The Last Thing She Ever Did

by Gregg Olsen

  Bradley Collins, 40, of Dayton, Ohio, was interviewed for two hours.

  “Collins was cooperative and has been cleared,” said Rick Massey, public information officer for the police department. “He’s one of many leads detectives have been following.”

  Massey said that they have no evidence that the boy drowned in the river, was abducted by a stranger, or met with some other foul play.

  “We don’t know what happened to Charlie Franklin,” Massey said.

  Liz was imploding, and if she totally blew, then he’d be ruined. She’d started this mess, and now it was up to him to find a way to end it all.

  He had been sure that Charlie’s body would have been recovered long ago. Finding the body would shift the case to a full-bore abduction/murder investigation. No one on earth would suspect that they would be involved in anything like that. But a registered sex offender, who’d been there on the river when Charlie went missing? Bradley Collins would surely get a very intense second look, from both the cops and the media. Fresh meat for them, instead of gnawing away next door on the only bone they had: what had happened the morning Liz’s RAV4 hit Charlie.

  Owen couldn’t wait any longer for the desert to give up the boy’s bones. The longer things festered in uncertainty, the greater the chance that Liz might ignore his warnings and tell the truth.

  Only the truth that she knew.

  That she had killed the boy.

  Which, of course, wasn’t the truth at all.

  He had.

  Owen left his office at Lumatyx and made his way down the street to Sweetwater. The restaurant was quiet when he arrived, the lull between the early afternoon and early evening rush. Amanda Jenkins, her red hair flowing down her back, was up on a step stool, stretching to reach a blackboard that promoted Alaska king salmon and Ellensburg rack of lamb. As her arm lifted the colored chalk in her hand to gracefully loop out the specials, her short skirt rode up a little to reveal more of her upper thigh than she probably would have liked.

  If she had an audience.

  Which she suddenly did.

  “Been a while, Amanda,” Owen said.

  Startled, she turned around and gave him a look.

  He held out his hand, but she refused it.

  “Yeah, Owen, it has,” she said, stepping off the step stool. “Lunch is over. Sorry.”

  “Didn’t come for lunch.”

  “What do you want?” Her tone was colder than it needed to be.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Don’t be such a bitch. I came to see David. He in?”

  “Right,” she said, taking her eyes away from him. “Yes. In there.” She indicated the doorway leading to David’s office. “Sorry about that just now. Things have been crazy around here.”

  David was on the phone and motioned Owen to sit. The windowless space was crammed with piles of papers, invoices, order forms, and letters organized into three different piles.

  “Right,” David was saying. “I need a little more time. I’ve been going through a lot around here. Ever read the paper?” He hung up and looked at Owen. “Jesus! Two minutes late and you’d think the bank would have to close down.”

  “Idiots,” Owen said, concealing his surprise.

  David relaxed a little. “Been a nightmare lately.”

  Understatement on all fronts.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “I don’t even know what to do anymore. Carole wants me to act one way. The police have nothing. I sit around here, because every time I go out on the floor, someone offers condolences for something that hasn’t happened.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Owen said.

  “No one can,” David said. “I couldn’t. You think you would feel a certain way if something really bad like this happened to you. But you really can’t fathom what to feel. You know what I mean?”

  Owen didn’t, but he said he did. “Lots of forces at work,” he said. “In the end, it’s really only about getting your son back home. That’s all that matters.”

  David put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin in his hands. “I think someone took Charlie,” he said. “I don’t think for one second that he fell in that goddamn river and drowned. He’s a smart boy. He knows that the water is dangerous.”

  “A kidnapping, then?”

  David shook his head. “No. I think a pervert took him. You saw that story in the paper, right?”

  “The Ohio guy?” This was perfect, Owen thought. The guy was primed.

  “Damn pervert out here on a vacation, on the goddamn prowl. A registered sex offender! This is what we get for being a tourist destination.”

  Owen didn’t say anything. He let David rant.

  “I bet half the people I serve here have been convicted of some goddamn crime.”

  Still not a word.

  “Owen? You all right?”

  Owen pretended to snap back to the moment. “Yes, fine. Just thinking about something. Probably nothing.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” Owen said. “Probably nothing.”

  David looked hard into Owen’s eyes. “You know something.”

  “No. No, I don’t. I mean, when you said Ohio . . . my mind flashed on seeing Ohio plates at Columbia Park the morning Charlie went missing. I remember because we seldom see cars from the Midwest. Seems those folks vacation in Branson, Missouri, or places closer to home.”

  David got up. “You sure? Did you notice anything else? The car?”

  “No,” Owen said. “I was running, pretty much didn’t look up. Just saw the plate. It was Ohio. That’s for sure. Pretty weird, huh? Should I tell the police?”

  “No,” he said. “They’ve pretty much ruled out the guy. Goddamn them. I just feel it in my bones that he’s the one that took my son.”

  “What are you going to do?” Owen asked.

  “Do?”

  The two men locked eyes for a long moment, and then Owen shrugged. “If he’s the one.”

  David picked up his keys, knocking over one of the three piles of envelopes. Owen could see PAST DUE stamped on several. Loan documents from Washington Federal had been shoved aside. Owen had thought that David and Carole had it all, but now he began to have doubts. She’d made a pile from her time at Google. The house. The cars. The Venetian glass collection. But that didn’t mean it would last forever. Maybe they really had nothing at all?

  “I don’t know,” David continued. “The guy’s staying at the Pines. He might have stashed Charlie somewhere.” He rubbed his face, hard. “He’s the last straw. I swear to God he is.”

  Five minutes later Amanda caught up with Owen on his way out of the restaurant. She looked anxious and scared at the same time.

  “Did they find Charlie?” she asked.

  Owen barely slowed. “Huh?” he asked.

  She put out her hand to stop him, but he kept going.

  “David went out of here like a bat out of hell,” she said. “What did you tell him? Is there news?”

  “No,” Owen said. “No news.”

  At least there wasn’t any just yet.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS

  The Pines was one of the last places David Franklin ever thought he’d visit. Sex with some tourist who flirted with him at the restaurant? He’d do better than the Pines. Hell, just pull her into the pantry. He recalled the time that his server Carla had rubbed her ass against him—accidentally, she insisted—when she tried to wedge her way past her boss in the kitchen. Rudy, the cook, caught it and gave David the look, said something along the lines of “Why don’t you tap that?”

  “Who says I haven’t?” David shot back, although he hadn’t.

  Not yet.

  “Everyone else has,” Rudy said, leering at Carla as she made her way out of the kitchen, arms loaded with plates of food for a noisy four-top in the front of the restaurant.

  The truth was, David hadn’t even considered having sex with
Carla before Rudy opened his flytrap. She was pretty and all. Cute figure. Wide-set eyes that literally smiled when she talked about the things that made her happy: her new car, her half-marathon finish in the top ten for her age group, the way she could defuse an unruly customer and still get a big tip.

  To David’s way of thinking, Rudy’s comment was a challenge. David was like a compulsive gambler: any challenge fueled behavior over which he had no control.

  Rudy said it. David acted on it.

  A week or so later he and Carla messed around in the freezer. He pushed her against one of the lockers and the two hooked together like frozen Velcro. He told her she was sexy. She told him he was hot. She leaned into him and he acted as though she was the only thing he’d ever wanted. When the Velcro unsnapped, they stood there acknowledging almost at once that neither one of them really cared for the other.

  Carla had thought she’d get a better shift, the one after eight, when the well-heeled tourists from California and Seattle got tipsy, ordered more alcohol than they should, and ran up a bar bill that always translated into the fattest tips of the night.

  David had thought that by screwing Carla he’d feel like more of a stud. Now in his fifties, he felt those feelings beginning to wane unless injected with the excitement that comes with exploring a body firmer than his own. Carole had been sexually adventurous when she was with Google and needed to unwind fast: they’d made love on every form on transportation, including a helicopter and a snowmobile. Their lovemaking was rushed and exciting. When Charlie had arrived, and when the house in Bend was finally finished, Carole had all but cut him off. Certainly no more Adventureland. No more blow jobs in the car.

  Carole never said so, but the implication was always more than clear: Moms don’t do that.

  As he parked his Porsche, deep down David knew that he’d been challenged by his wife. She’d made him feel like shit with her comments about their teetering marriage and his apparent lack of devotion to Charlie. He loved his son. Yes, he complained about the fact that he no longer got to enjoy Sunday morning sex. He’d whined about how she controlled him with the money. None of that meant that he didn’t love Charlie.

  On the passenger seat, nestled in a bag on the black leather of the Porsche, was a bottle of Old Grand-Dad. He’d drunk that from college through the failure of his first restaurant. He’d sworn on his life that he’d never take another sip. And for years now, he hadn’t, though the thirst for alcohol never abated. In a way, it propelled him to be even more successful at Sweetwater than he’d ever been. He couldn’t drink, so all of his energy and all of his angst drove him to work harder. Work filled the place that alcohol had once staked out.

  But that bitch Carole. She’d pushed him so hard with her cruelly insightful remarks. Even when she didn’t say the words, she’d challenged him all right. She’d questioned his manhood. His fatherhood. His role in a world that she’d bought and paid for.

  David reached for the bag and pulled the bottle from it, settled it in his lap. Its bright orange label was a roadside warning cone. He ignored it. His hands shook as he twisted the cap, the tiny metal prongs holding it to the neck snapping like firecrackers. He seethed. He knew that he was about to undo everything that had gotten him as far as he’d gone with Sweetwater. He didn’t know for sure, but the industry rumor mill had him short-listed for a James Beard Award. The Portland PBS station suggested he might appear on a local version of A Chef’s Life.

  “What you do with razor clams, sherry, and cream is a culinary gift to the people of the Northwest,” the producer had said. “A rethinking, a reimagining, of the flavors that make us unique. That we love.”

  David held the mouth of the bottle to his nose and hesitated before taking in the sweet, oaky, and acrid smell of the alcohol that had been his downfall so many times. A hint of citrus filled his nostrils. He flashed to the time he sideswiped a parked car and kept going, rubbing the smudge of paint from the passenger car door with an old rag. Red paint. It had looked like blood. Inside, he knew it could have been. He thought of the time he nearly had a heart attack coming home from the restaurant after drinking well past closing. How the sound of a police siren sent waves of fear through every fiber of his being. He imagined a score of passersby gawking at him as he stumbled heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, while trying to walk a straight line, or as he tried to blow into a Breathalyzer tube, or as he slurred his speech while arguing with the police officer. The handcuffs. The mug shot. The newspapers publishing an item about it.

  Yet somehow—by the grace of God, he once believed—he’d avoided all of that. The police car swept past him, and David Franklin stopped drinking because he knew that if he didn’t, there would be nothing left but disaster. His life would be as empty as those pearlescent razor clam shells that were discarded after he’d proudly collected all of those rave reviews. He’d attended the meetings with those he once looked down on as losers, when really they were only different versions of himself.

  Now whatever he thought he’d found when he’d pulled himself together had been eroded by the fact that Charlie was missing and that Carole somehow blamed him for everything. She might as well have taken a pair of her orange-handled Fiskars scissors to his balls and mounted them on one of her weavings.

  The man from Ohio had mentioned to the chatty bartender at Anthony’s that he was staying at the Pines. He’d passed that information on to the police.

  He also told David Franklin.

  A Toyota Camry with Ohio plates, grimy from a nearly cross-country trip, sat parked in front of cabin 22; a NO HATE IN OUR STATE sticker was affixed to the back window. Inside, David was sure, the man who took his boy was doing whatever freaky, disgusting thing that he did. David took a full, deep drink from the bottle. It was nectar coating his throat, reminding his body what alcohol did for him. It gave him the kind of calming rush that made him feel ten sizes bigger. A kind of power surged through him.

  I’ll make that freak tell me where my boy is, he thought, taking another drink before getting out of his car.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS

  David had cut his right hand. Blood oozed onto the leather-covered steering wheel, making his hand slip as he drove. The last thing he wanted was any attention to his driving—or to what he’d done. He’d ditched Brad Collins at the hospital and the Old Grand-Dad bottle somewhere between the cabins of the Pines and home. If he’d expected to feel more like a man for having beat the shit out of a pervert, he found the opposite to be true.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!!!

  The expletives were useless, but they kept coming while he replayed what had taken place at the Pines as he tried to get home without getting pulled over.

  Brad was caught completely unaware. The Ohio tourist was watching Judge Judy in his boxers when a rage- and alcohol-fueled David shoved open the cabin door. It swung so abruptly that David was uncertain if it had been unlocked or if he’d been given some kind of superhero boost from the bourbon that he’d guzzled in the parking lot.

  “Hey!” Brad said, dropping his feet over the edge of the bed and standing as if at attention. “You’re in the wrong room, buddy!”

  David pulled the door shut behind him and wheeled on him. “You pervert! You took my boy!” he said, then lunged at him, jumped on top of him. It was lightning-fast. Superhero-fast. It was faster than a man of his age could normally manage.

  “I didn’t do anything to anyone!” Brad said as David, bolstered by the booze and powered by the contempt he had for himself and the world, pummeled the younger man over and over.

  Brad tried to fight his attacker, but David Franklin was like some kind of machine. He just kept punching, emitting a grunt like a prizefighter with each swing. At one point his hands found a T-shirt and he shoved it inside the bloody man’s mouth.

  All while demanding answers.

  “Tell me where Charlie is!”

  Brad had no idea, of course, and the T-shirt made speaking impossible. He t
ried to shift his weight and slither out from under his attacker, but David was relentless.

  “You sack of shit! You know where my boy is and I’ll goddamn kill you if you don’t tell me! Where did you put him? Where in the hell did you put my boy?”

  Brad managed to extract the T-shirt from his mouth. His lip was torn so badly that it hung like a piece of tenderloin on a skewer. Blood oozed like a ketchup commercial.

  “I told the police,” he spat out. “I don’t know anything.”

  David hit him again.

  “Liar!”

  Brad coughed up more blood.

  “Not lying,” he said. “Not . . .”

  They struggled a bit longer, and David finally got off him and sat there, gasping for air and snapping out of his rage. His victim’s eyeballs were white marbles rolling backward in a sea of red. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him again.

  “Don’t you die on me without telling me where Charlie is! Where did you put him?”

  Brad lay still. He couldn’t move. “I don’t want to die,” he finally said.

  And just like that, like the flicking of a light switch from full glare to complete blackness, terror seized David. He was gripped and slapped hard by the reality of what he’d done.

  He’d nearly beaten a man to death.

  Bloody and weak, Brad Collins fought for air. It was a sickening sound. A trash fish caught in a gillnetter’s line, fighting for life.

  “Jesus,” David said, “what did I do?”

  “Doctor,” Brad said. “I need a doctor.”

  David sat there on the floor next to the other man, who was slippery with blood. His own hand was bleeding, and there was blood spatter on his face. He wondered who, if anyone, had seen him at the Pines. He wondered if the guests in the next cabin over had heard him land blow after blow, or if in places like the Pines people just minded their own business. He got up, surveyed the cabin. He wondered what evidence he would leave behind. How long it would take Brad to die. The cabin had an old-school rotary phone, and David grabbed it, yanking its cord from the wall.