Gregg Olsen - Victim Six

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

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

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

Or a killer.

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

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

Her mouth was bound too.

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

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

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

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

Yet, there was nowhere to go.

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

March 30, 11 a.m.

Port Orchard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kendall pretended that she hadn’t heard a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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