Chapter Four

March 30, 1:40 p.m.

Port Orchard

With a jacket over his restaurant uniform, Tulio Pena sat quietly in the secured area adjacent to the detective’s offices, next to a pasty-faced young man holding a large plastic bag marked with his name in large letters. After seven months as a guest of the county jail, the man with the bag was waiting for his mother to take him home. Tulio, nervous and beside himself with worry, tried to make small talk with the just-released inmate.

“My girlfriend’s missing. That’s why I’m here.”

The young man fidgeted. “Bummer. I’m sorry.”

Tulio nodded.

“I’m starting over again.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

The Kitsap detectives emerged from the hallway.

“Mr. Pena?” Kendall asked.

Tulio jumped to his feet so quickly that it startled the young man on the seat next to him. He dropped his bag.

“I’m Tulio Pena. Please help me.”

Kendall nodded understandingly. “That’s why we’re here. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

The trio found space in a small interview room. Kendall offered the young man coffee or a soda, but he declined. He only wanted one thing.

Celesta.

Tulio’s dark, almost-black eyes were bloodshot. It had been almost a full day since his Celesta vanished from the woods. When he first reported her missing, he was told that little could be done for twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem right, but he understood it. He and his brothers scoured the woods the rest of the day and that morning. When twenty-four hours had elapsed, on the dot, he was in the interview room.

“Something has happened to my girlfriend Celesta,” he began.

Kendall reviewed the reporting deputy’s report. “We’re here to help, Mr. Pena. It says she, you, and your brothers were harvesting brush out near Sunnyslope?”

“Sí,” he said, before quickly correcting himself. “Yes.”

“Were you licensed to pick there?” Josh asked. “You legal here?”

Kendall wanted to kick Josh under the table. The question would have to be asked, of course, but not right then and not with an accusatory tone. It had nothing to do with the fact that a young woman was missing. At least, not in any way she could imagine.

“Yes. Yes, we are, and yes, we had permits.” There was a flicker of indignation in the young man’s eyes.

Kendall soothed him, or at least tried to. The last thing the county needed was a complaint that could spiral into a lawsuit.

“I think what my colleague is getting at is, was Celesta familiar with the woods? The area?”

Tulio focused on Kendall. “Oh. Yes. She had been there before. She didn’t get lost. She couldn’t have gotten lost. She made it back to the van. We found her stuff.”

Again Josh pushed. “Your girlfriend and you, did you have a fight?”

Tulio shook his head. “No, never.”

“Was she angry about going out there to pick brush?”

“No. She liked to help. We were sending the money back to her family in El Salvador. Here’s her picture, taken last month. You will put it on TV and in the papers, right?”

He slid a photo across the table.

“She’s very pretty,” Kendall said, looking at the image of a smiling Celesta Delgado. Glossy dark hair. White teeth. Lips that were generous and brown eyes that sparkled. Beguiling eyes, she thought.

“Once we determine if she’s missing, we’ll do a media release. No guarantees that anyone will run her picture,” Josh said. “A dozen people go missing every day. Most come home when they are good and ready to.”

The young man’s eyes pooled. “She’s missing. She’s in trouble.”

The detectives took down Celesta’s description and noted that her brush bag was found just inside the trailhead, heavy with neatly bundled salal.

“You go to work, now,” Josh said, his tone condescending. “We’ll call you at work if we need more information. Understand?”

Tulio stood. His hands trembled a little, and he put them in his jacket pockets, in an attempt to steady himself. “I have a cell phone.”

Kendall looked at Josh, a cold stare to indicate that he had stepped over the line.

“Good,” she said. “Keep it with you. I’ll walk you out.”

Kendall found Josh back behind his messy desk, sipping a cup of coffee and looking online at Craigslist.

“I need a new pressure washer,” he said.

She ignored him. “What was that all about? You treated that guy like garbage.”

Josh set down his cup. “I’m just irritated. These brush pickers are scavengers. They come around the county stripping away whatever they think they can sell, and then they move on. They’re raping the woods, that’s what they’re doing.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re now concerned about the environment,” she said.

Josh turned back toward the computer. “No. I’m just sick of our resources being used up by transients. The whole goddamn county is being overrun by meth-heads, brush pickers, Navy pukes, and others who have no vested interest in doing things the way they ought to be done. This girl’s like the rest of them. She got what she wanted and split.”

Kendall looked at her watch. “Awfully early for you to be in such a foul mood.”

“I’m always in a foul mood.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Look, Kendall, you work the Delgado case. I’ll juggle the backlog.”

The “backlog” was a stack of drug and gun cases that he could work in his sleep.

“Fine,” she said, looking at her notes. “Maybe Celesta did leave for home, as you seem to think. But maybe something happened to her. Good luck with finding your pressure washer.”

Kendall walked across Division Street into the new Kitsap County Administration Building, where a commanding view of the Olympic Mountains and Sinclair Inlet filled the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a luminous beauty of a building that looked as if it had been plucked out of Seattle or some other city of means and planted on the hill across from the courthouse. Kendall smiled to a records clerk she knew and continued across the gleaming floors to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. The barista waved at her and started making her usual midday pick-me-up, a Tuxedo Mocha: white and dark chocolate. Cup in hand, she returned to her SUV and drove out to Sunnyslope, to the pathway off the highway where Tulio Pena said he’d parked the van the day before.

A jogger stopped to catch his breath as she got out of the SUV. “Hi,” he said, squatting a little, his elbows pinned to his sides.

Kendall said hello and identified herself.

“Looking for that renegade bear again?” the jogger asked. He was referring to an incident the prior month when a man riding his mountain bike through the woods had been attacked by a black bear. It seemed that his dogs had spooked the mom defending her cubs, and the man, hapless and ill-prepared, was caught in her crosshairs. She ripped off his ear and tore out his cheek. Local animal lovers sided with the bear, saying that the animal “was just doing what a mama bear does” and that “the bike rider shouldn’t have brought his dogs.”

Kendall shook her head. “No bear. Looking for a missing brush picker.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s good. I mean, that it isn’t a bear. They can be pretty scary. Seen a couple around here in the past year.”

The detective held out the photograph of Celesta Delgado.

“She’s pretty,” the man said.

“Yeah, she is. She went missing yesterday. You live around here?”

“Up the road in Sunnyslope.”

“Seen her or her crew out here?”

The man shook his head. “We get pickers around here all the time. I don’t pay ’em much attention. Sometimes they leave a bunch of trash in the woods, and that pisses me off.”

“How’s that?”

“Most of us who live out here live here for a reason. We don’t want to live in town next to Wal-Mart, and we don’t want people tramping around here with carts and bags thinking the forest is their personal convenience store.”