Kendall thumbed through Birdy’s autopsy report on Carol Godding.
“Godding also had particles recovered from her shoulder blades,” she said.
“Maybe they’ll match.”
Kendall was thinking about the age of the boat.
“Almost thirty years old,” she said. “Can’t be too many of those around here.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Bernardo said. “I mean, a boat that old is not exactly a classic, you know, like a Chris-Craft.”
“Old, but not a classic,” she repeated.
Serenity allowed the thought to come to her, though she’d resisted it before. Sam Castile had a boat. An old one. Sam had a proclivity for bizarre, controlling behavior. Even Melody had said so. Serenity recalled the clues she’d seen at the log house when she and her parents had visited there. Something was strange. She’d recalled how Josh had asked her about the rolling pin and how she’d dismissed it out of hand.
Her heart pounding, she called her sister.
No answer.
“I’m sorry for bugging you about this, Melody. Don’t take it the wrong way. But I’m worried about Sam. He might be involved in something. Something bad.”
She thought better of leaving such a message and waited for the prompt so she could erase it. It felt good to have it out of her system. But no such prompt came.
Sam Castile held his wife’s phone to his ear and stared at her.
“We’re going to need to take care of the little bitch,” he said. “You hate Serenity.”
“Yes, I hate her,” she repeated.
“She’s always had everything that you wanted.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I need to remind you, bitch, because you’re so goddamn stupid, you wouldn’t know how to do anything if I didn’t tell you how.”
It soothed her a little when he treated her like she was nothing.
“Your parents never understood you the way I do,” he said, turning around to measure her reaction. “They underestimated what you are and who you are.”
“I know. I know.”
He started toward the Fun House. “Taking care of her will not only stop her from asking stupid questions, it will be payback for everyone for what they did to you. Best of all, we’ll have a hot time doing it.”
He didn’t seem to care that in killing Serenity he was breaking one of his rules. Rules, he knew, were never meant for him.
Chapter Fifty-five
April 3, 2:10 p.m.
Olympia , Washington
Police in Olympia, an hour to the south and east of Kitsap County, found Paige Wilson’s red Datsun abandoned in front of a mystery bookshop in the historic downtown section of Washington ’s capital city. A traffic enforcement officer named Jerry had chalked it earlier in the day, but it wasn’t until the bookstore was closing that evening that someone noticed that the car wasn’t going anywhere. Police ran the tags and notified Kitsap County when they learned it was registered to a Brent Wilson and that there was a missing person hit out on the car. It belonged to a missing beauty queen, Paige Wilson, seventeen.
Early the next morning, Kendall Stark drove down Beach Drive to the Wilsons’ place to let them know their daughter’s vehicle had been recovered-and, more importantly, that there was no trace of Paige.
Deana Wilson was in the driveway when Kendall pulled in. She wore a pale blue bathrobe, and her hair was wet from the shower. She’d read the news blog and contacted everyone she could think of-the reporter, the editor, the sheriff-to see if it was really true.
“We can’t reveal our sources,” the Lighthouse editor had said.
“We don’t know where they got their information. We don’t have any information confirming your daughter was abducted by anyone,” was the canned response from the Sheriff’s Office.
Kendall had called to say she was coming by. The wary look in Deana’s reddened eyes indicated that she already knew the detective had not brought good news.
“I put our son on the bus a few minutes ago,” she said,. “I found myself just standing here, waiting, not wanting to go back into the house until you got here.”
Her face was pale, and her features, without makeup, seemed to recede into the anguish that consumed her.
“Let’s go inside,” Kendall said.
Deana nodded and led Kendall across a pathway of cedar rounds to the front door.
“You found her,” Deana said, without looking at Kendall. They walked to the kitchen, where her husband sat framed by the view of Puget Sound and the gray mottled trunks of a grove of alders.
“No, no,” Kendall said, acknowledging Brent Wilson. “We found her car.”
Brent, a man who almost never betrayed any emotion about anything, started to cry upon hearing the news.
“This is not good,” Deana said, gripping her husband’s hand on the kitchen table, where they’d seated themselves.
“We don’t know what it means,” Kendall said, trying not to offer false hope but not wanting to lie to the couple, who were already fearing the worst possible outcome.
“I know,” Brent said, pulling away from his wife. He’d composed himself by then. “It means that she’s gone. It means that she’s dead.”
Before Kendall could say a word, Deana let go of her husband’s hand and pushed away from the table.
“We’ve read the papers. We know that there’s some kind of freak out there.”
“That’s an enormous leap, Ms. Wilson,” Kendall said.
Deana gulped. “Then where is she?”
Kendall told her the truth. “We don’t know.”
“Please find her,” Deana said.
Kendall nodded. “We’re doing everything we can.”
After leaving the Wilsons ’, Kendall returned a call that Josh had made to her while she was inside delivering the news. He told her he’d received word from the state crime lab in Olympia. They’d expedited the forensic exam.
“We’ve got a whole lot of nothing on the car,” he said. “The interior is devoid of any prints, any blood, anything at all.”
“Not even a trace of Paige?”
“Right. They found one thing and one thing only. On the steering wheel they picked up some latex particles.”
“Gloves?”
“You got it.”
Kendall braked to a stop to allow a family of Canada geese to walk across Beach Drive to the water. “That tells us plenty, doesn’t it, Josh?”
“Yeah-that the perpetrator is careful.”
“We knew that. It also tells us the worst possible news. If we’d thought for one second that Paige might have run away, that’s out the window. No teenager is going to wipe her car, vacuum it out, and wear gloves while she’s doing it.”
“Nope,” he said. “No teenager’s going to vacuum her car-period.”
The geese safely out of the way, Kendall drove the winding road past the veterans’ home and toward downtown Port Orchard.
“You know it, and I know it, Josh. Paige Wilson is the fifth victim.”
“Probably, Kendall.”
“We have to find her before we’re too late.”
Josh let out a sigh. “We both know that if time hasn’t already run out, it will.”
Kendall first broached the subject of a pattern to the killings with Steven after Cody had been put to bed that Friday night. The dates associated with the case nagged at her. She sat on the edge of their bed with an eighteen-month cat calendar that she’d purchased for her mother but had never given her because it would only remind her that she didn’t know what day of the week it was most of the time.
She marked the dates that the Cutter’s victims had vanished, or were believed to have vanished. Every one had been on the far left of the calendar-a Sunday.
“Don’t ask me,” Steven said. “I’m an ad salesman, and I’ll buy just about anything.”
She smiled at him and knew that he was right about that.
On Saturday morning she went looking for Josh, whom she knew would be in the office. Despite the fact that he now had a girlfriend, he did not have much of a life. She found him once more by the coffeepot in the break room.