In the Clearing (7 page)

“Don’t know.”

“Well, at least we know somebody was doing something during those twenty-one minutes,” Kins said.

“You think she’s covering for the son,” Faz said.

“Very well could be.”

CHAPTER 6

B
ack in the car on their drive home from the Almonds’ house, just past Kelso, Dan reached for the radio and turned down the Seahawks game, drawing Tracy’s attention. She’d been staring out the window, watching the acres of farmland pass along I-5, the daylight fading quickly, as it did in the fall.

“I thought you were enjoying the game,” Tracy said.

Dan angled toward her, his left arm on the steering wheel. “Enjoying? The Forty-Niners are kicking our butts. I’m not enjoying it.”

“Oh,” Tracy said.

“You’ve been awfully quiet. I don’t think you’ve said more than two sentences the past half hour, and you’ve obviously tuned out the entire third quarter, or you’d have known we’re down by twenty points.”

She smiled. “Okay. Guilty.”

“Does it have anything to do with that file back there?” Dan gave a small nod toward the backseat.

“You noticed that, did you?”

“You’re not the only one with detective skills. So, what is it?”

“An old case Jenny found in her father’s desk.”

Dan reached into a bag of wasabi-flavored almonds. He was on a quest to lose five to ten pounds and didn’t go anywhere without some form of nut to snack on. “A cold case?”

“Not exactly. In 1976 a seventeen-year-old Native American girl went missing on her way home from work. Two fishermen found her body in the White Salmon River the next afternoon, caught on the limbs of a submerged tree. The autopsy and the prosecuting attorney concluded she jumped into the river and drowned.”

Dan popped more nuts in his mouth. “Jumped? As in, on purpose?”

“The official conclusion was that she was upset over a recent breakup with her boyfriend. Unfortunately, it happens too often in high school. One minute they’re in love; the next minute they hate each other. Jenny thinks her father believed there was something more to it. She asked me to have a look.”

“Can you do that? It’s a different county.”

“We can. It usually happens if a body is found in one county but it’s suspected the murder took place somewhere else—things like that. But the sheriff of a county can always ask for assistance. Jenny wants a fresh take, in case she has to reopen the investigation.”

“How do you think Nolasco is going to react?” Dan asked, referring to Tracy’s captain and longtime nemesis.

“Johnny Boy’s been on his best behavior since he got his hand slapped by OPA,” she said. The Office of Professional Accountability was reviewing a decade-old homicide investigation by Nolasco and his then partner, Floyd Hattie. Tracy had found the file for the case while hunting the Cowboy, and her review of it revealed certain improprieties that called into question Nolasco’s methods. OPA had broadened its inquiry to Nolasco’s and Hattie’s other cases, and word was, it was finding more misconduct. Only the support of the union had kept Nolasco at his desk.

“You think maybe it could be too close to home?” Dan said, concern creeping into his tone.

“They’re always going to be too close to home,” she said. “A disproportionate number of victims who get abducted, abused, and murdered are young women. I can’t change that.”

“No, but you don’t have to volunteer either.”

“I know, and when Jenny started telling me about the case, I thought my first reaction would be to say no. But the similarities between Kimi and Sarah are what made me want to take a look. Maybe it’s because I know what something like this does to a family.”

“Forty years is a long time,” Dan said. “Is there any family left still alive?”

“The mother passed away. The father would be is in his mid- to late eighties. Jenny thinks he lives on the Yakama Reservation. The girl also had a brother.”

“What if they don’t want to talk about it?”

Tracy hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’ll cross that bridge if I ever get to it. I might not find anything that warrants reopening the investigation anyway.”

After saying good-bye to Dan, who had an early flight to Los Angeles the next day and still needed to get back and prepare for a week of depositions, Tracy shut the door to her West Seattle house and took care of Roger, her black tabby. Roger let her know loudly that he was not happy about being abandoned for two days, never mind that he had an automatic feeder, plenty of water, the full run of the house, and a teenage neighbor who came in to check on him each day.

As Roger devoured his canned food, Tracy poured herself a glass of wine and took it into the dining room, eager to review Buzz Almond’s file. She turned on her iPad, found a country music station, which she liked to listen to when working, and let Keith Urban fill the silence.

The first thing that struck her about the file was its thickness—hefty for an investigation that had quickly concluded that the victim committed suicide. What created much of the bulk were four gold-and-white Kodak envelopes, the kind she used to pick up at the Kodak counter in Kaufman’s Mercantile Store in Cedar Grove. She opened the first packet and thumbed the pictures but quickly set them aside. She never started a review with photographs, since she had no idea what they were meant to depict. She unfolded the two brass prongs holding the file folder together and carefully slid the contents free.

She flipped to the first entry, which turned out to be a yellowed newspaper article folded in half to fit the length of the file. It had been cut from the
Stoneridge
Sentinel
, the date handwritten above the headline:
Sunday, November 7, 1976
.

Stoneridge Red Raiders

Reach Pinnacle, Win State Title

Tracy quickly skimmed the article. The Red Raiders had defeated Archbishop Murphy 28–24, capping an undefeated season for Coach Ron Reynolds and capturing the school’s first state championship in any sport. A parade was to be held in Stoneridge that Monday afternoon to celebrate the accomplishment.

Accompanying the article was the type of iconic photograph found framed in high school trophy cases everywhere. Young men, looking exhausted but jubilant, beamed at the camera, their uniforms grass- and dirt-stained, their hair matted with perspiration, their faces smeared with black eye grease and bits of dirt. They held aloft a shimmering golden football mounted atop a wooden base.

Tracy moved to a second article, hand-dated Monday, November 8, 1976, this one commemorating the parade in the team’s honor. In the accompanying photograph, three boys wearing letterman jackets sat atop the backseat of a convertible, fingers raised. A sizable and animated crowd of fans waving Stoneridge High pennants and pom-poms lined the sidewalks, streamers and confetti fluttering all around them. Like the previous picture, it was a moment forever frozen in the small town’s history, and that was likely the reason Buzz Almond had included the articles in the file. Trying to get witnesses to remember an event months or even just weeks earlier could be difficult, but the fact that Kimi Kanasket had disappeared the weekend of what was apparently the most celebrated sporting event in Stoneridge’s history gave Buzz Almond, and now Tracy, a point of reference to ground witnesses’ recollections. It was like asking people who lived through the sixties “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” It was also an indication that Buzz Almond had deduced that the investigation could take years.

Tracy set the second story aside and reviewed an article on Kimi Kanasket’s death.

Local Girl’s Body Pulled

from White Salmon River

This article was given far fewer inches of print—just half a column and a few inches long, with Kimi’s senior photo halfway through. It said that as a junior at Stoneridge High the previous year, Kimi had competed in the state track championship in the hundred-yard dash and the high hurdles, finishing second and third, respectively. She was survived by a mother and father, Earl and Nettie Kanasket, and an older brother, Élan. There was no mention of suicide. There was no mention of an investigation. There weren’t even any follow-up articles.

Having grown up in a small town in the mid-1970s, Tracy knew people didn’t air their dirty laundry or others’. If Kimi Kanasket had killed herself, Tracy doubted anyone would have been eager to publicize it or to read about it. A stigma was firmly affixed to suicide and, unfairly, to the family. When Tracy’s father shot himself two years after Sarah’s death, he destroyed not only his own legacy, but also the family’s. People talked—never in front of Tracy or her mother, but they talked. It was one of the reasons Tracy wanted her mother to move with her to Seattle.

Tracy next found a wallet-size photo of the young woman stapled to a missing-persons report. Kimi had lustrous black hair that flowed well past her shoulders. Visible just beneath her right earlobe was an intricate feathered dream-catcher. Tracy suspected that Kimi’s youthful facial features would have become more angular with age, making Kimi a stunningly attractive woman. But Kimi Kanasket, like Sarah, wouldn’t get that chance. She would be forever young.

Buzz Almond’s responding officer’s report was next. The onionskin paper and uneven type indicated that it was his original report and not a copy. It looked thorough—nearly seven pages—and documented everything, starting with Almond’s receiving the call from dispatch and his conversations with the Kanasket family at their home.

A separate report documented Buzz Almond’s conversation with Tommy Moore the following Monday, the day of the parade.

Monday, November 8, 1976

Buzz Almond left his house before the sun had risen, though it was officially his day off. He avoided downtown Stoneridge. With the parade preparations under way, most of the streets had been cleared of snow, but portions were blocked off with sawhorse barricades and orange cones. People would be up early, despite the chilly temperatures, to set up folding chairs for the best seats. The superintendent had canceled school, and the mayor had proclaimed the day Red Raider Day. Many of the local businesses were shutting their doors between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. so everyone could take part in a celebration that would wind its way through downtown and end with speeches and a potluck in the school gymnasium.

Not being from Stoneridge, Buzz thought the hoopla was more than a little over-the-top, but he’d read about such things—high school football games in small towns in Texas that drew 20,000 spectators, and standing-room-only crowds for basketball games in Indiana. He got a sense that the victory wasn’t just about sports, but rather a validation of a way of life, proving that the small-town kids could compete just as well with the big-city boys, which somehow equated to small-town living being equal to, if not better than, urban living.

Lost in the euphoria was the fact that a young woman’s body had been pulled from the river. Buzz was starting to sense that maybe the town didn’t think of Kimi as one of their own, and he wondered if that was because of the increased tension caused by the protests outside the football games. For white residents, the name “Red Raiders” was synonymous with high school football, and both were sacrosanct. The suggestion that the name was offensive didn’t sit well. If anything, the locals countered, the name and the mascot were flattering to Native Americans; their football boys were fierce warriors ready to do battle.

Buzz was up early to get his own choice seat, though not along the parade route. He intended to wait outside Tommy Moore’s apartment. Moore had not returned over the weekend; Buzz had periodically checked while on patrol, and he’d asked other deputies to do the same on their day and swing shifts. No one had seen Moore’s white Ford truck. But Buzz figured come Monday, Moore had to go to work or risk getting fired.

So Buzz returned to Husum. The main intersection for the unincorporated town consisted of a gas station, industrial buildings, and a few warehouses. Just north of a grocery store, he turned into a dirt-and-gravel parking lot littered with trucks, tractors, and harvesting machinery in various stages of disrepair. All had been dusted with an inch or two of snow. He drove along the side of the well-worn stucco building for M&N Mechanics to the back of the lot. His hunch had been accurate. Moore’s white Ford sat parked near the long staircase leading up to the second-floor apartment.