The Hive, page 4
She placed the memorial program on the counter, swung open the fridge door, and popped open a very cold beer. Lindsay came from a big family, one that considered alcohol a necessity at any gathering to remember the dead. She could have used a drink while at Alan’s.
She sat at the classic fifties kitchen table she’d stabilized with a folded napkin under one leg and scrolled through her phone.
Jack hadn’t come with her from the memorial service to the reception, but he’d sent a small flurry of messages.
Alan was a great guy.
I always liked him.
I’m sorry you are going through all of this.
And finally, I miss you, babe.
She sipped her beer. Jack had been gone for more than a year. He was a manager at the paper mill in Bellingham and had done the predictable. It had been so obvious it was embarrassing. It was like all of a sudden, the guy she was in love with—married to for six years—had hit forty and become the poster boy for a midlife crisis. First, he hit the gym. Then the new clothes started arriving from some Internet stylist. Then out of nowhere he started wearing cologne.
Who is this man?
She wondered that for longer than she should have, before finally switching gears.
Who is the other woman?
That turned out to be classic, too. She was twenty-five, slender, beautiful, and adoring. She was also his secretary. Lindsay tried not to hate her. After all, she wasn’t the cheater. Her husband was. God knew what he had said about their marriage when he and his new lover spent afternoons at the Shangri-La Motel on Samish Way.
That, too, was embarrassing.
“Really, Jack? The Shangri-La? What are you, some college kid without a credit card?”
“You don’t have to be so hostile, Lindsay.”
“You don’t have to be so stupid, Jack.”
“I’m sorry, Lindsay,” Jack had said when she confronted him. “Really. I didn’t want this to happen. It just did.”
Lindsay didn’t even cry. She was too angry for tears. Too embarrassed to be the last to know. She didn’t even raise her voice.
“Things don’t just happen, Jack,” she finally told him. “People make things happen. You made it happen. And I don’t even care why. The why will never make a difference to me. This is all on you.”
“You weren’t around much,” he said. “I was lonely.”
“Seriously, Jack? I knew you’d say something like that. Me? I’m not running around to conferences—and now I know why you were. I’m working hard. I’m doing something that matters, though I don’t work half the hours that you do. Let’s amend that: when I thought you were working.”
Jack pushed back. “A lot of those times I was,” he said.
“I don’t want to argue. You think you’re in love. Fine. Our marriage is done. I’m not even going to fight to save it. I can’t. Betrayal is black and white.”
“You’re taking this better than I thought you would,” he said.
Lindsay thought of telling him that she still loved him, that inside she was a mess and that she’d give anything to make this moment vanish. She didn’t. She had a kind of outer shell that she used to protect herself. She’d let him inside. That was what hurt. He knew her. And still he had done this.
“This girl you are fooling around with doesn’t even care about you,” she said.
Jack stood to leave. “Her name is Willow,” he said. Willow, for God’s sake. “And I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you, Lindsay. Willow and I are in love. We want to make a life together, maybe in Bali or somewhere.”
Bali? Who is this stranger?
Lindsay bolted for the front door, twisted the knob, and jerked it open.
“Go,” she said without looking at him.
And that was that. At least, that was that until two weeks ago, when Willow decided she was no longer in love with Jack or the idea of living in Bali. She’d left him a goodbye text and vanished. Jack, according to mutual friends, was stunned. He hadn’t seen it coming. Willow was his fantasy girl, his dream come true. She was the quintessential arm candy who hung on every word. She’d waxed herself into alabaster smoothness and told Jack that he was the best lover she’d ever had.
She’d never want another.
Until she did.
As predictable as the trajectory of his midlife crisis, so was its inevitable and sputtering end. Jack told Lindsay that he felt like a fool, and she wondered if he knew that everyone else thought he was a fool, too. He had rented a condo downtown over an Italian restaurant and smelled of olive oil and garlic when he arrived in the office each morning. For her part, Willow wasn’t a conniver. She didn’t whistle-blow about their relationship and how it had violated company rules.
She could have.
She simply didn’t even think enough of Jack to bother. She did, however, take a new job as the administrative assistant to the president of the mill. It was, as everyone in the office thought, a big step up. Not only that, the president was single.
The night of her partner’s memorial, as she sat in the darkening kitchen, another beer in her hand, Lindsay didn’t even allow a sliver of regret to envelop her. Alan had been her shoulder to cry on. He’d been the one to tell her that if she wanted to forgive her husband, that was fine.
“Whatever you decide,” he had said, “please understand that it is never going to be the same. You will spend the rest of your life wondering if you did the right thing. You can’t hide your feelings, either. They will tear you apart. Trust me.”
At the time he said that, she had known he was right. Now something ate at her as she thought about his advice. Trust me. What was he talking about? Had he and Patty had problems? Or had it been something else?
Lindsay slept on the same side of the bed as always, although she’d chided Jack for claiming the one next to the window. Breeze in the summer. Moonlight in the winter. She climbed in bed, feeling as alone as she’d ever felt. Lonelier than when her mother had died. She closed her eyes and replayed the day in her mind. She thought back even further to when Patty had found Alan dead in their garage. Then further. She thought about how Alan had been distracted by something the week before at Der Dutchman. At the time, he had told her it was nothing.
“Just stuff.”
She refrained from asking for details while they waited for coffee. She wanted him to break the silence between them by explaining. Instead, Alan switched gears.
“Lindsay, do you mind getting my coffee?” He handed her ten dollars.
She pushed the money away. “No,” she said. “I mean, yes. I’ll pay. My turn.”
“Thanks,” he said, turning toward the door.
As the line moved, Lindsay caught a glimpse of him. Alan was outside on the sidewalk next to his car, on the phone. She held the image for a second, then turned away. It seemed as if she was intruding on something personal just then. The look on his face was peculiar.
Was he agitated or excited?
She couldn’t be sure.
As Lindsay lay there with her eyes shut, she pondered that incident—whether it was a sign she’d missed. She wished she’d asked Alan about the phone call. He’d been so private about “stuff” and she hadn’t wanted to push him away. She had respected him. Admired him. Being helpful, she had come to know, can feel intrusive and prying. She turned on her side and faced the pillow—the same one on which her ex-husband had laid his head. She shifted and pulled up the covers.
When she had asked if he was all right, he’d apologized for being uncharacteristically distant.
“Just stuff on my mind,” he’d said.
His words now carried a sense of finality, like the remembered last lines of a closed book.
She wondered, if she’d pushed harder, might she have found a way to save him?
It was a futile mind game she was playing with herself, and she knew it. Answers about Alan might never come.
The dead girl at Maple Falls was a completely different matter.
CHAPTER 7
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Ferndale, Washington
The desk across the hall from Lindsay was nothing if not a reminder.
The mentor she had leaned on was gone.
Maple Falls was hers alone.
She looked at the time and got to work. The victim would be autopsied that afternoon in a fluorescent-lit, tile-walled examination room in the Whatcom County coroner’s office in Bellingham. A records search turned up a list of missing women between the ages of fifteen and forty, some matching the description only a little. A few, though, were ringers. Lindsay studied the proximity of where the body was found and the location of those reporting a missing person. There were at least six that seemed more likely than others, but the reality of such things is much more random. Some killers are methodical and smart, having read up on police procedure on the Internet and from the endless parade of TV crime shows that serve as how-to guides to avoid detection.
As Lindsay saw it, there were three principal rules embraced by the informed killer: Keep your mouth tightly clamped. Make sure the body is clean of all forensics—fluids, fibers, latent prints. And finally, never dump a body in your own backyard.
Each of the principles was important; together, they formed a trifecta to ensure being free to kill again.
Lieutenant Madison poked his head into her office.
“Any update on Maple Falls?”
She told the lieutenant Jane Doe’s autopsy was after lunch and that she’d report back on any preliminary results.
“A few potentials here,” she said, indicating the list of missing women and girls on her computer screen. “We’ll know more in a few hours. Also ran a check on sex offenders in the area, new releases and whatnot. Nothing there. We’ll know more where to look once we find out where she’s from.”
“And where she was killed,” Lieutenant Madison said.
“That, too.”
The lieutenant glanced in the direction of Alan’s office. “We probably need to pack up his personal stuff. Patty will probably want it.” His eyes scraped over Alan’s collection of Mariners baseball bobbleheads and black-framed citations for his stellar police work—including the photo for his work with school kids. A family photo of Alan, Patty, and Paul was placed next to the phone.
“I’ll take care of it,” Lindsay said.
“You sure?”
“I can do it. I want to.”
After Lieutenant Madison left, Lindsay printed out the list of names and set it aside. She looked for a box to put Alan’s things in but couldn’t find one. She started to fill his gunmetal-gray trash can with his things. It was undignified, but Alan probably would have laughed about it. She laid the bobbleheads flat and then added a second layer, keeping Ichiro Suzuki for last. He had been Alan’s favorite player.
“I love the guy,” Alan had said one time, “but for crying out loud, he’s lived here for decades; you’d think he could say a few words in English. He’s got enough money to hire a dozen language teachers.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to learn English,” Lindsay had countered.
Alan had shrugged it off. “Don’t get all PC on me. He should. That’s all there is to it.”
She opened the top drawer of his desk and went through its contents: receipts, a collection of paper beer coasters, and other odds and ends. In a small manila envelope were two flash drives. She knew how Patty deplored the ugliness behind the work they did, so she set those aside for the Records Department to review and either destroy or catalog. Alan had been sweet, smart, and very sloppy.
On top of the pile, Lindsay stacked the citations and the picture of the Sharpe family. It was taken on the beach in Hawaii when Paul was a gangly teenager. The light was low, setting in the west, and everyone was bathed in a peachy, golden light. She remembered how he had talked about that trip and how he and Patty always planned to go back.
“Maybe for our next wedding anniversary.”
More rain fell, and the wipers on Lindsay’s SUV did their best to sweep the water from the windshield as she drove down the interstate from Ferndale to Bellingham. Autopsies never bothered her. She wasn’t sure if that meant she was a pro or that she’d been born without the capacity to be grossed out by things that sent others running to the toilet.
She turned on the radio and listened to the news. There was no mention of Maple Falls. Not really surprising: the news staff at both the radio and the newspapers had been cut to the nth degree. That meant that social media picked up stories first, reported half-truths, and swiftly moved on to whatever would get a host of likes and follows. Viral, that insidious word, was everything.
She drove past her estranged husband’s downtown condo and into the parking lot next to the coroner’s office. A homeless man approached her as she climbed out of her rig, and she waved him away.
“I give directly to the food bank and the shelters,” she said. “Do yourself a favor and go there. You don’t have to live out here.”
He flipped her off and disappeared down an alleyway.
With that, Lindsay went inside, pushed the buzzer, and announced her arrival. “Darlene is expecting me,” she said.
“All right, come in,” said the woman controlling the entrance to the coroner’s office.
The door was unlocked, and waiting in her office, scrubs on and hair pinned back, was probably the most beautiful woman in Whatcom County. And the smartest, too.
Darlene Watanabe looked up from her coffee, then at her Cartier watch. She was rich, too, the money having come from a family that had made a fortune in a multitude of businesses that ranged from agriculture to tech.
“Right on time, Detective. Let’s see what Jane Doe has to say. She’s on the table, ready to tell us about how she ended up at the bottom of the ravine. And who she is. At least, I hope so. But before we start, I want to tell you how sorry I was about Alan.”
Clad in pale-blue scrubs, Lindsay stood adjacent to the autopsy table and watched the pathologist as she examined the body. She’d made it a practice to attend autopsies, though not because she enjoyed them. Far from it. She came to watch because she felt the victim deserved the respect of being seen as more than mere evidence, although ultimately anyone who landed on a table in Dr. Watanabe’s suite was firmly placed in that category. Before that, however, the body on the stainless-steel table had been someone’s child, husband, wife, sibling . . . any number of roles ascribed to the living.
Dr. Watanabe went about her protocol, methodically documenting what she was seeing, now and then adding the occasional non sequitur.
“Decomp extreme. Dead a few days.”
“Late teens, early twenties.”
“Good health.”
“Tried the new Thai place on Railroad yet?”
“Perfect teeth. Orthodontics for sure. Not a street girl.”
“Some bruising on the wrists. Hard to tell how recent.”
“No sign of rape. But with this kind of decomp, I’ll swab, of course.”
“You ought to try it. Best satay in the state.”
While the pathologist went on with her exam, a picture emerged of the dead girl on the table. She wasn’t likely a member of any of the risk groups that sometimes get caught up in something nefarious. In the past few years, there had been an influx of homeless people in Bellingham. Substance abuse and mental illness were often what linked those newcomers.
“No obvious signs of drug use?” Lindsay asked.
“None that I can see. Tox will have to tell us that story.” Dr. Watanabe paused a moment and ran a light on the girl’s neck. Bruising in the shape of fingertips wrapped around it.
The killer’s hands.
Lindsay waited for Dr. Watanabe.
“Manual strangulation is definitely a part of the equation here.”
“I noticed the bruising at the scene,” Lindsay said.
“Very good, Detective,” Dr. Watanabe said in a way that didn’t seem derisive. She was direct and compassionate. The previous pathologist was the flip side of that. Always puffed up about what he knew and how inconvenient a traffic fatality was. “What’s the point? Crushed and dead? End of story.”
“Doctor,” Lindsay said, “any thoughts on whether she was alive when she was dumped?”
Dr. Watanabe looked at her through her plastic face shield. “My guess now is that all of these scrapes and abrasions were postmortem. Not a lot of blood loss here. That indicates, as I imagine you know, that she was in fact dead before she hit the bottom of Maple Falls.”
Lindsay turned away as the pathologist ran her scalpel in the Y configuration to unzip the body and reveal the organs. It was the only part of the procedure—along with the sound of the Stryker saw as it cut into the skull—that made Lindsay uncomfortable. Looking at the contents of the body as they were weighed and measured wasn’t nearly so bad. Just the unzip. And the sound of the saw.
Blood oozed, and the cheerful pathologist applied suction, letting the blood and other body fluids swirl into the drain that ran around the table like a little moat.
“This one’s messy, Detective. Sorry. The fall. Ribs shattered. Organs look like they were run through a Vitamix as she fell into the ravine.”
Lindsay nodded.
“Any travel plans?” the doctor asked.
“Not really.”
“Heard that Jack already got himself dumped.”
“Yeah.”
“Such a moron.”
Lindsay couldn’t argue with that.
“Hyoid’s broken,” she went on. “Strangled before she was dumped.”
“Someone dragged her,” Lindsay said. “Dirt on her heels.”
The pathologist nodded. “Good eye.”
Near the end of the autopsy—Dr. Watanabe photographing everything as she went, weighing each organ, and noting details into the mic that hung from the ceiling over the table—Lindsay thought of the missing girls that she’d pulled from the records. At five feet five inches and 108 pounds—the same height and weight as the victim—one had emerged as a frontrunner.
