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.”
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,
