Closer Than Blood. Gregg Olsen
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the way to St. Joe’s. Didn’t say a word. Told the neighbor that a guy broke in, shot her and her old man. Nobody’s seen anything to approximate a break-in.”
“Security system?”
Cal watched the ambulance doors as they closed on Alex Connelly.
“Looks like it was turned off,” he said.
The sirens started and about ten onlookers started to head back to their homes.
“Show over,” Kaminski said. “At least for now. I’m going to the hospital.”
Most who inhabit such a fine street as North Junett would consider the most dominating piece of artwork that hung in the Connelly living room as something incongruent with the home’s stature or the place in society that its inhabitants surely held. It was a bourgeois depiction of a stone cottage in the midst of a snowstorm. The artist, Thomas Kinkade, was known for a popular, albeit kitschy, style that stoked memories of a long-ago time when skaters wore fuzzy earmuffs and free-flowing scarves as they skimmed over the surface of a frozen pond.
This Kinkade print on canvas was called Evening Glow. Besides its stone cottage, it featured an illuminated gas lamp that appeared to emit an orange red glow. In fact, such a feature was the hallmark of Kinkade’s paintings. He was, his aficionados insisted, “not an artist, but a painter of light.”
None of the men and women from the Tacoma Police and the Pierce County Coroner’s offices at the crime scene paid the lush accoutrements of the Connelly household much mind as they went about tagging and bagging the victim and the assorted evidence they’d need to run through the lab.
If they’d have looked closer, they would have noticed that Thomas Kinkade’s ability to trick the eye with illumination techniques was in better-than-average form. The light on the top of the lamp standard twinkled.
As it did so, the discourse among the interlopers on the scene continued.
“What do you make of the lady of the house?” a cop asked a forensics tech.
“Meaning?” a woman’s voice answered.
“A lot younger than the husband,” the man’s voice said. “Better looking, too.”
The same woman’s voice responded. “I guess.”
“I’ll tell you what I guess,” the man said. “I guess that when they do a GSR test on the missus they’ll find that she was the shooter. Honestly, the wound on her leg was a graze. Self-inflicted. Betcha a beer.”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I don’t like beer.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Kitsap County
The Lord’s Grace Community Church was a converted metal Quonset hut in Kingston, Washington, that had once been used to store floral greens for a long-since-closed brush-cutting operation. The structure was so close to the edge of the road, it had been the frequent and unfortunate recipient of more than one car’s broadside. In fact, a makeshift memorial of a cross marked the location, adorned with faded photos kept mostly dry inside Ziploc bags, a red plastic lei, and stenciled letters that read C-A-N-D-Y. The tribute’s central feature—the cross—was so solid and substantial that a passerby unfamiliar with the events might assume that the cross belonged to the church. It had been seven years since Candy Turner slid on the pavement and crashed her cherry red ’69 El Camino pickup truck.
Locals who didn’t attend there called it the Candy Church, the home of “My Sweet Lord.”
Inside, Pastor Mike Walsh got on his knees and looked up at the big Douglas-fir cross. He’d been contacted weeks ago and the conversation stayed with him. Like a leaky pipe tucked away in the ceiling, quietly, steadily doing damage.
It was a woman, a crying woman, who’d contacted him. She recalled a traffic accident that he’d happened upon a decade and a half ago.
“You could have told the truth,” she said. “But you didn’t.”
“I was scared. I wasn’t the man that I am now.”
“I’m sure the passage of time has made you a better person.”
“A better person, but not a perfect one,” he said.
There was a short pause before the woman made her point.
“It is never too late to do what’s right.”
Pastor Mike couldn’t help but agree. “But I made a promise,” he said.
“That was a long time ago. Things change. The truth, Mikey. The truth is all that matters.”
It was a troubling, haunting conversation, as if the woman on the other end of the line was merely testing his resolve. He wondered if she’d taken Jesus into her heart so that she’d be free of what had happened. Forgiveness was so powerful. He prayed for guidance and the strength to do what was right.
He remembered what happened that night.
As he knelt down to help the girl who had been driving, he watched the other one hurry over to where the boy was sprawled out on the gravel. He was saying something to her, though Mikey couldn’t hear a word of it.
He heard the sirens coming from the end of Banner, a good four minutes away.
The girl standing over the boy was yelling at him.
“I hate you. I wish I’d never met you,” she said.
“Help me,” said the girl in his arms. “Help my sister. My boyfriend.”
Mikey tried to soothe her. His brain was fried and it was so hard to concentrate on what was happening. The smoke. The headlights still on, punching through the blackness of the night. The sirens getting louder and louder.
“They’re okay.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said.
He patted her hand. “It was an accident. You were probably going too fast for the Jump. It happens.”
“Are you sure they are okay?”
He looked over at the other girl. She was yelling at the boy.
“Goddamn you! I hate you!”
What he saw next would haunt him forever. The other girl clenched her hands around the boy’s neck.
“You’re a piece of shit, Jason!”
“What’s happening?” the first girl said.
“I don’t know. Nothing!”
The lights of the sirens came down the hill like fireflies on steroids.
He looked over and the boy had stopped moving. The other girl’s eyes locked on Mikey’s and she came toward him.
“You say anything and you’re dead. I’ll make sure the sheriff blames you for all of this. That you crossed the center line and forced us into the ditch.”
“You’re a crazy little bitch,” he said.
“I’ve seen you around. You’re Mikey Walsh. You’re trailer trash, a drug addict. A loser. No one would ever believe you over me.”
The girl went over to her twin, leaned close to her ear, and whispered something. A moment later, a deputy sheriff and the commotion that comes with the sirens and lights arrived.
It was late evening and the silhouette of Blake Island was outlined by a halo of lights from Seattle on the other side of Puget Sound. Kendall tightened her frame to stay warm as she