The Bone Box

CHAPTER ONE

There was an irony in the return address that never failed to elicit a sheepish wince from most anyone who received something postmarked there. Maybe even a sardonic smile. A reaction.

The town from which the letter had been mailed was Walla Walla, a southeast Washington city with the somewhat ironic nickname “a place so nice they named it twice.” While Walla Walla might be nice-it had a burgeoning wine industry, vistas of ruggedly beautiful landforms, and a state champion youth basketball team-it was known mostly because it was home to the state’s oldest and toughest penitentiary. The most notorious killers and rapists, violent offenders of any kind, were housed in a razor-wire-and-sharpshooter-rimmed complex that was all about doing time, paying for their crimes.

In her modest Beach Drive rental in Port Orchard, Washington, Kitsap County Forensic Pathologist Birdy Waterman kicked off her sensible shoes, turned the CD player to a Stan Getz track, and rummaged through her refrigerator-a cache of zombie food that indicated a life too busy with things other than cooking. Selecting a Coors Light, she looked out at the water of Puget Sound and watched as something under its shimmery gray surface caught the attention of a flock of gulls. Birdy had seen the address on the envelope dozens of times, of course. But this was a first. It was a letter addressed to her, not one she’d put in the mail to the prison each November when Tommy Freeland’s birthday came around. She instinctively wiped the rim of the beer bottle and took a gulp as Getz’s sax glided through the chilly air of the drafty old beach cottage.

It was Friday. She had no plans but to eat, go to bed, maybe dream about one of the cases she’d been working-a three-year-old girl whose mother claimed she’d been abducted from the bedroom of their Chico, Washington, home. Tulip Lawson’s remains had been discovered by clam diggers ten days after she’d been reported missing. Little Tulip’s body was now stored in the chiller at the morgue, Birdy’s grim domain.

The letter sent from the ditto-named town in the southeast corner of the state beckoned. Birdy slid into her new sofa, a Pottery Barn camelback that she’d ordered to fit the smaller space of the old house’s living room. She’d never ordered furniture from a catalog before-now she was hooked. No more endless browsing. Just click and order.

She swallowed some more beer and reached for the letter. In a very real way, she’d long hoped to hear from Tommy one day. It was one of the reasons she sent those birthday cards, year after year. Her other reason was deeper-and one she never gave voice to. It was to assuage her guilt a little. It wasn’t that she had done anything wrong. She had told the truth.

The truth. She’d learned then, at a very young age, that sometimes the consequences of telling the truth are too difficult to bear. Her testimony at her cousin’s trial was one of the key points that had helped send Tommy Freeland to the land of inmates, wineries, and basketball hoops.

A place so nice they named it twice.

The letter was typed, which surprised Birdy. She hadn’t known Tommy knew how to type. She really didn’t know much about him at all. He had been a nineteen-year-old high school dropout when he was sent to prison.

As the sax soared and the gulls circled, Birdy read.

Birdy, I bet you are surprised to hear from me. Yeah, I got all of your birthday cards and the notes. At first I thought maybe you’d been required by someone to send them. I also thought that maybe you were being cruel and ironic. After a while, I figured you were just being you. I’ve had twenty years to think about what happened to Anna Jo and how it was that I ended up here. I would like to say I’m sorry for all of it, but I can’t because I know I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have done it. I don’t blame you for what you did. I don’t really blame anyone. I’ve learned a lot about life here in prison and one of the biggest things is knowing that forgiveness is the only way through salvation. You might not be religious, but sometimes forgiveness is something different than God stuff. Anyway, I am not a liar. I am not a murderer. I guess you know that I’ve been up for parole and all they want me to do is admit to killing Anna Jo. I can’t do it. I can’t admit to something I didn’t do. So, I’ve never asked you this. I don’t have any money to ask anyone else. Will you help me? Will you come down here? — I know we’ve never really talked since before the trial. I want to talk to you. I put your name on my visit list. All you have to do is fill out this form and you can come.

He signed it: Yours, Tommy.

As Birdy looked down at the visitor’s registration form, two things struck her. One, her eyes were slightly moist. She was no crier. She never had been. There was something about continually seeing the worst that human beings do to each other that forced a person to wall up their emotions. Protection mode, she called it. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt to see a strangled child, a mangled car crash teenager, or a woman beaten to death by her boyfriend. All of those things hurt like hell, but Birdy never cried about them. Not her job to cry, she told herself. Her job was about making sure that the prosecutors had all the evidence they needed to stop the perpetrators from doing it again.

Birdy dried her eyes.

The next thing she knew was she was reaching for a pen to fill out the form. It was as if Birdy’s response was completely automatic. There was no dissecting the pros and cons of seeing him. No need to analyze his invitation. And, she knew, it was more than curiosity that would take her there.

She simply had to see him.

The rental house on Beach Drive had been built in 1951 and it looked every bit of its vintage-asphalt shingles, aluminum-frame windows, and a screen door that couldn’t stop a sparrow. It was, in the kindest possible terms, cozy. It would take a coin toss to determine which of the two bedrooms was larger. The closets were miniscule. The kitchen had been built at the time when people gathered around a table in a little nook to discuss their days.

Birdy, at thirty-four, lived alone. She had no one to gather around the built-in nook. While others considered her too smart, too pretty, too wonderful to be single, being single was just fine with her.

She’d rented the bungalow with the idea that it was a temporary residence and she’d find something bigger, better, and more in keeping with her desires for privacy. She worked with a real estate agent to find a more permanent residence, but didn’t find what she wanted. The gray and white house facing Sinclair Inlet and Bainbridge Island was home. She’d clipped a few ideas from home-decorating magazines in hopes the Seattle owner would eventually decide to sell the house to her. She’d be ready.

That night before she tucked in, Birdy went into the second bedroom. It was ceiling-high with boxes, books, and furniture that she still hadn’t found a place for since her move from Seattle. She’d planned on setting it up as a guest room, but the need for guests seldom materialized.

Birdy flipped on the switch and scanned the overstuffed room for the box that held the odds and ends of cases that troubled her. Her father had made the box to hold the tools he used for carving toy figures he sold to tourists for extra money. The container was precious, but so were its contents. She looked inside at the file folders that filled a third of the box, the manila folders protruding like the spine of a dead animal.

Not all these cases had been failures insofar as the courts were concerned, but something about each of them troubled her. There was the young woman who drowned in a boating accident off Agate Pass-her best friend and husband reportedly had done all they could to save her. The case troubled Birdy not for the facts as presented at the inquest, but for what happened two years later. The best friend and the distraught husband got married, left town, and used insurance proceeds to buy a ranch in Arizona. There had been no evidence to suggest that the woman who drowned had been murdered-at least not at the time of the inquest. Drownings without bruising to show a struggle or wounds to show a major fight were frequently difficult cases for prosecutors. It was never about the drowning, but about what happened before and after.

Sometimes after was too late.

Another case that had found its way into the cardboard box involved a teenage girl who was the purported victim of a serial killer. Tara Hanson fit the victimology of the three women who had been killed by a sexual sadist rapist and murderer named Percy Bosworth. She had been the right physical type (slender, blond, short hair). And like the other two victims, Tara had been a bit of a party girl, had lived alone, and had been abducted from a mini-mart-as all of Bosworth’s victims had been.

And yet Tara didn’t quite fit in. She was like the jigsaw puzzle piece that is just close enough go in a particular spot, even when the imagery-the hot air balloon, the kitten with the ball of yarn, or whatever-doesn’t mesh accurately. Victims one and two were employed by Kitsap mini-marts-Shellee Casper in Silverdale, LeeAnn Tomm at one in Olalla. While Tara’s car was recovered from a convenience store in Navy Yard City, she didn’t work there. Further, Tara lived in Kingston, far north of the location of her purported abduction. All victims had been strangled and posed after they were dumped, but only Tara had been strangled manually. The others were killed with the application of a two kinds of ligature-the first victim was strangled with a bungee cord and the second victim had been murdered with the tie from a hoodie. While the spread of the fingertip bruising left on Tara’s throat was a close match for Bosworth’s, it was troubling that Tara’s case-as Birdy famously and regrettably told a Kitsap Sun reporter “stood out like a sore thumb.” The headline put up by a copy editor with a decidedly wicked streak took the comment further:

Pathologist Still Coming to Grips With Hanson Case

There were other cases in the box too, more than twenty. The case that she’d first put into that sad little file was the one involving her cousin Tommy and the murder of Anna Jo Bonners on the Makah Indian Reservation, where Birdy had been raised. At first, the Tommy/Anna file had been there just because Birdy’s own personal history was tied up with that particular crime. Later, as she added cases to the box, she’d wondered if it had been unsettling for another reason-a deeper one.

Though she never said it out loud, Birdy Waterman had a name for her little cardboard repository of the unsettling, the unfinished. She called it the Bone Box. Not to anyone else, just herself. That night, she pulled the Bone Box out from the would-be guest room and brought it to her bedside. She lifted the lid and looked down at the neat row of file folders, some thick, some thin. She knew that after doing so she wouldn’t have a decent night’s sleep. There were a lot of reasons why visiting those files was unnerving. But one above the others niggled at her subconscious. Guilt is like a dripping faucet that can never be tightened or turned off. Even when the guilt is undeserved. More so, rightly, when it is.

Birdy just wasn’t sure where she fit in that spectrum.

There were only three clippings in the Port Angeles Daily News about Anna Jo’s murder. The lack of media coverage was a sad but powerful indicator about how easily crime on the reservation was accepted, ignored by the press. It was as if Native Americans were only the subject of some kind of charity profile written in a patronizing manner. Or, Birdy thought, there were the articles that made her people seem as though they’d never been able to make lives for themselves and were mired in social problems like alcohol and drugs. Those were the stories that seemed to find their way onto the pages of the Seattle papers. A murder of one Makah by another, apparently, was not so newsworthy.

The first article announced the arrest.

Indian Arrested for Murder of Girlfriend

It described the basic circumstances surrounding Anna Jo’s murder and the discovery by a “family member” of Tommy soaked in blood.

A second clipping included a photograph of Anna Jo and another of Tommy. Hers was a pretty image taken in the eighth grade. His was a glowering mug shot taken at the county jail.

Makah Murder Case On Trial Next Week

It was on the front page of the paper, a preview of the evidence, including the passage:

Freeland’s 14-year-old maternal cousin is one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution. Because the Makah native girl is a minor, the Daily News is not naming her. She’s expected to testify about seeing the accused flee the scene of the stabbing.

And then, the final clipping.

Freeland Convicted Of Bonner’s Murder

SENTENCED TO LIFE

The article was short, only four inches. After it ran, Tommy Freeland had been sent away to prison and expunged from most conversations around the reservation. His wasn’t the worst crime committed, but as far as Birdy Waterman remembered, it was the one her family never talked about. Only a couple of times had her mother brought it up.

“I know you saw what you saw, Birdy, but you didn’t need to tell anyone about it. Bad things need to stay in the family.”

Lastly, Birdy studied the autopsy report with its voodoo-doll-like outlined drawing of a genderless dead figure, accompanying weights and measures, and the deadpan commentary about a young woman and her horrendous demise. The medical examiner, Stephanie Noritake, had been an idol of Birdy’s. She was one of the first women Birdy had heard of doing the work of speaking for the dead. Birdy had stood in line for two hours to get a signed copy of the doctor’s Among the Stones and Bones: My Life in the Autopsy Suite. She felt like she’d gushed too much when it came her turn to get an autograph, but she couldn’t help it. Dr. Noritake was a forensic science rock star, a woman who mixed care and concern with authority and science. There was no denying that the two shared a bond. Dr. Noritake was one of the first Asian women to hold the position of medical examiner in a major American city when she served in San Jose in the late 1960s. After retirement she moved to the Pacific Northwest, where her family had lived before internment in World War II. Dr. Noritake consulted on cases in Clallam, Jefferson, and Kitsap Counties.

One of those was the Anna Jo Bonner’s case.

She’d testified at trial that the blood found on the victim matched what had been recovered from Tommy’s T-shirt-putting him in the cabin-but her most interesting testimony had been about the stab wounds that killed the girl.

From the autopsy report:

. . there are twenty-seven wounds, indicating overkill. Twenty of the wounds were made after the victim was supine on the floor; nine of those hit the floorboards after piercing the victim’s upper torso …

It was, as Dr. Noritake said in her report, and later at trial, “a classic rage killing.”

And while there could be no doubt that whoever had wielded that knife had overdone it-severing the carotid artery had done the job just fine-as far as Birdy could recall there was no mention as to why Tommy would have wanted to kill his girlfriend. If it had been rage killing, then what was he so angry about?

The next morning, she faced the mirror in the tiny mint-green and black-tiled bathroom. Birdy wasn’t big on makeup, but a hurried glance indicated her sleepless night and the need for a little help. Her brown eyes were puffy, and her skin uneven. She applied a light swipe of powder. Tying back her shoulder-length black hair with a rubber band, she pronounced herself presentable.

It must have been intentional because it happened every time, but Birdy Waterman found herself dressing down for her trips back home to Neah Bay. She commanded a good salary as Kitsap County’s forensic pathologist. She dressed beautifully every day for work. Weekends around Port Orchard, she always put on dressy slacks and a nice top. Jeans-and not even new ones at that-were reserved for visits home.

She put on a pair of Lee’s from Walmart and a sweater. In Port Orchard, she was Dr. Waterman, and she wore her accomplishments proudly. At home, where they would certainly be noticed, she was merely Birdy. And she did everything she could to keep herself from giving the appearance that she’d made it.

And, yet, everyone on the reservation knew she had. There were very few secrets kept among the Makah.

Maybe just one.