Victim Six. Gregg Olsen
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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.”
Kendall had heard that sentiment a hundred if not a thousand times before on Kitsap County calls. Kidnap County, as some called it, could be the kind of place where people had gates, dogs, guns, and an attitude that said “back off!” in no uncertain terms.
It was, she reflected, a good place to hide out and be alone.
“If you see her, call us. Okay?”
He took her business card and put it in his back pocket. “Sure. Will do.”
Kendall looked around and noticed the weave of various car and truck wheel treads in the muddy parking area. She walked toward the woods, an archway of ocean spray marking its entrance. She found some remnants of salal cuttings, a bundle of rubber bands, and the muddy footprints of at least a dozen people and a few dogs. Sunlight sifted through the maples and cedars, sending globes of light to the damp forest floor. She walked about a hundred yards before something pink caught her eye: a cellophane wrapper emblazoned with a depiction of a smiling shrimp and Asian characters.
Kendall bent down, her heels digging into the muddy soil, and wondered if it was evidence or carelessness. She bagged the wrapper, just in case, and got back into her car as a deer wandered into the parking lot. The scene was breathtaking in its incongruity.
The forest is so beautiful, yet so dangerous.
She got back in her car and started back to Port Orchard. The sky had darkened. She turned on her headlights and wipers as rain began to splatter on the windshield. Many of Kitsap County’s rural roads have no edges, no borders, as they wind through forests of Douglas fir and western red cedars.
Tree trunks along rural roadways are thickly collared with salal, huckleberry, and the spires of the native sword fern. Some roads follow old deer trails from Puget Sound inland to valleys fed by a network of streams.
The woods were lush and lucrative.
And, just maybe, Kendall Stark thought, deadly.
Celesta Delgado was naked, shivering, on a sheet of plastic when she awoke. It was so dark in the room that she reached for her face, struggling to see if her own black hair had blocked the light. She couldn’t reach. She rolled back the moments as best she could. She’d been out in the woods. But where was she now? Had she passed out? Why couldn’t she move her arms? She tried to sit up, but her legs were paralyzed too.
Had she been in an accident?
Nothing in her memory suggested an accident, and the realization that her predicament was intentional came over her. Fear consumed her. If she’d been hurt and was in the hospital, would she be nude? She’d never been hospitalized before, yet she knew that every patient was allowed the dignity of some covering. She shivered again as cool air moved over her body.
A fan?
She wanted to call out, but her voice failed her too.
What is happening to me?
There was nothing to do but wait and cry tears that simply oozed into the fabric of the blindfold over her eyes.
She lay there, frozen and terrified, in the dark until a harsh voice was directed at her.
“Your hands and feet are no longer tied. Get up.”
Celesta heard the commands; nevertheless, she was unsure how to maneuver in order to perform them. She knew she was on her back, of course, but she had no idea how to pull herself upright. She was still blindfolded and confused about how to orient herself from the plastic sheeting that held her. She was so cold by then that her buttocks felt stuck to the sheeting. It was as if she were bound in plastic like a half-frozen roast.
“I know you can’t see, bitch, but you can hear. Now, get up. Roll over. On your knees.”
Celesta couldn’t cry out, although inside her head she’d screamed Tulio’s name over and over.
Tulio, please help! Tulio, save me!
The man in the dark grabbed her ankles. Celesta