Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  “You’re not here about the crash vic this morning, are you, Kendall?”

  Kendall shook her head. “No. Something from quite some time ago. You probably don’t have it.”

  Birdy smiled. “I sense a little trepidation there. You must know about our wonderful filing system.” She looked toward the stairway to the attic.

  “I’m sure it’s better than ours,” Kendall said, recalling the difficulty the sheriff’s office had when the records division went to a fully computerized system some years ago.

  “What’s the case? And, almost more important, when was it?”

  “November or October 1994. A fatal accident on Banner Road. The victim was a seventeen-year-old-boy named Jason Reed.”

  The forensic pathologist took in the information, but her face was without recognition.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” she said. “It’ll take some looking. I can dig around this afternoon.”

  Kendall thanked her, stood, and reached for her coat, a long lapis peacoat that was more suitable for winter than for spring.

  Washington weather for you, she’d thought, when she put it on that morning. Never warm when it should be.

  “No big rush,” she finally said to Birdy, though she really didn’t mean it.

  Kendall walked back from the coroner’s office across the parking lot toward the rear entrance of the Kitsap County sheriff’s offices. The rain had slickened the lot, leaving a dozen puddles swirling with the iridescence of motor oil. She drew her hands into her pockets to hike up her pant legs. She needed to do something about those pants. Ordering online was easy, but the fit was never right.

  She wondered how it was that so many years had passed since she thought of Jason and the night that he’d died. In the months following the accident, she doubted that a day went by without her thinking of it.

  Jason Reed’s death had changed the trajectory of so many of their lives. Especially her own.

  It took about two minutes for the staff in the Tacoma PD crime lab to validate that the gun recovered from the Connelly residence had been, in fact, the murder weapon. Three casings retrieved from the scene and slugs from Alex Connelly’s brain were fired from a 357 Ruger. DNA analysis on the gun had confirmed it. Traces of blood and hair—belonging to Alex Connelly—were found on the outside edges of the barrel. A second person’s DNA was also captured along the underside of the gun’s barrel. There was a partial print, but it was barely there at all. Also missing were the weapon’s identification numbers. They’d been somewhat crudely scratched out.

  “An attempt to obliterate the serial numbers was made by someone,” a technician named Carol-Ann told Kaminski when he sidled up next to her behind the counter, where she’d placed the gun under a microscope outfitted with a camera.

  He leaned as close as he could without interfering with her personal space. Carol-Ann could be touchy. “You read anything?”

  She barely glanced at him before answering. “Of course. That’s my job. I’ll run some prints for you, but the printer’s in its god-awful cleaning cycle—ten minutes or ten hours.”

  “Just read ’em. I’ve got a pen.”

  She read out the numbers and Kaminski jotted them down.

  “Wonder where this will lead?” he said.

  “Back to Connelly’s front door,” Carol-Ann said. “I’m not a detective, but I’d say a random intruder might shop at Target, but I doubt they’d bring the bag to the crime scene and dump it off right in the bushes or pond or whatever.”

  He almost corrected her by calling the store Tar-zhay, as Lindsey did, but he didn’t think that would get Carol-Ann to smile.

  Nothing ever did.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Kitsap County

  Kendall hadn’t suggested any real urgency, but Birdy Waterman was never the type to hear a request made more than once. She found the 1994 Jason Reed file in the attic in a plastic tub of other files that had never been converted to microfilm or destroyed as a matter of disposal protocol. That wasn’t unusual, given the cost of the conversion process, but it was fortuitous. She went into the coroner’s office kitchen with its view of the county’s administrative buildings, courthouse, and always-jammed parking lots. At one time the homeowners who lived there when the house was new probably had views of the Olympics and Sinclair Inlet. She poured some coffee from a formerly white, then brown Mr. Coffee machine that had been there longer than she had.

  The file folder was thin: a single X-ray film, a death certificate, and a partial police report covering the basics of the accident. Tori O’Neal had been the driver, with the victim Jason Reed in the passenger seat. Her sister, Lainie, had been in the backseat. The twins’ statements were identical. They’d been to a party where there had been drinking. The roadway was wet. Tori was driving at least ten miles an hour too fast—but, she insisted, not much more than that. The file was interesting for what it didn’t contain—an autopsy report. Yet, a death certificate had been issued. A predecessor had signed off on it—internal injuries the result of impact in a car accident.

  Birdy set the film against the light box and flipped the switch. It was an X-ray of Jason Reed’s chest, indicating several broken ribs. The fractures were consistent with the crash described in the report. She looked closer, fumbling for glasses she still was not used to wearing. The fractures did not indicate that they’d splintered and pierced any organs. Nor was there any pooling of blood.

  She looked closer yet. Although the previous pathologist had likely meant only to cover only the dead boy’s chest, at the top of the frame Birdy’s dark eyes fastened on the horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone. It had been broken. In a boy the age of Jason Reed, that particular bone was not likely to have broken in the impact of the crash—it was known for its flexibility as it hadn’t completed the process of ossification.

  Yet Jason’s was broken, crushed, smashed.

  She set down the film and called Kendall.

  “You in your office?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “Good. I feel like taking a walk. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Birdy Waterman smiled at the photo of Cody and Steven on Kendall’s desk. It was an image Kendall had taken of the two of them crabbing off the dock in Harper. Though they hadn’t caught anything of consequence, it was clear that father and son were enjoying the sunny weather, the water, and the pleasure of just hanging out and having a good time.

  “Cody looks happy,” she said, taking a seat.

  “That was a great day. We’re having a lot of those lately,” Kendall said, not wanting to jinx it, but happy to acknowledge that life had become better, more joyous, over the past months. Hers was not like anyone else’s family, but she was feeling a lot better about their lives and the road that they’d been on since Cody’s autism diagnosis.

  “I have something to show you,” Birdy said, turning the banker’s lamp on Kendall’s desk upward. She pulled the film from an oversize envelope.

  “Jason Reed,” she said.

  Kendall nodded and looked on. “I knew you’d find him.”

  “I don’t want to lie and tell you it was difficult. There seems to be a method to the madness in the attic.”

  “Sounds like a horror movie,” Kendall said.

  Birdy missed the reference and looked unsure.

  “The Madness in the Attic starring some TV actor.”

  “Yes, Tony Danza.”

  Kendall laughed. “I like it. Random, but I like it.”

  The forensic pathologist held the film to the light, darkening the room. She pointed out her discovery.

  “Is this conclusive?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy didn’t think so. “Not at all. But given what we know about Tori O’Neal now, it might be wise to take another look.”

  “Why didn’t they catch that the first time?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy shook her head. “I’d like to say that I’m a lot better at my job than any of my predecessors, but I won’t. Mistakes happen.
”

  “Are you thinking, what, a second autopsy?”

  Birdy’s dark eyes flashed. “Yes. And sadly, you know what that means.”

  Kendall’s eyes landed on Cody’s photo, his halo of blond hair, his blue eyes, and the smile that spoke of a cherished moment and the promise of more to come.

  “No mother should ever have to go through that twice,” she said.

  Mary Reed knew that the rhythm of her life had been interrupted. At fifty-nine, she was a woman who had always liked order. She’d found comfort in ensuring that everything lined up in ways that it ought to. She did that for more than twenty-five years as a custodian at the Kitsap County Courthouse. All of her cleaning supplies were set on her swiveling-caster cart in a sequence that made perfect sense. She always worked from top to bottom: glass and mirror cleaner (no streaks), counter surface cleanser (disinfects, too), and the industrial floor cleaner that she was sure would give her lung cancer someday, despite assurances that it was not toxic to humans. Mary, a woman of some girth and muscle, considered the sequence of things in everything she did. And yet, she knew there was a great failure to her theory that one thing should always follow the other.

  A child should never die before his or her parents.

  Never should a mother watch her baby’s coloring move from the pink of life to the blue of death.

  Never. Ever.

  As she rubbed out the spitty spray above the sinks in the second floor’s women’s bathroom, she saw her own reflection for the first time in a long while. She was no longer a young woman. New creases bolted from the corners of her pale blue eyes.

  The same color as Jason’s.

  She pulled back a fallen strand of her dark-from-the-bottle brown hair.

  The color of her hair belonged to no one, not anyone on earth.

  She rubbed at the streaks with greater vigor, first with her fingertips, then with the heel of her palm. Harder. Faster. The streak was getting worse, not better. The damn mirror cleaner was no good.

  Probably eco-friendly. Damn!

  She stopped for a moment and turned around.

  “Are you all right, Mary?”

  It was Grace, another custodian.

  Mary shook off the intrusion.

  “I’m fine.”

  Grace, a Korean woman of about twenty-five with too-short bangs and overwhitened teeth, stepped a little closer. Her brown eyes were intense with concern.

  “But you’re crying,” she said.

  Mary dropped her cloth and blotted her eyes with the inside of her elbow.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Give me a second, Grace.”

  The younger woman, not really convinced whatsoever, nodded and backed away.

  Mary wasn’t fine, of course. She’d been thinking of Jason and how he’d be in his thirties had he lived. A husband maybe? A father? A police officer? A lawyer? A TV star? She would never know what he would have been because he was gone, a tight, sad slipknot in the sequence of what she knew to be the proper progression of things in an ordered, fair world. There was no one to talk to about it anymore. It had been nearly fifteen years. Mary’s husband, Doug, had specifically told her on more than one occasion, maybe a hundred occasions, their son’s untimely death was no longer a subject he’d consider for conversation.

  “I feel as you do, babe,” he said. “But we have a daughter. We have a marriage. Our lives can’t be about the loss we’ve suffered. Our lives should be about the joy we had with Jason and the future that Sarah brings to our lives.”

  She knew Doug’s sentiments came from the survivor’s part of his heart, the little place that somehow recognized that with each beat of life, a person must go on. With a daughter at home there was no other option.

  No curl up and die. No way she could pour a handful of pills down her throat and pray that God would forgive her for what she’d done.

  Mary Reed studied her image in the mirror once more. The whites of her eyes were now braided with the tiny fissures of red that come from crying. She wrapped her arms around herself. It was as if she could pull herself together in a way that felt as though someone, Jason maybe, had given her a hug. She took a deep breath into her former smoker’s lungs and conjured the memories of her baby.

  The one taken from her in a bloody crash Tori O’Neal caused on Banner Road.

  Kendall Stark knew where to find Jason Reed’s mother. She’d seen Mary Reed at least once or twice a week at the courthouse when she was chatting with deputies working the security detail by the main entry, or when she was headed into court to testify.

  It was just before her shift when Kendall found Mary in the locker room in the courthouse basement.

  Mary smiled when she saw the detective.

  “Great minds think alike,” she said.

  “Hi, Mary,” Kendall said. “How so?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you lately, wondering if we’d be talking.”

  “You’ve been following Tori O’Neal’s case, have you?”

  Mary nodded. “Like everyone else.” She pulled on a deep-pocketed smock and stuffed a cleaning rag and a small squeegee into the front panel.

  “Let’s sit,” Kendall said, indicating the bench. Mary complied.

  “I used to feel sorry for Tori, so young, so pretty. Her whole life ruined by an accident. Not anymore. I never thought she was that sorry. She seemed sorrier about missing senior prom than the fact that she killed my boy.”

  “I was only a teenager then,” Kendall said. “I remember things about the accident, how sad we were about losing Jason. I don’t know if I ever told you how sorry we were. I was at his funeral, but I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “That’s all right, Kendall. I know you care about people. I know that’s why you do what you do. Me, I’ve spent my life cleaning up the mess. Maybe it’s because I could never clean up, make right, what happened to Jason.”

  Kendall didn’t completely understand, but she put her hand on Mary’s. It was a gesture that was meant to comfort, and it did.

  “I know. I wanted to talk to you about something very important, but it is also very difficult.”

  Mary fixed her eyes on the detective’s, but she stayed quiet, letting Kendall speak without interruption.

  “We’re looking at Jason’s death with fresh eyes. It isn’t that we think that there is anything there other than a tragic accident, we just want to make sure.”

  “Because of Tori’s husbands?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I wasn’t there that night, and I don’t know what happened.”

  “I know. But I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Dr. Waterman wants to do a full review of Jason’s case.”

  “All right. That’s fine. You mean reinterviewing people?”

  Kendall narrowed her focus and looked Mary in the eyes.

  “More than that,” she said. “We want to conduct a second autopsy on Jason.”

  Mary’s eyes started to flood, but she didn’t cry.

  “How can you do that?” she asked.

  “That’s the hard part and that’s why I’m here. I want to ask you something that no mother would ever want to be asked. And I don’t take it lightly,” Kendall said. “I want to ask you for permission to exhume his body.”

  Mary shook her head. “I don’t know about that.”

  “I know this is hard, Mary,” Kendall said.

  “No, I won’t allow it.”

  “You want to know the truth, don’t you?”

  “We know the truth, don’t we?”

  “I’m going to tell you something very important and something very confidential.”

  “What is it?”

  “The file on Jason is very, very scant on information. We have the accident report and a single X-ray. No photos. No nothing.”

  “Yes.”

  “The X-ray shows a slight irregularity,” Kendall said. “It appears that Jason’s hyoid was compressed, b
roken.”

  Mary looked confused. “Hyoid?”

  “A bone in his neck,” Kendall said.

  “From the accident?”

  “Not likely.”

  Mary looked down at the chamois that she’d been absentmindedly balling up in her hands.

  “I’ll have to think about it a while. My baby’s been undisturbed for fifteen years.”

  Kendall Stark looked at her phone. There was still plenty of time to get over to Tacoma to talk with Detective Kaminski. The round trip across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and back took about an hour. She dialed his direct line and he answered right away.

  “Not a good day today,” he said. “Things stacking up a little on our case. Maybe later in the week?”

  Kendall understood completely. She knew how impossible it was to get everything done, every procedure done correctly, in the beginnings of a murder case.

  “We have an exhumation in the works,” she said. “An irregularity appeared on the films of the dead boy.”

  It felt strange to call Jason the “dead boy” when she knew him. It seemed so impersonal and she didn’t like the way it came out of her mouth. But it also struck her that Jason would always be a dead boy, never a man. Never anything that he had dreamed about.

  “Interesting,” Kaminski said. “But just so you know, we don’t like your friend for this shooting. In case that’s where you’re going with this.”

  Kendall took a moment. “No, not at all. Going for the truth, that’s all.”

  “That’s the name of the game,” he said. “What else are you doing on the Reed case?”

  “There’s not much we can do. Only three witnesses, an addict who came on the scene and the two sisters.”

  “Addict around?”

  “As a matter of fact, he is. He’s a pastor of a church in Kingston.”

  “Parker, you let me down once,” Tori Connelly said, her voice decidedly stern, the kind of icy, emotionless tone that reminded the teenager more of his mother.