A Cold Dark Place

Chapter Eighteen

3:15 RM., twenty-one years ago, northern Washington

It began like most grisly discoveries. A hapless individual wanders upon the unthinkable in a place where nothing sinister has ever transpired, where it is completely unexpected. The heart skips a beat. The eyes strain to see through the mind's protective shield of disbelief.

It was that way for Jeremy Landon, a seventeen-year-old from Meridian, Washington. He was paddling the Nooksack River, a meandering waterway that ran lazily from the crispedged Northern Cascades to Puget Sound, when a flash of white against a gray sandbar caught his eye. He paddled closer and maneuvered around a fallen cedar that dipped into the icy and swift-moving waters. Incredulity kicked in and adrenaline pumped like a spigot cranked on all the way. Jeremy knew what he'd seen before he poked the large plastic cocoon with a paddle. Hair protruded from an opening on one end. It was long and blond. A mahogany hand with fingertips still accented by cherry-red nail polish fell from a tear in the midsection of the cocoon. He rocked the large bundle with his paddle and yelled, this time, even louder.

"You okay?"

His kayak nudged the sandbar, a grating noise of gravel against the fiberglass hull and the rushing water was the only answer. He kept poking and calling out.

But nothing. The plastic-wrapped package just lay there. He knew. He'd found what everyone in the Northwest had been looking for, because it was clear the bundle contained two people. He felt a shiver deep in his bones. It was better than 80 degrees that sunny afternoon, but he was shaking like it was a midwinter snowstorm. The smell of death blew over the water, just under the summer breeze.

"Hey, you all right?" he said, his voice almost a prayer by then. Soft. Pleading. Yet, at the same time, knowing the worst had come to pass.

"Not sure why I called over to them," he told his dad, crying, some days later. "I know it seems stupid and wrong, but I really didn't want it to be those girls. I was hoping it was a couple of store mannequins wrapped up in a painter's tarp"

Shelley Marie Smith and Lorrie Ann Warner had been found.

Olga Morris moved methodically through apartment 703 in the monolithic redbrick building that Cascade University students called "Bucky Towers" or "BT." Buchanan Towers was the kind of building that could only have been dreamed up by architects working on a bare-bones state budget. Floors were warrens of studio and double units. Windows were tiny vertical slots and rooms were sparsely furnished with bunk beds, desks, and a pair of chairs. Upholstered love seats dominated the living room/kitchen combinations.

Olga Morris was a detective for the Meridian Police De partment and the irony of the task at hand weighed heavily on her. She was there investigating the murder of two coeds, across the hall from the same apartment that she had lived in when she was a student.

Olga was barely five feet tall, a sparkplug of a woman with short-cropped blond hair and a confident presence that always made her seem taller. Even though a decade had passed since she had lived in the building, it felt exceedingly, and painfully, familiar. The faucet dripped in 703 as it had in her apartment. Blue mineral deposits corroded what was supposed to be a stainless steel sink. The ventilation was poor and she cranked open one of the narrow windows. A faint breeze moved the miniblinds.

Morris retreated to the bedroom. Shelley had the bottom bunk; Lorrie, the top. The bedding had been removed by the crime scene investigators and had been processed for fibers and hairs. Semen and pubic hairs that weren't Lorrie's were found on her sheets, a cheery lemon and orange percale that her mother had bought for her junior year.

Her mother, Morris thought as she pulled a desk drawer open, seemed more upset that her daughter had a boyfriend and was sexually active than the fact she was missing.

But she was no longer missing. She and Shelley, or rather their remains, had been discovered by a kayaker on the Nooksack River.

"Find anything?" It was Tammi Swenson, the resident aide, who apparently had the uncanny ability to come into any room unnoticed. "How's the case going?"

Olga looked up and managed a smile. She shut the drawer. Tammi was one of those upbeat young women who talked in the peppy cadence of a cheerleader.

"Fine, Tammi. We'll catch whoever it was that killed the girls. You can count on that"

Tammi sipped her lemon-flavored Pepsi Lite, her blue eyes widening. "I hope so. I mean, I know you will. I feel like I'm way out of line, but my supervisor wanted me to ask you again-nicely-when you're gonna release the room. I have two girls on the wait list and they're really nice. I mean, a good fit for the floor."

Detective Morris nodded. "I see. Well, tell your manager--2'

"-he's just a supervisor. He thinks he's a manager, though"

"As I was trying to say," the diminutive detective continued, "the room is available. We've processed everything. Nothing left. This wasn't the crime scene-be sure to tell the new girls that, okay?"

Light streamed through the slashes of glass and the blinds moved once more. Music rumbled from down the hall. It was Fleetwood Mac with Stevie Nicks doing her best to rock Bucky Towers.

Tammi brightened for a moment. "Good to know. Thanks! Can I ask you a question?"

Olga nodded. "Sure, I'll try to answer."

Tammi took a deep breath. The detective had seen that move a time or two, usually when a suspect is being questioned and is suddenly ready to reveal something they think will help throw the interrogator off the track.

Tammi wasn't trying to do that, of course. Instead, she was summoning the courage to ask a question to which she had no business knowing the answer.

"Was it true what the papers said about Lorrie and Shelley?"

"What, specifically?"

"They were, you know, violated."

The detective looked directly into Tammi's vapid blue eyes.

"Dear," she said, "we can use the word rape"

Tammi sighed. She seemed emboldened by the detective's clarification and her precision.

"Okay, were they raped? Because that's what I read."

It dawned on the detective that the girl wasn't in search of salacious details. The look on Tammi Swenson's face was utter fear.

I can't say one way or another; the case is ongoing. But I will tell you this. Don't go out alone at night. Check your car before you get in it. Don't talk to people you don't know."

The college student stepped backward, toward the door. Olga Morris continued her litany of warnings.

"Be careful. Tell your friends. Tell every girl on the floor, okay? We'll catch him, but we won't catch him until he makes a mistake. And, Tammi, we don't want that mistake to be any more dead girls, okay?"

Tammi gulped hard. Her bulging eyes shifted nervously away from the detective's piercing gaze. "Okay."

What neither Olga nor Tammi knew was that the mistake had already been made.

Coffee rings and a spherical grease spot indicating a doughnut had been consumed while someone reviewed the autopsy report turned Olga Morris's stomach. She wondered if she'd ever get to the place where'd she be so callous as to be able to eat breakfast over the kind of descriptions and images that came with such reports. In her office at the Meridian Police Department, she spread the pictures and documents across her desk. Photos of Lorrie here. Shelley there. A stack of the medical examiner's reports, the interviews conducted by the police in the early stages of the case-when it had been a missing persons case and not yet a homicide. She squared up the edges of each pile of papers and photos. It dawned on her as she moved from one stack to the next that it almost looked like she was playing some freakish version of solitaire.

She knew then the images would never leave her. The bodies, wrapped in plastic, and out in the sun had swelled and burst. Water had chilled the exposed body parts-Shelley's right hand, in particular. Clumps of hair had fallen from her head. Decomp was a nightmare far beyond the imagination of anyone who'd never seen a rotting body.

Who had the stomach to eat an old-fashioned doughnut and look at these?

As she scanned the color 8 x l Os, Olga noticed that a ligature of some kind the ME thought that the marks, smooth, but with a single striation down the center, indicated an electric cord had cut so deeply into Shelley's wrists that her hands were nearly severed. Lorrie's body had incubated in the plastic wrap, so it was harder to tell. It appeared she'd suffered the same fate. Both had been brutally raped and shot in the back of the head in what laypeople always called execution-style.

Some execution, Olga thought as her unblinking eyes scanned. With what these girls went through they probably were grateful for it to end.

The ME suggested that both women had died about the same time-but not right after their disappearance. It was tough to pinpoint exactly when they did die. Because of the plastic tarp, the sun had literally cooked their bodies, the greenhouse effect accelerating the decomposition process.

Based on the ME's guess-blowfly larvae, tissue decay, and a copy of the Meridian Herald dated July 18, the girls had been dead only a month when discovered. Maybe six weeks. The newspaper, Olga and others surmised, had been used to absorb a puddle of blood-probably at the scene. Since neither victim's head held a single bullet, ballistics would be of no use in tracking the killer. The gun was probably in the bottom of the river, or somewhere. Olga was fixated on the cording used as the ligature.

Find the cord, find the killer.

The detective knew that in most instances when a killer used electrical cording it was either an extension cord or some cut from a table lamp or other small household appliance. It was usually just the right length-three feet to tie up a victim.

She looked around her office. A poster of Mt. Baker hovered above her desk, its white conical form silhouetted against a fiery sunrise. The bookcase behind her was overstuffed with training manuals, some photos of her cats, and two notebooks that kept cold cases always within the swivel of her office chair. Her credenza was set up as a mini hot beverage bar, with an electric teakettle, a wicker basket of dried noodle soups, hot chocolate, instant coffee, and teas. She eyed the teakettle and its electrical cord, but thought better of it.

What can I use?

Olga ran her fingers through her short hair, pondering the scenario she was about to employ. She could go down to Property and get a spool of twine, but that was a hassle and she was the type of woman who wanted to do what she wanted, when she wanted to do it. The answer was on her desk. The telephone. She unhooked the wire from the jack and disconnected the phone. Just then Stacy Monroe appeared in the doorway.

"Phone problems?" Stacey, a patrolwoman with a husky voice and warm demeanor, poked her head inside Olga's office. "That happened to me last week"

Olga smiled. "No. No problem. But you're just in time to lend me a hand-literally-with a little experiment. You game?"

Stacey's eyes moved over the photos and files on Olga's desk. Clearly she was intrigued.

"Warner and Smith?" she asked.

The detective nodded, and stepped around from behind her desk, the phone wire now coiled in her hand. "I'm just playing around," she said. "I'm glad you're willing. Why don't you sit here?" She pointed to the edge of the desk. "I'm going to tie you up ""

Stacey let out a nervous laugh and sat down. "Not like I haven't done that before"

Olga gave the officer a slight wink. "Oh really?"

"Kidding! God, you know my life. You know my husband."

"Yes, I've met Frank" She smiled. "Just how did we get on this topic, anyway?"

"I don't know. You were about tie me up ""

"That I was. Put out your arms" Keeping the end of the length in her left hand, Olga started wrapping the beige wire around Stacey's outstretched wrists. Once. Twice. Three times. She stopped and craned her neck to better view the photograph of Shelley Smith's disfigured and decomposed wrists. "Looks like he wrapped around five or six times," she said, almost to herself. "I expect pretty tight, too, but I won't do that to you"

"Good," Stacey said, suppressing a smile. "Something to look forward to later."

Olga played along. "Aren't you just full of surprises?"

The women laughed, cutting the tension of what they were really doing. Olga was mimicking the actions of an unknown killer while poor Stacey who'd just wandered onto her shift had made the mistake of coming by to say hello.

Olga stepped back and admired her technique before unspooling the cording. Stacey stood up and rubbed her wrists. As gentle as Olga had been, the wire still hurt a little. Her wrists were red.

Olga fished a ruler from the top drawer of her desk.

"Almost twenty-four inches," she said.

"Good? Bad?"

By then, Olga had started for the door, scooping up her black saddlebag purse, detective's shield, and a tan Gore-Tex coat that was all about function rather than fashion. It was raining outside.

"Bad, I'd say. Bad for someone who works at Builders' Center."

"Huh?"

"You'll see. Thanks, Stacey." With that, her coat swung over one arm, Olga Morris was gone.