by Gregg Olsen
A light switched off.
He stood in the foyer facing a pair of cops, one middle-aged, one younger. Both rightly grim-faced. As they prompted him for details, Darius Fulton gave a statement about what had occurred. How he’d heard the knock, saw the terror on Tori’s face, and the story she’d conveyed about the intruder.
“Did she say anything about the man who shot her?”
“No. Just that he shot her husband, too.”
The younger cop noted the info on a pad.
“Who was shot first?”
Darius didn’t know and said so.
“Did she say how it was that she was able to escape?”
Darius shook his head. “No. I just assumed that she might have startled the intruder and was able to get out of the house.”
“Things like this just don’t happen around here,” he said.
The older cop shook his head knowingly. “Maybe not on this street,” he said. “But, yeah, this kind of stuff happens.”
Not usually around here.
“No, not here. Yeah, I mean, the Hilltop is ten blocks away, but this isn’t there.”
The meaning was clear and not without merit. The Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma was the center of most of the city’s violent crime. While things had improved somewhat due to a consortium of police and community groups who sought to clean it up, it was still rough. Indeed, it was a world away from this tony neighborhood. This was a street more known for dinner parties, book club meetings, and wine tastings. It had always been so. Tacoma’s North End had once been the address of the most notable names in Northwest history, chief among them the Weyerhaeuser family. The lumber baron’s stately mansion was but a couple of blocks from North Junett.
Edmund Kaminski, a Northwest native who lived in nearby Spanaway because on a detective’s salary he couldn’t afford rent in Tacoma’s better neighborhoods, was on his way to investigate. He gave a quick check to his shirt collar and tie in the rearview mirror.
Looking sharp.
Kaminski had just turned the big 4-0. He’d taken up running to shed what his teenage daughter, Lindsey, called his “middle jiggle.”
“Better a middle jiggle than a full-fledged spare tire,” he playfully shot back, though Lindsey’s words stung a little—in the way that truth frequently does.
“I don’t know, Dad. You don’t watch it, you’ll be shopping for clothes at Sears automotive.”
The extra poundage was a symptom of a life off track. He knew it. Lindsey knew it. He’d found solace in long runs along the Thea Foss Waterway, with its views of Commencement Bay and Mount Rainier. Time to think. Time to wonder if he’d made any mistakes that could have altered the dissolution of his marriage to Maria. She’d given him the old “it isn’t you, it’s me” song and dance, and it just didn’t sit right. It didn’t give him a chance to play the role of the fixer. Even so, he doubted if he could make her love him if she no longer did.
He threw himself into his work while trying to negotiate the realities of being a Weekend Dad. On Saturdays he’d pick up Lindsey and they’d spend the day doing something fun together. Lately that meant a lot of time roaming the shimmering halls of Tacoma’s Museum of Glass. Seattle Mariner games were no longer as much a draw for a girl who’d had her nose and eyebrow pierced and dyed her tawny brown locks a fireman’s-boot black. Lindsey loved her dad, but she was changing.
The notion of all of that crushed him.
He popped a Rolaid into his mouth and immediately bit down. Detective Kaminski never waited for anything. Not even for an antacid to dissolve. He turned down a side street, and a bag of yard waste that had rolled from the curb acted like a speed bump, reminding him to slow down a little.
Always in a hurry.
While Kaminski didn’t know the specific house that had been referenced in the 911 call that evening, he surely knew the neighborhood. Lindsey had dragged him there when she was obsessed with actor Heath Ledger. The actor had filmed Ten Things I Hate About You in Tacoma, and a house on North Junett had been the home of his character’s love interest, played by Julia Stiles in the film.
“Heath didn’t really want to change Julia,” Lindsey said as they stood in front of the three-story white bungalow that had been featured in the movie. “He just wanted her to be, you know, herself. Changing someone never works.”
“Really,” he said, looking at Lindsey, pondering what it felt like when she blew her pierced nose.
“Yeah, changing someone isn’t love, Dad.”
Kaminski considered a hidden agenda wrapped up in his daughter’s words. Was this something that Maria had said about him? Had he really tried to control her? Was that what she’d meant by it not being about him, but her? That she could no longer take being the perfect wife, the detective’s wife?
“I can’t imagine, honey,” he said.
Lindsey looked at him and he sized up her expression. Like her mother, Lindsey was hard to read. Harder every day.
He turned down Junett and went just past the house used in the movie. Every light was on, and the place looked like it was floating above a perfectly coiffed front lawn. A Mercedes and a Lexus were parked in the driveway.
Living large in Grit City, he thought, his mind flashing to his one-bedroom condo in Spanaway that could be swallowed up in one gulp by the parlor of any home on this grand street.
It wasn’t hard to find the Victorian where the crime had occurred. It was a birthday cake explosion that screamed to the world to pay attention to its gingerbread curlicues and overwrought paint color scheme. That night, the bouncing red and blue lights of the police and ambulances in front of the carriage house tinted the already garish colors akin to a Tim Burton fantasy. How that house could coexist across the street from the impeccable lines of the more simple and elegant bungalows and brick Tudors was a colossal mystery.
Though it clearly was not the biggest mystery on the street at that moment.
Kaminski parked his black Toyota Prius and approached a couple of blues who’d secured the scene. One a slightly haggard veteran and the other an eager beaver.
“Guys,” he said.
“Evening, Ed,” said Tracy Smart, the more seasoned of the two.
“The female vic in there?” Kaminski indicated the ambulance as the door closed and the driver stepped inside.
Tracy shook his head. “She’s en route to the ER.”
“Going to be okay?”
“That’s what I hear,” said the younger cop, a kid with an earnest demeanor that reminded Kaminski what it was like to be fresh out of the academy. The top-of-the-class syndrome , he thought. The eager beaver’s need to raise a hand, make a comment, just to be sure to be a part of the conversation.
“Thanks, Tracy . . . and . . .” He looked at the kid.
“Officer Caswell.”
Kaminski grinned. “Yes, officer. You got a first name?”
“Robert,” he said, nodding, like he was confirming some major mystery of life.
Kaminski nodded back and looked up over the lawn at the front door of the house. “Got it.”
Not Bob. Not Rob. But Robert.
“Call me Detective,” he said over his shoulder, stopping a beat to look up and down the block as he made his way up the painted gray steps.
He nodded at another officer by the door.
“House is secure?” he said.
The officer nodded. “Yeah, neighborhood canvass at work, too.”
Kaminski pulled the knob and stepped inside. The foyer was grand, museum-entryway grand. The floor was burnished oak topped with a powder blue and gold oriental rug, its pile so thick that the soles of his shoes nearly levitated as he walked to the sitting room. The coffered ceiling seemed a mile overhead. He looked up; pale blue insets filled the voids between dark oak mullions. The staircase was curved, sweeping from the first floor to the second like an anaconda. A series of portraits artfully illuminated by unobtrusive spotlights added to the museum vibe.
Not my taste, he
thought. But who knows what a man will do with the dough if he has too much?
He glanced in the direction of the pocket doors, pulled open to reveal the activity of the murder scene. The smell of blood and gunpowder was unmistakable. Sweet and smoky. Not like barbecue, of course, but more like the scent of a Fourth of July picnic. A Tiffany fixture overhead sprayed gold light from its mushroom shades; Kaminski could see the coroner and assistants in clean suits, assuring that whatever evidence would be gathered from the deceased would not be anything they brought in from the outside. There was never a time when that procedure didn’t make sense, but it didn’t become official until a case a dozen years before in which a defendant claimed chain-of-custody issues when a detective’s Persian cat’s fur was discovered on the corpse.
If a person visiting an open house was required to wear disposable booties, then no one should argue the need for initial criminal responders to suit up.
Kaminski caught the attention of forensics specialist Cal Herzog, hunched over the area by the sofa where the body had been found.
Cal, a balding man of about fifty, who began working in the forensics unit at the Tacoma Police Department after a reasonably distinguished career in the military, was crouched over the dead man.
“Evening, Cal.”
“Just in time. Medical examiner’s about ready to bag him,” Cal said.
Kaminski stepped closer. “Let me have a look.”
“Point-blank,” Cal said, indicating the wound on the back of Alex Connelly’s head. The place of entry for the bullet was like a bloody borehole that cut through the man’s skull and into his brain. Death, no doubt, was instantaneous. Alex Connelly, sitting in his robe, facing the television, might not even have had an inkling that the gun was going to fire.
“SOB didn’t struggle,” Cal said. “Didn’t even know this was going to happen.”
Kaminski crouched behind the camelback sofa and looked up at the TV over the mantel.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Pretty good reflection off that plasma. Almost like a mirror.”
Cal looked up. The TV had been on when the blues arrived and secured the scene, but it had been loud and one of the cops shut it off.
Kaminski fixed his eyes on the victim. He wore a blue and gold robe. It was a flimsy, silky fabric that he wouldn’t be caught dead in.
Which, of course, Alex Connelly had just been.
He had slippers on his feet. Nothing else.
“What does the vic do for a living?”
“Works for an investment firm downtown. About middle on the high-up scale, if you ask me. You know, makes enough dough for a lease on this place, but not enough to buy it.”
“Lexus, actually a his and hers, in the garage, er, carriage house,” one of the cops said, correcting himself. “Not a Porsche.”
“Almost feel sorry for him,” Kaminski said. “You know, not being able to get a Porsche.”
It took three men to move the body to the split-open bag. In doing so, the robe slipped to reveal the victim’s chest. A tattoo of an eagle with artillery and olive branches in its talons soared over his right pec, which, given his age, was well defined.
“Nice ink,” Kaminski said. “Looks like navy.”
While the techs and cops worked together to process the scene for evidence, Kaminski took a tour of the house. It was late by then, but the place seemed as if it had been ready for a Realtor’s open house. Nothing was out of place. The kitchen, small by the standards of what modern people wanted, was nicely redone to include the niceties that big-bucked folks wanted. A Sub-Zero refrigerator was clad in white cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen. A Viking range was another giveaway that the place had been redone. Nothing was out of place on the plane of soapstone that served as the counter.
Upstairs, Kaminski entered the master bedroom. A Rice bed that in someone else’s house would have been ridiculously oversize commanded the large room. The bed had been turned down. All perfect.
The dead guy was in a silky robe and slippers.
Where were his clothes?
The bathroom was also show-ready. He went inside and a flash of red caught his eye. On a hook on the back of the door, a woman’s teddy.
Nice, he thought.
As he moved the door, the fabric fluttered, like a red flag.
He opened the shower door and caught a whiff of cleaner. The marble surface was slick, dripping wet.
Cal appeared in the doorway.
“Everything diagrammed, photographed. ME is taking the body now. Some blood in the hallway, fair amount of spatter on the wall behind the couch. We’re dusting everything. Place is pretty clean. Must have a maid.”
“All right. I’m going to the hospital to see Mrs. Connelly.”
“Techs are there now.”
“Gunshot residue?”
“Hands have been swabbed.”
Kaminski nodded. “Prelim?”
“Clean.”
The two started down the stairs as the body was being carried out, bagged and tagged, on a gurney. A breeze from Commencement Bay filled the air with marine smells, a welcome reprieve from the odor of blood and gunfire.
“She talk?”
“Not on the way to St. Joe’s. Didn’t say a word. Told the neighbor that a guy broke in, shot her and her old man. Nobody’s seen anything to approximate a break-in.”
“Security system?”
Cal watched the ambulance doors as they closed on Alex Connelly.
“Looks like it was turned off,” he said.
The sirens started and about ten onlookers started to head back to their homes.
“Show over,” Kaminski said. “At least for now. I’m going to the hospital.”
Most who inhabit such a fine street as North Junett would consider the most dominating piece of artwork that hung in the Connelly living room as something incongruent with the home’s stature or the place in society that its inhabitants surely held. It was a bourgeois depiction of a stone cottage in the midst of a snowstorm. The artist, Thomas Kinkade, was known for a popular, albeit kitschy, style that stoked memories of a long-ago time when skaters wore fuzzy earmuffs and free-flowing scarves as they skimmed over the surface of a frozen pond.
This Kinkade print on canvas was called Evening Glow. Besides its stone cottage, it featured an illuminated gas lamp that appeared to emit an orange red glow. In fact, such a feature was the hallmark of Kinkade’s paintings. He was, his aficionados insisted, “not an artist, but a painter of light.”
None of the men and women from the Tacoma Police and the Pierce County Coroner’s offices at the crime scene paid the lush accoutrements of the Connelly household much mind as they went about tagging and bagging the victim and the assorted evidence they’d need to run through the lab.
If they’d have looked closer, they would have noticed that Thomas Kinkade’s ability to trick the eye with illumination techniques was in better-than-average form. The light on the top of the lamp standard twinkled.
As it did so, the discourse among the interlopers on the scene continued.
“What do you make of the lady of the house?” a cop asked a forensics tech.
“Meaning?” a woman’s voice answered.
“A lot younger than the husband,” the man’s voice said. “Better looking, too.”
The same woman’s voice responded. “I guess.”
“I’ll tell you what I guess,” the man said. “I guess that when they do a GSR test on the missus they’ll find that she was the shooter. Honestly, the wound on her leg was a graze. Self-inflicted. Betcha a beer.”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I don’t like beer.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Kitsap County
The Lord’s Grace Community Church was a converted metal Quonset hut in Kingston, Washington, that had once been used to store floral greens for a long-since-closed brush-cutting operation. The structure was so close to the edge of the road, it had been the frequent and unfortun
ate recipient of more than one car’s broadside. In fact, a makeshift memorial of a cross marked the location, adorned with faded photos kept mostly dry inside Ziploc bags, a red plastic lei, and stenciled letters that read C-A-N-D-Y. The tribute’s central feature—the cross—was so solid and substantial that a passerby unfamiliar with the events might assume that the cross belonged to the church. It had been seven years since Candy Turner slid on the pavement and crashed her cherry red ’69 El Camino pickup truck.
Locals who didn’t attend there called it the Candy Church, the home of “My Sweet Lord.”
Inside, Pastor Mike Walsh got on his knees and looked up at the big Douglas-fir cross. He’d been contacted weeks ago and the conversation stayed with him. Like a leaky pipe tucked away in the ceiling, quietly, steadily doing damage.
It was a woman, a crying woman, who’d contacted him. She recalled a traffic accident that he’d happened upon a decade and a half ago.
“You could have told the truth,” she said. “But you didn’t.”
“I was scared. I wasn’t the man that I am now.”
“I’m sure the passage of time has made you a better person.”
“A better person, but not a perfect one,” he said.
There was a short pause before the woman made her point.
“It is never too late to do what’s right.”
Pastor Mike couldn’t help but agree. “But I made a promise,” he said.
“That was a long time ago. Things change. The truth, Mikey. The truth is all that matters.”
It was a troubling, haunting conversation, as if the woman on the other end of the line was merely testing his resolve. He wondered if she’d taken Jesus into her heart so that she’d be free of what had happened. Forgiveness was so powerful. He prayed for guidance and the strength to do what was right.
