Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  He closed his eyes.

  Red.

  He started to cry out, but the sounds he made into the pillow were the same sounds that Pastor Mikey had made.

  That his father had made.

  He felt that his life was over. That there was nothing to do but kill himself. Stop the pain. Stop all of the red.

  But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do that to his mother. She deserved more than that.

  He opened his phone and called her.

  “Mom,” he said.

  “Parker. I’ve been worried sick. Where are you?”

  “Mom, I want to come home.”

  “Come home, baby. I’ll come and get you.”

  “Mom, I killed that man.”

  Laura refused to cry. “I know. I know you did. Why? Honey?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “You’re calling me because you can. I’ll come and get you.”

  “Mom, it’s Tori,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “She’s in love with me. I’m in love with her. She said we could be together. She wants us to get married.”

  “Parker, I don’t know. . . .” Laura wanted her son to come home. She didn’t want to push him away. “We can talk about all of that.”

  “She shot Dad. She made me shoot him, too. He was dead when I shot him. I just couldn’t do what she wanted.”

  Laura was crying now but fighting hard to sound calm. “Where are you? I’ll come and get you.”

  “Mom, she’s going to kill her sister. She’s going to switch places with Lainie.”

  “Where are you, Parker?”

  “I’m at the American Inn off I-5, south of Tacoma.”

  “Don’t move. I’m coming to get you.”

  Laura Connelly had not held her son that closely in a long time. He’d not said a word the entire way home from the motel. He stared out the window, and she let him be quiet. Whatever was really hurting him was deep, deeper than she could understand. She knew enough not to provoke him. When they got inside, she led him to the sofa, where they sat together. Almost immediately, he’d slumped against her, letting her absorb his pain. In every way, except for the awareness she had that he was nearly a grown man, it felt like a mother holding her baby. He was taller than her, stronger than her. Yet there he was warm, sweating, sobbing quietly in her arms.

  Between gulps of air and a torrent of tears he let some words pass his lips.

  “I thought she loved me,” he said. “She said she did.”

  Laura patted him gently, almost so softly that she wasn’t sure he’d even feel it.

  “I know,” she said, though she did not know at all. “I’m sure she did.”

  He shuddered a little, unwinding, unspooling. “She and I were going to get married on Monday. We were going to fly away to Bermuda.”

  Laura knew how fragile Parker was just then. She knew what kind of a manipulator Tori could be, but even this was far beyond anything she could have guessed.

  There was no girlfriend. At least not a girlfriend that she could have imagined for her son.

  “You were wanting that to happen,” she said, almost a question.

  Parker took a breath. “No, Mom. She and I were soul mates. We’re going to have a baby.”

  A baby? This was too much. It seemed an impossibility. He was only a teenager. She was a grown woman. There was no way that there was going to be any baby. If it was true, there was a deep sickness inside Tori. If it was not true, her son was deluded, and dangerously so. Every explanation, every excuse she could conjure, came at her like Niagara. With so many explanations, so many possibilities, there had to be one that made absolute sense.

  There had to be one that would save her little boy.

  Laura didn’t want to offend her son, scare him off, do anything to break the bond they’d somehow managed to forge in that moment of crisis. Parker needed his mother more than ever. She felt that she’d failed him in the past. She owed him the help that he needed.

  “Was Tori your girlfriend?” The words were delivered as flatly as possible. Laura Connelly used all that she possessed to try to keep the tone of judgment out of her words. To judge him was to push him away.

  To push him away at that moment would be to lose him forever.

  “Mom! I told you, she’s pregnant. I’m going to be a father. I’m going to be a better dad than Dad ever was.”

  She patted him gently. The touch of his heaving body scared her. He was going to disintegrate. “I have no doubt,” she said, softly, but with all the conviction of someone desperate to keep her son safe.

  No matter what he did.

  Parker fixed his stare on his mother.

  “She lied to me, Mom. She lied to me. She wasn’t going to be with me. She was going to take our baby and run off with someone else.”

  Laura was crying now, but silently. “How do you know?”

  “I heard her. She was talking to him on the computer. I’ve been tricked. She made me do things that I shouldn’t have.”

  “Parker, what things?”

  He tucked his head down on his mother’s chest, and she held him like a baby.

  “Bad things, Mom.”

  Laura tried to remain calm. Her son was in serious trouble and on some level it felt like calmness was needed. Like the time he’d split his knee open after falling from the backyard swing when he was seven. The wound looked bad, but she acted as though it was nothing. She knew, like all moms do, that her fear would be reflected back at her boy.

  “What kind of bad things?” she asked.

  Parker didn’t answer.

  “You can tell me, Parker. Tell me.”

  He looked up at her. “She wanted me to kill Dad, but I couldn’t. I was too weak. I didn’t do what a man would do that time, but later, Mom, I did. I really did.”

  Laura could feel her muscles tighten. She willed herself to stay calm, as though she really could.

  “What did you do, Parker?”

  “That minister. She made me kill him. She told me that he was going to hurt her. That he would send her to prison and we’d never be together. She said that our baby would be aborted by the state. I couldn’t let that happen. A baby needs a father. I needed a father.”

  Laura was crying, but she didn’t make a sound. Her tears rolled from the corners of her eyes and landed in the tangle of her son’s hair while she cradled him in her arms. She could only think of one thing. She needed to get her son out of harm’s way.

  “We have to get you away from here. Get you out of here. Somewhere where the police can’t find you.”

  “That’s just it, Mom. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want anyone else to die. I don’t want to hide.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Bremerton, Washington

  Mary Reed could no longer hold her secret. It took everything she had—and her reserves were substantial—to break her silence. She had made a promise. Her word meant something. It always had.

  But with all that was being said about Jason, Tori, Kendall, Lainie, and the whole Class of ’95 reunion, she knew that the time was right. It was as if God had called her and told her that it was time to shine a light on the past.

  It was her day off from her job at the courthouse. For some reason, maybe pride, she decided to dress up a little. She put on a pretty new pink top and dark trousers that made her look slim and stylish. It was as if she was going out for a lunch date with a girlfriend. She wanted to look her best when she said what she had to say.

  “You look like a million bucks today,” Doug said as he sipped his coffee over a stack of brochures from Poulsbo RV. Retirement from the shipyard was beckoning, and Doug was sure that a recreational vehicle would be ideal for their new “footloose and fancy-free” lifestyle.

  “We’re going to need a million bucks to afford one of those,” she said, heading out the door.

  So wrapped up in the brochure, Doug hadn’t noticed that his wife had been crying.

  I
can do this, she told herself as she drove to the sheriff’s department. What I’m about to do is for good, not to hurt.

  Mary parked her car and went through the back door. She told the receptionist who she needed to see and waited in one of those uncomfortable visitor’s chairs.

  “Mary?” Kendall said, emerging from the door by the front desk. She was exhausted and exhilarated from her trip, though she told no one that she’d just returned. She’d come to work directly from SeaTac Airport. She hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, but didn’t really feel the need to. She was sure that Tori had murdered her husband Zach and Ronnie in Hawaii. She was running on adrenaline, but the look on Mary’s face brought that all to a halt.

  “Kendall, I have something to tell you,” she said, looking as if she was going to burst into tears.

  Kendall hurried toward Mary, her face full of concern. She wondered if the exhumation had been too much, brought back too many memories.

  “What is it? Are you all right?”

  “Not here,” Mary said. “Is there some place we can go?”

  “Some place” meant somewhere private—not an interview room or her office.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Kendall said.

  It had warmed up considerably and it finally felt like spring. Kendall didn’t see a need for a jacket, so they started out along Division Street until they came upon a row of old maple trees banking one of the uglier courthouse complex’s parking lots. She hadn’t told Mary about the bloody message on the dollhouse and she wondered if she’d somehow heard about it.

  Penny? Adam?

  But it wasn’t that.

  “Kendall, I really need to get something off my chest.”

  “Mary, the investigation is moving along, slowly. But we’re making progress. I’m sorry that it has been taking so long.”

  Mary shook her head.

  That wasn’t it, either.

  “I’ve done something to you. Something I shouldn’t have.” Mary stopped talking for a moment. It was as if her words were suddenly lodged in her throat. Kendall had no idea what she was talking about, but the pain was so evident that her own eyes began to pool with tears.

  Losing a child is something that can never really be over. “It can’t be that bad,” Kendall finally said.

  Mary looked down. “I sent those messages through the website.”

  Kendall was confused. The conversation wasn’t going in the direction that she’d imagined at all. It wasn’t about Jason’s investigation.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t follow you,” she said.

  “When the class reunion card came in the mail for Jason—I guess the class of ’95 forgot that Jason was dead—I just couldn’t stop myself. I dropped the note in your office, too.”

  Kendall’s heart raced. “The ‘I know everything’ message?”

  Mary nodded.

  “I also e-mailed the committee. I wrote a message about how the truth will set you free.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Kendall said, though she had an idea.

  “Kendall, I talked to your mother. I took a part-time job at the Landing last fall to make some extra money. When I cleaned your mother’s room, she told me the truth.”

  The truth.

  Kendall knew what was coming and she felt her knees weaken. She sat down on the curb and Mary joined her.

  “What did she tell you?”

  There was still hope that her secret was safe, though a part of her wanted it to be out, over. Finished. Keeping silent all those years had made it the forefront of her thoughts, not forgotten.

  “That you had a baby. Jason’s baby. My grandson.”

  Kendall tried to come up with the right words for a conversation she’d never intended on having.

  “You must hate me, Mary,” she said.

  Mary put her arms around Kendall.

  “You were so young,” Mary said. “I’m sure it was the hardest time of your life.”

  Kendall hugged her back. Her words came in pieces. “After we broke up . . . I found out I was pregnant, but it was too late. He’d started seeing Tori O’Neal. I’m so sorry.”

  Jason’s mother lifted Kendall’s head and looked into her eyes.

  “Don’t be. I’m happy. Knowing that a part of Jason is alive is the greatest gift I could have.”

  Maddie Crane looked out over Commencement Bay as she absentmindedly scrolled though e-mails while talking on speakerphone with Darius Fulton from the Pierce County Jail. She looked at the time and wondered what had delayed the bank transfer. She also wondered what had delayed her afternoon tea. Where was Chad? If anything, Maddie was the consummate multitasker. She felt a surge of power that she hadn’t experienced in some time. It had been a long, hard road since the DUI that nearly cost her everything. But it was behind her. It had faded from the news. She thanked God that she’d been given another chance, and she promised herself that the second time she was stopped for driving drunk would be the last time. While the deal she made compromised her ethics, it was all she could do.

  She was not going to be the sad woman who’d lost everything.

  “I’m sorry, Darius, but you’re just going to have to be patient. Your threats to Ms. Connelly have done you in.”

  “I did not threaten her.”

  “She says you did. Phone records bear out her claims.”

  “I never called her.”

  Maddie logged on to a secure server and doubled-checked the bank transfer she’d initiated for a client’s offshore account.

  She smiled at the confirmation that $2 million in life insurance benefits had been deposited.

  “Hang tight,” she said. “I’ll do my best to get you out of there after the weekend.”

  “Don’t be so vague. Say you’ll get me out of here on Monday.”

  She swiveled in her chair at the sound of her assistant coming into her office.

  Finally, the tea.

  “I have to go now, Darius.”

  She clicked off speakerphone and took the tea from the tray. She dropped two cubes of sugar into the steaming amber liquid—the color of whiskey, the way she liked it.

  “Chad, will you let Tori Connelly know that her business is completed?”

  Chad nodded. “Will do.”

  Tori Connelly set down her phone and made her way to her Lexus. The house was locked, but not because she cared about anything inside. The contents were not important. Where she was going, she’d be starting over with the man of her dreams. The only one who understood both her beauty and her power.

  She carried an overnight bag with the bare essentials she needed for the trip later that night.

  And then she’d be rich and free.

  She texted Lainie, her last loose end.

  RUNNING LATE. CALL U WHEN I GET TO YR PLACE. MEET ME IN GARAGE.

  She sent one final text message:

  LOVE U. SEE U SOON.

  She selected two names and pressed send.

  It was so easy to stay connected.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Port Orchard

  Kendall Stark stood in front of the mirror, looking at herself. She was not a woman given to overt displays of vanity, but she could not help but wonder how well she’d really held up over the past fifteen years. It was hard to know. Age was a funny thing. It seemed to work so slowly, sneakily, against the beholder. It was as if one day you look in the mirror and you see a line that surely must have been there the day before, but it had gone unnoticed. Unrecorded. Ignored. She thought she looked pretty good. Adam Canfield had reminded her that since she hadn’t been a cheerleader or a prom queen, no one would be giving her the critical and cruel eye.

  “I’m not saying you don’t look great, because, honestly, Kendall, you do. But the truth is that no one cares about what the B-listers look like now. They only want to see how fat the cheerleaders are and how bald the jocks have gotten since graduation.”

  B-lister?

  She wore a black dress that was short enough to
show some leg, but not so much that it looked like she was a Bremerton girl who tried too hard to snare a sailor by the navy base. She almost never wore them, but that evening she put on the single strand of pearls that her mother had insisted she keep when she moved into the Landing.

  “Wow, look at Mommy,” Steven said as he and Cody appeared in the doorway.

  “Look, indeed,” she said, dangling the pearls. “Will you hook the clasp?”

  Cody sat on the edge of the bed, smiling at his mom.

  “You look pretty,” he said.

  “Well, aren’t you the charmer,” she said, looking down at Cody. She held her hair above the nape of her neck while Steven fiddled with the tiny lobster-claw clasp. “Your daddy looks pretty good, too.”

  Steven wore a dark gray jacket, black slacks, and an electric blue tie that was youthful and cool.

  Like he always was.

  “Tonight should be fun,” he said.

  “Memorable for the right reasons, too.”

  “Fifteen Minutes of Fame, here we come.”

  On the drive over to Gold Mountain, Kendall asked Steven to take a detour and drive down Banner Road.

  “That’s out of the way,” he said.

  “I know, but I need you to do this for me. I need to talk to you.”

  He could see the anguish in her eyes.

  “All right, we can do that.”

  It wasn’t dark yet. In fact, the sky was blue and the sun turned the tops of the enormous firs along Banner Forest into gold-tipped spears.

  “Steven,” she said, “Park down by the Jump.”

  He didn’t like the idea, but he could plainly see that whatever it was that Kendall wanted—needed—to say was dark, deep, and difficult. He’d notice how stressed she’d been in the past few weeks and he knew her well enough to know it was more than the murder cases she was working, more than the reunion, or the last-minute forensics conference.