Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  He found a spot, pulled over, and turned off the ignition. A deer and her impossibly tiny twin fawns ambled across the roadway.

  “Her babies are beautiful,” she said, as she watched the trio disappear into the blackberries and ferns off the edge of the roadway.

  Kendall kept her gaze toward the deer, though they were gone.

  “You look like you’re going to crumble,” he said.

  “I am,” she said. “I’ve lied to you. I’ve pretty much lied to everyone.”

  Steven reached over and put his hand on her knee. “What is it? It can’t be that bad,” he said, though he could easily see that it was.

  “After we broke up, I saw someone.”

  “You mean in high school, right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s fine. I dated, too. While you were away.”

  “That’s why I went away.”

  “To study. Yes, I know.”

  “I was in trouble. I got pregnant. I left because I had to do something about it.”

  Steven could feel his own eyes misting. He had no idea that was coming.

  “Kendall,” he said. “Lots of women have abortions.”

  She shook her head. “I know. I understand that. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.”

  “You couldn’t? You had the baby?”

  Steven clenched his fists. Not in rage, but in an attempt to hold his emotions inside.

  She nodded.

  “Whose baby was it?”

  “Jason’s,” she said.

  The name didn’t surprise Steven. Nothing could surprise him after hearing that Kendall had given birth before Cody. He wondered what he missed. How he didn’t notice anything about her that might have tipped him off. After Cody’s birth, her body changed in subtle ways. Why hadn’t he noticed it?

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “He was adopted. I don’t know by whom.”

  “Who else knows? Do the Reeds know?”

  “My mom. Mary Reed. I told her today. Are you disgusted with me?”

  Steven folded his arms; his face was red, but he wasn’t angry. Not really. He could see that his wife was in torment then. It was a huge burden.

  “Not disgusted, just disappointed that you’ve lived with this and didn’t think enough of our relationship to tell me.”

  “It wasn’t that. I was so ashamed. I waited so long and then it seemed like it was too late. That it didn’t need to be brought up anymore.”

  Steven embraced her and kissed her. It was a soft, gentle kiss. Almost the kind of kiss that a parent gives a child to make them feel better.

  “I love you, Kendall. You know that. My heart aches for all you’ve gone through. You’re going to be all right. We all are. You want to bag this reunion and go home?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Adam and Penny would kill me. And we’ve had too much of that around here lately.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Bremerton

  The Olympic Room at the Gold Mountain Golf Club had been decorated with balloons and posters that highlighted the class theme “Fifteen Minutes of Fame.” Images of popular ’90s bands, TV and film actors, and political figures were interspersed with blowups from the yearbook. Side-by-side comparisons of celebrities and classmates made it all too clear—that Port Orchard was slightly behind the times when it came to being stylish. The South Kitsap version of “the Rachel” was a little bigger in volume, decidedly less sleek. Some of the men who rocked a ’90s goatee still wore them. Long sideburns, thankfully, had been replaced by a slightly more contemporary look.

  The Bremerton band Penny Salazar had fought for was playing its maudlin version of Céline Dion’s “The Power of Love” as Kendall and Steven surveyed the room. Most of the faces were familiar in the sense that, fifteen years after graduation, most still held on to the characteristics that marked them in high school. Blondes were still blond. Most athletes still looked reasonably trim. Maybe slightly beefier around the middle, but good.

  “Not the train wreck we thought,” Adam said, carrying a glass of white wine from the bar and offering it to Kendall. “Are you on duty or here for what passes for a good time in Port Orchard?”

  She took the glass.

  “Good time, I guess.”

  “Penny’s already overdoing it,” Steven said, indicating the primary organizer of the event. Penny wore a flowing low-cut gown that looked as if it used up the entire yardage at JoAnn’s fabric store in Port Orchard.

  Penny, they all knew, sewed her own clothes and never saw a “designer look” that didn’t invite her improvements.

  “Michael Kors?” Kendall said.

  “More like Bob Mackie,” Adam said.

  Kendall sipped her wine. She was exhausted from her trip and reeling from the disclosure she’d made to Steven. She didn’t feel like being anywhere close to the reunion festivities. But she had no choice. She’d agreed to it long ago. She’d already planned on coming up with an excuse for the next reunion.

  Let’s share the fun with other people, Penny. It would be wrong for me to be so selfish to do it again.

  “Maybe we should mingle,” she said to Steven.

  “All right, honey,” he said, squeezing her hand as if to tell her everything would be okay.

  Kendall’s phone buzzed and looked down at the screen. It was Laura Connelly.

  “Hang on,” she said, turning toward the door to the patio that overlooked the golf course. “I’ll take this outside.”

  “Laura?” she asked as she found an empty place by the rail.

  “Kendall, I’m sorry to bother you. But Parker and I need to see you. It’s about Tori and Lainie.”

  “What is it? Did you say you found Parker?”

  “Yes, and I’m scared, Kendall. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “That’s all right. You can call anytime.”

  The band started in on their version of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” It was louder than the Céline cover, and Kendall tried to move to a quieter section of the patio, away from a couple who’d had too much to drink and were arguing about who had dumped whom first.

  “I’m at a function right now,” Kendall said. “I can’t get away.”

  “You’re at Gold Mountain, right? We’re coming to you.”

  “Why, yes. How did you know? Who is ‘we’?”

  The phone went dead.

  Kendall dialed Josh Anderson.

  “Josh, I need you to get over here. Laura Connelly found her son, and she’s bringing him here. She sounds terrified.”

  “I can be there in a half hour. Backup needed?”

  “No,” said. “This is a mom and a boy. We can handle it.”

  “Got it. On my way.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Bremerton

  Lainie was sure she was dead. The world had gone completely dark. The last thing that happened—before she was dispatched into the darkness—was a sudden, sharp pain to her head. Had there been an earthquake? Had something fallen? As she was ruminating over what might have happened, Lainie O’Neal realized that she was alive.

  But where was she?

  She was curled up in the darkness. She was not bound, but free to move. Although any movement was difficult, the space was so confining.

  Am I underground?

  She continued to wriggle and shift her body as much as she could, all the while feeling around in the darkness. She touched something round. Hard. Her fingertips felt the grooves of what she knew to be tire treads.

  A spare tire.

  Lainie was in the trunk of a car.

  She shifted her body again and tried to roll in the opposite direction. She was sure that if she was in a trunk, she was facing the wrong way. Because the right way, she hoped, would have a pinprick of light.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Lainie stopped her efforts. She was getting nowhere. She knew there was only one more thing she could do to get help.

  She could sc
ream.

  “Help! Help!” The words came out of her mouth, but she was unsure just how loud they were. Inside the car trunk everything seemed wrapped in silence. She tasted blood on her lip and remembered that she’d banged her face against something as she fell into the trunk.

  “Get me out of here!”

  Deirdre Jericho Landers planted herself by the bartender stationed outside the Olympic Room. If she’d thought for a moment that the class reunion was a good way to get reacquainted with her high school pals, she was wrong. The reality of her senior year had just come sharply into focus. She’d only gone to South Kitsap for her senior year. She was a perpetual outsider. Despite all that she’d done to fit in, she was scooted aside by girls and guys with friendships that went from elementary school to adulthood.

  Dee Dee drank a gin and tonic at a bar in Gorst before her arrival at the reunion. She was between husbands and boyfriends and felt a little self-conscious. She wanted to take the edge off. Unfortunately, she followed that with a couple more once she arrived. She wasn’t an alcoholic, just a woman who was tired of being on the outside looking in.

  “I know you,” she called over to Eddie Kaminski, standing by the door. Kendall looked over, surprised that Kaminski was there. Josh had likely given him the heads-up on Parker and he was there to keep his hand in the case. The boys’ club, she figured, would never really die.

  “Sorry,” he said, barely looking at her. “I’m not a member of the class.”

  Dee Dee looked him over. Closely. Her first thought was that he was handsome, fit, and the kind of guy she’d fallen for more than once. She wondered for a second if he seemed familiar because he was the type of guy she usually went home with.

  Masculine. Military. Sure of himself. She liked the vibe.

  “No, I know you,” she said, rethinking her approach. “Are you on TV or something?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Sometimes for my work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  By then, Dee Dee had examined his left hand for a wedding band.

  Good. This one’s available.

  “Police. Tacoma.”

  “Tacoma?” The wheels were turning, but Dee Dee had had one too many drinks and they weren’t all going in the same direction.

  “Have a good night,” he said, walking away.

  Laura and Parker Connelly stood in the turnaround in front of the golf course clubhouse. Kaminski stayed put, waiting for Tori to show up. Kendall and Josh led mother and son to a quiet place near a lineup of golf carts. Laura’s face was pinched in anguish. She’d implored her son to do the right thing and he was there.

  “She lied to me,” Parker said.

  “Tori?” Kendall asked.

  Parker nodded.

  “She totally used and manipulated Parker. She’s an evil bitch,” Laura said, obviously unable to hold back.

  Kendall acknowledged the mother’s anger but turned her attention to the teenager.

  “Tell us, Parker.”

  Parker swallowed hard and took a seat on the back of a golf cart. “She shot my dad. I shot him, too. But he was dead. I swear he was dead.”

  Josh moved in closer and Kendall motioned for him to back off. This wasn’t the time to intimidate. The kid was talking.

  “I’m really sorry for what I did to that minister,” he said.

  “What did you do to Pastor Mike?”

  “I killed the dude. I shouldn’t have. But she told me that it was the only way we could stay together. She thought that you—” He stopped and looked directly at Kendall. “You were going to ruin things with that stupid investigation into that Jason kid’s death. All of this is your fault.”

  “Parker,” Laura said. “You know that’s not true.”

  He buried his face in his hands. “I guess so. I mean, I know so.”

  In that moment Kendall could see clearly that the boy who killed the minister was really very much a boy, listening to his mother, deferring to her.

  Like he might have deferred to Tori.

  “Tori lied to me,” he said.

  “We get that, Parker,” Josh said. “Specifically, about what?”

  “She said I was the only one for her. That I was her soul mate. But she lied. I put a webcam in her bedroom ... I heard her talking tonight on the webcam.”

  He stopped and looked at his mother, who had taken a seat next to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

  “Go on,” Kendall said.

  “There’s someone else. They were laughing at me.”

  He turned to his mother and started to cry. “She was laughing at me, Mom.”

  Laura cradled her son. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.”

  Kendall couldn’t help but think of the connection between Jason and Parker. Both of their lives had been ruined at seventeen by Tori O’Neal.

  “Please don’t hurt her,” Parker said. “She’s going to have our baby.”

  Josh turned to Kendall and said in a low voice, “Jesus, this couldn’t get any better, could it?”

  Of course, like almost always, Josh Anderson was wrong.

  Laura pulled Kendall aside.

  “What’s going to happen to Parker? Is he going to go to prison?”

  Kendall hated to answer. She could barely imagine what Laura was feeling. She sometimes wondered—though she would never say it aloud—if the burden on the parents of a killer was equal to the anguish of the parents of a victim. For the rest of their lives, those parents walk each footstep in shame. They wonder if they’d done something to create the monster. There is never, ever any closure.

  “I can’t say how they’ll charge this, but he was a juvenile.”

  The hope was false, and Kendall knew it. More and more, prosecutors charged young people as adults. Parker was looking at serious jail time.

  “He is a good boy. She was using him.”

  That was true, but it probably wasn’t enough.

  “Laura, the prosecutor will surely consider those as mitigating factors.”

  “He’s not lost forever,” Laura said.

  Kendall gripped Laura’s hand. “No, no one is.”

  “Wait a second!” A voice called over to Kendall, Josh, and Kaminski as they compared notes over what Parker had just told investigators.

  It was Dee Dee Landers.

  “I remember now. You’re the guy I saw with Lainie or Tori at the El Gaucho last summer. You’re her boyfriend.”

  Kaminski took a step toward Dee Dee. “Sorry, you must have me mixed up with someone else.”

  The slightly drunk brunette staggered on her heels, four-inchers that didn’t exactly do her any favors in the agility department.

  “No. No. I haven’t,” she said.

  “She’s had too much to drink,” Josh said. “Let’s get her out of here so she can dry out.”

  Kaminski locked his arm on hers and started to take her out the door.

  “Detective, wait a sec,” Kendall said, ushering them to the breezeway between the Olympic Room and the main clubhouse. “I want to hear what she has to say.”

  Dee Dee nodded, a little wobbly, but in the affirmative.

  “Yes. Thank you. Do I know you?” She looked at Kendall. “Oh, yes. You’re Kendall. As I was saying—do you mind letting go of me?—as I was saying, I ran into you and one of those O’Neal twins last year. I talked with Lainie about it this fall when I saw her in Seattle. She didn’t remember, so it must have been Tori. The other twin. The one no one around here seems to like.”

  Kendall looked over at Josh and then locked eyes on Kaminski.

  Dee Dee would not be denied. She was not that drunk. “I saw him on TV the other day. I know he’s the man that was in El Gaucho.”

  In the dark of what she now knew was her sister’s car trunk, Lainie O’Neal began to reconstruct what happened to her. She’d met Tori in her condo’s garage.

  “Let’s move this bag to the trunk,” Tori had said. “I forgot to stop at Goodwill with these odds and
ends.”

  Tori never thought her sister was the Goodwill type, but she helped her move the bag from the passenger seat to the trunk.

  “Shove it in the back,” she said. Lainie bent over, and all of a sudden everything went black. Just like that. It was instantaneous.

  Tori had struck her. Hard.

  When she worked for the P-I she’d written a story about what to do if one is trapped in a trunk. She looked for the taillight to kick it out and wriggle her hand or foot to attract attention. She was so turned around she didn’t know which direction the back was. She felt along the top of the trunk for the other tip—the reason for her news story—look for the escape latch and pull.

  Found it.

  A flash of light.

  She was free. A sign in the parking lot told her where she was.

  WELCOME TO GOLD MOUNTAIN

  Drive Friendly.

  Jesus, she thought, feeling the blood dripping from her head. This is the worst appearance by a schoolmate since Carrie went to her prom.

  Kendall and Steven huddled with Lainie. It was obvious that something major was going on. Kitsap County deputies and detectives were swarming the parking lot. Penny Salazar told the band to play louder, but Ace of Base didn’t get better with volume. Penny was beginning to feel her theme had been a bit prophetic.

  But not in a good way.

  “Parker confessed that your sister killed her husband,” Kendall said.

  Lainie steadied herself. “It doesn’t surprise me, but it still hurts. Knowing that she could do something like that.”

  “You’ll need to tell your father. It’ll be in all the papers.”

  Lainie said she would.

  “This will kill him, you know,” she said.

  “There’s more, Lainie. I think your sister killed some other people, too.”

  Lainie looked incredulous. “What other people?” “Jason, a boy in Hawaii, Zach . . . maybe even your mother.”