Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  “Of course not,” he said. “Where was dinner?”

  “Oh, a little Italian place on Pacific we’d never tried before, and we’re never going back.” She caught her mistake. “I’ll never go back. No, I won’t.”

  His stare bore down on her. “Anything happen at dinner?”

  “What do you mean? Happen?”

  “Out of the ordinary? I’m just trying to capture what happened before the shooting.”

  She stared at him. “Did we argue? Is that what you’re hoping for, Detective?”

  Kaminski was taken aback by her sudden shift to an undeniably defensive tone. “No, that’s not what I was inferring, Ms. Connelly.”

  “Implying,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Implying, not inferring.”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  “I want to know if Alex suffered long, or at all. If he was able to say anything.”

  The detective hated this part of his job. More than anything. “I’m sorry, Ms. Connelly, but your husband was dead at the scene. I thought you knew.”

  She looked away, toward the window.

  “I knew. I just wanted someone to say it to me.” She looked at Kaminski, her hollow eyes now flooded. “I knew when I ran out that door that I’d never see him again. Never again.” The words tumbled out. “I loved Alex so, so much.”

  “I know. I need to know what happened,” he said.

  Tori looked at him, almost pleadingly.

  “I don’t want to relive it.”

  “You are the only living witness,” he said. “You want us to catch the killer, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “Tell me. I’m here to help you,” he said.

  She told him that she was in “another room” when she heard a commotion and the “popping” sound of a gun.

  “I mean, I know it was a gun now, but honestly, I thought it was a champagne cork popping. Alex could be like that, you know. Surprising me.”

  “I’m sure he was a good man. I’m sorry for your loss. Then what happened?”

  “I went into the living room and a man was standing there by Alex. I screamed and he started to run to the door.”

  “How’d you get shot?”

  She looked at him, irritated and emotional. “I’m getting to that. Do you mind?”

  “Not all, please. Just trying to help, Ms. Connelly.”

  “Then it was over. He ran out the door and I followed. I went over to Darius’s place and he called for help.”

  “What did your assailant look like?”

  “It happened so fast,” she’d said. “I think he had dark eyes, but they might have been dark blue or green.”

  The response could have not been more ambiguous.

  At least she didn’t say “red,” thereby ruling out an albino assailant, he thought.

  “Could you determine his ethnicity?”

  She looked at the reporting officer, almost blank eyed. “Not really. He had on a mask.”

  This was the first time she’d mentioned a mask. Kaminski underlined that.

  “Ski mask?” he repeated.

  The wheels were turning now. Tori was retrieving some information. A pause, then an answer. “Not sure. More like a panty hose. I could see his face, but his features were smushed by the fabric.”

  “Had you seen anyone in the area who matches—to the best of your recollection—what you saw that night?”

  The question was bait, and usually good bait. A suspect frequently takes the suggestion and runs with it.

  “He looked like a gardener.”

  “A man who delivers groceries.”

  “A transient I’ve seen a time or two nearby.”

  Tori went limp. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  “You’re going to have to give me a minute. This is extremely difficult.”

  Kaminski waited for her to collect herself. Her eyes were damp with tears, but none flowed down her cheeks. She was a coolheaded woman, a logical woman. She’d expected the worst and had prepared herself for the moment when she’d knew with certainty, with utter conviction, that she was alone in the world.

  What came from her lips next would have been stunning to the most veteran detective.

  “I’ll need a lawyer,” she said. “Won’t I?”

  “Why would that be?” he asked.

  “Just call it a hunch,” she said, this time looking directly at him. “You’ll focus the investigation on me. I understand it. I know how things are done. In the end, you’ll have to look elsewhere because I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “No one is looking at you,” Kaminski said.

  She looked past him once more, breaking the gaze they’d held. “Not now. But tomorrow somone will. Someone will say the ugliest things and your minions will circle me and my tragedy like a school of sharks. Each after a piece.”

  She stopped talking.

  Kaminski stood there in uncomfortable silence.

  “Detective,” she finally said. “I want to know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How am I supposed to live without him? He was my soul mate. I loved him.”

  Tears started rolling down her cheeks.

  “Again, I’m truly sorry for your loss,” he said, taking a couple of steps backward before turning for the door.

  She looked back at the sky through the window, turning to the blush of a new day. “Thank you, Detective,” she said.

  The beige Princess phone next to Tori O’Neal Connelly’s bedside rang. She smoothed her covers and disregarded it for a moment. But the ring was persistent and altogether annoying. She reached for it, wincing with the pain that came with stretching skin that had been sutured. She assumed it was a nurse or, as she liked to call them, an attendant from the hospital. She planned on telling whoever it was that she would make an outgoing call if she wanted anything. Tori was never shy about indicating whatever it was she wanted. Her heart’s desire was hardwired to her mouth.

  As she clasped the receiver to her ear, nurse Diana Lowell entered the room.

  “Hello,” Tori said into the mouthpiece. She shifted her body in the bed. Immediately, her face froze. She turned away from the nurse who was emptying a plastic bag liner brimming with used tissues and other nonsharps into a large disposal can.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Her voice was low. Not a whisper, but if Diana Lowell had actually tried to listen, it would have taken considerable effort.

  “Understood,” she said, her eyes fixed on the nurse as she rolled the disposal can from the room to the bathroom.

  She turned away.

  “Don’t ever call me here again,” she said, her voice, decidedly firm.

  She pressed the button to disconnect the call. The line went dead, but she didn’t put the phone down just yet.

  “Don’t worry. I will be fine,” she said, her eyes purposefully catching the attention of the hospital worker. “I miss you, too. I can’t wait to see you.”

  The nurse who frequently didn’t see a need to hold her tongue just looked at her.

  Tori shifted in the bed. “My sister,” she said. “She’s coming to see me.”

  Diana nodded and smiled, that practiced smile that didn’t really betray the fact that she thought the patient with the dead husband was a B.S. artist of the highest order.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tacoma

  The Tacoma News Tribune ran a follow-up to the shooting in the morning’s paper:

  Police Question Widow in North End Shooting

  Tori Connelly, the wife of a Tacoma financial consultant, was questioned by police in conjunction with the shooting death of her husband, Alex.

  “We’re satisfied that this case will reach a proper conclusion soon,” said lead investigator Edmund Kaminski. “Ms. Connelly has been cooperative.”

  A tech working in Tacoma Police Department’s state-of-the-art forensics lab had taken a swab of Tori Connelly’s hands for
gunshot residue particles at the scene of her husband’s murder. An analyst at the lab compared the particles captured by the swab to determine if the woman who’d been injured was the shooter. Law enforcement in Tacoma and elsewhere had become wary of gunshot residue in the past few years. There were several instances on the law books in which men had been wrongfully convicted when they tested positive for GSR when they’d only handled a gun, or had recently been in the proximity of one that had been fired. There had also been a famous Northwest case that was botched when it was determined that the GSR found on a shooter’s jacket had been the result of contamination from a police detective who’d been at the firing range before going out to the murder scene.

  Tori Connelly’s white nightgown was next. It had been hanging in the biohazard room drying since the shooting. Specialist Cal Herzog spread out the garment on a table under fluorescent and ultraviolet lights to see what story it might tell.

  Eddie Kaminski stood over the garment next to the tech, a young man in his late twenties with hair heavy with product and teeth that appeared all the whiter as the ultraviolet light bounced off the fabric of the filmy nightgown. The blood had already dried to a dark wine, almost chestnut, color.

  The younger man, Rory, smoothed out the fabric, took a series of photos, and cut two small square patches from the bloodiest part of the material. He made a few remarks about the blood’s pooling and how gravity had dragged a pair of rivulets down to the hemline.

  “Can’t be sure until we analyze it, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything here other than what we see. No semen. No other fluids,” he said.

  “What’s interesting is right here,” Cal said. His hands were gloved, but he didn’t get close enough to the nightgown to really touch it. He motioned to the fabric, though his eyes stayed on the young man.

  “What are you getting at?” Kaminski asked.

  “Look closer.”

  “I am looking closer,” Rory said, his teeth flashing like a cotton bale bound by steel wires. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Precisely. There’s nothing to see.”

  “So? I’m not blind,” the young man said.

  Cal rolled his eyes, enjoying the moment.

  Kaminski held his tongue. What he wanted to say was something about the kid having earned his degree in a correspondence course or that whatever training he really had was B.S. He expressed his irritation because, well, it was fun to irritate the kid.

  “If she was shot like she said she was, I’d expect a bullet hole, a tear, something in the nightgown, wouldn’t you?”

  Point made.

  “Yeah, I guess I would.”

  With the new widow still in the hospital, Eddie Kaminski returned to the scene of the shooting on North Junett. He’d noticed a koi pond near the walk up to the Connellys’ front door the night of the shooting, but it wasn’t because it was sinister. His former wife, Maria, had wanted to have a goldfish pond installed in their backyard early in their marriage. When they couldn’t afford a landscaper, she dug the pond herself, shovel by shovel. Kaminski remembered coming home from a long day on patrol, and how happy she was that the inexpensive feeder goldfish she’d bought by the bucket had laid eggs. It wasn’t the only news she had to share. She was pregnant. It was the happiest day of his life.

  The last time he saw the pond was moving day, when all the happiness had literally drained from the Kaminskis’ life. The pond had turned green and was full of Douglas fir needles, a decaying symbol of their dying marriage.

  He walked up the pathway to the door of the stately Victorian and the koi pond. Just below the surface a fragment of red and white caught his attention. Kaminski bent down to get a better look. It was the edge of a plastic bag. The red, a half circle filled with another, smaller one, appeared to be the familiar logo of Target. He wondered what was more incongruent—a Target bag in that neighborhood or the presence of plastic refuse in a pristine pond.

  He looked around for something to help retrieve the bag. The yard was perfectly landscaped with not a tool lying around, not even a garden shed. Nothing was handy, so the detective did his best to wrestle with some bamboo that had been artfully planted along the pond’s farthest edge.

  Another reason to hate this annoyingly invasive plant, he thought.

  A piece snapped in his hands, and he poked the end through a small void in the lily pad–studded surface. It took some finessing, and he figured ice fishing north of Spokane with his dad had served him well when he snagged the bag and managed to pull it out.

  It was heavy.

  It didn’t belong there.

  He knew what he had. The bag conformed to the shape of its contents.

  A gun.

  “Not just any gun,” Kaminski said to himself, his heart pumping with a little more vigor. “The murder weapon.”

  It had started in the kitchen with his back to the soapstone island. Tori wore a thin blouse that allowed her nipples to show. She opened the refrigerator and let the cold air pour over her body.

  As if she needed to call attention to what she was selling and how good it would be.

  Is there a more beautiful woman on the face of the earth? Not in magazines. Not on TV. The movies. Nowhere, she thought, always the best marketer of her own charms. She spun around and latched her hands around the small of his back, pulling gently, teasingly.

  “You seem a little excited,” she said, looking at her lover.

  “That’s lovely.”

  He wanted to speak, but he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She was in control and he was going along for the ride, happily, hungrily.

  Her fingertips slipped under his shirt and caressed his chest.

  He leaned backward, pushing his pelvis toward her.

  “I know what you want,” she said. Her voice was soft, yet playful.

  “Yes, I know you do,” he said.

  She undid his belt, then his jeans. Her fingers found his zipper and she pulled.

  “A little tight,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, dropping to her knees.

  He was breathing heavy by then. He closed his eyes and she put her mouth on him.

  She stopped.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “I will. I’ll get you there. Just let me do what I do best.”

  And she did.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kitsap County

  Cooking dinner in the Stark household was the kind of communal endeavor that artists so charmingly sketched for the Saturday Evening Post and that modern-day advertisers with buckets of guilt and products to sell still employed to remind people that the family that ate their meals together stayed together. Kendall and Steven alternated the roles of sous chef and head chef. On days when she was up to her neck with criminal investigations and the people who populated the files of her in-basket at the sheriff’s office, Kendall liked the feel of a sharp knife in her hands as chief chopper. She enjoyed the way carbide made its way through a potato or an onion. The cut felt good.

  A release.

  The day had been consumed by thoughts of the reunion, Lainie, and, of course, Tori. That her partner Josh Anderson was coming to dinner might drag the day to a new low. She pulled herself together.

  Focus, Kendall. Good things. Happy things.

  She looked around the kitchen. Things didn’t get much better than what she saw. It was—her son, her husband, her home—what she had dreamed about as a girl in Port Orchard.

  The Starks had recently remodeled the kitchen, with Steven doing most of the work except the fabrication of the limestone slab countertop. Kendall sanded the cupboards before Steven lacquered them with a creamy white, but quickly learned that there was no glory in sanding. Increasingly, it was clear that the kitchen had been designed with Steven’s preferences in mind, anyway. Kendall didn’t care. The backside of the new island had, by default, become her domain. She prepped the salad—a mix of arugula, romaine, and
fennel—and looked at the clock.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.

  Steven stirred the contents of a saucepan.

  “You mean an evening with To-Know-Me-Is-to-Love-Me?”

  “I felt sorry for him,” Kendall said.

  “Josh almost cost you your job. But, no, if you can forgive him, I can, too.”

  Kendall turned to Cody, who was sitting at the kitchen table working on arranging dried pasta into an intricate design that suggested both chaos and order. Kendall was unsure if it was a road in a mountainous landscape or something else. Pasta was linked up, one piece after another, and fanned out into a kind of swirling shape. Cody had always been adept at puzzles—sometimes putting them together with the reverse side up, using only shapes and not imagery to fit each piece together.

  “You doing okay, babe?” Kendall asked.

  Cody looked up, a faint smile on his round face. Whatever he was thinking about at that moment was a pleasant thought. It might have been dinner. It could have been the stars in the sky. Cody spoke, but not often. He was not an alien like some spiteful people consider those with autism, but a gentle spirit who had an awareness of everything around him—even when it seemed he let no one inside.

  “Good. I’m good,” he said.

  “I know you are,” she said.

  Cody had become more verbal in the past few months. And while his responses weren’t exactly lengthy, they did get the point across, and they gave his parents and doctors hope that his particular form of autism might not be as severe as once thought. It was true that he’d likely never be able to function without continued support and guidance; he wasn’t going to end up in some hospital somewhere. He was only nine, of course, but the Starks feared the day that they were gone and what their son would face in life without the love of those who knew him.

  “Lasagna’s ready to come out,” Steven said.