Victim Six (13 page)

September 19, 10:15 a.m.
Port Orchard

The house at 704 Sidney Avenue had a history both mundane and macabre. It was a place that passersby and drivers skirted past, disinterested. Certainly, in its eight decades of existence it played out a thousand family dramas and joys. Most places that old have. Babies were born. Kids went to school. Teens went to the proms. Memories were made.

All of the things that make a house a living thing had transpired there.

Yet, this place was a little different. There was a touch of strangeness and darkness about the house as well.

One time in the 1990s, a woman who stopped by the house and spoke to the present occupants told a tale of her mother’s suffering with cancer.

“Dad couldn’t stand her constant crying all night,” said the visitor, who had once lived there. “So we set her up in a tent in the front yard. Dad put her out there so he could get some sleep. Seems a little cruel now when I think of it. But back then, it was a good solution.”

Not surprisingly, others who lived there reported that the house with an obscuring tree that had been lovingly planted by the first owners had a weird, sad vibe. Most who felt it did so only after learning that the place was the final stopping point for the dead of Kitsap County.

The house adjacent to the Sheriff’s Office back parking lot was the Kitsap County Morgue. It is doubtful that any other morgue in America was quite as homey.

The coroner’s offices were upstairs in what had been a dining room, living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a battered blue linoleum floor. Throughout the house, with its coved ceilings, pale gray paint, and thick-cut moldings, were the remnants of the dead. The staff stored formaldehyde-soaked tidbits of people in plastic bags set in large plastic tubs like the ones families use to store Christmas decorations. A built-in nook held teeth and a floating finger in small jars. Each body part was a clue to the unthinkable things that people did to each other. Despite the accoutrements of death, the upstairs was a staid, quiet office. Phones were answered, mail sorted, budgets balanced. If things were a little disordered, it was because the space was so small.

And body parts took up a lot of space.

Downstairs, however, was where the work that leaves a Rorschach pattern in crimson on a pristine white lab coat was done every time a stiff rolled in on a gurney. Early in the morning after the Little Clam Bay body was found, forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman put on her scrubs in the small dressing area in the converted garage that was a most unlikely autopsy suite. She checked the body logbook on a table next to a chiller that held six bodies at the time. It had only been full once or twice in the county’s history. While a couple of hundred bodies were autopsied every year, they were dispatched to funeral homes—mostly for cremation—within twenty-four hours of their arrival on Sidney Avenue.

“Move ’em in and move ’em out” was a phrase favored by the county coroner, an affable fellow named Kent Stewart who’d been elected to the position for a dozen years. He was more than an elected glad-hander. He was also a skilled manager of an ever-shrinking budget. The day before the dead body from Little Clam Bay had come in, Kent purchased four new office chairs from Boeing’s surplus store south of Seattle. The total cost was $28.

If Kent Stewart was the “face” of the coroner’s office, Birdy Waterman, a forensic pathologist, was the chief cook and bottle washer. Her hands were on everything. That was fine too. Kent only occasionally came downstairs to see what was happening in the morgue—mostly in the summer, when a decomposing body sent a stench up through the floorboards.

“Downstairs is your domain,” he said time after time. “Call me if you need me.”

With the exception of days that started with an autopsy, Kendall Stark never wore jeans to work. That morning as Steven organized Cody’s things for school, she packed an overnight bag. She moved around their bedroom, silently, gathering up a pair of slacks and sweater that she could wear while Dr. Waterman completed her examination.

Steven emerged from the bathroom and looked at the bag she’d filled.

“I was going to tell you to have a nice day,” he said, thinking better of it.

She pressed her lips into a slight smile. It was meant to acknowledge his support.

“I could barely sleep last night,” she said. “All I could think about was that dead young woman.”

“I know,” he said. He stepped closer and looked into her eyes as he held her hands.

“That’s what makes you good at your job, Kendall. You give a shit. Not everyone does. Some people sleepwalk through their lives, never really noticing why they’re here.”

She knew he was right, but she also wondered if he was talking about his own work. He’d been down about it, telling her not long ago that he “hadn’t dreamed of this life, this job” when he was a little boy. She’d tried to support him by reminding him that he was so good at selling ads.

“A trained chimp with half a personality could do what I do,” he’d shot back. His demeanor was slightly sardonic, but not so much that Kendall could be sure just how he really felt. She was left to wonder. When Steven talked about his disappointments in life, was he talking about her? About Cody?

She picked up her overnight bag.

“When I think of why I’m here,” she said, “I know it’s to help people, to bring the lost back home.”

Steven kissed her and playfully touched her hair. “You’ll find out what happened to the girl,” he said.

She didn’t say how she felt about Celesta Delgado and how she’d failed to find her killer. Mason and Kitsap counties postured over who owned the case: the jurisdiction in which she had gone missing or the one where her body was found. She didn’t tell Steven that she’d had an encounter with Tulio Pena at the Albertsons supermarket on Mile Hill and how he’d accused her of not caring, of giving up.

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “See you tonight.”

September 21, 9:30 a.m.
Port Orchard

Birdy Waterman looked up as the frosted-glass door swung open.

“Morning, Detective,” she said, as Kendall let herself inside.

“Sorry I’m late,” Kendall said taking off her jacket and hanging it on a hook near the logbook.

“You’re not late. Just in time, in fact.” Birdy rolled on a pair of gloves. She looked at the overnight bag. “Oh, goody. Why didn’t you tell me we were having another sleepover?”

Kendall smiled back. “A surprise,” she said.

“Where’s Anderson?”

“Good question, Doctor. He said he might be late, so I waited for him at the office. Never showed up.”

Kendall went into the small dressing room and put on a set of scrubs, emerging a few moments later to ask the question that had haunted her after seeing the body.

“What happened to her face?”

She stopped a few paces behind the pathologist as Birdy unlatched the enormous refrigerator and rolled out a sheet-covered corpse to a space on the far side of the room.

“The catchall is ‘animal activity,’ and I suspect I’ll be able to pin it to a seal. There are some teeth marks where the nose was excised.”

She watched as Birdy gently peeled back the pale green sheet.

“See here?” Birdy said, pointing with her gloved index finger. “Those small tears form a pattern. Each is spaced two inches apart.”

Kendall leaned a little closer to get a better view. She took in the acrid scent of the corpse, which made her stomach roil only a little. Then it passed. She found it strange that the sight of the body had such a fleeting impact. Certainly, she’d already seen the woman at Little Clam Bay, but in the outside world the smell of the dead can be somewhat ignored on a cool damp day. Not possible, she knew, in the confines of the morgue, where bright light, sterile surfaces and the faint odor of cleaning supplies can’t completely foil the assault on a person’s olfactory senses.

“I’m thinking a sea lion pup,” Birdy said, barely glancing back at Kendall. “Humans aren’t really good eating, of course, and even an orca will pass one up. Sharks too. I think a pup did a little nibbling here and there and then gave up. Animal DNA could confirm, of course. Did I tell you about the body found in the woods by the golf course at Gold Mountain? Had to take bite impressions to the University of Washington. Turned out it was a bobcat, not a cougar.”

“I guess that would make a difference,” Kendall said, somewhat tentatively.

Birdy looked at the detective. “Actually, you’re right. It did. Bobcats are aggressive only to a degree and can be fended off with a well-placed poke of a nine iron. An angry cougar, however, is another matter.”

Birdy lowered an overhead lamp and took a pair of chrome Fiskars, sliced off the woman’s clothing, and deposited it into clear plastic evidence bags. While trace evidence was always possible, it was highly unlikely on the outside of the clothing. The body had been in the water for a while, at least a couple of days. Sometimes hairs and fibers were protected in the interior of a garment. That, both women knew, was a long shot. The choppy waters of Puget Sound were like a Kenmore washer on a heavy-load cycle.

The pathologist took a succession of digital photos, some with flash, and others without.

Kendall used a Sharpie to mark the bag for the sliced jeans, then another for the now-shredded green blouse. She’d take them back over to the crime lab for drying before any additional examination. Drying would preserve evidence and make the stink of the clothing somewhat bearable.

Feeling strands of her long black hair fall from the band of her disposable head covering, Dr. Waterman stepped back from the autopsy table. She took off a glove and tucked in the stray locks.

“There will be no contamination on my table,” she said, putting on a clean glove.

Kendall nodded, although the remark seemed more for the pathologist than her audience.

As she worked in her basement autopsy suite, Birdy Waterman spoke in measured tones, her voice betraying no emotion. It didn’t matter. She’d conducted hundreds of autopsies and knew that each one was a professional obligation and a personal burden: each one broke the doctor’s heart.

“…the victim, a well-nourished female age seventeen to twenty-five, five feet, two inches in height, 110 pounds, dark blond hair, blue eyes…”

She hesitated as she thought of a way to clinically describe the horror of what she was seeing. “There are no facial features, likely due to animal activity, postmortem…”

She noted that there were no distinguishing marks on the woman’s body.

She didn’t get the tattoo urge that so many of her age had
, she thought.

The condition of the victim’s teeth indicated reasonable if not excellent dental care. The dead woman or girl was not a meth-head. She was clean, well cared for. Dr. Waterman swabbed the dead woman’s mouth and clipped her soft, unpainted fingernails, and Kendall collected each snip into poly bags.

“I don’t see anything under the nails, but you never know what your guys can find in the lab,” she said.

Kendall nodded. “I’m always amazed at—and appreciative of—how the smallest things can point to a killer.”

Next, Dr. Waterman focused the beam on the victim’s ears, then cheeks, a part of the face that still remained relatively intact. She swabbed again. Fibers and hair had adhered in a couple of places on the cheeks. She swabbed more.

Adhesive,
she thought, before catching Kendall’s eyes. “Our victim might have been restrained or gagged by some kind of tape.”

“Photo?”

The pathologist stepped back to allow Kendall to get closer for more photos, macro views of faint gummy striations.

“Okay, now for the reason she’s here on my table,” she said as she flexed the woman’s wrists and noted the dark bands of contusions that encircled them.

“Victim shows evidence of ligature on both right and left wrists.”

For the first time Kendall noticed parallel lines of dirt and bruising. Faint, yet there nonetheless. Her camera’s shutter sounded six times in rapid succession.

“She was tortured. Held captive. This is too brutal for some sex game gone bad.”

She was referring the case of Sheila Wax, who had died the year before when a so-called breathing game went too far. Kendall had worked that case.

Birdy ran a stream of water over the nude torso. Dark, congealed blood ran along the drainage gutter of the table.

“This is far more than torture,” she said, locking her eyes on Kendall. “Victim’s areolae on both breasts have been excised,” she said.

Kendall felt the familiar shudder of sickness that sometimes came in the basement autopsy suite, no matter how seasoned she believed herself to be or how prepared for the aftermath of murder. She steadied herself while Dr. Waterman pointed to the edges of the wounds.

“See this?” she asked, taking the tip of a scalpel and lifting the pale skin. “A cut, not a tear. Definitely not animal activity, like the face.”

Kendall studied the wounds. “Postmortem, like the animal activity?”

“Hard to know for sure, but when I see things like this, I pray to God that the victim was dead before whoever it was took it upon himself to cut her. We had a case a few years back in which a man hacked off his wife’s hand and then drove her to the hospital.”

“How thoughtful.” Kendall took some more photos.

Birdy turned her attention back to the corpse. “This is the work of a sexual sadist. He bound, gagged, defiled, tortured, and cut her, and kept part of her body for a souvenir.”

Kendall knew what the pathologist was getting at. “Someone who commits this kind of crime doesn’t just stop.”

“That’s right, Kendall. Someone who does this has to
be
stopped.”

Finally, the beam of the pathologist’s handheld light found the woman’s vagina. It was just another invasion of the dead woman’s privacy that had begun when the two boys skipping school had found her and sent out photos to their friends at school. For Dr. Waterman, probing in a woman’s most private area was the necessary evil of finding out what had happened, and it always felt like a violation, no matter how many bodies she’d autopsied.

More photos.
Flash!

Next she bent her knees slightly, bore down, and rolled the body onto its side, then onto its stomach. She walked to the end of the autopsy table and gently spread the woman’s legs apart.

“Indications of trauma in both anal and vaginal cavities…”

Dr. Waterman winced a little and amended words: “
Severe
anal trauma…”

The exterior exam complete, Dr. Waterman went for the garden loppers that she’d purchased on her expense account at the local Ace Hardware off Mile Hill Road. The bright-green-handled loppers were the ideal tool for cutting through the ribs. While Kendall looked on, the doctor made her Y-incision from shoulder to shoulder and down between the mutilated breasts. Then she reached for the loppers.

Kendall watched, listened, and wondered.

Who did this to you? Who are you?

Kendall always thought of the dryer in the Kitsap County property processing room as a “clothesline of death.” She carefully logged in the victim’s clothes and hung them in the dryer. It was a bulky piece of equipment that functioned more like a warming oven than a spin dryer. Clothing hung limply until it dried to crispness. Body fluids and, in the case of the Little Clam Bay victim, seawater would provide a stiffness like starch.

Heavy starch.

“How’s our girl in the morgue?”

It was Josh.

“She’s still dead,” Kendall said, a little irritated that he’d missed the autopsy. While it wasn’t required to have two investigators there, murders were so infrequent in Kitsap County that an extra pair of eyes and hands would have been useful.

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

Kendall closed the glass-fronted door. “You mean like the fact that some freak cut off her nipples, raped her, and tortured her? That kind of out of the ordinary?”

“You seem pissed off at me.”

Kendall peeled off her latex gloves and threw them in a receptacle.

“I could have used you there, Josh.”

Josh murmured something about being sorry before he made his excuse.

“I had an interview with the paper that I couldn’t get out of. They’ve been hounding me. I’m getting a feature story. Probably front page.”

“I doubt that,” she said, heading toward the door.

“Huh?”

“A dead woman trumps a self-centered cop any day.”