by Gregg Olsen
Olga nodded. “Sure, I’ll try to answer.”
Tammi took a deep breath. The detective had seen that move a time or two, usually when a suspect is being questioned and is suddenly ready to reveal something they think will help throw the interrogator off the track.
Tammi wasn’t trying to do that, of course. Instead, she was summoning the courage to ask a question to which she had no business knowing the answer.
“Was it true what the papers said about Lorrie and Shelley?”
“What, specifically?”
“They were, you know, violated.”
The detective looked directly into Tammi’s vapid blue eyes.
“Dear,” she said, “we can use the word rape.”
Tammi sighed. She seemed emboldened by the detective’s clarification and her precision.
“Okay, were they raped? Because that’s what I read.”
It dawned on the detective that the girl wasn’t in search of salacious details. The look on Tammi Swenson’s face was utter fear.
“I can’t say one way or another; the case is ongoing. But I will tell you this. Don’t go out alone at night. Check your car before you get in it. Don’t talk to people you don’t know.”
The college student stepped backward, toward the door. Olga Morris continued her litany of warnings.
“Be careful. Tell your friends. Tell every girl on the floor, okay? We’ll catch him, but we won’t catch him until he makes a mistake. And, Tammi, we don’t want that mistake to be any more dead girls, okay?”
Tammi gulped hard. Her bulging eyes shifted nervously away from the detective’s piercing gaze. “Okay.”
What neither Olga nor Tammi knew was that the mistake had already been made.
Coffee rings and a spherical grease spot indicating a doughnut had been consumed while someone reviewed the autopsy report turned Olga Morris’s stomach. She wondered if she’d ever get to the place where’d she be so callous as to be able to eat breakfast over the kind of descriptions and images that came with such reports. In her office at the Meridian Police Department, she spread the pictures and documents across her desk. Photos of Lorrie here. Shelley there. A stack of the medical examiner’s reports, the interviews conducted by the police in the early stages of the case—when it had been a missing persons case and not yet a homicide. She squared up the edges of each pile of papers and photos. It dawned on her as she moved from one stack to the next that it almost looked like she was playing some freakish version of solitaire.
She knew then the images would never leave her. The bodies, wrapped in plastic, and out in the sun had swelled and burst. Water had chilled the exposed body parts—Shelley’s right hand, in particular. Clumps of hair had fallen from her head. Decomp was a nightmare far beyond the imagination of anyone who’d never seen a rotting body.
Who had the stomach to eat an old-fashioned doughnut and look at these?
As she scanned the color 8 x 10s, Olga noticed that a ligature of some kind—the ME thought that the marks, smooth, but with a single striation down the center, indicated an electric cord—had cut so deeply into Shelley’s wrists that her hands were nearly severed. Lorrie’s body had incubated in the plastic wrap, so it was harder to tell. It appeared she’d suffered the same fate. Both had been brutally raped and shot in the back of the head in what laypeople always called execution-style.
Some execution, Olga thought as her unblinking eyes scanned. With what these girls went through they probably were grateful for it to end.
The ME suggested that both women had died about the same time—but not right after their disappearance. It was tough to pinpoint exactly when they did die. Because of the plastic tarp, the sun had literally cooked their bodies, the greenhouse effect accelerating the decomposition process.
Based on the ME’s guess—blowfly larvae, tissue decay, and a copy of the Meridian Herald dated July 18, the girls had been dead only a month when discovered. Maybe six weeks. The newspaper, Olga and others surmised, had been used to absorb a puddle of blood—probably at the scene. Since neither victim’s head held a single bullet, ballistics would be of no use in tracking the killer. The gun was probably in the bottom of the river, or somewhere. Olga was fixated on the cording used as the ligature.
Find the cord, find the killer.
The detective knew that in most instances when a killer used electrical cording it was either an extension cord or some cut from a table lamp or other small household appliance. It was usually just the right length—three feet to tie up a victim.
She looked around her office. A poster of Mt. Baker hovered above her desk, its white conical form silhouetted against a fiery sunrise. The bookcase behind her was overstuffed with training manuals, some photos of her cats, and two notebooks that kept cold cases always within the swivel of her office chair. Her credenza was set up as a mini hot beverage bar, with an electric teakettle, a wicker basket of dried noodle soups, hot chocolate, instant coffee, and teas. She eyed the teakettle and its electrical cord, but thought better of it.
What can I use?
Olga ran her fingers through her short hair, pondering the scenario she was about to employ. She could go down to Property and get a spool of twine, but that was a hassle and she was the type of woman who wanted to do what she wanted, when she wanted to do it. The answer was on her desk. The telephone. She unhooked the wire from the jack and disconnected the phone. Just then Stacy Monroe appeared in the doorway.
“Phone problems?” Stacey, a patrolwoman with a husky voice and warm demeanor, poked her head inside Olga’s office. “That happened to me last week.”
Olga smiled. “No. No problem. But you’re just in time to lend me a hand—literally—with a little experiment. You game?”
Stacey’s eyes moved over the photos and files on Olga’s desk. Clearly she was intrigued.
“Warner and Smith?” she asked.
The detective nodded, and stepped around from behind her desk, the phone wire now coiled in her hand. “I’m just playing around,” she said. “I’m glad you’re willing. Why don’t you sit here?” She pointed to the edge of the desk. “I’m going to tie you up.”
Stacey let out a nervous laugh and sat down. “Not like I haven’t done that before.”
Olga gave the officer a slight wink. “Oh really?”
“Kidding! God, you know my life. You know my husband.”
“Yes, I’ve met Frank.” She smiled. “Just how did we get on this topic, anyway?”
“I don’t know. You were about tie me up.”
“That I was. Put out your arms.” Keeping the end of the length in her left hand, Olga started wrapping the beige wire around Stacey’s outstretched wrists. Once. Twice. Three times. She stopped and craned her neck to better view the photograph of Shelley Smith’s disfigured and decomposed wrists. “Looks like he wrapped around five or six times,” she said, almost to herself. “I expect pretty tight, too, but I won’t do that to you.”
“Good,” Stacey said, suppressing a smile. “Something to look forward to later.”
Olga played along. “Aren’t you just full of surprises?”
The women laughed, cutting the tension of what they were really doing. Olga was mimicking the actions of an unknown killer while poor Stacey who’d just wandered onto her shift had made the mistake of coming by to say hello.
Olga stepped back and admired her technique before unspooling the cording. Stacey stood up and rubbed her wrists. As gentle as Olga had been, the wire still hurt a little. Her wrists were red.
Olga fished a ruler from the top drawer of her desk.
“Almost twenty-four inches,” she said.
“Good? Bad?”
By then, Olga had started for the door, scooping up her black saddlebag purse, detective’s shield, and a tan Gore-Tex coat that was all about function rather than fashion. It was raining outside.
“Bad, I’d say. Bad for someone who works at Builders’ Center.”
“Huh?”
“Yo
u’ll see. Thanks, Stacey.” With that, her coat swung over one arm, Olga Morris was gone.
Chapter Nineteen
1:05 P.M., twenty-one years ago, Meridian, Washington
The sky was a colander. Olga Morris scanned the parking lot of the Builders’ Center off Railroad Avenue as she sought a vacant spot close to the door. Her coat, while waterproof, lacked a hood. Her short hair guaranteed a chilly splash on her scalp. She maneuvered her dark blue Chevy into a reserved parking spot. She did so somewhat reluctantly, but the thought of getting drenched won out over the prospect of being caught taking advantage of the silver and gold shield she carried in her purse.
Inside, she rushed past the contractor’s help booth, and a swarm of shoppers filling their carts with caulking, lumber, and the miscellaneous provisions of home repair. The detective was grateful that she was an apartment dweller and hadn’t been forced into the nest-building trap so many homeowners had embraced unwittingly.
Forget a caulking gun; I’d rather carry a Glock.
She made her way to Arnold Davis’s office, a small room behind a ten-foot-wide two-way mirror that allowed the fifty-ish manager with gorilla-haired knuckles and a tuft of troll-doll hair protruding from his open collar to keep an eye on the selling floor.
“I’m back, Arnie. Miss me?”
She took off her coat and shook it slightly. Rain puddled the linoleum tile floor. “And I’m soaked!”
Davis looked up from his Tupperware bowl of macaroni salad. Mayonnaise collected at one corner of his tight mouth, and Olga’s gaze zeroed in on it in such an obvious manner that he scrambled for a napkin. The room smelled of garlic.
“I assume you’re back to talk about Lorrie and Shelley,” he said. “We’re having a memorial after hours, now that . . . now that we know.”
“May I?” Not waiting for an invitation to sit, she pulled up a visitor’s chair. “I hadn’t heard about the memorial. That’s nice. When is it?”
“Saturday at nine.”
“Okay, I’ll be here.”
“If you didn’t come about the memorial, then what’s up?”
“We’re looking into the manner of death,” she said, her tone shifting from warmth and concern, to cool and dead serious. “This is very important. I want to talk to you about some of the products you sell.”
“What do you mean?” Davis leaned closer and looked toward the open door. Several customers standing in line were looking inside. “Let’s shut the door,” he said.
Olga nodded and reached over to the knob, teetering on the cheap plastic molded chair, and pulled it in tight. The air was sucked out of the room. Behind the two-way glass the people who’d been staring turned away. There was nothing for them to see, just a silver void and their own gawking images.
She noticed a couple of flyers, slightly balled up in the trash. She knew what they were. Anyone in town would have. Since the girls went missing more than four thousand handbills had been stuck on telephone poles, Laundromat bulletin boards, and anyplace where college students congregated. Across the top of each page was the word MISSING. Underneath those big block letters were Lorrie and Shelley’s photos. Both had been employed part-time at Builders’ Center.
“None of this has been in the media,” Olga said, “and I expect it to stay that way.”
“I understand,” he said. His eyes looked watery and she wasn’t sure if the store manager was tearful or overdosed on garlic, which, judging by the overpowering smell in the room, was Mrs. Davis’s chief ingredient in that macaroni salad she’d packed for her husband’s lunch.
“Two things turned up by forensics indicate the killer might have had access to a special kind of wire and a clear plastic tarp of a fairly large size. Of course I thought of your store.”
“I see.” The color drained from his face. “You don’t seriously think the killer shopped here?”
Olga shook her head, but it was halfhearted. “No, I’m not saying that.”
“Good.” Relief washed over his Davis’s face, but it was only momentary.
Olga Morris dropped the bomb.
“I think he might have worked here,” she said.
“Look, Detective,” Davis said, rising and suddenly turning his salutation into something formal. “You and your people have talked to everyone here. There isn’t an employee here who didn’t love those girls.”
“I’m sure, but this is a crime of sexual brutality, Arnie—and sometimes there is a fine line between love and brutality. In some people, it’s a hair trigger between the two.”
Davis’s face was now red. “You know what I mean. We’re like a family here. No one here would ever hurt Lorrie and Shelley.”
“Let’s hope so. Now I’m going to show you something that might be upsetting. I’ve cropped out the girls, but I want you to look at two pieces of evidence.”
“Oh God,” Arnie Davis said, slumping back down, the crimson draining from his face. “What is it?”
“Two pictures. That’s all.” From her purse, Olga removed two color photographs. She had used strips of copier paper to mask off any bits of human flesh. With her eyes riveted to Davis’s she put them on the desk, scooting the Tupperware bowl to one side with her other hand. Davis dropped his gaze to the desktop, a perplexed look on his face.
“What is it?” he asked. “May I?” He indicated the desire to turn the first photograph at another angle. The exposed photographic image was narrow on that one, with the other being broader. Still unsure, he looked up at Olga.
“It’s Shelly’s wrist,” she said.
Davis gasped. It was an involuntary response, one he wished he’d felt coming. The color of Shelly’s skin looked so gray for human flesh it almost seemed as if it had been taken with black-and-white film, yet there was a hint of color in the form of thin bands that marked her wrist. He peered closer and felt the macaroni rise slightly in his stomach.
He tapped the photo. “What are those?”
“Ligature marks. Look closely. Do you have anything for sale that might leave that kind of indentation?”
Davis pulled reading glasses from his breast pocket. “It looks like a double line, each mark.”
“That’s correct. The wire or tubing used to bind the girls’ wrists and feet, we think, though I admit it has been difficult determining just where they were bound because of the decomposition of the bodies.”
“It could be 45V9, electrical,” he said. “It’s dual wire and is about that thick.” He tapped the photo once more. “Pretty flexible, too.”
Olga wrote down the stock number. “You sell it here?”
Davis looked up, queasy, but emotionless. “Yes. Not often, but we keep it on spools.”
Spools, good. The killer needed lengths of it to tie them up.
“All right,” she continued. “Before you take me to it, look at the other photo. I’m concerned with the plastic tarp.”
“Is that a leg?” he asked, looking closer at the larger of the two images on his desk.
Olga didn’t answer him directly. “Focus on the plastic,” she said. “Anything like that around here?”
Davis shook his head and rapped his hairy knuckles on his desk. Nerves were kicking in and beads of sweat had collected and started to roll from his temples. “No, I mean . . . I mean it is just clear plastic. That can come from anywhere. It could be Saran wrap for God’s sake. Maybe the Safeway people next door can help you.”
Olga stood, picked up a Builders’ Center pen and directed him back to the photo.
“I realize that,” she said. “But look here. Look at the edge of the material. It is as plain as day and I don’t need to blow it up to prove to you that there’s something distinguishing about this tarp.”
Davis narrowed his gaze back to the unpleasant business at hand. Just past where the form of the human leg ended, he could make out some whitish cross-hatching. The tarp was at least three millimeters thick, and the edge of it had been embossed with three rows of X’s. They ran the full length o
f the seam, and then disappeared under, what Davis, now apparently allowed himself to accept, was one of his part-time cashiers’ dead bodies.
“I think I know what that is,” he said. He lifted the photo and brought his gooseneck desk lamp closer. He turned the fixture to better illuminate the image. “Looks like Crossbeam’s Triple D painter’s tarp. The edge is embossed to stop tears.”
Olga wrote that down, too. “DDD?”
“Dense, durable, and defect-free. And yes, we sell it here. Not much. It’s expensive. Top of the line, but we do sell it. Oh God, no . . .” His voice trailed to a soft whimper as the realization of what it meant set in. “You don’t think the killer got his supplies here?”
Olga gathered up the photos and tucked them back inside her oversized purse. “As I said, I don’t think he shopped here. But I’d bet my life he works here.” She reached for her coat and started for the door. “I want to see Dylan Walker. Is he working today?”
If there was a more handsome man working at the Builders’ Center—in all of Meridian, for that matter—Olga Morris would have been hard pressed to give up a name. Everything about Dylan Walker was perfect. His teeth were whiter than plaster of paris. His eyes were dark and sparkly. At thirty-three, he had a thick mane of dark brown hair that any woman would have killed for. His body was that perfect V: broad shoulders that were square without being too angular and honest-to-goodness six-pack abdominal muscles that revealed themselves whenever he reached for a can of paint on a higher shelf. More than one Meridian woman asked for the eggshell tint base, when she really wanted a flat paint because, well, Dylan Walker had to move that body to reach it.
Olga moved past the plumbing supply section, sinks and toilets displayed with pencil-point lighting that made them look like objets d’art. The smell of gardenias from a shipment of plants in the nursery hung in the soggy air of the rainy day. As she rounded the corner at the end of the aisle, she could hear a woman twittering about something.
“. . . Oh really? I thought it would be so much harder to do.”
