Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  “That couldn’t be. You’re wrong about that.”

  Kendall felt so sorry for her, but she had to know.

  Eddie Kaminski, who caught the last few words of the conversation, offered to take Lainie somewhere if she wanted to clear her head.

  “That would be nice. I really don’t feel like partying.”

  Even an unbudgeted round of extra hors d’oeuvres barely captured the attention of the Class of ’95. There was too much drama in the parking lot. That was about to change when a second blonde in a little black dress showed up.

  “Tori’s here,” someone said.

  All eyes went to the entryway.

  “I’m Lainie and that bitch of a sister of mine whacked me.”

  Kendall looked over at Lainie and Kaminski as they started toward the door.

  “You’re Tori,” she said to the twin who’d just arrived. “That’s Lainie.” She pointed to the woman with Kaminski.

  The first blond twin shook her head.

  “Oh, Tori, why are you saying that? Don’t you ever stop?”

  “I am Lainie,” said the second, as she hurried across the room to face the other.

  “I can’t tell the difference,” Kendall said.

  “I am Lainie and I’m getting out of here,” she said, grabbing Kaminski’s arm and tugging.

  “You’re not going anywhere!”

  “Can someone calm her down? Please. This is embarrassing.”

  The bleeding blonde grabbed the other, but she pulled away. The contents of her Coach purse spilled onto the polished aggregate floor. Tubes of makeup, plane tickets, and a wallet tumbled out.

  “I can prove she’s not me,” the second said snatching up the wallet. “Her driver’s license. I’ll show you.”

  She tore open the wallet and her face fell.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t . . .”

  Kendall bent down and picked up the plane tickets. Two hundred classmates stopped in their tracks to watch the spectacle. Kendall pushed people away in that way cops often do to “give people some air.”

  Penny told the band to play something else—and fast.

  “She’s bleeding,” a former cheerleader called out. “Someone get a bandage.”

  The woman felt her head and stepped backward. She bumped into the guest registration table.

  “Make her sign her name!” she said.

  Kaminski rolled his eyes, clearly exasperated. “This is stupid.”

  “We don’t know who is who,” Kendall said. “And considering what we found out tonight, we need to.”

  A former geek-turned-hottie who was hosting the table handed over the guest book and a pen. The woman signed her name and handed the pen to her sister. She knew her sister was a practiced forger, but there was one thing she couldn’t do.

  The sister complied and the tip of the pen ran over the paper.

  “They look the same,” Kaminski said, looking down at the signatures.

  “Better do that again,” the bleeding one said. “This time use your left hand. Like I did. Lefty Lainie.”

  Kendall eyed Josh. No words were needed between them.

  “Tori Connelly,” Kendall said. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Mikey Walsh.”

  “She’s my collar,” Kaminski said.

  “Not so fast,” she said.

  Kendall held out the airline tickets. One ticket had been made out for Lainie O’Neal; the other, Edmund Kaminski. She looked at the Tacoma Police detective with the kind of disgust that cops use for the scourge of their brotherhood—the dirty cop.

  “And you’re mine,” she said.

  Tori was cuffed and sitting in the back of a Kitsap County sheriff’s cruiser. Her makeup was smeared, her dress disheveled, and her hair looked like it had been styled by an immersion blender. Tori probably never looked worse in her life and Lainie figured that probably bothered her as much as anything.

  Even the reason why she was cuffed in that car.

  Lainie went over to Tori. A deputy put his arm out to stop her.

  “Let her,” Kendall said.

  Lainie nodded at the detective and walked past the deputy barricade. She stood by the open car door and faced her twin sister.

  “I won’t even begin to ask you why. I doubt you know,” Lainie said.

  Tori barely looked at her. “My life would have been different if I hadn’t been forced to share it with you from the minute we came onto this earth.”

  “I thought your life was wonderful, Tori.”

  “I hate you,” she said, this time looking right into Lainie’s eyes. “I always have.”

  Lainie stood her ground. Her sister could say nothing to make her hurt, to make her cry. She’d done that over and over and there was no emotion left.

  “I know. Maybe you have reason to hate me.”

  Lainie and Tori watched as Parker was escorted to another cruiser. The teenager held his head down, looking only at the pavement. He looked like a boy who’d been caught smoking by the school principal.

  Except he’d killed a minister. Except he plotted to kill his father.

  “You mean about going to jail for you? That was a mistake. A spur-of-the-moment decision that I regretted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tori said halfheartedly. “I’ve told you that.”

  “I guess sorry doesn’t do much after all, Tori.”

  “It wasn’t easy for me. You think I’m tough, but I got raped in that hellhole by that asshole prison guard,” Tori said.

  Lainie’s heart raced, something that seemed a physiological impossibility given all the stress she’d been through. She thought she might have a heart attack.

  “You, too? You were raped, too?”

  Tori allowed a faint smile to cross her lips.

  “Yeah, Lainie, join the club.”

  Lainie’s face was red. “My own sister handed me over to be raped. Who could do that but you, Tori?”

  “I figured you deserved it for what happened to me. Besides, I knew how you operate. All I had to do was ask. You live on guilt the way some people live on Diet Coke.”

  Lainie was reeling then, and Kendall came over and pulled her by the shoulder.

  “I’m not finished here,” she said.

  “Let her go,” Kendall said gently.

  Lainie turned to face her sister one more time.

  “Were you going to switch identities, pretend you were me and live your life?”

  Tori rotated her shoulders as if she were bored. She waited a beat before she turned her laserlike eyes toward her sister.

  “Something like that,” she said. “But really, just long enough to get past airport security and get out of this country.”

  “You killed Mom, too, didn’t you?”

  “Not sure what you’re getting at.”

  Lainie started to ball up her fists, though she never would have hit her sister. She was tense, angry, and still reeling from her ordeal in the trunk.

  “I know you did,” she said, refusing to cry. “I saw you do it in my dreams. I told you . . . I saw things like that.”

  “Your dreams were stupid, Lainie,” she said.

  Lainie turned away and started walking, but she had one more parting shot.

  “You’re sick, Tori.”

  Tori held her hard gaze at her sister. “Look who you’re talking to. Remember, I’m a mirror of all that you are. Everything I am, you are. Our genes and DNA are the same.”

  “We’re not the same,” she said. “We never were.”

  EPILOGUE

  Port Orchard

  Sunday morning all over Puget Sound people did what they always did. Some woke up to brewing coffee, sizzling bacon, or the frenzy that comes with getting ready for church. Some hurried out the door to walk their dogs or take a run along a path. May in the Northwest is stunningly unpredictable.

  The night before it had rained buckets, soaking the streets, filling swollen gutters from Bremerton to Seattle, but that morning the whole region was bles
sed with the blue skies and soft marine winds that make the region among the most beautiful places on Earth to live.

  All across the Puget Sound region, people connected to Tori’s crimes stirred.

  In their cozy Harper bungalow, Kendall snuggled next to Steven, relieved that there were no more secrets between them. He’d been so understanding and forgiving that she wondered how she could have doubted him at all. The fact that she’d given birth so many years ago hadn’t changed who she was to him or to Cody. That she’d made the decision to give her son up for adoption hadn’t changed who she was. It was not a mark against her.

  Her oldest son. He’d be eighteen in a couple of years. She wondered if he’d look for her. She hoped so. She wanted more than anything for Mary and Doug Reed to see their grandson.

  As she drifted off toward much-needed sleep, Kendall made a list in her head. Vonnie, Jason, Zach, Ronnie, Alex, Mikey . . . Lainie would have been Tori’s seventh victim. Tori was only thirty-three. She’d had decades of killing to do. There was no telling how many people she might have killed during the ten years that she’d vanished. The FBI was working the case along with the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. Seattle, Tacoma, and Bremerton police were also scouring their records for any connection she might have had.

  It was possible that the only murder she’d do time for was Alex’s.

  Kendall didn’t think it was fair, but murder and justice usually weren’t.

  When Parker Connelly was being booked into the Kitsap County Jail, all of his personal effects were cataloged, bagged, and placed into bins for storage.

  The booking officer looked quizzically at the ID retrieved from his duct-tape wallet.

  “This is you, but the name’s not right,” the officer said.

  Parker shrugged. “I know. My girlfriend had it made for me.”

  “You don’t look like an Eddie Kaminski. Maybe a Teddy Kaczynski.”

  “I guess she thought it was funny,” Parker said. “You know, naming me after the guy she was using until we got out of here.”

  The officer closed the lid to the plastic tote.

  “Look, kid, I’ll tell you something about that woman. Forget about her. Forget you ever laid eyes on her. I married a gal like that. Maybe not that bad. But the type. You meant nothing to her.”

  Parker kept his mouth shut.

  I don’t care what you say, asshole, he thought. She’s my soul mate. I can forgive her.

  It took two minutes for Darius Fulton to hear the news that a new guy had joined the ranks of those killing time at the Pierce County Jail. Edmund Kaminski was locked up in a segregation cell.

  “That piece-of-shit cop is going away big-time,” a guard said. “So is that woman. You’ll be out of here by tomorrow. This thing’s big.”

  Darius assumed he was talking about Tori, but he wasn’t.

  By the time police came knocking on her North Tacoma door, Maddie Crane had downed her fourth whiskey sour and retired for the night. She looked at her watch, satisfied that everything was over. The plane had taken off from SeaTac to Miami. She was free. She was grateful for the second chance that Edmund Kaminski had given her the night he found her car in a ditch by the railroad tracks along Ruston Way. Instead of arresting her and destroying her once-damaged reputation, he’d offered her a deal. At the time, it didn’t seem too much of a compromise. Being a lawyer had always been about give-and-take.

  The knocking on her door woke her, and she put on a robe and went to answer. It was Tacoma Police Detective Daniel Davis and two uniformed officers. Blue lights showered her garden with an eerily pretty light.

  “Madeline Andrea Crane?”

  “You know who I am, Dan,” she said.

  “You’re under arrest for conspiracy and fraud.”

  In her cell at the Kitsap County Jail, Tori Connelly lay awake, staring at the ceiling. The woman next to her smelled of vomit and body odor, and Tori pulled the scratchy blanket up over her mouth and nose to filter out the stink. She thought of a million reasons why she’d ended up there. She’d miscalculated. She blamed Jason, her sister, Kendall, Kaminski, Parker, even Maddie Crane.

  She blamed everyone but herself.

  “You’re that bitch who killed her husband, aren’t you?”

  The smelly woman on the other bed had awakened, and she was coming toward her.

  “Excuse me?” Tori asked, suddenly ramrod upright.

  “I saw you on TV. You’re something. We’re going to be friends. Come over here and sit next to me.”

  Tori flinched a little at the invitation. “I’d rather die.”

  “You’re too pretty to die.”

  A smile came to Tori’s face. She knew the woman was right.

  Lainie O’Neal didn’t lie awake all night like she had night after night. After she’d been treated at Harrison Hospital and released, Adam Canfield took her to her Seattle condo. They’d arrived very, very late, and Adam curled up on the couch. Without Ambien, without counting games to numb her mind, she simply and sweetly fell asleep. When she finally opened her eyes she remembered nothing of her dreams. She could remember what happened the night before and the drama that came with it, but that was all a true memory. It wasn’t one of those transplanted dreams that her sister seemed to send her.

  Her eyes lingered over the photograph of her sister and her sitting on the top of her dresser. It showed the two of them in their ballet recital costumes.

  Lainie shifted in her bed and grabbed the extra pillow. She flung it across the room, knocking the photo and its silver frame to the floor.

  Adam Canfield scurried into the room and turned on the light.

  “You all right?” he said. “I thought I heard something.”

  She glanced in the direction of the broken photograph and Adam nodded at the splinters of glass and the black-and-white photo. No comment was needed.

  “My head hurts,” Lainie said, pressing her palm against the spot that had been shaved and bandaged.

  “That’s because your twin bitch-ter smacked you with a crowbar or something.”

  “Right,” she said, though she hadn’t forgotten anything. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven forty-five.”

  “A.M. or P.M.?”

  Adam laughed. “Morning. You’ve been out, but not that long.”

  “I’m going back to sleep,” she said.

  Adam reached for the light switch. “No problem. You need the rest. I’ll be here.”

  “Thanks, Adam,” Lainie said, slipping back deeper under the covers. “Thanks for bringing me home.”

  She closed her eyes, thinking that the bad dreams would come back to taunt her.

  But they didn’t. They couldn’t. She was safe and free.

  TURN THE PAGE

  FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF

  GREGG OLSEN’S NEXT PAGE-TURNING THRILLER

  COMING FROM PINNACLE IN 2012

  Lisa Lancaster could not make up her mind. A willowy brunette with wavy shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not-blue eyes stood outside the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do.

  With her hair.

  Her major.

  Her life.

  Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had more to do with the breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than $120,000 in student loans.

  And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

  Lisa was talking on the phone to her best friend of the moment, Naomi, when she first noticed a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.

  Lisa r
olled her eyes and turned away.

  “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.

  “This campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.

  “Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.

  Lisa rolled her eyes, though no one could see them. There was no one around. Just her and the guy struggling in the parking lot.

  “Never mind,” she said. Naomi wasn’t nearly as stupid as she often pretended to be. Neither was she all that smart. She was, as Lisa saw it, a perfect best friend. “I can’t decide if I should skip dinner and go home. My parent’s fridge never has anything good.”

  “Mine, neither,” Naomi said. “Even though I make a list, they ignore it. I practically had to kill myself in front of them to get them to buy soy milk for my coffee. I hate them.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I hate my parents, too.”

  The young women continued to chat while Lisa kept a wary eye on the dork with the backpack.

  “God,” she said. “I don’t know why the handicapped—”

  “Handi-capable is the preferred term, Lisa.”

  Lisa shifted her weight from one foot to another. She was impatient and bored. “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t understand why they don’t get a dog or a caregiver to help them get around. Or just stay home.” Lisa stopped and let her arm droop a little, moving the phone from her ear. “He dropped his pack again.”

  “You know you want to help him,” Naomi said. “Remember when we both wanted to be physical therapists?”

  “Don’t remind me. But I guess I’ll help him. I’ll call you back in a few.”

  Lisa turned off her phone and started across the lot.

  Unlike the woman walking toward him, Jeremy Howell had a singular focus. Once he found out who he was, he knew that it was his birthright to follow in footsteps marked with his own DNA.