Victim Six

Chapter One

March 29, 8 a.m.

Near Sunnyslope, west of Port Orchard, Washington

The early mornings in the woods of Kitsap County, Washington, were wrapped in a shiver, no matter the season. The job required layers and tools. The smartest and best-prepared brush pickers started with an undershirt, another shirt on top of that, a sweater or sweatshirt, and a jacket. Gloves were essential too. Some were fashioned with a sewn-in cutting hook to expedite the cutting of thinner-stemmed plants like ferns. A sharp knife or a pair of good-quality loppers made easier the business of cutting woody stems like evergreen huckleberry, salal, and in the Christmas-wreath season, fir and cedar boughs. As the day wore on, pickers shed their clothing, a layer at a time. Picking was hard work, and a good picker was a blur, cutting, fanning, and bundling, before bagging floral gleanings in thick plastic bags.

Instead of garbage in those bags, of course, there was money.

Pickers often left indicators they’d been through an area. Empty bags of chips emblazoned with Spanish words that touted the snack’s flavor. Sometimes they left torn gloves or leaky boots in the forest. Some left nothing at all.

Sunday morning Celesta Delgado-along with her boyfriend, Tulio Pena, and his two younger brothers, Leon and Reno -left the mobile home they were renting in Kitsap West, a mobile home park outside the city limits of Port Orchard, just before first light. Behind the wheel of their silver-and-green 1987 Chevy Astro van, Tulio drove northeast toward state-owned property near Sunnyslope where they held permits for brush picking. Celesta and Tulio also worked at a Mexican restaurant in Bremerton, but this being Sunday, they had the time to earn-they hoped-about $60 apiece for a day’s work in the woods. The center seats of the van had been excised so they’d be able to haul their gleanings back to the brush shed, or processing plant, off the highway to Belfair. The two younger ones sat in the backseat amid supplies and the cooler that held lunch.

Celesta, at just five feet tall, was a fine-boned woman with sculpted cheeks and wavy black hair that she wore parted down the middle and, only at the restaurant, clipped back because it was required. She adored Tulio and tolerated his younger brothers with the kind of teasing repartee that comes with both love and annoyance.

“You boys are lazy! Help your brother fix the van.”

“Hey, Celesta, you take longer with your hair than Shakira!”

At twenty-seven, Tulio was five years older than the love of his life. He was a compact man with the kind of symmetrical muscular build that suggested he worked out to look good, rather than worked hard with his body. The opposite, of course, was the truth.

Tulio parked the van adjacent to a little crease of pathway into the forest, the entrance to Washington State Department of Natural Resources land that had been cleared by loggers in the 1970s. The second growth provided the ideal growing conditions for the foliage that serves as filler for market bouquets. Anyone who’s ever purchased a bunch of flowers from a grocer has held in his hands the gleanings of dark green to accent gerbera daisies, tulips, delphinium, and other floral showstoppers. They’ve held the work of those who labor in the forests of Washington and Oregon.

The small group all put on thick-soled rubber boots and retrieved their cutting tools, rubber bands, and hauling bags from the back of the van. Then the quartet started out, their Forest Service tags flapping from their jacket zippers. They could hear the voices of Vietnamese pickers, so they turned in the opposite direction and followed a creek to a narrow valley. Stumps of massive trees long since turned into houses, fences, and barns protruded from mounds of dark, glossy greens. The area had not been over-picked, which was good. It was getting harder to find places that didn’t require a three-hour hike. Tulio had been assured that the area was regulated and in good condition. It was good, though, not to have been misled. He valued their permits and foraged with care rather than with the bushwhacker mentality that denuded sections of the forest. Tulio saw it as a renewable resource-that is, renewing and filling the usually empty fold of his wallet.

“Don’t cut all the moss, bros,” Tulio told Leon and Reno. “There won’t be any to come back and get later.”

“Sí!” they chimed back, looking at Celesta.

Celesta shrugged a sly grin. She’d been the one who over-harvested the moss from the trunk of a big-leaf maple the last time they went out to work in the forest.

Fog shrouded patches of the valley as the four fanned out to cut and bundle. They set to work. Celesta was the slowest of the four because she sought out sprigs that were of a higher quality. No wormholes. No torn edges. Just beautiful shiny leaves that were often mistaken for lemon leaves by those who didn’t know botany and sought a more romantic origin for their floral displays than the sodden forests of the Pacific Northwest. Bunches of salal were pressed flat and stacked before being bagged.

The morning moved toward the afternoon, with three trips to the van and then back into the woods. No one saw the Vietnamese pickers they’d heard talking in the woods at the beginning of the day. At the van, Reno and Leon heard the sound of car doors slamming somewhere nearby. They assumed more competitors were on the way, but they never saw anyone.

Around 2 P.M., Celesta decided she had to use the bathroom. She loathed squatting in the woods. She told Tulio she was going back in the direction of the van, where she’d seen the remnants of a shed that would provide some kind of privacy.

“All right,” he said. “Two more loads, and the day is done.”

“Good, because I’m tired.” Celesta lugged her latest batch of greens over her petite shoulder and disappeared down the same deer trail they had followed into the clearing.

Even in the midst of a spring or summer’s day with a cloudless sky marred only by the contrails of a jet overhead, the woods of Kitsap County were always blindfold dark. It had been more than eighty years since the region was first logged by lumberjacks culling the forest for income; now it was developers who were clearing land for new tracts of ticky-tacky homes. Quiet. Dark. Secluded. The woods heaved quietly in a darkness that hid the fawn or the old refrigerator that someone had unceremoniously discarded. Patches of soil were so heavy with moisture that a person stepping off the nearly imperceptible pathway would feel his shoes being nearly sucked from his feet.

The woods were full of dark secrets, which is exactly what had attracted him in the first place. He’d noticed the brush pickers when he’d been out on the hunt several weeks before, when he had an urge to do something. A crammed-full station wagon was parked on the side of the road as close to the edge as possible without going into the ditch. They poured from their vehicle, talking and laughing, as if what they were about to do was some kind of fun adventure.

He sized up the women.

Most were small.

Good.

Most were thin, reasonably pretty, and young.

Also good.

Some didn’t know English-at least not enough to speak it with any real fluency.

He took it to mean that they were likely illegals.

Excellent. Who would care if one of those went missing?

A few days later, he returned to the place where he knew more of them would come. From across the road, he watched the pretty dark-haired girl get out of the van, flanked by three young men.

A challenge.

He liked that too.

Later, when he felt her body go limp in his arms, he smiled.

Good girl, he thought. Give yourself to me.

A half hour or more passed, and Tulio wondered why Celesta hadn’t returned. The air had warmed up considerably, and he’d stripped down to a sleeveless T-shirt. He called out for his brothers, and the three of them gathered up their impressive haul of cuttings.

“She must be waiting back at the van,” he said.

An hour had elapsed by the time they made it to the clearing.

“Celesta?”

No answer.

Tulio put his bag down and unlocked the Astro van.

“Where are you?”

Leon, the youngest, hurried over to the vehicle, waving a pair of gloves and a cutter that were obviously Celesta’s because she’d used pink nail polish to apply her initials and a tiny rendering of a daisy.

“Look, I found these. She left them there,” he said, indicating an area of gravel near the path into the woods.

Tulio took the gloves and stared into his brother’s worried eyes. “What happened? This doesn’t make sense. Something’s wrong. Something has happened to Celesta.”

Chapter Two

March 30, 10 a.m.

South Colby, Washington

“Now, that’s attractive,” she thought.

Kendall Stark sat in her white Ford SUV in the school parking lot and fumbled in her purse for a toothpick. Nothing. She checked the glove box. Again nada. A sesame seed from a morning bagel had lodged between her front teeth. Coming up empty-handed, she used the corner of one of her Kitsap County sheriff’s detective business cards. Tacky as she knew it was, mission accomplished. She reset her rearview mirror and got out of her car, proceeding toward the front office of South Colby Elementary School. She said hello to Mattie Jonas, the school secretary, who in turn handed her a clipboard with a signup sheet.

Son’s spring conference, she wrote for the reason of her visit.

Mattie nodded. “You know the drill. Gun-free zone. No exceptions, even for Kitsap County ’s finest.”

With her mind on the meeting, Kendall had forgotten to remove and store her Glock in her car’s gun safe, something procedure called her to do. While the school secretary looked on, she removed the magazine, set the safety, and put the gun into a metal lockbox that the secretary had provided for that purpose.

“We don’t worry about you,” Mattie said, locking the box with a key she kept on a chain around her slender wrists. “I mean, you and the other cops are on the side of right, but a rule’s a rule.”

“Of course,” Kendall said.

“How’s your mom?”

Kendall sighed. “Good days and bad days. More bad days lately, I’m afraid.”

Mattie didn’t press for details. It was clear Kendall didn’t want to go into it. It was a question that came at least once a day. Most people in town knew her mother. Port Orchard was small enough that on any given day, paths would cross with those who shared histories. Mattie had been an assistant in Kendall ’s mother’s fifth-grade classroom many years ago. Mrs. Maguire-never Ms.-was a favorite of anyone who had her. Bettina Maguire was a marmalade-colored redhead who taught her pupils with the fervor of a preacher and the kind of self-deprecating humor that made other teachers standoffish and jealous.

Kendall walked the familiar corridor to Classroom 18 and turned the knob, her heart beating a little faster as she went inside. Lori Bertram’s classroom was a riot of construction-paper cutouts and the smells of all things that seven-year-olds live for: Paste. Sour green-apple candy. Guinea pigs. Lori Bertram had been teaching at South Colby for the past six years, but she still carried the enthusiasm of a first-year teacher. Ms. Bertram was a brunette with pointed features and a splatter of freckles over the bridge of her nose. A charm bracelet with all fifty states, something she used as a teaching tool, jangled whenever she moved her arm.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Stark,” she said, motioning toward one of those impossibly small chairs. Green eyes sparkled through wireless frames.

Kendall Stark was there about her son Cody, an autistic boy who was easy to love but a challenge nonetheless. He was blond-haired and blue-eyed, like his mother. His head was like a small pumpkin, so round and perfect. In photographs, he was the ideal. A cherub. The Gerber baby. The image of the child that young women always dreamed would find their way into a perfectly appointed nursery. He was almost one when the doctors first diagnosed the possibility of “delayed development.” If only. At two, the autism was confirmed. The diagnosis, at first, was a torpedo speeding toward every dream Kendall had for her son. It would never change her love, of course, but in her darkest hours she knew that her son was born to suffer in some way. It broke her heart.

To outsiders, at least, it appeared to take longer for Steven Stark to come to terms with the idea that their son was “different from the others.” An advertising salesman for a hunting and fishing magazine out of Seattle, Steven used to be the kind of man who was all biceps and bravado. Snowboarding. Bungee jumping. Driving fast cars. He was drawn to whatever gave him a challenge, a rush. He had assumed that when he became a father, he’d be able to relive the excitement of the things that didn’t seem to be in the dignified realm of adulthood. He loved his son too. But the cruelty of autism was a chasm between father and son. Steven’s love, it seemed, was seldom returned. There would be no playing catch. No baseball games. No deer hunting.

“This may not be the son you’ve dreamed of,” Kendall said on the way home from one of their first consultations with an autism specialist. “But in time you’ll see. He will be the boy of your dreams.”

Steven put on his game face. “I’m sure you’re right, babe.”

“God gave us a special son because we’re the right parents for him.”

“I know,” he said, his tone more rueful than he’d wanted.

Later, when she played back the conversation, she wondered who had said what.

Kendall Stark knew no speeches could change what Lori Bertram was about to tell her. She knew that the second-grade teacher cared for her little boy. She’d said so many, many times. She’d arranged for special testing, more hours from the support staff than were required to help him stay in the same class as the kids he’d known since preschool.

“Kendall,” the teacher she said, lowering her glasses to view a printout, “I’m sorry to report that things aren’t working out for Cody here at South Colby as we’d all hoped.”

The words were not a surprise. Ms. Bertram had sent several missives home, as had the special education teacher, Ms. Dawson. All seemed to agree that Cody was not a candidate for mainstreaming.

“Cody’s needs and challenges are too great for a standard classroom,” she said.

As a detective, Kendall knew the kinds of questions to ask in order to get the kind of result she wanted. But not now. She was powerless.

“I can get him more help,” Kendall said. “Another specialist.”

The teacher looked away. The moment was awkward. “Look, you already have. You have done an exemplary job, and I know whatever avenue you choose to pursue will be the right one. But the truth is, having him in the classroom is too disruptive to the education process.”

Kendall thought about fighting back. She wanted to tell the teacher that what was best for Cody was that he’d stay with the other children. But she held her tongue. There had been enough warning that this was coming.

“I’ve told Inverness about Cody,” Ms. Bertram went on. “They might have room for him in the fall.”

“I see,” was all Kendall could come up with. The teacher’s words were meant to offer hope, but they stung.

The Inverness School was in Bremerton. Reviews on the institution were mixed. Some kids were boarded there, which Kendall considered no better than warehousing the disabled. The school itself earned decent marks from educational advocates for the disabled. It was probably the best place for Cody in Kitsap County.

The only place.

“Can I see him before I leave?” Kendall asked.

Ms. Bertram nodded. “He’s in music now. Follow me.”

The two women walked down a polished-aggregate corridor to a small classroom filled with the sound of children singing “Baby Beluga.” Only one little boy remained silent, the flicker of recognition that something was going on around him barely discernible. Yet, like a flipped switch, when he saw his mother, he rushed over, nearly knocking down a little girl.

“Mama!”

She scooped him up and gave him a loving embrace, kissing the top of his beautiful blond head.

“I was here to see your teacher,” she told him.

She gave him another peck on his forehead and told him she’d see him at home after school.

“I love you!” the boy said.

Cody was a child who didn’t say much. Unsurprisingly, the words he did utter went straight to his mother’s soul.

“I love you, Cody.”

Her gun secure in her holster, Kendall returned to her car feeling the heaviness of her son’s complicated future on her shoulders. Steven was at home, asleep-his routine on the day back from a three-day trip to a sportsmen’s show in Louisville. She could feel the tears start to come, but she willed them to stop. The tears were for Cody.

Inside, she knew that Cody’s heart would be broken when he found out that he’d have to leave the children that he’d known until now. Kendall recognized that he had some understanding that he was different than his friends, Adam and Tristan. She saw his frustration when he tried to play a video game. He saw how the others could read. He saw that the monkey bars at school were for those with the dexterity to hold on tight and swing. Kendall and Steven had vowed they’d raise their son with the advantages of knowing that, while he was indeed different than others, his future was full of promise. They knew there might someday be a day of reckoning.

Which just came in the form of the conference with Ms. Bertram.

Kendall turned on her cell and noticed that there’d been a call from Josh Anderson, one of the nine others who carried a gold Kitsap County sheriff’s detective star.

“Kendall, the lieutenant wants us to work a missing brush picker’s case. Don’t ask me why. She probably ran back to wherever the hell she came from. Celesta Delgado’s the name. Hope things went well with Cody’s teacher. Get your ass in here so we can get to work.”

In the room made just for her misery, Celesta Delgado woke once more. By then she’d figured out that she was not in a car trunk, as she first had imagined. There would be no way she could fiddle with the emergency latch as she’d seen a young woman do on the Today show when she reenacted her own escape from a would-be rapist.

Or a killer.

Her eyes traced a pinprick of light that bored through the wall, which was weeping with condensation.

Celesta wriggled some more, panting, pushing, trying to break the tape that kept her strong body constricted. She did not want to be raped. She wanted to get the hell out of there. She twisted with all of her strength and somehow rolled herself on her side, her hands still behind her back. She wanted to scream from the pain emanating from her shoulders, but it wouldn’t matter.

Her mouth was bound too.

Again she followed the light. She could see better now, both eyes in play.

If only she could shout. At no time in her life did she ever think she would die like this. Die-yes, die. No rape. No way out.

Tears rolled down her sticky cheeks. Celesta needed to pull herself up and get out of there.

The door swung open, and a blast of light came at her all at once. A shadowy figure moved toward where she’d pinned herself against the wall, screw tips clawing at her back. She pushed away from him as he moved forward.

Yet, there was nowhere to go.

“Please, God,” she said. “Can’t you hear me?”

Chapter Three

March 30, 11 a.m.

Port Orchard

All the offices that dispense and manage justice for Kitsap County hunker on a hillside in Port Orchard overlooking Sinclair Inlet, a blue-gray swath of Puget Sound that breathes in and out with the tide like the last warbling spasms of an emphysema patient. The current runs mostly on the surface, leaving a deep layer of muddy oil from the naval shipyard that occupies the north side of the inlet. At night the shipyard twinkles like a kid’s dream of a military holiday: tiny white lights on aircraft carriers and naval tugs. Contiguous with the courthouse and jail, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office was an office-space planner’s version of hell. Outside, the building was a jumble of concrete, glass, bricks, and the occasional spray of ivy. It appeared ordered and well maintained. Inside, however, past a lobby decorated with a sheriff’s star fashioned from dozens of silver CDs (“The same artist did one of a fish for Fish and Wildlife, and it looks even better. The CDs look like fish scales!” was a receptionist’s familiar refrain) and the requisite display of confiscated weapons and pot pipes, was the entrance to a warren of offices connected by passageways that rivaled the circuitous schematics of the Winchester Mystery House. Go down the hall, around the corner, double back, turn another corner, and a visitor could easily lose his or her way. Drop bread crumbs. Carry a cell phone. Pay attention. The hodgepodge was the result of making do as the always cash-poor county grew in size.

Kendall breathed a sigh of relief when she found a parking space behind the building-something she wouldn’t have even attempted if she’d arrived first thing in the morning. The expansion of the county jail a few years prior had consumed much of the on-site parking for Sheriff’s Office employees. But it was 10 A.M., and she knew that coming in that time of day was occasionally rewarded with a spot vacated by someone off to a meeting or out on a call.

The fifteen-minute drive from her son’s parent-teacher conference had been full of introspection, soul-searching, and heartache. It was partially, Kendall felt, the same battle other working mothers waged every day. Do I do enough for my child? It was a conflict that she was sure should have been resolved with her mother’s generation. Yet it was a debate that still plunged a hot needle into her skin. No mom could ever really think she’d done enough-especially if she did anything for herself. That included pursuing a meaningful career, of course. Anyone without a special-needs child is always at the ready to tell those who have one what they ought to do.

At thirty-one, Kendall Stark had been in law enforcement for a decade, having started as a reserve officer for Kitsap. Next had come a three-year stretch as a Washington State Patrol trooper assigned to her home region. She returned to the Kitsap Sheriff’s Office to live and work in a community she loved. She’d moved up to detective after only six years, the result, she felt, of PR-motivated affirmative action by the previous sheriff, who ran for office with the pledge to see more women in higher positions. She was smart, attractive, and a very good investigator. She was the poster girl for the future of an office that had battled an “old-boys’ network” image that rankled the Democratic base of a county in search of change.

Kendall told herself over and over that how she had gotten there, how she leapfrogged over a couple of other candidates, didn’t matter. Ultimately, she’d proven herself and won the respect of most of the Sheriff’s Office. The sole exception was a small cadre of women: a pair from the records department and an icy brunette who ran the supply functions for the detectives unit. Those three seldom gave Kendall a break. The week before, she overheard them bashing her when she slipped into the break room, the sound of the old microwave popping corn masking her presence.

“She obviously hasn’t put her son first. What kind of woman would work these hours when her little one is in such need? I know it isn’t PC, but it says a lot about a woman who doesn’t nurture her own.”

Kendall pretended that she hadn’t heard a word.

“Hi, ladies,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t be making popcorn, unless you make some for everyone.” Her smile was frozen.

“Oh, hi, Detective,” said the one who’d been talking. She always said “detective” with a slight coating of sarcasm, as if Kendall should be behind a keyboard doing administrative work rather than out in the field dealing with the worst crimes committed against human beings.

“Blame Deb,” the other chimed, her face suddenly scarlet. “I’m on Weight Watchers, and I can’t even have this stuff. Movie-butter style, no less!”

Kendall took a Dr Pepper from the machine. “Tell me about it.”

She left the women in the break room that afternoon and took the longest, most serpentine route back to her desk in her dank, windowless office. She needed every moment to compose herself, to deflect the intentional cruelty of the “Witches of Kitsap,” as her husband liked to call them. Kendall would fight for Cody’s future with all that she possessed, but ultimately she knew that there likely was no magical fix for her seven-year-old. It left a hole in her heart. She saw her detective’s gold star as a means to fill it by doing something worthwhile. To stop pain elsewhere. And in Kitsap County, there had been more than enough.

Some cases never left her. The baby that had been dropped on his head by his Bremerton shipyard worker father, the little girl who’d been offered up for sex to an online predator by her Port Gamble mother. The young man from Seabeck who’d been in and out of the county jail so often he thought he’d be able to leave some belongings behind for his next stretch of incarceration.

That Monday morning she’d resisted the urge to go home and tell Steven face-to-face what the teacher had said. Having their son in a regular classroom for most of the day had fueled hope that he’d be able to live as others did when he was grown, when they were gone. That had faded, and she couldn’t break the news to Steven in person and see in his eyes the pain of the loss of hope once more.

Before collecting her things and locking her car, Kendall punched the speed-dial number for Steven. When he didn’t pick up, as she knew he wouldn’t, she left a message:

“Honey, bad news. We’ll need to check out Inverness for Cody. Ms. Bertram was very nice, but they just can’t help him there. Not the kind of help he needs. I’m not angry. Just sad. See you tonight.”

Rain started to fall. She looked up and regarded the crack in the gray sky. It was spring, and the weather had-in typical Pacific Northwest fashion-forgotten the season. The wind kicked up a little, sweeping maple-tree pollen in a pale orange swirl over car windshields and against the curb. Across the parking lot, under the overhang where a couple of corrections officers had left a pair of plastic office chairs, she saw Josh Anderson and the glow of a cigarette.

“You really should quit, Detective,” she said as she approached him.

He nodded. “I would if I could, but I blame the county. They used to let us smoke at our desks, you know.”

“So I’ve heard. They used to let you shoot seagulls at the dump too.”

Josh crushed out his smoke. “Those were the good old days.”

Kendall smiled. “Let’s go inside.”

At fifty, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Josh Anderson had turned the corner. Every day that he looked in the mirror he could see that he was no longer the man that he used to be. Lines now creased what had been an exceedingly interesting, if not handsome, face. It had been the kind of visage that telegraphed sexuality and vitality. A look. A wink. A smile. Yet that was fading, and fading fast. His black hair was snowy at the temples, and his hairline was marching backward. His nose seemed longer at the tip. The hooded eyelids that had once given women sighs of desire were now the slightly fleshy bags of a man growing older.

Josh had been married and divorced three times. The last time, to a county deputy prosecutor, ended in a bitter and very public sideshow nine years earlier. Although Washington was a no-fault divorce state and his peccadilloes were therefore irrelevant, they did matter when his wife sued for sole custody of their son, Drew. Everyone in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office knew he couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, but the public soon found out. The local paper latched on to the story, and when Josh Anderson went down, it was with a resounding thud. He lost his position as president of the Deputy Sheriffs Guild, or union, and did a two-year stretch as a civil deputy before crawling back to detective. He acted as though he was unrepentant. His ex-wife was a “bitch and a ballbuster.” He used to joke that he was a serial philanderer or that women were like items on a buffet line just waiting for him to sample.

“I can’t help myself…and, apparently, they can’t, either,” he once told Kendall in a revealing bit of introspection.

This guy’s ego is ten times the size of the brain in his pants, she had thought, almost saying it aloud.

As the years ticked by, Josh Anderson felt the kind of niggling self-loathing that told him he was a “three-time loser.”

What a difference a decade made.

Anyone passing by the adjacent offices occupied by Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson could see the distinct differences in the two detectives’ personalities and habits. There was a wall between them, but with Josh’s office first and Kendall ’s next, it was almost like some bizarre “before and after” HGTV makeover show. Josh’s office was a maelstrom of paperwork and coffee cups-ceramic and paper. If he had a filing system of any kind, it was beyond the ability of anyone short of Einstein to figure it out. In reality, he figured that if Kendall had everything in order, why should he? He could saunter over anytime and pull a file or notebook without so much as a sigh from his exceedingly organized partner. His desk drawers were crammed with office supplies he didn’t need: He had more Post-it notes than the supply cabinet. He had a stress ball in the shape of a globe and loved “squeezing the life out of the world.” No houseplants, of course, unless the island of green mold floating in one of those cups counted as such.

“Science project,” he laughed when Kendall once told him that if he didn’t watch it, “the blob you’re growing over there will overtake this office.”

Next door, Kendall ’s desk was in order. A framed photo of her husband and son, a ruffled pink and white African violet that defied the odds and never stopped blooming under a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade, and a small Roseville pottery vase that her mother had given her for a pen and pencil holder commanded a pristine work surface. Her notebooks were color coded and filed in alphabetical order. A desk drawer was stocked with PowerBars, green tea, and low-sodium ramen for the days when she was too busy, too absorbed with a case, to leave for a bite.

“Missing brush picker?” Kendall said as she hung her coat on the hook behind the door.

Josh nodded. “Yup. Only in Kitsap.”

Kendall continued looking through a small stack of messages. “What’s the story?”

“Missing since early yesterday. Boyfriend’s here. Let’s chat him up.”

She’d been his favorite thus far. She’d been passive at first, as he commanded her to be.

“Like you’re dead. Okay? No fight. Or I’ll kill you. Just that simple. Easy to understand, right?”

“Please don’t hurt me. Please, I’ll do what you want.”

“You’re a good girl,” he said as he tightened the leather straps around her wrists.

“You’re hurting me!”

“Are you going to keep talking? I told you to shut up.”

“But it hurts.”

He took a spool of duct tape and scraped at it with a pocketknife, searching for the start of the roll.

“More than a thousand uses for this stuff,” he said, finally pulling a long piece. “Bet the makers don’t know about this one.”

Her eyes flooded with tears, and she struggled on the mattress that he’d offered her. Pinpricks in the wall allowed a sprinkling of light to fall over the room, the dank place where she was being held captive.

On the floor next to the mattress were a green blouse, blue jeans, and a brand-new box cutter, still wrapped in its Home Depot cello bag. All ready to go.

Chapter Four

March 30, 1:40 p.m.

Port Orchard

With a jacket over his restaurant uniform, Tulio Pena sat quietly in the secured area adjacent to the detective’s offices, next to a pasty-faced young man holding a large plastic bag marked with his name in large letters. After seven months as a guest of the county jail, the man with the bag was waiting for his mother to take him home. Tulio, nervous and beside himself with worry, tried to make small talk with the just-released inmate.

“My girlfriend’s missing. That’s why I’m here.”

The young man fidgeted. “Bummer. I’m sorry.”

Tulio nodded.

“I’m starting over again.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

The Kitsap detectives emerged from the hallway.

“Mr. Pena?” Kendall asked.

Tulio jumped to his feet so quickly that it startled the young man on the seat next to him. He dropped his bag.

“I’m Tulio Pena. Please help me.”

Kendall nodded understandingly. “That’s why we’re here. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

The trio found space in a small interview room. Kendall offered the young man coffee or a soda, but he declined. He only wanted one thing.

Celesta.

Tulio’s dark, almost-black eyes were bloodshot. It had been almost a full day since his Celesta vanished from the woods. When he first reported her missing, he was told that little could be done for twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem right, but he understood it. He and his brothers scoured the woods the rest of the day and that morning. When twenty-four hours had elapsed, on the dot, he was in the interview room.

“Something has happened to my girlfriend Celesta,” he began.

Kendall reviewed the reporting deputy’s report. “We’re here to help, Mr. Pena. It says she, you, and your brothers were harvesting brush out near Sunnyslope?”

“Sí,” he said, before quickly correcting himself. “Yes.”

“Were you licensed to pick there?” Josh asked. “You legal here?”

Kendall wanted to kick Josh under the table. The question would have to be asked, of course, but not right then and not with an accusatory tone. It had nothing to do with the fact that a young woman was missing. At least, not in any way she could imagine.

“Yes. Yes, we are, and yes, we had permits.” There was a flicker of indignation in the young man’s eyes.

Kendall soothed him, or at least tried to. The last thing the county needed was a complaint that could spiral into a lawsuit.

“I think what my colleague is getting at is, was Celesta familiar with the woods? The area?”

Tulio focused on Kendall. “Oh. Yes. She had been there before. She didn’t get lost. She couldn’t have gotten lost. She made it back to the van. We found her stuff.”

Again Josh pushed. “Your girlfriend and you, did you have a fight?”

Tulio shook his head. “No, never.”

“Was she angry about going out there to pick brush?”

“No. She liked to help. We were sending the money back to her family in El Salvador. Here’s her picture, taken last month. You will put it on TV and in the papers, right?”

He slid a photo across the table.

“She’s very pretty,” Kendall said, looking at the image of a smiling Celesta Delgado. Glossy dark hair. White teeth. Lips that were generous and brown eyes that sparkled. Beguiling eyes, she thought.

“Once we determine if she’s missing, we’ll do a media release. No guarantees that anyone will run her picture,” Josh said. “A dozen people go missing every day. Most come home when they are good and ready to.”

The young man’s eyes pooled. “She’s missing. She’s in trouble.”

The detectives took down Celesta’s description and noted that her brush bag was found just inside the trailhead, heavy with neatly bundled salal.

“You go to work, now,” Josh said, his tone condescending. “We’ll call you at work if we need more information. Understand?”

Tulio stood. His hands trembled a little, and he put them in his jacket pockets, in an attempt to steady himself. “I have a cell phone.”

Kendall looked at Josh, a cold stare to indicate that he had stepped over the line.

“Good,” she said. “Keep it with you. I’ll walk you out.”

Kendall found Josh back behind his messy desk, sipping a cup of coffee and looking online at Craigslist.

“I need a new pressure washer,” he said.

She ignored him. “What was that all about? You treated that guy like garbage.”

Josh set down his cup. “I’m just irritated. These brush pickers are scavengers. They come around the county stripping away whatever they think they can sell, and then they move on. They’re raping the woods, that’s what they’re doing.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re now concerned about the environment,” she said.

Josh turned back toward the computer. “No. I’m just sick of our resources being used up by transients. The whole goddamn county is being overrun by meth-heads, brush pickers, Navy pukes, and others who have no vested interest in doing things the way they ought to be done. This girl’s like the rest of them. She got what she wanted and split.”

Kendall looked at her watch. “Awfully early for you to be in such a foul mood.”

“I’m always in a foul mood.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Look, Kendall, you work the Delgado case. I’ll juggle the backlog.”

The “backlog” was a stack of drug and gun cases that he could work in his sleep.

“Fine,” she said, looking at her notes. “Maybe Celesta did leave for home, as you seem to think. But maybe something happened to her. Good luck with finding your pressure washer.”

Kendall walked across Division Street into the new Kitsap County Administration Building, where a commanding view of the Olympic Mountains and Sinclair Inlet filled the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a luminous beauty of a building that looked as if it had been plucked out of Seattle or some other city of means and planted on the hill across from the courthouse. Kendall smiled to a records clerk she knew and continued across the gleaming floors to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. The barista waved at her and started making her usual midday pick-me-up, a Tuxedo Mocha: white and dark chocolate. Cup in hand, she returned to her SUV and drove out to Sunnyslope, to the pathway off the highway where Tulio Pena said he’d parked the van the day before.

A jogger stopped to catch his breath as she got out of the SUV. “Hi,” he said, squatting a little, his elbows pinned to his sides.

Kendall said hello and identified herself.

“Looking for that renegade bear again?” the jogger asked. He was referring to an incident the prior month when a man riding his mountain bike through the woods had been attacked by a black bear. It seemed that his dogs had spooked the mom defending her cubs, and the man, hapless and ill-prepared, was caught in her crosshairs. She ripped off his ear and tore out his cheek. Local animal lovers sided with the bear, saying that the animal “was just doing what a mama bear does” and that “the bike rider shouldn’t have brought his dogs.”

Kendall shook her head. “No bear. Looking for a missing brush picker.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s good. I mean, that it isn’t a bear. They can be pretty scary. Seen a couple around here in the past year.”

The detective held out the photograph of Celesta Delgado.

“She’s pretty,” the man said.

“Yeah, she is. She went missing yesterday. You live around here?”

“Up the road in Sunnyslope.”

“Seen her or her crew out here?”

The man shook his head. “We get pickers around here all the time. I don’t pay ’em much attention. Sometimes they leave a bunch of trash in the woods, and that pisses me off.”

“How’s that?”

“Most of us who live out here live here for a reason. We don’t want to live in town next to Wal-Mart, and we don’t want people tramping around here with carts and bags thinking the forest is their personal convenience store.”

Kendall had heard that sentiment a hundred if not a thousand times before on Kitsap County calls. Kidnap County, as some called it, could be the kind of place where people had gates, dogs, guns, and an attitude that said “back off!” in no uncertain terms.

It was, she reflected, a good place to hide out and be alone.

“If you see her, call us. Okay?”

He took her business card and put it in his back pocket. “Sure. Will do.”

Kendall looked around and noticed the weave of various car and truck wheel treads in the muddy parking area. She walked toward the woods, an archway of ocean spray marking its entrance. She found some remnants of salal cuttings, a bundle of rubber bands, and the muddy footprints of at least a dozen people and a few dogs. Sunlight sifted through the maples and cedars, sending globes of light to the damp forest floor. She walked about a hundred yards before something pink caught her eye: a cellophane wrapper emblazoned with a depiction of a smiling shrimp and Asian characters.

Kendall bent down, her heels digging into the muddy soil, and wondered if it was evidence or carelessness. She bagged the wrapper, just in case, and got back into her car as a deer wandered into the parking lot. The scene was breathtaking in its incongruity.

The forest is so beautiful, yet so dangerous.

She got back in her car and started back to Port Orchard. The sky had darkened. She turned on her headlights and wipers as rain began to splatter on the windshield. Many of Kitsap County ’s rural roads have no edges, no borders, as they wind through forests of Douglas fir and western red cedars.

Tree trunks along rural roadways are thickly collared with salal, huckleberry, and the spires of the native sword fern. Some roads follow old deer trails from Puget Sound inland to valleys fed by a network of streams.

The woods were lush and lucrative.

And, just maybe, Kendall Stark thought, deadly.

Celesta Delgado was naked, shivering, on a sheet of plastic when she awoke. It was so dark in the room that she reached for her face, struggling to see if her own black hair had blocked the light. She couldn’t reach. She rolled back the moments as best she could. She’d been out in the woods. But where was she now? Had she passed out? Why couldn’t she move her arms? She tried to sit up, but her legs were paralyzed too.

Had she been in an accident?

Nothing in her memory suggested an accident, and the realization that her predicament was intentional came over her. Fear consumed her. If she’d been hurt and was in the hospital, would she be nude? She’d never been hospitalized before, yet she knew that every patient was allowed the dignity of some covering. She shivered again as cool air moved over her body.

A fan?

She wanted to call out, but her voice failed her too.

What is happening to me?

There was nothing to do but wait and cry tears that simply oozed into the fabric of the blindfold over her eyes.

She lay there, frozen and terrified, in the dark until a harsh voice was directed at her.

“Your hands and feet are no longer tied. Get up.”

Celesta heard the commands; nevertheless, she was unsure how to maneuver in order to perform them. She knew she was on her back, of course, but she had no idea how to pull herself upright. She was still blindfolded and confused about how to orient herself from the plastic sheeting that held her. She was so cold by then that her buttocks felt stuck to the sheeting. It was as if she were bound in plastic like a half-frozen roast.

“I know you can’t see, bitch, but you can hear. Now, get up. Roll over. On your knees.”

Celesta couldn’t cry out, although inside her head she’d screamed Tulio’s name over and over.

Tulio, please help! Tulio, save me!

The man in the dark grabbed her ankles. Celesta winced in pain as his callused hands scraped her skin. He pulled her down the plastic sheeting, now wet with her own urine.

“You’re going to do as I say or you’re going to die.”

She nodded, her cheeks now wet.

Tulio! Tulio!

He spread her legs and started to rub against her buttocks. She could feel the hair on his stomach and the hardness of his penis as he grunted and rubbed.

“Now, don’t move while I do you, bitch. You move, you die.”

Please no!

She tightened her thighs as he raped her.

“I said don’t move, bitch.” He slammed a fist into her kidney. “Don’t budge!”

A sharp pain worse than she’d ever known tormented every nerve in her torso. It was like an electric shock running from the base of her spine to her brain. She felt the man’s sticky-hot semen roll down her inner thighs.

She’d been praying for rescue. Now she wished for death.

“You ready?”

For what? What more could you do to me?

But the man wasn’t talking to Celesta. She heard another person moving in the room, coming closer but not speaking. The hands that grabbed her this time were smaller.

“No lube needed, I just primed the pump,” the man said.

Everything that was happening to Celesta was beyond wrong, but what was happening now was beyond her comprehension. She screamed out in pain.

“Shut up, bitch!” said the man who had raped her first.

The other remained silent while violating Celesta with some kind of a cylindrical device. It was rigid, cool, not made of flesh.

The first man started to laugh. “You have to get better at this.”

Celesta vomited blood.

God, take me from here. Jesus, take me home.

Just as darkness cascaded over her, she thought she saw the face of an angel. From a small slit in the tape across her eyes and head, she caught a glimpse of a divine figure. Yes, she was sure of it. She was small and beautiful, with a smile that brought a sense of peace.

“Help me,” she whispered.

Chapter Five

March 30, evening

South Colby

Steven and Kendall Stark lived in a gray and white 1920s bungalow above Yukon Harbor in South Colby, a few miles outside Port Orchard on the way to the Southworth ferry landing. Since her childhood in nearby Harper, Kendall had admired the house and how it sat on an incline backed with an impressive grove of moss-covered maples and silver-barked alders. It didn’t take any convincing to get her husband to share her dream. In fact, when the house went on the market five years into their marriage, it was Steven who surprised his wife with an open-house flyer and a promise “to make this happen for you, babe.”

A stone-edged walkway led from the street to wide front steps and a covered porch that seldom saw a summer evening without the presence of someone kicking back with a beer or a soda, watching the bay turn from blue to ink. It was a home that felt instantly comfortable, like those favorite brown leather slippers some dads wear for decades until they split at the toes. The place had been remodeled in the 1980s by a couple who likely didn’t realize the benefits of restoring a vintage home to its original charm. Wall-to-wall carpeting was easy enough to remove to expose original fir floors, but layers of mauve and kelly green paint over the rest of the woodwork was a daunting challenge. It took Steven and Kendall almost a year to scrape, sand, and re-stain the doors and trim. In the end, the house was any young couple’s vision of the perfect first home-enough room for children, a lawn that rolled from the front door to the main road, and a view of Blake Island and the harbor interrupted only by a few power lines and the frontage road.

Steven destroyed the kitchen making his specialty for dinner, lasagna layered with roasted red bell peppers and sweet apple sausage. Between sales calls, he picked up a loaf of French bread at the Albertsons on Mile Hill Road and slathered it with garlic butter-Cody’s favorite.

By the time Kendall made it home, the house smelled like an Italian restaurant. And a pretty good one at that. If she was stuck with the dishes (“You cook, I’ll clean”), the deal seemed fair enough.

“Where’s the wine?” she asked, setting down her things and taking off her coat.

“Uncorked and breathing.” He went for the glasses, the last pair that matched from their wedding stemware. “Cody’s in his room.”

The words were familiar. Cody’s way of coping was isolation.

“We have to talk,” she said.

“I know.”

Kendall nuzzled the back of her husband’s neck as he poured the wine, a dark, almost syrupy cabernet that infused the glasses with the glow of a glass full of rubies.

“We can’t pretend he’s going to be okay,” she said.

“I stopped pretending a long time ago.”

She took a sip of her wine and thought carefully. “You know what I mean. We’re going to have to reconsider Inverness or something like it. He’s got his whole life ahead of him, and we have to find out what is best for him.”

Steven’s eyes narrowed on his wife. The year before she’d cut her medium-length blond bob to a shorter cut. Sometimes when she hastily ran the hair product through her hair in the mornings, she ended up with an almost spiky do. It suited her. It made her deep blue eyes more pronounced and more of a mirror of what she was thinking.

“He’s not living there, and you know that,” he said.

Kendall set her wineglass on the still-mauve laminate kitchen countertop.

“We have to do what’s best,” she said. “I just wish I knew what that was.” A tear threatened to roll down her cheek, and she wiped it away.

There would be plenty of time for crying later. Her husband was more certain about the future, taking a kind of optimistic approach that she’d abandoned. Partly it was because of her job, but also because her dreams for her little boy had faded over time too.

“I’m going to check on Cody,” she said, heading down the hallway to Cody’s room with its captain’s bed, orca wallpaper, and array of toys that would be the envy of any child his age, or maybe a little younger. He was playing with a puzzle that he liked to put together, wrong side up.

Kendall let her mind wander back to the first moment she had any inkling that something was different about Cody. She never allowed the words wrong and aberrant to find their way into her thoughts. Even the euphemisms like special or challenged were banished from her vocabulary when she replayed any of the instances in which her beautiful boy seemed, well, different. He was three months old, a bundle of pink skin and downy blond hair swathed in a pale blue blanket. The cat had jumped up on the coffee table and knocked over a tippy vase of daffodils, sending it crashing to the floor. The noise startled Kendall but not Cody. Not at all. He just stayed still, a slight smile on his rosebud lips, his blue eyes fixed on the table lamp. Kendall worried that Cody’s lack of response could indicate hearing impairment. She snapped her fingers in his face.

Again nothing. A trip to the pediatrician the next day confirmed that his hearing was fine.

It was more serious than mere deafness.

“It’s too early to say, of course,” the doctor said, “but this kind of intent, uninterruptible gaze can sometimes foretell autism.”

Kendall felt the air rush from her lungs.

“Are you sure?”

“Look, Kendall, I’ve been a pediatrician long enough to see the early warnings. Testing will need to be done, certainly. But the truest indicator will be time itself.”

“But he might outgrow it, right?”

“Some do. Most don’t. And, dear, remember, there are varying degrees of severity. Maybe we’ll be lucky here.”

The word luck always stuck in her mind. Kendall Stark was not a believer in the concept. She felt that all people, good and bad, had a role in the outcome of their lives. As a cop and as a mother, she had to think so. Otherwise, the world was too random of a place for order.

Order was what she craved.

She stood quietly watching Cody as he worked the puzzle on the braided rug that covered the old fir floor of his bedroom. He never turned the pieces to make them fit. He just knew where they snapped into place. She wondered what other strange talents her special son might have. Autism was heartbreaking beyond comprehension, she knew, but there was a bit of magic in the disorder too. Some children could work numbers in a way that an MIT graduate couldn’t; some were artists whose inspiration was otherworldly.

And yet, she had prayed for a miracle since the day of his diagnosis. That there would be something that would bring her son back to what she and Steven had dreamed their child would be. Kendall put on a brave face with Steven, because she had to. And no matter the future-a gifted child or one who stared forever into space-Cody Stark would always be her beautiful boy.

Later that evening, after Cody was asleep, the story of the missing brush picker and the harsh reality of the teacher’s conference no longer fighting for her awareness, Kendall and Steven took a moment just to hold each other. It was not a mechanical embrace or a kind of attempt by one to guide the other to the bedroom. It was something deeper, the kind of gesture that confirmed that no matter what they faced, they would always face it together. The spring evening was warm enough for a sweater, and the couple went outside on the porch with the last of their cabernet. Miles away, across Puget Sound, they could see a portion of the Seattle skyline, including the iconic spire of the Space Needle.

Lights flickered on a few boats that moved silently through the waters. Some carried freight destined for the ports of Seattle or Tacoma. Some held partiers who’d had too much to drink, fisherman who were disappointed by what they hadn’t caught, marine biologists who wondered where a missing member of a local pod of orcas had gone.

One carried a dark specter of depravity that no other human being could imagine.

He tucked a Camel straight between his lips and looked out over the water as a trio of harbor seals bobbed in the wake of another boat, now all but a pinprick on the horizon. She’d been the perfect victim. Her terror was a rush, a vibration that stimulated. She was, in fact, his Magic Fingers. She was what he considered a lucky catch, a girl just begging to be a victim because of her trusting nature. He preferred those who fought a little harder or wore their skepticism like a shield.

His cigarette dangling, his fingertip rubbed across the silver Crossfire lighter that felt so good in his palm as he let the cool evening air pour over his handsome face.

She was looking at the Seattle skyline.

He imagined a conversation:

Everything all right, baby? she asked, her eyes a mix of worry and fear.

No problems I can’t fix, he answered into the wind.

Need any help?

He shook his head and went to cut the boat’s engine.

No. You’ve done enough.

Kendall crawled under the covers and nuzzled her husband. Steven was asleep, snoring softly in the manner she found more charming than irritating. The regular rhythm of his slumber was something that she could always count on, and it comforted her just then. She found herself thinking of how her life might have gone if they’d stayed apart. She remembered how lost she’d been that lonely, dark time years ago.

His voice on the phone still reverberated in her memory.

“ Kendall, I don’t really know what’s going on.”

“I don’t, either.”

“But you do,” Steven said.

“I need more time to sort out things.”

“I’m begging you,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. “Please.”

Chapter Six

March 31, 8 a.m.

Port Orchard

Tulio Pena had left two voice messages on Kendall ’s office phone. Both were colored by the anguish of a man frightened to death. In the background, Kendall could hear the sounds of piped-in mariachi music and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

“Do you know anything? Did you find anything?”

She knew he worked a late shift, so she didn’t call back with the non-answer she’d have to give. Families of the missing always hungered for any tidbit of information offered up by anyone in a position to know anything: first, by investigators, then by reporters, and lastly, if the period of time elapsed had become too long to foster hope, by a psychic. Most cops working a missing-persons case have felt the wrath of a family in search of answers.

“We’re doing all that we can,” she’d said more than once.

“All that you can? It seems like nothing! Nothing at all!”

“We can’t give you visibility for every detail of our investigation.”

That last line choked in her throat whenever she had used it. Sometimes it was more posturing than a real reflection of what was going on in the offices of the in investigative body.

Her sesame-seed bagel at the ready, Kendall went about some background research. She knew about the brush industry, of course. She’d been raised in Kitsap, a region with NO BRUSH PICKING signs as commonplace as GARAGE SALE placards. She booted up her PC and started the search for crimes on LINX, a regional criminal database. She used the key words: brush, floral industry, violence. From her open doorway, she saw Josh Anderson in the hall trying to work his vanishing charms on a pretty young temp.

He’ll never change. And he’ll never get her to go out with him, she thought.

She clicked on a couple of hits on the subject in a law enforcement database. In Oregon, two men had been killed over a cache of cinnamon-scented mushrooms that brought an astonishingly high price in Japan ’s epicurean industry. A Filipino woman in Thurston County was mutilated by a rival picker when she was caught working his territory.

He cut off both her thumbs.

“You bitch, you steal no more,” he’d said over and over as she ran holding her severed thumbs to her chest, screaming out of the woods. The man was eventually arrested and convicted and was serving ten years in Walla Walla.

A report indicated that violence had escalated along with the demand for floral greens. It seemed that more and more illegal immigrants were taking up the trade as the land, in some places, became overworked. She learned that Sheriff’s Office stats indicated that over the past two years the number of complaints made by private landowners had doubled.

The complaint made by Brett Matthews of Olalla in the very southernmost part of Kitsap County was typical of what Kendall found in the reports:

You should see the noble fir my dad planted twenty years ago. They’ve skinned the branches up to the tiptop. Hope someone’s enjoying that Christmas wreath at my expense. What’s with these people? Why don’t they stay off my land? Next time I’ll shoot anyone who comes to rustle what’s mine.

Kendall checked Mr. Matthews’ tax records to make sure he didn’t own any property in the Sunnyslope area.

He didn’t.

An article in the mainstream press also caught her eye. It had appeared in the Olympia paper two years prior. The writer presented the idea that brushpicking was one of the last vestiges of the Old West, a kind of job that pitted man and woman against the elements, literally living off the land, dodging bullets, and collecting just enough money at the end of the day to feed the family and do it all over again. They were floral rustlers. Cowboys fighting over what they felt they had a right to.

It was after eleven, and Kendall called Tulio, figuring that no matter how late he’d worked, he’d want to talk to her.

A younger man, who identified himself as Leon Pena, answered.

“One minute. Tulio! The police are on the phone!”

“Detective Stark, do you have news?” His voice was full of hesitation and hope.

Kendall locked her eyes on Celesta’s photo and spoke into the handset. “I’m afraid not.” She refrained from reminding him that they’d only had the case a day, but she knew that even an less than savvy observer who watched any TV whatsoever knew that missing-persons cases were solved in hours, not days. Days of searching usually meant someone was dead or had run away.

“Tulio, have you had any problems out there with other pickers?”

“Problems? What do you mean?”

“Did anyone threaten you or cause problems with you where you were picking?”

There was a short pause. “No. No, Detective. We did not want any trouble. We heard some Asians out there that day, but we never saw them. We never talked to them.”

“All right. I have one other question, Tulio. This is touchy, difficult…”

She could almost hear him gulp on the other end of the line. She wanted to let him down easy, if there was any possibility that Celesta Delgado had left him for another man, no matter how unlikely the scenario.

“How were you and Celesta getting along? Did you argue?”

“We were in love.”

“In love, yes,” she said, repeating his words. “But was she happy? Do you think she might have been seeing anyone?”

“No. She loved me. Only me.”

Only you, she thought. Of course, only you.

She told Tulio that she’d continue working the case and that if she had any more questions she’d call. As she hung up, Josh Anderson appeared in the doorway. For the first time Kendall noticed he was wearing a new suit, a gray chalk-striped outfit with a crisp blue shirt and a raspberry tie.

“How’s your day going?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “In court today or going to your homecoming dance?”

“Funny,” he said, sliding into a chair across from her. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”

“Okay.” Kendall looked back down at her work.

“Aren’t you going to ask what it is?”

She took out a highlighter and made a yellow trail through some text on the printout. “Nope.” She could feel his agitation percolate inside his brand-new suit, and she loved it. She knew that Josh Anderson was the type of man who never missed an opportunity to tell someone-particularly a woman-how smart, how successful, and just how in demand he was. She silently counted to three.

“I’m speaking at Burien today.”

Burien was the location of the state’s police training facility.

“Really, Josh? I guess you forgot to mention it.” She glanced at the whiteboard hanging on the wall adjacent to her desk. In block letters, it read:

JOSH SPEAKING ON INVESTIGATIVE RESOURCES IN MID-SIZE JURISDICTIONS

She waited a beat. “Of course I remember. Break a leg, Josh. I want to hear all about it. I’ll work the Delgado case while you’re basking in the glow of your admirers.”

He smiled at her. She had his number. And that’s why he liked her most of the time.

Those who worked in it called it a brush shed, but Every-Greens of Washington called their processing offices next to the Old Belfair Highway a “dream factory.” The sheet-metal-sided building was the size of a mid-century high school gymnasium with faded panels depicting bouquets that celebrated the major holidays: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. Kendall parked next to a row of old cars, many mud-caked with cracked windows and backseats containing baby blankets and Wendy’s food wrappers. She figured they were the cars of the processors, mothers who worked there part-time during the week and possibly up in the woods on the weekends as pickers.

Karl Hudson was a round-faced fellow of about sixty, with heavy bags under his eyes, protruding ears, and hairy knuckles that gave him a distinctly simian appearance. He introduced himself to Kendall as the president and chief operating officer of the company that his father and mother had founded in the 1950s. Every-Greens was one of the oldest purveyors of floral greens in the state.

“You said you’re here about Celesta Delgado.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I don’t like surprises,” he said. “So I checked. Her residency status was good. She was a good picker. Always had a permit. All our pickers do.”

Kendall followed him into a large room with about twenty massive tables. Young and middle-aged women were busy sorting the raw bundles, trimming the stems of leaves that appeared bug-eaten or torn by the move from the forest to the bag.

“That’s the moneymaker,” he said, indicating a bunch of salal, its dark green, almost leathery leaves glossy with water from a quick rinse. “Lasts for months in cold storage. Can’t keep up with the demand. Bet you’ve had your share of bouquets.”

Kendall nodded. “A few.”

“When you think about it,” he said, “we are dream makers here. Our team creates the foundation for wedding arrangements, new baby bouquets, and, yes, even memorial wreaths. Every moment marked by flowers carries a little bit of Kitsap County.”

“Was Celesta ever a processor here?”

Karl motioned for Kendall to take a seat in his office, which she did.

“She was here for about a month, until she got the restaurant job. She was a good processor. She figured she could make more waiting tables. I didn’t stand in her way. Was glad to have her out in the woods with the Penas. Good people. Good workers.”

She knew that was the bottom line for Mr. Hudson.

“Any problems that you know of between Tulio and Celesta?”

“I wouldn’t really know. They seemed happy.” He looked down at her file.

“You seem hesitant, Mr. Hudson.”

“Look, I am concerned. We’ve had some turf wars. Demand is huge, and we’ve got people coming up from Mexico and other points south canvassing the woods for any scrap of green they can find. A few years ago, it was impossible to get pickers. Now the woods are overrun with them.”

Kendall didn’t say so, but she could feel the ugly undercurrent of racism in the way the man referred to those who worked for him-those who made him enough money to buy the Lexus she saw parked out front-as them.

She noticed the CELEBRATING 50 YEARS gold sticker that was affixed to the outgoing mail on his desk.

“A lot has changed in fifty years,” she said.

“Yes. My father-in-law started this place. He’s dead now, and a good thing-he’d go apoplectic if he had to deal with what I do these days. Between you and me, these people don’t really want to work. At least, not hard. Not like they did back in the day.”

“I see,” Kendall said, deciding she’d never buy a supermarket bouquet again.

“I pay the processors a dollar more an hour than minimum wage, and benefits to boot,” he said, glancing through his office window, which overlooked the women hovering over tables, sorting salal.

“Celesta and the Delgado brothers at least had the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great. You know, when it actually was great.”

When they were finished, the Every-Greens president escorted Kendall back through the work area.

A Mexican woman of no more than twenty-five handed her a single rose flanked by a fan of huckleberry.

“Celesta is a nice girl. I hope you find her,” she said.

Before Kendall could say anything, Karl Hudson shot the young woman a cold look.

“Break time isn’t for another forty-five, Carmina. Let’s get back to work, ladies.”

Chapter Seven

March 31, 10 a.m.

Port Orchard

Instinct and intuition often play an important function in police work. Those who deny their crucial roles are likely those who don’t possess that something extra that allows an interrogator to home in on the truth when the facts don’t always add up: how the flutter of an eyelash indicates a lie, the curl of an upper lip says more than the words coming from the subject. Truth, Kendall Stark knew, was more than the sum of available facts. There was nothing to really back up the belief that Celesta Delgado simply ditched her boyfriend in the middle of cutting brush in Sunnyslope. Nor did she think that the gentle man who’d come into the Sheriff’s Office was involved with her disappearance. She drove out to Kitsap West, the ramshackle mobile home park that was best known for a dead baby that had been found the previous year on the other side of the rusted eight-foot wire fence that cordoned off the single- and double-wide mobiles, along with a smattering of travel trailers and fifth wheels.

She parked her SUV in front of space 223, a single-wide Aloha with new steps and decking, and knocked.

A woman of about sixty answered. Although it was past ten, she was still wearing slippers and a bathrobe. As she spoke, the remnants of the cigarette she’d been smoking curled in the still air. And while she had a pleasant face and reasonably warm eyes, everything else about her told Kendall that she was going to be of no help. She barely opened the door, for starters.

A sure sign that the person is hiding something inside: a messy house, maybe a dead body…

“I don’t need a vacuum or aromatherapy if that’s what you’re here for,” she said.

Kendall offered a smile. “I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office. I’m Kendall Stark.”

“I don’t know anything about my nephew.”

Kendall suppressed a smile. She could never begin to count the times that someone misunderstood why she was on their front doorstep and offered up a relative or a neighbor as a quick means to save themselves from some hidden concern.

“Ma’am, I’m not here about your nephew. I’m here about the missing woman who lived next door.”

The woman widened the door a bit more. “You mean the Mexican?”

“I think they are Salvadoran.”

“Same to me.” She motioned for Kendall to come inside. “I liked Celesta. Nice girl. What she was doing with those rowdies, I’ll never know.”

A four-foot patch of linoleum served as the entryway to a living room that was papered in a cheery orange poppy print. A brown sofa, two small chairs, and a TV playing a shopping channel that sold only gems completed the milieu of a person of big dreams and modest means.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Kendall said, scooting a sheaf of newspapers to one side of the sofa before taking a seat.

“Sally Todd,” she said. “Coffee?”

Kendall politely declined. “No, thanks. I’m here about Celesta. You seem to think there was trouble at home. Am I getting that right?”

Sally Todd tightened the knotted belt on her robe, a pale blue flannel garment that needed laundering, and took a seat facing her visitor.

“Look, these days there is always trouble with young people. I know the girl. I know Tulio and his brothers too. They had their music playing at all hours. I called the sheriff on them five times last summer. You can check on that, if you don’t believe me.”

“Did Celesta ever indicate to you that she wanted out of the relationship? That maybe she wanted to return to El Salvador?”

The older woman looked for her cigarette case and pulled out a More. She flicked on her lighter and pulled air through the slender dark brown cigarette.

“She said that Tulio was no good and she wanted to get away from him. He was too controlling.”

This interested Kendall, although she wasn’t sure if she believed anything this woman had to say. “Really?” she asked.

“I’m talking out of school,” she said, “but I don’t care. The girl needed to get away from the lot of them. The Pena brothers have turned this quiet mobile home park into party central. I think one of the boys stole my leaf blower. They denied it. But that’s what I think. I called the sheriff on them too.”

“I see.”

“Yes, and you can verify all of this. The girl finally got some sense. Really, picking brush? What kind of life is that? She could do better than that. Who couldn’t?”

Kendall thanked her. She didn’t tell her that the county was rife with desperate people who would do just about anything to survive-and stay out of the reach of the law. Picking brush was far from the worst endeavor she could imagine.

With Josh Anderson away at the academy speaking about his experiences investigating rural crimes, detectives’ row in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s office was far quieter than usual. Almost pin-drop hushed. Two were out in the field, running down drug cases, and a third was working the third murder of the year, the case of a Seabeck woman who’d been arrested for the killing of a woman she and her husband had picked up after a night of partying at the Bethel Saloon. The tavern was a Kitsap classic, a rough-around-the-edges biker-type bar that shared a parking strip with a butcher, Farmer George’s, frequently prompting a retort about the two establishments’ close proximity:

“Wonder which is the bigger meat market?”

“Judging by the looks of some of those biker babes hanging around the pool tables, I’d say there’s more gristle at the Bethel than at Farmer George’s.”

Kendall Stark had felt genuine concern coming from Tulio Pena when he spoke about Celesta. She’d seen the way a husband or boyfriend can try to emulate devotion or worry by saying the right words. Sometimes they even eke out a tear to punctuate the moment with a display of emotion that is supposed to support their position as a loving partner.

“I don’t know why she did this to me.”

“I had no idea she was unhappy.”

“All I ever did was love her.”

Kendall just didn’t see a false note when Tulio gave his statement. Even so, something troubled her greatly, and there was no way to really dismiss it. The reporting deputy noted in the initial missing-person report that Celesta Delgado’s purse had been left behind in the van.

Inside the purse were the three main indicators of an abduction or a homicide: Celesta’s cell phone, keys, and wallet.

No woman running away leaves those things, she thought.

It was around five when Kendall found her husband and son in the plaza of the Kitsap County Administration Building. Steven had a client meeting that evening, and they’d planned on an early dinner. A few clouds had rolled in, obscuring the Olympics and turning what had been a lovely afternoon into what promised to be a cool spring evening.

Cody’s face lit up when his mother emerged from the Sheriff’s Office walkway. “Mommy! I see you!” he said.

Kendall beamed and ran toward her son with outstretched arms. Some days there were no words, just the rocking of a small body as he looked at her with eyes that seemed empty of recognition.

“Hi, you two,” she said.

“Ready for a dinner out?” Steven asked, his broad white smile another salvo to her heart.

“Yes, I am,” she said, scooping up Cody. “Pancakes, everyone?”

Cody smiled.

Whenever they went out, they’d have pancakes at the same restaurant, in the same booth.

“Make mine banana pecan,” Steven said with a wink.

“Strawberry for me.” Kendall shot back.

It was always banana pecan, strawberry, and blueberry. Each member of the Stark family had a prescribed meal, time, and place. To deviate was to cause unease and ruin what was a pleasant dinner-or, in this case, breakfast-out.

“How’s your day going?” Steven asked.

“Oh, you know.” She set Cody down and gave her husband a quick peck. “Kind of slow.”

“Any sign of the missing girl?”

Kendall and Steven talked shop only on the most cursory level. He’d tell her if he closed a big ad sale; she’d mention if a perp had been nailed or a case stymied. But she didn’t like to bring her work into their personal lives. They’d agreed to take his car to eat, then drive back to the Sheriff’s Office parking lot so Kendall could take Cody home.

“I’m worried about her,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat of the nine-year-old red Jeep Wrangler that they’d purchased just slightly used a couple of years after Cody was born. Despite his age and size, Cody was secured in a car seat, behind his parents.

“I thought she bolted. I mean, Jesus, she was working two jobs. I’d leave town too.” Steven glanced at Cody in the rearview mirror. He was watching the world slip by his window.

“Josh talked to Celesta’s sister in El Salvador. She’s as worried as Tulio is.”

“Boyfriend troubles, maybe?” he asked, turning onto Sidney Avenue and heading south to Tremont.

Kendall turned on a CD, a Raffi recording that Cody loved. She turned around, hoping to catch a smile, but the little boy just stared out the side window.

“I really don’t know. Can we talk about something else?”

“I drove over to Inverness this afternoon,” Steven said. “Just to check it out.”

Kendall felt his words stab at her, although she knew Steven meant no harm. The idea of the alternative school for their son hadn’t really set in yet. She wasn’t ready for it to set in.

“I thought we’d do that together,” she said.

Steven let a sigh pass from his lips. He took his eyes off the road and looked at her.

“I was making a run up to Bainbridge to meet with an advertiser. It was on the way home.”

“I see. I guess that makes sense,” Kendall said, looking away.

Why are you pushing this? she thought. Putting him there is one step closer to saying he’s never going to get better.

As much as she loved Steven, there was no doubt there was a wall between them. She knew that some walls can never be scaled. Not even with all the love in the world.

Chapter Eight

April 1, 10 a.m.

East Bremerton , Washington

The Azteca was a quintessential cookie-cutter Mexican restaurant, one of the type that sprouted all over America around the time that salsa overtook ketchup as the country’s bestselling condiment. Frothy frozen margaritas in flavors that God (or a decent bartender) had never intended-peach mint, cantaloupe, and blackberry-and tortilla chips warm from the deep fat fryer, served until the meal itself becomes an afterthought.

Kendall took a call from an Azteca busboy named Scott Sawyer, looked at her watch, and decided she’d head north from Port Orchard and time it for lunch. Josh was out pursuing a lead on a drug dealer near Wye Lake, so she drove up alone.

“I have something important to tell you,” Scott had said in a voice that cracked in a way that suggested he was barely out of puberty. “It’s really important. About the case you’re working on.”

“Can you give me a hint?” she asked, wanting to find out before she left if the kid had anything worth telling.

“Celesta had something going on here with another waiter. Tulio was so mad I thought he was going to kill her.”

That was certainly enough for the drive up the highway to Bremerton.

Peeling off his apron, Scott Sawyer slid into an orange and brown vinyl booth in the back of the restaurant. He was blond, pale, and as lanky as an orchard ladder. He introduced himself and apologized for keeping her waiting. She’d had to tell the server twice she didn’t want any more chips, although she’d barely touched her basket. She wondered if anyone ate the red and green chips, a tip of the hat, or rather sombrero, to Mexico ’s flag.

To Kendall, it always seemed more like a nod to Christmas.

“First off, I just want you to know that everyone here really likes Celesta. She’s our best hostess by far. She trained me.”

Kendall smiled. “I’ve heard nice things about her.”

“When the boss remodeled the restaurant in Port Orchard, she was the one he selected to hostess the grand reopening.”

The waitress brought a taco salad and silently set it in front of her. For a second, Kendall thought she detected the server rolling her eyes slightly. It was subtle and could have been a nervous tic.

“I made the dressing,” he said. “Good stuff. Not good for you, but good stuff.”

Kendall speared a piece of lettuce and dipped it into the spicy sour cream dressing.

“Anyway,” Scott went on, “Celesta liked me. I could tell. I knew that she was hooked up with Tulio, but she just, you know…”

“No, I don’t know.”

Scott rested his bony hands on the table. A tattoo across his knuckles spelled out ROCK AND ROLLA.

“She could do better,” he said. “Tulio wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t like the brush thing. She wanted to move forward here, not run around the woods with a clipper trying to make a buck.”

The server-who wore a name tag that said MARIA but, with her green eyes and blond highlights, looked more like a Mary-shook her head as she cleared the table on the other side of the restaurant. She caught Kendall ’s eye, and the detective made a mental note to speak to her before leaving the restaurant.

“You said on the phone you had some information that could be helpful in finding her,” she said to Scott. “Do you know where she went? Did she say anything to you about leaving town?”

Though clearly enjoying the attention, Scott looked a little impatient. He wasn’t ready, it seemed, to cut to the chase.

“I’m getting there. I’m getting there, Detective Stark.”

“All right. We’re trying to find a missing person, Scott.”

“You’ll find her. But she’ll be dead when you do.” His words were delivered matter-of-factly.

Kendall felt a chill. “How do you know that?”

Scott flexed his tattooed knuckles and grinned. “Because I bet you money that Tulio killed her. I read the article in the paper. That’s why I called. Tulio and his brothers are big liars. They want to act all lovey-dovey and whatnot, but that’s a big fat lie.”

Now Kendall could see where this was going. “How do you know this, Scott? Is this an opinion or what?”

“No. One time Celesta and I were messing around in the back.”

“‘Messing around’?”

“Well, not like that. It wasn’t messing around. I had a tear in the strap of my apron,” he said, picking up the food-spattered white garment that he’d removed before sitting down. “See right here?” He pointed to some black thread. “That’s where Celesta sewed it up. I was wearing it at the time, and Tulio came in and saw us. He thought something was going on.”

“But nothing was, right?”

“Right, I mean, I wish. But no, nothing. He just lit into her, saying, ‘If I ever catch you touching another man, I’ll do what they do to whores back in El Salvador!’”

“And what did you take that to mean?” she said.

“I don’t know exactly. I went online and looked up what they do to cheats in El Salvador, and I found something about how a woman can go to prison for six years if she gets caught cheating on her husband.”

“But Tulio and Celesta weren’t married.”

His break over, Scott got up to return to the kitchen. “They acted like it. Or at least he did.”

Maria, who turned out to be Maryanne Jenner, a student at Olympic College in Bremerton, rang up the bill at the cash register by the front door. The recorded mariachi music blared from the bar, and Kendall had to strain to hear the young woman.

“I hope you don’t put much faith in what Scott says,” she said. “He’s had a thing for Celesta, and she wouldn’t give him two seconds of an hour.”

“Was Tulio the jealous type?”

“Look,” the young woman said, “I’ve never seen it. Not from him. Others, yeah.” She handed her the change, and Kendall pushed it back to her.

“Thanks. One more thing, Detective.”

“What’s that?

“I think she’s dead too. She’d never just run off. Celesta wasn’t that kind of girl.”

All cops know that if Oscars were handed out to workers in any profession other than moviemaking, it would be to homicide detectives, who must approach suspects with an unyielding poker face, or ratchet up sincerity to win over those on the brink, or feign anger to force a meltdown of defenses. Kendall had liked Tulio Pena and believed him. She did not believe or like Scott Sawyer, but it was her duty to follow up on what he had said.

It wasn’t going to be a good cop/bad cop scenario when Kendall and Josh met with Tulio for a follow-up interview based on the information provided by Scott Sawyer and Maryanne Jenner at the Azteca Restaurant. Josh remained disinterested in the case, sure that Celesta had ditched her boyfriend for greener pastures.

Or at least where she didn’t have to quite literally work greener pastures.

Kendall told Tulio that they found some evidence and he needed to come down as soon as possible. He was in the little room within thirty-five minutes of her call, still wearing the white Mexican wedding shirt that was his restaurant uniform.

“Tell us what you did with Celesta,” Kendall said, looking dead-eyed at Tulio as they sat across from one another in a small, windowless interrogation room in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office.

“What I did with her?”

Kendall forced all her emotions to flatline. “Yes. Did you fight?”

“I don’t know what you are saying.”

“Did you tell someone that you would make her pay if she ever left you for another man?”

“She would never.”

Josh was snapped back into the moment by the adrenaline coming from across the table. “We have a witness who says so.”

Tulio was caught completely off guard. He pushed back his chair. “Who? Your witness is a liar!”

“Look,” Kendall said, finding her way back into the interview, “we have a good idea what happened. You argued in the woods, didn’t you. She told you she wanted to leave you, correct?”

“She never.”

“Did you beat her? Did you choke her?”

His eyes were filling with tears. “I love her.” The compact man across from the detectives shrunk before her eyes. “No. I did not.”

Josh jabbed an accusing finger at him. “What did you and your brothers do with her body?”

By then Tulio had stood up. “We did nothing.”

“It is only a matter of time,” Josh said. “We will find out what you’ve done with her.”

Kendall saw genuine emotion in Tulio’s eyes, and her instinct was to tell him that everything would be all right. That they’d find her. That they didn’t really think he killed her. Tulio got up and went toward the doorway, stopping before passing through.

“You don’t believe me. But I am not lying.”

Kendall felt a twinge of shame as Tulio made his way out of the building. She did believe him, but there was nothing else to go on. Something had happened to the young woman in the woods near Sunnyslope.

For the next two days an angry and confused Tulio did what he’d been told: he waited. He and his brothers returned to Sunnyslope and yelled out Celesta’s name. They called the police a couple times a day, but got the same response from the deputy who’d gone out to see them following that first call. So Tulio did what he’d seen others do in cases in which the police stonewalled.

He called the newspaper.

And while Tulio was seeking answers, the man who had them kicked back and enjoyed what made Washington such a lovely place in the spring.

Never too hot.

Never too cool.

He did all of the things that other men did. He drove to work. Drank beer. Barbecued. Went out on his boat in Puget Sound. Hauled in crab pots brimming with Dungeness beauties. He even took his boat up to Hood Canal during the short-lived shrimp season. He considered heading toward the Theler Wetlands in Belfair, where he’d dumped his victim, but he thought better of it.

Mostly, however, he reveled in what he’d done and what he’d do next. He knew the smartest killer would never kill in his own backyard. He likened it to how a dog wouldn’t defecate in his own kennel. How a drunk tries his best to get to a toilet rather than vomit anywhere where cleanup would be required. A smart killer doesn’t discard a victim too close to home. He’d researched what had been the downfall of others who’d aspired to the kind of greatness that he did. He wasn’t sick, just clever. The others hadn’t refined the rules as he had.

He wrote them down on a scrap of paper in his office at the shipyard.

Never kill someone who will be missed.

Never tell anyone.

Never kill in close proximity to another kill.

Never kill someone with a child.

Never kill someone in your family.

As he contemplated his next move, the man with the sharp blade knew that at least one of his rules would be violated, but he carelessly dismissed it. Clever as he was, he felt that set of laws he’d adopted served a mighty purpose.

They kept others in line.

Chapter Nine

April 3, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

At twenty-four, Serenity Hutchins knew that her return to Port Orchard to work on the city’s weekly newspaper, the Lighthouse, was the necessary first step in her media career. A stepping-stone sunk into familiar ground. It wasn’t about being a failure when she wasn’t hired by a major Northwest daily. Starting at the Lighthouse was merely the best she could do for now, especially in an industry floundering in a failing economy. She’d come home, but she was not the same person who had graduated from South Kitsap High. She was no longer the girl who’d squandered her high school years dating a football player who’d claimed that she’d be his bride once he turned pro.

Which, of course, never happened.

Certainly, Rick Silas had a decent college career and was a third-round pick of the Seattle Seahawks, but after a lifetime of promises of undying love, he’d found a new love-a cheerleader, no less.

Life wasn’t fair, and Serenity Hutchins knew it. She probably always had.

She could have moved in with her mother in Bremerton; instead she chose to rent an apartment at Mariner’s Glen in Port Orchard, one of those hopelessly nautically themed apartments that saw great use for rusty anchors, ratty nets, and heaps of silvery driftwood at its entryway. She lived there with her cat, a black-and-white tabby named Mr. Smith.

Her editor, a heavyset fellow who’d worked at papers in Seattle and San Francisco but had come back to helm the tiny Port Orchard newspaper, lumbered toward her. Charlie Keller could have been Serenity’s idol. He’d interviewed a couple of presidents as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board. He had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice for spot news reporting. He’d even had a long-running column in the Seattle Times. He’d done it all, had it all, and then lost it to a gambling habit.

He’d come home to Port Orchard to finish out his career and die.

That will never happen to me, Serenity thought as she watched Charlie maneuver between the newsroom desks, his beefy frame pounding on the hollow flooring of the modular building that was the modest headquarters of the Lighthouse. I’m going to make a name for myself and stay on top for good.

She smiled at him.

“Hutchins,” he said. “Might have something for you.”

She liked it when he used her last name. It was so All the President’s Men. “What’s up?”

“Missing brush picker out in Sunnyslope. Probably nothing. Probably more about a homesick girl wanting to go back to El Salvador than anything. You want the story? Remember, nothing much happens around here, and that’s pretty much the way they like it.”

Serenity was finishing up an article about a beautification project that had languished for years as downtown Port Orchard merchants griped about the cost.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, dropping the story into an electronic file folder for the copydesk.

“Talked to Josh in the Sheriff’s Office.”

“I’ll run it down,” she said. “Details?”

Charlie looked over by the front door, where a clean-cut man in a blue sweatshirt and jeans was waiting. He had black hair and the faint tracings of a goatee that had either just started or, if it had been growing a while, he ought to abandon.

“That’s the boyfriend,” Charlie said. “Tulio Pena is his name. Let’s put something in the paper. Okay?”

Serenity took a notepad and pen and went toward Tulio.

“See if you can get a picture, okay?” Charlie called out. “We need art, you know.”

“I know,” she said, with the resignation that came with the realization that photos and coupons were the primary reason anyone bothered with the Lighthouse. Text-no matter how good-was needed only to fill the spaces between art and ads. She thought of it as “word mortar designed to keep the ads from falling off the sheet of newsprint.”

The Lighthouse’s conference room was furnished with seven ladder-back chairs and an antique mahogany table that, newsroom legend had it, was salvaged from a near-shipwreck around the Cape by one of Port Orchard’s first settlers, a sea captain who’d planned on retiring in Seattle but instead settled in Sidney, the forerunner of present-day Port Orchard. The back wall had the framed sheet-metal press plates of some of the biggest stories covered by the paper throughout its history: The stock market crash. World War II. Kennedy’s assassination. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. By the late seventies, not only had the Lighthouse switched to cold-type processing, but several purchases by out-of-state companies had stripped the paper of its pursuit of the big story. In a very real way, the display was a reminder that, outside of a small news hole, the Lighthouse was merely a shopper feeding a shrinking gob of income to an out-of-state owner. It was no longer a paper of daily record. It had gone weekly as a cost-cutting move not long after it changed hands.

“I heard what he said,” Tulio said, indicating Charlie Keller, as he took a seat across from Serenity. He opened an envelope carrying three photos and slid them across the deep, dark wood surface.

Serenity noticed a slight tremor in his hands.

This guy is scared, she thought.

The images were of Celesta Delgado. One had her in a raspberry cap and gown; another in a Mexican peasant blouse embroidered with holly and poinsettias. The last was of the two of them, taken with a flash as the sun highlighted the tops of the Olympics. She was a lovely girl, not much younger than Serenity.

“She’s a high school graduate,” he said. “We both are.” His eyes fixed on the photo; then he looked up at the reporter, trying to detect a flicker of surprise. He’d met enough people who, because his skin was bronze and his accent could not be masked, assumed that he could not be anything but a migrant. One of the invisible who do the jobs no one else wants.

“ South Kitsap?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“Any family here? You know, so I can talk to them about Celesta’s background.”

Tulio shook his head. “Her dad died, and her mom and sister moved back to El Salvador. She’s only got me. I am her family. We were going to be married in August.”

Serenity pointed to the photo of Celesta in the Christmas blouse, her hair thick and blue-black.

“Taken at work,” Tulio said. “She is a restaurant hostess at Azteca. She was employee of the month earlier this year.”

“You want us to publish these photos, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The police are doing nothing. We have to find her. I need help.”

Serenity understood. She didn’t blame the Sheriff’s Office. They were understaffed and overworked just like anyone else. Maybe a little story could help.

“Tell me everything about the day Celesta went missing.”

Tulio took a deep breath. “Okay. We left early…”

Within an hour of Tulio Pena’s departure, Serenity put the finishing touches on a short article about Celesta Delgado. The photo-imaging guy at the paper had done a reasonably decent job with the scans, holding the detail that would look beautiful online but surely would muddy up on the printing presses. She finished a bottled water with some leftover eggplant parmigiana that had at most one more day of survival in the refrigerator.

Brush Picker Vanishes Near Sunnyslope

A local woman disappeared while harvesting greens for a floral supply warehouse Sunday afternoon.

The Kitsap County Sheriff responded to a call from Celesta Delgado’s boyfriend, Tulio Pena, at 3 p.m. just off the Sunnyslope highway fronting DNR land.

Delgado, 22, and Pena, 27, were working as brush pickers, along with Pena’s two brothers. All carried permits issued by the state.

“We were having a good day,” Pena said in an interview with the Lighthouse. “Celesta was taking a bag of salal back to the van, and the next thing we knew, she was gone. Something is wrong.”

Kitsap Sheriff Jim McCray says that his office is investigating.

“We are putting resources on it,” he said, “but we are concerned that this might be the case of a young woman who got tired of things here, or missed her family and went back home. She did the same thing three months ago.”

McCray was referring to reports that Delgado left her job as a hostess at the East Bremerton Azteca Mexican Restaurant without giving any reason. However, a check by the Lighthouse indicated that the departure was a misunderstanding. Delgado was rehired by Azteca following a three-week absence.

“Her sister in El Salvador was ill. She did not leave without warning that time,” Pena said.

But this time, Pena says, is different.

“Something has happened to Celesta,” Pena said. “Please help me find her. I am-we are-very, very worried.”

If you’ve seen Celesta Delgado, please contact the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark this newspaper.

Serenity finished the article by writing extensive captions to accompany the photos. By providing the text with the images of Celesta, it would ensure that the overburdened copydesk would publish the pictures, at least online. She’d made a few calls to the numbers that Tulio provided. It seemed that everyone-the police, her employer, and her friends-believed that it was possible she left the country for her mother’s home in El Salvador

Everyone considered it an option but Tulio Pena. He complained to his brothers when he read the paper the next morning: “They are treating Celesta like she doesn’t matter. Like we don’t know her. It is not right. She’s lost, or she’s been taken.”

Or, as he was about to find out, something far worse.

He looked at the article that Serenity Hutchins had published in the paper. Sure, it was only a small-town paper, but in time he’d see his hobby find a place in the pages of newspapers far bigger. More important. Serenity would get something out of that too, and she’d have him to thank for that, of course.

He ran his fingertip over her byline, smudging it into oblivion.

The blood flowed from his heart to his genitals, and his erection throbbed until he could take it no more. He slipped his hand under the waistband of his underwear.

He knew what he liked.

He pulled up Facebook, logged on with a bogus name and e-mail address, and went to the group called “Girls Who Want Adventure.”

The young woman who’d posted the day before had taken the bait and answered his e-mail offering a job on a boat in Seattle. She was blond, blue-eyed. She had the kind of all-American-girl good looks that advertisers selling cornflakes and diet soda love to feature. He leaned close to the screen as he ejaculated.

Both a methodical hunt and a surprise ambush had their distinct appeal, but this one would be different.

He’d set a trap.

He reached for a Kleenex to mop up the evidence of his arousal.

Yes, she’d be just fine. But when? Timing, as he knew, was everything.

Chapter Ten

April 4, 10 p.m.

Port Orchard

Serenity Hutchins set down her phone and looked at her notepad. She noticed for the first time that she’d been crying as she wrote down an anonymous caller’s deluge of cruelty. Everything he had said in a flat, barely audible voice had revolted her. She was sick to her stomach. Tears had spattered the top sheet of her reporter’s notebook, sending the blue ink into a swirling bloom. She took a sheet of paper towel and blotted it. The transfer of ink and tears reminded her of blood.

She dialed her editor’s home number.

Charlie Keller was in the middle of a model of a steamship, Virginia V, one of the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that flitted from Sinclair Inlet east to Seattle and points southward too. He’d painstakingly created the model himself, out of balsa and fir. His dining room table had been converted to a mini-shipbuilder’s workspace since he’d returned to Port Orchard. It was the only hobby that kept his attention and kept him out of the Indian casinos. His house was a modest one tucked in the ivy-infested woods off Pottery Avenue. It was a three-bedroom with dinged-up wooden floors, a cracked tile countertop in the kitchen, and not a window treatment to be had. Mrs. Keller was missed for many reasons, and the lack of window treatments was somewhere near the bottom on the list of a lonely man. His dog, Andy, a smooth-coated and very overweight dachshund, was curled up on a sofa cushion that Charlie had removed and placed on the floor.

The phone rang, Andy lifted his head, and Charlie got up to answer. It was after ten. As he ambled over to his cell phone on the kitchen counter, he wondered who’d be calling him at this late hour.

It was Serenity.

“Kind of late for a call,” Charlie said somewhat gruffly. He slumped back into his chair and rubbed his socked foot over Andy’s protruding belly.

“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to know what to do here.”

Her voice was shaky. Charlie Keller’s annoyance at the intrusion turned to concern.

“You sound stressed. You okay?”

“No. I’m not. I’m scared. Charlie, I just got off the phone with some freak who says he’s a killer. He said he killed Celesta Delgado. He also said he had plans for another girl.”

Charlie sat down next his model of the Virginia. “Probably a crank. Don’t sweat it. I talked to five Zodiac wannabes when I was down in San Francisco.”

Serenity didn’t think so. “He was so direct about what he did to her. He told me things that he did to the body. Disgusting things.”

“I see,” Charlie said, adjusting some line that he’d coiled on the deck of the boat model. “I’m not saying, Serenity, that he’s absolutely not the killer. But I’d bet this house that it was a crank caller. What exactly did he say?”

“He started by telling me how he subdued her, how she begged him to let her go.”

“Who?”

“Celesta, I guess. Maybe another girl. I don’t know. He says he held her for three days. He…” Serenity looked down at her notes as if she needed to see the words in order to repeat what the caller had said. As if his words could be erased from her mind. “He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”

Serenity stopped. She was sobbing, and she hated that she’d fallen apart, even if it was just on the phone.

Charlie wanted to say something gruff and inappropriate about the caller being a Martha Stewart hater or something, but he held his tongue. The young reporter was crumbling.

“Kid, it’ll be all right,” he said, trying to comfort Serenity, and yet glad that he was on the phone with her and not searching for a tissue in his office.

“I guess so,” she said, regaining a measure of composure. “What should I do? Call the sheriff?”

“You could. But let’s hold off until tomorrow. First, you don’t know if his info is genuine. Chances are, like I said, it isn’t. Let’s run down the story tomorrow, first thing.”

“I don’t know. I mean, are you sure we shouldn’t call Detective Stark?”

“Look,” he said, “we all have jobs to do. We’ll work the story tomorrow.”

Serenity didn’t want to argue. “If you say so.”

“That I do. Now, are you going to be all right?”

“I think so. Good night, Charlie.”

“Good night, Hutchins.”

He hung up, a slight smile on his face. It wasn’t that he was happy about the fear in her voice. It was the memory of his experiences as a young reporter.

Those days were long gone.

Serenity thought of calling someone else just then, maybe her sister. But she dropped the notion. She was still unnerved by the creepy caller, but her editor was probably right. It had been a crank call. Part of her reasoning was that killers don’t often call to brag about what they’d done. But why her? There were far bigger newspapers serving the region: Bremerton had one, Seattle had one, Tacoma too. She could understand why he wouldn’t call a TV or radio station; those would require audio and video for a story.

But why her?

She decided to make a cup of decaffeinated Market Spice tea and take a book to read in bed. While she set a mug of water in the microwave, she walked through the apartment, checking the windows, the front door, and the slider that led to the small balcony. Everything was locked. The microwave dinged, and she took her drink and the novel she was reading to her bedroom.

Yes, she thought, the caller had to be a fake.

As the crow flies, the man who’d called wasn’t far from the Mariner’s Glen apartments, where the reporter lived. He emerged from the seldom-used bank of phones in the back of the bar at the China West Restaurant and ordered another beer.

A plump man in his late fifties, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki vest that he couldn’t have buttoned if he’d tried, sat on his right, staring straight ahead as the bartender went about her business.

He slipped the prepaid phone card inside his wallet.

“Old lady pissing you off?” the man in the vest asked.

“Huh?”

“You were on the phone. Just figured your old lady was bitching at you like mine does.”

The bartender sent down a beer.

“Yeah. Never stops.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m in the same boat with you and every other guy. I’d like to shut that bitch up.”

The man sipped his beer. He wasn’t thinking of his wife just then. He had his mind on another woman.

“Yeah, shutting her up is good,” he said. “Sometimes I’d like to shut her up permanently.”

“Tell me about it.”

The man just smiled. He’d already told someone about it. And that felt really good.

Trey Vedder’s father, a prominent Bremerton dentist, thought his son’s lack of drive and tepid enthusiasm meant that he’d been given too much too soon. The nineteen-year-old college dropout didn’t seem to mind one whit when his grades from Washington State University dipped low enough for the academic watch list. His father thought otherwise and yanked him out “faster than an abscessed tooth” and told him he’d work a year. He had one caveat: “It’ll be with your hands and back instead of your brain. You need to see what’s out there for those who miss the boat.”

Trey took “the boat” literally: he took a job at a Port Orchard marina cleaning the dock, helping the harbormaster, doing whatever needed to get done.

It was late afternoon, and Sinclair Inlet was darkening as the sun moved west toward the Olympics. The foothills faded behind some feathery clouds.

“Need any help?” Trey said, more out of boredom than the desire to be genuinely helpful.

The captain of a thirty-five-foot Sea Ray, the Saltshaker, shook his head. “Got it handled, kid,” he said.

The teenager held his hand out to catch the line anyway, and the captain gave in and tossed it in his direction.

“How’s the fishin’?” Trey asked, securing the blue nylon rope.

The captain cut the motor. “Wasn’t fishing.”

Trey looked over at a white plastic bucket on the deck. He thought it contained chum used as bait. Inside, red liquid swirled to conceal what, with a little more scrutiny, he made out as a pair of gloves.

“Nope. Just a little redwood stain job in the galley,” he said. “I’ll dispose of the bucket at the transfer station.”

Trey nodded as the man snatched up the bucket. The remark, however, struck him as a little odd. A lot of boats in the harbor had redwood-stained woodwork. But he’d been inside the Saltshaker.

It was fiberglass, aluminum, and vinyl.