by Gregg Olsen
“Heart failure,” Dr. Beakman says, coming through the door, “brought on by hyperthermia.” A Mötley Crüe song comes from inside the autopsy suite, muting to a faint reverb as the big glass door shuts. His scrubs removed and his street clothes on, Dr. Beakman is as fit as a thirty-year-old. I don’t doubt for a moment that he could outrun Al and Gavin from Luke’s office. And most definitely he could best that Pillsbury Doughboy Luke Tomlinson. I wonder if seeing all that this man sees—bodies of all shapes and sizes over his long career—is the source of his ceaseless quest for physical fitness. At least once a week I catch a glimpse of him running along the river.
“Probably died around noon, give or take,” he says, running his hand over his wiry hair to release it from the shape of the cap he’s just removed.
He thinks that’s what I’ve come for. It is, but only partially. There’s something else I need to know.
“Doctor,” I say, drawing myself deeper into the fan’s cooling breeze, “the dad says that when he got in the car after work he didn’t notice her right away. Not until he started driving. Witnesses at the scene say the stench was overwhelming.”
“Putrefaction,” he says. “Yes. It would be on a level that no one with olfactory senses could miss. Stronger than strong.”
I recall Luke’s excuse.
“Could, say, a rotten egg or sausage from a breakfast sandwich be mistaken for the smell of the dead body?” I ask.
Dr. Beakman lowers himself into his chair. A plaque presented to him by the local Rotary for community service is mounted on the wall next to his diploma from the University of Washington School of Medicine. A small plush Husky, UW’s mascot, sits on the credenza behind him. He leans back and shakes his head.
“Detective,” he finally says, “you know the answer.”
He’s right about that. I do. “I need to hear it from you. I’m not a physician.”
“The smell of that little putrefying body, volatile gases being released into a sealed-up car with temperatures spiking on one of the hottest days of the year? It would be intolerable. I don’t even know how he could open the door without succumbing to the odor. Let alone drive down the street.”
“How warm do you think it became in the car?” I ask.
“Hard to be precise,” he says. “Let’s see, it was ninety-four on Tuesday. After about a half hour I would say about one hundred twenty-five. Give or take two or three degrees.”
Seems pretty precise to me.
“He parked the car a little after nine,” I say. “Ally was in her car seat. Coworkers say he went to his car around noon to put away something he’d purchased during lunch. What do you think the temperature was then?”
He thinks a second. “Maybe somewhere in the area of one hundred fifty degrees.”
I want to stop the picture in my mind. “She was gone by then, right?” I ask.
He takes in my gaze and nods. “Yes. Likely so. And by then her body would have started emitting gases. She was wearing a soiled diaper. There was no way that the car didn’t stink to high heaven.”
For some reason I hang on the word heaven. That’s where I told Emma that Ally had gone.
“The girl suffered,” he says. “She clawed at the straps holding her in the seat.”
I feel tears well up in my eyes, and I turn away.
“It’s all right, Detective,” he tells me. “I’ve been doing this a very long time and whenever I get a little one on my table, it’s all I can do but remind myself that this is only evidence that the little boy or the little girl is gone.”
Our eyes meet. “Thank you, Dr. Beakman. I appreciate that.”
“We don’t do this for the money,” he says. “We do this work because we’re on the right side of things.”
I start to work my way to the door to leave.
He stands up. “Report will be ready later this afternoon,” he says. “I’ll send it over as soon as it’s done.”
“Thanks for that,” I say, my words absorbed by the whir of the fan. “Appreciate it.”
“Nicole,” he says, using my name for maybe the first time ever, “we each do our part. Let’s make sure this guy goes away for good. As her body temperature went up and up, the little girl cried her eyes out until there were no tears in her body. I’ve been around a long time. There is no crueler murder than one perpetrated by a parent on a child.”
Because I’m close by and because I can’t stop myself from loving him, I stop at Ocean View to see my father. He’s in his bed, a cast on his right arm. “God Only Knows” is playing softly on the CD player on his bedside table. He looks at me with what used to be gin-soaked eyes, but which now seem vacant and cloudy.
“Stacy,” he says, a smile coming to his thinning lips. “There’s my beautiful girl. My good girl.”
I don’t respond right away. I’ve grown weary of the stalemate I’ve forced between us—the one in which I made the decision not to correct my father because it confuses him and there’s no point in it.
I lean over and kiss him on the forehead.
“Where’s your mother?” he asks. “She hasn’t been here in a long, long time.”
I glance at a nurse as she walks past the open doorway. I don’t know why I do it, but I lean in toward my dad’s ear, where there is a porcupine of hair erupting from the ear canal.
“Mom dumped you, Dad,” I whisper. “She was fucking the county commissioner before she split for California to find fame. Instead she got cancer. She’s dead. Stacy killed her husband, Cy. She’s disappeared, Dad, and I’m raising your granddaughter, Emma. Do you understand? Can you understand anything at all? I’m Nicole, your oldest daughter. I’m all you have now and you still treat me like shit. See you tomorrow.”
I pull away just as the overdubbed vocals on the Beach Boys song coming from the CD player fade to their conclusion.
God only knows is about right.
“How’s he doing?” an aide asks as I walk past the nurses’ station.
I don’t stop. “About the same,” I answer.
My Accord revs as the air-conditioning moves from furnacelike to cool. It’s on the maximum setting, but it does little to cool me. It’s easy for me to say things to my father when I know he doesn’t understand any of it. I know that whatever he plays on that continuous loop in his brain is an amalgamation of memory and fantasy, a mean-spirited blend of selected bits and pieces from my years growing up in Hoquiam. Somehow he’s been able to pick the joy from the pain and create some kind of scenario that made his wife and daughter out to be something they never could be. I’m petty. I confess. I should be happy for him, but as if I were some dog that’s peed on a new carpet, my father rubs my face in it every time I see him. The doctors tell me his Alzheimer’s has made his mind into a Jenga game. The pieces of his memory tumble into nonsensical and inaccurate order. I know this. And yet every time I see him, he makes me feel worse instead of better. It’s like when Mom left and I cleaned the house to win him over, and he was angry because he said he couldn’t find anything.
“Your coffee mug is in the cupboard,” I told him one time.
“Don’t you sass me, girl,” he said, reaching over with an open hand.
Target hit.
My hand jumped to my hot, stinging cheek, and without so much as a peep from my lips, I ran up to my room, skipping risers to get there as fast as I could. Seconds later, Stacy appeared in the doorway on the pretense of being there to comfort me. Stacy was three years younger than I was but a know-it-all from the day she came home from the hospital.
“Dad’s drunk,” she said, as though it was some kind of breaking news flash. “He didn’t mean it. You know that. He loves you, Nic.”
I nodded at her. To engage any further was an invitation for Stacy to poke at my humiliation, my awkward embarrassment that my dad had slapped me. I sat there on the bed, clutching the soft frayed edges of the chenille coverlet that reminded me of when Mom still lived with us. When we were a family. I didn’t cry. I never
cried much at all.
A few seconds later I heard Stacy downstairs telling Dad that she didn’t know why I was such a bitch. I heard him agreeing with her. It’s funny how things eluded me for so many years. Stacy was always a double agent. Ten minutes later the front door opened and closed. A car pulled up in the driveway, music blaring.
My sister found a way to turn my misfortune into something wonderful just for herself. She wasn’t supposed to go out on a school night, but because I’d purportedly been so awful, she was given a free pass.
I put the car in gear and merge into summer beach traffic to meet Carter at the Tomlinsons’ apartment unit. We’re about to execute a search warrant. I know then that whatever problems I had growing up, whatever complications I have right at that moment, are nothing compared to what happened to Ally.
I survived my childhood.
I was lucky.
Ally got into her dad’s car to go to McDonald’s and then on to Little Pal’s Day Care. The one-year-old with big blue eyes and a sprout of red hair who’d celebrated her first birthday with a big pink-frosted cake just days ago never made it that far. Instead, she was abandoned in her car seat, trapped in a hot, airless vehicle. She’d become a victim of her father’s negligence or something far worse. And when I thought of her, all I could see was how she was covered in a pale green sheet, face up in a cooler in the basement of the same hospital where her mother works just a couple of floors above.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thursday, August 17
The Clark Terrace Apartments’ buildings are nice, as Aberdeen rentals go. Painted in a creamy white with a bland, timbered facade, they are newish. Clean. They lack curb appeal, but Aberdeen was never a town concerned much with that. Like Hoquiam, Aberdeen was built with economy in mind. An unkind person—or someone who’s never lived in a mill town—might turn up their nose at such a place where face value is always front and center. People who weren’t raised here, a place where billowing ocean fog adds the only designer touch to the landscape, don’t get it.
I think of my father just then. How he would come home from the Harbor Paper mill smelling of vanillin, the synthetic vanilla extracted from pulp. He’d grab a beer and start pounding nails on the addition that he was building. No permit. No plans. The end result showed. The windows to our den leaked from day one. He had an endless supply of caulk that he would squirt into the cracks every season. It was a patch job, to be sure.
I park next to Carter’s car and get out. On the way there, I’d filled him in on what I’d learned from Dr. Beakman. Carter said little during the call. I know that he’s thinking of his own kids. Cases like this one always bring a father or a mother back to their own children. It’s just the way it works.
A couple of kids in board shorts and tank tops watch us from a driftwood log that was probably brought in by landscapers. The apartment manager, a beefy man with a soul patch and massive forearms that instantly make me think of Popeye, stands by the door with a master key ready. A patrol officer and his partner have cordoned off the space between the parking lot and the front door of the unit.
Carter sees the look on my face, a lingering layer of sickness that marks me as having come from a toddler’s autopsy.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I say.
He gives me a quick nod and turns to Popeye.
“No need to wreck the door,” the manager says, letting us inside. “Security deposits don’t cover what they used to.”
It hits me hard. Right away. I wonder if Carter feels it too.
Immediately, the apartment comes across as a tableau of a little girl’s lost life. By the front door is a basket of little shoes; over it is a pegboard decorated with a row of hand-painted daisies. An impossibly tiny denim jacket hangs next to a larger one—Daddy and Me, I think.
Our warrant is specific. We’re looking for laptops, personal computers, phones, tablets—anything that might provide an electronic chain of evidence to prove that Ally’s father had deliberately left her in the car to die. Even as I process those words through my brain, I have an arduous time believing anyone could be so cruel, so utterly callous, that they would torture their own child to death.
I think of different ways people have murdered their children. Beatings come to mind. Shaken baby syndrome. Smothering with a pillow. Those scenarios are hideous, of course. Yet I know from cases that I’ve worked that often there is alcohol or drugs involved. That didn’t appear to be the case with Luke Tomlinson. He was sober enough to go to work. Most infanticides are fueled by rage. A mother or father is pushed beyond the brink of their ability to cope by a child who can’t stop crying, a baby who refuses to sleep. Even rarer are those who kill their children because a mental illness pushes them into doing the unthinkable. Andrea Yates, the Texas mom who drowned her children one by one, did so because voices inside her head insisted that by doing so she was sparing them from evil on earth and sending them straight to heaven.
The only parallel I can conjure as I survey the Tomlinsons’ apartment is the case of a man who set fire to his house to kill his children for insurance money. It is similar because he turned on the gas, lit a candle, and waited for the house to blow up.
Like Ally’s dad, that killer was absent from the scene of the crime.
It is, I’m sure, the most cowardly way to kill.
Just as we are about to start our search, Mia Tomlinson shows up. The hair she carefully put up in the morning for work has come undone, and her makeup is smeared. She, as my father used to say, “looks like she’s been dragged through a knothole.”
Sweat rolls from her temples and down her cheeks.
“Luke’s lawyer said you would be here,” she says in her mint-green and white nurse’s aide uniform. She sets her purse on the table next to the entryway and instantaneously wedges her way between Carter, me, and the living room. “All you had to do was ask.”
“We could have asked,” I say, “but in the end, we’re working a case. We have a lot of procedures to follow.”
Mia’s mouth is a straight red line.
“You know about procedures as a nurse,” Carter says, hoping to defuse what might turn ugly.
“Right,” Mia says. “Of course. I just wanted you to know that neither Luke nor I have a thing to hide. Open books. That’s what we are, and you are making us feel as though we’re bad people. You’re really making things a lot worse by sneaking around and going through our stuff. You know, without asking.”
“Look,” I say, “we know that no other time in your life will be worse than what you’re going through now. We get that, Mia. We also owe it to Ally to make sure that we know what happened to her.”
Mia is tough, unwavering. “I know that you already think my husband did something wrong, but you are wrong about that, Detectives. And, yes, you are making this worse than I could have ever imagined. My baby is dead! Do you know how that makes me feel?”
I don’t, and I can’t deny Ally’s mom that one bit of truth.
“No one can,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
There was nothing more to say about that.
“Mia, you are welcome to observe,” Carter says. He hands her a copy of the warrant. “While we are here looking for specific items, we are able to examine anything that’s in plain view.”
Ally’s mother sits in one of those white molded-plastic Ikea chairs that look cool but couldn’t possibly be comfortable.
“Fine,” she says. “Just get it done. I have to go back to work when you are finished.”
We let her sit as we move as a pair from room to room. The living room is first. It’s a bit of Ikea and a bit of Goodwill. An enormous TV hangs on a wall. It is so obnoxiously large, I find myself looking up at it very often. A black behemoth looming over the space. A PlayStation and an Xbox sit on top of a small white laminate stand beneath the TV.
Luke, with his roly-poly middle, looks like a gamer, not a runner. That’s for sure. Also beneath the TV is
a basket of toys, dolls, stuffed animals, and the like. I wonder which of them had been Ally’s favorites. A Care Bear stares out at me, bringing back memories of my own childhood. Our parents bought me and Stacy a bunch of Care Bears for Christmas one year. Stacy coveted the pair that I’d been given. She begged for them, and as much as I loved them, I gave them to her.
A few months later I found them in the far reaches of the basement, next to the canning jars that our mother had sent me after. Stacy hadn’t wanted those Care Bears at all. She merely hadn’t wanted me to possess them. That scenario would play out over and over in our adult lives too. So much so, that at times I was afraid to tell her that I wanted something that I didn’t yet have. Whenever I slipped, I’d find Stacy with the blouse I’d admired at Nordstrom, the dog that I’d wanted, the dream car.
The Tomlinsons’ living room is tidy, and the toys make the scene so sad.
“Luke wouldn’t have done this on purpose,” Mia says. “He and I talked about it. We did. We knew that a hot car was dangerous to children. We aren’t stupid.”
Not stupid, I think, but oddly clairvoyant.
Carter wants to hear more.
“When did you talk about it?” he asks.
“The beginning of the heat wave,” she says. “We saw something on the news about dogs being left in a car and then we remembered how that lady in Centralia left her baby in the car when she went into a tavern. It was an accident. Sad. And we felt for her at the time.”
“It was tragic,” I say, remembering the case, but also remembering Luke’s Texas Walmart mom.
Mia is scrolling through her phone, looking at pictures of her baby.
“Mia,” I say, “I know everything we say and ask you feels hurtful, but you have to remember it’s for a good reason.”
