by Gregg Olsen
She sets down her scissors. “I don’t want to talk.”
“There’s a lot at stake here,” I say. “I need your help.”
“I made a mistake,” she says, “but I didn’t do anything illegal. And neither did he. Right now I’m feeling really pissed off at my sister. God, I hate her so much.”
We could find some common ground there. I’d said those same words about Stacy more than a time or two. More than a thousand times, I’d wager. Wager. A gambling term. Where did that come from just now?
“This is important,” I tell her. “If you think that Luke is innocent and you care about him, then you need to help.” The idea of helping Luke makes me sick, but the truth can be messy and sometimes misguided. I’m all but certain he killed Ally on purpose, but the ultimate arbiter will be a jury or a judge. Rachel might play a role in the outcome of the judicial process. I just need to know how.
“We can’t talk here,” she says, her lips tightening over perfect teeth. So perfect that I wonder if she and Amber are actually from Grays Harbor County. “I work here and this place is gossip central.”
“I’m sure,” I say. “We can talk at the police station.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh, no way! That would weird me out. Let’s go over to the Starbucks. I’m off shift in twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll see you there.”
The cactus lady catches my eye as I leave.
“I can’t tell which one,” she says, pointing to a yellow- and red-flowered duo.
“Both look pretty prickly,” I tell her. “I like the yellow.”
She smiles and puts it into her shopping cart. “Me too.”
God, how I wish every decision in life could be so simple.
I text Carter and let him know to meet Rachel and me at Starbucks.
Me: She had a relationship with Luke.
Carter: No kidding.
Me: That’s your response?
Carter: OTW. Order me a mocha Frappuccino. Venti.
I shake my head. I don’t tell Carter that the beginnings of his spare tire could be stamped “Frappuccino” instead of “Goodyear.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Monday, August 21
The Starbucks across the WinCo parking lot is completely dead inside, though the baristas feverishly pull espresso shots for drive-through customer beverages. I order a Frappuccino for Carter, a couple of iced lattes for me and Rachel, and wait patiently while the machine that turns coffee, ice, and chocolate syrup into Carter’s drug of choice roars like a chain saw under a cloche. A hipster jazz track plays, and I find my way to a table in the back under the community bulletin board. Advertisements for car washes and rummage sales blanket the space. Community here means selling something.
Carter finds me and immediately makes a face.
“Didn’t I say no whip?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I’m trying to cut back a little,” he says, sliding into the seat next to me.
“Really? I haven’t noticed.”
He sips his drink, and I fill him in on what I know about Rachel.
“Maybe I should join some self-help group to get some leads,” he says. It’s meant to be a joke, and I’m not offended. If I had been, I would have suggested that Overeaters Anonymous might have a space for him. But since I’m not, I don’t. I just think it.
Rachel Cromwell makes her way to the table. She looks nervous. Her face is pink.
“Should I have a lawyer here?” she says, sitting down. “I’ve never done this before and I just don’t know.”
I introduce Carter, and she gives him a quick nod.
“I can’t answer if you need an attorney or not,” I say. “If you’ve committed a crime, then all right, let’s not talk here.”
“I told you that I didn’t.”
“That’s right,” I say. “So I’m pretty sure no need for an attorney.”
I slide Rachel’s drink across the table. She thanks me and forces a smile. Again her pretty teeth are revealed. Around her wrists are tattoos of Scandinavian runes. In a land of barbed wire and sea-related ink, her selection is oddly out of place. Sophisticated, even. I remind myself once more to check my biases against the people and the place that I escaped and ultimately returned to.
“I know you are upset about all of this,” I say.
She removes the paper wrapper from the familiar green straw.
Carter chimes in. “We realize this can be kind of embarrassing,” he says. His words are meant to support her, but she bristles instead.
“Love,” she says, her eyes glued on Carter’s, “is never, ever embarrassing.”
More annoying smooth jazz fills the air.
“When did it start?” I ask.
Rachel Cromwell pokes the now-naked straw through the X on the top of the plastic lid sealing her cup. “It’s been on and off for a while,” she says. “Neither of us planned it. It happened. One time we were hanging out in the WinCo break room and the next thing I knew we became a thing. Like I said, not planned. Just happened.”
“Right,” I say. I feel a little uncertain about her. Rachel seems smart and capable. And yet she’s done the most idiotic thing a woman can do. She fell for a loser. Of course, I did the same thing too. “It started in the break room,” I finally repeat.
She gives me a look—a glare, I think—and then one to Carter. “We didn’t have sex in the break room, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
It had crossed my mind, but that’s not what I was thinking, and I tell her so.
“Sorry,” I say. “What was it about Luke that attracted you?”
She smiles. “You’ve seen him, right?” she says. “Sure, he could lose a few pounds, but he’s a catch. Has an awesome personality. Called me ‘Sugar.’ Because of my bakery gig. Sweet. So much fun. We fell for each other plain and simple. I’d come out of a bad relationship and he was in the middle of one.”
“Unhappy with Mia?” Carter asks.
She thinks before answering. “Miserable. All she cares about is her stupid nursing degree. Studying all the time. Never even considering her husband and his needs. Really kind of a selfish bitch. But you know that. You’ve met her.”
I don’t even know how to respond. Thankfully, Rachel goes on with her thoughts about Mia and Luke and what she denounces as a “marriage from hell.”
“I’m actually kind of surprised they even had a baby,” she says, wadding up the straw wrapper. “She never had any time for Luke. He practically had to beg her for birthday sex. That’s how she got pregnant. On Luke’s birthday.”
I calculate nine months from Luke’s birthday. The math doesn’t exactly compute. Luke’s birthday is in September. Ally was born in August. Only an elephant would have had a longer gestational period.
Rachel indicates things have cooled off between them in the past few weeks.
“We still catch up with each other,” she says. “But not as often as we used to. He’s busy. The office guys have so much more work to do than those of us on the floor. For a while I have to admit that I did feel a little bit like a booty call. That was before I found out what a bitch Mia was and how she made him do all the housework, take care of the baby, and still move up the ranks at WinCo.”
“Mia wasn’t nice to him?” I ask, though I’m skeptical and mostly concerned with keeping Rachel talking.
“Nice?” Rachel repeats, her voice shaking. “Luke showed me text messages that he’d get from her telling him what to do and when to do it. Treating him like he was nothing, and all he wanted was to do right by her.”
She stops talking. It’s abrupt. I go for it.
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” I ask.
She stiffens a little and pulls back away from the table. “It’s kind of obvious, I guess. I am. I think he’s awesome. He can be a little rough around the edges, but that’s okay. I can handle it. Yeah, I love him.”
“What did he say about Ally?” Carter asks. “Anything?”
&
nbsp; “He loved her. He said she was his bundle of joy. He said that he was trying to get used to life with a baby and that it was really hard, but he never regretted having her. Told me over and over that he wished I’d been the one that he’d gotten pregnant instead of that bitch.” She takes a moment. She’s thinking about whether or not she’s going to disclose more.
“Continue, please,” I say, pushing her gently.
“I don’t know. It sounds kind of stupid, I guess. I mean, I still love Luke.”
“Go on, Rachel,” I say. “I can see that.”
“Well, as great a guy as Luke was, I knew that we could probably never really be together.”
“He was married,” Carter says.
She gives up a bona fide glare in his direction.
“Yes, I know. But marriages around here seem to be mostly temporary, right? In the beginning I did think we’d be together, but then something happened. I figured Luke was more like my dad than the man of my dreams.”
“What happened?” I ask.
She sighs. “My dad was a cheater. I’m pretty sure Luke was too.”
I don’t get this girl. Of course he was a cheater. He cheated on Mia.
“Right,” I say. “He cheated on Mia.”
Rachel almost laughs, but she stops herself, proving once and for all that she has a modicum of self-control after all.
“On me, Detective Foster. Can you believe it? Luke cheated on me.”
I could.
“No,” I say. “Seriously?”
She nods. “I saw his car over by the river landing. It was random. I was just going by and did a U-turn. I figured he was just chilling or something.”
Her voice cracks a little.
“And?”
“I couldn’t park next to him because he was at the end of the lot and another car was there. I went up to the driver’s window. You know, to surprise him. He was all leaned back in the seat with his eyes closed. I was about to knock to wake him, but I could see there was another girl with him.”
“Wow,” I say, charging my voice with a little shock and urgency. “Seriously? Who was it?”
Amber’s little sister looks down at the table and picks up a napkin. She starts to shred it like a manic gerbil.
“Some girl,” Rachel says, letting a little bitterness out. “All I could see was the back of her head in his lap.”
“Did you confront Luke?” Carter asks.
Though this is obviously no party, her napkin is now confetti.
“Later I did,” she says. “He said that I had to be mistaken. That it was someone else who had borrowed his car. He has a Nirvana decal on his back window—which I saw—but he still lied to my face. That’s when things kind of ended for us. I figured that Luke cared so much about me that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. He’s that kind of guy.”
I want to know more about his relationship with Mia.
“We’re going to need to take a statement, Rachel,” I say before adding, “down at the station.”
She pushes away a little. “I don’t really want to be involved.”
“You know that you already are.”
“But he didn’t kill Ally on purpose,” she says.
“We really don’t know that,” I tell her.
Rachel’s eyes look at me, pleading. “But I told you, he’s a really good guy.”
I’m convinced now that her taste in men is worse than mine. At least Danny didn’t two-time me—that I know about, anyway.
“You can ride with me. I promise it won’t be difficult, and you don’t have to do anything but tell us what you told us here. You’ll sign the statement and then we’ll bring you home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Monday, August 21
After taking Rachel’s statement, Carter and I settle in front of my computer screen to watch the video surveillance clip from McDonald’s. The image is so clear that it nearly catches me off guard. I’m used to the low-grade, grainy video that makes it nearly impossible to identify a subject. This is high-def.
“Want to get something to eat?” Carter asks.
“Didn’t know you were a McDonald’s fan,” I say.
He shrugs. “Fries are pretty good.”
I nod as Luke comes into view. He’s carrying Ally. She’s smiling at everyone. At one point Luke pushes his daughter toward the cashier.
“What’s that all about?” Carter asks.
“Not sure,” I say. “It’s like he’s showing her off to the McDonald’s staff.”
“Why?”
“Maybe to make sure that they see Ally?”
“Why?” Carter asks. “He’s planning on killing her in a New York minute.”
I can’t argue with that. “Maybe to show what a great dad he is. I don’t know. To point out later that he couldn’t have done this on purpose because the video proves that he loves her. Or something along those lines.”
Carter gives a little shrug. “Could be. Who knows what a sick bastard like Luke Tomlinson thinks.”
The cashier takes Luke’s debit card and sets up a tray for his order.
“Wow,” Carter says. “Three Sausage McMuffin sandwiches. No wonder the guy has the belly of a forty-five-year-old.”
Pancakes are served next. Ally reaches for them right away, and the McDonald’s employee laughs. Father and daughter turn away from the camera.
I switch to the next video clip. This one shows Luke and Ally in the dining room. It’s busy, but the two of them sit in the back in front of a giant rendering of Ronald McDonald. Ally is in a high chair, eating her breakfast. Luke has a Sausage McMuffin in one hand and is scrolling through his phone. A few seconds later he sets down his breakfast sandwich and texts a message to someone. After he sends it, he glances over at the counter, presumably at the young man who took his order. He smiles and nods.
“Nothing to really see here,” Carter says.
“Agree,” I say.
We watch until Luke and Ally’s meal concludes. It takes all of ten minutes. Luke picks up his daughter, and the two of them exit the restaurant.
“I always bus my table,” Carter says. “Luke’s a total slob.”
I nod. “Yeah. As I was watching, I was wondering about only one thing.”
Carter gives me a look. “How much you hate McDonald’s?”
I smile at my partner. He knows how I feel about the Golden Arches.
“No,” I tell him. “I kept wondering what it was that Luke was texting. And to whom? He seemed intense. Did you notice how at one point he poured more syrup on Ally’s pancakes without even looking at her?”
“Yeah,” Carter says. “Surprisingly good aim. Takes some skill and decent peripheral vision too. Might be the only positive takeaway that I can come up with here.”
I drink from my coffee cup. It’s cold, but I don’t really care.
“That too,” I say. “Whatever he was texting had to be something very, very important to keep him fixed on his phone like that.”
“Phone’s not back from the lab,” he says.
“No,” I say, “but as soon as his and Mia’s phones get over to us, I expect we’ll find some much-needed answers.”
We watch the clips a second time. Nothing else jumps out at me. Carter, however, makes an observation.
“He was playing a little pocket pool,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Other than moving some syrup over to Ally’s plate, the only other time Luke took a hand off his phone was to make a little adjustment to his junk.”
“I had a boyfriend who did that all the time,” I say, thinking of my treacherous ex, Danny Ford, but not saying his name. “A loser too.”
Before going to bed, I lay out my clothes for the next day. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to things like funerals. I choose a black skirt, white blouse, and black jacket. I wonder if I’ll look like a waitress. I hope not. I’ll be at Ally’s funeral to mourn the death of a child.
And to catch her killer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tuesday, August 22
Fern Hill Cemetery sits on a small knoll a stone’s throw from the Wishkah River. It’s an old cemetery with a mix of graves that harken back to Aberdeen’s founding in the 1880s. If there are any ferns on the hill, I don’t see them. Perhaps they are a victim of the heat wave and have melted into the landscape. In any case, Carter and I stay back from the mourners who’ve come to pay their respects to a dead one-year-old girl. I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who are there but who didn’t know Ally or her parents. People rally around a dead child. This is the case here, for sure. Ally’s death has sparked media attention locally and as far away as Seattle. The lid of gray that has descended on Aberdeen feels especially present on Fern Hill.
It fits the mood. It fits my mood too.
All eyes are on the pink casket donated by the funeral home.
Like a wedding, where it is obvious which side is the bride’s and which is the groom’s, people have segregated themselves into two distinct camps. The WinCo crowd in their khakis and comfortable, thick-soled retail shoes stand to the right of the tiny pink casket; nurses in skirts and doctors in suits are on Mia’s side. A woman with spun gray hair and a stoop-shouldered man stand next to Mia, a kind of human pergola.
“That must be her folks,” Carter says.
They look too old, but it’s hard to tell these days. “Grandparents, maybe?”
Mia sees us and gives us a nod, though it is more dismissive than welcoming. She’s wearing heels and a pale yellow dress with a photo button of her daughter fixed just below the neckline.
Others are wearing the same button. I’m silently amazed at how fast a tragedy becomes a thing. Not all tragedies. Just some. I’m sure that some parents try with all they have to bang the drum of attention, but to no avail.
Ally is a thing now. That’s not intended to be mean. It’s just the truth. Her death hit the news cycle on the right day. She’s white. She’s cute. Her parents are young. How far this attention will go is tough to surmise. Ally could be regional first, then national. Or she could fizzle if some other tragedy comes on with a better backstory and a more appealing victim.
I think of all the cases I’ve observed over the years and know that the zeitgeist of crime is fickle.
