Kendall took a Dr Pepper from the machine. “Tell me about it.”
She left the women in the break room that afternoon and took the longest, most serpentine route back to her desk in her dank, windowless office. She needed every moment to compose herself, to deflect the intentional cruelty of the “Witches of Kitsap,” as her husband liked to call them. Kendall would fight for Cody’s future with all that she possessed, but ultimately she knew that there likely was no magical fix for her seven-year-old. It left a hole in her heart. She saw her detective’s gold star as a means to fill it by doing something worthwhile. To stop pain elsewhere. And in Kitsap County, there had been more than enough.
Some cases never left her. The baby that had been dropped on his head by his Bremerton shipyard worker father, the little girl who’d been offered up for sex to an online predator by her Port Gamble mother. The young man from Seabeck who’d been in and out of the county jail so often he thought he’d be able to leave some belongings behind for his next stretch of incarceration.
That Monday morning she’d resisted the urge to go home and tell Steven face-to-face what the teacher had said. Having their son in a regular classroom for most of the day had fueled hope that he’d be able to live as others did when he was grown, when they were gone. That had faded, and she couldn’t break the news to Steven in person and see in his eyes the pain of the loss of hope once more.
Before collecting her things and locking her car, Kendall punched the speed-dial number for Steven. When he didn’t pick up, as she knew he wouldn’t, she left a message:
“Honey, bad news. We’ll need to check out Inverness for Cody. Ms. Bertram was very nice, but they just can’t help him there. Not the kind of help he needs. I’m not angry. Just sad. See you tonight.”
Rain started to fall. She looked up and regarded the crack in the gray sky. It was spring, and the weather had-in typical Pacific Northwest fashion-forgotten the season. The wind kicked up a little, sweeping maple-tree pollen in a pale orange swirl over car windshields and against the curb. Across the parking lot, under the overhang where a couple of corrections officers had left a pair of plastic office chairs, she saw Josh Anderson and the glow of a cigarette.
“You really should quit, Detective,” she said as she approached him.
He nodded. “I would if I could, but I blame the county. They used to let us smoke at our desks, you know.”
“So I’ve heard. They used to let you shoot seagulls at the dump too.”
Josh crushed out his smoke. “Those were the good old days.”
Kendall smiled. “Let’s go inside.”
At fifty, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Josh Anderson had turned the corner. Every day that he looked in the mirror he could see that he was no longer the man that he used to be. Lines now creased what had been an exceedingly interesting, if not handsome, face. It had been the kind of visage that telegraphed sexuality and vitality. A look. A wink. A smile. Yet that was fading, and fading fast. His black hair was snowy at the temples, and his hairline was marching backward. His nose seemed longer at the tip. The hooded eyelids that had once given women sighs of desire were now the slightly fleshy bags of a man growing older.
Josh had been married and divorced three times. The last time, to a county deputy prosecutor, ended in a bitter and very public sideshow nine years earlier. Although Washington was a no-fault divorce state and his peccadilloes were therefore irrelevant, they did matter when his wife sued for sole custody of their son, Drew. Everyone in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office knew he couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, but the public soon found out. The local paper latched on to the story, and when Josh Anderson went down, it was with a resounding thud. He lost his position as president of the Deputy Sheriffs Guild, or union, and did a two-year stretch as a civil deputy before crawling back to detective. He acted as though he was unrepentant. His ex-wife was a “bitch and a ballbuster.” He used to joke that he was a serial philanderer or that women were like items on a buffet line just waiting for him to sample.
“I can’t help myself…and, apparently, they can’t, either,” he once told Kendall in a revealing bit of introspection.
This guy’s ego is ten times the size of the brain in his pants, she had thought, almost saying it aloud.
As the years ticked by, Josh Anderson felt the kind of niggling self-loathing that told him he was a “three-time loser.”
What a difference a decade made.
Anyone passing by the adjacent offices occupied by Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson could see the distinct differences in the two detectives’ personalities and habits. There was a wall between them, but with Josh’s office first and Kendall ’s next, it was almost like some bizarre “before and after” HGTV makeover show. Josh’s office was a maelstrom of paperwork and coffee cups-ceramic and paper. If he had a filing system of any kind, it was beyond the ability of anyone short of Einstein to figure it out. In reality, he figured that if Kendall had everything in order, why should he? He could saunter over anytime and pull a file or notebook without so much as a sigh from his exceedingly organized partner. His desk drawers were crammed with office supplies he didn’t need: He had more Post-it notes than the supply cabinet. He had a stress ball in the shape of a globe and loved “squeezing the life out of the world.” No houseplants, of course, unless the island of green mold floating in one of those cups counted as such.
“Science project,” he laughed when Kendall once told him that if he didn’t watch it, “the blob you’re growing over there will overtake this office.”
Next door, Kendall ’s desk was in order. A framed photo of her husband and son, a ruffled pink and white African violet that defied the odds and never stopped blooming under a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade, and a small Roseville pottery vase that her mother had given her for a pen and pencil holder commanded a pristine work surface. Her notebooks were color coded and filed in alphabetical order. A desk drawer was stocked with PowerBars, green tea, and low-sodium ramen for the days when she was too busy, too absorbed with a case, to leave for a bite.
“Missing brush picker?” Kendall said as she hung her coat on the hook behind the door.
Josh nodded. “Yup. Only in Kitsap.”
Kendall continued looking through a small stack of messages. “What’s the story?”
“Missing since early yesterday. Boyfriend’s here. Let’s chat him up.”
She’d been his favorite thus far. She’d been passive at first, as he commanded her to be.
“Like you’re dead. Okay? No fight. Or I’ll kill you. Just that simple. Easy to understand, right?”
“Please don’t hurt me. Please, I’ll do what you want.”
“You’re a good girl,” he said as he tightened the leather straps around her wrists.
“You’re hurting me!”
“Are you going to keep talking? I told you to shut up.”
“But it hurts.”
He took a spool of duct tape and scraped at it with a pocketknife, searching for the start of the roll.
“More than a thousand uses for this stuff,” he said, finally pulling a long piece. “Bet the makers don’t know about this one.”
Her eyes flooded with tears, and she struggled on the mattress that he’d offered her. Pinpricks in the wall allowed a sprinkling of light to fall over the room, the dank place where she was being held captive.
On the floor next to the mattress were a green blouse, blue jeans, and a brand-new box cutter, still wrapped in its Home Depot cello bag. All ready to go.