by Gregg Olsen
Dr. Waterman had seen that so many—too many—times before.
“Can I help you?” she repeated.
“I hope so,” Sandra said, anxiously looking for a place to sit. Her knees shook just then.
“Let’s go into my office,” Dr. Waterman suggested, gently placing a hand on Sandra’s bony shoulder as she led her to what had once been a bedroom but now functioned as her office. In addition to the louvered closet doors along the farthest wall, the ceiling light above her was the only other remnant of the office’s original purpose. It was a glass fixture etched with figures of cowboys and their spinning lariats. It had been a child’s room.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Waterman said, moving things aside to clear more space across her desk, “I didn’t get your name.”
“Sandra Berkley. My daughter was Katelyn.”
Of course. Even though she’d only seen her laid out on her autopsy table, there was no mistaking the resemblance.
Dr. Waterman nodded. “I’m deeply sorry for your loss.”
Sandra started to cry. “Thank you.”
“Can I answer some questions for you?”
The words sounded flat, and not at all helpful, which was not the forensic pathologist’s intention. It was merely the fact that no words could ever seem right. There was not a damn thing she could do for that woman. No one could.
Finally, Sandra spoke. “Was my daughter pregnant?”
A little caught off guard by the question, Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, I would have noted that. It would have been in my report. Our exams are very, very thorough.”
Sandra winced a little, squeezing tears from her eyes as she reached for a tissue from a box on the doctor’s desk. Then she dug into her purse and pulled out a Ziploc bag containing the pregnancy test stick.
“I found this in her room. I thought … maybe that’s why she might have killed herself … because she didn’t want to disappoint me …” Her words trailed off into more sobs.
Dr. Waterman gently pushed the tissues closer.
“Mrs. Berkley, that wasn’t it at all. I examined your daughter. As I recall it didn’t appear that she was sexually active. Your daughter was more than likely still a virgin.”
Sandra stopped her tears. “Then why would she have this?” she asked, waving the wand once more.
A somewhat startled Dr. Waterman shook her head. It was a very, very good question.
“No idea,” she said. “Maybe she and her boyfriend messed around and thought she might be pregnant. I don’t know. Kids are funny. When I was young, I almost believed you could get pregnant from a French kiss.”
“If she had a boyfriend, her father and I never met him.”
You wouldn’t be the first mother who had no idea what her daughter was doing when she was out of your sight, Dr. Waterman thought.
“I know that none of this is easy and there’s nothing I can do to make you feel better,” she said.
It was all she could say.
Sandra Berkley stood. She was sad, hurt, and mad at the same time.
“I will never feel better again,” she said.
“I understand, Mrs. Berkley. Really, to the best of my ability, I do.” Dr. Waterman reached for a tablet and a pencil. She jotted down a phone number. “I know an excellent grief counselor in Poulsbo. Maybe you could talk to her? It might help.”
“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Sandra said, her voice louder than needed. “I want my daughter back. I want to watch her graduate from high school. Go to college. Get married.”
Birdy Waterman let her go on. Nothing short of an AK-47 could halt the mother of a dead teenager as she grieved for all that had been lost.
chapter 34
SHE MAY HAVE BEEN FUELED BY VODKA or it might have been only the enormous sadness of her loss, but Sandra Berkley made a beeline for Katelyn’s phone when she got home from the Kitsap County morgue. How could I not know my own daughter? How could it be that she didn’t tell me?
First on the list was Starla Larsen.
It didn’t ring and went immediately to voice mail.
“Starla, this is Sandra, Katelyn’s mom. Call me back when you get this.”
A few minutes later she tried again, with the same results. Sandra had half a mind to just go next door and confront Starla face-to-face, but she thought better of that. She didn’t want to fall apart in front of Mindee and Jake. They’d avoided her lately with the kind of sad, frightened look parents sometimes give others whose children had special needs, or died—suicide or otherwise.
Next she tried Hayley Ryan.
She and her sister were nosy enough to snoop in Katelyn’s room. Maybe one of them knew something.
Hayley was nearly done with the forensics book when she looked down at her vibrating phone. Her face went nearly white. It was as if she’d seen a ghost. In a very real way, with Katelyn’s name popping up on the caller ID, it was a ghost.
“Hello?”
“Hayley, this is Sandra Berkley. I have something I need to talk to you about. Maybe your sister too. I’ve tried to reach Starla, but she’s probably out running the universe.”
There was genuine sarcasm in Sandra’s voice. Hayley liked that.
“What is it?”
“It’s private. Can you come and see me?”
“Sure. Shall we come to the restaurant or your house?”
“I’m home.”
“Okay, what’s it about?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Bring your twin.”
Bring your twin. That didn’t sound good.
Hayley hung up and went looking for her sister. Whatever it was, this was big. It had to be, because the last time the two of them had interacted with Sandra Berkley, she’d wanted to bite off their heads and toss them out of her daughter’s second-floor bedroom.
Ten minutes later, Hayley and Taylor Ryan stood on the Berkleys’ front doorstep, bracing themselves from the cold and for whatever it was Katelyn’s mom wanted to say to them.
Sandra opened the door and wasted no time getting to the heart of the matter. There was no offer to take their coats, of a warm beverage, or anything like that. Not that they’d wanted anything, but still it was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. She’d barely invited them in when she dropped the bomb.
“Who was my daughter sleeping with?”
“Huh?” Taylor asked, looking at her sister.
Hayley looked clueless.
Sandra had planted herself right in front of the twins and didn’t step back. She was totally invading their personal space.
“Do you know who Katie was having sex with?” she asked, her eyes fierce and angry.
It was a look neither girl had seen from Sandra, who had always seemed so fragile.
Hayley shook her head. “As far as I know, she wasn’t. And if she was, it was none of our business when she was alive.”
“Or now, when she’s, you know, not alive,” Taylor said.
Sandra’s eyes were stony. She was upset. Cold. Livid.
“Dead is the word you’re looking for, Taylor,” she said.
Taylor felt her face go pink. “Right. Dead. Well, we honestly don’t know.”
Sandra was on a mission. She needed to know. “Did she have a boyfriend?” she asked.
Hayley took that one. Taylor was unusually flustered. “She might have had someone she was talking to online.”
“This is more than online,” Katelyn’s mother said, backing up and going toward the coat tree. She started fishing through her coat pockets.
“Damn,” she said. “I can’t find it.”
“Find what?” Hayley asked.
“The pregnancy test she took,” Sandra said, now digging through her purse but coming up empty-handed. “Must have left it in the car.”
Taylor looked over at Hayley. She didn’t say it, but she was thinking that nobody takes a test for having online sex. If people did, grocery and drugstores would be selling the kits by the cartful.
�
��Look, Mrs. Berkley,” Taylor said. “We didn’t know her that well. Not like we did when we were little. But I’m pretty sure Katelyn would have told you if she thought she was pregnant.”
Taylor’s words seemed to soften Mrs. Berkley’s features.
“Maybe so,” she said. “At least, I hope so.”
She opened the door, which was their cue to leave. As it swung shut, the twins looked at each other.
“What you just did was very nice,” Hayley said as the pair hurried down the steps to the sidewalk in front of house number 23.
Taylor shrugged off the compliment. “That’s not why I did it. It was the truth. Mrs. Berkley and Katelyn were close. Close enough to make me wonder what it would be like if it was just me and Mom.”
“Instead of you, me, and Mom?”
“Right.”
“That’s a nice thought. Thanks for that.”
“Oh, come on. Like you haven’t wondered what it would be like as a singleton.”
Just then they noticed Teagan, loitering in the alleyway with his BB gun and a coffee can that he’d been using for target practice. Both girls thought it, but didn’t say it: Who buys coffee in a can anymore?
“Starla home?” Taylor asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “The little B is upstairs.”
“You mad at her?” Hayley asked.
Teagan lowered his BB gun. “Not really. Or maybe yes. She’s always telling me what to do. Even when I’m not mad at her, I have to get ready to be mad.”
He kicked the coffee can.
“Aren’t BB guns illegal?” Hayley asked.
“You going to tell on me?”
“No. I’m just asking.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care if they are. It’s fun to shoot stuff. One time I knocked a robin out of a tree. That was cool.”
“Actually, that’s not cool at all,” Hayley said.
“Whatever. I’m going inside. Come on and I’ll let you in.”
chapter 35
TEAGAN KNOCKED ON STARLA’S BEDROOM DOOR and opened it before she had time to call out an answer. Brothers across the world routinely did that. Girls routinely got special treatment like that. No sister ever has to knock to get into her brother’s room, that is, if she’d ever want to actually go into the gross, stinkfest lair that is usually on the other side of such a barrier.
Starla was sitting on the floor in that god-awful beanbag chair texting and listening to her iPod. The room smelled of strawberry incense, and whoever thought that torching strawberries was a good idea was completely devoid of any good sense or scents. The only thing worse was tea rose incense, which Taylor was convinced smelled like a burning grandmother. Starla had taken to burning incense to round out what she called her “spiritual” side.
“Hayley and Taylor are here,” Teagan announced.
“Oh, hi,” Starla said, not looking particularly happy to see them. She reached up through her cascade of golden hair and pulled out her earbuds. “What’s going on? You two look like crap.”
Teagan disappeared into his room next door, and Hayley and Taylor went inside.
“What’s up is that five minutes ago Mrs. Berkley just asked us if we knew who Katelyn was having sex with,” Hayley said.
Starla didn’t get up and the twins didn’t sit. “Oh, that must be why she’s been calling me,” she said.
“So spill the beanbag,” Hayley said. “Who was she sleeping with?”
“Sleeping with? A pillow is about it,” Starla said. “Probably a blanket.” If Starla had meant to be ironic just then, it fell flat.
“Honestly, you don’t know?” Taylor said.
Starla’s phone buzzed with a text, and, ignoring the two girls in her room, she went about the business of answering it. Without looking up, she said, “As far as I know she’d met that guy online but not in person. He stood her up.”
“Right,” Taylor said. “But how come her mom found a pregnancy test kit in her room?”
Starla looked up startled and then returned to her texting. “Beats me. I mean, maybe Katelyn was playing around more than we thought. Sometimes quiet girls are the wildest ones, right?” Turning, she specifically directed her gaze at Hayley. “How’s Colton doing?”
Hayley smartly refused to take the bait. “Look, we thought you liked Katelyn,” she said instead. “We thought that you’d want to know how she died. If she was pregnant, she might have felt there was no way out.”
“No way but a suicide,” Taylor said.
Starla shrugged slightly. “That seems dumb, but maybe.”
“Or maybe she didn’t want anyone to know because the guy that got her pregnant was someone older, someone she was protecting,” Hayley said, a little proud that she refrained from saying something snarky to Starla in retaliation for the crack about Colton.
“But I don’t know anything,” Starla said. “I’ve got ten thousand messages to answer.”
It was Starla’s way of dismissing them, and it worked. Taylor and Hayley turned to leave. Teagan emerged from his room as they were heading out.
“You were right, Teagan,” Taylor said. “Your sister is a total B.”
“The biggest B in the history of Port Gamble,” Hayley added.
“No argument from me,” he said with an undisputed grin on his face. “I heard you asking about Katelyn. What’s up?”
“What’s up?” Taylor asked. “She’s dead, and we don’t think she killed herself. What do you know?”
Teagan watched as Hayley hesitated in front of the door.
“Me? Nothing,” he said. “She was depressed. I guess that’s something.”
Taylor pushed a little. Maybe the kid was more observant than his sister and actually knew something. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
He shook his head. “I think that’s why she was depressed. She didn’t have one.”
LATER THAT EVENING, HAYLEY AND COLTON looked at the screen on Hayley’s computer. They’d opened up the files from the thumb drive, and with a few clicks went a little deeper, beyond the contents of the messages themselves to the source files. What they were seeing was baffling beyond belief. The IP address for all the messages sent to Katelyn came from the Larsens’ house. All of them.
Including the “meet me in Seattle” message.
“Jake,” Colton said. “That creep was stalking Katelyn.”
“Jake,” Hayley repeated. She avoided saying something stupid like the fact that she’d always had a “funny feeling” about Jake Damon, but she had. So had her sister. Beth too. One time the previous summer, Beth had complained that he drove by her house very slowly as she washed the car in the alley.
“Outside of Segway Guy, he’s the creepiest person in Port Gamble. I’m glad that Jake’s boning Starla’s mom. She deserves it,” Beth had said.
“That’s harsh, Beth. Even for you,” Hayley said.
Beth barely blinked. “That’s me, I guess. Harsh.”
As Colton scrolled through code, Hayley thought some more about Jake, and the pieces began to fall into place. It wasn’t a perfect fit but the kind that inspired more digging. There had always been talk about Jake Damon and his supposedly lurid past. No one really knew exactly what it was, and they assumed all sorts of nefarious possibilities—drug-running from Seattle to Alaska, motorcycle gang activity (derived from his first appearance in Port Gamble on a BSA Chopper), and even the suggestion that he’d been in prison (one of his tattoos looked suspiciously homemade). Hayley’s dad took the bait on that one, but after computer research and a couple of phone calls, the only criminal activity that came up for Jake was traffic related.
And none of that involved a motorcycle gang.
Jake was handsome, kind of shiftless, and never seemed to need fulltime employment. When he hooked up with Mindee Larsen around the time her husband left town, most people saw him as an opportunist.
“Mindee’s drowning her sorrows in a six-pack of steel,” Sandra Berkley had blurted to Valerie when she and the twins were shop
ping the previous autumn at Central Market in Poulsbo.
Valerie had remained silent. The scene was too sad.
Sandra had the last word, though. “I know what kind of a guy Jake Damon is. I’ve seen the way he looks at our daughters.”
Of course, Sandra knew something about drowning her own sorrows. Her idea of a six-pack had nothing to do with abs, either. In her cart were half a dozen bottles of Yellowtail Shiraz—on sale with a ten-percent discount for shoppers who bought six.
Sandra Berkley had a lot to forget. And not all of it had to do with her daughter’s death. No, Sandra’s regrets went back almost a decade, and no amount of cheap wine could ever let her truly forget.
chapter 36
MOIRA WINDSOR NEVER TOLD ANYONE she was interviewing that she wasn’t exactly an employee of the Herald. She was a stringer, a freelance writer. She thought that particular term made it sound like no one would hire her, so she never mentioned it when she was out talking with sources.
After speaking with Kevin Ryan, whom she thought was a royal jerk in the way he just brushed her aside, the pretty twenty-three-year-old returned to her aunt’s house in Paradise Bay, just across the Hood Canal Bridge. The name of the place always made her wince a little when she told people where she lived. The view of the bay was lovely, but it was far from paradise. Her aunt was off snowbirding in Tucson, Arizona, and she’d left Moira to house-sit. The word house was a bit of a stretch. It was really more of a cabin with a woodstove for its sole heat source. Outside in the crusty snow were fourteen bird feeders, eight garden gnomes, and two bleach bottles cut and bent to allow the wind to spin them as they hung from the eaves.
Moira was sure that Ann Curry never had to live like this.
She lined up two bottles of sparkling water, turned on some background TV, and sat down at her computer to search for whatever she could find about the infamous Port Gamble crash. She’d grown up in Bremerton and had vague memories about it, but as a pudgy teenager back then she likely gave it two minutes of thought: Wow, that’s terrible! I feel sorry for those kids and their families!
And then she went back to her life and her dreams of getting out of naval-gray Bremerton, the county’s largest city.
