Victim Six

Chapter Twenty-five

September 26, 7:45 p.m.

Vancouver , British Columbia .

Cullen Hornbeck picked up his phone and looked at the number to call his ex-wife, Sydney, at her home in Sedona, Arizona. He hated making the call, but he had no choice. Cullen had hoped that his own phone would ring with a call from Skye telling him that she’d hitched to Arizona. She’d grown tired of Vancouver ’s rain, the overabundance of blue and green as mountains and trees conspired to hem in British Columbia ’s largest city. Skye was twenty-four, a young woman who was the curious mix of her mother, a silversmith and jewelry designer, and her father, the chief financial officer of an import/export business that procured Asian antiquities. Cullen was drawn to the arts, but his emphasis had been on the business side of things. Sydney was the proverbial free spirit, the kind of woman who seemed both buoyant with her flair for fashion and design yet weighed down by the realities of an artist’s life. She had left Cullen and Skye, a fourth-grader then, with no plans other than to “find her center” and the life that the creator had devised only for her.

Although he followed strict process flow for his import business and knew his way from Point A to Point B on most matters, Cullen was left to raise his daughter without a road map. A girl, he quickly learned, required a completely different set of skills. A young girl was not a commodity. When Skye had her first period three years later, Cullen drove to a drugstore at breakneck speed and visited the male’s most unfamiliar aisle, only to return home to his amused daughter with a box of Kotex supers.

“I think I need to get some pads, Dad,” she’d said, allowing a smile to cross her face. “I don’t think what you’ve picked up will work for me. But I’m new to this, so what do I really know?”

Cullen felt his face go hot. The errand had been embarrassing, of course. This was his daughter, a young woman, at least biologically. He’d miscalculated. He’d failed where Sydney would have succeeded.

He wondered if this was one of those times too. Skye had been restless in the past few months. She’d graduated with a degree in art restoration from the University of British Columbia. She’d thought she could straddle her parents’ worlds, perhaps. Maybe bring them together in some way. Yet, over and over, she let it slip that she wanted adventure.

“I want to do something off-the-wall, Dad,” she said, looking at him intently. “Something fun-dangerous, even.”

“You’ve backpacked across Europe and the U.S. Isn’t that dangerous enough?”

Skye laughed. “No. I’m looking for a life experience, Dad. I don’t want to…” She hesitated. “You know…end up like Mom at thirty-five or you, sorry, at fifty.”

He furrowed his brow, feeling a little stung. “Exactly, Skye, what do you mean?”

She knew she’d hurt him. Her eyes pleaded for understanding. Her choices were her own. She was trying to be the woman she wanted to be.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out a little harshly.”

“You can say that again.”

She didn’t take the bait. “What I can tell you, Dad, is that I want an adventure. I want to do something that I can remember always. You know, something that doesn’t fit within the prescribed boxes that you’ve followed in your life.”

Cullen put his arms around his daughter. “You and your mom were always the boxes that I could never checkmark cleanly.”

So there he sat, replaying that conversation, staring at his phone. He’d gone to work the previous Friday, and she was gone when he returned.

There was a note, of course.

Dad, I’ve left on my adventure. I’m not sure when I’ll return, but I’ll call you soon. Don’t tell Mom.

Skye never called. Cullen was unsure when he should start to panic. Was it after three days? Or four? By the sixth, he’d made inquiries with the Vancouver police. He notified the hospitals.

“Were you and your daughter getting along all right?” the cop in the Missing-Persons Unit had asked, in a tone suggesting boredom more than concern.

“Yes, we were,” Cullen shot back, a tad defensively. “We’ve had our moments, but this wasn’t a running-away-from-home situation. She’s twenty-four.”

“That’s right,” the cop said. “She’s an adult. If she wants to disappear for a little while, she’s entitled. Lord knows, I’d like to vanish sometimes myself.”

Cullen wanted to snap at the man: This isn’t about you. This is about my daughter and the fact that I’m a complete failure as a father. This is about the fact that she might be at her mother’s, and I hate calling up the bitch to concede said failure.

Cullen said none of that. He thanked the man and dialed his ex-wife. Before he could even get to the point of his call, Sydney cut to the chase.

As she always did.

“Is Skye all right?”

He wondered for a split second how she’d known the reason for his call. Then he remembered: Skye was all they had in common anymore.

“I was hoping you would be able to tell me,” he said.

“Me? How am I supposed to know how she’s doing? I haven’t heard from her for a couple of weeks.”

Cullen could feel the air drain from the room. “I thought you two were talking again.”

“That’s beside the point.” Her tone was sharp. “Are you calling me because you don’t know where our daughter is?”

He hated how Sydney occasionally deigned to use the modifier our when referring to the little girl she’d left behind. On a whim. A selfish whim!

She’s my daughter. And I don’t know where she is!

Instead, he swallowed hard and let the bile drop back down his throat. “Look, Sydney, I’m calling to let you know that I’m a little concerned about Skye. She’s been gone for about a week. I was half hoping she was headed down your way.”

“Gone? Like missing?”

Cullen gulped. He hated the woman on the other end of the line. He imagined her in a house swimming in crystals, diaphanous fabrics, and beaded curtains that she tied back with a string of bells from an import store.

“Like missing, yes.”

The sound of wind chimes clattered in the background. “Of course, you thought I had something to do with her finally getting out of that rain gutter, Vancouver, right?”

“No, it wasn’t that at all. I just thought…” He let his words trail off to silence.

“Cullen?” Again her tone was ice, as it had been since the day she left him.

“Yes, Sydney, I had hoped she’d gone to see you. She was seeking an adventure somewhere, and you wrote the book on that one, didn’t you?”

His words were meant to punish. It was as if Skye’s words about the reason Sydney left them were a double-edged blade. She’d pierced him with it, and he’d shoved it right back at his former wife.

Syndey was silent for a moment.

Was she remembering? Was she sorry? Was she only angry that every call-every call spaced out over a fourteen-year period-had ended just the same?

“Good-bye, Cullen. I’ll let you know if I hear from her. You do the same.”

Click. The call was over. Cullen Hornbeck felt sick to his stomach. If his grown daughter had any friends, he didn’t know them. If she had any real connection to another human being besides himself and her mother, he didn’t know who it would be. The police had said she was an adult and could damn well do what she wanted. He felt like screaming into the phone at the officer, who didn’t seem to care.

“She is all I have! She might be an adult, but she’s fragile. She’s dear. She’s headstrong. She would tell me where she would go. Not disappear for a week! She loved me.”

Still carrying his phone, remembering the seven minutes he’d spent on the phone with Sydney, he flipped on the light in his daughter’s bedroom. At her urging, he’d redecorated the room after she went to college. Yet, there were remnants from her childhood. In the corner by a window there was a hammock that was brimming with Beanie Babies she had collected in grade school. He remembered how thrilled she’d been when she found the purple Princess Diana teddy bear at a Surrey five-and-dime. He picked up the bear and looked at it for a moment before setting it back among its cadre of animal friends. There was also a poster of Justin Timberlake on the back side of the door.

He’d kidded her about all of those things when she left for college. He’d threatened to redo the room into an exercise room.

“Like you’ll ever exercise,” she’d said.

He recalled how he patted his slightly doughy abdomen and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Next time you come home, I might have a hard body.”

“Ugh. That’s the last thing a daughter wants to hear about her dad,” she said.

They had both laughed. And he’d vowed right then not to change a thing.

She didn’t seem to see a need for it, either. It was a shrine to a time that had come and gone.

Cullen snapped his phone shut and sat at her desk. Her laptop was gone. There was nothing to rifle through. No papers in the trash. Skye had vanished.

Sydney Hornbeck Glyndon put down the phone and looked at the photo of her daughter staring from the art niche that she’d had specially created when she and her new husband, Brannon, built their Arizona dream house. Originally she had it in her mind as a place to spotlight one of her bronze sculptures of children. She’d always loved children, although she’d never quite been able to put aside her own needs for the one child who really mattered. She felt a chill in the air despite the heat that oppressed the valley that time of day. She knew that Cullen was more than concerned. He was scared. She could remember the last time she’d heard that in his voice.

“You’re leaving us forever,” he’d said when he saw her bags packed and lined up like a row of mismatched sentinels at the front door of their Vancouver home.

“I don’t know,” she’d answered, not looking at him.

“What am I supposed to tell Skye?”

Still refusing to meet his gaze, she replied, “Tell her what she should already know. I love her.”

“You have a great way of showing it.”

“She’ll understand someday. Sometimes a woman needs freedom. You’re a kind man, Cullen, but I need to be me. Not someone’s wife.”

“And not someone’s mother,” he’d said as the door shut.

Chapter Twenty-six

September 26, 10:44 p.m.

Key Peninsula

There was something comforting about speaking to a machine, if comfort had ever really been a concern. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Sam Castile had never done a thing in his life other than find ways to feel good. Sometimes he wondered if his desires worked on some other plane, in a world far from those of other men. Other men seemed to strive. They seemed to seek to protect. It seemed that other men just wanted to ensure that they were always at the top of the heap, the winners of the competition. Control. What gave him a charge-both sexual and intellectual-were the hunt, the capture, the destruction of someone weaker than he was. It was primal. When he watched those other men with their pretty salon-cut hair and Macy’s clothes lament the challenges of their jobs, he wanted to laugh. They were playing a game that they could never really win. They’d been told by women how it was to be a man.

How they should be. Feel. Do.

By doing so they’d lost any real semblance of manhood. Sam saw the ruse for what it was and almost pitied those who didn’t understand that, in the case of domination and submission, there could only be one victor.

Sam loved the fight, the moment in which his prey acquiesced, fell limp, gave up. He loved the screams for mercy, the promises to do whatever he wanted, when he wanted.

Before he could tell her how dark his thoughts were, he talked into the machine. No judgments. No assessments about what he was doing. Just the cool sound of his voice as he recounted how things operated in his universe.

Where he was king.

“Me again,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about Number Three the past few days. How her skin felt, all wet, warm, soft. She was the prettiest one. She was the one teenage boys would dream about boning. Not all of them have been as hot, as weak. She was compliant. She did what I commanded. She was mine, like a pet. Like a toy.”

He could feel the bulge in his leather underwear grow with the recollection of what she’d been like. He slipped his right hand into his waistband, feeling the warmth of his own body. Liking what he felt. Rubbing his penis. The shaft, the head, his testicles.

All of it was feeling so good.

“She could have been my pet longer. She could have done what I wanted her to do. But no, she had to get some ideas of her own. Stupid bitch. She hurt me. She found a goddamn screwdriver and actually tried to kill me. Kill me! That stupid bitch!”

Sam opened his desk drawer and retrieved two black metal binder clips. He clamped one on his right nipple, the other on his left. He winced and gulped. The hurt was good, what he imagined it felt like for his victims when he brought them to the edge of passing out with pain.

He was nearing climax as the images of her surrender came faster and faster. He worked his right hand faster and faster, leaning back in his brown leather office chair. Thinking of how he had snuffed out her life, and the relief that came with it.

“Oh, you stupid bitch. You shouldn’t make me mad. I’ll goddamn slice you up like a deli sandwich.”

His mind conjured up the brutal images of his own hands, his hairy knuckles, white with tension as his fingers squeezed her slender neck. The struggle. The quiet, coughing scream that ended with her falling limp. He’d started to roll her over, determined to put himself inside her in a way that he was sure she’d like. If she were alive. To his disappointment, she’d soiled herself.

“Jesus,” he’d said, “you piss me off. You could have been such a good bitch. A clean bitch. I don’t like a dirty whore. You shouldn’t have tried to hurt me. I’m the boss. You belonged to me.”

As he remembered her, how she had been, he thought how much he might enjoy it if he could tell a living person what he’d done.

He spoke into his recorder.

“No one really knows what it takes to be me.”

Once he’d finished all he needed to do, he clicked on the Web site for the Lighthouse newspaper. How he loved seeing his work, reliving the glory of the last moments of another’s life. It excited him once more.

Here I go again, he thought, feeling another erection swell.

Kendall Stark tucked Cody into bed as Steven looked on. The nighttime ritual was as it had always been, quiet and peaceful. She kissed him on his forehead, still warm from his bath after dinner. Cody’s eyes fluttered, his lids heavy with sleep.

“Good night, my baby,” she said.

She imagined a smile, yet there really wasn’t one.

“He had a good day,” Steven said. “He seems happy in the new school.”

“He’s adjusting,” she said. “We all are.”

Steven put his arms around her waist as they left their son’s bedroom for their own.

Kendall looked at her husband and nodded, although she was unsure what he had said. She hated more than anything that she wasn’t living in the moment. She was far away on the shores of Little Clam Bay with a dead girl, a girl without a face.

Chapter Twenty-seven

September 27, 10:45 a.m.

Portland , Oregon

Not surprisingly, a number of forensic artists find their way to the profession because of an interest in criminology. These were the kind who stayed up late watching crime and cop shows, feasting on criminology. They had artistic skills, of course, but artistry wasn’t the driving force for their careers.

Margo Titus, a good-looking brunette who always wore her hair up in a messy bun, with frameless glasses on a gold chain around her slender neck, was from the other camp. She’d been an artist first. She drew Sparky in the margin of a magazine reader response card when she was eleven years old, waiting for her mother in an Idaho doctor’s office. She wore all sixty-four of her prized Crayolas to nubs, even the ugly flesh-toned one. She won two school competitions for her artwork by the time she was in junior high. One was a sculpture of a woman walking a dog that landed her in a coffee-table book, KID ART!

There was no mistaking it. Margo Titus was going to be a fine artist, a sculptor. She was going to sell her pieces in galleries in New York. She was so talented that if she stuck with it, she was told by all her teachers, she could be the artist that generations would remember.

“You are the kind of student that teachers dream of having but once in a lifetime,” said her high school mentor, a woman who wore knee-length skirts and copper bangle bracelets. “You are going to do all the things I dreamed about when I was your age.”

Dreams, Margo learned, do die. Her pieces never caught fire like she and others had hoped. They were dismissed as too provincial. Sweet but forgettable. She ended up moving back to Boise and waitressing at a downtown martini bar for a couple of years before going to Boise State for classes in forensic science, inspired by a TV show spotlighting how artists could put their skills to use in helping others.

“The most important thing in the world isn’t how a piece of art goes with your couch and love-seat set,” she told an artist friend when she made up her mind.

Three years later she was doing facial reconstruction out of a studio she called The Face Lab Inc., in Portland.

Kendall Stark contacted Margo to work the Little Clam Bay case. They’d met at a Seattle conference several years earlier. When Margo answered the call and the two women exchanged some personal updates, Kendall was very direct on two key points.

“We have a limited budget up here, but we also have a case that needs solving.”

“I’m sure I can work within your parameters, Kendall. What’s the case?”

“A young woman, early twenties, found floating in one of our local estuaries. We’ve put the word out, but, you know, sometimes a description isn’t enough.”

“Decomp?”

“No. Not too bad.”

Margo knew that sometimes a morgue photo required a little help too. Facial expressions, the way a person’s mouth and eyes work together to form a true representation of what he or she looked like in life, were sometimes crucial to finding out just who they were.

“There is some tissue damage. The coroner thinks it was animal activity.”

“How bad?”

“Parts of the mouth and nose.”

“Eyes in place? Brows?”

“Yes. Barely.”

“That’s fine. I’ve worked with a lot less.”

“I know that they closed the case on Ridgway’s ‘last victim’ because of you,” Kendall said, indicating the case profiled in a police journal that featured Margo’s work. The article had recounted the discovery of a small skull near Star Lake in south King County, Washington. Over time, seven more bodies had been found in the vicinity, most together in a single cluster of grisly mayhem that shocked the Pacific Northwest nearly as much as the Ted Bundy murders had over the previous decade.

The article had concerned the skull of a young African American woman-or maybe even only a girl. No other personal effects. No bones. No nothing. Just the dark gray skull found by hikers among the sword and bracken ferns that fill in the lush undergrowth. The “last victim” went unnamed until six months after the trial, when Margo took up the challenge because, according to the article, “every mother deserves to know what happened to her daughter, no matter what. I don’t care if this girl was a prostitute or a gangbanger. At one time she was someone’s precious baby girl.”

It turned out that the Star Lake location was Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s body dump site. Margo’s work gave the victim back her name: Tammy Whitman.

Kendall admired the humanity and respect for the victim that was an essential part of Margo’s work. Being murdered was heartbreaking enough. To be a victim with a Jane or John Doe bracelet in some Podunk morgue was an insult to whatever life that person had led.

Or to those loved ones or friends who were out there, wondering just where he or she had gone.

“I’m assuming that a 2-D image is acceptable,” Margo said. “How soon can you send me facial measurements? Photos?”

“How does this afternoon suit you?”

Margo laughed. “This is one of those you-need-it-yesterday requests, isn’t it, Kendall?”

“Not really. Sooner is better than later.”

“All right. Get me the material, the coroner’s contact info, and I’ll see what I can have for you in, let’s see…a day or two?”

“Next time you’re in town, martinis on me,” Kendall said.

After she hung up, Kendall went looking for Josh Anderson. Help was on the way. Without knowing who the victim was, there was no way they’d catch the killer.

Everything always started with the ID.

Most of her contemporaries worked solely on the computer, but Margo Titus still loved the way colored pencils and Conté crayons felt against the smooth surface of high-quality rag paper. She found greater success in bringing the material to life by using the old-school methods that she’d first picked up to make her reputation, her legacy, as a fine artist. After working to specific measurements on a transparency atop the photographs, she’d draw, color, and then scan the image for manipulation in Photoshop.

On a row of shelves above her worktable were three sculpted heads that she called the “Janes.” Although they’d been found in three different states, they shared the unique bond of being Jane Does. All three were crafted with such realism even Margo thought their eyes followed her about the room. Sometimes she wondered if their vigilant gazes were meant to remind her that she’d failed to determine who they were.

Who is missing you three?

Next to the Janes was a framed portrait of Margo’s husband, Dan, and their sons, Jacob and Eli. Below the shelves was a corkboard decorated with the whimsically macabre drawings of her boys, depicting their mother at work in her studio. Heads on the table. Morgue photos scattered like confetti. A paintbrush in hand.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the boys are talking about my work at school, she’d thought more than once.

She looked down at the photos and the autopsy report, all of which she’d printed out.

“You won’t be one of the Janes,” she said. “Not if I can help it.”

Margo stirred some sugar into her licorice tea and turned on her CD player. The liquid notes of a Stan Getz samba filled the air. She’d have played it louder, but she didn’t want to miss a call if her boys or husband tried to reach her. There was something soothing about the samba, with its sliding percussion overrun by a soaring saxophone. It gave her a calm energy.

“Let’s see who you are, little one,” she said as she undertook her distinct blend of science and art.

She had no one to consult with as she began to work. In cases she’d worked for the Portland and Boise police departments, she’d had the opportunity to interview witnesses who’d seen a perpetrator. She would inquire carefully, probing into the memory of the viewer. It was a collaborative process as the witness offered up the cues of recognition fixed in his or her memory. The slant of a brow. The flare of the nostrils. Lines on a forehead. So much information was held in a person’s recollections that the true skill came in digging it out as much as the application of any artistic skills.

But this one had no one to speak for her or who her killer might have been.

Chapter Twenty-eight

October 1, 11:50 p.m.

Port Orchard

They had made love all night long, and as she positioned herself on the toilet in the darkness of his bathroom, Serenity Hutchins knew that she’d gone too far for the story. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to him. He worked out, and, despite being old enough to be her father, he had a nice physique. The last guy she’d dated was much younger, but his body was a doughy mess. She finished going and debated for a moment whether or not she should flush. She didn’t want to wake him.

If I wake him, she thought, he’ll want to do it again.

She risked it. Whoosh! She squinted in the faint light coming through the mini-blinds as she washed her hands.

“Baby, come back to bed.”

“Coming. But Baby’s tired,” she said.

“We don’t have to go to work tomorrow,” he said as she moved toward him in the darkness.

“I do,” she said. “I have to get some sleep. I have an event to cover in Manchester. A salmon feed or something.”

He put his mouth on hers.

“Oh, Josh, don’t you have a crime to investigate?”

He nuzzled her. “ Kendall is working the hard stuff. I’ll just lay here and enjoy you.”

The face staring up at her was young and pretty. She had a slender nose and a mouth fuller on the lower lip that gave her a slight pout. It was very late, and the chill of an early autumn seeped through the windows as Margo Titus stepped back from her worktable. The face she’d painstakingly restored seemed more melancholy than most that she’d created. Margo never created a face that would cause someone to smirk: a cartoonish visage that somehow made a joke out of the victim. Some forensic artists offered up images that, while possibly very accurate, cast a distinctly creepy vibe.

Margo wanted the kind of countenance that spoke to the viewer. She sought an expression that triggered a genuine emotion of concern. This face looking up at her was a sad one. A heartbreaker. It was the face of a pretty young woman, one who had to be missed by someone.

Somewhere. But where? And by whom?

She looked at her wall clock. It was 4 P.M. She had time to finish up, get to Whole Foods, and have dinner going before her family assembled around the table. After working on the rendering with such deliberation, such intensity, she could still set it aside when it came to being a wife and mother. It wasn’t that the morgue photos were expunged from her memory, but they were stored in a place separate from the world that saw her as something other than a woman who draws dead people.

Margo scanned her artwork and prepared to send it via e-mail it to the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. It would be quicker than a phone call, and she had to get going.

Kendall, I hope this helps in your investigation. There’s a little guesswork because of the tissue damage, but I think this should be close enough to get the attention of anyone who knew her-provided they see the rendering. Good luck. Let me know when you identify her. She deserves that, along with justice for her killer.

Before she pushed SEND her eyes lingered on the damage to the right breast. The cut looked so clean, so precise. It was as if a diamond of flesh had been removed from the dead woman’s breast.

Sweet Jesus, she thought. What kind of maniac would do that?

As he tore at her, ripping her underclothing, commanding her to do this and that, she flashed on how it had started. The first few times Sam Castile made a shopping list for Melody, she saw nothing interesting in it. He wanted a motion detector, a fourteen-foot steel chain, and four brown tarps. The items were mundane, utilitarian. Melody looked at her husband’s list, added a few things she needed for herself, and pointed her silver-colored Jeep in the direction of Home Depot and Costco. Sam Castile had made it clear that the tarps he required were not blue, which were the ones most commonly sold by local stores. The brown were certainly less conspicuous when placed over a leaky roof, a cord of wood, a chicken yard. He wanted the chains to be polished steel, not galvanized. He said galvanized links were weaker. The motion detector had to be top of the line.

“If someone’s out there, you know, lying in wait,” he’d said, “I want fair warning.”

He was concerned about her safety, or so she had first believed.

The motion detector morphed into a trio of the devices. One was affixed to the side of the house, casting a beam whenever an errant deer wandered by. The other pair stood guard along the winding driveway that meandered through the heavy fringe of salmonberries, sword ferns, and a tangle of ocean spray leading to the house.

“If you want to run a day care out here, babe,” he’d said, “you’ll need to make sure the kids are safe.”

In the beginning she’d believed her husband. She thought that Sam’s words of concern, his need for protecting her and the children, were genuine.

That, of course, was only in the beginning. But there was no day care. There was only isolation.

Sam installed motion detectors fifteen feet past the farm gate, which they kept chained tightly. Visitors hated the gate more than anything: there was no way of tripping it so that it would open without them getting out of the car, unlatching the chain that held it in place, swinging the gate open, driving through, and then getting out of the car to shut the gate. It was a colossal hassle by any measure. In the early days, at least, if Melody had any designs on sharing a cup of chamomile tea with a girlfriend from next door, the gate obliterated them.

No one came over unless they absolutely had to.

Her tuxedo mocha on her desk, Kendall Stark looked intently at the image of the Little Clam Bay victim as Josh Anderson strolled into her office.

“Hey, you,” he said, sitting down, “what do you have there?” He seemed more upbeat than usual, and certainly more upbeat than the moment called for.

“Margo’s rendering of our victim.”

“Let me have a look,” he said, reaching for the photo printout. “Good-looking girl. Sure doesn’t look like what we saw on the scene.”

“That’s the point,” Kendall said. “We’re looking at trying to find out who she is, not scare people away.”

“I know. I was talking to the sheriff yesterday. He thinks we should use this case to spark some better relations with the local media.”

Kendall took her eyes off the photo and studied Josh.

“I wasn’t aware there was a problem with local media. Are we talking about KIRO TV and what they said about our jail?”

“No. More local. Local like the Lighthouse.”

“I thought we were good with them,” she said.

“There have been some complaints. You know, from the publisher to the sheriff. Says we don’t give them a heads-up on anything. You know, blah blah blah, you only talk to us when we cover your stupid office pancake feed for Kitsap Crime Watch.”

“No one mentioned it to me,” Kendall said, taking a sip from her coffee.

“No biggie. Sheriff thought we should toss them a bone now and then. Maybe I could take this over to the paper myself.”

Kendall thought for a moment. Josh’s ulterior motive was so transparent, she wanted to laugh.

“I’ll give it to Serenity what’s-her-name,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, pulling the photo back from Josh’s grasp. “I’ll take it.”

Josh looked a little disappointed.

“She’s too young for you.”

“Who is?”

She scolded him with a cool look before answering. “Serenity Hutchins.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kendall.”

Kendall nodded. “Never mind. I was only joking.”

But she wasn’t, of course. She almost never joked.

Serenity Hutchins was hunkered in front of her computer screen when Kendall made her way across the small newsroom.

“I want to talk to you. I have something I need to discuss with you.”

Serenity looked up. “You do?”

“Yes, I do.” She dropped a photo on Serenity’s chaotic desk.

Serenity looked at it for a long time, her eyes finally returning to the detective’s.

“She was pretty. Who made this?”

“A forensic artist from Portland. Her name and number’s on the back, in case you want to interview her. I’m giving this to you first. It goes out to the Seattle, Tacoma, and Bremerton media tomorrow.”

Serenity nodded. “I’m all over it, Detective.”

“I’m sure you are.”

Kendall turned toward the door. She didn’t hear the reporter thank her, although she did. She was focused now on the part of police work that depended on the public and whether or not someone would help her find out the name of the dead woman. She brushed past a girl talking to the receptionist at the front desk. She didn’t know right then that she had walked past a young woman who had also caught the killer’s eye.

She didn’t know there were others too.

Melody Castile had one thought that reverberated in her mind. It was a kind of mocking refrain that she knew no longer carried the kind of weight she might have hoped. Better her than me.

The figure on the filthy mattress was streaked with blood and her own feces. Fear had caused her to let go of all bodily functions. She was weak, barely breathing. Her mouth had been covered by the now-familiar silver-gray duct tape.

“Clean her,” Sam said, unbuttoning the snaps on his blue and red flannel shirt. Pop. Pop. Pop. His undershirt was torn, and he pulled that over his head, flexing his biceps and his triceps for his adoring audience. “Then Baby and Daddy are gonna play.”

He stepped out of his jeans, kicked them aside, and stood there nude, his penis already hard.

“Is she okay?” she asked.

“She’s alive,” he said, “so I guess not.” He let out a laugh and bent down. The woman on the plastic-covered mattress couldn’t speak, but her eyes were flooded with terror. He slapped her, and the woman shook. “See, she’s alive.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Now, get naked,” he said, looking over at Melody, who was already unfastening her bra, “and let’s have some fun-you know, until one of us can’t anymore.”

Melody reached for the baling wire and grinned at him.

“Want me to spin my web?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

Chapter Twenty-nine

October 5, 3:30 p.m.

Key Center , Washington

The drive out to her sister Melody’s place took almost an hour. Serenity Hutchins kept her radio on an eighties music station playing hits that were popular before she was born. She listened to the Waitresses’ song, “I Know What Boys Like” and wondered how come music wasn’t fun like that anymore. Her sister, Melody, and her husband, Sam, lived on almost five acres in a log home just outside of Key Center on the Key Peninsula. The Castiles had a son named Max who had just turned eight. In fact, the gathering that afternoon was to celebrate the boy’s birthday and the last sure sunny day before the Northwest rains kicked in and stole the last of the summer. The music was loud in her little black car, but more out of habit than a desire to blast her eardrums. Serenity had gone so long with a loud muffler that after she finally fixed it, she’d gotten used to a decibel level that threatened hearing damage.

Relationships between sisters are always complicated. Any sibling can vouch for that. But with a ten-year age gap, Serenity and Melody shared little more than the commune-style names their mother had given them.

Melody had resented her sister from the time her parents brought her home. She’d suddenly been demoted to helper and sister instead of the center of the universe. Whenever her mother and father left Serenity in the care of her sister, she’d feign attentiveness until the door shut behind them.

She never changed Serenity’s diaper. She never gave her a bottle. She just let her cry it out until she saw the headlights of her parents’ car in the driveway.

Later, there were hair-pulling, screaming, and setups to get her in trouble. Serenity was far from perfect. She’d learn to give as well as she got. One time she found a condom wrapper in a park and planted it in her sister’s room. Melody got a beating from her dad and a smile from her sister. Both sisters held memories distorted by their own wants and wishes. Theirs was a relationship in a constant mend.

At least they played at it as though they cared. Attending Max’s birthday barbecue was part of the game.

Serenity parked her car and knocked on the door.

Sam, dressed in blue jeans and a faded red shirt, answered. He was forty-four, broad-shouldered, and a little more than six feet tall. On this particular afternoon his black hair was wavy and a little long, swept back from his forehead. Sam Castile was a man of a thousand looks-facial hair that changed from a full beard to a goatee and then back to a Fu Manchu. He was handsome in a Marlboro Man way, weather-beaten and a little too tan.

“Your sister was thinking you forgot,” he said, letting her inside.

“She always thinks the best of me.”

Sam shook his head. “Now, now.”

“She started it. Or you did.”

There was some truth in what she said, and it only made Sam Castile suppress a smile. He loved lighting the fuse between his wife and her little sister.

Max ran up to his aunt, eyeballing the small package wrapped in blue tissue paper she held at her side as he hugged her.

“For me?”

Serenity kissed the top of his head. “It sure is, Max.”

The boy reached for it, all smiles.

“Video game?” he asked, taking the present.

“You’ll see.”

She followed her brother-in-law into the kitchen, where her sister was slicing onions and lemons.

“Need some help?” she asked, finally.

“I thought that was you driving in. Do you really have to blast the neighborhood with your music?”

Serenity wanted to say, “What neighborhood? You live out in the middle of nowhere.” But she kept quiet.

“Really, what can I do?” she asked.

Melody went about her chopping. She was a pretty brunette who wore her hair pinned back even when she wasn’t in the kitchen. A silver pendant hung around her neck like a swinging pendulum as she attacked an onion with her knife. Melody had light blue eyes, so pale, that sometimes, when the light hit them just so, they looked like shiny black beads floating in pools of white. Her skin had always been flawless, although Serenity thought she could finally see the tiny creases around her mouth from smoking and too much sun.

You’re getting old, sis, she thought.

Sam took a beer from the refrigerator and held it out to Serenity.

“No, thanks,” Serenity said.

He removed the top and started to drink.

Melody just kept slicing, filling the air with the scent of onions and lemons, the garnish she’d planned to adorn the salmon that her husband had caught on one of his overnight fishing trips.

“How’s work?” he asked.

Serenity shrugged. “Oh, you know, boring most days.”

Melody ran a fillet knife along the fish’s spinal column, expertly separating the bone from the rosy flesh.

“I’m glad you’re getting so much out of your college degree.” Melody never missed an opportunity to say something about how her parents had put Serenity through school when she herself had had to drop out.

“Seems like you’ve had some interesting things to write about lately,” Sam said.

“You mean the election of the Fathoms o’ Fun Queen?” Serenity said, her tone deadpan.

“I missed that one,” he said. “I’m talking about the dead girl in Little Clam Bay.”

Serenity nodded and started to talk about the forensic artist in Portland and how she’d been the first to publish the photograph, but her sister cut her off.

“Grill hot enough, Sam?” Melody asked, interrupting the conversation.

Sam winked. “Always. Come on, Serenity, you can help.” He set down the last of his beer and headed for the French doors with the salmon.

While Serenity held the platter and he scraped tiny bits of burned-on black off the grill and into the fire, they talked about the murder case, the weather, the fact that her sister could be such a bitch.

Serenity looked across the backyard while he worked the grill. Sam was using charcoal briquettes instead of gas, and she liked the old-school touch. Sam was a traditional guy, and, coming from a family with a father who wasn’t, Serenity could see why her sister was attracted to him. Sam’s hair was still licorice black, as thick as it had been in high school. The lines on his face only accentuated his handsomeness, as if dimples and prominent cheekbones needed to be underscored. His eyes sparked intelligence and fire, more golden than brown. He was a man’s man, the kind who put in a full day as an inspector at the shipyard, a soda with his buds at Toy’s Topless in Gorst, then went on home to his wife and son. All in all, Serenity figured, her sister had been reasonably lucky in love. As lucky as she deserved. On the other hand, Sam could have done a little better.

“Been out on the Saltshaker?” Serenity asked. “Or is it too cold now?”

The Saltshaker was Sam’s pride and joy, a thirty-five-foot Sea Ray cabin cruiser that was more than twenty years old. Sam had babied it in every possible way. He hosed it off. Waxed it. Redid the galley and the head, and put in new vinyl on the seat cushions that served as a banquette at the dining table.

“Every now and then. Half the time alone. You know your sister.”

She poured herself some iced tea. “Yeah, she always hated the water.”

“Maybe I can get you to come aboard sometime?”

“I’m a little like Mel that way. Probably the only way.”

Sam laughed. “I get what you’re saying.”

“What’s up with that?” she asked, changing the subject.

“What?” He tried to follow her line of vision, but didn’t catch what she was talking about.

She pointed to a mobile home tucked behind the trees.

“Oh, that. Been here forever. Just didn’t have the sense to have the previous owners tow it away. Wish we did. A damn eyesore.”

Serenity grinned. “Fits in with the sketchy neighborhood. No offense.”

The barbecue splashed some fire, and Sam jumped backward a couple of steps.

“None taken,” he said. “We like the seclusion of the place. Some people pay a premium for it. For others it’s all they can afford.”

Serenity knew what he was talking about. It was the perfect last sunny day of the season.

At least, she thought so.

Sam Castile had seen that look on his wife’s face before. Cold. Bitter. Pissed off.

“She got him a goddamn video game,” Melody said.

Sam turned down the blanket on his side of the bed. “Your point?”

“Jesus, Sam. She’s supposed to be educated. Doesn’t she know that Max will end up a big, fat, stupid couch potato if he hangs out in front of the TV screen playing when he should be doing something better?”

He peeled off his underwear and T-shirt. “She was trying to be nice.”

Melody knew what was coming. She went for the bottom drawer of her dresser and, from a stack of twenty identical undergarments, pulled out a filmy, frilly bra and panties. “She knows how I feel about this stuff. She doesn’t care. Never has. She just does what she wants.”

“Lighten up,” he said, now running his hand over her small breasts. “We do what we want, too.”

Melody was about to make another cutting remark about Serenity but didn’t. Her tirade just then had been a lapse in the kind of control that she needed. She could hate her sister, be jealous of her. She could think anything she wanted. But she wasn’t in control. She never had been.

“I want to play now, babe,” he said. “Been a long day.”

She knew what he wanted, and she rolled over onto her stomach. There was no love in their lovemaking. It was more of a punishment, an endless poking and prodding. A game in which she was always the defeated and he the victor.

Everyone gets what they want, she thought. Everyone but me.

Only once since her life became dark and completely undone had Melody Castile reached out to anyone for help. She had phoned Serenity and asked if she’d meet her for lunch at the Shari’s just off Highway 16, near the first Port Orchard exit.

“What’s the occasion?” Serenity asked after the hostess had seated them in a window booth looking out at the highway. “My birthday isn’t for six months.”

Melody wore nineties-style pale blue jeans and an olive sweater. She never had anything new. She looked old, tired. Even her hair, which had been the true marker of her beauty, was dull, pulled back in a loose ponytail held together with a scrunchy.

Who still wears scrunchies? Only my sister, that’s who, Serenity thought.

Melody ordered coffee and a slice of strawberry pie. Serenity ordered apple. She thought no pie without a top crust was a real pie.

“You look like shit, by the way,” Serenity said.

“Thanks, I needed the compliment. You always know what to say.”

Serenity could see that her sister was troubled. Her eyes stayed fixed on the traffic blur outside. She wanted to tease her more, kick her a little when she was down. There hadn’t been too many times in childhood when the balance of power had been in her favor. They were sisters in name only. Serenity had longed for something closer, something that approximated a genuine bond. She’d given up on that.

If Melody was waving a white flag just then, Serenity didn’t see it.

“So what’s up? Is it Mom?”

Melody set her fork down and looked at her sister. “No. It isn’t. It isn’t Max. It isn’t you. It isn’t Sam. No, really. This is about me.”

“And how you’re stuck out in the country, wasting your precious years?”

Serenity knew the words were harsh, but she’d already let them out of her mouth.

Melody reached for her purse. She pulled out a twenty and put it on the table.

“Never mind,” she said, edging toward the end of the booth.

“Mel, I’m sorry. What did you want to talk about?”

“Nothing. It’s all right. Never mind.”

Melody Castile knew that she was alone. It had happened so slowly that there was never a point at which she could have stopped it. Alone. And if she was sleeping with the devil, then she knew just what that made her.

With satellite dishes affixed like mushrooms on rooftops around the residential neighborhoods of Vancouver, getting a feed from U.S. TV networks was no longer the challenge it once was. In the years of rabbit ears and roof- or tree-mounted antennae, it was a lucky family who could pick up Seattle TV stations. Despite the fact that satellite TV brought in the possibility of picking up L.A. or New York TV, old habits died hard. Certainly, Cullen Hornbeck could watch anything he wanted, but he still stayed fixed on Seattle’s venerable KING-TV for its evening news broadcast. Since he traveled to Seattle a couple of times a month on business, it made perfect sense to stay current on the goings-on down there.

It had now been two weeks since his daughter went missing. He’d seen her face in the crowds at the local market. He’d heard her voice over the loudspeaker at the airport. He’d tricked himself at least twice a day into believing that she was all right and it was her finger that was tapping him on the shoulder when no one was there at all.

He splashed some Crown Royal over a couple of cubes of ice. More, he thought.

Another splash.

He rolled the smooth, sweet alcohol in his mouth and down his throat. He could feel the slight burn of the whiskey as it sent a shock wave of warmth through his body. The ice crashed against his lips as he swallowed more.

The anchorwoman, a striking blonde who’d been on the air since he was a teenager, announced the next story.

“They are calling her Jane around the morgue in Kitsap County, but they know that’s not her real name. The county coroner is hoping that someone watching this broadcast can help identify her…”

The TV showed a body of water, and a reporter, a black male in a puffy orange vest that made him look more road improvement worker than journalist, started to speak.

“Two Port Orchard boys skipping school two weeks ago found her floating right here in Little Clam Bay.”

Cullen poured another shot, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen. When Skye’s Siamese cat, Miss Anna, rubbed against him, he ignored the impulse to pick her up.

“She was young, in her twenties. She was wearing-”

Cullen set down the glass, missing the tabletop. The tumbler shattered, and Miss Anna ran for a place under the table.

The clothes look as though they could be Skye’s. The age is right too.

His heart raced. He disregarded the broken glass and stared at the TV.

“…the young woman’s injuries were so severe that a forensic artist was brought in to re-create what she might have looked like in life.”

A woman identified as the coroner came on the screen. Birdy Waterman held up a drawing. Cullen felt relief wash over him. The image was all wrong. The girl in the rendering had a kind of vacant stare. She wasn’t vibrant and full of life.

Of course, he told himself right away, she was dead.

“This is an artist’s representation of what our victim might have looked like. It isn’t a photograph of her,” Dr. Waterman said. “If you are missing someone who approximates this image, please contact the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office.”

The blond woman came back on and read a phone number. Without even thinking, Cullen Hornbeck wrote it down.

It can’t be her. She isn’t dead. She just can’t be.

It passed through his mind that he might not have the courage to dial the number. Not knowing still meant hope.

Chapter Thirty

October 7, 10 a.m.

Port Orchard

Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson fielded the calls after the story featuring the Little Clam Bay victim rendering ran in the Lighthouse and on TV. Calls came in fits and starts throughout the morning and into the afternoon. Sometimes it was clear that the person on the other end of the line was heartbroken or an attention seeker. Sometimes a little of both.

“Looks like a girl I worked with at the Dinners Done Right on Bethel Avenue.”

“My sister has been missing for two years. Might be her.”

“My aunt.”

“Best friend from high school. I think.”

“My daughter.”

There were dozens of such calls. But only one had some information that promised some real potential.

It was from a man in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“Was the blouse a Trafalgar?” he asked. “My daughter’s missing. I saw that the girl you found was wearing a green blouse.”

Kendall looked at the list of clothing found on the victim.

“Sir,” she said, “how long has your daughter been missing?”

“Three weeks yesterday,” he said. “Is it my daughter that you’ve found?”

Kendall could hear the man’s heart shattering.

“I don’t know. But the blouse is a Trafalgar. Can you come to Port Orchard?”

Kendall had seen the all-consuming look of loss on the faces of others who’d sat in the waiting room, next to the array of magazines on a glass-topped side table. The magazines were well worn but barely read. They were brought in by thoughtful staff members, the address labels neatly removed with scissors. Cullen Hornbeck sat slightly stoop shouldered, as if the air had been let out of his body and he’d refused to take in any more oxygen. His eyes were black buttons, unblinking and sad.

“Mr. Hornbeck?” she asked as she stepped into the room. “I’m Detective Stark.”

He stood and extended his hand.

“Yes, I’m Cullen.” He looked around, catching the eye of the only other person waiting to see law enforcement, a gray-haired woman with a peeled orange and a People magazine. The woman went back to her reading.

“Thank you for seeing me,” he said.

“Of course, Mr. Hornbeck. We’ve already sent for your daughter’s dental records. We should have them this afternoon.” She looked at her watch. “Or they could be here even now, waiting in the coroner’s lab for log-in.”

She motioned for him to follow, and the pair meandered through the lobby, behind the receptionist’s desk, past several unoccupied cubicles. She opened a door and led him inside a grim little room with two chairs and a black metal table.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“No, thank you, Detective.”

“All right, then.”

“It has to be Skye,” he said. “The girl you found.” His tone was slightly demanding, and Kendall found it a little off-putting. It was almost as if he was insisting that his daughter be identified as the Little Clam Bay victim.

“Sir, as I told you on the phone, we won’t know until we compare her dental records or barring that, DNA from your daughter. You brought her toothbrush?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “Right here.” He pulled a bright red toothbrush clad in plastic wrap from his breast pocket and slid it across the table. “I also brought her hairbrush. I know that sometimes that can be helpful.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Detective, you’ve never asked me why I know that the dead girl is Skye.”

“You saw it on the news.”

Cullen shook his head. “No, that’s not all of it. That’s not how I found you to call. It’s deeper than that.”

He looked at Kendall, wondering how many times she’d been faced with a man in his shoes.

“How is it?”

He took a breath. “I saw her picture on the missing girls’ Web site.”

Kendall was unsure what Internet site he was referring to.

“Sorry? Someone put up a photo of your daughter to help get the word out that she’s missing?”

“No,” he said. “Someone put up a photo of the body you found in Little Clam Bay.”

Kendall had known several cases in which armchair detectives-or cybersleuths, as they liked to call themselves-had put up victims’ photos, sometimes gruesome and offensive images, with the hopes that they’d strike lightning and glean a nugget of truth from the gawkers that flock to such sites. She knew that despite the confiscation of their phones, the images that Devon and Brady took of the dead woman had been floating around the Internet like a heartbreaking calling card.

“I have this feeling in my gut. It is like the blade of a knife stuck in so deep that it presses against my spine. I know that my daughter is dead. I know that she’s never coming back.”

He pulled out a photograph and handed it to her.

It was a pretty young woman wearing the green blouse.

“She’s pretty. Very pretty.”

“Smart too.”

“Where’s Skye’s mother? Has she heard from your daughter?”

Cullen shook his head. He had a hangdog expression that made Kendall want to proceed with gentleness.

“Maybe she knows something.”

“I doubt it. The woman only knows one thing-and that’s how to live her own life, unencumbered. She never loved Skye.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong, Mr. Hornbeck. All mothers love their children.”

“Look, all mothers are supposed to love their children. It is supposed to be automatic, natural. But it isn’t so.”

Kendall looked down, feeling the man’s pain swell to the point where it was palpable. She wanted to argue with him about what Skye’s mother felt. She was sorry for her too. Her daughter was dead, and whatever had transpired between them would never get resolved.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no business presuming how anyone felt. That’s between them.”

Cullen looked hard at her.

“That it is,” he said.

“A bay view will be fine,” Cullen Hornbeck said as the Holiday Inn Express clerk slid a plastic key card across the front desk. She was a chubby girl, a brunette with lively brown eyes that she accentuated with a heavy application of mascara. She was younger than Skye and by no means a ringer for Cullen’s daughter, but the front-desk girl’s very aliveness taunted him. Picked at him. She tilted her head as she watched the hotel’s newest guest complete the requisite paperwork. She smiled a friendly smile.

“Canada, huh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He noticed that the girl wore braces and had three holes pierced into each ear.

Skye had had braces when she was fourteen.

Skye had two…or was it three holes in each ear? How was it that he couldn’t be sure?

“My mom goes up there every six months to get the aspirin with codeine. Can’t get it here.”

Cullen didn’t say a word.

“We have free continental breakfast tomorrow at six. If you’re looking for dinner tonight, the Chinese place across the street is pretty good. Try their rainbow pot stickers and sesame balls.”

“That sounds good,” he said, knowing that the idea of any food whatsoever was the furthest thing from his mind.

His hotel room door secure, Cullen threw his suitcase on the bed and turned on the shower. He turned on the TV, louder than he would need to hear it, but not so loud as to be a nuisance to the other guests. He drew back the bedspread and dropped onto the pillow. He thought of how his daughter had always felt hotel bedspreads and pillows were full of “cooties” and that no one in their right mind would touch his or her bare skin to either. Deep within the folds of the poly foam, he began to scream. At first there were no words but the guttural cries of a man who had lost everything.

Finally, the pillow consumed his grief, keeping his words tucked inside.

“Skye, no! Please come back to us! Come back to me!”

Sam Castile knew the value in “mixing it up,” as he liked to call it when it came to dealing with the women he stalked, used, and discarded. The only method that was off limits was gunfire. Even the most inept police department had access to labs that examined the lans and grooves of a spent bullet. Ballistics ensured that a killer could be traced. That is, of course, if the gun could be found and matched to the killer. Certainly, he could have stolen a gun. But even that upped the ante for the risk of detection. So many killers in the Encyclopedia of Crime that he kept on the shelf with other, less useful books had been caught because they’d committed another crime.

Ted Bundy had been pulled over on a traffic violation in Salt Lake City. He’d attempted to elude police by driving through stop signs. With his headlights off! When he finally gave up, cops found an ice pick, handcuffs, and a pantyhose mask in the vehicle.

The serial killer’s traveling kit.

The Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, screwed up his string of fourteen murders in the L.A. area when he was traced to a Toyota stolen from some restaurant goers in the city’s Chinatown. It was, Sam thought, a stupid move. If Ramirez had kept his focus, he’d have been able to keep his string of murders alive.

No killer likes to be told when they are finished doing what they do best.

Aileen Wuornos, who took it upon herself to rid Florida of purported philandering husbands and male abusers by killing the men she picked up for sex, was another one who could have prevailed if she hadn’t been so careless with her associated crimes. She was traced to a stolen car belonging to a dead man. Pawnshop receipts for victims’ belongings were mottled with her fingerprints.

Kill for sport or to make a point, not for money, stupid bitch!

So there he sat, thinking of what he might like to select from his smorgasbord of murder. What would be the most memorable way to steal the life from someone? What would fuel his desires? How would it play back when he remembered? Would it make him hard? Or would it merely frustrate him because there were not enough aspects to conjure a decent erotic fantasy?

Who would it be?

Chapter Thirty-one

October 8, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

Lighthouse publisher Tad Stevens scurried out of his occasional office and stood under the YOU AUTO BUY and LET’S GROW REVENUE banners that had been plastered on a nearby wall to motivate the long-suffering advertising staff.

“People, I need your attention. People, I need your attention now.”

Mr. Stevens, as he insisted on being called, was the owner of the half dozen small papers that made up the struggling chain that caught the ad revenue and news crumbs that the Seattle papers apparently deemed too insignificant. Mr. Stevens was a remarkably neat man with a small frame, soul patch on his chin, and rimless glasses that held the DG logo of Dolce & Gabbana at the right temple hinge. He lived alone with his two Pomeranians, Hannity and Colmes. Editor Charlie Keller, for one, insisted that everyone in the newsroom show the publisher respect.

“Whenever he’s in the office, be nice,” Charlie had instructed them. “When he’s gone, you can call him dipshit if you like.”

No one had a problem following Charlie’s lead.

“People, no one likes the idea of capitalizing on tragedy. But that’s what papers do better than any entity other than maybe police departments and the medical profession,” Mr. Stevens said.

Let’s not forget the lawyers, Serenity thought.

“We have a golden opportunity to kick some ad revenue and readership butt, team.”

Golden opportunity? I’d like to kick someone’s butt, she thought some more. But it isn’t a reader’s or an advertiser’s.

The publisher went on, his enthusiasm swelling: “It appears a serial killer might be at work right here in our own backyard. We’ve got the dead woman in Little Clam Bay and what’s her name…the brush picker.”

Jesus, do you have to be gleeful? Two women are dead. This isn’t the biggest thing to hit Port Orchard since the Wal-Mart went in.

Serenity wanted to say something but stayed quiet. Not something she was particularly good at, either.

“We need to be tough,” he said. “We need to own this story. We need to sell our expertise as the local paper with its hand on the pulse of a major case. If this serial killer case gets the kind of traction I’m thinking, we’ll be able to sell photo rights to media outlets across the country.”

He looked over at Serenity but didn’t say her name.

“There will be opportunities for all of us. TV interviews. Maybe even a book. But our focus now is claiming this as a Lighthouse exclusive.”

Next he lowered his impeccable DGs and looked over at Travis Janus, the backup sports reporter who also did the paper’s Web site.

“TJ, let’s think out of the box on this. We need to enrich the content that we have up now. I’d like to see photos and docs pertaining to the case. If you need content to connect the dots, Serenity will help out.”

Serenity nodded, but knew that TJ wouldn’t ask her for anything. The Web was his bailiwick. He didn’t take advice from anyone. Supposed computer experts never do.

“You see this?”

Steven Stark, sweaty from his early-morning run from their place to Manchester’s boat launch and back, handed Kendall the morning’s edition of the Lighthouse. Cody was at the table waiting for a pancake and Kendall set down the spatula.

SERIAL KILLER STALKING KITSAP?

The story with Serenity Hutchins’ byline ran at the top of the front page and featured two photographs. The first appeared to be Skye Hornbeck’s high school photograph; the other was one of the images that Tulio Pena had provided for the feature story that ran after his girlfriend, Celesta, was reported missing.

“She makes a reasonable case that the two are connected,” Steven said.

“Oh, she does, does she?”

“I’m just saying,” Steven said, taking a seat at the table.

Kendall started to read while the pancake on the griddle began to burn. Serenity noted how the women were of approximately the same age, on the petite side, and both wore their hair long.

“She’s describing half the county,” Kendall said, looking up at Steven. “I thought that was a stretch. But that’s not where she won me over.”

Kendall read on as the Lighthouse reporter indicated that the fact that both dead women had been butchered in too similar a fashion to ignore. She’d interviewed a profiler who lived on the Internet and offered no real credentials but was always handy with a quote. The article concluded with an over-the-top line that made Kendall wince and her husband laugh.

“Boston had its Strangler. New York had Son of Sam. Are we being plagued by the Kitsap Cutter?”

Steven got up from his chair and flipped the burning pancake.

“She’s trying to sell some papers,” he said. “Nothing more, I’d wager.”

Kendall put the Lighthouse on the counter and squeezed some syrup on Cody’s short stack.

“Only one problem, honey,” she said, hesitating a little. “We’ve never released the extent of Skye’s injuries.”

“Wasn’t she there when the body was pulled from the water?”

She put the plate in front of her son and watched for a second.

“Want Mommy to feed you?” she asked. Sometimes Cody didn’t want any help. This, it turned out, was one of those mornings. He took the fork and started to eat. Kendall looked back at Steven, who was flipping another pancake.

“What was the problem, Kendall?” Steven asked, obviously curious.

“Serenity was there at the crime scene, but she couldn’t have seen what Dr. Waterman and I observed during the autopsy. We’ve never released the information about the cuts to her breasts.”

“Then how did she know that?” he asked.

Kendall set down her coffee. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

Kendall Stark shut her car door with so much force, she actually slammed it. Josh Anderson, snuffing out a cigarette in the parking lot of the Sheriff’s Office, winced from twenty yards away. His startled look was the only good thing that had happened since her husband pointed out the lead article in the newspaper.

“Did you tell her about Skye Hornbeck’s wounds?”

Josh looked as blank as he could. “Tell who?” he asked.

Kendall crossed her arms and stared at him. She kept her voice calm, but there was no mistaking how she felt. “Don’t bullshit me, Josh. Did you tell Serenity Hutchins about the condition of Skye’s body?”

He shook his head. “No. Why would I?”

“Because you think she’s hot for you. Or something like that. The older you get, the more stupid you get.”

Josh took a step back. He’d never seen Kendall so heated.

“Look, I never told anyone about that,” he said.

She jabbed a finger at him. “Like I’m going to believe you? Look, I know you’ve been seeing her. What is she, twenty-one?”

“No. I don’t know. I haven’t told her anything.”

Kendall knew that her face was red, but she didn’t care.

“We look really stupid, you know.”

“Is that what this is about? Looking stupid, Kendall?”

Kendall turned to go inside. He was partially right, of course.

“Don’t even go there,” she said. “If we have a serial killer, then we have bigger worries than anyone’s ego. That includes yours and mine.”

Josh followed her inside, but Kendall was too angry to say anything more to him. When they found their offices, she shut the door. A blinking red light on her phone indicated a message. She dialed the code for her voice mail.

The voice was familiar.

“Detective Stark, is it true? Did this Kitsap Cutter kill Celesta?”

It was Tulio Pena. His voice was in shards.

Kendall felt a kind of sickness wash over her. It was the feeling that came from letting down someone who had depended on her. She could blame Josh for leaking information to Serenity. She could even blame him for insisting that Celesta’s murder had been the result of a turf battle over floral greens. She could even tell herself just then that she had done the best she could.

But that was a lie.

“I want you to call me,” he said. “I want you to tell me that you are still trying to find who killed Celesta.”

Kendall hung up and drew a deep breath. She dialed Tulio’s number. Her heart was heavier than the anchor her father had used to lock their boat into a fishing spot on the east side of Blake Island when she was a girl.

“I’m so sorry,” she began, “that you had to read that in the paper…”

As she spoke to Tulio, she had no idea that things were about to get worse.

Margo Titus had done her job and the outcome was what she’d prayed for: an identity revealed. She put away the files that she’d accumulated on the case. It was always a great relief to store the bits and pieces she’d used to help find out who was who. While the vacant-eyed Janes looked on, Margo’s eyes landed on the autopsy photo. For the first time she noticed a series of very faint red impressions on the victim’s neck.

Skye Hornbeck’s neck, she corrected her thoughts.

She dialed Kendall’s cell number.

“I was just thinking of you, Margo,” Kendall said. “I meant to call. I’m guessing you heard the news.”

“It isn’t about that. They don’t always end this way. I’m glad that this one worked out.”

“Me too.”

They talked about the case, the cause of death, the fact that Kendall had been in touch with Skye’s father.

“I don’t know if it is anything,” Margo finally said. “I was looking at the photos, and I noticed marks on her neck. I don’t know if you have a serial up there or a onetime psychopath, but he might have taken a trophy.”

Kendall, pulled the photos and began flipping through them. “A necklace?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Her father mentioned one.”

“If the killer took it, he took it without unclasping it.”

Kendall saw the series of faint red marks in one of the autopsy photos.

“I see it.”

“Of course, I could be wrong. But I worked a case in Red Bluff where the perp kept all his vics’ brassieres in a laundry bag under his bed. One in Oklahoma City kept his vics’ earrings.”

Kendall Stark stood in line behind the other county workers looking for their caffeine buzz. She’d had a restless night with Cody and the case. The press accounts fueled by Serenity Hutchins hadn’t helped, either. She wasn’t sure right then what was weighing most heavily on her mind. Her son didn’t-or couldn’t-use words to indicate that the Inverness School had been a stunning disappointment for him too. It was hard to gauge a shift in his awareness. At times, he showed no emotion whatsoever.

Kendall, who didn’t favor a foundation for her makeup, applied some concealer under her eyes. Her hair was in need of a cut or a double-dose of hair product. She didn’t look good, and she didn’t need anyone to tell her so. What she needed was that mocha.

She felt an abrupt peck on her shoulder, and she turned around. It was Serenity Hutchins.

“I know you don’t think much of me,” Serenity said.

Kendall let out a sigh and knew she’d lost her place in line. There was no way they were going to have that conversation right there. She indicated for Serenity to follow her to a table by a large window filled with the view of the inlet. They sat facing each other.

“It isn’t about you. It isn’t personal,” Kendall said.

Serenity was upset, but it was unclear right then if she was angry or embarrassed. She’d gone after Kendall, but she seemed to pull back a little.

“I’m doing the best that I can,” she said. “I’m trying to get at the truth.”

Kendall knew better than to say what she was thinking, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Look, I just don’t like your methods, Serenity.”

“My methods?”

Kendall allowed a slight glare of condemnation to zero in on Serenity’s unblinking eyes.

“Yes, your methods. I really don’t want to get into it. Can we leave it alone?”

“No. We can’t. I have a job to do too.”

Kendall looked out the window. “Fine. We all do.”

Chapter Thirty-two

October 15, 9 a.m.

South Kitsap County, Washington

A long gravel and mud road led to the parking lot and then a wide path followed a steep embankment to the pristine sandy beach at Anderson Point. The location was not for the infirm or the underexercised. It was so difficult to get to, and, despite its status as a county park, it had very few visitors. It was almost always deserted. Lovers came to have sex behind a burned-out cabin, hidden from view by a three-foot barrier of silver-gray beach grass, all blades bent away from the surfside. On the hottest summer days, mothers took their little ones there to dig in the sand and collect bleached-out clamshells while they listened to music on iPods or read the windswept pages of a paperback novel.

Mostly the park was empty, beautiful, and quiet as God had intended it to be. Mid-October brought a blast of cold air off the Colvos Passage, but that didn’t stop the diehards who jogged from the parking lot to the beach. On October 15, an early-morning jogger made his way down to the water, running the switchbacks at a better clip than he would be able to do later when returning to his car. Everyone, especially joggers, knew that the trip down to the beach was much easier than the steep climb back to the parking lot. He crossed over the grass-tufted dunes and faced out over the narrow passage that separated Kitsap County from Vashon Island. He heard a seal bark and watched some seagulls battle over something good to eat fifty yards down a beach strewn beautifully with grass, wood, pebbles, and, finally at the water’s edge, sand the consistency of cake sugar. The gulls were making such a ruckus that the jogger altered his course and worked his way down the beach, heading south. The tide was out a little, and his running shoes stamped the sand. He breathed in the air and was about to turn back when he noticed seagulls screaming at each other as one tried to fly away with its prize. Whatever it was, the bird dropped it and it fell to the beach.

Jesus, what’s that? he thought.

The jogger walked closer and bent over to get a better view. Was it the leg of a hapless sea star? He pushed at the object with the tip of his dirty blue running shoe. It was slender and wrinkled, with a tapered end and a tattered one. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

A human finger.

As he spun around with his back to the sound and dialed 911 on his cell phone, he noticed a cacophony of gulls twenty yards away, near a neat pile of driftwood. He made his way toward the squawking birds, as a tugboat passed a half mile down Colvos Passage.

This isn’t happening, he thought.

Cradled between two parallel logs was a human body.

A woman.

Nude.

Although he strained to see exactly what he was looking at, the jogger took a step backward, his heels sinking in the sand.

The 911 operator answered and he coughed out the words, “I found a human body, I think. Out here at Anderson Point.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, it’s just that…well, I found most of a human body.”

The corpse was missing more than a finger.

“This lady has no head.”

Over on the Key Peninsula, Melody Castile was lost in her thoughts again. She turned over her purse and let its contents fall onto the bleached maple kitchen table. A few coins rolled to the floor, but she paid them no mind. Nor did she take a moment to view the mini photo album that she carried wherever she went. Inside were the incongruent, nearly Betty Crocker-inspired photos of her with her husband and little boy. She fished through the brushes, the tissue, the car keys-everything that she carried with her-in search of the waterproof mascara that she was just sure was there.

And then she found it. She pulled the cap from the top to expose the slender wand and applicator. The makeup had been in her purse for some time-since the previous summer when she swam at the Gig Harbor YMCA.

Good, she thought, seeing that there was plenty of the dark pigment left. This should be perfect. She considered a coppery-red lipstick too, but dismissed it out of hand because she knew that her husband didn’t like the messy way lipstick sometimes transferred.

The oversize chest freezer in the Fun House was in the very back of the old mobile home, behind the false wall that allowed a modicum of discretion and security. Even if some kids wandered in to find out if it was a good place to get in trouble, they’d never find the mattress or the freezer.

Just boxes of things that weren’t worth bothering with.

It was a gruesome gathering. Kendall Stark, Josh Anderson, and Birdy Waterman stood over the headless corpse in the basement of the Kitsap County coroner’s office. Even Josh, who’d never missed an opportunity to make an off-color remark, was silent. The acrid scent of the deteriorating tissue and seawater was only too familiar.

Celesta Delgado.

Skye Hornbeck.

“If we ever doubted before, we have a serial,” Kendall said. “Don’t we?”

Dr. Waterman nodded as she worked her light over the dead woman’s torso.

“The question,” she said softly, “at least for now, is just who this is?”

Kendall nodded. “If she’s local and reported missing, we might be able to pinpoint who she is.”

Even without a head.

“Midnight Cassava,” Josh said. “She’s been missing since the second week in April. Or thereabouts. Hard to tell with her comings and goings. Hooker, you know.”

“Marissa,” Kendall corrected, ignoring the hooker remark.

The pathologist looked over her glasses at Josh and Kendall. “Did she have any children?” she asked

Kendall nodded. Suddenly she no longer smelled the decomposition of the body. “Yes, a little girl. She’s living with her grandmother now.”

“This woman has had at least one baby. See the stretch marks? Internal exam of the uterus will verify it. Her name wouldn’t happen to be Tasha, would it?” Birdy asked.

The beam of the light illuminated a wrist tattoo of letters spelling out T-a-s-h-a, each character separated by a tiny daisy.

Kendall thought of the little girl. Her mother was a prostitute and had died the kind of unspeakable death that no one, no matter how she lived her life, deserved.

Striations around the wrist were visible. Like the others, likely made by wire bindings.

“Was she restrained? Like Skye?”

“I can’t be sure,” Dr. Waterman said. “There’s some obvious freezer burn here. See that dark patch of skin along the arms?”

The pallid limbs of the victim had broad markings that ran from the shoulders to the hands. The right hand was missing the index finger.

“Why cut off just one finger?” Josh said. “I mean, if you’re going to lop off someone’s head for fun, why bother with a single digit?”

The pathologist shrugged. “My guess is that he didn’t mess with cutting off her finger. Those damn gulls did. Look at this cut. More of a tear, really. Not like the head.”

Indeed, the neck was the most obvious and shocking injury Kendall had seen. It was a blood-clotted stump. Tissue and vertebrae pushed upward like a mushroom from the remarkably clean cut that had severed the head from the body.

“Look at how precise this is,” Dr. Waterman said. “This was no hacking but a careful-and I’d say skilled-decapitation.”

Josh popped an Altoid mint into his mouth, as if the fresh taste of the candy would mitigate the stench of the room. “Who has that kind of-as you put it-skill? A taxidermist? A French Revolution reenactor?”

Birdy let a slight smile break across her usually serious face.

“That’ll be your job to figure out,” she said. “I’m just calling it like I see it, Josh.”

Next, scalpel gleaming, she made her Y-incision, slicing the skin shoulder to shoulder, then down the sternum.

“I suspected this,” she said.

Kendall bent closer. “What’s that?”

“See the crystals here?” She pointed to the edge of her scalpel next to the heart. Thin wafers of ice glistened like tiny diamonds on deep-red velvet.

Kendall indicated she did.

“This lady’s been kept in a freezer.”

Josh Anderson’s cell phone sounded, but he let it go to voice mail.

A beat later, Kendall’s buzzed. Thinking it might be something about Cody at school, she snapped off her glove and reached for her phone. It wasn’t the school. It was the number for Serenity Hutchins. She ignored it.

“Your reporter girlfriend is certainly quick on the story,” she said to Josh, who seemed to shrug it off. Birdy regarded the two detectives and spoke up.

“Now that you mention Ms. Hutchins,” Birdy said, “I was wondering how she was able to write such an incisive story on victim two.”

Josh looked a little embarrassed, his face darkening. He stepped away from the autopsy table and put his hands out as if to push back.

“I didn’t tell her about the cuts,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Kendall said. “You’d never kiss and tell.”

“But I didn’t,” he said. He looked intently at both women. “Not this time.”

Chapter Thirty-three

October 15, noon

Bremerton

The hospital chapel had seen ten thousand tears. Maybe a million. It was a dour little room with four pewlike benches upholstered in dusty olive and facing a simple brass and wood cross. Very modern, or at least it was modern in the 1970s, when having a hospital chapel was part and parcel of dealing with dead patients.

Donna Solomon said nothing at first. She simply buckled over, hugging herself, as Kendall Stark told her the news.

“I’m sorry,” Kendall said. “This is such sad, sad information to take in.”

Donna found the strength to draw in a deep breath. Her eyes were flooded by then, and tears started to pour down her cheeks, collecting in the corner of her mouth.

“It is, it is…” she finally said.

“No one should ever have to go through this. Few people have.”

“Thank you for telling me before the papers put something out there.”

Kendall put her arms around Mrs. Solomon. Her daughter had been missing since mid-April. She’d thought, hoped, that Marissa had gone somewhere to be with a boyfriend.

“I always thought she’d come back. She did love her baby, just as I loved her.”

“I know.”

“Can I see her?”

Kendall shook her head. “That wouldn’t be a good idea. Her body isn’t completely intact. I’m sorry.”

Donna Solomon dabbed at her eyes with a tissue from a dispenser on a table.

“What do you mean, intact?”

“The body was in bad shape, I’m afraid.”

Kendall didn’t want to tell her the details just then. She studied Donna’s reaction, and she seemed to be satisfied.

Devastated. Resigned. Satisfied.

Kendall Stark could have cried when she saw the headline in the Lighthouse the next morning. It was beyond anything she could have imagined.

HEADLESS IN SOUTH KITSAP:

THE CUTTER STRIKES AGAIN!

Despite the fact that Kendall was suspicious that Josh had tipped off the young woman, there was the distinct possibility that Serenity had gotten the information from the jogger or others at the scene. Even so, she poked her head into Josh’s office to give him a piece of her mind. He was gone. Next on her list was Charlie Keller.

She wouldn’t even bother with Serenity.

She dialed his number, and the editor got on the line.

“Big happenings in Port Orchard, Detective.”

“Look, Charlie, I like you. I like the paper. I don’t even mind it when you get things wrong. But don’t you have any kind of decency over there?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“How did you get that information? Couldn’t it have waited a day before you blasted it to everyone that the victim had been decapitated?”

“The news doesn’t wait.”

Kendall sighed. Of course he was right.

“No offense, Charlie, but the Lighthouse is hardly CNN. It could have waited.”

“Ouch,” he said.

“Don’t you care about the victim’s family? They’d barely been notified.”

“That’s your job.”

There was no point in the call, and Kendall Stark knew it. She’d dialed the Lighthouse editor to give him a piece of her mind about ethics, dignity, and concern.

All of that was lost on that bunch.

Serenity watched her boss turn off his office speakerphone. Despite Charlie Keller’s bravado during the call with Kitsap County detective Kendall Stark, he didn’t look happy. In front of him was a stack of messages from national media outlets ranging from Fox News to CNN. Kitsap was making the news in the way that forgotten little burgs gain overnight notoriety when evil presents itself.

“She was pretty hot, wasn’t she?” she asked.

Charlie Keller fanned the messages on the desk in front of him.

“Yeah, she was. Too bad. I like her. She does good work, and we don’t advance a story very often without the help of the police. No offense to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Boss.”

He shook his head, not looking up at her. His eyes still riveted on the messages. “You know. And I’m not saying that you’re not doing a great job. But really, it won’t look good for the paper if some blogger points out that our reporter is getting her info from her cop boyfriend.”

Serenity looked surprised. She hadn’t said a word about seeing Josh Anderson.

“Well, for your information, Josh didn’t tell me this info. Not this time. I have more than one.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “But let’s watch this, okay? These things have a way of biting people in the ass. And you don’t want your ass chewed, believe me.”

Serenity nodded. “You’re right. I don’t.”

Jamie Lyndon was petite, but she had nerves of pure carbide. If she hadn’t been too slight in her build to take on all the physical requirements of the qualification exam, she would have been happy to be a corrections officer at the Kitsap County jail. At a breath under five feet and not quite a hundred pounds soaked to the skin, she eventually found her niche with a headset firmly in place as a 911 operator working at Kitsap County’s central communication center, CENCOM. Less risky. Less fun, to be sure. But her cool demeanor always served her well in a job that demanded calmness on the rocks with a splash of humor.

“Must be a full moon,” she said to her coworker, Sal, as they fielded call after call. “Werewolves and teenagers, if you can tell either apart on a night like this.”

“Yup, the board’s on fire tonight, for sure,” returned Sal, a part-time communications officer, part-time student, and full-time single dad. “That’s what we live for around here. Love it when we’re busy.”

“Me too-” Jamie began to answer before swiveling around to face her console and another call.

“9-1-1. What are you reporting?”

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line was female, soft-spoken. So much so that Jamie couldn’t quite make out what she was saying.

“Can you please speak up?”

“Okay. I just don’t want anyone to hear me.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“Yes. It is. I think it qualifies. It’s about a murder.”

“All right. Can you be more specific?”

“The dead lady at Anderson Point. I know the guy who did it.”

“Who is this? Where are you calling from?”

“I’m not saying. And don’t try to catch me. This phone’s about out of minutes, and I’ll just get another from the gas station.”

“All right. Who are you talking about?”

“The dead lady.”

“Yes, I know that. I mean, who is the guy you’ve alluded to?”

“I’m not saying.” The woman paused, as if she hadn’t contemplated that she’d be asked such a simple question. “I can’t. But I want you to know that he’s not a monster.”

Jamie knew enough from the newspaper and the Sheriff’s Office scuttlebutt that the caller was wrong. The man who had murdered and dumped Jane Doe in the frigid waters of Puget Sound was nothing less than a monster.

“You need to talk to someone, provided you really do know something.”

“I do. I do.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. You called for a reason.”

“I was feeling sorry for the dead woman. She didn’t deserve to die. Not in the way she did.”

Jamie pressed the caller. She had a way of pulling up just a touch of sarcasm to make someone spit out what they had to say.

What she needed them to say.

“Is that so? Tell me something we don’t know.”

There was a silence for a second, and Jamie wondered if she’d pushed the caller too hard. “The dead girl has a small crescent-shaped scar above her right knee.”

In case the information was accurate, Jamie pushed a little harder. “Where is he?”

“I’ve already said too much.”

“You’ve just got started. You don’t make a call like this and then just drop it. Who is he? This man who did this?”

“I’m not saying.”

“Who is he to you?”

“This call isn’t about me.”

Jamie took a breath. She wanted this woman to do the right thing. It was, after all, the reason she called in. Or was it? They had their share of crazies phoning 911. One man called at least once a week with the tale that he was sure a young girl was being tortured in the apartment above his. The police were routinely dispatched for the sole reason of making sure they were not at risk in any potential lawsuit-in case there really was a girl being tortured on the third floor of the Marina Apartments.

“How do we find him?” Jamie asked.

A slight hesitation, some kind of a tapping sound. “You won’t.”

“How do you know? Do you know him?”

“I love him, and I serve him.”

Jamie felt the air suck out of the room.

“Please hold the line, will you? I think you’ll want to talk to one of the sheriff’s detectives. Hang on. Okay?”

There was no answer. She heard a door slam and some muffled sounds.

“Are you there?”

Still nothing.

A man’s voice cut on to the line. “My bitch is done talking to you.” The voice was deep, cold, unforgettable.

Sal looked up from a computer screen, where he had just logged in the basics of his latest call. “What was that?”

“Some woman, first. Some man at the end. Says she knows who killed the woman out on Anderson Point. It sounded like she knew something. The man shut her up.”

“Get the number? Location?”

“Disposable cell phone, she says.”

“God, we hate those.”

Jamie sighed. “Yeah, we do.”

“Think she was for real?”

“I’ll forward it to the Sheriff’s Office. That’s their job. Ours is to answer the calls.” She turned her attention to the call light flashing from her console. “God, here comes another.”

Jamie pushed the button on her handset.

“9-1-1. How can I help you?”

The caller was inquiring about the neighborhood block watch program. Jamie politely reminded him that those types of inquiries were not an emergency.

“Try back tomorrow. Use the help line. This is for emergencies only,” she said.

She rolled her eyes in Sal’s direction, and he, too, was handling a call.

Jamie wrote up a brief note on what the caller had said about the corpse on the shore at Anderson Point and forwarded it to her floor supervisor. She’d noted the call log accession number, which would allow investigators the ability to pull the recording of the call so they could listen to what was said-and how it was said.

Jamie Lyndon had a pretty good feeling that this particular call would lure some ears sooner than later. And she was right.

The next morning, Kendall Stark looked at the CENCOM report about the nighttime caller and the chilling message that she’d relayed to the operator. It was only two paragraphs long, but it provided a crucial piece of information.

She looked up at Josh as he strode into his office, coffee in hand and a smile on his face as if he was going to tell a joke.

“What’s with you?” he said. “It’s too early for this to be a crappy day already.”

She indicated the report with a tap of her finger. She had also downloaded an audio file of the call.

“One of our operators took a call last night. If it’s genuine, and I have no reason to believe it is…” She let her words trail off.

“Yeah?” he said, sliding into a chair.

“This is a theory,” she said, “and I’d like to tell you, but…”

“But what?” He looked impatiently at her and took a swig from his dirty mug.

“I don’t want to read about this in the paper. Okay?”

“I thought we were beyond that, Kendall.”

“I hope so,” she said. “And because I need you on this case, I’m willing to give you my trust just one more time.”

Josh didn’t offer up a quick retort; instead, he just nodded.

“The so-called Kitsap Cutter isn’t acting alone,” she said.

“You mean like Bianchi and Buono?”

He was referring to the Hillside Stranglers, who’d raped and murdered ten women in California in the 1970s. The crimes were notorious for many reasons, one of which dealt with how the two acted in tandem. They shared a psychopathology that entwined them in such a way that enabled them to act out on their fantasies together, each stoking the sick desires of the other.

“Not exactly.”

She played the recording.

“I love him, and I serve him.”

Josh stared at Kendall as the audio concluded.

“More like Bianchi and Betty,” she said.

“The Cutter’s accomplice is a female?”

Kendall nodded. “It fits the evidence. The cleaned-up victims, the hesitation in some of the cuts, the way he’s been able to lure victims without tipping them off.”

“They weren’t afraid,” Josh said.

“That’s right. Because she,” Kendall indicated the report once more, “the caller, was there too.”

Chapter Thirty-four

October 16, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

Kitsap County Sheriff Jim McCray, a stern presence who rose up through the ranks when he won a neck-and-neck election two years prior, called Kendall and Josh into his office. It was just after 9 A.M., and the day felt like trouble already. Jim McCray was a hulking figure at six-foot-five and two hundred and fifty pounds. He had deep-set brown eyes, which seemed to penetrate more than stare.

“Look,” he said, as the pair took chairs opposite a desk loaded with paperwork that needed tending, “you two are great detectives.”

Josh glanced at Kendall. “I have a feeling we’re getting an award,” he said, his tone sardonic and a little resentful.

“Or about to be fired,” she said.

Jim McCray allowed a rare smile.

“Neither. But the fact is we need some help here. The FBI is going to assign some resources out of the Seattle field office. Mason County and Pierce County are going to put a guy-or gal-on the team, too.”

The gal reference was a nod at Kendall, and it wasn’t meant to be sexist, just a correction from a man who was still working on his human resources skills.

Josh didn’t like what he was hearing one iota. “Sounds like you really don’t think we can do the job,” he said.

Jim shifted his frame in his chair. “Not that at all. We’re getting pressure. And I’m not just talking about the Lighthouse.”

Kendall knew that he was referring to Serenity’s latest story and the accompanying editorial that called for the obvious: JUSTICE NEEDED FOR CUTTER’S VICTIMS NOW.

“Who’s leading the task force?” she asked.

“The FBI has enough to do with their terrorism investigation in Blaine,” he said, referring to an Iraqi national who had been caught at the Canadian border crossing with a trunk load of plastic explosives and a schematic of Seattle’s Space Needle, “but to answer your question, they’re leading.”

“Jesus,” Josh said, “we’ve just started here, and you’re letting us get stepped on.”

The sheriff tightened his mouth and munched on his response. “We blew it with Delgado, and everyone knows it. We have to pay the price for our blunder by eating a little dirt.”

Kendall looked at Josh. He was fuming.

“It was a mistake,” she said. “And I’m sorry about it.”

Josh looked out the window. He’d been written up for outbursts in the past. He’d been to anger management training. He counted to five. There was no need to count to ten.

“Fine,” he said.

A discernable pattern marks the surge of Puget Sound. Most currents follow the ebb and flow from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, that choppy channel of Pacific blue that isolates Washington from Vancouver Island. The currents are swiftest there, petering out considerably as islands and peninsulas impede the natural movement of tidal waters.

Kendall maneuvered her SUV into a tight space in the visitors’ parking lot adjacent to the Veterans’ Home in Retsil, only a few minutes east of Port Orchard. From the water, ferry passengers on the Bremerton-Seattle run caught a glimpse of the building, looking stately and grand on a bluff that soared above the lazy tide lines of the beach that scurried over to Rich Passage.

Kendall reviewed the locations of where Celesta, Marissa, and Skye’s bodies had been discovered. While nothing was absolute in the investigation, she and Josh shared the general feeling that the killer lived in the northern part of Kitsap County.

“Shoving a dead woman into the water is a nighttime activity,” Josh had said after a short meeting with the sheriff and a speakerphone connected to members of the task force. “The killer cruised to the Theler Wetlands and plunked Celesta where he thought no one would find her-in the shallows near Belfair. Reedy there. Weedy there.”

“He didn’t really hide her,” Kendall said. “He wanted us to see what he’d done.”

Josh shrugged. “Maybe. But my gut’s been at this longer than you, and I don’t agree.”

Kendall found her way across the lot to the front entryway of the Veterans’ Home. She had a date with an old family friend.

Peter Monroe was eighty-seven-a still-with-it eighty-seven-and lived on the second floor in the remodeled section of the nearly century old institution. He was reading Clive Cussler’s latest tale by the window when she appeared in the doorway. He looked up and moved his book to his lap. His hands were twisted into gnarly kindling; his eyes were now faded denim. He slowly got up and gave Kendall a hug.

“Hi, Mr. Monroe,” she said as warmth came to his white-whisker-stubbled face. Though he told her after high school graduation that she could call him Pete, she never could do it.

“How’s my favorite marine biology student?” he asked, a reference to the classes he had taught at the university before retiring at seventy-nine.

“I’m fine,” she said. She’d taken a couple of courses from him out of personal interest, but also because she’d known him growing up in Harper. The Monroes had lived down the street from her family’s home on Overlook Road. “Still looking at the water from my front window and appreciating all that goes on under its surface.”

“You said you wanted to talk about currents.” He lowered his rimless glasses and looked at her. “What’s this all about?”

As Kendall pulled a folded paper from her black leather shoulder bag, she noticed a framed photo of Mrs. Monroe on the bed stand. She’d been gone for at least ten years. She felt a flush of sadness. He’d been alone a good long time. He had children, of course, but she wondered if they visited often. It was too personal to inquire, so she didn’t ask about them.

He took the paper and moved it into the sunlight, and Kendall sidled up next to him, so she could view her chart as he did. “The red dots are the locations where the bodies were recovered,” she said. “I’m wondering how the killer can get around so easily, dumping victims without any detection. They’re not really a cluster of dump sites.” She stopped herself.

Kendall hated that she’d even used the word “dump,” as if the women were nothing but trash.

“Hood Canal is interesting,” Pete said, sliding his glasses back up the bridge of his nose to get a better look at the swirling rings laid out by an oceanographer and a cartographer. The rings were spaced at varying widths, like the lines on a piece of driftwood. “I used to go shrimping there with Ida and the boys.”

“Those were happy times,” Kendall said, catching the look of a specific memory in his blue eyes.

Pete peered at Kendall over the brims of his glasses. “Yes, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re wondering if the perp-that’s the word you detectives like to use-went all the way to Belfair to drop off Ms. Delgado’s remains?”

Kendall hadn’t used Celesta’s name, nor was it on the map. Just Victim One, Victim Two, Victim Three. Mr. Monroe still read the paper. Good.

He went on. “Rough weather notwithstanding, the currents and tidal oscillations are a little sluggish here by the bridge,” he said, indicating the floating bridge used to traverse the narrowest part of the channel from Kitsap to Jefferson County. “Not knowing where he put her in the water, of course, my guess is that she couldn’t have been dumped off the bridge and floated all the way to Belfair. Not likely. If he put her around here,” he said, pointing to a location about a quarter mile from the bridge, “she’d ride the tide to the location in the wetlands.”

“How long would it take her body to travel that far?”

His answer was immediate, though not precise. “A few hours. Half a day at most.”

Kendall pointed to Little Clam Bay and Anderson Point, on Colvos Passage across from Vashon Island.

“Currents flow northerly on the Seattle side of Vashon,” Pete said, “and southerly on the side where you’ve indicated here and here.” He tapped a twiggy fingertip on the two red dots.

“So if we found some evidence related to one victim here near Anderson Point,” Kendall said, taking it in, “you’re telling me that the perp likely dropped the evidence north of Olalla.”

Pete nodded. “Yes. The passage is busy there, but not as busy as the east side of the island. I’d say if someone wanted to get rid of something overboard he would do it around Fragaria, maybe a little further north around Southworth. Not as far as Harper, where you live. The current’s too weak there.”

“Right,” she said, looking at the boat launch at Southworth. “That’s the only place along the whole passage where he could launch a boat other than here. No other ramps until way south until you get to Olalla.”

Little Clam Bay, where Skye Hornbeck’s remains were found, was less problematic.

“No doubt that the body caught a current right about here,” he indicated a location off Blake Island to the east of Manchester. “Current flows this way,” he said, drawing a line near the Naval Supply Center. “The body likely got sucked into the bay, here. Not easy to do. But doable. Terrible clamming there, by the way.”

Pete folded the paper and returned it to Kendall. “Sure, it’s possible that your perp is flitting around in a speedboat; my guess is that the boat’s a larger one. It would need to be a boat of some size to chug through the waters from Hood Canal to Southworth.”

“A commercial boat? Tug?”

“Possibly, but also a large pleasure craft. My point being, I’m doubtful he’s launching his boat off some trailer at Harper or Southworth. Must be moored somewhere around here.”

Kendall bent down and kissed his forehead.

Pete Monroe actually blushed.

“What did I do to get that?” he asked.

“Just because you’re a great man and I want you to know it.”

He smiled broadly as she gathered her things to leave.

“Come back and see me soon, okay?”

“There’s no doubt about that,” she said.

Max Castile knew that his parents had their secrets and there was no asking about them. The mobile home was off limits, of course, but so was the old Navy trunk kept at the foot of their four-poster. It had his dad’s name stenciled in block letters, CASTILE, and the black-and-white dial of a combination lock of the type that he’d seen used by kids to secure bikes to the metal railing behind the school.

For as long as the boy could remember, his father kept the trunk locked. The one occasion that it wasn’t was the time he looked inside. His dad was at work and his mom was doing something in the back of the house when Max’s curiosity got the best of him. The lid was heavy, and he had to pull hard to swing it open.

On top was a covering of thin, dark fabric. Max turned the edge and immediately caught a glimpse of silver. Chains. He pulled back more of the fabric to reveal a leather whip coiled and twisted into a figure eight, just like all the electric extension cords hanging on pegs in his father’s garage. He wanted to play with the whip, but he didn’t dare reach for it.

Something else caught his eye. He blinked. Next to the whip were various flesh-colored tubes: replicas of enormous penises. They reminded him of a horse’s he’d seen once when he was over at a friend’s house when he was five. The kid had told Max what it was, and he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off the stallion. He looked deeper into the trunk and saw a pile of magazines with covers showing men wearing masks and woman bound with cords.

Pleading. Begging. Screaming.

The images scared the boy, and he let the lid slam shut. Thud! He heard his mother’s footsteps and ran out of the room.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, catching him near the kitchen doorway.

“Nothing,” he lied, not looking her in the eye.

Melody studied her son, taking in his fear and wondering what he’d been up to.

Twenty minutes later he returned to his parents’ bedroom, drawn to whatever he’d seen. This time the box was locked.

Chapter Thirty-five

October 20, 8:30 p.m.

Key Center

Melody Castile turned to her husband and flashed an uneasy smile. It was subtle, and she turned her head as quickly as she could and faced the window. Rain splattered against windowpanes with broken seals, making the trailer fifty yards away hard to see. She knew what was coming.

“You coming to the Fun House or not?” Sam asked.

“The boy’s restless, Baby.” Melody looked in the direction of the TV room. Max was watching some kind of Japanese anime cartoon that held his imagination captive. He wasn’t restless in the least.

“Daddy wants you there,” Sam said. He was demanding, his meaning implicit: either you come now, or you’ll pray you did later. “Don’t make me get angry.”

She looked directly at him. “Baby wants to be there, but you know the boy needs me too.”

He shifted his weight on heavy work boots that had tracked in fir needles and the leaves shed by the willow she’d planted when they first moved onto the property. Corkscrew willow. She’d imagined that she’d be harvesting the curling stems for floral projects and craft shows. She had no idea that she’d have to abandon all that she’d dreamed of in order to fulfill his needs in the Fun House. The best she could say of herself was that she was a reluctant participant. But not all that reluctant. She’d done everything he’d wanted, when he told her to do it. She knew that if the unthinkable had ever occurred and they were found out by the police or someone else, she was going down too. She’d been there. She’d helped him.

And sometimes she had even enjoyed it.

“Fun House,” he said. “Now!”

Melody took a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen cabinet and followed him outside, across the wet grass, past the drippy willow stems, and between two firs that acted like shutters to the doorway of the mobile home. She filled her lungs with air and followed him. It was a single-wide, in decent shape, but outdated in a world in which only a lowlife Kitsap meth-head would call such place home. He’d ripped out the kitchen and knocked out the wall between the two bedrooms. He’d burned most of the garbage, filling the air with black smoke.

She was sure a neighbor would call in the illegal fire, and when she told him so, he’d looked at her with those cold eyes.

Eyes that she found full of cruelty, but in a way that made her lust for his touch. She’d never recoil from him.

But that was before the Fun House became what it was to be.

One afternoon he showed up with two old queen-size mattresses he’d purchased from Craigslist. She looked at them and made a face. She indicated a big stain that looked like dried blood.

“Those are nasty,” she said. “Someone had her period all over that one.”

“Baby, don’t worry. I’ll make it nice for us.”

She helped Sam carry the mattresses one at a time across the yard into the single-wide. She heard the laughter of children on the acreage next door as they played with the family dog, a German shepherd that they insisted would protect them from prowlers. With the truck bed empty, she noticed a box of chains and a spool of wire.

“What’s that for?”

He offered a smile, his lips barely parted. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, Baby.”

In time, yes, she’d find out.

From the beginning, Sam reminded Melody what was at stake and that any failure of their secret would be her fault alone.

“Look, I’ll kill you and go have a pizza before I do any time.”

She simply nodded. Her heart fluttered, but she only agreed.

“No one knows what goes on here besides you, me, and the girls we pick up here and there. They won’t say anything, that’s for sure. They’ll never get the chance to.”

“I love you,” she said. “I just want you to be happy.”

“I might have been happy if I’d have married someone other than you. But you’ll do what I want nine times out of ten, and that’ll be enough to keep you breathing.”

It was a threat, and it excited her.

“I promise to be good.”

“Good isn’t what I want or need. I like my women a little on the rough side, bitch. You know, sweet like a soft cookie, but with the crunch of nuts inside.” He let out a laugh.

She laughed, too, as if what he’d said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

It was too much of a reaction, and his eyes shot her a shut up glance. She shut up right away.

Kendall answered Dr. Waterman’s message with an in-person visit. She needed some space to think, and the walk across the parking lot from the Sheriff’s Office to the morgue was about as good as it was going to get. She found the county’s forensic pathologist eating some slightly congealing ramen at her desk in what had been the dining room of the sad little house that served as the county morgue. Birdy set her mug of noodles down and greeted her with a smile.

“Such service,” she said.

“We aim to please, Doctor.”

Birdy motioned for her to sit, and Kendall obliged. “I know. I’m glad you came over. I have something for you. Lord knows you could use it.”

The last sentence wasn’t meant as a dig, and Birdy regretted how it came out. “You know what I mean. We all could use a break.”

Kendall nodded. “You can say that again. Have you got something for us?”

Birdy folded back the metal clasp of a manila envelope and pulled out a four-page report, most of which was boilerplate and protocol.

“About those paint specks.”

Kendall scooted forward on the chair. “You’ve got something, haven’t you?”

“Nothing as definitive as you’d like, I’m sure, but something yes. Lab results came back this morning. Not only did the ladies in Olympia-with an assist from the feds’ lab-confirm the chemical makeup and date of the paint-1940, prewar-they determined that the outer surface of the paint indicated some wear.”

“‘Some wear?’”

“That’s right,” Birdy said, drumming her fingernail on the report. “It appears that the object inserted into our victim was likely a household item: eggbeater, rolling pin, potato masher.”

Kendall didn’t say anything, and Birdy filled the silence with more information.

“The postmortem damage to her vagina fits the kind of shallow penetration of a painted dowel pin-you know, four inches or so. Whoever raped her after death used some kind of old kitchenware. I’m about sure of it.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“That’s your question to answer, but the truth is, Kendall, we never really know what triggers the darkest and the unthinkable. The killer could have picked up a rolling pin because it was handy or because using one in such a vile way held some meaning for him.”

“Like he hated his mother,” Kendall said.

Birdy put the report back in the envelope. “That’s one possibility, I suppose.”

“Obvious as it is.”

“Right. Remember the murders in Spokane ten years ago? I know this is a bit before your time. They called him the Grandma Killer?”

Kendall searched her memory. “Yes,” she said. “I think he killed four women, all elderly.”

“Yes,” she said. “The media-and my colleagues in law enforcement-were all but certain he was targeting older ladies because of some anger against them or some sexual compulsion. A classic rage killer.”

Kendall was unsure where the conversation was going, and the look on her face signaled the pathologist to wrap it up.

Which she did.

“Point being, the killer wasn’t targeting older women because he was attracted to them. They were simply random picks based on opportunity. They’d spent months profiling a killer they thought had a granny complex for nothing.”

“He was just lazy, right?”

Birdy nodded. “That’s right. So what I’m getting at is, I don’t think that our Kitsap Cutter has anything against his mother per se. I think we’ve got a man who is an opportunist and is looking for women he can control, defile, and do with as he pleases. And there’s one more thing. I’m all but certain that our killer has an accomplice.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Some alleles were picked off the paint chips. They don’t match each other. They come from more than one person.”

“Is the Cutter a killing team?”

“That’s my guess. Of course, it might merely mean there was trace from the grandma who owned the old rolling pin. DNA, like fingerprints, is not time/date stamped.”

Kendall Stark parked her child-fingerprinted SUV in the lot behind Bay Street in an oil-stained lot that looked out over Sinclair inlet at the Navy ships across the water in Bremerton. The Olympic Mountains, rugged and bare of snow, were an awe-inspiring backdrop. She glanced at the moored ships, gray and enormous, like whales lazing, and then proceeded to one of the antique stores that lined much of Port Orchard’s downtown thoroughfare. She was on the hunt for classic kitchenware, items that had once lovingly helped to prepare meals, but now had been used for the unthinkable.

Most stores had “a little of this, a little of that,” but one seemed the most likely place to learn more. It was Kitchen Klassics, a hole-in-the-wall shop, just steps away from the library, a popular tavern, and a bail bondsman’s office that were the three busiest places on the main drag of town.

Adam Canfield, a man who wore a cardigan and a bow tie every day of the year, nodded at Kendall as she came inside, ringing the bell. He set down his supersized mug of black tea and lit up with recognition.

“Hi, detective,” he said, brushing back a lock of prematurely salt and pepper hair that hung foppishly fringed on his suntanned brow.

Kendall had known him since high school when they worked on a production of Brigadoon. She’d been Fiona; he was a set decorator.

“Adam, I’m on a mission, and I think you’re the one to help.”

“A case.” He raised an eyebrow. “The case?” he asked, without saying the obvious.

She smiled at Adam. He was complete gossip, but an effective one when it came to feigning confidence. He should have been an actor.

“I can’t talk about the specifics,” she said. “But I’m hoping you can help.”

He moved his tea aside and leaned on the glass case that served as a counter, his elbows sliding a little.

“I’m here for you,” he said.

Kendall described the color, size, and age of a particular kitchen item.

“I’m thinking a handle on a cook’s tool.”

Adam resisted the urge to offer up some kind of innuendo. “Red or red with a white underglaze?” he asked.

She pondered the lab’s report. “Yes, there was a white underglaze.”

“Good, that makes it more interesting,” he said. “And more valuable. Follow me.”

Adam led Kendall between rows of old appliances and dining sets to a large locked case. Inside were crocks loaded with rolling pins, potato peelers, and tools with purposes unknown to the Kitsap County investigator. Adam unlocked the case and reached for a rolling pin with cherry red handles.

“Made only one year, 1938, in Germany,” he said, giving dough roller a spin as he handed it over.

Kendall stopped the whirling pin. “What happened?”

“Company went TU,” he said. “The war, Jewish company, Germany.”

Kendall rotated the pin. The dowel was not stationary like some rolling pins, but inside ball bearings turned the cylinder. It glided over pastry like a vintage Ferrari, smooth and with style.

“I see,” she said.

“Retails for about $400. You can have it for $375.”

Kendall handed it back. “Thanks, Adam. But I’m more interested in who else might have wanted one of these.”

He locked the case. “I’ve sold a couple since I’ve been in this location. Highly collectible, this stuff. Few people appreciate something so simple, so rare. “

“How are your records?”

Adam grinned. “They suck, but I could do some digging.”

A while later, Adam Canfield was on the phone. Kendall was sitting in her office with Josh Anderson going over the minutes of the last task force meeting, taking their lumps and wishing they’d been able to put an end to the Kitsap Cutter case before things had spun out of control.

Even more so.

“Hi, Kendall, er Detective,” he said, correcting himself.

“Hi, Adam,” she said, “have you got some good news for me?”

“I don’t know if it’s good news. But it is news. I dug through the files. God, I wish I made enough dough to hire a full-time bookkeeper. It isn’t easy being in retail, you know.”

“I’m sure, Adam. What did you find out?”

“Three names: Katrina Dodson, Melody Castile, and Veronica-she likes to be called Ronni-Milton. All of them have purchased something in that old line I showed you.”

She wrote down the names. Something seemed so vague, and she asked him about it.

“My records are lousy. Lou-zee. I don’t know what they bought. You’ll have to ask ’em. Kat and Ronni live in Port Orchard. Melody’s out on the peninsula.”

Josh Anderson’s eyes flashed recognition at one name on the list, and when Kendall hung up, he wasted no time telling her what he knew.

“Melody Castile is Serenity’s sister. She’s one of those collectors, big-time. About all she does. I’ll run this one down.”

Kendall didn’t have a great feeling about Josh “running down” anything when it came to Serenity Hutchins, but she agreed. She’d follow up on the other two vintage kitchen collectors. She always did two-thirds of the work when she and Josh worked a case together, anyway. Why should the Cutter be any different?

Josh Anderson pulled the cork from the slender neck of a wine bottle, sending a nice pop into the air.

“You’ll get a kick out of this,” he said to Serenity as he poured some wine into the last two goblets that his wife had left when she packed up (his first wife, not his last wife). The pair were holed up in his condo in Bremerton, taking in the view of the moonlight water and a passing pleasure boat.

Serenity tasted the wine and nodded in approval. It was a crisp chardonnay that she favored, and Josh knew it.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You mentioned your sister being a kitchen junk collector.”

She rolled her eyes. “Among other things.”

He nodded. “Yeah, among other things.”

Condensation clung to her glass, and she wiped it away with a paper napkin.

“Her name came up today on a list of buyers of stuff that may be related to the case.”

Serenity wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but she didn’t press for details right then.

“My sister’s a little loopy and her husband is a creep, but since my folks died they’re pretty much all I have,” she said.

He drank some wine. “You don’t mention them much.”

“We’re not close. Sometimes I wish we were,” she said.

“I know how that goes.”

Chapter Thirty-six

October 22, 3:30 p.m.

Key Center

Max Castile had begged for months to be Indiana Jones for Halloween. At first Melody had been surprised by the choice. It seemed to be a character out of her own childhood and an unlikely candidate to inspire the imagination of a child of today. She had her sister to thank. It was an Indiana Jones video game that Serenity had given Max for his birthday.

She took out her mother’s old Singer sewing machine and worked day and night at the kitchen table, taking one of Sam’s work shirts and reducing it in size for her little boy to wear. She’d found an appropriately beat-up fedora at the Gig Harbor Goodwill that smelled of someone’s grandpa.

Max had found the whip.

“Mom, I love you,” he said, holding up the small black riding crop with a silver skull at its knob end. “This is so cool.”

The whip was not part of the costume she was making but had been among the toys that she and Sam employed in the Fun House.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, her voice a controlled scream.

Max looked confused and then burst into tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you got it for me, Mom.”

“This is not for you,” she said, taking the whip back.

The little boy ran from the kitchen. His mother did not follow. She didn’t know what to say or whether it was worth making any more issue of it.

She turned the machine on and started sewing.

Melody Castile had been the star of Sam’s little productions nearly since the time they were first together. At first it made her feel uncomfortable, doing the things that he insisted turned him on. When it came to lipstick, he wanted her to wear bright red, not muted shades of brick and persimmon. Candy Apple was the color he desired on her lips. He wanted her to wear crotchless panties that he purchased off some Frederick’s of Hollywood-type site on the Internet.

“For my all-access pass,” he said when he gave her the sheer underwear with the slit on the front panel.

Sam’s requests escalated over time. No longer did he seem to be content to make her over into his version of sexy. He had her do things. Oral sex in a bathroom at the Space Needle. Allow him to slip his fingers into her vagina while they waited in the drive-through line at the Port Orchard Starbucks. Each time she acquiesced, the line moved closer toward the sordid.

“Baby, I need you to put this on and be my dirty little bitch.”

He handed her a short dress, pale blue: it looked like the kind of garment a flower girl might wear at a summer wedding.

“No panties, bitch,” he said as she dressed.

What is this game? Why am I doing this?

“I want you to put this inside of you, bitch,” he said, handing her a clear Lucite dildo. She’d never seen it before. It was enormous, shiny, like a phallic icicle. God only knew where he’d purchased it. At one of those seedy sex shops near the Navy base in Bremerton? Or in Tacoma at that suburban-style superstore, Castles? There, a credit card and a taste for the wild side could get a customer Jenna Jameson’s vagina or Johnny Wadd’s penis made of rubber or silicone with a starburst on the package proclaiming that it was dishwasher safe.

“Get on the bed,” he said, pushing her slightly, as his digital camera started to whir.

It wasn’t just that his voice was demanding: It was more that she wanted to please him. Melody knew that men sometimes needed something more than the usual. She wanted to help him, to please him. So she obeyed.

He took off his pants and underwear but not his shirt or socks as he stood before her. He almost never took off his socks when they had sex. Yet, she had to be devoid of all clothing and jewelry, down to her wedding band. It was what he preferred.

“Legs up. Spread your legs, bitch,” he said. “Higher.”

He held out his camera.

“But you can’t take sexy pictures of me, baby, if you can’t see my face,” she said.

She didn’t tell him that she’d spent a half hour on her hair and makeup, thinking that the sexy pictures he had in mind were more Playboy than Hustler. She was a pretty woman who didn’t need a heavy hand with the lipstick or blush, but he liked her to “paint it up” a little. She’d even put a little foundation on the thin white stretch marks she carried after childbirth.

He laughed. “Bitch, I don’t care about your face.”

She looked a little hurt, and he seemed to respond to her concern.

“I want to show these to my friends. If they see your face, they’ll know it’s you. Then they’ll hit on you. I don’t want that.”

She relaxed a little.

“Good, bitch. Now, put it in!”

Later she would think back to this moment, wondering if she’d crossed over to a dark and dangerous side. Was this her turning point? If she’d said no to the photos, the dildos, the leather straps, the chains…would things be different?

“It hurts,” she said.

“Oh, bitch, that’s good. That’s how I like it. That’s how you like it too.”

She lay back on the bed, feeling sore and ashamed. Whatever questions she had about what they were doing stayed unasked.

A few days later he came home from the shipyard, beaming. She was in the kitchen.

“I showed your pictures to some of the guys,” he said, cornering her in the kitchen while she prepared dinner. He spoke in low, conspiratorial tones. It was as if they’d done it together as a team. She’d felt she was just an object under his direction. But he seemed to suggest more. Your pictures. It made her feel good. “I didn’t tell them it was you, just some bitch I photographed.”

There was pride and excitement in his voice, and it stirred something in her. It was dark, nasty, and wrong on every level, but she wanted more. She wanted to make him happy.

“I’m glad to be your hot bitch,” she finally said, sliding her pink top up to reveal her breasts, still round and lovely even after having had a child. “Pinch me hard.”

Sam complied, taking her nipples between his rough, callused fingertips and twisting as if he were turning a stuck cap on a ketchup bottle. He could feel her tense up in pain, and it aroused him. She reached down and grabbed his crotch, feeling the power of her own.

“Good girl,” he said, twisting her harder.

“Yes, I am.” Tears rolled down her face, and her knees buckled. “I’m a very good girl, Daddy.”

He kissed her, his breath smoky and sweet from a beer he’d had with his friends.

“I want you to put it in me,” she said, almost pleading.

“My bitch wants it bad?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Real bad?”

“Yes, Daddy, yes.”

He took his hands off her breasts and smacked his palms against her shoulders, sending her backward into the counter. A dinner plate fell and shattered.

“Only I say when!”

She pulled herself up as their son, Max, entered the room.

“Mom, what happened?” he asked, looking first her, then at his father. “Dad?”

Sam turned away, and Melody gathered herself. “We’re fine. Mommy just slipped. Dinner’s ready in five minutes.”

Max stood in the doorway for a beat and then went back to watching TV.

“Good, bitch,” he said, his voice a whisper. “You know just what to do.”

Melody Castile dreaded the encounter for more than a week. Her husband had rented a motel room in Tacoma a couple of exits south of the mall. She got a babysitter and had her hair done at the Gene Juarez Salon, a big splurge.

“I like your hair that way. Special occasion?” the sitter, a neighbor girl, asked as the couple was headed out the door.

“Any time with my husband is special,” she said, feeling her heart beat a little faster under her blouse.

“When will you be home tomorrow?”

“Early afternoon. There’s a frozen pizza you can fix for lunch.”

The conversation was mundane, constructed on what had to be said. What was an acceptable bedtime? Which snacks were okay, and which were verboten. The conversation with the sitter was a part of the deception that had started to overrun their lives. Soon everything was a lie. What they did. Who they were doing it with.

Except for their love. That would always be grounded in truth. And fear.

She told herself over and over that it was like going out on a double date, except there would be three of them. He had promised that the guy was “clean” and “in good shape” and that “he thinks your pictures are hot.”

His name was Paul. He was in his late thirties, divorced, no kids. He’d made the remark that swinging as a single would be a better use of his free time than trying to find another woman to settle down with. Women are heartbreakers, she sensed he was thinking, although she also sensed that he’d never admitted to Sam or anyone that his heart had been broken.

Melody remembered little of the encounter, and what she did recall came to her in pieces like the colors of a kaleidoscope, moving, turning, never really fitting into any identifiable shape. Her husband tied her up and took pictures as Paul penetrated her in every orifice. Repeatedly. After he could no longer maintain an erection, he used the neck of a champagne bottle that he’d brought along “to get us all in the mood.” Sam put down the camera and let Paul take photographs of her while he “tickled” her nipples with the tip of a hunting knife.

At one point Melody remembered looking down on herself as one man straddled her, forcing his penis in her mouth, while the other entered her anally. She could not be sure which of the pair of sweaty men was her husband and which was their playmate. When the man ejaculated into her mouth, he rolled out of view. In a mirror over a cheap dresser, she could see her face, smeared makeup, puffy eyes, and a small river of tears.

“Take it, whore! Take it!”

When she woke up the next day, Paul was gone. Sam was next to her, spooning her naked body with his own.

“Fun last night,” he said. His breath was hot on the nape of her neck, and she fought the urge to recoil.

Melody moved her head slightly, indicating her approval with a nod. But she swore to herself that she’d never do that again. How had it gone so far? How could this man who loved her so brutally violate her with another man? It was cruel. Scary. She would never get herself into that kind of a situation again. Not one in which she was the object of her husband’s twisted fantasies.

If there were any more three-ways, there’d be a second woman.

And I don’t care what happens to her, she thought. So long as it isn’t me and as long as it keeps my love happy.

When he offered up an alternative scenario, she jumped at it.

“I was thinking,” he said as she helped him shove a new chest freezer into a corner of the old mobile home. “Wouldn’t it be hot if we, you know, caught someone?”

“‘Caught?’”

“Yeah, you know, snagged some chick that we could play with together.”

Melody’s heart raced. “A woman?” she asked.

Her husband’s eyes flashed that look that she knew better than anyone. It wasn’t a question. It was a demand. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“I like it,” she said. “Sounds like fun.”

Melody Castile brought a bag of Nacho Doritos to pass the time by feeding the seagulls. She drove all over Kitsap County before finding herself on Olalla Valley Road in the very southern part of Kitsap County. Just after the Olalla Bay Bridge, she crossed the centerline and parked, her car facing traffic. If there was any. A young man sat in his pickup truck twenty yards ahead, his window cracked, smoke sliding out into the sea breeze. She opened the car door, found her footing on the rocks that edged the causeway, and ambled down to the water. She was alone. Her hands dipped into the Doritos bag, her fingertips turning orange. As if on cue, the birds came.

As they circled around her, pulling the DayGlo snack from her fingers, she winced at the pain.

The girl begging for her life.

The shadowy figure of a man as he penetrated a woman’s severed head.

A baby crying for its mother.

The images that came to her mind were raw. They brought a visceral response that shocked and soothed her at the same time. The birds mistook her orange-colored fingertips and bit her. Blood rolled down her wrist.

The smell of sex and murder.

The taste of a man after he’d finished having sex with a dead girl.

The light that went out in a young woman’s eyes as she tumbled into the depths of her terror.

Melody continued feeding the birds as a man with a clam bucket and shovel walked toward her.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked.

She didn’t respond.

“Those birds are hurting you.”

Snapped out of her thoughts, she turned toward the man.

“You all right?”

Melody’s eyes were dilated and scarcely showed the recognition that another human being had asked her a question.

The man put down the bucket and shovel. “Seriously, you all right?”

The last of the Doritos were snatched by a particularly aggressive gray gull.

“Fine. Yes. Fine.” She smiled at him. “Just lost in my thoughts, that’s all.”

Weeks passed and the temperatures dropped. Northwest rains came and turned maple leaves into a sodden mass. Detectives Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson felt the case of the so-called Kitsap Cutter grow cold. The FBI’s famed Behavioral Science Unit was consulted, but offered up nothing more than what an avid viewer of Forensic Files could: the killer was a white male, in his late thirties to forties, and likely had someone who helped him either with the procurement or torture of his victims.

Kendall put it this way on an interdepartmental memorandum:

There’s no doubt he’s a sexual sadist, but he’s also scrupulously careful. We may be in the unfortunate position of waiting for someone to come forward or another victim to turn up.

Chapter Thirty-seven

December 10, 5:30 p.m.

Key Center

The voice on the phone spoke in husky, quiet notes. Serenity Hutchins had to strain to hear as she swiveled away from the TV playing in her apartment kitchen. She might have even hung up out of annoyance like she had with other callers to the paper.

She didn’t this time.

“Too bad you don’t have all the facts about my latest little project.”

“You again? Just who are you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I think you should tell me who I’m talking to.” With the phone pressed against her ear, she undid the latch to the dishwasher. The washing cycle stopped. But the damned TV was still playing in the background.

“Can you speak louder?” she asked.

“I could, but I don’t want to wake the baby,” he said, his voice still very low.

“Who are you?”

“I’m the one who knows the truth about the body in Little Clam Bay.”

Serenity hadn’t been on the job long, but she knew the ring of truth when she heard it. She popped the phone from her ear and looked at the Caller ID window. The code, like the other calls, indicated a calling card, not a phone number and a name.

“How is it that you know?” she asked.

“Do you need me to spell it out? Are you really as stupid of a bitch as you come across in the paper?”

She ignored the personal insult, and as far as insults go, it wasn’t the worst aimed at her by a reader of the pages of the Lighthouse.

“I guess I am,” she said. “I do need you to spell it out.”

“I put her there.”

Serenity felt the downy hairs on the back of her neck rise up. The man’s voice was utterly emotionless. There was no reason to believe him, but neither was there any reason to dismiss what he was saying.

“Who are you?”

A short pause.

“Seriously, you think I’m going to tell you that?”

“What are you going to tell me?”

“I’m going to tell you how much the girl begged for mercy. I’m going to feed your nightmares for the rest of your life. Or I’m going to hang up and tell someone else. You choose.”

Serenity reached for some paper in the drawer under the phone. She moved the ballpoint pen in cyclone curlicues over its surface, but it only scratched the paper. She reached for another, a red pen, and found success.

“Tell me.”

Another short delay. She thought she heard someone talking in the background, but she was unsure if that was the caller’s radio or TV.

“You’ll ask no questions,” he said.

“But that’s my job.”

“Or I’ll tell someone else.”

Serenity felt the flutter of fear, the kind that comes when making a deal with the devil. She didn’t know it, but in a way that was exactly what she was doing.

Steven Stark strung the lights on eaves of their home. He’d used a combination of blue-and-white LED lights that seemed too dim to really do the job.

“Interesting, in a subtle kind of way,” Kendall said. She had joined Steven and Cody on the driveway to get a better view.

“I know what you mean,” Steven said. “I actually like the gigantic bulbs that my folks used to put up. Energy hogs, but they at least told the world that you’d bothered to decorate.”

Cody’s eyes traced the string of lights that his father had hung with the taut precision of a perfectionist.

“Pretty,” he said, a broad smile over his face.

“I think so, too, baby,” Kendall said.

The three went back inside the house with the promise of hot chocolate. The moment outside had been a welcome escape from the Christmas card that she’d received that day at the office. She hadn’t opened it. She hadn’t wanted to.

Now it was time.

The address was from Vancouver, British Columbia. Hornbeck was the last name.

While Steven poured milk into a saucepan, Kendall pulled the envelope from her purse and opened it.

The front was a picture of a Madonna and child. Inside was a message signed by Cullen Hornbeck. Two photographs were also enclosed. She read the message first:

I want to believe that you are doing your best to find out who killed Skye. It has been months since she was found. I think of her every day. I want you to think of her too.

The first photo was a picture of Skye with her father at some kind of sporting event. They appeared to be laughing. Her hand rested on his shoulder. On the back of the photo, Cullen had written:

These are the memories that I wish were at the forefront of my thoughts of my daughter.

The second photo was one of the images taken by the teenage boys who’d found Skye’s body while skipping school that September. He wrote:

This is what I see every night in my dreams. Please don’t forget about her.

Kendall set down the card and photos, her eyes damp with emotion.

“What is it, babe?” Steven asked.

She turned to Cody. “How about you get your jammies on?”

Cody spun around and went down the hall to his bedroom.

“Skye’s father,” Kendall said, indicating the card. “But it is more than Cullen. Tulio Pena. Donna Solomon. All of them. All of them are facing the holiday without their loved ones and no answers to let them rest in peace. This isn’t right. We have let them down.”

“You haven’t.” He put his arms around her.

“I don’t know what more we can do. The FBI has taken its sweet time to tell us what we already know. We have a serial killer somewhere around here. He’s a sexual sadist. We know he lives somewhere in a fifty-mile radius, which means Kitsap, King, Mason, and Pierce counties.”

“And he’s stopped killing,” he said.

She shrugged slightly. “The last profiler we talked with said it was likely that he has moved from the area or…get this…is taking a break. Or it is possible that he’s killed and we just haven’t found the next body.”

Cody came into the kitchen. He’d changed into his pajamas. Green tree frogs ran up and down his flannel legs.

“Hot chocolate is about ready,” she said, looking at first at Steven, then at her son. “Let’s find a book, and I’ll read to you.”

She tucked the photos back into the card and slid it under her purse.

What next? she asked herself.

Despite her best efforts, Kendall had come to grips with what most seasoned investigators of serial killers learn, piece by bloody piece. The perpetrator is only caught when he makes a stupid mistake.

It was only a matter of time. And yet, at the same time, that meant that someone else would have to die. Someone else would be made to suffer.

The voice on the end of the line was hauntingly familiar. It was husky, slightly modulated in a way that sounded as if he had been out for a run and was trying to rest up as he spoke.

“You fixing dinner for someone special tonight, Ms. Hutchins?”

She looked at her caller ID. The screen indicated: OUT OF AREA, PRIVATE.

“Who is this?” she asked. She was in her car about to unload her groceries when she picked up the phone. She turned off the engine and looked around.

“You know who it is,” he said.

It was him.

“I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“You mean that cop you’ve been screwing? Good for you. Call him, and you’ll miss what I have to say to you.”

Serenity rolled down her window and looked around the apartment complex parking lot. A little boy and his brother rolled past her on skateboards toward the play area. A girl walked her dog. There was no one else around. She looked in the backseat of her car, even though it was packed with groceries.

“What do you want?”

“Like all good boys, I want to play.”

“You’re sick.”

He laughed. “That’s what I’m told.”

“I’m hanging up,” Serenity said, although she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Silence on the other end.

“You still there?” she asked.

He laughed again. “I knew you’d want to hear more.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up, that’s all.”

The phone went dead.

Chapter Thirty-eight

January 15, 1:25 p.m.

Olalla, Washington

It was a running joke in rural Kitsap County that if you ever wanted to get rid of something, just stick it off to the side of the road with a FREE sign: No matter what it was-hideous couch, broken lawn mower, TV console turned into an approximation of a minibar-it would be gone in the blink of an eye. It seemed that the southern end of the county was blessed with a good portion of the population who just couldn’t pass up a bargain without tapping the brakes. Indeed, it was a kind of protocol to the disbursement of the unwanted. No one ever dumped anything at the makeshift free-for-all. People only took.

On the morning of January 15, Ken Saterlee set out two boxes of half-used interior paint and a few other odds and ends from a construction site that he’d worked the previous month as a “punch man.” His wife hated the Sunshine Yellow color that he’d thought was a major score. By 10 A.M., after he returned from coffee, he noticed that there were three boxes next to his driveway off Willock Road, just south of Port Orchard near Olalla. The first two were the boxes he’d set out; the third was a medium-sized wooden container with a weathered brass fastener and hinges. It looked more decorative than functional, the kind of thing one might pick up at an import store. It was about ten inches tall and a foot wide.

He picked it up. It had something inside. Not expecting much of a treasure, Ken Saterlee figured someone had dropped off the box to take advantage of his FREE sign.

He opened the box and nearly vomited. Twenty minutes later, detectives from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office were on the scene.

Inside the box was a human head.

Medical Examiner Birdy Waterman had hoped that the head would show up in her basement office sooner rather than later. She rescheduled the autopsy of a car-crash victim the minute she heard the missing piece of the Marissa Cassava case would be arriving. When it did, she took the box that the deputy coroner had ferried into the autopsy suite and set it on the smaller of the two stainless steel tables.

She was alone: her assistant was out with a bad sprain, and homicide detectives Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson were still combing the scene around Willock Road in search of anything they could turn up to help with the investigation. That morning, Dr. Waterman wore her hair up, twisting her thick black locks into a French braid. She planned on meeting a man she had once dated for drinks right after work. He was in Seattle on business. Birdy always considered him one of the good ones, one of the men she wished she’d tried harder to find a way to share her life with. But she hadn’t back then. It was probably too late now. She’d never know. Judging by the hour, the head on the table would eat up the rest of the day and then some.

There would be no dinner that night with an old friend.

With nimble gloved fingertips, she opened the lid on the box. The reporting deputy had been correct when he said that it was an “antique-looking” container, not a real antique by any means. She fully expected that when she flipped it over it would say, MADE IN INDONESIA or MADE IN CHINA.

She looked down. “Hello, Marissa,” she said. “What in the world did he do to you?”

Gently, she lifted the head and set it on the table. The woman’s brown eyes were staring upward, open, blank in their gaze. Her hair had broken off in patches on the side of her head. The pathologist rotated the head almost sweetly, the way a person might pick up a small animal. Not wanting to hurt it. The eyes looked right at her.

Dr. Waterman ran her light over the face, looking for signs of trauma, fibers, fingerprints, anything that might help tell the story of the Kitsap Cutter’s third victim. She swabbed the mouth for semen and other biologicals.

Everything looked so clean. So pristine. She wondered how the head could have stayed so preserved, so perfect. Her answer came when she used her temperature probe to record the temperature of the head. It was a routine task in any autopsy, although usually the coroner took the liver temp to determine how long the victim had been dead.

“Forty-four degrees,” she said to herself, recording the information on a chart. The temperature outside exceeded that by five degrees.

Next, she took a closer look at the neck, paying particular attention to the condition of the vertebra. The head had been removed from the body with surgical precision. A clean slice that matched perfectly with the body that she’d processed the previous year.

She had hoped to find some tool marks cut into the bone that might indicate what had been used for the decapitation. Serrated blade? Hunting knife? A piece of evidence that might point to the killer had eluded her when she examined the body.

Again, nothing. So very clean.

A butcher? A skilled hunter? A doctor? she wondered. Or someone just quick, strong, and maybe lucky enough to sever the head from the body in a clean, swift hack?

The tissue where the head had been severed was clean, like a piece of washed meat. No blood. No fluids whatsoever. It was dry, the way human flesh can sometimes resemble beef jerky.

Birdy Waterman knew the head had been stored somewhere, cared for, maybe even used in some ritualistic manner. It had been a trophy, but ultimately it was discarded with some junk.

She lifted the covering over Marissa Cassava’s body-frozen since its recovery at Anderson Point-and reunited it with her head. It took her back to the reservation when she and her friends would swap Barbie doll heads, ditching the blonde for the one with the dark hair, the one that somewhat resembled them. She inched up the fabric, thinking about the young woman with a baby waiting at home, and how someone, something, undeniably evil had done this to her.

Her mask on, goggles in place, she turned on the Stryker saw she used to cut into the skull. Despite the saw’s superb air filter, bone dust blew through the air and onto the pathologist’s protective gear. To some, the noise was the most hideous sound imaginable, but to Dr. Waterman it was the sound of getting to the truth.

Inside the cranium, blood sparkled like tiny shards of rubies. Still frozen.

As she wrapped things up, she returned her attention to the wooden box. She flipped it over and smiled: A WAL-MART EXCLUSIVE MADE IN CHINA.

She pulled off her gloves and washed up. A quick phone call later, and the homicide detectives were on their way.

Chapter Thirty-nine

January 15, 3:25 p.m.

Port Orchard

Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson stood in the morgue, looking at the reassembled head and body as Birdy Waterman rolled back a sheet. They’d come directly from Willock Road, Kendall’s shoes still muddy from an unfortunate slip in a ditch.

“I know you’ve seen a lot of things come across your autopsy table, but really, Birdy, this has to be one for the ages,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

“Yeah, remind me not to eat dinner,” Josh said.

Kendall looked at Josh. “I’ll remind you that this is someone’s daughter.”

Dr. Waterman couldn’t let the moment pass without her own retort. “And I’ll remind you that the victims’ support group is doing another round of sensitivity training, Detective. You might want to get in on it.”

“I’m just saying what comes to me.”

“That’s the problem,” the pathologist said.

The forensic pathologist led the detectives toward the body on the table.

She pulled on a pair of gloves. “I’m disgusted and intrigued at the same time. Usually I’m merely heartbroken and disgusted. No one who comes to see me comes for a social visit,” she said.

Kendall nodded. Point made. She braced herself as the sheet was pulled back to reveal the sum of what had been Marissa Cassava. The open eyes were so unnerving that Kendall immediately understood why people take the time to shut them when someone dies.

“Do you know if she was alive when she was-”

“If you’re asking me if she was alive during decapitation, I can tell you she wasn’t.”

Kendall nodded. “Thank you. I know I should be desensitized to some things but, really, this was the most brutal thing I could imagine.”

“You don’t want to be desensitized, Detective. Your emotions are a gift. Your feelings are all about compassion. That’s why you’re so good with victims.”

“The living ones, you mean.”

“Yes, of course.”

Josh looked at the face. “What more can you tell us about her?”

The pathologist allowed her eyes to wander over the detectives as she started to talk. “A couple of things. The head was kept below freezing. I did a temp check, and then when I examined the brain, I found ice crystals.”

It took Kendall a second to wrap her mind around that. The obvious seemed incomprehensible, beyond evil.

“So you’re thinking the killer kept the head in the freezer?” Josh asked. “This isn’t like some cannibal move, is it?”

“No, not exactly. I mean, if it was a ‘cannibal move,’ as you call it, then I expect he would have eaten it.”

Kendall didn’t understand. “Then why did he freeze it?”

“Just a guess here, but it’s been written about in the literature. He kept it for one of two reasons. One, he thought of it as a trophy.”

Josh piped up. “Jeffrey Dahmer kept some body parts that he didn’t eat because he wanted to be close to the victim.”

“The other reason, Birdy?” Kendall asked

Birdy took a second to search for the right words.

“This is very troubling, but when I swabbed her mouth for biologicals, semen specifically, I drew a blank. Nothing in the pockets of the mouth that usually hold such things. But when I went in as deep as I could go down her throat, I found the presence of semen. I think that whoever kept the head used it as some kind of grotesque sex toy.”

Kendall’s mind lurched at the hideous possibility that the killer had used the open mouth of his dead victim for sex. Did he hold the head? Did someone else hold it? Did he thrust his hips to create enough friction to ejaculate, or did he lift the head up and down?

It turned her stomach.

“This makes me sick,” she finally said.

“You’re not alone.”

“Thank you,” Kendall said, appreciating that Birdy Waterman didn’t disrespect her for her feelings but instead thought they made her a better investigator. She knew that later when she discussed Birdy’s findings with Josh, she’d have to describe everything in a detached, cool manner. If Josh made some disgusting joke, she’d have to slough it off.

“Are you going to release the body for burial?” Kendall asked.

Birdy nodded slightly as she scanned the report she’d compiled. “I have a few more tests, but I expect to be done tonight.”

“DNA?”

“Off to the state crime lab.”

“What can I tell her mother?”

“Tell her what you feel is best. She doesn’t need to know about the sex-toy aspect right now. If-when-we catch the perp, she’ll need to know then.”

“Agreed.”

Kendall looked at Josh. Her eyes were cool, and there was no trace of emotion on her face.

“Josh, can you keep your mouth shut on this? I mean, can you keep it out of the paper?”

Josh jabbed a finger at Kendall. “I’m getting tired of you putting the blame on me! There’s no way that I’ve leaked anything. My private life is just that, my private life.”

Only once did Serenity truly cross the line, and she knew that by telling Josh the truth, she’d risk everything. By then it was more than her credibility as a news reporter. She could live with that. But she’d also fallen a little for Josh. He had an oversized ego and a kind of obnoxious charm when he was “on,” but when it was just the two of them, he seemed genuine. A decent guy. Certainly a bit of a father figure, but not so much that it felt creepy to be attracted to him.

“Look,” Josh said, “people are talking about us, and I’m not sure where we stand.”

“‘Where we stand’?” she asked. “I don’t get your meaning. At least, I’m hoping that I’m reading too much into the remark.”

Josh shook his head. “No. No, I didn’t mean that. We’re casual, right?”

“As casual as I can be without being easy,” she said.

“Right. I think,” he said, letting a smile come to his face. “The problem isn’t us but what Kendall and the others are saying.”

“What? That I’m sleeping with you to get a break on the Cutter?”

“Basically.”

“That’s funny. That’s really funny, Josh. You know that’s not what this is about.”

He stared at her. “I know. I just had to say it. I just can’t have you put anything in the paper about the case that comes from me. Okay?”

“Nothing will come from you,” Serenity said. “Promise.”

After they’d made love and he drifted off to sleep, Serenity slipped out of bed, put on one of Josh’s robes, and quietly made her way to his home office down the hallway. A rope light tucked behind the crown molding guided her steps with a wash of faint blue light. Josh had insisted that the lighting feature was some wonderful upgrade, but Serenity thought it was cheesy, like something in a sandwich shop or around a movie theater food concession. He’d mentioned earlier in the evening that he’d brought home some case files, including Dr. Waterman’s autopsy report.

Her eyes immediately went to the toxicology report. Four flecks of red lead-based paint had been found in the dead woman’s vagina.

Pigment is consistent with paint produced in the U.S. in the 1940s, pre-awareness of the dangers of lead toxicity. Paint fragments show a 20-degree curve consistent with adherence to a dowel.

Serenity felt a flush of fear from the realization that the most evil of men actually had whispered in her ear. The caller had known what he was talking about. He’d told Serenity that he’d used “Grandma’s rolling pin” as a sex toy. The idea of it disgusted her, but the gleeful manner in which the caller recounted the story made her hang on every word. Words alone, she knew, didn’t always convey the message.

…and she loved it. I called her my sweet pie-hole. She was a hot one…too bad she didn’t last as long as she could have. I thought she had a lot more fun in her…

“Serenity,” Josh called from the bedroom. His voice was sleepy and sexy, but it shook her nevertheless. “Don’t make me come and get you,” he said.

Serenity shut the file folder and shoved it back into Josh’s black leather briefcase.

Two days later, the Lighthouse published its latest scoop, this time in the form of a Tad Stevens op-ed piece:

The Unthinkable: Vic Raped

by Foreign Object

The editorial was over the top in the righteous indignation that newspapers sometimes employ, when in reality they are courting eyeballs on their inky pages; if they didn’t want to inflict further injury to the victims’ families, they wouldn’t publish the salacious details. Stevens attributed the detail about rape with a foreign object to insiders handling the investigation, a vague reference that left Sheriff Jim McCray and his investigative team scurrying once more to plug the leak.

Stevens ended the piece with a clarion call for justice: “Someone out there is doing unspeakable evil and he must be stopped. If you have any leads, call this paper or the Sheriff’s Office.”

The Sheriff’s Office seemed like an afterthought.

The afternoon that the editorial ran in the paper, Serenity Hutchins took another phone call. Serenity was standing in line at a sandwich shop on Bay Street when she answered PRIVATE CALLER.

“Your publisher really laid it on the line,” the caller said. “Big, tough, pointy-nosed nerd calling for justice.”

It was the same strange voice.

“Turn yourself in,” she said, for the first time conceding-at least to him-that someone’s life was worth more than a shot at the big time.

“I enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “Why would I stop now?”

“Because what you’re doing is…” her words trailed off. Serenity wanted to say evil or deplorable or something that really drove the point home, but those adjectives felt insufficient.

“You’re at a loss for words,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I can’t think of a single reason to stop killing,” he said. “Canoe?”

The phone went dead.

“Salami grinder?” the man behind the sandwich prep counter said.

She nodded. Her bones felt chilled. She wondered if she had heard the voice of the killer correctly.

Did he say “Can you?” or “Canoe?”