The Bone Box (6 page)

Authors: Gregg Olsen

BOOK: The Bone Box

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Annoyance had clearly given way to genuine irritation.

“It is nice to dream, isn't it, Sheriff?” she said, getting up and reaching for her coat. “Thanks for your time. Thanks for all you've done for my ... my
people
.” She paused and turned, a smile on her face.

“I have often thought of the nice woman, Patricia, who was so kind to me during the trial,” she said as they passed by a record's clerk outside his office.

A look of recognition came over the sheriff's face, but it was fleeting. “Yes, Patricia Stanford,” he said. “Nice and smart. Retired from the department years ago.”

“Do you happen to know where she is?” Birdy asked.

Jim Derby, witch hazel balm oozing from every oversized pore, looked upward and then shook his head. “Sorry, but I lost track of her. I think, yeah, I think she passed away.”

As Birdy climbed into her bright red Prius, a finger tapped at the window.

It was the records clerk, who'd overheard Birdy's conversation with the sheriff.

“Hey, don't know why he said that. I can only guess. He never liked Pat much. Not that I could tell anyway. As far as her being dead, that's a complete crock. I chatted with Pat-Stan last month at the Antiques Mall in Port Angeles. She runs the place.”

“He must have made a mistake,” Birdy said, purposely a little unconvincingly. She didn't like Jim Derby at all. She was glad she didn't live in his congressional district. She would probably doorbell for any other candidate no matter what their qualifications.

“It wouldn't be the first time,” said the clerk, a middle-aged woman whose county-issue name badge identified her as Consuelo Maria Diego. “But I don't think so. He just hated Pat. She quit here because of him. I don't know what the beef was, but Sheriff said, âPat didn't have a leg to stand on.' He could be mean like that, you know.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

The Wicker Avenue Antiques Mall was a gritty warren of old, musty collectibles of debatable value. Customers entered the tight rows of vendor cubicles with their questionable arrays of Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes, milk jugs from defunct Northwest dairies, or the occasional 1970s-era kitchen set and were immediately skeptical that they'd find anything there that they couldn't get from the closeout section of the local Goodwill. In fact, the Port Angeles Goodwill had a better record for delivering the occasional treasure.

Patricia Stanford had snowy white hair that she wore down to her waist. She also had one more distinguishing feature. Pat-Stan was missing her right leg, having lost it in a meth lab shootout the year after she'd made it to the detective's rank.

Didn't have a leg to stand on.... What a jerk!

“Patricia Stanford?” Birdy asked, approaching Pat as she fanned out the items in a jewelry case around a handwritten sign that said BAKELITE SOMEONE HAPPY.

Pat turned on her good leg. “That's me. Can I help you find something?”

“I've found what I'm looking for,” Birdy said. “That would be you.”

Pat appeared surprised. “Me?”

Birdy nodded and introduced herself, and the flicker of recognitionâat least of her nameâcame over Pat-Stan in the most pleasant of ways. The woman, who leaned a little because she didn't like the way the prosthetic leg felt on the stub of her thigh, managed a warm smile.

“You're grown up,” she said. “You look the same in the eyes, but, well, well, you have grown up.”

Birdy returned the smile. “I remember how kind you were to me back then.”

“And you've come here to tell me that?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” Birdy said. “I came for help.”

Pat-Stan narrowed her focus, ignoring a couple of women haggling over a stack of vintage hankies. “What kind of help?”

“I came here for my cousin Tommy.”

Pat-Stan shifted her weight and winced. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Of course not,” Birdy said, explaining that Tommy was ill and she wanted to help clear his name before it was too late.

“Where's he living?” she asked.

Birdy paused a beat. She wondered why Pat-Stan asked that. “Walla Walla. He never got out of prison.”

The shop manager looked genuinely surprised. “But that was more than twenty years ago. I thought he'd be out long ago,” she said.

“He won't admit to something he didn't do. And that's the only way he could have been paroled.”

“I wish I could help you,” she said, stepping away to twist the small padlock on the jewelry case door.

Birdy touched her shoulder. “You can. You don't have to wish.”

Patricia took a small step backward, both hips now resting against the cabinet. “I don't remember anything,” she said. “I was a secretary studying to try to get the god-awful job that cost me my leg. The pension is good. But I'd rather have my leg.”

It was a joke, an attempt to defuse the tension between them.

“Actually, I'm a little surprised that you're alive. I spent a half hour with Sheriff Derby and he told me that you were dead.”

“Interesting. He probably wishes I were dead. The man's a complete ass. He was a terrible boss, he's estranged from his only kid, his wife only comes out to pose for campaign photos. Messed up. I hate him.”

Some common ground, good.

“You're not one to hold back,” Birdy said, trying to keep the disclosures coming. “But why would he wish you were dead? I don't get that.”

Again, nervousness took over and Pat-Stan called to the women fighting over the hankies that she'd be right over. She looked back at her visitor.

“I really don't want to get into it,” she said.

Birdy pushed harder. “Does it have anything to do with Tommy's case?”

Pat-Stan waited a long time. Uncomfortably long. It was one of those awkward pauses that usually invites an exit from an uncomfortable conversation.

“Probably,” she said. “No. Yes. I mean, I don't know. Jim was not just a jerk yesterday. His jerkdom has been a long time coming.”

“What about Tommy?” Birdy asked.

Pat-Stan pretended to search her memory. “I can't say. Really. I don't exactly remember.”

“Please,” she said.

“I've said all I should. I really do wish you luck. Don't know how it can help Tommy. He's served more than his time, that's for sure. Can't give back all those years.”

“Do you think they should be given back?” Birdy asked.

Again, a long pause. Pat-Stan clearly wanted to spill her guts right over that tacky display case, but she held back the best she could.

“I will say this and it's against my better judgment. I transcribed his tape and I can tell you this.... When I saw his statement at trial I noticed that it was slightly different. Some parts were omitted.”

“I have his statement here,” Birdy said, pulling out the file.

“I don't have my glasses and I wouldn't remember exactly. Just something kind of bugged me. I told Detective Derby about it, but he dismissed it as a clerical error. That really angered me because, well,
I
was the clerk.”

“What was different?” Birdy asked.

Pat-Stan shrugged. “Don't remember. Check the tape.”

“Video?”

“No, audio. We taped all the interviews. Policy.”

This interested Birdy. The transcriptsâno matter who did themâdidn't sound completely like Tommy. “Where are the tapes?” she asked.

“I've got some. When I left, I was so mad that I took a bunch of old case files. Don't lecture me. You've never lost a leg and then had your boss tell you that it would be best if you sat at a desk for the rest of your life. I get off at five. House is a mess, but I do the best that I can. Come over.”

She wrote down an address on Hawthorne Avenue and went down the narrow aisle. No one would have known that she'd lost a leg. Pat-Stan had practiced her gait. She might have lost a limb, but she had never lost her sense of pride. As Birdy Waterman saw it, despite its place in the “sin” category of the Bible, pride could be a very good thing. Pat-Stan was angry about the contents of the report.

Anger, Birdy knew, could be a good ally.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

With a little more than an hour to kill, Birdy found a coffee shop that made ginormous cinnamon rolls. Even though the time of day was so wrong for that kind of indulgence, the forensic pathologist with a sweet tooth ordered one.

“Heated with butter?” a pleasant young man behind the counter asked.

“If I'm going to die from sugar overload, might as well go all the way,” Birdy said.

As she drank her coffee and ate the gooey roll at the table in the back of the cafÃ©, she reread her own statement and compared it against what Tommy told the detectives.

I was smoking pot and drinking beer that afternoon in the woods alone. I had talked to Anna Jo Bonners about meeting me at the cabin so we could mess around. Anna Jo didn't show up so I hung out by myself. I heard a scream coming from the cabin later and I went inside. I found Anna Jo Bonners in a pool of blood. I was scared that whoever had hurt her was still there so I grabbed the knife. I ran out of the cabin and hurried down the trail where my cousin Birdy found me. I don't know why I picked up the knife, but I threw it away before my cousin came up to me. I did not kill her. I really liked Anna Jo. I think I might have loved her even.

All of the evidence supported the contention that Tommy was the killer. He'd had Anna Jo's blood on his shirt and hands, his fingerprints had been recovered from the knife, and Birdy's eyewitness testimony had put him fleeing the scene of the grisly homicide in Ponder's cabin.

Yet he said he didn't do it.

Surprised that she'd devoured half of the roll, Birdy pushed the plate away just as a call came in with a 509 area code, eastern Washington.

“Waterman,” she said.

“Dr. Waterman, I hope you don't mind the intrusion,” a man's voice said. “This is Ken Holloway. I'm the guard you talked to at the prison. You know, about your cousin?”

“Of course. Is everything all right? I didn't leave my ID behind, did I?”

“No. Not that. It's about Tommy. He's been admitted to the infirmary. They might take him out of here to Spokane. He's not doing so hot. After you left, he changed his family contact info to your name. Not changed. Actually gave a family contact. The spot on his file had been empty since he got here.”

Birdy felt sick and it wasn't the cinnamon roll, which was now expanding in her upset stomach. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “He wanted me to give you a message. He wanted me to tell you that ...” The man's voice grew soft. For a second, Birdy thought he might be crying.

“Are you all right, Sergeant?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice clipped in an obvious attempt to snap out of his grief. “He just wanted me to tell you that even if you don't believe in him all the way yet, he's grateful knowing that someone out there thinks he matters.”

Birdy asked, “Will you let him know I got the message? Tell him that I'm doing my best. I don't want to give him false hope.”

“Hope is never false,” he said. “Hope is what keeps the innocent from killing themselves. Hope is what makes me think that justice will be done.”

She hung up and looked at the time on her phone. Pat-Stan was waiting for her.

Patricia Stanford produced an old audiocassette from the box of things she'd taken when she'd hobbled out of the Clallam County Sheriff's department. It had been kept in an envelope with the date and Tommy's first name scrawled on it in pencil. On the top right-hand side, a red ink stamp read: EVIDENCE.

Pat-Stan offered her some coffee, but Birdy declined. She was sick to her stomach.

“If you have any Rolaids,” she asked. “I'll take a couple.”

“Alka-Seltzer all right?”

Birdy nodded. Pat-Stan went into her kitchen and returned shortly with a fizzing glass of water.

“Lemon lime,” she said.

As Birdy drank it, she couldn't help but think of Pat-Stan's need to collect some things from her office, her own kind of a Bone Box, maybe. She wondered if there were hundreds, if not thousands, of law enforcement people who carried away the flotsam and jetsam of cases that niggled at them too.

“Why Tommy's tape?” she finally asked.

Pat-Stan inserted it into the player. “I guess I took things that bugged me. Things that I wasn't really sure about.”

Birdy didn't tell her about her own stash. Pat-Stan, in some ways, was a kindred spirit. Maybe law enforcement was full of people like them; those who were on the right side of the law, but weren't as convinced as the men and women who lined up in the jury box. More times than she could care to admit, Birdy and her colleagues turned over the best information they could find, in hope that the jury would sort out the puzzle pieces that didn't really fit. Their job had been to gather the evidence, the prosecutor's job was to put it all into a story, and the jury was called upon to make the final call.

“Were you there?” Birdy asked. “In the room when this was recorded?”

She shook her head. “No. Not at all. Didn't have the right badge back then. Derby treated me like an office girl and flunky. My scores on the detective's test were twenty points higher than his. He's now sheriff and I'm a human tripod selling
Partridge Family
lunchboxes.”

Even though the woman had clearly been wronged by her boss, in a very real, and very uncomfortable way, Birdy was grateful for it. Pat-Stan's anger was proving to be more helpful than she'd hoped. Bitterness, sadly, was something that she could put to use.

Pat-Stan pushed the PLAY button. The tape crackled and popped, but Tommy's voice was unmistakable. It was young Tommy. Broken Tommy. Not the man old before his time rotting away in prison. Tommy Freeland spoke in a deliberate, halting manner.

“I was smoking pot and drinking beer that afternoon in the woods alone. I had talked to Anna Jo Bonners about meeting me at the cabin so we could mess around. Anna Jo didn't show up so I hung out by myself. I heard a scream coming from the cabin later and I went inside.”

His words were so precise that Birdy wondered if he'd been reading his statement. But he couldn't have been because the statement was a transcription of the tape, not the other way around.

“I found Anna Jo Bonners in a pool of blood. I was scared that whoever had hurt her was still there so I grabbed the knife. He told me to put it down. So Iâ”

“Stop the tape, please,” Birdy said, looking up from the transcript of her cousin's statement, her heart beat a little faster. The Alka-Seltzer roiled in her stomach.

Pat-Stan complied. She kept her facial expression flat, but her eyes were alert and sharply focused. There was awareness behind them, and, Birdy thought, a kind of appreciation for what she was hearing.

Maybe even a little relief.

“Did you hear what I heard?”

“Yes. I guess that's why you're here, isn't it?”

“He says that someone told him to put the knife down,” she said.

“That's right. That's what he says.”

“But at trial he said he was alone.”

“He didn't. Maybe you don't remember, but Tommy Freeland never actually testified. His lawyer told him not to. The transcripts were used.”

“But the transcriptions are wrong.”

The former detective nodded. “I know. I was there. The only comfort I've had is that all the other evidence so clearly indicated that Tommy was the killer. It was only after his conviction that I played back the tapes.”

“Not only that, but doesn't he sound peculiar?” Birdy said.

Pat-Stan watched her visitor closely. “How so?” she asked.

“Stilted, calm. Not like someone who'd just killed his girlfriend and was looking for a way out of it,” Birdy said.

“Funny that you should say that,” Pat-Stan said, her finger hovering over the recorder to advance the audiotape one more time. “I saw him the afternoon they brought him in. He was a complete wreck. He was barely able to breathe because he was crying so hard. Also, this isn't an interview tape at all. It seems like a compilation, bits and pieces strung together. Did you hear how the hissing in the background stopped at the end of the sentence?”

Birdy was still stunned by the disclosure that someone else had been at the crime scene. “Not really,” she said. “I'll listen more carefully.”

Pat-Stan nodded. “I want you to follow along with your transcription, okay? You are missing something.”

“Missing something?”

“Listen carefully. There's a hiss on the tape just as he says it.”

“All right.”

The tape resumed.

“I ran out of the cabin and hurried down the trail where my cousin Birdy found me. I don't know why I picked up the knife, but I threw it away before Birdy came up to me.”

“Stop, please.”

The former detective pushed the button, her finger hovering to advance the tape once more.

“He said that he threw it away, before he saw me.”

“That's what he said.”

“But when I read the report, it indicated that the knife had been recovered from the cabin.”

“I don't recall that, but all right. What does it matter where it was found?”

“It matters to me. Not so much where, but by who?”

“That's easy. Detective Derby found it.”