LITMIR.BIZ

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Most don’t. And, dear, remember, there are varying degrees of severity. Maybe we’ll be lucky here.”

      The word luck always stuck in her mind. Kendall Stark was not a believer in the concept. She felt that all people, good and bad, had a role in the outcome of their lives. As a cop and as a mother, she had to think so. Otherwise, the world was too random of a place for order.

      Order was what she craved.

      She stood quietly watching Cody as he worked the puzzle on the braided rug that covered the old fir floor of his bedroom. He never turned the pieces to make them fit. He just knew where they snapped into place. She wondered what other strange talents her special son might have. Autism was heartbreaking beyond comprehension, she knew, but there was a bit of magic in the disorder too. Some children could work numbers in a way that an MIT graduate couldn’t; some were artists whose inspiration was otherworldly.

      And yet, she had prayed for a miracle since the day of his diagnosis. That there would be something that would bring her son back to what she and Steven had dreamed their child would be. Kendall put on a brave face with Steven, because she had to. And no matter the future—a gifted child or one who stared forever into space—Cody Stark would always be her beautiful boy.

      Later that evening, after Cody was asleep, the story of the missing brush picker and the harsh reality of the teacher’s conference no longer fighting for her awareness, Kendall and Steven took a moment just to hold each other. It was not a mechanical embrace or a kind of attempt by one to guide the other to the bedroom. It was something deeper, the kind of gesture that confirmed that no matter what they faced, they would always face it together. The spring evening was warm enough for a sweater, and the couple went outside on the porch with the last of their cabernet. Miles away, across Puget Sound, they could see a portion of the Seattle skyline, including the iconic spire of the Space Needle.

      Lights flickered on a few boats that moved silently through the waters. Some carried freight destined for the ports of Seattle or Tacoma. Some held partiers who’d had too much to drink, fisherman who were disappointed by what they hadn’t caught, marine biologists who wondered where a missing member of a local pod of orcas had gone.

      One carried a dark specter of depravity that no other human being could imagine.

      He tucked a Camel straight between his lips and looked out over the water as a trio of harbor seals bobbed in the wake of another boat, now all but a pinprick on the horizon. She’d been the perfect victim. Her terror was a rush, a vibration that stimulated. She was, in fact, his Magic Fingers. She was what he considered a lucky catch, a girl just begging to be a victim because of her trusting nature. He preferred those who fought a little harder or wore their skepticism like a shield.

      His cigarette dangling, his fingertip rubbed across the silver Crossfire lighter that felt so good in his palm as he let the cool evening air pour over his handsome face.

      She was looking at the Seattle skyline.

      He imagined a conversation:

      Everything all right, baby? she asked, her eyes a mix of worry and fear.

      No problems I can’t fix, he answered into the wind.

      Need any help?

      He shook his head and went to cut the boat’s engine.

      No. You’ve done enough.

      Kendall crawled under the covers and nuzzled her husband. Steven was asleep, snoring softly in the manner she found more charming than irritating. The regular rhythm of his slumber was something that she could always count on, and it comforted her just then. She found herself thinking of how her life might have gone if they’d stayed apart. She remembered how lost she’d been that lonely, dark time years ago.

      His voice on the phone still reverberated in her memory.

      “Kendall, I don’t really know what’s going on.”

      “I don’t, either.”

      “But you do,” Steven said.

      “I need more time to sort out things.”

      “I’m begging you,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. “Please.”

      Chapter Six

      March 31, 8 a.m.

      Port Orchard

      Tulio Pena had left two voice messages on Kendall’s office phone. Both were colored by the anguish of a man frightened to death. In the background, Kendall could hear the sounds of piped-in mariachi music and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

      “Do you know anything? Did you find anything?”

      She knew he worked a late shift, so she didn’t call back with the non-answer she’d have to give. Families of the missing always hungered for any tidbit of information offered up by anyone in a position to know anything: first, by investigators, then by reporters, and lastly, if the period of time elapsed had become too long to foster hope, by a psychic. Most cops working a missing-persons case have felt the wrath of a family in search of answers.

      “We’re doing all that we can,” she’d said more than once.

      “All that you can? It seems like nothing! Nothing at all!”

      “We can’t give you visibility for every detail of our investigation.”

      That last line choked in her throat whenever she had used it. Sometimes it was more posturing than a real reflection of what was going on in the offices of the investigative body.

      Her sesame-seed bagel at the ready, Kendall went about some background research. She knew about the brush industry, of course. She’d been raised in Kitsap, a region with NO BRUSH PICKING signs as commonplace as GARAGE SALE placards. She booted up her PC and started the search for crimes on LINX, a regional criminal database. She used the key words: brush, floral industry, violence. From her open doorway, she saw Josh Anderson in the hall trying to work his vanishing charms on a pretty young temp.

      He’ll never change. And he’ll never get her to go out with him, she thought.

      She clicked on a couple of hits on the subject in a law enforcement database. In Oregon, two men had been killed over a cache of cinnamon-scented mushrooms that brought an astonishingly high price in Japan’s epicurean industry. A Filipino woman in Thurston County was mutilated by a rival picker when she was caught working his territory.

      He cut off both her thumbs.

      “You bitch, you steal no more,” he’d said over and over as she ran holding her severed thumbs to her chest, screaming out of the woods. The man was eventually arrested and convicted and was serving ten years in Walla Walla.

      A report indicated that violence had escalated along with the demand for floral greens. It seemed that more and more illegal immigrants were taking up the trade as the land, in some places, became overworked. She learned that Sheriff’s Office stats indicated that over the past two years the number of complaints made by private landowners had doubled.

      The complaint made by Brett Matthews of Olalla in the very southernmost part of Kitsap County was typical of what Kendall found in the reports:

      You should see the noble fir my dad planted twenty years ago. They’ve skinned the branches up to the tiptop. Hope someone’s enjoying that Christmas wreath at my expense. What’s with these people?

      Why don’t they stay off my land? Next time I’ll shoot

      anyone who comes to rustle what’s mine.

      Kendall checked Mr. Matthews’ tax records to make sure he didn’t own any property in the Sunnyslope area.

      He didn’t.

      An article in the mainstream press also caught her eye. It had appeared in the Olympia paper two years prior. The writer presented the idea that brushpicking was one of the last vestiges of the Old West, a kind of job that pitted man and woman against

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