographs of the Kitsap Cutter’s victims. While the brutality that each had endured indicated a specific type of sexually sadistic serial killer, the women themselves were a diverse bunch. They weren’t a collection of “throwaways,” as some media people characterize a victim like Midnight Cassava. Carol was an accomplished professional woman; Skye, a recent college graduate.

  Kendall wondered if there was some similarity in their backgrounds that had attracted the Cutter to them, or if their selection had been completely random. She looked at Paige’s photo and retrieved her file. Why her? What had made her stand out? She read the article in the paper about her being crowned Fathoms o’ Fun Queen and how she was going to use her achievement to feed the homeless and embark on a career in the entertainment industry.

  Her eyes wandered over Celesta Delgado, victim one, and then to her file. She studied the witness statements and Dr. Waterman’s autopsy report. Her hands had been expertly removed. Was the killer a butcher? Chef? An ardent hunter? She perused the article Serenity Hutchins had written when the partially clad body was found in Mason County. She recalled what she had learned about brush picking and saw the photo that had been published the previous summer showing Celesta as the hostess at the grand opening for the remodeled Azteca.

  Victim two, Marissa, had also been profiled by the Lighthouse reporter, although less sympathetically than Celesta. Marissa’s mother had conceded that her daughter had had a “troubled” past, including arrests and convictions for prostitution and check kiting. Her head had been removed and the two parts of her body discarded in two different places, at two different times. The head in the box was meant to shock, which it did. She was found nude.

  Skye Hornbeck, victim three, had been an adventure seeker—the opposite of Celesta, who had merely aspired to a cozy middle-class life with her future husband. Skye had been strangled and stabbed and was missing a necklace, but there was no way to tell if the other victims had had any personal effects taken by the killer.

  Celesta’s engagement ring was presumably somewhere with her hand.

  Marissa couldn’t hang on to any jewelry, hence the wrist tattoo of her daughter’s name.

  All had been dumped in water. The killer surely had a boat. But so did a hundred thousand other people in the Seattle Tacoma area. Finding the right boat was like finding a needle stuck in the muddy bottom of Puget Sound.

  Impossible.

  There was no way she could stop herself. There was a kind of rush that came with reporting the news of a serial killer’s latest victims. Serenity Hutchins knew that some kind of evil being had anointed her to be the messenger of his deeds. The afternoon that Carol Godding’s body was snagged in the fishermen’s nets, she posted an entry on the Lighthouse news blog—there was no waiting for the print edition.

  The posting was headlined:

  CAROL GODDING’S BODY FOUND IS PAIGE WILSON THE KILLER’S NEXT VICTIM?

  She wrote that while the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office had not made an official statement that the missing beauty queen was a victim of the Kitsap Cutter, she had it on “good authority” that they suspected as much.

  A source close to the investigation indicated that Wilson is the fifth victim, and there likely will be others.

  She didn’t say that the source was the killer himself.

  Sam Castile read the blog and grinned.

  “‘Close to the case?’ She has no idea just how close she is,” he said to himself.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  April 2, 8:35 p.m.

  Key Peninsula

  Kendall looked at the map pinned to her office wall. A casual visitor would not have understood the meaning of the red dots marking Little Clam Bay, Anderson Point, Lisabeula, and the Mary E. Theler Wetlands.

  She and Josh had canvassed marinas all over Kitsap County and Gig Harbor in Pierce County. Each of those was marked with a gold star. The detectives knew that the person dumping the bodies was doing it from a boat. A lot of good that did them. Puget Sound was often referred to as the “Boating Capital of the United States.”

  “You look intense,” Josh said after sauntering into her office, looking as if he were on vacation or about to climb onto a bar stool.

  Without a care in the world.

  Kendall was stressed and made no attempt to hide it. “Why wouldn’t I be, Josh? There’s a maniac out there, and everyone from the FBI to the Seattle PD thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “We’re doing the best we can,” he said.

  “Not good enough.” Kendall let it go. She didn’t want to get into it with Josh just now. It seemed that he’d let his personal life cloud his occasional good sense, and it irritated her. “Look, the killer is a boater. We know that. He has to moor his boat somewhere around here.”

  “He could trailer it and launch it from a boat-ramp too.”

  Kendall disagreed: “I don’t see how he’d have time to haul it in and out, dump a body, and get back to whatever rock he lives under.”

  Josh sat down with his long legs stretched out. “People like that always find the time,” he said.

  Again the noise beckoned. Max Castile thought he’d heard a small animal bawl from behind the mobile home, shrouded from view by a stand of native cedar and a hedge of black bamboo his parents had planted. He’d been admonished to stay away from the mobile “for safety reasons,” and he was the kind of obedient child who knew that when his parents said something, they meant business. From his bedroom window, Max could see into the detached garage. His father was crouched over his workbench, silhouetted by the fluorescent tubes that hung overhead on a pair of galvanized chains. As he looked into the garage, Max imagined that he had become a character in a video game and that his dad was some kind of metallic scorpion that he could take out with a blast of his laser. Sometimes he wanted to do just that. He tiptoed past the master bedroom, where his mother had fallen asleep holding a novel in her lap. The book rested in her hand as if she were about to turn the page.

  The boy decided to go through the kitchen to get a flashlight. If his mom caught him there, he’d say something about needing a glass of water or being scared. Something she’d believe. The light was in the utility drawer next to the fridge. He slid it open slowly, quietly. Max fished out the flashlight and started to follow the noise across t
he darkened yard. It faded in the wind, and he stopped to listen.

  Where is it coming from? What is it?

  Nothing.

  He picked up a large stick and waited for the noise again.

  “Pleee-eee-se!”

  Just as he thought: it was coming from the direction of the old mobile home.

  Max checked behind him. No one was watching. His father had never bothered to skirt the trailer, so he crouched down low and looked to see if there was something caught under the structure.

  “Pleee-eee-se!”

  It was coming from inside the mobile home.

  As Max reached for the door handle, a hand pulled at his shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Max spun around and faced his mother. Melody Castile’s eyes were fierce with anger. It was a mom’s usual look of disapproval multiplied by a thousand.

  Max blinked back tears.

  “Mom, I thought I heard something.”

  She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “What did your dad and I tell you? This place is not for you!”

  “I’m sorry. I just thought…”

  Without another word, she yanked her son back toward the house.

  Paige Wilson had heard shards of the confrontation between mother and son as she lay on the mattress in her own filth. The duct tape that had been applied to her mouth had slipped off, allowing her to call out for help. As she rolled her head back on the mattress, Paige felt the familiar pressure of the bobby pins that held her crown to her head.

  How had all of this happened? she wondered, retracing the text messages, the promises of a modeling contract, the meeting in the parking lot at the Poplars…and finally the smelly cloth going over her face before falling into darkness.

  She tried to burn into her memory the last thing she had seen: a Department of Defense parking decal, silver and blue, with a beginning sequence of identifiers: D7D. She’d seen the familiar stickers her whole life. Whoever owned the car had been employed at the shipyard or maybe the submarine base at Bangor. Rental cars don’t come with DOD decals.

  Whoever had her was not some modeling agent and his assistant from California. Lying on that mattress, in the middle of nowhere, she knew she was a long way from Top Model. A long way from anywhere at all.

  She whimpered helplessly in the dark and tried to come to grips with her situation and think of how to get out of there.

  Paige had been a virgin before she was captured and violated. She had told her friends otherwise, as if bragging about having had sex made her seem adult. She didn’t want to be called “the Virgin Queen,” so she’d made up a lie about a boyfriend at a prep school in Tacoma. Paige had been all talk. She’d let the float driver fondle her breasts once, but that was the sole extent of her experience with men.

  Now she was cut, bleeding, and all but certain she was going to die.

  After returning to the house and putting Max in his room for the rest of the night, Melody went to the garage, where Sam was washing out the inside of Paige Wilson’s car. He wore gloves and used a chamois that she’d purchased from a late-night TV pitchman. They’d laughed at how the pitchman could tout the uses they’d devised for his product. Certainly it could soak up soda pop from the floor, but it also did a good job obliterating fingerprints.

  Sam stopped what he was doing. “What’s with you?”

  “What’s with me? That’s a good one.”

  “Are we playing games here, Mel? Because if we are, I’m missing something.”

  Melody was tense, her arms folded across her chest, her hair matted against her sweating forehead.

  “Max almost went into the Fun House. That little bitch we picked up was making some noise. You need to make her quiet.”

  Her tone was indignant—she expected him to do something. Now.

  “Oh, I need to?” Sam set down his dripping chamois. His eyes were ice, and the veins in his neck plumped with blood. “What’s the matter with you? You go shut her up. For good.”

  “I don’t do that,” she said.

  He jabbed a finger at her.

  “You do as I tell you. That’s our deal, babe.”

  Bernardo Reardon, the detective with the Mason County Sheriff’s Office who’d met with Kendall and Josh when Celesta’s body was a heap of waterlogged flesh the previous March, looked down at the report submitted by the state crime lab in Olympia. It had been among a batch of documents found in the trunk of a fired lab worker’s car.

  It was unremarkable except for one small notation.

  Trace analysis recovered distinct particles of marine fiberglass and sealant used by U.S. boat manufacturers prior to 1980.

  He got Kendall on the phone in her office and told her what he knew.

  “Basically, whoever dumped the body had an older boat,” he said. “All have been water dump sites, so I guess that’s no real news.”

  Kendall thumbed through Birdy’s autopsy report on Carol Godding.

  “Godding also had particles recovered from her shoulder blades,” she said.

  “Maybe they’ll match.”

  Kendall was thinking about the age of the boat.

  “Almost thirty years old,” she said. “Can’t be too many of those around here.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Bernardo said. “I mean, a boat that old is not exactly a classic, you know, like a Chris-Craft.”

  “Old, but not a classic,” she repeated.

  Serenity allowed the thought to come to her, though she’d resisted it before. Sam Castile had a boat. An old one. Sam had a proclivity for bizarre, controlling behavior. Even Melody had said so. Serenity recalled the clues she’d seen at the log house when she and her parents had visited there. Something was strange. She’d recalled how Josh had asked her about the rolling pin and how she’d dismissed it out of hand.

  Her heart pounding, she called her sister.

  No answer.

  “I’m sorry for bugging you about this, Melody. Don’t take it the wrong way. But I’m worried about Sam. He might be involved in something. Something bad.”

  She thought better of leaving such a message and waited for the prompt so she could erase it. It felt good to have it out of her system. But no such prompt came.

  Sam Castile held his wife’s phone to his ear and stared at her.

  “We’re going to need to take care of the little bitch,” he said. “You hate Serenity.”

  “Yes, I hate her,” she repeated.

  “She’s always had everything that you wanted.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “I need to remind you, bitch, because you’re so goddamn stupid, you wouldn’t know how to do anything if I didn’t tell you how.”

  It soothed her a little when he treated her like she was nothing.

  “Your parents never understood you the way I do,” he said, turning around to measure her reaction. “They underestimated what you are and who you are.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He started toward the Fun House. “Taking care of her will not only stop her from asking stupid questions, it will be payback for everyone for what they did to you. Best of all, we’ll have a hot time doing it.”

  He didn’t seem to care that in killing Serenity he was breaking one of his rules. Rules, he knew, were never meant for him.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  April 3, 2:10 p.m.

  Olympia, Washington

  Police in Olympia, an hour to the south and east of Kitsap County, found Paige Wilson’s red Datsun abandoned in front of a mystery bookshop in the historic downtown section of Washington’s capital city. A traffic enforcement officer named Jerry had chalked it earlier in the day, but it wasn’t until the bookstore was closing that evening that someone noticed that the car wasn’t going anywhere. Police ran the tags and notified Kitsap County when they learned it was registered to a Brent Wilson and that there was a missing person hit out on the car. It belonged to a missing beaut
y queen, Paige Wilson, seventeen.

  Early the next morning, Kendall Stark drove down Beach Drive to the Wilsons’ place to let them know their daughter’s vehicle had been recovered—and, more importantly, that there was no trace of Paige.

  Deana Wilson was in the driveway when Kendall pulled in. She wore a pale blue bathrobe, and her hair was wet from the shower. She’d read the news blog and contacted everyone she could think of—the reporter, the editor, the sheriff—to see if it was really true.

  “We can’t reveal our sources,” the Lighthouse editor had said.

  “We don’t know where they got their information. We don’t have any information confirming your daughter was abducted by anyone,” was the canned response from the Sheriff’s Office.

  Kendall had called to say she was coming by. The wary look in Deana’s reddened eyes indicated that she already knew the detective had not brought good news.

  “I put our son on the bus a few minutes ago,” she said,. “I found myself just standing here, waiting, not wanting to go back into the house until you got here.”

  Her face was pale, and her features, without makeup, seemed to recede into the anguish that consumed her.

  “Let’s go inside,” Kendall said.

  Deana nodded and led Kendall across a pathway of cedar rounds to the front door.

  “You found her,” Deana said, without looking at Kendall. They walked to the kitchen, where her husband sat framed by the view of Puget Sound and the gray mottled trunks of a grove of alders.

  “No, no,” Kendall said, acknowledging Brent Wilson. “We found her car.”

  Brent, a man who almost never betrayed any emotion about anything, started to cry upon hearing the news.

  “This is not good,” Deana said, gripping her husband’s hand on the kitchen table, where they’d seated themselves.

  “We don’t know what it means,” Kendall said, trying not to offer false hope but not wanting to lie to the couple, who were already fearing the worst possible outcome.