CALLER: Ciao.
Sally logged the end of the call on her computer screen.
Ciao? Really?
The 911 dispatcher wasn’t sure exactly what was going on up there in the northern edge of the county, but if there really was a dead girl on the floor—and if this wasn’t some teenager’s Halloween prank—the incident was going to be newsworthy. The caller’s attitude had struck Sally as atypical. She seemed more annoyed than upset. It was also strange that she wouldn’t confirm if her friend was breathing. She had asked her boyfriend to do it. Her boyfriend? While Brianna Connors was on the phone making a 911 call, she said her boyfriend was watching TV.
Who watches TV with a dead girl in the next room? What was up with that?
MOST OF THE KIDS FROM PORT GAMBLE coveted a house like Brianna Connors’s place on Desolation View Drive, a couple of miles outside the historic district off the highway to Kingston. Perched on a craggy bluff overlooking Puget Sound, it was a three-story mega-home built of the finest materials: western red cedar beams on a football field of travertine. Her father was a stub of man, a lawyer who apparently needed to show the world that he’d made it. Big-time. He wore a different Armani suit every day, and parked his Lamborghini in the three-car garage next to his two limited edition Porsche Boxsters that he only drove on rare sunny days. Yet none of that was what the Port Gamble crowd envied most about the Connors. It was that the house was new in a town full of vintage homes whose doors didn’t shut tightly, whose uneven floorboards could send a skateboard across a room without even the slightest push. In Brianna’s house, weather-sealed, double-paned windows held the heat inside where it belonged, instead of leaking icy air through handblown glass windows as it did in most of the houses in Port Gamble. Everything about the Connors’s place, like Brianna herself, was unqualified perfection.
Everything, of course, except for the dead girl in the upstairs bedroom soaked in her own blood.
Brianna Connors and Drew Marcello huddled together outside in the damp air as crime-scene investigators went about their business inside the mega-home with the killer view. A reporter from the North Kitsap Herald had already arrived and was taping the goings-on with a tiny video camera, capturing footage he’d likely upload on the newspaper’s website before sunrise.
Drew, wearing jeans and a dark-blue hoodie, slung his arm around Brianna. She was trembling and he kissed her gently at first on the cheek, then with more passion on the lips.
Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribal Police chief Annie Garnett was a dominating presence at just under six feet tall, with a cascade of black hair spun up under a knit cap to ward off the chill and to hide what no stylist could fix in a middle-of-the-night roust from bed. She interrupted the kiss as she approached the pair across the darkened lawn.
“Brianna, you told the responding officers that your parents aren’t home?” Annie asked.
The crime scene was inside Annie’s jurisdiction, but her police force was small. Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department deputies and coroner’s personnel were also on the scene to deal with the violent death of a teen girl. Annie knew that none of them was thrilled to be there—and it wasn’t because it was so early in the morning.
None of them ever liked to deal with a murder of someone so young.
Brianna pushed Drew away and shook her head. “Dad and step-monster are on vacation. Acapulco or St. Croix. My mom lives in Seattle. I called her and she’s taking the first boat over here.”
“All right. When did you call her?” Annie asked.
Brianna watched a pair of uniformed county deputies unfurl yellow crime-scene tape and attach it to a post and then around the fountain and on to the Japanese maple tree that framed the view of the gazebo. “Right before I called 911.”
“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance first?” Annie asked.
Brianna looked at the police chief steadily, her large eyes the startling green of a traffic light. “Because I kicked Olivia pretty hard with my foot and she didn’t move at all. She was probably totally dead. What good would an ambulance have done?”
The police chief made a note in a little black, leather-clad book. The book hadn’t been used in a while, but she knew this case would require extra care. It was tragic and messy. Parents gone. Alcohol and possibly drugs. Decedent from another country.
Annie turned to Drew. “And you? Were you already here?”
“No way,” Drew said. “Bree called me, and I drove like hell. I live ten miles away. Got back here in less than five minutes, which is my personal best.” He gripped Brianna’s right hand and she pulled away, flinching, before shoving it into the pocket of her fluffy Victoria’s Secret Pink robe.
“Do you have Olivia’s parents’ phone number?” Annie asked.
“Oh, God, no,” Brianna said, pulling her robe tighter to stave off the chilly air. A small bit of blood speckled the robe’s trim. Brianna was a stunner. She had a heart-shaped face and big green eyes that somehow managed to be alert and evasive at the same time. Her hair was long, a dark shade of blond with—at least in that darkened light of night—an auburn cast. Not burgundy. Not red. “They live in London or Liverpool or somewhere. She’s a foreign-exchange student. She’s staying with Beth Lee and her mom in Port Gamble.”
Annie knew all that, but she let Brianna go on anyway.
“I think I have Beth’s number,” Brianna said, tucking a long strand of silky hair behind her ear and scrolling through her phone list. “We’re not close, not like me and Olivia. I really liked her.” Brianna stopped briefly to respond to a text someone had just sent and then continued searching through what seemed like the longest contact list ever.
“Found it,” she said, finally. She held up her phone to give Annie the number. The police chief tried very hard not to lose her patience with Brianna, who, as insensitive as she was, might have been the very last person to see Olivia before the murder. What Brianna had to say, what Brianna had seen, was crucial.
Chapter 3
KITSAP COUNTY DETECTIVES SCOURED every inch of the Connorses’ cavernous living room. It appeared to be more of a shrine than a living room. There were photos of Brianna everywhere. None of her dad. None of the woman in his life. None of her mother. There was Brianna on a horse. Brianna at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Brianna in pigtails. Brianna. Brianna. Brianna. Besides serving as center stage in The Brianna Show, it was obvious that the room had been built, designed, and decorated to impress. All the furnishings were white and modern. With its pair of white leather Barcelona chairs facing the inky night waters of Puget Sound, it almost had the vibe of an upscale dental office, the kind where teeth whitening comes free with the first visit.
Now, however, the room looked like a frat house after a Friday night. Someone had stacked up seven red plastic cups on a window ledge. The luxurious white leather couch with matching throw pillows (not too many to be annoying, but not too few so as to accommodate slouching) was thrown together by someone who didn’t know that the zipper ends of the cushions should face inside. Pizza boxes, chip bags, and some kind of cheese dip that had congealed in its microwavable plastic container indicated that despite the tony address, the party was decidedly downscale.
As the detectives moved methodically through the still life of the party’s aftermath, they photographed and bagged anything that might have DNA on it. Everything else was coated and brushed with carbon so fingerprint comparisons could be made. Their goal was twofold: collect evidence and find the murder weapon.