Closer Than Blood

PROLOGUE

Kitsap County, Washington

Fifteen years ago

If Kitsap County’s road engineers had wanted to seek careers as Disney Imagineers, they might have served up Banner Road as proof positive that their designs could deliver the requisite thrill. The ups and downs of the Bactrian-camel-on-’roids roadway were only matched by its highs and lows. The stomach-in-throat feeling that came with motion and speed was delivered there every day without fail. Truth be told, the roller-coaster effect owed more to the topography of that stretch of the south county, which chases up and down the hills as it careens along a nine-mile path just east of Colvos Passage from Sedgwick Road to the Olalla Bay Bridge. At about its midpoint, near the intersection with Fragaria Road, was a spot locals had long dubbed the Banner Jump. The Jump was a patch of asphalt that eggs on the lead-footed, as it literally begs those who traverse it to fly. A quick descent down the hill is followed by a slight rise, and then another drop. Even at the posted speed of 40 miles per hour, a driver and passengers can feel that tickle in the tummy that makes some people queasy and little kids cry for more. For as long as there have been teenagers with something to prove or fathers yearning to give their kids what they’ve wanted, there has been the invitation to push the pedal to the floor. Those with a ’70s TV or film reference flash on the opening moments of Starsky and Hutch or possibly the famed chase sequence of The French Connection. Kids called it “going airborne.” The Banner Jump was a buzz that required no alcohol to deliver the goods. No amusement park fee. Just a not-so-lazy drive past modest homes, equestrian estates with sprawling pastures, and mobiles, to and from Port Orchard. In rural places like South Kitsap County, cheap excitement was frequently the order of the day. The thrill could be as short-lived as a spark. A decade and a half ago, it was also quite deadly.

Mikey Walsh no longer cared what time it was. What day it was. Where he was. It was a week before Thanksgiving, and Mikey had little to be thankful for. He’d been tweaking for a week. Or maybe it was just three days. He’d never be able to swear to it. Not in court. Not anywhere. Crystal meth had been the solution to a problem of his own creation and he knew it. Certainly, it wasn’t his fault that he hurt his back at a construction job site for a new Taco Bell in Bremerton, a half hour to the north. But the fact that he’d tested positive for drugs was. He’d violated his employment contract—and that meant he had no insurance, no compensation. Mikey sat in his double-wide mobile home on a twisty gravel road in South Kitsap and started to contemplate just how it was that he’d be able to get himself out of the debt that threatened to take over his life. As far as he could tell, he had two choices. Cooking methamphetamine or turning his life over to God.

Mikey thought about it long and hard, and in a moment of weakness and despair, he did what any addict would do. He didn’t choose God. Crank, as most in his crowd called it, was like anything illicit. At first a thrill, then a curse. It kept him going when he wanted nothing more than to stop. Mikey was never a handsome figure, but bit by bit meth took every ounce of his youth. His hair thinned. His teeth yellowed. His eyes became languid pools of emptiness. When he wandered the aisles of the all-night Albertsons off Mile Hill Road in Port Orchard, everyone knew he was a tweaker. His empty stare, his bamboo limbs, and the fact that all he ever purchased was beer, chips, salsa, and wings were the giveaways that checkers make casual note of in the ceaselessly boring hours of a late shift. The night everything changed for Mikey, he landed behind the wheel of his 1979 Chevy Silverado with a shudder and a thud. It was almost midnight when he found himself headed down Banner Road toward his mobile in South Kitsap. The roadway was shiny and he considered the possibility of frost. It was only for a moment. Meth impairs its users with a sense of invincibility, bravado, as it sends a steady flow of energy and false signals of well-being into a shell-shocked system. Mikey had been out on a drug run late that night, delivering, selling, and sampling his wares as he went from customer to customer swapping Baggies of drugs for crumpled twenties. He wasn’t tired. Hell, he never got tired. Down the long hill from the intersection at Willock Road, Mikey reached over and turned the knob to the defroster to clear the condensation off the pickup’s cracked windshield. The combination of his watery eyes and the low skirting fog made it hard to see. His gaze returned to the road and he shook his head. It couldn’t be. A girl was waving frantically from the center of the road just at the Banner Jump. Jesus! You dumb shit! I’m going to kill you! His eyes riveted to the figure in the roadway, Mikey slammed on the brakes. Get. Out. Of. My. Way!

The Silverado’s nearly bald tires laid a smelly patch of rubber and slid toward the shoulder. Gravel spit out from under its tires, and in that instant Mikey thought that he was going to meet his Maker. Not in the way that he’d imagined lately. Not in the flash of an explosion in the toolshed where he converted the raw materials—the very flammable raw household materials—that turned a toxic brew of chemicals into money. Making meth was part chemistry class flunkout and part short-order cook. Mikey had assumed that if he died young, it would be in a blaze of glory. A literal blaze. As he skidded to avoid the girl in the road, Mikey did what he hadn’t done in a long time. He said a silent prayer. The sound of branches scraped the side of his cab. The sparkle of broken glass glittered in the wet road like a busted snow globe. All came at him in the strangeness of slow motion. All came at him in the instant that he would later say was the beginning of a turning point. The girl in the center of the road rushed at him. She was pulling at the handle of his door and he sat still and scared.

“We need help. Our friend’s hurt. My sister might be hurt, too.” She was a teenager. Pretty. Scared. Very scared. Her words pelted him between big gulps of air. Mikey thought he detected the odor of beer, but he wasn’t sure if he’d smelled himself or the remnants of a can of Bud that had ricocheted from the drink caddy on the floorboard to the passenger seat. Reflexively, he reached down and tucked the beer under the seat. His priorities were warped by trouble, which followed him like a shadow. Trouble had been his soul mate. Personal disaster, his closest companion. Mikey didn’t need another dose. He didn’t need a DUI. The girl pulled open the driver’s-side door and lunged at him. She was blond with ice blue eyes. Everything about her was stunning—the kind of girl who got noticed in a crowd. The kind of girl he might have asked out on a date if he hadn’t ruined his life. A splash of blood trickled down from her temple, but otherwise she looked fine. Scared, but oh-so-fine. Mikey pulled back, but the seat belt held him in her grasp.

“What are you doing?”

“We need help! You have to help us.” The young man pushed himself from behind the pickup’s steering wheel. He swung his legs to the ground. His vision was fuzzy and he wiped his eyes with his palms as the girl dragged him to a silver ’92 Taurus on its side. Steam or smoke poured from the car’s crunched engine block. It was an instance in which there was no color. Shades of gray, black, silver. The girl’s black shirt was wet and he looked closer at it. Was it water? Blood? More steam erupted from the stomped-beer-can Taurus.

“This is gonna blow!” he said.

“We got to get out of here.”

“Not without my sister, we’re not,” the girl said.

“Hey, I don’t care about your sister. I care about being blown to bits.”

“We need an ambulance. The sheriff!” Mikey loathed the concept of wanting the sheriff in any proximity whatsoever. He had been arrested twice before and, despite the numbing haze of his addiction, he did not want to join the “Third Time’s the Charm” club of tweakers and drunks. He pulled back, but the panicked girl grabbed his wrist.

“Over here,” she said. It was nothing short of a command.

“Hurry! What’s the matter with you?” He looked over and rubbed his eyes as the second girl, hunched over a body, looked up. He shook his head. The second girl locked her eyes on his. He rubbed his eyes. Even in the dim glow of a broken headlight, it was apparent that she was a dead ringer for the first girl. Was he seeing double? “Get moving! You have to help!” What he saw next, he’d never forget. And never speak about. Who would believe a tweaker like him? One of the twins leaned closer to another figure on the roadside, a teenage boy.

“Help,” he said.

“Help me, please.”

Fifteen years later, Detective Kendall Stark looked at the e-mail that she’d printed out on the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department laser printer. It was brief, puzzling, and, the detective had to admit to herself, a little concerning.

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

It was e-mailed to the Class of ’95 reunion website.

“That e-mail you forwarded was interesting,” she said, when she got Adam Canfield on the phone. Adam’s various responsibilities with the reunion committee included managing the website.

“You mean the truth one from the Bible?”

“Yes. Any idea who sent it?”

“Nope. It came from a Kinko’s copy center. Some loser from our class must work there.”

“All right. See you at the next meeting.” She hung up and put the e-mail away. She wondered which one of their classmates had sent it and, more important, just what truth the writer had in mind. Kendall had no idea that she was on the edge of a whirlpool, about to be sucked in.

CHAPTER ONE

Tacoma, Washington

It was close to midnight and Darius Fulton couldn’t sleep. He found himself on the couch watching TV. He wasn’t sure if it was the somewhat suspicious aioli he slathered on leftover crab cakes or the general malaise of his life. He was queasy and uneasy. He scrolled through the satellite guide. Hundreds of channels were listed there, but nothing was on. Nothing good, anyway. It was a cool spring night, the kind that made the inside of a historic North End Tacoma home chill down. Fast. Sometimes it felt like the walls were more colanderlike than solid. Outside, gusts shook the feathery tops of bright green pampas grass in front of his North Junett Street house, partially blocking the neighbors’ view. Oh, yes, the neighbors. Darius had heard them arguing earlier in the evening. Since they’d moved in a year and a half ago, they seemed to never miss the opportunity to seize the attention of everyone within earshot and eyesight. New car. New landscaping. New this. New that. Darius had been divorced for more than a year and knew that his days of keeping up with anyone were long gone. At fifty-five, Darius was going to have to make do with the residual trappings of the life he’d once known. Before the jerk with the Porsche scooped up his wife and left him in the dust. He hoisted himself up and went to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of wine, dropping an ice cube into the slightly amber liquid. He didn’t care if ice cubes in wine was some grand faux pas. Hell, it was Chablis out of a box. He returned to the couch and restlessly flipped through the channels before settling on an Oprah broadcast that celebrated all the things he’d need to do to have his “best life.” My best life was five, no, ten years ago, he thought. Another sip. A guzzle. Ice cubes collided with his teeth. And he hoped that sleep would come right then and there on the couch that he and Greta had picked out together. That was back then. Then, when she still loved him. Then, when he was climbing the corporate ladder with the vigor and grit of a man who knew that he’d have the world in his hands. Always. Forever. He thought he heard a sound at the door, and just like that his pity-party-for-one was over. His ex-wife’s cat, Cyrus, scooted under the dining table in the other room. How he loved that cat. At times, he found himself talking to him as if he were his only friend, a feline confidant. It was as if the silver tabby understood every word. Darius hoped that Greta would allow him one little consolation in the bitterness of their split. He wanted to keep Cyrus.

“What was that, Cyrus? Too late for a visitor,” he said. The cat stayed put, but cocked its head in that knowing way that cats do. When he heard the sound a second time, Darius looked at his mantel clock and determined that he had not misheard. Next, the sound of a fist bumping the rippled windowpane on the front door. The glass is a hundred years old! Be careful! he thought, Greta’s admonition when he washed the windows coming to him. Darius pried himself from the couch.

“Who’d be over at this hour?” he said, turning on the overhead lamp. The glass door was smeared with red. Jesus, what’s happened? He moved closer to get a better view. In that instance when reality is suppressed for a more plausible, a more acceptable scenario, he allowed himself to think that a bird might have lost its way in the dark, hitting the window and splattering blood. Yet at once it was obvious that there was too much red for that. The bloody smear was a big red octopus on the center glass panel. Or the shape of a human hand. The underemployed, cat-loving executive turned the lock and swung the door open. Wilting on the front steps was a woman in her nightgown. It must have been a white nightgown, but now it was red. She was lying there, shivering, making the kind of guttural sounds that people do as they fight for their last breath. He knew her. Tori Connelly lived in the Victorian across the street.

“Good God!” Darius said, dropping to his knees.

“What happened to you?” Tori curled in a defensive ball, lifted her damp head. Her hands were smeared with blood.

“Help,” she said.

“I need an ambulance.”

“Of course,” Darius said, his adrenaline pumping.

“I’ll call for one now.”

“Not for me,” she said.

“My husband. Alex has been shot, too. We’ve both been shot. He needs help. Oh, God. Help me. Help him!”

“What happened?” Darius asked. Her eyes were terror filled.

“A man got in. Our security system is down. He got inside the house to rob us. He shot us. He shot Alex.” Darius bent down and pulled her inside. It was all happening so fast. He was slightly drunk from the crummy wine he’d consumed, and he knew it. He wasn’t sure right then if he should go for his phone—charging in the kitchen—or get something to help stop Tori’s bleeding.

“Are you going to call for help? I need help, too!” Tori said. He slammed the door shut and turned the deadbolt. The SOB who’d shot his neighbor was out there. His heart pounded and he thought of getting his own gun. But Greta had a thing against guns, so the firearm that he’d bought for protection was in a lockbox in the carriage house. He couldn’t get to it, even if he’d been under attack himself.

“Yeah, dialing now,” he said. Tori began crying loudly, loud enough to be heard by the 911 dispatcher. Darius knelt next to her as he gave his address. He looked into the woman’s fearful eyes. Her skin was white. Her eyes glazed over. He pulled a knit throw from the sofa and pressed it into her bloody thigh.

“It’s my neighbor, Tori Connelly. She’s been shot. Her husband Alex Connelly’s been shot, too.” The dispatcher confirmed the address and told Darius to stay calm.

“How’s Ms. Connelly doing?”

“Not great,” he said, his heart racing toward what he was sure would be a heart attack.

“What’s her color? Can she speak?”

“She’s pale, and, yes, she can talk. Please get someone here fast,” he said.

“Are you applying pressure to the wound?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m doing my best.”

“They’re on the way. Stay with me,” the dispatcher said.

“Stay with me,” Tori echoed.

“Please stay with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Darius said, gently touching her shoulder.

“Hang on. You’ll be fine.” He wasn’t sure if he was unintentionally lying or hoping for the best. With the spatter of blood drenching her nightgown, it was hard to say just what her chances were.

CHAPTER TWO

Seattle, Washington

Lainie O’Neal awoke as the clock app on her iPhone rolled like an old-school digital alarm clock to 3:00 A.M. She drew in a breath and held it a moment before exhaling. It was an exercise that was supposed to return her to slumber. Once more. Please. Her eyes were wide open and the pinprick of light coming from the slit in the window shade found her like a searchlight’s beam. Spring rain pelted the window. Why now? Why can’t I sleep? She took another breath. Something felt wrong. Lainie just couldn’t get comfortable. She flipped the pillow over and over, on the hunt for the cool side. As if that would matter. Lainie shut her eyes with a decided force, almost a wincing action, which she knew was more than needed. Although the bedroom was chilly, she kicked her covers to the floor. Whenever the first indication of insomnia hit her, as it had the night before, a twinge of panic came with it. She was never sure if the dreaded sleeplessness would last a night or a week. Maybe longer? She’d been through counseling. She’d seen a doctor. In fact, she’d seen two. Nothing worked. She sat up and threw her legs over the edge of the bed. She cradled her face in her hands. Lainie knew the reason for her insomnia, and no counselor or doctor could quite grasp what was so obvious to her. For the past several days, she’d been thinking about Tori. More than usual. It was as if her twin sister wouldn’t let her sleep. It was as if the twin she hadn’t seen for years had her hand on her shoulders, shaking Lainie as she tried to fall toward that desperate and dark space. I’m not going to let you. You better listen to me. She went to the medicine cabinet, took an Ambien, and looked inside the pill bottle. Only one more. She checked the date. She had a week more on the prescription. She’d have to resort to an over-the-counter sleep aid to get her through refill time. She drank some water and set down the paper cup. The mirror swung shut, and the haggard face that met her gaze belonged to another. Tori. She shook her head, turned away, and looked back at the mirror. She blinked. It was her own face. Lainie steadied herself a moment. Me. She padded back to her tousled bed, hoping that the pill would work its magic and send her to the restful place she needed. And not, she prayed, to the nightmares that visited her all too often. Ten minutes later, the lid of darkness shut over her supine body.

Setting the stage was as crucial as it was easy. All one had to do was think like a crime scene investigator or a cop. Maybe a little like a nosy mother-in-law. The woman pondering that scenario had had a few of those to contend with, too. Ultimately, she knew that no detail was too frivolous. Even the mundane had to be considered, very carefully. The point of setting the stage was to ensure that she was in the final act. The act that had her getting everything she ever wanted. The plasma screen over the fireplace was playing The O’Reilly Factor. The man glued to the TV loved the political commentator’s take on politics, business, and culture. He even drank from a “Culture Warrior” ceramic mug. The woman considered the TV analyst an insufferable blowhard. A chime from a grandfather clock sounded. The woman felt the chill of the air from an open window as she stood nude behind the sofa.

“Babe, how about a piece of that pie?” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen.

“Right here,” she said. Yet there was no pie. She put the barrel of the pistol to the back of his head and fired. Blood spurted like from a stomped-on ketchup packet. Specks of red dotted her glove-covered arm. There was likely more blood than she could see with the naked eye, but that was fine. She knew how to handle it. She’d planned for it. He gurgled a little, but it wasn’t the sound of a man fighting for his life. That was over. It was the sound of air oozing from his trachea. He slumped over. She made her way to the shower, which was already running. She pulled off the glove and set it inside a trash can lined with plastic. The water was ice cold by then. Even for her, it had taken considerable effort to summon the nerves to do what she had wanted to do. Gunfire was messy. Blowback is hell. Spatter matters. And only time will tell. It was a kind of verse that she’d conjured that moment, and she allowed a smile to cross her lips as the icy water poured over her. She looked down at her legs, long, lovely. Flawless. But not for long. The water had gone from crimson to pink to clear, swirling down the drain between her painted toes. She turned off the shower and reached for a towel. As she patted her face dry she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Still lovely. Still rich. Even more so at that very moment than she’d ever been in her life. She poked her arms through the sleeves of a sheer white nightgown and let the filmy fabric tumble down her body. This was part of setting the stage. Her augmented breasts—not freakishly so, just enough to arouse a man when she needed to—would protrude only slightly. She’d act modest and embarrassed, but if the cops on the scene were under fifty, they’d be looking where they shouldn’t. A distraction. One of many. She poured a plastic cup of bleach down the shower drain and ran the water while she counted to ten. Taking the trash can liner that held the glove and the empty plastic bleach cup nestled inside, she hurried back into the living room and surveyed the scene. Exactly seven minutes had passed since she pulled the trigger, propelling the slug into her unsuspecting . . . pie-wanting . . . TV-WATCHING . . . husband. It was important to get on with it. The pool of blood around his head would congeal, and her story would not seem so plausible. She knocked the contents atop the coffee table to the floor. Using her hip, she pushed over a potted button fern. A trickle of black soil scattered over the rug. A drawer in a sideboard was pulled to the floor. Knives fell like gleaming Pixy Stix. It looked like a struggle. Not much of one, but one that could have taken place in the moments that she’d later describe. Next, she put on a second rubber kitchen glove—the long kind that ran from fingertips to elbow—and picked up the gun. She was grateful for all the things that money could buy just then. Pilates. Yoga. Tai chi. She’d taken all those courses with the other rich bitches. They never accepted her, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t there to get to know them. She was there to limber up. She bent down and twisted her shoulder as she pointed the gun at her leg and fired. She didn’t cry out. Instead, she bit her lip and started toward the door. She was no longer concerned about blood and where it fell. In the throes of her imagined escape, there could be blood anywhere. His or hers. She left the door open, and started to pick up the pace by the koi pond that had been a labor of love, apparently, of the previous owners. She didn’t love anything or anyone. Except, of course, a brimming bank account. She bent down, her nightgown now more red than white. She’d missed her femoral artery, of course. But she hadn’t expected that much blood. Good thing Darius is still up, she thought, looking up the walkway of the property across the street. The violet light of a TV slashed through the manicured foliage framing the window. She tucked the gun into the plastic bag, dropped in a three-pound lead weight, and deposited all of it between lily pads in the pond. She dropped the bag containing the gloves into the storm drain on the street—it was a risk, but one that she’d take. Each time she moved her leg, she let out a yelp. Then a scream. Finally she turned on the tears. One notch at a time. She caught a glimpse of a figure between the house and the hedge, and she smiled.

Lainie’s eyes fluttered, struggling to open, weary slits reacting to light they wanted to avoid. She looked at her phone. It was now 4:00 A.M. She felt the chill of the early morning air and pulled up the sheet. Groggy from the pill, she had a million things to do in the morning ... and she was going to look like hell. She reviewed her list as she tried to find her way back to slumber. Just fifteen minutes more. Only fifteen. There was an interview to conduct for an article she was writing for a blog, an overdue errand to the dry cleaner, and a ferry ride over to meet with the high school class reunion committee in Port Orchard. She exhaled, closed her eyes. The dream shook her. They always did. Dark. Violent. Specific and ambiguous at the same time. They always led back to thoughts of her sister. Her heart pounded. She knew her dream had been a nightmare, but there was no way to analyze what it might have meant. If, that is, she was still the kind of woman who would do that sort of thing. She could not recall much about it . . . except the gun, the figure running . . . and the face that was hers when she looked in the mirror.

CHAPTER THREE

Tacoma

Police and ambulance sirens serve to warn others that danger is near. Stay away. Move aside. Let us through. Get the F out of here! In truth, the shriek of the siren only ensures that people will congregate toward the commotion. A siren is like a rising curtain and the switch on the panel of stage lights. There is no stopping the casual onlooker when the siren screams. People can’t help themselves. Everyone wants to see what the fuss is all about. Everyone wants to see the show. It was surely that way that cool spring night in Tacoma when Tori Connelly and her bloody nightgown arrived on the front porch of Darius Fulton’s North Junett Street home. Without waiting for a second, Darius reacted with the instinct that comes with the injection of adrenaline into the bloodstream. He comforted her and dialed the police, who in turn called the paramedics. Darius had flipped the switch. Woman injured. Shot. Bloody. Hurry.

“When will help get here?” Tori had asked over and over. She’d only been in his house five minutes. If that. But she was slipping away.

“Hold on,” Darius said, cradling the limp Tori in his arms, now on the sofa.

“I hear help now,” he said, speaking to the 911 dispatcher as much as to the now nearly unconscious woman who had bled all over his sofa.

“You can hang up,” the dispatcher said.

“They’re in front of the house now.” Darius snapped his phone shut, slid a pillow from the sofa under the woman’s head, and flung open the door as a team of young, jacked-up, soul-patched paramedics swept inside.

“Hurry,” he said.

“She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“What’s her name?” asked a young man with a port-wine stain crawling from under his bright white T-shirt collar.

“Tori Connelly. She says her husband’s been shot, too. You got to get over there. Across the street. There’s a madman out there somewhere.”

“Already on it, sir,” he said, as two other paramedics ran her vitals. Darius stepped back to give them room.

“I hope she’s going to be okay. I didn’t know how to stop the bleeding.”

“You did fine,” the first paramedic said.

“Wound looks worse than it is.” The second paramedic nodded.

“Color’s not so good, but she’s stable. Let’s transport her now.” Tori murmured something unintelligible as they rolled her out the door into the strobe of the aid cars and police.

“Take care,” Darius said. In less than two minutes, the living room that had been the scene of the unthinkable was empty. Drops of blood still freckled the floor, the sofa, and the pillow that Darius had offered Tori. The TV droned with an infomercial for a chamois. Adrenaline still routed through Darius’s veins, but with less intensity. It had gone from chaos to quiet. A light switched off. He stood in the foyer facing a pair of cops, one middle-aged, one younger. Both rightly grim-faced. As they prompted him for details, Darius Fulton gave a statement about what had occurred. How he’d heard the knock, saw the terror on Tori’s face, and the story she’d conveyed about the intruder.

“Did she say anything about the man who shot her?”

“No. Just that he shot her husband, too.” The younger cop noted the info on a pad.

“Who was shot first?” Darius didn’t know and said so.

“Did she say how it was that she was able to escape?” Darius shook his head.

“No. I just assumed that she might have startled the intruder and was able to get out of the house.”

“Things like this just don’t happen around here,” he said. The older cop shook his head knowingly.

“Maybe not on this street,” he said.

“But, yeah, this kind of stuff happens.” Not usually around here.

“No, not here. Yeah, I mean, the Hilltop is ten blocks away, but this isn’t there.” The meaning was clear and not without merit. The Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma was the center of most of the city’s violent crime. While things had improved somewhat due to a consortium of police and community groups who sought to clean it up, it was still rough. Indeed, it was a world away from this tony neighborhood. This was a street more known for dinner parties, book club meetings, and wine tastings. It had always been so. Tacoma’s North End had once been the address of the most notable names in Northwest history, chief among them the Weyerhaeuser family. The lumber baron’s stately mansion was but a couple of blocks from North Junett.

Edmund Kaminski, a Northwest native who lived in nearby Spanaway because on a detective’s salary he couldn’t afford rent in Tacoma’s better neighborhoods, was on his way to investigate. He gave a quick check to his shirt collar and tie in the rearview mirror. Looking sharp. Kaminski had just turned the big 4-0. He’d taken up running to shed what his teenage daughter, Lindsey, called his “middle jiggle.”

“Better a middle jiggle than a full-fledged spare tire,” he playfully shot back, though Lindsey’s words stung a little—in the way that truth frequently does.

“I don’t know, Dad. You don’t watch it, you’ll be shopping for clothes at Sears automotive.” The extra poundage was a symptom of a life off track. He knew it. Lindsey knew it. He’d found solace in long runs along the Thea Foss Waterway, with its views of Commencement Bay and Mount Rainier. Time to think. Time to wonder if he’d made any mistakes that could have altered the dissolution of his marriage to Maria. She’d given him the old “it isn’t you, it’s me” song and dance, and it just didn’t sit right. It didn’t give him a chance to play the role of the fixer. Even so, he doubted if he could make her love him if she no longer did. He threw himself into his work while trying to negotiate the realities of being a Weekend Dad. On Saturdays he’d pick up Lindsey and they’d spend the day doing something fun together. Lately that meant a lot of time roaming the shimmering halls of Tacoma’s Museum of Glass. Seattle Mariner games were no longer as much a draw for a girl who’d had her nose and eyebrow pierced and dyed her tawny brown locks a fireman’s-boot black. Lindsey loved her dad, but she was changing. The notion of all of that crushed him. He popped a Rolaid into his mouth and immediately bit down. Detective Kaminski never waited for anything. Not even for an antacid to dissolve. He turned down a side street, and a bag of yard waste that had rolled from the curb acted like a speed bump, reminding him to slow down a little. Always in a hurry. While Kaminski didn’t know the specific house that had been referenced in the 911 call that evening, he surely knew the neighborhood. Lindsey had dragged him there when she was obsessed with actor Heath Ledger. The actor had filmed Ten Things I Hate About You in Tacoma, and a house on North Junett had been the home of his character’s love interest, played by Julia Stiles in the film.

“Heath didn’t really want to change Julia,” Lindsey said as they stood in front of the three-story white bungalow that had been featured in the movie.

“He just wanted her to be, you know, herself. Changing someone never works.”

“Really,” he said, looking at Lindsey, pondering what it felt like when she blew her pierced nose.

“Yeah, changing someone isn’t love, Dad.” Kaminski considered a hidden agenda wrapped up in his daughter’s words. Was this something that Maria had said about him? Had he really tried to control her? Was that what she’d meant by it not being about him, but her? That she could no longer take being the perfect wife, the detective’s wife? “I can’t imagine, honey,” he said. Lindsey looked at him and he sized up her expression. Like her mother, Lindsey was hard to read. Harder every day. He turned down Junett and went just past the house used in the movie. Every light was on, and the place looked like it was floating above a perfectly coiffed front lawn. A Mercedes and a Lexus were parked in the driveway. Living large in Grit City, he thought, his mind flashing to his one-bedroom condo in Spanaway that could be swallowed up in one gulp by the parlor of any home on this grand street. It wasn’t hard to find the Victorian where the crime had occurred. It was a birthday cake explosion that screamed to the world to pay attention to its gingerbread curlicues and overwrought paint color scheme. That night, the bouncing red and blue lights of the police and ambulances in front of the carriage house tinted the already garish colors akin to a Tim Burton fantasy. How that house could coexist across the street from the impeccable lines of the more simple and elegant bungalows and brick Tudors was a colossal mystery. Though it clearly was not the biggest mystery on the street at that moment. Kaminski parked his black Toyota Prius and approached a couple of blues who’d secured the scene. One a slightly haggard veteran and the other an eager beaver.

“Guys,” he said.

“Evening, Ed,” said Tracy Smart, the more seasoned of the two.

“The female vic in there?” Kaminski indicated the ambulance as the door closed and the driver stepped inside. Tracy shook his head.

“She’s en route to the ER.”

“Going to be okay?”

“That’s what I hear,” said the younger cop, a kid with an earnest demeanor that reminded Kaminski what it was like to be fresh out of the academy. The top-of-the-class syndrome , he thought. The eager beaver’s need to raise a hand, make a comment, just to be sure to be a part of the conversation.

“Thanks, Tracy . . . and . . .” He looked at the kid.

“Officer Caswell.” Kaminski grinned.

“Yes, officer. You got a first name?”

“Robert,” he said, nodding, like he was confirming some major mystery of life. Kaminski nodded back and looked up over the lawn at the front door of the house.

“Got it.” Not Bob. Not Rob. But Robert.

“Call me Detective,” he said over his shoulder, stopping a beat to look up and down the block as he made his way up the painted gray steps. He nodded at another officer by the door.

“House is secure?” he said. The officer nodded.

“Yeah, neighborhood canvass at work, too.” Kaminski pulled the knob and stepped inside. The foyer was grand, museum-entryway grand. The floor was burnished oak topped with a powder blue and gold oriental rug, its pile so thick that the soles of his shoes nearly levitated as he walked to the sitting room. The coffered ceiling seemed a mile overhead. He looked up; pale blue insets filled the voids between dark oak mullions. The staircase was curved, sweeping from the first floor to the second like an anaconda. A series of portraits artfully illuminated by unobtrusive spotlights added to the museum vibe. Not my taste, he thought. But who knows what a man will do with the dough if he has too much? He glanced in the direction of the pocket doors, pulled open to reveal the activity of the murder scene. The smell of blood and gunpowder was unmistakable. Sweet and smoky. Not like barbecue, of course, but more like the scent of a Fourth of July picnic. A Tiffany fixture overhead sprayed gold light from its mushroom shades; Kaminski could see the coroner and assistants in clean suits, assuring that whatever evidence would be gathered from the deceased would not be anything they brought in from the outside. There was never a time when that procedure didn’t make sense, but it didn’t become official until a case a dozen years before in which a defendant claimed chain-of-custody issues when a detective’s Persian cat’s fur was discovered on the corpse. If a person visiting an open house was required to wear disposable booties, then no one should argue the need for initial criminal responders to suit up. Kaminski caught the attention of forensics specialist Cal Herzog, hunched over the area by the sofa where the body had been found. Cal, a balding man of about fifty, who began working in the forensics unit at the Tacoma Police Department after a reasonably distinguished career in the military, was crouched over the dead man.

“Evening, Cal.”

“Just in time. Medical examiner’s about ready to bag him,” Cal said. Kaminski stepped closer.

“Let me have a look.”

“Point-blank,” Cal said, indicating the wound on the back of Alex Connelly’s head. The place of entry for the bullet was like a bloody borehole that cut through the man’s skull and into his brain. Death, no doubt, was instantaneous. Alex Connelly, sitting in his robe, facing the television, might not even have had an inkling that the gun was going to fire.

“SOB didn’t struggle,” Cal said.

“Didn’t even know this was going to happen.” Kaminski crouched behind the camelback sofa and looked up at the TV over the mantel.

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

“Pretty good reflection off that plasma. Almost like a mirror.” Cal looked up. The TV had been on when the blues arrived and secured the scene, but it had been loud and one of the cops shut it off. Kaminski fixed his eyes on the victim. He wore a blue and gold robe. It was a flimsy, silky fabric that he wouldn’t be caught dead in. Which, of course, Alex Connelly had just been. He had slippers on his feet. Nothing else.

“What does the vic do for a living?”

“Works for an investment firm downtown. About middle on the high-up scale, if you ask me. You know, makes enough dough for a lease on this place, but not enough to buy it.”

“Lexus, actually a his and hers, in the garage, er, carriage house,” one of the cops said, correcting himself.

“Not a Porsche.”

“Almost feel sorry for him,” Kaminski said.

“You know, not being able to get a Porsche.” It took three men to move the body to the split-open bag. In doing so, the robe slipped to reveal the victim’s chest. A tattoo of an eagle with artillery and olive branches in its talons soared over his right pec, which, given his age, was well defined.

“Nice ink,” Kaminski said.

“Looks like navy.” While the techs and cops worked together to process the scene for evidence, Kaminski took a tour of the house. It was late by then, but the place seemed as if it had been ready for a Realtor’s open house. Nothing was out of place. The kitchen, small by the standards of what modern people wanted, was nicely redone to include the niceties that big-bucked folks wanted. A Sub-Zero refrigerator was clad in white cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen. A Viking range was another giveaway that the place had been redone. Nothing was out of place on the plane of soapstone that served as the counter. Upstairs, Kaminski entered the master bedroom. A Rice bed that in someone else’s house would have been ridiculously oversize commanded the large room. The bed had been turned down. All perfect. The dead guy was in a silky robe and slippers. Where were his clothes? The bathroom was also show-ready. He went inside and a flash of red caught his eye. On a hook on the back of the door, a woman’s teddy. Nice, he thought. As he moved the door, the fabric fluttered, like a red flag. He opened the shower door and caught a whiff of cleaner. The marble surface was slick, dripping wet. Cal appeared in the doorway.

“Everything diagrammed, photographed. ME is taking the body now. Some blood in the hallway, fair amount of spatter on the wall behind the couch. We’re dusting everything. Place is pretty clean. Must have a maid.”

“All right. I’m going to the hospital to see Mrs. Connelly.”

“Techs are there now.”

“Gunshot residue?”

“Hands have been swabbed.” Kaminski nodded.

“Prelim?”

“Clean.” The two started down the stairs as the body was being carried out, bagged and tagged, on a gurney. A breeze from Commencement Bay filled the air with marine smells, a welcome reprieve from the odor of blood and gunfire.

“She talk?”

“Not on the way to St. Joe’s. Didn’t say a word. Told the neighbor that a guy broke in, shot her and her old man. Nobody’s seen anything to approximate a break-in.”

“Security system?” Cal watched the ambulance doors as they closed on Alex Connelly.

“Looks like it was turned off,” he said. The sirens started and about ten onlookers started to head back to their homes.

“Show over,” Kaminski said.

“At least for now. I’m going to the hospital.”

Most who inhabit such a fine street as North Junett would consider the most dominating piece of artwork that hung in the Connelly living room as something incongruent with the home’s stature or the place in society that its inhabitants surely held. It was a bourgeois depiction of a stone cottage in the midst of a snowstorm. The artist, Thomas Kinkade, was known for a popular, albeit kitschy, style that stoked memories of a long-ago time when skaters wore fuzzy earmuffs and free-flowing scarves as they skimmed over the surface of a frozen pond. This Kinkade print on canvas was called Evening Glow. Besides its stone cottage, it featured an illuminated gas lamp that appeared to emit an orange red glow. In fact, such a feature was the hallmark of Kinkade’s paintings. He was, his aficionados insisted, “not an artist, but a painter of light.” None of the men and women from the Tacoma Police and the Pierce County Coroner’s offices at the crime scene paid the lush accoutrements of the Connelly household much mind as they went about tagging and bagging the victim and the assorted evidence they’d need to run through the lab. If they’d have looked closer, they would have noticed that Thomas Kinkade’s ability to trick the eye with illumination techniques was in better-than-average form. The light on the top of the lamp standard twinkled. As it did so, the discourse among the interlopers on the scene continued.

“What do you make of the lady of the house?” a cop asked a forensics tech.

“Meaning?” a woman’s voice answered.

“A lot younger than the husband,” the man’s voice said.

“Better looking, too.” The same woman’s voice responded.

“I guess.”

“I’ll tell you what I guess,” the man said.

“I guess that when they do a GSR test on the missus they’ll find that she was the shooter. Honestly, the wound on her leg was a graze. Self-inflicted. Betcha a beer.”

“I don’t know,” the woman said.

“I don’t like beer.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Kitsap County

The Lord’s Grace Community Church was a converted metal Quonset hut in Kingston, Washington, that had once been used to store floral greens for a long-since-closed brush-cutting operation. The structure was so close to the edge of the road, it had been the frequent and unfortunate recipient of more than one car’s broadside. In fact, a makeshift memorial of a cross marked the location, adorned with faded photos kept mostly dry inside Ziploc bags, a red plastic lei, and stenciled letters that read C-A-N-D-Y. The tribute’s central feature—the cross—was so solid and substantial that a passerby unfamiliar with the events might assume that the cross belonged to the church. It had been seven years since Candy Turner slid on the pavement and crashed her cherry red ’69 El Camino pickup truck. Locals who didn’t attend there called it the Candy Church, the home of “My Sweet Lord.” Inside, Pastor Mike Walsh got on his knees and looked up at the big Douglas-fir cross. He’d been contacted weeks ago and the conversation stayed with him. Like a leaky pipe tucked away in the ceiling, quietly, steadily doing damage. It was a woman, a crying woman, who’d contacted him. She recalled a traffic accident that he’d happened upon a decade and a half ago.

“You could have told the truth,” she said.

“But you didn’t.”

“I was scared. I wasn’t the man that I am now.”

“I’m sure the passage of time has made you a better person.”

“A better person, but not a perfect one,” he said. There was a short pause before the woman made her point.

“It is never too late to do what’s right.” Pastor Mike couldn’t help but agree.

“But I made a promise,” he said.

“That was a long time ago. Things change. The truth, Mikey. The truth is all that matters.” It was a troubling, haunting conversation, as if the woman on the other end of the line was merely testing his resolve. He wondered if she’d taken Jesus into her heart so that she’d be free of what had happened. Forgiveness was so powerful. He prayed for guidance and the strength to do what was right. He remembered what happened that night.

As he knelt down to help the girl who had been driving, he watched the other one hurry over to where the boy was sprawled out on the gravel. He was saying something to her, though Mikey couldn’t hear a word of it. He heard the sirens coming from the end of Banner, a good four minutes away. The girl standing over the boy was yelling at him.

“I hate you. I wish I’d never met you,” she said.

“Help me,” said the girl in his arms.

“Help my sister. My boyfriend.” Mikey tried to soothe her. His brain was fried and it was so hard to concentrate on what was happening. The smoke. The headlights still on, punching through the blackness of the night. The sirens getting louder and louder.

“They’re okay.”

“It’s all my fault,” she said. He patted her hand.

“It was an accident. You were probably going too fast for the Jump. It happens.”

“Are you sure they are okay?” He looked over at the other girl. She was yelling at the boy.

“Goddamn you! I hate you!” What he saw next would haunt him forever. The other girl clenched her hands around the boy’s neck.

“You’re a piece of shit, Jason!”

“What’s happening?” the first girl said.

“I don’t know. Nothing!” The lights of the sirens came down the hill like fireflies on steroids. He looked over and the boy had stopped moving. The other girl’s eyes locked on Mikey’s and she came toward him.

“You say anything and you’re dead. I’ll make sure the sheriff blames you for all of this. That you crossed the center line and forced us into the ditch.”

“You’re a crazy little bitch,” he said.

“I’ve seen you around. You’re Mikey Walsh. You’re trailer trash, a drug addict. A loser. No one would ever believe you over me.” The girl went over to her twin, leaned close to her ear, and whispered something. A moment later, a deputy sheriff and the commotion that comes with the sirens and lights arrived.

It was late evening and the silhouette of Blake Island was outlined by a halo of lights from Seattle on the other side of Puget Sound. Kendall tightened her frame to stay warm as she sat on the old madrona stump with a glass of wine. She’d been quiet since coming home from the sheriff’s office. In fact, she’d been quiet the last few days. Steven brought the bottle and a glass outside in search of his wife. It was a cool night, but late spring in the Northwest guaranteed such weather. A sweater and a blanket were kept in a storage bin by the back door.

“I haven’t seen you like this in a long time,” he said. Kendall looked up and smiled.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m not good company.”

“You’re always good company, honey. But sometimes you’re very quiet company. What’s going on with you? Is it the case?” The case. Those words were often volleyed among the spouses of those in law enforcement when they tried to dig into the source of whatever it was that had stolen all the attention. Steven didn’t mean it in that way, of course. He’d long accepted that Kendall had a purpose in life nearly as great as mother and wife—putting away monsters so they’d never hurt or kill again. It was that simple. It didn’t matter one bit if the victim was a child, an old man, a person of wealth or not. All were equal in her mind. He sat next to her and poured himself a glass.

“Want more?” He extended the bottle and Kendall nodded.

“I’m trying to sort things out.”

“Can I help?”

“Not really.” She wanted to say something more; she wanted to tell her husband that she was wrapped in lead-lined clothing and she could barely breathe. But she didn’t. She just couldn’t.

“Make a wish,” he said, looking at the quilt of stars over the inky-black island.

“A falling star.” Kendall looked skyward and did just that. She wished that she didn’t have to say anything to Steven, ever. Not the truth. It just hurt too much.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kitsap County

Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark looked at the text message on her cell phone. It was from Adam Canfield and marked urgent. She pondered if it was something about the fifteen-year high school reunion that, in the scheme of things, was anything but urgent. Annoying, yes. Urgent? Only to those with something to prove. Her short blond hair was damp from a morning towel-dry as she stood in the kitchen of her Harper, Washington, home and considered the rest of her morning. There had not been any major cases in a while, at least none that hadn’t already wound their way from investigation to the prosecutor’s office. There was a lull in Kitsap County, and that alone made her a little nervous. Kendall Stark believed in the concept of calm before the storm. Every criminal case started that way. From nothing to something. With a gunshot. A knife. An electric cord wrapped around the neck. Kendall’s phone buzzed again. She sipped coffee and listened to the radio as it recounted more news about a stumbling economy, a soggy spring, and a shooting in Tacoma. She opened the first message:

CHK OUT PAPER. TORI O SHOT. HUSBAND DEAD. L8R.

Then the second. Adam had a penchant for drama and never used one exclamation mark when several would do.

Can u believe it?!!!!

Kendall couldn’t, or rather didn’t want to. Tori O’Neal had been a student at South Kitsap High. Her sister, Lainie, was on the reunion committee, along with Adam, Kendall, and Penny Salazar. No one—not even her sister—had heard from Tori in years. Her name was the proverbial “blast from the past,” and, in Tori’s case, a cold blast indeed. I hope Lainie’s all right. This is the last thing she needs, Kendall thought as she retrieved the paper from a stack ready for the recycling center on Burley-Olalla Road. Her husband, Steven, hadn’t gone running that morning, and that meant that the morning’s edition hadn’t been picked up from the tube at the end of the driveway. Tori O’Neal? Shot? Dead husband? She unfolded the paper and scanned for the story. The article was tucked near the bottom right-hand corner next to articles about toxic rainwater runoff in Commencement Bay and a tragic accident involving a church bus and a semi in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Man Dies in North Tacoma Shooting, Wife Injured

An intruder shot a North Tacoma couple in their home early this morning. Police are unsure if it was a home invasion or a robbery gone wrong. The man, an executive with an investment firm, died at the scene. The woman was transported to St. Joseph Medical Center for treatment.

“We’re still piecing together last night’s events,” Sgt. Tammy Lewis said. She cited privacy laws when declining to provide the prognosis for the woman.

“There did not appear to be much of a struggle so we don’t consider this a home invasion.” Lewis’s remark referred to several cases involving intruders who held their victims captive. The most recent case pending involved a trio of young people who’d murdered and tortured victims they’d met through Craigslist when they feigned interest in purchasing jewelry or other items.

“We can’t say anything about her condition other than to say she was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center for treatment. She was admitted sometime after midnight.”

The article’s abbreviated content was more a reflection of the timing of the shooting than what had actually occurred at the residence and who the victims had been. If it had taken place earlier in the day—and provided there were decent photos—it easily would have found itself above the fold on the front page of the News Tribune. Cutbacks at the News Tribune and other papers had shifted more editorial effort to the electronic side of the news operation. Frequent updates, blog entries, and even video supplied by “mojos,” or mobile journalists, would be featured there. Partly because her husband was in the media business, working for a hunting and fishing magazine, the Starks still subscribed to print editions of three newspapers: the Kitsap Sun, the Port Orchard Lighthouse , and the Tacoma News Tribune. She set the paper aside and opened her laptop on the kitchen table and clicked over to the web page, where the update included the victim’s name, Alex Connelly. There was also a photo. He was a handsome man with a square jaw and dark hair that he wore combed straight back. His eyes were intense and very blue. Piercing blue eyes, even in a photograph. The image appeared to be a business portrait. In the casualness of the Pacific Northwest, a suit and tie were seldom worn unless it was for work or a wedding. In the comments section someone had posted:

RIP, Alex. You were a great guy. It was an honor to serve with you.

Although the paper said he was an executive with an investment firm, it was clear that Kendall’s first impression was right on the money. She instantly saw the unmistakable deliberateness that came with a military background. A military man’s eyes never failed to telegraph directness. He looked straight at the camera. Unblinking. Sure. Confident. She wondered where Tori had met him. Had it been across Port Orchard’s Sinclair Inlet in Bremerton where the navy decommissioned old battleships and aircraft carriers? Or maybe Fort Lewis south of Tacoma? That was army. Or McChord Air Force Base right next door? More than anything, she thought about Tori. How was it that she was able to escape when her husband was likely trained in self-defense? It was close to 8:30 and she needed to finish drying her hair and scoot out the door to work, a ten-minute drive away. That it had been a slow spring, crime-wise, was just as well. She wasn’t the kind of cop who’d signed on because she was an adrenaline junkie. She knew that type and felt they’d missed the whole point of law enforcement.

“We’re here to help people, not ride the wave of others’ misfortune,” she once told her frequent partner in investigations, Josh Anderson.

“Do you really need to smile so much at a scene?” Kendall went outside to the patio, following the sound of her husband and son in the yard. She glanced at the stump of the madrona that had once arched over the backyard with its distinctive red-and-green striated bark and canopy of waxy green leaves. It had silvered in the weather of the past couple of seasons, and a series of fissures ran from the center of the cut outward, like spokes on the wheel of an old ten-speed bicycle. The cool air from Yukon Harbor blew against her face and she touched her damp hair, wondering if she’d be able to avoid the blow dryer and just tousle it with her fingertips. It was short and she could get away with that technique most days. She was still young and attractive, but time was creeping at her and she knew that fingertip hairstyling and a light swipe of lip gloss was no longer a wise go-to regimen for the morning. She watched Steven and their nine-year-old son, Cody, burn deadfall in a fire pit on the edge of the yard. For most, it would have been too early in the morning for such an endeavor. But not for those two. Father and son were early risers. Kendall was the opposite—the last one out of bed on a Saturday morning. The one to turn out the lights of the house in the evening. The one to check the door locks and the security of the windows. A smile broke out over her face as she caught her son’s gaze. Cody was quiet, leaving the conversation to his father. As always.

“Let’s get that bunch of branches from over there, son. Let’s get this thing going good.” Kendall moved across the wet grass.

“Isn’t there a burn ban?” she said, half kidding.

“You going to arrest us?” Steven said, winking at his son. Cody remained mute, but the flicker in his eyes indicated he’d understood the irony of his dad’s comment.

“I might have to,” she said. Steven poked the fire and put out his hand to push Cody back a step.

“Full plate today?”

“Barring a catastrophe with the committee at lunch, it won’t be a long day,” Kendall said. The reunion was a week from Saturday at the Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton. As far as Kendall was concerned, the next nine days couldn’t pass quickly enough.

“We’ve got it handled, babe,” Steven said, giving her a short kiss.

“You smell like smoke,” she said. Steven grinned.

“You smell beautiful.” Cody set a nest of grapevines at the edge of the fire pit.

“Be careful, Cody.” The boy nodded and Kendall kissed him. Steven patted their son on the shoulder.

“He’s good.” Cody’s autism was fickle, cruelly so. Sometimes he’d speak plainly, even spontaneously. Not that day. Kendall climbed into her white SUV and started to back down the driveway, Cody and Steven looking smaller and smaller as she pulled away. She hadn’t mentioned to Steven what she’d read about Tori and she knew the reason why. Tori was connected to a part of her past that she’d just as soon never revisit. She knew she’d have to say something eventually. Once it broke that their old high school friend was the wife of the murder victim, Tori’s name would surely find its way to the pages of the Lighthouse, the local paper. She could feel her heart rate quicken and willed herself to relax. This was a stressor she didn’t need. She thought of a note on the back of a card that had come through the mail when the save-the-date and early head count cards went out six months prior. It too had bothered her. It made her a little paranoid. She hated even admitting to that kind of feeling. It was only eleven words.

I KNOW EVERYTHING. SEE YOU THERE. IT’LL BE LIKE OLD TIMES.

Just what did the sender mean? And to which committee member had it been directed? Kendall wasn’t sure if the card was a threat or just someone’s idea of a joke. She didn’t tell anyone—not Sheriff McCray, not Josh, not even Steven—that she’d taken the card to the crime lab and processed it herself. No fingerprints but her own. No postmark. No identifier whatsoever. Later, she pored through the stack of cards to see if it had come in an envelope that she’d misplaced somehow, but she came up empty handed. She wondered how that card got to her if it hadn’t been mailed. She also wondered if it was related to the Kinko’s e-mail.

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

Earlier that same morning, a very tired Lainie O’Neal stared at the void of her computer screen. French roast coffee perfumed the confines of her home office, the second bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment she’d rented for five years on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. She watched her Siamese fighting fish, Rusty, blow bubbles on the surface of the brandy snifter that was his home. It was just before 7:00 A.M., and she had time to polish a chapter of a book that she’d been working on—with renewed vigor—since the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” She’d dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a “content provider” for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer sought. Everything from how many mint sprigs and limes should be muddled in a mojito to the best fish tacos in Los Cabos. She hated the whole lot of what she was doing, but reporters like her had been shoved out the door in an age that no longer seemed to value context, nuance, and depth. Everything was free, and fast. Even the news. Her cell phone rang and her eyes darted to the tiny screen, but she did not recognize the number. It was too early for a source to phone. Neither was it the number for one of the other reporters who’d regularly called to commiserate about their bleak futures in a post-newspaper world. A moment later, the caller tried a second time. It must be urgent, she thought. She clapped the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Lainie?” The voice was a whisper.

“Yes, this is Lainie O’Neal,” she said. A second of silence and the sound of a deep breath.

“Lainie, it’s me. Your sister.” Lainie no longer needed the early morning jolt of a mud-thick French roast coffee from Starbucks. The words were a cattle prod at her heart.

“Tori?” Silence.

“Tori? Is that you?” Another hesitation on the line.

“I’m in the hospital. I’ve been hurt. I need you.”

“Where?”

“Tacoma. I’ve been shot.”

“Oh, wow, but no, where are you?”

“St. Joe’s.” Lainie felt her adrenaline surge, slowly, then a tidal wave. She needed more information. She had no idea in which city her sister resided. They were twins, but they hadn’t spoken in years. Just how many, Lainie didn’t know. She refused to count the number anymore. It hurt too much.

“What happened?”

“An intruder last night. Late. I was shot. My husband was killed.” Husband? Lainie had no idea that Tori had married again.

“Will you come? I need your help.” Again, an awkward silence, the kind that invites the person waiting to hear to press the phone tighter to her ear.

“They’re whispering about me . . . I think they think I did this to myself,” Tori said.

“To him.”

“I’ll be there,” Lainie said.

“Right away.”

“No. Not now. Wait a day or two. I’ll be okay in the hospital. I’ll let you know when to come.”

“Are you sure? I can come visit you now.”

“No. Good-bye.” Lainie hung up and looked across the room at a photograph of two little girls posing in leotards on a balance beam. Their hair was blond, eyes blue. Everything about them was the same, but in reverse. Like looking into a mirror. Lainie’s hair parted naturally on the left side of her face, Tori’s on the right. Lainie’s upper left lip had a mole. Tori had had hers—on the right side—removed when she was fourteen. Their mother dressed them alike until fourth grade, when both girls rightly rebelled. No one could tell them apart. They were so close. So seemingly identical. Yet they were not the same. Not by a mile. She wondered about her sister living in Tacoma, too. An encounter with an old classmate the previous fall came to mind.

Lainie O’Neal felt a tap on her shoulder as she stood in line at a Queen Anne drycleaner. Her mind was on her job-hunting suit and the stuffed-mushroom stain from September’s “networking” meeting for displaced media professionals. She turned around to a somewhat familiar face.

“Lainie, it’s me. Deirdre Jericho, now Landers, from South Kitsap.” Lainie paused as the synapses fired and the memory returned. Fourteen years ago, Dee Dee was a sullen girl with blue streaks in her brunette hair and a penchant for scoop-neck tops that dropped a little low for South Kitsap dress codes. Except for the disappearance of those blue streaks, she hadn’t changed all that much.

“Oh, yes, Dee Dee! How are you?”

“Better than last time I saw you,” she said. Lainie nodded.

“Back in high school,” she said.

“It has been a long time.”

“No, not then. In Tacoma at the bar in El Gaucho. You were there with your boyfriend and you, well, you acted like you didn’t know me.” Lainie shook her head.

“I’ve never been to El Gaucho,” she said.

“It was you. I’m pretty sure. You treated me like a total bitch.”

“Honestly, Dee Dee, I never would have done that.” Dee Dee smiled.

“That’s what I thought.” Dee Dee Jericho had come in to South when the navy transferred her dad, a commander, in the beginning of her senior year of high school. She barely made an impression on anyone.

Kendall Stark knew she’d loathe the endeavor almost from the moment she agreed to do it. She would have rather been back home burning yard waste with Steven and Cody. In fact, she would rather be poking around the most gelatinous decomposing body than working on her South Kitsap High School class reunion committee during lunch. It was a quagmire of hurt feelings, unfinished business, and the kind of tedium that comes with agreeing on even the minutest of details. The news that one of their old classmates was involved in a shooting made all of it seem more trivial. Who cares about what color the napkins are? The question was rhetorical, of course. Penny Salazar’s steely stare and finger tapping on a planning binder said everything about what she thought commanded supreme importance.

“Look, people,” said Penny, who was a sawed-off, square-shouldered brunette and ran the Port Orchard deli that had been the committee’s meeting place since the first of the year, “details are what people remember when they remember a special event.” Kendall looked at the other committee member, Adam Canfield. Adam had always been a sensible ally, from high school on the drama team to the Kitsap Cutter serial-killer investigation when he supplied some key evidence from his Bay Street collectibles shop. He had texted Kendall with the news that Tori had been shot, but he and Kendall agreed not to mention it. Penny could find out about it in the Lighthouse. She was an incorrigible gossip. Adam tugged at his gray lamb’s-wool cardigan.

“Yes, details,” he said.

“I’m glad we approved maroon and white, with maroon the accent.” Adam swallowed the last of his Diet Coke and waited for Penny to disagree. She’d made it a point to disagree with anyone’s idea that didn’t mirror her own plan for the fifteen-year reunion. She’d even come up with a theme: Fifteen Minutes of Fame. Fifteen Minutes of Blame, Adam had thought before acquiescing to Penny’s ill-conceived plan.

“But shouldn’t the napkin design have been the other way around? I mean, our cheer uniforms weren’t white. We’d have looked like nurses if they had been.” It was Penny again, once more using the opportunity to remind the group that she’d been a cheerleader.

“Lainie texted me,” Adam said, not surprisingly, unable to hold his tongue.

“She’s not going to make it to the meeting.”

“The ferry?” Penny was referring to the most common excuses people employed when they gave their regrets about missing an event, party, or appointment on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

“No. She wanted me to tell you that her sister’s in some kind of trouble.” Penny’s eyes widened.

“Tori?” she said, taken aback by the mention of the name. Lainie’s sister hadn’t been heard from for years. Not by Lainie, not by anyone in Port Orchard. She’d vanished.

“What kind of trouble?” Penny asked. Adam looked anxiously at Kendall, who had stuck to her word. She didn’t want to say anything about Tori O’Neal. Penny reached for her binder and started writing something down. She looked up, satisfied, and smiled.

“Now we can invite Tori. I thought she’d dropped off the face of the earth. You know, another dead end. About half the class is a dead end one way or another.”

“That makes number two,” she said, again doing some updating in the binder.

“She’s a very unlucky girl, our Tori O’Neal,” Adam said. Kendall looked at Adam. She knew he was making a statement swathed in irony, his forte since high school, but she didn’t like it.

“No one is that unlucky,” she said, unable to resist adding her two cents.

“Poor Lainie,” Adam said.

“Torrid was fun to watch in high school, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be her sister.”

“Her twin,” Penny said, drawing the connection even tighter.

“Yeah, that would totally suck.” Penny didn’t have a way with words, Kendall thought, but she was right. Tori O’Neal came with more baggage than an airport skycap.

“I wonder what happened this time?” Penny said.

“And where is she, anyway?”

“Tacoma,” Adam said. Penny was clearly surprised and there was no hiding it. Tacoma was across the Narrows from the peninsula, barely a half hour away from Port Orchard.

“That’s weird,” she said.

“I had no idea she was still in the area. I thought she’d left for California or Alaska or anywhere but around here. She hated it here.”

“Yeah, imagine that,” Adam said, looking at his phone as if it would force Lainie to send another text.

“Tori’s been hiding in plain sight.”

Kendall Stark returned to her office and dialed the number for the Tacoma Police Department. She identified herself and asked for the investigator in charge of the Connelly murder case, and Eddie Kaminski got on the line. She told him that Tori had roots in Kitsap and had been associated with the death of a young man, Jason Reed.

“You say it was a car accident?”

“Yes, but some things seemed odd about it.”

“Odd in what way?” Kendall didn’t have anything specific and she felt foolish just then.

“One witness said he was talking—alive—then suddenly, dead. Internal injuries can be like that. Other talk, too.”

“We deal with more than talk here in Tacoma,” Kaminski said.

“We deal with facts.” Her cheeks went a little pink.

“Of course. Did you know that her first husband died, too?” There was a short pause.

“It might have been mentioned to the other investigators,” he said.

“Yes, I think it was.”

“Can we meet? I could tell you more.” Again a slight pause.

“Hang on for a sec.” He put the phone on mute and returned a moment later.

“Busy here, sorry. Sure. Maybe you can come over this way?”

“All right. I’ll figure out a time and get back to you,” she said. After he hung up, Kaminski turned his attention to the medical examiner’s report on Alex Connelly. The sum of all the dead man had been reduced to the weights and measurements of his liver, his heart, his kidneys. His gunshot-addled brain. All were unremarkable. He was fit, healthy, and struck down in the prime of his life by a masked assailant. A bullet to the brain had killed him instantly. The second shot was merely icing on a murderer’s cake. He scanned the report—fifteen pages of diagrams and notes made by a pathologist who knew it was best to include every detail, mundane or not. Alex Connelly’s right earlobe bore the telltale puncture of a scarred-over piercing. As he read, Kaminski touched his own lobe, feeling the tiny lump of a scar from his own youthful indiscretion for the sake of fashion. Except for the fact that Connelly made five times Kaminski’s salary, the detective and the victim were so very much alike. Height and weight were the same. The victim had had a vasectomy. His tonsils had been removed. Check. Check. There was really nothing remarkable about Connelly, other than the horrific and violent way that he’d died. By the time the body was processed and released, his widow had already arranged for his cremation. It was as fast as one of those Pyrex commercials that crow about moving something from the freezer to the oven without a second in between.

CHAPTER SIX

Tacoma

It was the weary time of day when the world is sleeping and the digits on the clock are small and stand alone. Except for the crying from down the cavernous hallway toward the elevators, the fifth floor of St. Joseph Medical Center was quiet. No visitors. A nurse with a citrus yellow scrub over a red turtleneck studied the chart and checked the bag of fluids that circuited from a tube overhead into the vein of the woman everyone at the fifth floor nurses’ station was talking about. The gossip at the station centered on the tragedy that had unfolded on North Junett Street. Nurses have well-deserved reputations for caring and nurturing, but the reality of their world is that they see so much that it is hard to force a tear for every misfortune that rolls down the high-gloss linoleum floors. Diana Lowell, the nurse wearing the yellow smock, chatted a moment with a younger woman fresh out of nursing school. Her name escaped the veteran nurse, out of the unfortunate acceptance that young people came and went. Few became lifers like her. Diana was friendly, but only enough to get the job done. They spoke in hushed tones. It was the kind of casual chatter that characterized a lot of admissions at St. Joseph’s. Probably true of any hospital in any city. The exchange was somewhat lighthearted despite the subject matter at hand. Frivolity constantly played against tragedy at the nurses’ station.

“Her husband was shot,” Diana said.

“An intruder, I guess.”

“Yeah, right in the face, I heard,” Corazón White, the younger nurse, said.

“I have a friend in the morgue. I’ll ask for details.” Diana smiled slightly as she observed an exasperatingly slow computer screen morph from one patient’s file to the next.

“Nice to have friends in low places,” she said wryly.

“Yeah, I guess,” the newbie said without a trace of humor.

“Last person most of us see is the morgue attendant.”

“That’s why you must always look your best,” Diana said, playing with the girl now.

“Anyhow, is she going to be okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Barely a graze, really. Three stitches. Lucky girl, she is.” Diana picked up a clipboard, the last vestige of the days when she was in the newbie’s position. Several nurses carried electronic clipboards, but Diana was lagging behind on her required training. She started toward the corridor that led to Tori Connelly’s private room, 561D, arguably the best room on the floor. It was smaller than the others, and because of that it, was never converted to a tandem. There was no sharing of a bathroom. No feigned interest in one patient’s malady from across a curtain suspended by grommets and a steel tube. Diana Lowell let her eyes wander over the woman in the bed. She could tell that the patient was watching her every move, though her head stayed stationary. Diana could feel those eyes follow her as she rotated the bag containing clear liquid that was a mixture of saline and anti-anxiety meds. Not enough to knock her out. Not enough to keep her from complaining. If the woman in 561D was a complainer, that is. In time, most were. Diana flipped the crisp new pages of the printed chart and scoured its contents. Tori Connelly certainly had the pedigree to be a complainer. Her home address was an exclusive street in North Tacoma. Her hair was cut with the messy precision of a stylist who probably charged half of what Diana made in a day. The color was good, too. Blond, the hue of wheat on a bronze-lit summer day. Not the DIY color from the bottle that Diana and her sister used because they were “worth” it.

“How are we feeling?” Diana asked, catching the patient’s stare.

“You slept all day yesterday.”

“We,” Tori said, moistening her parched lips.

“We have been shot.” Diana smoothed a bedsheet.

“Of course, I know that. How is the pain? You know you can increase the dosage by pressing the button.” Tori was annoyed.

“You are pressing my buttons now,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“Just trying to be helpful.”

“I want to know if my husband’s okay. He was hurt, too.” Diana knew what had happened to the patient’s husband, of course, but it wasn’t her place to say anything. The doctor could tell the new widow. A cop could. She set the chart down and focused on Tori.

“The police are here now,” she said, moving toward the hallway and catching the eye of the man lingering by the doorway.

“They’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“The police?” Diana looked at her.

“Yes. The shooting, remember?”

“I look like a wreck,” she said.

“Besides, I’ve already answered questions galore.” This one was going to be memorable in every way.

“You look fine. You know, considering all you’ve been through.” Tori ran her fingertips through her hair. In doing so, she tangled the tubes taped to her wrist. She indicated the IV line.

“This hurts,” she said. Diana bent closer and unwound the tubes from the bed rail.

“Let me help you.” She gently splayed them out from Tori’s wrist to the bag of solution.

“Will I be all right?”

“You’ll be fine,” Diana said. There were times when that phrase was said as a white lie, only to bolster a patient’s dwindling prospects. But Tori Connelly would be as good as new. At least physically.

“I bet I look like twenty miles of bad road,” she said.

“Not hardly.” Diana studied Tori. She’d been shot, yes. She’d lost blood. Yet somehow she held herself together enough to allow her vanity to come into play. The woman in 561D was one of those women with nerves of platinum and an unbending concern for how things appeared. A man appeared in just inside the doorway and Diana motioned in his direction. It was Eddie Kaminski.

“She’s resting comfortably, but she can talk, Detective,” she said, walking out the door and past the detective. Kaminski knew that the victim’s recollection of the crime would be most accurate closer to the event, rather than later. Tori Connelly’s doctors told him that she was on pain medication and fluids, but was lucid and given the circumstances would be able to share what she knew about what had transpired.

“Ms. Connelly,” Kaminski said, ducking into her room.

“I’m sorry to disturb you.” She barely looked at the man in a seasonally questionable black overcoat, dark slacks, and a rumpled white shirt.

“Ms. Connelly?” he repeated, this time a little louder, but modulated for the hospital setting.

“I’m Detective Kaminski, Tacoma P.D. I’m here to talk about the shooting.” She moved her lips. Her eyes fluttered.

“Yes,” she said. He found a place by her bedside. Not so close as to invade her personal space, but with the narrowest of proximity to hear her words. Tori Connelly’s hair was swept back and her skin quite pale. Her eyes rested in charcoal hollows. She was fine featured. Despite her ordeal, however, she was an attractive woman. She looked up, eyes damp.

“There was so much blood. Everywhere.” He nodded.

“Yes, there was.” She lowered her eyes and then looked out at the Tacoma skyline.

“He didn’t make it,” she said, more a statement than a question.

“My husband, I mean.” He shook his head.

“No, I’m afraid not.” A tear rolled from the corner of her eye, leaving a shiny trail as it traveled to the white linen of the hospital pillow.

“But you did,” he said. She held her words inside a moment.

“Yes, yes, I did.” Kaminski took out a notepad and started writing. He’d given up the idea that he could remember every word uttered by a witness. It wasn’t that he was struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It was simply the recognition that a notation was a safeguard against forgetting when it came time to tap out the report.

“Did he suffer?” she asked. Kaminski stopped writing and looked up.

“The coroner doesn’t think so. Death was instantaneous or thereabouts.” She stayed quiet for a moment and then let out a long breath.

“That’s a blessing.”

“I’d like to talk about what happened. From the beginning, if you don’t mind. I know you’re exhausted.” He didn’t really care that she was tired, but he’d come off a two-day sensitivity training workshop that had him primed to all but hug a felon.

“We’d been out to dinner,” she said.

“It was just one of those lazy evenings. We never expected anything to happen.”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Where was dinner?”

“Oh, a little Italian place on Pacific we’d never tried before, and we’re never going back.” She caught her mistake.

“I’ll never go back. No, I won’t.” His stare bore down on her.

“Anything happen at dinner?”

“What do you mean? Happen?”

“Out of the ordinary? I’m just trying to capture what happened before the shooting.” She stared at him.

“Did we argue? Is that what you’re hoping for, Detective?” Kaminski was taken aback by her sudden shift to an undeniably defensive tone.

“No, that’s not what I was inferring, Ms. Connelly.”

“Implying,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Implying, not inferring.”

“Fine. Okay.”

“I want to know if Alex suffered long, or at all. If he was able to say anything.” The detective hated this part of his job. More than anything.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Connelly, but your husband was dead at the scene. I thought you knew.” She looked away, toward the window.

“I knew. I just wanted someone to say it to me.” She looked at Kaminski, her hollow eyes now flooded.

“I knew when I ran out that door that I’d never see him again. Never again.” The words tumbled out.

“I loved Alex so, so much.”

“I know. I need to know what happened,” he said. Tori looked at him, almost pleadingly.

“I don’t want to relive it.”

“You are the only living witness,” he said.

“You want us to catch the killer, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Tell me. I’m here to help you,” he said. She told him that she was in “another room” when she heard a commotion and the “popping” sound of a gun.

“I mean, I know it was a gun now, but honestly, I thought it was a champagne cork popping. Alex could be like that, you know. Surprising me.”

“I’m sure he was a good man. I’m sorry for your loss. Then what happened?”

“I went into the living room and a man was standing there by Alex. I screamed and he started to run to the door.”

“How’d you get shot?” She looked at him, irritated and emotional.

“I’m getting to that. Do you mind?”

“Not all, please. Just trying to help, Ms. Connelly.”

“Then it was over. He ran out the door and I followed. I went over to Darius’s place and he called for help.”

“What did your assailant look like?”

“It happened so fast,” she’d said.

“I think he had dark eyes, but they might have been dark blue or green.” The response could have not been more ambiguous. At least she didn’t say “red,” thereby ruling out an albino assailant, he thought.

“Could you determine his ethnicity?” She looked at the reporting officer, almost blank eyed.

“Not really. He had on a mask.” This was the first time she’d mentioned a mask. Kaminski underlined that.

“Ski mask?” he repeated. The wheels were turning now. Tori was retrieving some information. A pause, then an answer.

“Not sure. More like a panty hose. I could see his face, but his features were smushed by the fabric.”

“Had you seen anyone in the area who matches—to the best of your recollection—what you saw that night?” The question was bait, and usually good bait. A suspect frequently takes the suggestion and runs with it.

“He looked like a gardener.”

“A man who delivers groceries.”

“A transient I’ve seen a time or two nearby.” Tori went limp. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“You’re going to have to give me a minute. This is extremely difficult.” Kaminski waited for her to collect herself. Her eyes were damp with tears, but none flowed down her cheeks. She was a coolheaded woman, a logical woman. She’d expected the worst and had prepared herself for the moment when she’d knew with certainty, with utter conviction, that she was alone in the world. What came from her lips next would have been stunning to the most veteran detective.

“I’ll need a lawyer,” she said.

“Won’t I?”

“Why would that be?” he asked.

“Just call it a hunch,” she said, this time looking directly at him.

“You’ll focus the investigation on me. I understand it. I know how things are done. In the end, you’ll have to look elsewhere because I had nothing to do with any of this.”

“No one is looking at you,” Kaminski said. She looked past him once more, breaking the gaze they’d held.

“Not now. But tomorrow somone will. Someone will say the ugliest things and your minions will circle me and my tragedy like a school of sharks. Each after a piece.” She stopped talking. Kaminski stood there in uncomfortable silence.

“Detective,” she finally said.

“I want to know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“How am I supposed to live without him? He was my soul mate. I loved him.” Tears started rolling down her cheeks.

“Again, I’m truly sorry for your loss,” he said, taking a couple of steps backward before turning for the door. She looked back at the sky through the window, turning to the blush of a new day.

“Thank you, Detective,” she said.

The beige Princess phone next to Tori O’Neal Connelly’s bedside rang. She smoothed her covers and disregarded it for a moment. But the ring was persistent and altogether annoying. She reached for it, wincing with the pain that came with stretching skin that had been sutured. She assumed it was a nurse or, as she liked to call them, an attendant from the hospital. She planned on telling whoever it was that she would make an outgoing call if she wanted anything. Tori was never shy about indicating whatever it was she wanted. Her heart’s desire was hardwired to her mouth. As she clasped the receiver to her ear, nurse Diana Lowell entered the room.

“Hello,” Tori said into the mouthpiece. She shifted her body in the bed. Immediately, her face froze. She turned away from the nurse who was emptying a plastic bag liner brimming with used tissues and other nonsharps into a large disposal can.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was low. Not a whisper, but if Diana Lowell had actually tried to listen, it would have taken considerable effort.

“Understood,” she said, her eyes fixed on the nurse as she rolled the disposal can from the room to the bathroom. She turned away.

“Don’t ever call me here again,” she said, her voice, decidedly firm. She pressed the button to disconnect the call. The line went dead, but she didn’t put the phone down just yet.

“Don’t worry. I will be fine,” she said, her eyes purposefully catching the attention of the hospital worker.

“I miss you, too. I can’t wait to see you.” The nurse who frequently didn’t see a need to hold her tongue just looked at her. Tori shifted in the bed.

“My sister,” she said.

“She’s coming to see me.” Diana nodded and smiled, that practiced smile that didn’t really betray the fact that she thought the patient with the dead husband was a B.S. artist of the highest order.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tacoma

The Tacoma News Tribune ran a follow-up to the shooting in the morning’s paper:

Police Question Widow in North End Shooting

Tori Connelly, the wife of a Tacoma financial consultant, was questioned by police in conjunction with the shooting death of her husband, Alex.

“We’re satisfied that this case will reach a proper conclusion soon,” said lead investigator Edmund Kaminski.

“Ms. Connelly has been cooperative.”

A tech working in Tacoma Police Department’s state-of-the-art forensics lab had taken a swab of Tori Connelly’s hands for gunshot residue particles at the scene of her husband’s murder. An analyst at the lab compared the particles captured by the swab to determine if the woman who’d been injured was the shooter. Law enforcement in Tacoma and elsewhere had become wary of gunshot residue in the past few years. There were several instances on the law books in which men had been wrongfully convicted when they tested positive for GSR when they’d only handled a gun, or had recently been in the proximity of one that had been fired. There had also been a famous Northwest case that was botched when it was determined that the GSR found on a shooter’s jacket had been the result of contamination from a police detective who’d been at the firing range before going out to the murder scene. Tori Connelly’s white nightgown was next. It had been hanging in the biohazard room drying since the shooting. Specialist Cal Herzog spread out the garment on a table under fluorescent and ultraviolet lights to see what story it might tell. Eddie Kaminski stood over the garment next to the tech, a young man in his late twenties with hair heavy with product and teeth that appeared all the whiter as the ultraviolet light bounced off the fabric of the filmy nightgown. The blood had already dried to a dark wine, almost chestnut, color. The younger man, Rory, smoothed out the fabric, took a series of photos, and cut two small square patches from the bloodiest part of the material. He made a few remarks about the blood’s pooling and how gravity had dragged a pair of rivulets down to the hemline.

“Can’t be sure until we analyze it, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything here other than what we see. No semen. No other fluids,” he said.

“What’s interesting is right here,” Cal said. His hands were gloved, but he didn’t get close enough to the nightgown to really touch it. He motioned to the fabric, though his eyes stayed on the young man.

“What are you getting at?” Kaminski asked.

“Look closer.”

“I am looking closer,” Rory said, his teeth flashing like a cotton bale bound by steel wires.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Precisely. There’s nothing to see.”

“So? I’m not blind,” the young man said. Cal rolled his eyes, enjoying the moment. Kaminski held his tongue. What he wanted to say was something about the kid having earned his degree in a correspondence course or that whatever training he really had was B.S. He expressed his irritation because, well, it was fun to irritate the kid.

“If she was shot like she said she was, I’d expect a bullet hole, a tear, something in the nightgown, wouldn’t you?” Point made.

“Yeah, I guess I would.”

With the new widow still in the hospital, Eddie Kaminski returned to the scene of the shooting on North Junett. He’d noticed a koi pond near the walk up to the Connellys’ front door the night of the shooting, but it wasn’t because it was sinister. His former wife, Maria, had wanted to have a goldfish pond installed in their backyard early in their marriage. When they couldn’t afford a landscaper, she dug the pond herself, shovel by shovel. Kaminski remembered coming home from a long day on patrol, and how happy she was that the inexpensive feeder goldfish she’d bought by the bucket had laid eggs. It wasn’t the only news she had to share. She was pregnant. It was the happiest day of his life. The last time he saw the pond was moving day, when all the happiness had literally drained from the Kaminskis’ life. The pond had turned green and was full of Douglas fir needles, a decaying symbol of their dying marriage. He walked up the pathway to the door of the stately Victorian and the koi pond. Just below the surface a fragment of red and white caught his attention. Kaminski bent down to get a better look. It was the edge of a plastic bag. The red, a half circle filled with another, smaller one, appeared to be the familiar logo of Target. He wondered what was more incongruent—a Target bag in that neighborhood or the presence of plastic refuse in a pristine pond. He looked around for something to help retrieve the bag. The yard was perfectly landscaped with not a tool lying around, not even a garden shed. Nothing was handy, so the detective did his best to wrestle with some bamboo that had been artfully planted along the pond’s farthest edge. Another reason to hate this annoyingly invasive plant, he thought. A piece snapped in his hands, and he poked the end through a small void in the lily pad–studded surface. It took some finessing, and he figured ice fishing north of Spokane with his dad had served him well when he snagged the bag and managed to pull it out. It was heavy. It didn’t belong there. He knew what he had. The bag conformed to the shape of its contents. A gun.

“Not just any gun,” Kaminski said to himself, his heart pumping with a little more vigor.

“The murder weapon.”

It had started in the kitchen with his back to the soapstone island. Tori wore a thin blouse that allowed her nipples to show. She opened the refrigerator and let the cold air pour over her body. As if she needed to call attention to what she was selling and how good it would be. Is there a more beautiful woman on the face of the earth? Not in magazines. Not on TV. The movies. Nowhere, she thought, always the best marketer of her own charms. She spun around and latched her hands around the small of his back, pulling gently, teasingly.

“You seem a little excited,” she said, looking at her lover.