Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  “She’s done,” he said. “I’m here. We’re all done.”

  The detective gave the lawyer an almost sheepish grin. “Hi, Lyn. Didn’t figure she’d have the dough and the connections to hire the likes of you.”

  Tori smiled at her newly hired lawyer. “I’m tired. Can I go home? Maybe we could stop somewhere and get something to eat. As rough as this ordeal has been, I still find the need to have something to eat.”

  The detective held his tongue. He wanted more than anything to say to her, Eat? Said the spider to the fly?

  Instead, he stood, poked his head out of the interview room. He spoke in low tones with a couple of other police department suits and returned.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. She can go.”

  He spoke directly to the lawyer, without even looking at the beautiful woman sitting there.

  “Don’t go far,” he said. “We’re not done with you.”

  Tori looked at her lawyer. “Tell him that I have plans. My sister’s in from out of town and I’m going to take her on a little trip.”

  Lyn Knox didn’t see any need to relay the message. It was clear what she said.

  “I’ll make sure Ms. Campbell is available if you need her again.”

  Tori Campbell uncrossed her long, shapely legs and stood. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her sheer skirt and swung her big white leather purse with the oversize silver buckle over her shoulder and started walking toward the door. She rounded her shoulder with a stretch of her arm, exhaled.

  “Lyndon,” she said, sweetly, “I really want to have dinner with you tonight. I’ve been so lonely. I’ve been through so much.”

  The detective shook his head.

  This lady has game. And I doubt I’ve heard the last of her.

  “One more thing,” Kendall said, getting out the photos that Lainie had sent to her. From her side of the table, she slid the image of the Hawaiian boy, his dark eyes flashing fear into the lens of the camera. “Do you know why this photo was among Tori’s things?”

  Rikki held the photo in his fingertips to the flame of the candle in the center of the table. He shook his head, thinking.

  “Wait a second,” he said. “That’s Ronnie Jonas.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s a local kid. Died the same week that Zach Campbell did.”

  “Is there a connection?” Kendall asked.

  “There is now.”

  Her bag packed, Kendall Stark made a beeline through the hotel lobby past the brochure rack that touted all of the luaus, booze cruises, and authentic lei-making classes that promised tourists “a real Hawaiian” experience. She’d had none of that on this trip. She got in her rental Jeep and drove past the farmers’ market and along the beach road to the highway to Honolulu. She had one last stop before heading home.

  She wanted to say good-bye to Kiwana at Bali House.

  She found her just inside the turtle-decorated gate, cutting a bouquet of bird-of-paradise, long green stems topped with spikes of orange and purple.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Kiwana asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I talked with the detective last night. He told me something that got me thinking a little.”

  “What was that?” She put down the flowers and opened the gate.

  She pulled her rental car inside and Kiwana shut the gate.

  “Come on. I have more of the tea you loved so much.”

  Kendall didn’t have the heart to tell her host that the tea was beyond sickeningly sweet.

  “No, thank you.”

  Kiwana laughed. “No worries. I know it wasn’t your favorite. I have pop, too. Come and sit. Let’s watch the ocean. Turtles are coming today.”

  They sat on the white wooden lounge chairs facing the pummeling surf. Kiwana looked over at the spa and shook her head. “Darn thing’s turning green.” She got up, fished around the closet that held the boogie boards and tiki torch oil, and produced a bottle of Clorox.

  “Seawater is lovely when the sea can churn it and keep it clean.”

  “The spa is seawater?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell anyone, but I do spike it with chlorine bleach. Just enough to keep it fresh.”

  Kendall set down her cola, but she missed the rattan side table and the plastic glass scuttled to the patio.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have to leave.”

  “It’s all right, dear. That’s why we use plastic.”

  “It isn’t all right. Not at all,” she said, getting up. “I have to go. I have a flight to catch.”

  And, she knew, the truth to confront.

  Across the Pacific, another dream came. Lainie reached for a sleeping pill. She curled up in the empty bed, pulling the sheets up high to her neck as if she would choke the life out of herself just to get some sleep.

  Sleep without dreams. Slumber without nightmares. Was that too much to ask?

  The images came to her slowly. The water boiled and roiled . . . a seemingly toxic brew. She was naked and she wasn’t alone. She felt a man’s hands on her waist.

  “I’m going down,” he said.

  His voice was husky, deep.

  She watched as he lowered himself in the water, as she arched her back and spread her thighs apart.

  She turned and spoke in the direction of some bushes.

  “Now,” she said.

  “All right,” another voice answered, also male, but much younger.

  She clamped her thighs around the man’s head and grabbed his hair with both hands. She pressed with all her might. The man, who’d gone down to please her, was fighting under the roiling waters.

  “Hit him now!” she said.

  An oar dropped into the hot tub. A small amount of red bloomed in the water.

  “Let’s get him in the car,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Kitsap County

  “Tori! What am I going to do now?”

  Lainie and Tori stood outside their car. The smell of gasoline and the crunch of broken glass, torn leather, and acrid striations of burned rubber fell over Banner Road like the remnants of an S&M parade gone terribly wrong. Or, at the very least, more wrong than usual.

  “We’ve got to get Jason out of the car,” Lainie said. Her blue eyes were nearly black as her pupils soaked in every drop of light in the darkness of the stretch by the Banner Jump. The fun of the rise and fall of the car had ended in a nightmare. Airborne had become terror. The sisters, working in tandem, battered and bleeding from the crash, hoisted the limp teenage boy from the overturned car and laid him out by the roadside.

  “Is he alive?” Lainie asked. She was shaking and bleeding from a small gash in her forehead. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was going too fast. We were having fun. I thought it was fun.”

  “He’s alive,” Tori said, bending closer.

  “What am I going to do? I’m going to go to jail!”

  Tori put her hand on her sister’s shoulder. She was bleeding, too. “He’s going to be fine.”

  Lainie was crying then, bending over Jason and looking up at Tori.

  “I already have one ticket! I’m going to be in so much trouble. I’m going to go to jail!”

  She was referring to a minor-in-possession ticket that she got after a party in Manchester earlier in the year. Their father had gone ballistic and Tori had reveled in the fact that “Lainie the Perfect” had gotten a little taste of being on the outs.

  Lainie, inconsolable and in full panic mode, was crying as she bent over her sister’s boyfriend. Tori went to turn off the ignition. She looked up to see the headlights of an approaching car.

  The sheriff already? Couldn’t be. It would take ten minutes to get anyone out in that southernmost part of the county.

  She squinted in the headlights as the vehicle parked on the opposite side of the road. The door opened and the driver stepped onto the pavement, which was glittering with glass.

  “It’s that d
ruggie Mikey Walsh,” Tori said.

  “That’s okay,” Lainie said. “Jason’s alive. He’s going to be all right.”

  Jason Reed’s voice was weak. Not really a whisper, but the kind of soft voice one uses when speaking from the heart, which he was. Tori cradled his head in her arms, while Lainie went over to talk to Mikey Walsh.

  “I’m not gonna make it,” he said.

  “You are, too,” Tori said. “Help will be here in a few minutes. God, I hate this county!”

  “I made a big mistake,” he said.

  “It wasn’t your fault. Lainie went too fast.”

  He shook his head. “No, not that.”

  Tori heard Mikey talking with Lainie, telling her to calm down.

  “This is my fault! All my fault!”

  She leaned closer to her boyfriend.

  “I don’t love you, Tori. I love Kendall. But I screwed things up.”

  She didn’t think she heard him correctly and she leaned closer. She wanted to scream at Lainie and Mikey for talking so loudly.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  His pale blue eyes were open, staring at her, unblinking. He spoke and his words trailed off to a whisper, caught up in the wind of the night, but indelible in Tori’s memory.

  Tori O’Neal was crouched over Jason Reed as Mikey Walsh rounded the Taurus. The young man who was tweaking and partying just moments before was now in a sweat. He held his arms close to his chest in an attempt to control his pounding heart. He didn’t know what to do. He thought of the drugs in his vehicle, and he’d hoped that if the sheriff came, they’d consider him a Good Samaritan and not someone who they needed to bust.

  Why didn’t I take the Valley Road? I could have avoided this mess.

  It appeared as if Tori was consoling Jason, though she was not saying anything. Her eyes were rimmed in red. Even in the stabbing beam of the headlights across the road, it was obvious that the unthinkable had just occurred.

  “He’s dead,” she said. “Jason is dead!”

  By then Lainie joined them, slumping onto the gravel roadside and crying so loudly that the nearest neighbors surely would have heard her, even if they’d missed the sound of the breaking glass, twisting metal, and the skidding tires of the crash itself.

  “Oh, God,” Lainie said. “What have I done?”

  Tori reached for her sister and hugged her. “You didn’t do anything,” she said. “I was driving. This is my fault.”

  Lainie studied Tori’s face. She was offering a solution, an unselfish gift if ever there was one.

  Had she heard her right?

  “What are you saying, Tori?”

  “I’m saying that I was driving. This accident is on me.”

  As Tori spoke, she caught a glimpse of something in Mikey Walsh’s expression. She was adept at reading people. Better than her sister. But she wasn’t sure what it was that his drugged-out and fearful expression meant.

  Just how much had he heard? How much had he seen?

  Mikey turned to Lainie.

  “I thought you said you were driving.”

  Lainie was practically on top of Jason’s body, sobbing. She looked at Mikey and started to speak, but Tori cut her off.

  “Are you on something right now? Do you need to have a drug test when the sheriff gets here? Or are you just stupid? I was driving. I said so.”

  Lainie never told anyone about what happened that night. There was no point in it. She was sure that Tori would get off without having to go to jail. It was an accident and she’d never done anything wrong. What she didn’t know was that the Kitsap County authorities had reached their limit when it came to teenagers and their dangerous joyriding around the county.

  Tori O’Neal was going to be the example that everyone remembered.

  Mikey Walsh had been a loose end and a pathetic one at that. The former speed-freak-turned preacher had been lurking in the darkness of Tori’s memory for fifteen years. She reviled loose ends. She knew from experience that she alone was the only one worthy of being a witness to whatever it was she’d done. As she packed her suitcase, she knew that her plan had its share of risks. But the rewards were so very great. Two million reasons would easily tip the scales in favor of taking the risk.

  She wasn’t sure if she was being watched by the police, reporters, anyone. With Darius Fulton’s arrest and the refusal of bail, eyes were not on her right then.

  “He called me from the jail,” she told Kaminski. “Threatened to kill me. He said that if he couldn’t have me, no one could.”

  Despite all of that, Tori was not a woman who wanted to take any unnecessary chances. Not when she was so close to the prize.

  When Lainie arrived to “help” after the shooting, Tori sized up the one attribute that she needed to alter.

  Her hair.

  Lainie’s hair was at least two shades darker, and shorter. It was the kind of haircut and color that screamed “average” and she knew it wouldn’t be hard to mimic. Tori went into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and a box of honey wheat hair coloring. A few snips, a slathering of the drugstore-brand dye, and it was over.

  It took all of a half hour to alter her appearance from stunning to merely attractive. It was a trade-off she was willing to make for a very short time. The matter of her breasts, however, was a slight problem. They were larger than Lainie’s. She purchased a bra that, while uncomfortable, would minimize what her surgeon had given her. Tori didn’t mind binding them. They were never for her anyway.

  Finally, she put on a little black dress that was a duplicate of the one that Lainie had bought at Nordstrom for the class reunion. It was not something that Tori would ever have picked for herself. Lainie’s taste in attire was lackluster—from dress to heels to accessories. She was a road map to mediocrity.

  Always had been.

  She studied herself in the mirror.

  Something wasn’t right. What was it?

  Tori smiled at her reflection. “Oh, yes, that,” she said aloud. It was a small detail, but one that might be noticed. She picked up a rattail comb and changed the direction of her part.

  “Hi, Lainie,” she said into the mirror.

  Inside, she knew relief would come once she took care of the final loose end in her life.

  Her sister.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Tacoma

  Parker opened his laptop and clicked on the icon for the webcam. Tori had her back to the camera. She was wearing the red teddy. She’d told him that she only wore that on special occasions—the times when they’d be together. In the hotel in Seattle that first summer. The time they’d made love on the soapstone island in the kitchen. The night his father was set aside for good. Parker was about to speak when he noticed a man’s voice, then some laughter. He turned up the volume because he couldn’t quite make out what was being said. Despite what the Radio Shack clerk had promised when he made the purchase, the sound quality was only good when the person talking directed his or her attention right at the built-in microphone.

  “He thinks I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “I know. Stupid sap,” the male voice said.

  Parker couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It had to be some kind of a joke. Who was Tori talking to?

  Tori crawled onto the bed, unaware that she was being watched.

  “The other day when I had a glass of wine, he told me that it might hurt our baby. I told him that the doctor said that a glass of wine or two is good for it.”

  “You’ve got him wrapped around your finger,” the man said.

  Parker started to shake. None of this could or should be happening—she was his soul mate. They’d done the unthinkable, all for love. All that they’d ever wanted had been built on a big lie.

  “Young, dumb, and full of cum,” she said.

  Who was she talking to? He couldn’t see. The voice seemed a little familiar, but not so much that he could identify it.

  Parker slammed the laptop shut, imagining
that the noise reverberated all the way to North Junett Street and startled her.

  Her. She. The woman he loves. The woman who told him he was a man. The woman who had asked him to prove his love with a gun and a knife.

  Parker started to cry, guttural, deep—heart-wrenchingly so. He buried his face in a pillow as he sobbed and screamed. It was his eighteenth birthday. Everything that he thought was true was a lie. He was not a man. He was a fool. He got up and rifled through his bag as if there was something he could take to end his life. The medicine to control his acne probably couldn’t do that much. He looked for a razor, but he’d forgotten to pack one.

  He only shaved once a week.

  He thought of his dad. How his dad had showed him how to shave with the back of a comb when he was five.

  “Dad, I’m sorry. Dad, can you hear me? Forgive me.”

  Parker was frantic. There was nothing there to end his life, and once that thought was accepted as reality, perfect, clear, there was only one thing to do. If he could not die, he’d have to face up to what he’d done.

  When Parker Connelly closed his eyes, all he saw was a river of red. When he held his hand over his ears, he could still hear the guttural sounds made by the minister he’d murdered. His hand could still feel the grip of the blade and the ease with which he sunk it into Mikey Walsh’s neck and abdomen, draining him of blood and life. And while he doubted he could ever shake the images, the smells, the experience of murder, he didn’t want to give voice to what he did afterward. Not to her. Not to Tori. He didn’t tell her how he’d sat down and cried before going inside to do what she needed done.

  He knew he was in love with her. That he wanted to be with her for the rest of his life. But he also knew how wrong all of that was. How twisted the fantasy had become. It was as if he’d been sleeping, dreaming, and now he was awake.