by Gregg Olsen
When the phone rang just before lunch, I told Valerie to tell the caller—a reporter, I was sure—that I was taking Hedda for a walk.
"It's Jett," she said quietly, her hand muffling the mouthpiece. "Better talk to her. This is the second time she's called for you today."
I got on the line and said hello. Jett took it from there.
"Now I know why you stood me up," she said. Her voice was somber. "I was mad as could be at you last night... but I saw the news this morning. It must have been awful finding her. Right on the front page there's a photo of Mrs. Parker."
She read the headline and a few lines:
MURDER ON OLD STUMP ROAD:
CRIME AUTHOR FINDS BODY
In a page out of one of his pulp crime books, Port Gamble author Kevin Ryan was in the right place at the wrong time... a source close to the Sheriff's Department stated that the author had been "badgering" the dead woman for an interview...
Pulp crime book? Badgering the deceased? I had enough. Valerie and the girls formed a circle around me as I set down the receiver. I was shaking slightly. I felt sick to my stomach. I was so sorry that I had even come out to see Mrs. Parker. I was so sorry that I had been the one to find her. My wife put her arms around my shoulders. Like blonde-headed dominos, Hayley and Taylor fell into us with reassuring hugs of sympathy. We were a family and we had made it through bad times before. Lots of bad times. The ups and downs of plain old living. If anything, by the nature of my career path we had seen much of the worst as it affected others. But we were removed from it; it was just fodder for a book. Whenever a book was finished, the pain and horror of what someone else had endured would fade somewhat. It had to. I had to move on. I had to get on with another story; another murder.
Nothing had tested us like we all knew this would. It was one thing to be late on a power bill and cook over a wood stove and tell your daughters that you were "indoor camping. " It was completely different to have your lives shattered by a gruesome discovery and the steady invasion of the purveyors of publicity that accompanied it.
♦
THREE DAYS AFTER THE GRISLY DISCOVERY on Old Stump Road, a producer named Ashlee Something-hyphen-Something from Rita Adams called to book me on a show they were putting together called "Unbelievable Ironies."
"Rita loves your work and when we saw the piece on the wire —"
I was startled by the revelation. I hadn't Googled myself in days. "It was on the wire?"
"Uh-huh. When we saw the piece we thought your story would be just the right touch for the Ironies show."
A week earlier, I couldn't have imagined that I would ever give up the chance for publicity, but considering what happened, it didn't feel right. Even so, I was torn. I struggled with the idea of going on television to blab about finding June Parker and the fact that I was there to interview her for a true crime book. It seemed distasteful. It was, I knew, deep down, too soon.
"Who else is on?" I asked, halfheartedly.
The young woman—probably some underpaid intern from a Midwest university trying to make it in show business—gushed about the potential guests.
"Get this! A Kansas man who had the wrong leg amputated! A woman who's allergic to chocolate but won the Pillsbury Bake-off with a brownie recipe. They are so good! She sent Rita a batch. Oh, and there's a guy from Boise, Iowa who was a confirmed bachelor until he married his sister."
"That last one sounds like Jerry Springer to me," I said, not bothering to correct her geography. People living on the East Coast rarely comprehended a difference between Iowa and Idaho. They incorrectly assumed the world stopped at Chicago.
The producer laughed at the Springer comment. "He didn't know she was his sister at the time. He found out after they were married. He didn't know he had any siblings whatsoever."
"You know, Ashlee, it sounds like a great show and you know how much I appreciate Rita inviting me on in the past, but I think I have to pass this time. It doesn't feel right to me."
Ashlee wasn't about to give up. Not easily, anyway. She appealed to my sense of personal greed. My need for viewers to buy my books.
"Could be a sweeps show if it goes well," she said trying to up the ante to make me change my mind.
I really didn't care about sweeps; it was the nadir of talk show programming, anyway. I detested going on against aliens on another show.
"How about another time? Maybe when the book comes out I can come promote it?"
The associate producer burbled a snotty "you'll be sorry to miss this opportunity," and we both hung up.
The hell with Ashlee. My editor had liked what he'd seen of Love You to Death so far, and wanted another chapter. Valerie and our girls wanted to go out for dinner. I was hungry, too. Stress always made me hungry. I planned on working after we ate. I put Hedda on her chain outside the door and off we went to Round Table Pizza in Silverdale for the "Guinevere," a veggie pizza my girls ate with gusto. Val and I liked it, too, though we pretended we wanted the "Lancelot"—more meat than a butcher's display case piled on top of a chewy crust. Sometimes kids have to be tricked.
But as it turned out, I wasn't that hungry, after all. I kept seeing Mrs. Parker's body in her hallway.
Even as I sat in the sticky vinyl booth at the pizza place, the volume of blood at the crime scene continued to bother me. At first when I found Mrs. Parker, I had seen nothing but red. Red everywhere. But the red was somewhat swirled, a kind of chiaroscuro effect. It hadn't been flat, elongated pools of blood, like I had seen in crime scene photographs. Blood almost always pools into a glistening mass near the wound on a butchered or bullet-riddled body. It oxidizes to a deep chestnut color within an hour. The blood at the Parker residence was red and thin. And streaky.
"I'm not going to eat," I said when Taylor offered me a slice of pizza topped with a plasma-red tomato slice. "Just don't feel that hungry, honey."
My daughter swung her golden ponytail and grinned as she set the piece on her plate.
"You want to leave?" Valerie asked me.
I faked a smile. "Oh, no. You guys finish."
♦
Monday, August 26
I WAS BACK ON Love You to Death, but not because I was really up to it. God knew I wasn't. It was because I had no choice. It was seven days after the murder and I still had a deadline with my editor. If I didn't produce, I figured they'd find someone who could.
Jett Carter asked me to meet her after work if I had time during my trip to Timberlake. She worked at Ho!, a juniors store specializing in what parents hated and what young girls apparently loved. Or it could have been the girls loved the stuff simply because their parents hated it? In some ways, at least at first blush, it wasn't too far off from what girls wore in early-Britney: cropped tops, low-riding jeans, chunky-heeled shoes and the like. But after looking around, it was clear that the envelope had been pushed. I shuddered at the prospect of a not-too-distant future when Taylor and Hayley would go to a place like Ho! for back-to-school shopping.
"I'll be done in a minute," Jett called from the cash register. "As soon as these girls decide on the perfect bathing suit."
I nodded and watched two teens wave a thong bikini bottom at each other. It was light pink with an opalescent sheen to the fabric. It was also very tiny. I winced at the thought of it.
A fat dumpy friend kept urging the more slender, yet still thick-thighed, girl to buy the suit, telling her it would make her look like Selena Gomez.
"It looks so hot on you," the friend said. "It makes me so jealous."
The girl was unsure. "You think?"
"Yeah. Everyone'll be looking at you and ignoring me, as usual."
The thick-thighed girl finally succumbed to her friend's pressure and assurance. Jett rang up the sale and packed the suit in a single sheet of tissue paper.
I figured it was the role of the Fat Dumpy Friend, aka FDF, as my daughters explained it to me. It was the FDF's job to make sure her friend looked as ridiculous as possible. That way she spared h
erself scrutiny and could gossip about her best friend's folly behind her back. I hoped for two things when the time my girls would mature enough to end up in a place like Ho!: one-piece bathing suits and no FDFs. An FDF could be as lethal as a spree killer.
"She's going to try to bring that thong back," Jett predicted as we walked to the Food Circus for lattes. "So sorry. But no returns on bathing suits—intimate apparel, you know."
We talked for about an hour, mostly about Connie and Janet and, of course, Mrs. Parker's murder. I told her that I had learned from Detective Raines that Mr. Parker had been released after questioning when the obvious was proved. Besides his physical limitations, there was no way he could have killed his wife. He had been, in fact, at adult daycare when June was murdered. Davy Parker was working at Wendy's.
Jett looked down at her coffee and shook her head sadly. "It sucks. She was a real nice lady. Her son is a jerk and a liar, but she was nice."
I agreed. It did suck. I wiped the foam from the edge of my mustache. Lattes always left their foamy milk mark on me.
"No matter what you think of Danny, that family has been through a lot of personal tragedy," I said.
Jett nodded. "Yeah, brought on most of it themselves."
Though I was in a hurry, I offered a ride back to her apartment. I had to get over to Detective Raines' house and couldn't stay to chat. We walked across the parking lot to the LUV.
"I've been meaning to ask you about your license plate," she said when we stood by my truck.
"Yeah?"
"What in the world does Truck Rim mean?"
I started to laugh and when I saw her look of curiosity turn to embarrassment I stopped short. I stood in front of the back plate. In dark blue letters against a graphic image of Mount Rainier, it read: TRUCRYM.
"True crime," I explained. "It's supposed to read True crime."
I could see she still felt a little foolish, so I lied.
"People are always asking what Truck Rim is. I guess I need additional letters to make it more obvious."
Jett grinned and I knew she understood that I had lied to make her feel better.
When I dropped her off outside her building, I felt sorry for her and glad that I knew her at the same time. I hoped my daughters would be as resilient as Jett Carter when the inevitable occurred and life dealt them the occasional bad hand. This girl—this young woman—was a fighter.
I watched her turn and wave to me from her front door. The girl was not only a fighter, she was also a sight. Dressed in a red lace back crop tee and cut-off denim shorts, Jett was a walking promo for the store she in which she worked.
God, how I hoped my girls never worked at Ho!
Chapter Seventeen
Late Monday, August 26
Frazzled and Tired as I was, I somehow found the energy to write the next chapter. Needing the dough had a way of doing that.
♦
Love You to Death
PART FOUR
HIS PLACE WAS AN OLD LOGGER'S ramshackle house pitched on five muddy acres outside of Big Slag, Washington, just fifteen circuitous miles from Timberlake. Brian Jackson was no Mr. Fixit and he hated what the old man had done to put his place together. Wires like a kettle full of spaghetti ran willy-nilly underneath the floors and between the walls. Nothing seemed to go anywhere. Nothing made sense. The man who built the two-bedroom place boasted as he pointed to his temple while telling prospective buyers that he had "everything, right upstairs. " He'd write it all down.
"Yup, that I'll do for ya," the old guy promised as he spat out the brown goo from his chew. "I'll write it up like a fuckin' Christmas list."
The old logger had lied. The day after the sale cleared escrow, he took his money and skedaddled out of Big Slag. Brian Jackson was left without either rhyme or reason. To turn on the lights in the living room meant going into the second bedroom. The hot water faucet turned on the cold and so on. Even so, it was all Jackson could afford. His mortgage payment was $143 a month, which included a reserve for property taxes.
Living in Big Slag, if anything, was cheap.
At 1:20 in the morning on November 28, Brian rolled out of bed to answer a loud banging on his front door. He threw on a shirt, stepped into a pair of work jeans and took a rifle from behind the bedroom door. Always be prepared, he told himself.
Brian found jittery pal Danny Parker sweating and pacing on his front steps. Behind the one-eyed dyslexic behemoth was Janet Lee Kerr. Janet also appeared somewhat agitated, though Brian did not know her well.
Danny spoke. "We need a place to crash. Can we stay here tonight?"
Brian didn't hesitate. Danny had stayed over before whenever he had a little too much to drink; the fact Janet Kerr was standing in his doorway at that ungodly hour was of no concern one way or another. Janet had probably downed her share, too. As far as Brian knew, she was the type of girl who'd sleep it off anywhere.
"Come on in," he said, shaking the sleep from his eyes and managing a foggy smile for Janet. "You can crash on the couch. Danny, you take the La-Z-Boy."
Later that morning, while Janet continued to snooze under a thick layering of Army-surplus blankets, Brian and Danny went to the mall. Not only was Christmas stuff needed—After Thanksgiving Sales were in full gear—Danny said he wanted to talk. At noon, they picked up a baker's dozen at Dunkin' Donuts, and disposed of a pair of women's LA Gear running shoes in a Dumpster behind the Wards store. Danny spilled his considerable guts over the events of the night before. He admitted he had been the shooter and the shoes belonged to Janet, who had been there when it happened.
"Janet told me to get rid of 'em," he said.
"You have to turn yourself in," Brian urged as they drove around Timberlake. "Don't you know how much trouble you're in?"
"I messed up," was all the big guy could say. "I messed up bad."
"You bet your ass you did."
"My ass, I sure did."
"You know where you gotta go, don't you?"
Danny blinked back tears. "Yeah, take me to the sheriff."
"Good."
"Brian, do me a favor?"
"Yeah?"
"Call my mom. She's probably worried about me, not coming home and all. With my dad the way he is, my mom depends on me."
Brian Jackson crossed the River Bridge to the Justice Center, a tomblike building of aggregate cement that engineers elevated from the earth to allow parking under its stilts. It was ugly as road kill, but it was convenient—a kind one-stop shopping approach for all local law enforcement needs. The sheriff's department, the prosecutor's office, judge's chambers, the jail—everything was there. Everything he needed.
Danny ate another doughnut and went inside to give himself up.
-
WHEN THE LAW WENT LOOKING FOR JANET Lee Kerr, they didn't have to look far. She wasn't at her little second-floor apartment on Beverly Street. She had taken her old yellow pickup to the grocery store when police pulled her over in front of the Quick Stop gas station on Ocean Boulevard.
"I'm going to pick up my daughter. She's at my mother's," she said as tears fell from her brown eyes.
"We just want to get a statement from you about the shooting of your boyfriend this morning."
"Can I get Lindy first?" Janet said, not really responding to what the deputy was saying. It didn't seem as if she were even concerned that Deke Cameron had been shot.
"Later," the officer said firmly. "Come on with us now."
She stepped from the cab of her pickup. The smell of stale beer clung to her sweatshirt. She looked weary, beat. Her long brown hair hung limply. Her makeup had rubbed off in patches. She wore no shoes. She looked like the late Anna Nicole Smith's backwater cousin after the hardest, longest night of the century.
"Where are your shoes, Miss?" the cop asked.
"I don't know," she answered without the slightest hesitation. "I have no idea."
-
THE PIERCE COUNTY SHERIFF'S interrogation room was one of those functional, sp
artan rooms with a big rectangle table and four plastic chairs that give it the uncluttered look of a classroom study hall. The blank expanse of one cinder block wall was interrupted with a four-foot-wide mirror. Most knew it was two-way glass. Even so, every once in a while a subject would turn to their reflection to pick their teeth or nose.
Detective Martin Raines had conducted hundreds of interviews in the little room in his dozen years at Pierce County, which neighbored my own Kitsap County. He had interviewed suspects from all walks and all crawls of life. He remembered them all. The teenage girl with the heavy-mascara raccoon eyes who had stabbed her mother because she wouldn't let her go on an overnight beach campout with her boyfriend. The old man who had backed his Pontiac Fiero over a little boy in a grocery parking lot. The neighbor who poisoned another's dogs because the damn animals barked all hours of the night.
Raines had played host and antagonist to many in that little room. In the first minutes after the door closed, he calculated an approach that would net him the best results. Good cop? Bad cop? Father Confessor? Skeptic?
With Danny Parker, it was easy.
Danny was thirty-two, a hundred pounds overweight, legally blind in one eye and slower than a stopped clock. He had the manner of an apologetic, big, stupid kid. He always said "sir" and "thank you. " He took every breath through a gaping mouth that could have benefited from orthodontics. Yet as disconcerting as his appearance was, Danny seemed a nice enough fellow—for an attempted murderer. He listened intently to each question Raines posed over the course of the two hours he would spend facing him across the table.
Ten minutes into the interview, Danny volunteered that he was hungry.
"Haven't eaten since a couple of doughnuts for breakfast," he said, his good eye staring at the investigator.
Raines nodded.
"How 'bout a Big Mac when we're done here?"
