Everything She Feared, page 18
“You’re a bit protective,” Benton said.
“Cut the crap, okay? I know J.J.’s done time. I did time, so did most of my crew. That’s in the past. We’re straight and we’re clean. Yet whenever you guys get any kinda beef, you jam us up.”
“So you’ll swear J.J. was here working on the morning of the tenth?” Pierce said.
“Absolutely. I picked him up that morning for work.”
Pierce threw a silent question to Benton to indicate something was off with these guys. She got her phone, cued up a clip of the video showing Smith’s pickup truck in the lot at the park.
“Explain why the camera at Sparrow Song Park, with this time and date stamp, recorded his pickup behind the Sunny Days school bus moments before a teenage girl in the group was killed?” Pierce said.
Smith and Robson leaned closer to the phone as Pierce replayed the video, pausing on Smith’s plate.
“You’ve got a history with teenage girls in wooded areas, don’t you, John?” Benton said.
The blood drained from Smith’s face; he shot a look at Robson, then the detectives.
“What the hell is this?” Smith said. “Some kinda setup? Some kinda joke? I wasn’t there. I was here.”
“Clearly you were at the park,” Benton said.
Smith shook his head, then raked his hands over his face.
“I did all the programs, took all the treatment. I stick to the conditions. I’m working, doing everything I’m supposed to do. Why’re you doing this with some kinda doctored video? I’m telling you I was never at that park.”
“That’s right,” Robson said. “I picked him up that morning because he didn’t have his truck.”
“Your truck is in this footage, John,” Pierce said. “You going to tell us it was someplace else?”
“It was in the shop, getting the transmission fixed.”
Pierce and Benton stared at him, their faces filling with doubt.
“I can prove it,” Smith said.
* * *
Robson, Benton and Pierce walked down the street with Smith.
Coming to Smith’s truck, the detectives took no risks. Because Smith was a convicted felon, they took his keys from him, then patted him down. Benton then unlocked the passenger door and Smith directed him to look in the glove box. Tugging on gloves and rummaging through the compartment, Benton withdrew a folded yellow sheet of invoice paper.
Pierce took a photo of it.
It was all there: transmission repair, parts, labor, drop-off and pick-up dates. Benton and Pierce looked at the name of the auto shop at the top of the invoice.
True Ocean Auto Dealers in Lake City.
The same shop where Tanner Bishop worked moving vehicles in and out of the service bays.
39
Seattle, Washington
Sara was losing her grip.
She’d nearly spilled a plate of lasagna and a bowl of tomato soup on two screeching boys, each about six years old, who were racing around tables, bumping into her.
The boys’ parents sat in a booth, faces in their phones, indifferent. Then one of the two older women in the corner booth, who’d seemed nice, tapped her spoon to her cup, her way of requesting more coffee. Meantime, a man glared at Sara from his seat because the detailed special order he’d made off the menu was taking too long—“No salt must be added in the preparation. Is that clear? No salt.”
But Sara was detached, her mind spinning with thoughts of Katie’s drawing, of Anna falling to her death, the horrifying truth growing into an internal cry.
Someone brought her back by saying her name.
Beth and Polly called her into the alcove near the kitchen door.
“Yes?” Sara answered.
“What’s wrong?” Beth said.
“Nothing.”
“Bull,” Polly said. “You look like the world’s fallen on you. What is it?”
“Is it Katie? Is it your mom?” Beth said. “Talk to us.”
“Lean on us, Sara,” Polly said.
Feeling Polly take her hand amid the din of the dining room, the clatter in the kitchen, Sara welcomed the heartfelt concern in the faces of her friends. Breathing evenly, Sara wanted to embrace them, collapse into their arms before she broke into a thousand pieces from her secret crushing fear. Maybe, just maybe, talking about it with them would help. At the brink of revealing it, her jaw opened slightly to form the words but—
No. No, I can’t risk telling them. I can’t bring myself to say out loud that I think Katie may have killed Anna and that even worse, I—No, I can’t...
“Order up,” Mel said, setting two plates with fish and chips at the pick-up window.
Sara touched Polly’s and Beth’s arms before they got back to work. “You guys are the best,” she said. “Thank you, but I can handle it.”
* * *
But Sara couldn’t handle it.
When her shift ended, she called her neighbor, Val Rossi. If there was one person Sara could lean on, it was Val. She’d moved into the neighborhood a few years ago, after her husband’s death. Sara and Katie met Val while she was walking her dog, Bingo. Ever since then they’d been friends. Val struck Sara as a little lonely. She didn’t have kids and took to Katie right away, often telling them: “You girls are like family to me.”
When Sara reached Val on the phone, she asked if she could watch Katie for a few hours as soon as Sara got home from the diner and Katie got home from school.
“Absolutely.”
“I’m sorry to impose, I just need some alone time.”
“No imposition. Happy to help. You’ve had a lot happen in the last little while.”
“Yes, a lot.”
“I’ll come to your house to get her. I’m dropping Bingo off at the groomers for some spa treatment. Katie can come with me.”
“She’ll love that.”
“I’ll take her out for a cheeseburger after, then some shopping before we pick up Bingo.”
“Sounds good.”
“How’s your mom doing?”
“She’s doing okay.”
“I’ve been meaning to get out to Bothell and visit her. Please give her my love, Sara.”
“I will.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“No, but thank you so much, Val.”
* * *
Rain webbed down the windows of Sara’s house.
Home alone, she clasped her hands around her ceramic cup of hot tea in a futile effort to subdue the icy dread inside her. She glanced at the cup with World’s Best Mom printed in colorful letters. Katie had made it for her at a Sunny Days craft class.
Sara then glanced at Katie’s drawing book on the kitchen table, opened to the sketch of Anna and Katie on the cliff.
Sara stifled a sob.
Why did Katie make this drawing? Is she trying to confess?
Sara thought back to the detectives, Pierce and Benton, sitting at this table not so long ago. They’d come to talk to Katie, a follow-up, they’d said. But they’d come with their binders, presenting Sara with options, and were so formal, so careful, as if laying legal groundwork.
What do they know?
She’d heard nothing from them since.
Sara pulled her laptop closer, went online and for several minutes searched news sites, social media posts. Then she went to the pages of the people mining rumors and conspiracies tied to her dark past.
It appeared that nothing new had emerged.
She looked at Katie’s drawing again.
Could it be some sort of evidence? Should I burn it? Should I get a lawyer? I can’t afford a lawyer. Who can I talk to? What should I do?
Sara buried her face in her hands.
I have to face the truth.
The truth.
Sara’s eyes flicked to the ceiling.
The truth is up there.
She left the kitchen and a moment later was on the second floor, looking down the hall to a closed door. Behind that door were the steps that led to the attic.
Sara hated going to the attic—knowing what was there.
Rooted before the closed door, glancing at her tattooed wrist, rubbing it, thinking of Katie having bad thoughts stirred her own...
...the rain...the pain...the screaming...
Sara turned from the attic door and hurried downstairs.
40
Seattle, Washington
“I’ll never forget that day.” Stephanie Leal’s voice rose from the recording playing on Ryan Gardner’s laptop as she recalled her former high school classmate Magda Kurtz.
That’s the file I want. That’s the one.
Ryan paused it and went to the kitchen. He made a ham and cheese sandwich, got a glass of milk, then came back to the recording. While eating, he surveyed the files listed in the folder where he’d stored it among additional material he’d obtained years ago that had belonged to Julie Carter, a Montana journalist.
Ryan had learned of Julie through a colleague at the L.A. Times, who knew of his pursuit of Magda.
“She was a freelancer based in Billings, and my wife’s distant cousin,” Dan Morden, an L.A. Times reporter, had told Ryan at the time over the phone from California. “She’d written for us, for everybody. She’d started working on a feature when Magda and her husband were arrested. Julie located nearly everyone in the region who knew them and was hoping to sell her article to the New York Times Magazine and turn it into a book.”
“I got an email from her once, but we never talked,” Ryan said. “You said she was working on a feature, past tense?”
“Several months after she got going, Julie was hiking in Glacier National Park when she was killed by a grizzly.”
“Oh, man, that’s awful,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, so she never wrote the piece. But she’d done massive research, it’s just boxed up. I thought of you and that maybe I can help you get access to it.”
Dan contacted Julie’s dad and set things up for Ryan to talk to him. After hearing Ryan recounting how Carrie, and her friend Willow, died, Julie’s father agreed to give him Julie’s research.
A few weeks later, Ryan pulled his rental up to a modest home in Billings. Julie’s dad, Butch Carter, a semi-retired welder who looked like a beat-up prizefighter, took him into his garage. He raised the door and in the center sat two plastic storage bins containing court records, statements, transcripts, notebooks, documents, USB keys, newspapers and more, all on the case.
Carter helped Ryan place the bins into his rented Jeep. Then he shook Ryan’s hand while clamping the other on his shoulder. His face was creased with grief, but he attempted a smile.
“Julie would’ve wanted someone like you to carry on her work. You see this through, son. By God, you see it through.”
For years, Ryan drew upon Julie Carter’s files, and added his own, in his search for Magda and her daughter, for any links to where they may be.
Now, taking the last bite of his sandwich, he went over everything in his head.
Okay, I’m not sure yet about Sherry Evers at the pharmacy in Tacoma. It’s not uncommon to have scars removed. And I’m not sure yet about Sara, the server at the Jet Town Diner. Maybe it’s because I’ve struck out so many times before. And I still need to follow up on the woman in Redmond. I’m not done here yet.
Finishing his milk, Ryan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then, being a former reporter, he did a quick scan of the local news, to see what was going on. He saw that officials were considering a plan to build a Seattle-to-Vancouver high-speed train. Scrolling further, he saw that the Seahawks were seeking a new quarterback. There’d been an engine fire on a ferry. Thankfully no injuries. Then: that case he’d been following of the Seattle teen who died taking a selfie in the park east of the city. A photo of the victim, Anna Shaw, seventeen, accompanied the story, along with file photos of emergency units, police and families in shock at the park. Does that woman look like the server from the Jet Town Diner? It was hard to tell. He couldn’t be certain. He stared a second before dismissing it. He read the short update, which said that Shaw’s death was believed to be accidental but the investigation was ongoing.
Interesting, he thought before he returned to Julie Carter’s files and her interview with Stephanie Leal, who’d gone to high school with Magda.
“I’ll never forget that day,” Leal said. “We were in our first gym class, sitting on the floor, twenty-five girls. Miss McCoy, our gym teacher, says, ‘Everybody listen up carefully. When I blow my whistle, everybody jump up and touch all four walls the fastest way you can, then sit back down.’
“She blows her whistle, and the class tears around the gym, slapping the walls, everyone except Magda.”
“What’s she doing?” Julie asked.
“She’s running diagonally, touching two walls in one corner, then running diagonally to the opposite corner and touching two walls. Then she sits back down alone, waiting and watching the rest of us trample around slapping walls.”
“What did the teacher say?”
“After we finished, we’re sitting on the floor, panting, gasping. Miss McCoy smiles right at Magda and says, ‘There’s one in every group.’ I’ll never forget Magda sneering at us with an air of superiority.”
“What did the teacher mean by one in every group?”
“Someone asked her later, and Miss McCoy said it meant Magda had genius-level intelligence or something. But when I think back on it, and how I used to sit next to her in class and how she went on to kill those people, I mean, God, it turns my blood cold.”
A moment later the recording ended, and Ryan clicked on another video Julie had made with another former student, Sandra Hinson.
“It was a high school dance in our senior year,” Sandra said. “I was dating this cute boy, Jake. It was a starry night, so pretty, and we left the dance for the slope.”
“The slope?” Julie asked.
“Our football field was in a valley. We called the grassy hill next to it the slope. We watched the games, from the slope. But this was at night, totally dark, no one there, if you know what I mean?”
“Got it,” Julie said.
“After we got there, we saw someone alone, lying on their back, not making a sound. We thought maybe they were hurt, or passed out? We walked over quietly. That’s when we saw it was Magda Kurtz. She was lying on the ground, staring at the stars. She knew we were there but didn’t move or speak. Jake nudged me and I said, ‘Magda, are you okay?’”
The recording hissed for a moment.
“Magda didn’t answer,” Sandra continued. “Then after about a minute, she looks up at us, and says: ‘You have no idea what I can do. One day you’ll all be in awe of me.’”
“Wow.”
“Then Magda got up, walked away, vanished in the dark. To this day, it still freaks me out.”
Ryan pulled a file folder of Julie’s typed interviews with people who knew Magda. After she graduated from high school, she fought with her parents, left home, moved to Billings and into an apartment with two older women. Julie had tracked down one of the women and wrote this note:
PENNY WOMACK
Roommate in Billings
We lived together for a time. Magda answered our ad for a roommate. My friend Kit Lee and I thought she was young, but we took her in to save on rent. Magda was smart and had a thing about numbers. Her room was full of calendars. She read weird books about mystics and the cosmos. She was quiet, a loner. She had a job at a poultry processing plant. Kit and I were office girls. One night we were all watching TV when Magda started talking about her job.
Lord, she went into such detail, how the birds, as she called them, are shackled upside down on a moving conveyor line, then electrically stunned before moving on to where their jugular veins were automatically severed. Magda said it was her job to ensure this stage ran smoothly, that the process was quick, effective and humane. But she was grinning, and her eyes were gleaming when she told us: “I just love watching them bleed.”
Ryan pulled out another of Julie’s notes:
JANINA RIMKUS
Poultry plant coworker
Magda was good at her job. She enjoyed it. She kept to herself until she met Herman Vryker, a trucker from Idaho, who moved shipments in and out of the plant and drove all over the country.
Herman was good-looking with intense eyes. But he was an outcast, or so the story went. He was a prepper who followed wild conspiracies and got kicked out of a doomsday cult. But Magda seemed to fall for him. She would suit him up and sneak him into the plant to watch the process. Magda told me that Herman thought it was “poetic,” that was his word, poetic, the way the blood flowed. Those two were made for each other. No one was surprised when they got married and moved into a double-wide at the edge of town.
Paper-clipped to the Rimkus note was another.
CAMILA DIAS
Poultry plant coworker
Magda and Herman didn’t get many visitors. I don’t think it bothered them. They didn’t care much for people. When word got around that Magda had a baby, a couple of us visited to fawn over her little daughter. They named her Hayley, a play on the name of Halley’s Comet, Magda told us. She was a beautiful baby. While we cooed over her, Magda said odd things, like “Hayley’s birthdate was an important sign for us to make use of her.” None of us knew what the heck she was talking about. “Make use of her?” We thought, who says things like that about their child? At one point Janina nodded to all the calendars, charts and numbers on the wall. It was strange. We’d heard the rumors about Magda’s borderline obsession with some sort of cosmic relationship with dates and events and numbers, I’m not sure, maybe like some sort of occult, numerology thing? But being there, hearing her and seeing her home, well, we left there a little shaken. I’m still uneasy talking about it because, well, of what they were planning.
