Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

“Excuse me?”

  “I was just thinking that it was good to ask the family what they thought. You know, you’re tough and nice.”

  “Port Orchard women?”

  “Yeah, those lumberjacks are good folks.”

  She smiled. “I’ll let you know what we—find.”

  “You almost said ‘dig up,’ didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You caught me on that. Tough and nice.”

  “What are you reading, Kendall?”

  Kendall looked over at Steven from her side of the bed. It was late and their bungalow was still. A book called Women Who Kill was propped up on her lap. It was after midnight and he’d fallen to sleep only to be awakened by her bedside lamp.

  “How to kill your husband and get away with it. Or something along those lines.”

  Her tone was deadpan.

  “Should I be worried?” he asked, propping his head up with an extra pillow.

  “Maybe,” she teased. “Some of these women that I’ve been reading about went through more men than we go through Splenda around here.”

  “That’s a lot,” he said, rolling a little closer to look at the pages of the book. Steven was a handsome man, but never more so than at night when the stubble of dark whiskers peppered his chin. She inched a little closer to him, but continued reading. The book was not a forensic journal, but one of those compendiums of crime that she picked up at the Port Orchard Walgreens. Most cops were loath to admit it, but those kinds of books were a guilty pleasure.

  “Who’s that?” Steven indicated a picture of a frumpy, middle-aged woman with horn-rimmed glasses and shoulder-length dark hair.

  “Nannie Doss. She confessed to killing eleven people.”

  “That’s more husbands than Larry King has had wives.”

  Kendall laughed. “Not all husbands with that one. She killed sisters, children, her mother. A real wonderful gal.”

  “So you think Tori is a Black Widow, do you?”

  Kendall looked above her frameless readers. “I have no idea, really. But two dead husbands, quick disposal of their remains, and a big cash settlement from insurance companies. A nice racket, I guess.”

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind bumping off those you supposedly love.”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “These women don’t mind at all.”

  She went back to her book, reading up about cases of women who did just that. Many did it for money. A more recent case that caught her eye took place in California, where two women in their seventies murdered men living in their boardinghouse.

  A cop working the case said, “It was like Arsenic and Old Lace, but it doesn’t have Cary Grant.”

  She read the line to Steven and he laughed.

  “Isn’t it great that you have such fun bedtime reading, honey?”

  His words were said teasingly, but there was a little jab in the mix, too. Kendall had never been able to separate the workday from her home life. She and Steven had gone around and around about it. There was a need to build a wall around her husband and Cody, but it wasn’t so easy. Not when her responsibility was so great.

  “How much did those old gals get?”

  “Two-point-eight million,” Kendall said.

  Steven cocked a brow. “Jesus. That’s big bucks, considering how a gangbanger will kill a guy for a pair of tennis shoes and a five-dollar bill.”

  Another case, even more recent, involved a woman from upstate New York named Stacey Castor. Castor, forty, was convicted of murdering her husband and the attempted murder of her daughter.

  “Nothing like keeping it in the family,” Steven said.

  “She used antifreeze.”

  “A woman that cold should use it on herself,” he said.

  Kendall rolled her eyes and nudged him.

  “Sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t. “Couldn’t resist.” Steven reached over and gave her a kiss. That would be the sum of any affection between the two of them that evening. He’d seen his wife like this on more than one occasion. He called it “fact-finding mode,” and once she was immersed, she didn’t come up for air until she knew everything she needed to know.

  Every once in a while, she’d turn to him and say something about what she was reading.

  “Case from Oregon is interesting,” she said. “Sami Watanabe was convicted of murdering her husband and trying to kill her little boys.”

  “Another real sweetheart,” Steven said.

  “That’s right. They see everyone as unnecessary. What is necessary is the money they’ll get when their victims are out of the way.”

  “So that’s Tori O’Neal?”

  “I don’t know, Steven. But look at it, two husbands, a high school classmate, and her own mother. That’s four dead people connected to one person.”

  Steven pushed the book down so Kendall would focus on him.

  “Her mother? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. It just strikes me as odd that Tori was the last person to see her mother alive.”

  “She died of an overdose, right?”

  “Technically, yes. I mean, no doubt. But even so, sometimes an overdose is accidental, sometimes on purpose.”

  “Jesus, Kendall, you really don’t like Tori, do you?”

  She ignored his invitation to argue. “I hate not knowing what happened to all the people who died, all the people who trusted her. Steven, really, one after another?”

  “You could say that about other people, Kendall. Misfortune has a way of visiting the same people over and over.”

  Kendall looked away from her husband and back at the book. “I agree. It could be just that. I guess I wouldn’t have thought of the first two as potential victims if we hadn’t considered the circumstances of the last two—the moneymakers.”

  “Moneymakers,” he said, reaching for the bedside lamp. His half of the bed fell into darkness. “That’s a cold way to think of anyone.”

  Kendall knew he was right and she wondered if someone she’d gone to school with could really be that evil.

  “We’ll find out,” she said.

  Kendall turned another page and started to read, but Steven lifted himself up and reached over to turn off her light. It wasn’t a subtle gesture, but he made his point. She wanted to tell him everything that was on her mind since the shooting in Tacoma, but she couldn’t. When she heard his soft snore, she felt relief.

  Later, she thought. I’ll tell him later.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kitsap County

  While many cemeteries in the Northwest feature water or mountain views for those quiet moments of reflection needed with the passing of a loved one, Fraola Cemetery in Olalla held no such distinction. It was flat as a football field, studded by shade trees and tombstones of the type that cannot be mowed over by an overtaxed volunteer caretaker. Fraola’s name came from the combination of two once-vital towns, Fragaria and Olalla.

  The Reeds lived in South Kitsap off Stormy Lane. When it came time to inter their son, Jason, they buried him in Fraola in a large plot purchased by Doug Reed’s family. A pink-hued granite monument loomed in the southwest corner of the cemetery; it was the size and style of a marker used for a wealthy family. The Reeds weren’t wealthy at all. Doug worked at the shipyard and Mary at the courthouse. The larger marker was a measure of the importance of their son to their family.

  When Mary Reed came to observe the exhumation of her son’s grave, it wasn’t to throw a fit, cry, or stomp her feet at the indignity of all of that. She was past that. Kendall had told her that the only way they’d know the truth of what had happened that terrible night would be to reexamine his body.

  “He’s already in heaven, Kendall,” Mary said. “I know that what remains in the casket is only flesh and bone. Not him. Not his spirit.”

  Kendall could scarcely argue. She’d seen the other side of the reaction at the mere suggestion of an exhumation. A young navy wife from Bremerton had insisted her daughter had stopped breathin
g, the victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, while her husband was on tour in the Northern Pacific. The investigators, the medical authorities, the forensic pathologist, and the coroner all agreed. Baby Natalie was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Bremerton. Two years later, baby Scott died in a similar situation when the father was out at sea. The woman broke down. The detective figured she’d do the same thing if her son Cody had died.

  That changed, of course, when the judge issued the exhumation order and the discovery was made that both children had died of ethylene glycol poisoning. She’d stirred three tablespoons of Prestone antifreeze into Scott’s and Natalie’s baby bottles.

  Since a backhoe was too large to get around the Reeds’ mammoth monument, four deputy sheriffs had volunteered for the exhumation. Birdy Waterman had outfitted each with a shovel she purchased at Ace Hardware—the clerk didn’t ask why she needed four.

  “You must dig your work,” he said, with an overt wink.

  She rolled her eyes playfully at the corny joke. Just to be kind to the clerk. But the fact was the pathologist found no pleasure in disturbing a grave. Birdy believed in the sanctity of a burial and the need for people to say good-bye only once. Putting someone through the nightmare of reliving the worst moment of their lives was never taken lightly. The only thing that motivated her was the hope that if anything had been missed by Kitsap’s previous forensic pathologist, she’d be able to see it. She wanted justice to be served, and she knew that sometimes justice was messy and late.

  Birdy had reviewed the thin report on the Banner Road accident one more time before coming out to Fraola that morning. If she could have come up with a reason to halt the exhumation, she would. She’d rather be embarrassed before, not after. Everything was in order.

  Bones held up pretty well after fifteen years, and if the embalming was good, the tissue would be relatively preserved.

  A black plastic curtain cordoned off the area so that any potential onlookers could only see the people working the grave opening from the neck up. After about a half hour of silent digging, one of the deputies moving the sandy soil to a blue tarp spread on the grass hit something solid. He stopped. The sound of scraping metal against a concrete liner was worse than fingernails over a school chalkboard. The coffin was about to be unearthed. After fifteen years in the darkness of a grave, Jason Reed, forever seventeen, was about to be exposed to the bright light of the world.

  The forensic pathologist looked over at Kendall and Josh as they stood about twenty yards from the exhumation. Behind them by another ten yards was Mary Reed and Jason’s sister.

  “Lift it,” Birdy said, softly.

  Two deputies checked the black plastic curtain to shield the view of the grave. It was time for the curtain to fall.

  “It’ll take some real muscle,” one of them said, “but we can get it out of here.”

  Birdy spoke to the investigators in a quiet and, as always, dignified manner.

  “This will take about two hours. I’ll see you in the autopsy suite.”

  “This is a waste of time,” Josh said.

  Kendall nudged him.

  “Tell that to Mrs. Reed,” she said. “She’s here for the truth.”

  Josh looked over and nodded at the mother and sister standing behind them. He’d hoped that neither had heard what he’d said to Kendall. He hated looking like he didn’t care.

  Even when he didn’t.

  A white halogen bulb pumped so much brightness onto the mummified body laid out on Dr. Waterman’s autopsy table that two of the three observers in the Kitsap County Morgue had no choice but to blink and turn away. Flash! Dead! Boy! The cuts and scrapes from the car accident had turned into dark scratches on an oddly smooth and waxy figure. Jason Reed’s face was in remarkable condition. He looked lifelike, with a trace of stubble protruding from his frozen-in-time adolescent chin. His eyes were shut, of course, but they did not look as if they’d been forced closed. Narrow slits made it look as if he might just wake up.

  Both investigators stood on the opposite side of the steel and aluminum autopsy table from Dr. Waterman.

  “I hope I look that good when I’m dead that long,” Josh said.

  Kendall looked straight ahead. “You don’t look that good now.”

  Birdy ignored Josh, which irritated him. Sometimes it seemed that he said things only to get a rise out of others. It was as if he thought insensitivity was somehow charming.

  Kendall braced herself, but she couldn’t help but be deeply moved by the sight of the body. He’d been dressed in a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt and Levi 501s. The last time she’d seen him was at South Kitsap High, on the commons. He was with his circle of friends, jocks mostly. He was a good-looking teenager with curly dark hair that always looked messy and sexy. She closed her eyes a second, imagining him as he was.

  “He was a really nice boy,” she said.

  Dr. Waterman nodded. “Most who end up here are,” she said. “At least to somebody.” She gently swabbed the rigid, waxy skin over the dead boy’s hyoid.

  “Dirt?” Josh said.

  “No, in fact, Jason’s casket had nary a leak. Tightest seal I’ve ever seen. I’m removing makeup that the funeral home had applied with their well-meaning but leaden hand.”

  “If you want to look that good, maybe you should use makeup,” Kendall said.

  Birdy smiled, but didn’t say anything.

  “Like your buddy, Adam?”

  Birdy glanced at Josh. “You know, you’d be better off not speaking at all, Josh Anderson. Every time you open your mouth, you piss me off. And I don’t like to be pissed off when I’m wielding sharps here.”

  She turned the beam of light lower to scatter a spray of light over her work area.

  “Look,” she said. “Right there.”

  Kendall went first.

  “Those marks? What are those?” Without touching Jason’s body, she pointed with a gloved finger to a darkened line four inches long and a half inch wide.

  “I’ll measure and map them. But my bet is they’re the reason for the broken hyoid.”

  Josh took his turn. “I see it. But what of it?”

  “Fingertips,” Birdy said. “Somebody cut off his air supply.”

  “Strangled him? Really.”

  “Yeah, that would be my guess. Of course, it is hard to say with complete certainty this many years later. If we were looking for poisoning, heavy metals, for example, they’d be here and we’d be able to call this a homicide for sure.”

  She bent lower to get a better look, completely absorbed in the process of doing her job. It didn’t seem to matter to Dr. Waterman how close she got to the face of the corpse. She sometimes got lost in what she was studying, considering. The spirit was long gone, but the remainder, the vessel, that had held the spirit also told the person’s life story. Jason Reed had a swath of acne above the bridge of his nose that was absent from the photo of the boy handed out at his memorial. No teenager wanted to be remembered for the bad skin that came with a changing body. His senior portrait had been retouched. His blue jeans had a trace of silver paint along the edge of the right-hand pocket. The forensic pathologist wondered if he’d been working on a car, a bike, some other project that had been his passion.

  She went back to his face, gently probing the stiffened tissue of his lips, drawn tight, thin, like a rubber band pulled to the point of near-breaking. Braces still held his lower teeth in a neat row.

  Had he dreamed of the day those came off? Is that why he didn’t have a full-on smile in his portrait?

  “So where does this take us, Birdy?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy stayed focused on the body. “What?”

  Josh spoke up. “Next step?”

  She set down the handheld light and looked over at the detectives. “Back to the witnesses, I’d say. But then again, I’m not a cop. That’s your job.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kitsap County

  Even for an outsider like Tori, the gossip line f
rom Port Orchard was as reliable as any means of communication, in any age. One time Tori dialed her father and pretended to be Lainie to fish for information on what everyone in town was doing. Her dad didn’t catch on. She also called Adam Canfield, and he fell for her ruse. But this wasn’t really gossip that day. She looked at the online edition of Port Orchard’s weekly paper, the Lighthouse.

  Body of Local Boy Exhumed

  The story reported that the county coroner’s office and sheriff’s detectives led by Kendall Stark were literally digging into Jason Reed’s death and interviewing old witnesses. The case was being reinvestigated because of connection with a more recent case in Tacoma.

  Jesus! Why not just name me? If Kendall wasn’t a cop, I’d kill her. Lainie entered the kitchen and Tori shut her laptop.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  Lainie, sleep deprived and feeling it, nodded.

  Tori poured them each a cup.

  “Tori, do you ever have dreams?”

  It was a simple question, rooted in something deep and foreboding. Lainie wanted more than anything to know if their broken bond was not so broken after all. Tori had called her for help. And while she didn’t trust Tori at all, she wanted to. She looked at her sister and waited for something to come from her lips that would bring them closer together. Maybe not as close as she’d hoped, but a little more was all she wanted. Just a few words. That’s all.

  “What kind of dreams?” Tori finally asked as they shared coffee in the immaculate kitchen of the North Junett house. Tori played it carefully. She always did.

  “About us. About me.”

  Tori laughed. “I’d call that a nightmare, wouldn’t you?”

  “Can’t you just try to be nice? You’ve invited me back into your life. I’m here. I’m thinking that you want us to be sisters again. And I wanted you to know that sometimes I dream about you.”

  “That’s sweet. You were always the sweet one, Lainie. But no, sorry. I never dream about anything. Not you. Not George Clooney. Not winning the lottery.”