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

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

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

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

“I think so. Good night, Charlie.”

“Good night, Hutchins.”

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

Those days were long gone.

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

But why her?

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

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

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

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

He slipped the prepaid phone card inside his wallet.

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

“Huh?”

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

The bartender sent down a beer.

“Yeah. Never stops.”

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

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

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

“Tell me about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was fiberglass, aluminum, and vinyl.

PART TWO. Marissa

Chapter Eleven

April 9, afternoon

Bremerton

The car sped along the back roads of Kitsap County, faster than it should. The driver didn’t care. Speed on a slippery pavement only ratcheted up the excitement of the hunt. It was as if what he sought to do weren’t dangerous enough. It wasn’t enough of a rush without the added risk of being stopped by a cop and assuming the affect of a concerned driver pulled over for a routine traffic stop-and not the look of a killer about to be apprehended. That, he was sure, would never happen as long as he paid attention to the rules.

He got on Highway 16 at Tremont Avenue and drove toward Bremerton. He slowed the vehicle in Gorst, the little burg at the tip of Sinclair Inlet. Gorst was always a possibility for what he had in mind. A topless bar and an espresso stand with baristas in pink leather hot pants was the chief draw for those who just might fit what he was looking for.

Something a little different. A little dangerous. Something pretty.

Nothing caught his eye. No need to brake, just keep going. Around the inlet and the off-ramp that led traffic past the row of Navy destroyers, aircraft carriers, and assorted ships awaiting their turn in the scrap heap. It was known as the Mothball Fleet-or, by those who disdained all things military, “tax dollars at work.”

It amused him how Bremerton, a decaying Navy town always on the cusp of a renaissance, had never been able to shake the vestiges of seedy tattoo parlors, hookers on the stroll, and druggies lurking in the garages of three-story parking lots. Half-million-dollar condos along a revamped waterfront and a horde of fine restaurants did little to ease the reality that places might change, but people’s habits don’t.

Except for some daydreaming, he’d never hunted in the place that, out of the entire Kitsap Peninsula, afforded the most chance for success.

The ferry landing was like raw bait swirling in a bucket and cast overboard. It was surefire. It attracted both people with a place to go and those who had no schedule, no clue, no interest in anything but loitering.

Or maybe scoring some heroin or the warm mouth of a hooker.

Before the enormous steel-hulled car ferries were deployed to shuttle people from one side of Puget Sound to the other, a veritable swarm of wooden steamers plowed the cold blue waters. The flotilla, aptly and lovingly called the Mosquito Fleet, had long since gone by the wayside in favor of so-called “superferries.” Yet, Port Orchard, a town that never really got the hang of redevelopment, held on to the good idea that had come and gone. The old wooden Carlisle II served as a link from Port Orchard’s ferry landing to Bremerton ’s just across Sinclair Inlet.

It was afternoon, and Sunday’s second shift of shipyard commuters had long since gone to work. The boat was empty, save for Midnight Cassava and a couple of beleaguered out-of-towners heading over to walk the deck of the USS Turner Joy, a retired navy destroyer that had been playing host to tourists and war buffs for more than a decade.