Victim Six (28 page)

March 30, 9 a.m.
Port Orchard

It was slightly foggy when Kendall Stark showed up at Maggie Thompson’s two-story wood frame house on Baby Doll Road, up Mile Hill Road from downtown Port Orchard. The queen mother had been in the middle of a quilting project when she answered the door. She carried strips of aqua and green pieces of fabric in her slightly nicotine-stained fingers.

“The piece I’m working on for my grandson is called ‘Under the Sea,’” she said, leading Kendall into a living room cluttered with fabric, batting, and a large tracing that laid out the scheme she was following, a quilt depicting King Neptune and various sea creatures in gaudy hues.

“Pretty,” Kendall said, gently scooting aside a stack of rumpled material to take a seat on a tan leather recliner.

Maggie grinned, her teeth a buttery yellow. “I won a rosette last year at the fair, so I’m pretty good at this.”

“I can see that,” Kendall said, indicating the gold and blue ribbon hanging above the jumbled fireplace mantel. Before Maggie could launch into quilting tips, Kendall quickly turned to the reason she’d called for an interview appointment.

“Did Paige say anything to you that will help us find out where she’s gone?”

“At first I figured she just skipped school and went to Seattle for the day. A lot of these kids around here do. They complain about how boring Port Orchard is and how there’s nothing to do. Boring here, you know. Pepsi?”

“No thanks,” Kendall said as Maggie popped open a can of diet soda. “If she was bored, did she say where she’d go?”

Maggie shook her head. “Look, I’ve been doing this Fathoms gig for years, and one thing I’ve learned is, you can’t trust these girls one iota. Over the years they’ve gotten more and more deceptive. They say they care about the homeless, the environment, and what have you. All they care about is getting some money and being able to brag they were a beauty queen.”

Maggie Thompson was on a roll, and Kendall just leaned back and let the woman go on.

“Paige was a phony. I guess they all are. I honestly don’t know why I bother carting them around, getting them to look classy, when they’re just some backwater girls with no ambition. Not like Shelly Monroe.”

Kendall knew Shelly Monroe. She was the Fathoms Queen in the late 1970s and used it as a springboard to a semi-successful television career. She’d been a weather girl in Seattle for a few years before landing a long-running gig on a game show on which she rolled oversized fuzzy dice. She had even written an autobiography called
Double or Nothing: My Life in the Wacky World of Game Shows.

“Not everyone is a Shelly,” Kendall said.

“I get that. But honestly, the girls of the last ten years or so seem to think that everything should be handed to them. They want this. They want that. Their constant requests are so tiring, and there’s no end to them. Can you tell I’m a little burned out?”

Kendall nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said, steering the subject back to the reason she was there. “Let’s talk about Paige. Had she said anything at all to you to indicate a problem? Boyfriend troubles? Something she was planning on doing? Anything at all?”

Maggie sipped her soda and thought for a moment. “I heard her talking to Danica, one of the other girls, about how she wanted to do some modeling. I think she signed up for an agency online….”

Danica Moses was still bitter that she’d been first runner-up in the pageant and made no bones about it when Kendall found her at her job at the Wendy’s restaurant in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Bethel Avenue. She was a pretty girl with brown eyes and long cinnamon hair that she wore in braids she’d twirled together herself. She wore a blue polo shirt with the word
TRAINEE
embroidered over the left breast in flamboyant script.

She sat with Kendall in a booth near the salad bar.

“I took my duties seriously,” she said. “Paige didn’t. That’s the truth. She didn’t care about winning the title, and I’m glad that she showed her true colors by skipping out.”

“You don’t seem to like her much, Danica.”

Danica looked over at her boss, an Indian with piercing dark eyes that reminded her that, despite the police interest, she was still on the clock.

“Don’t get me started. She just thought she was better than this town, that’s all.” Danica looked around. “Do you think she was even that pretty?”

Kendall wasn’t there to discuss whether there should be a do-over of the Fathoms Queen pageant. “Pretty enough to win, I guess.”

Danica made a face. It wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. “Well, I love this town,” she said, catching another glimpse of her boss. “I love this restaurant. I would have served my time as Fathoms Queen before doing anything to harm the good name of Port Orchard.”

Serve her time?
Was being a beauty queen like being a prisoner?

“Maggie Thompson told me that you and Paige talked about a modeling opportunity.”

Danica’s face went scarlet. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t interested in being a model. I want to go to college and get a nursing degree. I actually care about people. Paige was all about the easy way out of Port Orchard. She found some modeling agency on the Internet. I saw it on her laptop. I asked her about it. She didn’t say much.”

Danica seemed antsy, as if she had to use the restroom or get back to work. Kendall figured the latter. The boss was drumming his knuckles on the gleaming countertop.

“Well, then, what did she say?”

“Not much. Like I said,” Danica went on, “she bragged a little like she always did. She thought that she was so much better than the rest of us because she won first place. She picked out an ugly crown, if you ask me.”

Kendall hadn’t. “Did she say she was going off to meet anyone?”

“No, she didn’t. I expect she wouldn’t tell me that anyway. You know, in case things didn’t work out. I don’t think she trusted me.”

On her way back to the office, Kendall ate a hamburger she’d ordered off the Wendy’s dollar menu. It wasn’t that great, but it certainly wasn’t overpriced. If Paige Wilson had gone off to Seattle to meet with a modeling agent, she’d come home soon enough. There was no way to check her laptop to determine which Web site Danica had seen when the two girls were talking about Paige’s modeling plans.

Kendall learned from Josh that Paige Wilson’s laptop was missing, along with her cell phone and car. Skye’s cell phone had been missing too. She wondered if there was some connection.

Or if she was merely grasping at straws.

March 31, 1 p.m.
Vashon Island, Washington

The water was corduroy as bands of blue and gray etched the surface of Colvos Passage, the mile-wide stretch of Puget Sound that separates Kitsap County from Vashon Island. The island’s western side is a sparse mix of beachfront cottages and farmhouses facing an equally rural southern Kitsap County. Robert Carmichael and his sister, Leah, were bored out of their minds as they took a break from their grandparents’ place up the hill from Lisabeula, a park that had once been a campsite for Scouts and Native Americans long before Scouting was anyone’s idea of fun. The teens hiked down the steep road along a creek to the five-acre park. Fifteen-year-old Robert was hoping to get a glimpse of a pod of whales, as he had during the dull visit the year before. Leah, almost fourteen, didn’t care what they did. Their grandmother had been on Leah’s case for text messaging when she should be “engaging” with human beings.

Grandma didn’t get it.

They followed a trail to a madrona tree that had slipped down the hillside, its red bark rubbed off, leaving a green and brown indentation where others had tied a rope swing. During a hot summer’s high tide, it was the perfect setup for swinging and jumping into the water. The tide was out, and the wind coming down from the south brought a brisk chill. March was a far cry from summer weather.

Robert grabbed the rope, stepped up on the big knot at its base, and gripped another knot above his shoulders.

“Watch this,” he said, looking over at his sister, who was frustrated with her Sidekick.

“There’s no signal here. This sucks,” she said.

“So what? Engage with
people
, remember,” Robert said as he started to move over the beach toward the water.

“If you were a
person
, I might.”

Robert kept going as his sister dug her feet into the rocky beach, a disinterested gaze on her face that she’d perfected. He caught a glimpse of something red next to a silvery and gray remnant of a fir.

“Over by that driftwood,” he said, “someone left a backpack. Check it out.”

“Last time we found a dead harbor seal here,” Leah said. “Anything would be a step up from that stinky thing.”

She got up, put her phone in her back pocket, and walked over to the log. She bent at the knees to get a closer look.

“Hey, it’s a purse. It’s been out in the water. Not as gross as a dead seal, but not so great, either.”

Robert jumped off the rope swing and landed with a thud, his feet digging two deep holes in the gritty beach.

“Let me see. Could be some money in it.”

“If there is any, you better split it with me.”

Robert shot his sister a dirty look. “If there is any money, we’re going to give it back to the owner, stupid.”

“I hate you, Mr. Perfect. Whatever.” Her eyes widened all of a sudden. “That’s a Dooney,” she said as her brother picked up the soggy red leather purse.

“A what?”

“Dooney & Bourke.” Leah squatted next to Robert, who hadn’t a clue as to what she was saying. “An expensive purse. Too bad it’s ruined.”

He undid the clasp and dumped the contents of the purse onto a flat space atop the driftwood. A makeup brush; a lipstick; a pair of sunglasses; a set of car keys on a circular key fob with the DB logotype on it; a soggy packet of tissues; a tampon that had done what it was supposed to do—absorb liquid; a hairbrush; a tin of Altoids; a Mont Blanc pen; and a wallet that matched the red leather of the purse.

Leah didn’t bother telling her brother that the pen was expensive too.

“Not much here,” Robert said, opening the soggy wallet. “No money.”

Leah started to put her earbuds back in place. “That sucks too.”

From behind a clear plastic shield, fogged from the elements, the teenage boy retrieved a driver’s license. Although the photo had flaked off, the name was still legible:
CAROL GODDING
.

“Let’s head back to Grandma’s,” Robert said. He scooped up the contents of the soggy purse and put everything back inside.

Leah scrunched her nose in an exaggerated manner. “You’re bringing that?”

Robert shrugged as they started up the hill. “You said it was expensive.”

“When it wasn’t waterlogged. Now it’s a piece of crap. But if you’re going to keep it, can I have the pen?”

Melody rubbed the interior of the freezer with a rag soaked in diluted bleach. There had been so much to do to get the place ready for the new girl—the new toy. She could hear her husband laugh as the girl in the next room begged for her life. She hated the sounds the playthings made. It wasn’t because she felt sorry for them; it was more out of embarrassment. She knew that no amount of pleading or begging could set any of them free.

Not until Sam had done what he wanted.

Not until she’d done what Sam commanded her to do.

The freezer gleamed, and she noticed that she had missed a spot of blood. She wiped it again. Gone…then back.

She noticed for the first time that her knuckles were bleeding.

“Damn you, bitch!” she called out. “You made me bleed. Daddy! She made me bleed!”

The moaning in the other room stopped.

Good
, Melody thought.
She shut up. Good girl.

The freezer sparkling clean, Melody set down her cloth and took a pair of brand-new steak knives from the Fun House’s kitchen drawer. She hooked her fingers through a spool of fence wire and started toward the bedroom door.

Sam summoned her from another room.

“Coming!” she called out.

Elizabeth Carmichael studied the kids’ find. A concerned look pinched her normally tranquil face as she considered the sodden purse, the pen, and the wallet her grandchildren had found on the beach near her Vashon Island home.

“Did you see anything else down there?” she asked.

“There’s nothing to see, Grandma. Just some water and seagulls. Real exciting.” Leah wanted nothing more than to have her grandmother send her to her room so she could listen to music and text her friends at home in Seattle’s North End.

“Leah, this is serious. We need to call the police about this,” Elizabeth Carmichael said, going for her kitchen telephone. “I’ve heard this woman’s name on the news.”

Before she shrugged it all off and plugged her iPod earbuds back in, Leah couldn’t resist getting one more comment in. “Can’t we just take it to a lost and found somewhere on the island? You must have a lost and found around here somewhere.”

“We have no such thing,” Elizabeth said as she dialed the number for the King County Sheriff’s Office, which served the island with a small station and a couple of patrol cars.

“My grandchildren unearthed something on the beach at Lisabeula,” she said. “I think it belonged to that woman missing from Port Orchard. She was on the news. Carol Godding.”

After her grandmother hung up, Leah eyed the pen one more time.

“You’re not keeping that,” Robert said. “Get real, Leah. This stuff belonged to a woman who might have been killed by the Kitsap Cutter.”

Robert Carmichael watched the news too.

Kendall stood on the rocky shore and looked west across Colvos Passage to Kitsap County. A dog barked. Gulls swooped down into the wake of a green and white Foss tugboat towing a two-block-long boom of peeled logs toward Olympia or Tacoma. A deckhand tossed a cigarette into the water. Kendall had never been on that side of Vashon Island before. The view of the southern- and easternmost part of the county was somewhat deceptive. Million-dollar residences that aspired to look like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard shored up the frontage along the passage. Those were the homes of the people of means; seldom were they visited by the likes of her and her badge.

A young King County deputy with a buzz cut pointed to the location where Robert Carmichael had indicated he’d found the purse.

“See that fan of roots?” he asked Kendall, pointing to a mighty old fir that had succumbed to the crumbling cliffs on one side of the passage or the other.

She nodded.

“Near the base of that.”

Kendall sighed. There was no chance that there was any more evidence. The tide was high. Everything that might have been a clue was submerged.

The deputy handed her the Dooney, sealed in a large clear-plastic bag.

“Anyhow, I hope this helps,” he said.

“Of course I do too,” she said, knowing Carol Godding was more than merely missing. In all likelihood she was, indeed, victim four.

The day after the quarreling brother and sister found Carol Godding’s purse, a Native American fishing crew dropped their nets in Colvos Passage near Olalla Bay, about a mile south of Lisabeula. The water, rippled shiny like corroded shellac on an old tabletop, accepted the weighted nets, and the men on the boat took a moment to kick back and pass the time. Fishing was always about waiting; and in the case of Native Americans, it was also about putting up with the glares and hostile looks of the fisherman on the causeway bridge who cannot match the catch of a net dropped into the blue. At about 4
P.M
, it was time to reel in the curtain of nets.

“Pretty heavy,” one of the younger men said as the winch strained to lift a load of salmon.

“Maybe you snagged a deadhead,” another said.

“Not that bad,” the first fisherman shot back. “Just a good haul.”

Yet, it wasn’t a good haul. As the net broke the rippled surface of the passage, first a hand appeared, then the arm, and finally, the remainder of a nude and battered body.

Carol Godding had risen to the surface.