Closer Than Blood Read online

  “No. Good-bye.”

  Lainie hung up and looked across the room at a photograph of two little girls posing in leotards on a balance beam. Their hair was blond, eyes blue. Everything about them was the same, but in reverse. Like looking into a mirror. Lainie’s hair parted naturally on the left side of her face, Tori’s on the right. Lainie’s upper left lip had a mole. Tori had had hers—on the right side—removed when she was fourteen. Their mother dressed them alike until fourth grade, when both girls rightly rebelled. No one could tell them apart. They were so close. So seemingly identical.

  Yet they were not the same.

  Not by a mile.

  She wondered about her sister living in Tacoma, too. An encounter with an old classmate the previous fall came to mind.

  Lainie O’Neal felt a tap on her shoulder as she stood in line at a Queen Anne drycleaner. Her mind was on her job-hunting suit and the stuffed-mushroom stain from September’s “networking” meeting for displaced media professionals.

  She turned around to a somewhat familiar face.

  “Lainie, it’s me. Deirdre Jericho, now Landers, from South Kitsap.”

  Lainie paused as the synapses fired and the memory returned. Fourteen years ago, Dee Dee was a sullen girl with blue streaks in her brunette hair and a penchant for scoop-neck tops that dropped a little low for South Kitsap dress codes.

  Except for the disappearance of those blue streaks, she hadn’t changed all that much.

  “Oh, yes, Dee Dee! How are you?”

  “Better than last time I saw you,” she said.

  Lainie nodded. “Back in high school,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

  “No, not then. In Tacoma at the bar in El Gaucho. You were there with your boyfriend and you, well, you acted like you didn’t know me.”

  Lainie shook her head. “I’ve never been to El Gaucho,” she said.

  “It was you. I’m pretty sure. You treated me like a total bitch.”

  “Honestly, Dee Dee, I never would have done that.”

  Dee Dee smiled. “That’s what I thought.”

  Dee Dee Jericho had come in to South when the navy transferred her dad, a commander, in the beginning of her senior year of high school.

  She barely made an impression on anyone.

  Kendall Stark knew she’d loathe the endeavor almost from the moment she agreed to do it. She would have rather been back home burning yard waste with Steven and Cody. In fact, she would rather be poking around the most gelatinous decomposing body than working on her South Kitsap High School class reunion committee during lunch. It was a quagmire of hurt feelings, unfinished business, and the kind of tedium that comes with agreeing on even the minutest of details. The news that one of their old classmates was involved in a shooting made all of it seem more trivial.

  Who cares about what color the napkins are?

  The question was rhetorical, of course.

  Penny Salazar’s steely stare and finger tapping on a planning binder said everything about what she thought commanded supreme importance.

  “Look, people,” said Penny, who was a sawed-off, square-shouldered brunette and ran the Port Orchard deli that had been the committee’s meeting place since the first of the year, “details are what people remember when they remember a special event.”

  Kendall looked at the other committee member, Adam Canfield. Adam had always been a sensible ally, from high school on the drama team to the Kitsap Cutter serial-killer investigation when he supplied some key evidence from his Bay Street collectibles shop. He had texted Kendall with the news that Tori had been shot, but he and Kendall agreed not to mention it.

  Penny could find out about it in the Lighthouse. She was an incorrigible gossip.

  Adam tugged at his gray lamb’s-wool cardigan.

  “Yes, details,” he said. “I’m glad we approved maroon and white, with maroon the accent.”

  Adam swallowed the last of his Diet Coke and waited for Penny to disagree.

  She’d made it a point to disagree with anyone’s idea that didn’t mirror her own plan for the fifteen-year reunion. She’d even come up with a theme: Fifteen Minutes of Fame.

  Fifteen Minutes of Blame, Adam had thought before acquiescing to Penny’s ill-conceived plan.

  “But shouldn’t the napkin design have been the other way around? I mean, our cheer uniforms weren’t white. We’d have looked like nurses if they had been.”

  It was Penny again, once more using the opportunity to remind the group that she’d been a cheerleader.

  “Lainie texted me,” Adam said, not surprisingly, unable to hold his tongue. “She’s not going to make it to the meeting.”

  “The ferry?” Penny was referring to the most common excuses people employed when they gave their regrets about missing an event, party, or appointment on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

  “No. She wanted me to tell you that her sister’s in some kind of trouble.”

  Penny’s eyes widened. “Tori?” she said, taken aback by the mention of the name. Lainie’s sister hadn’t been heard from for years. Not by Lainie, not by anyone in Port Orchard. She’d vanished.

  “What kind of trouble?” Penny asked.

  Adam looked anxiously at Kendall, who had stuck to her word. She didn’t want to say anything about Tori O’Neal.

  Penny reached for her binder and started writing something down. She looked up, satisfied, and smiled.

  “Now we can invite Tori. I thought she’d dropped off the face of the earth. You know, another dead end. About half the class is a dead end one way or another.”

  “That makes number two,” she said, again doing some updating in the binder.

  “She’s a very unlucky girl, our Tori O’Neal,” Adam said.

  Kendall looked at Adam. She knew he was making a statement swathed in irony, his forte since high school, but she didn’t like it.

  “No one is that unlucky,” she said, unable to resist adding her two cents.

  “Poor Lainie,” Adam said. “Torrid was fun to watch in high school, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be her sister.”

  “Her twin,” Penny said, drawing the connection even tighter. “Yeah, that would totally suck.”

  Penny didn’t have a way with words, Kendall thought, but she was right. Tori O’Neal came with more baggage than an airport skycap.

  “I wonder what happened this time?” Penny said. “And where is she, anyway?”

  “Tacoma,” Adam said.

  Penny was clearly surprised and there was no hiding it. Tacoma was across the Narrows from the peninsula, barely a half hour away from Port Orchard. “That’s weird,” she said. “I had no idea she was still in the area. I thought she’d left for California or Alaska or anywhere but around here. She hated it here.”

  “Yeah, imagine that,” Adam said, looking at his phone as if it would force Lainie to send another text. “Tori’s been hiding in plain sight.”

  Kendall Stark returned to her office and dialed the number for the Tacoma Police Department. She identified herself and asked for the investigator in charge of the Connelly murder case, and Eddie Kaminski got on the line. She told him that Tori had roots in Kitsap and had been associated with the death of a young man, Jason Reed.

  “You say it was a car accident?”

  “Yes, but some things seemed odd about it.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  Kendall didn’t have anything specific and she felt foolish just then. “One witness said he was talking—alive—then suddenly, dead. Internal injuries can be like that. Other talk, too.”

  “We deal with more than talk here in Tacoma,” Kaminski said. “We deal with facts.”

  Her cheeks went a little pink. “Of course. Did you know that her first husband died, too?”

  There was a short pause.

  “It might have been mentioned to the other investigators,” he said. “Yes, I think it was.”

  “Can we meet? I could tell you more.”

&nbs
p; Again a slight pause.

  “Hang on for a sec.” He put the phone on mute and returned a moment later. “Busy here, sorry. Sure. Maybe you can come over this way?”

  “All right. I’ll figure out a time and get back to you,” she said.

  After he hung up, Kaminski turned his attention to the medical examiner’s report on Alex Connelly. The sum of all the dead man had been reduced to the weights and measurements of his liver, his heart, his kidneys. His gunshot-addled brain. All were unremarkable. He was fit, healthy, and struck down in the prime of his life by a masked assailant.

  A bullet to the brain had killed him instantly. The second shot was merely icing on a murderer’s cake.

  He scanned the report—fifteen pages of diagrams and notes made by a pathologist who knew it was best to include every detail, mundane or not. Alex Connelly’s right earlobe bore the telltale puncture of a scarred-over piercing. As he read, Kaminski touched his own lobe, feeling the tiny lump of a scar from his own youthful indiscretion for the sake of fashion. Except for the fact that Connelly made five times Kaminski’s salary, the detective and the victim were so very much alike. Height and weight were the same. The victim had had a vasectomy. His tonsils had been removed.

  Check. Check.

  There was really nothing remarkable about Connelly, other than the horrific and violent way that he’d died.

  By the time the body was processed and released, his widow had already arranged for his cremation. It was as fast as one of those Pyrex commercials that crow about moving something from the freezer to the oven without a second in between.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tacoma

  It was the weary time of day when the world is sleeping and the digits on the clock are small and stand alone. Except for the crying from down the cavernous hallway toward the elevators, the fifth floor of St. Joseph Medical Center was quiet. No visitors. A nurse with a citrus yellow scrub over a red turtleneck studied the chart and checked the bag of fluids that circuited from a tube overhead into the vein of the woman everyone at the fifth floor nurses’ station was talking about. The gossip at the station centered on the tragedy that had unfolded on North Junett Street. Nurses have well-deserved reputations for caring and nurturing, but the reality of their world is that they see so much that it is hard to force a tear for every misfortune that rolls down the high-gloss linoleum floors.

  Diana Lowell, the nurse wearing the yellow smock, chatted a moment with a younger woman fresh out of nursing school. Her name escaped the veteran nurse, out of the unfortunate acceptance that young people came and went. Few became lifers like her. Diana was friendly, but only enough to get the job done. They spoke in hushed tones. It was the kind of casual chatter that characterized a lot of admissions at St. Joseph’s. Probably true of any hospital in any city. The exchange was somewhat lighthearted despite the subject matter at hand.

  Frivolity constantly played against tragedy at the nurses’ station.

  “Her husband was shot,” Diana said. “An intruder, I guess.”

  “Yeah, right in the face, I heard,” Corazón White, the younger nurse, said. “I have a friend in the morgue. I’ll ask for details.”

  Diana smiled slightly as she observed an exasperatingly slow computer screen morph from one patient’s file to the next.

  “Nice to have friends in low places,” she said wryly.

  “Yeah, I guess,” the newbie said without a trace of humor. “Last person most of us see is the morgue attendant.”

  “That’s why you must always look your best,” Diana said, playing with the girl now.

  “Anyhow, is she going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. Barely a graze, really. Three stitches. Lucky girl, she is.”

  Diana picked up a clipboard, the last vestige of the days when she was in the newbie’s position. Several nurses carried electronic clipboards, but Diana was lagging behind on her required training. She started toward the corridor that led to Tori Connelly’s private room, 561D, arguably the best room on the floor. It was smaller than the others, and because of that it, was never converted to a tandem. There was no sharing of a bathroom. No feigned interest in one patient’s malady from across a curtain suspended by grommets and a steel tube. Diana Lowell let her eyes wander over the woman in the bed. She could tell that the patient was watching her every move, though her head stayed stationary. Diana could feel those eyes follow her as she rotated the bag containing clear liquid that was a mixture of saline and anti-anxiety meds. Not enough to knock her out. Not enough to keep her from complaining. If the woman in 561D was a complainer, that is.

  In time, most were.

  Diana flipped the crisp new pages of the printed chart and scoured its contents. Tori Connelly certainly had the pedigree to be a complainer. Her home address was an exclusive street in North Tacoma. Her hair was cut with the messy precision of a stylist who probably charged half of what Diana made in a day. The color was good, too. Blond, the hue of wheat on a bronze-lit summer day. Not the DIY color from the bottle that Diana and her sister used because they were “worth” it.

  “How are we feeling?” Diana asked, catching the patient’s stare. “You slept all day yesterday.”

  “We,” Tori said, moistening her parched lips. “We have been shot.”

  Diana smoothed a bedsheet. “Of course, I know that. How is the pain? You know you can increase the dosage by pressing the button.”

  Tori was annoyed. “You are pressing my buttons now,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “I want to know if my husband’s okay. He was hurt, too.”

  Diana knew what had happened to the patient’s husband, of course, but it wasn’t her place to say anything. The doctor could tell the new widow. A cop could.

  She set the chart down and focused on Tori.

  “The police are here now,” she said, moving toward the hallway and catching the eye of the man lingering by the doorway. “They’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  “The police?”

  Diana looked at her. “Yes. The shooting, remember?”

  “I look like a wreck,” she said. “Besides, I’ve already answered questions galore.”

  This one was going to be memorable in every way.

  “You look fine. You know, considering all you’ve been through.”

  Tori ran her fingertips through her hair. In doing so, she tangled the tubes taped to her wrist. She indicated the IV line.

  “This hurts,” she said.

  Diana bent closer and unwound the tubes from the bed rail. “Let me help you.” She gently splayed them out from Tori’s wrist to the bag of solution.

  “Will I be all right?”

  “You’ll be fine,” Diana said. There were times when that phrase was said as a white lie, only to bolster a patient’s dwindling prospects. But Tori Connelly would be as good as new. At least physically.

  “I bet I look like twenty miles of bad road,” she said.

  “Not hardly.” Diana studied Tori. She’d been shot, yes. She’d lost blood. Yet somehow she held herself together enough to allow her vanity to come into play. The woman in 561D was one of those women with nerves of platinum and an unbending concern for how things appeared.

  A man appeared in just inside the doorway and Diana motioned in his direction. It was Eddie Kaminski.

  “She’s resting comfortably, but she can talk, Detective,” she said, walking out the door and past the detective.

  Kaminski knew that the victim’s recollection of the crime would be most accurate closer to the event, rather than later. Tori Connelly’s doctors told him that she was on pain medication and fluids, but was lucid and given the circumstances would be able to share what she knew about what had transpired.

  “Ms. Connelly,” Kaminski said, ducking into her room. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  She barely looked at the man in a seasonally questionable black overcoat, dark slacks, and a
rumpled white shirt.

  “Ms. Connelly?” he repeated, this time a little louder, but modulated for the hospital setting. “I’m Detective Kaminski, Tacoma P.D. I’m here to talk about the shooting.”

  She moved her lips. Her eyes fluttered.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He found a place by her bedside. Not so close as to invade her personal space, but with the narrowest of proximity to hear her words. Tori Connelly’s hair was swept back and her skin quite pale. Her eyes rested in charcoal hollows. She was fine featured. Despite her ordeal, however, she was an attractive woman.

  She looked up, eyes damp. “There was so much blood. Everywhere.”

  He nodded. “Yes, there was.”

  She lowered her eyes and then looked out at the Tacoma skyline. “He didn’t make it,” she said, more a statement than a question. “My husband, I mean.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not.”

  A tear rolled from the corner of her eye, leaving a shiny trail as it traveled to the white linen of the hospital pillow.

  “But you did,” he said.

  She held her words inside a moment.

  “Yes, yes, I did.”

  Kaminski took out a notepad and started writing. He’d given up the idea that he could remember every word uttered by a witness. It wasn’t that he was struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It was simply the recognition that a notation was a safeguard against forgetting when it came time to tap out the report.

  “Did he suffer?” she asked.

  Kaminski stopped writing and looked up. “The coroner doesn’t think so. Death was instantaneous or thereabouts.”

  She stayed quiet for a moment and then let out a long breath. “That’s a blessing.”

  “I’d like to talk about what happened. From the beginning, if you don’t mind. I know you’re exhausted.”

  He didn’t really care that she was tired, but he’d come off a two-day sensitivity training workshop that had him primed to all but hug a felon.

  “We’d been out to dinner,” she said. “It was just one of those lazy evenings. We never expected anything to happen.”