Chapter Six

March 31, 8 a.m.

Port Orchard

Tulio Pena had left two voice messages on Kendall ’s office phone. Both were colored by the anguish of a man frightened to death. In the background, Kendall could hear the sounds of piped-in mariachi music and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

“Do you know anything? Did you find anything?”

She knew he worked a late shift, so she didn’t call back with the non-answer she’d have to give. Families of the missing always hungered for any tidbit of information offered up by anyone in a position to know anything: first, by investigators, then by reporters, and lastly, if the period of time elapsed had become too long to foster hope, by a psychic. Most cops working a missing-persons case have felt the wrath of a family in search of answers.

“We’re doing all that we can,” she’d said more than once.

“All that you can? It seems like nothing! Nothing at all!”

“We can’t give you visibility for every detail of our investigation.”

That last line choked in her throat whenever she had used it. Sometimes it was more posturing than a real reflection of what was going on in the offices of the in investigative body.

Her sesame-seed bagel at the ready, Kendall went about some background research. She knew about the brush industry, of course. She’d been raised in Kitsap, a region with NO BRUSH PICKING signs as commonplace as GARAGE SALE placards. She booted up her PC and started the search for crimes on LINX, a regional criminal database. She used the key words: brush, floral industry, violence. From her open doorway, she saw Josh Anderson in the hall trying to work his vanishing charms on a pretty young temp.

He’ll never change. And he’ll never get her to go out with him, she thought.

She clicked on a couple of hits on the subject in a law enforcement database. In Oregon, two men had been killed over a cache of cinnamon-scented mushrooms that brought an astonishingly high price in Japan ’s epicurean industry. A Filipino woman in Thurston County was mutilated by a rival picker when she was caught working his territory.

He cut off both her thumbs.

“You bitch, you steal no more,” he’d said over and over as she ran holding her severed thumbs to her chest, screaming out of the woods. The man was eventually arrested and convicted and was serving ten years in Walla Walla.

A report indicated that violence had escalated along with the demand for floral greens. It seemed that more and more illegal immigrants were taking up the trade as the land, in some places, became overworked. She learned that Sheriff’s Office stats indicated that over the past two years the number of complaints made by private landowners had doubled.

The complaint made by Brett Matthews of Olalla in the very southernmost part of Kitsap County was typical of what Kendall found in the reports:

You should see the noble fir my dad planted twenty years ago. They’ve skinned the branches up to the tiptop. Hope someone’s enjoying that Christmas wreath at my expense. What’s with these people? Why don’t they stay off my land? Next time I’ll shoot anyone who comes to rustle what’s mine.

Kendall checked Mr. Matthews’ tax records to make sure he didn’t own any property in the Sunnyslope area.

He didn’t.

An article in the mainstream press also caught her eye. It had appeared in the Olympia paper two years prior. The writer presented the idea that brushpicking was one of the last vestiges of the Old West, a kind of job that pitted man and woman against the elements, literally living off the land, dodging bullets, and collecting just enough money at the end of the day to feed the family and do it all over again. They were floral rustlers. Cowboys fighting over what they felt they had a right to.

It was after eleven, and Kendall called Tulio, figuring that no matter how late he’d worked, he’d want to talk to her.

A younger man, who identified himself as Leon Pena, answered.

“One minute. Tulio! The police are on the phone!”

“Detective Stark, do you have news?” His voice was full of hesitation and hope.

Kendall locked her eyes on Celesta’s photo and spoke into the handset. “I’m afraid not.” She refrained from reminding him that they’d only had the case a day, but she knew that even an less than savvy observer who watched any TV whatsoever knew that missing-persons cases were solved in hours, not days. Days of searching usually meant someone was dead or had run away.

“Tulio, have you had any problems out there with other pickers?”

“Problems? What do you mean?”

“Did anyone threaten you or cause problems with you where you were picking?”

There was a short pause. “No. No, Detective. We did not want any trouble. We heard some Asians out there that day, but we never saw them. We never talked to them.”

“All right. I have one other question, Tulio. This is touchy, difficult…”

She could almost hear him gulp on the other end of the line. She wanted to let him down easy, if there was any possibility that Celesta Delgado had left him for another man, no matter how unlikely the scenario.

“How were you and Celesta getting along? Did you argue?”

“We were in love.”

“In love, yes,” she said, repeating his words. “But was she happy? Do you think she might have been seeing anyone?”

“No. She loved me. Only me.”

Only you, she thought. Of course, only you.

She told Tulio that she’d continue working the case and that if she had any more questions she’d call. As she hung up, Josh Anderson appeared in the doorway. For the first time Kendall noticed he was wearing a new suit, a gray chalk-striped outfit with a crisp blue shirt and a raspberry tie.

“How’s your day going?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “In court today or going to your homecoming dance?”

“Funny,” he said, sliding into a chair across from her. “I’ve got some important business to attend to.”

“Okay.” Kendall looked back down at her work.

“Aren’t you going to ask what it is?”

She took out a highlighter and made a yellow trail through some text on the printout. “Nope.” She could feel his agitation percolate inside his brand-new suit, and she loved it. She knew that Josh Anderson was the type of man who never missed an opportunity to tell someone-particularly a woman-how smart, how successful, and just how in demand he was. She silently counted to three.

“I’m speaking at Burien today.”

Burien was the location of the state’s police training facility.

“Really, Josh? I guess you forgot to mention it.” She glanced at the whiteboard hanging on the wall adjacent to her desk. In block letters, it read:

JOSH SPEAKING ON INVESTIGATIVE RESOURCES IN MID-SIZE JURISDICTIONS

She waited a beat. “Of course I remember. Break a leg, Josh. I want to hear all about it. I’ll work the Delgado case while you’re basking in the glow of your admirers.”

He smiled at her. She had his number. And that’s why he liked her most of the time.

Those who worked in it called it a brush shed, but Every-Greens of Washington called their processing offices next to the Old Belfair Highway a “dream factory.” The sheet-metal-sided building was the size of a mid-century high school gymnasium with faded panels depicting bouquets that celebrated the major holidays: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. Kendall parked next to a row of old cars, many mud-caked with cracked windows and backseats containing baby blankets and Wendy’s food wrappers. She figured they were the cars of the processors, mothers who worked there part-time during the week and possibly up in the woods on the weekends as pickers.

Karl Hudson was a round-faced fellow of about sixty, with heavy bags under his eyes, protruding ears, and hairy knuckles that gave him a distinctly simian appearance. He introduced himself to Kendall as the president and chief operating officer of the company that his father and mother had founded in the 1950s. Every-Greens was one of the oldest purveyors of floral greens in the state.