The sun was sucking in its final breaths before plunging its head beneath the cold water, and I figured I had less than two minutes before I was engulfed in darkness.
After two more explosions of water on rock, I still hadn’t seen any sign of the woman. There was a strong possibility her body had been carried by the undertow and sucked from the cove whereby it would become someone else’s problem.
And good riddance, as they say.
I decided to give it one more wave before hightailing it up the rock while I could still find my hand in front of me. Then I saw her, her body twisting and rolling in the white water just off the rock bank. I nearly made a dash for it. I caught myself, and seconds later the cove erupted. The blast would have sent me reeling into the icy water.
At this point, it dawned on me it was going to be impossible to extract the woman from the freezing water without getting soaked myself. I removed my wallet and wedged it between two rocks.
Got to keep those Benjamins dry.
The water calmed, but the woman had disappeared. A moment later, her body popped up, rolling against the rocks. This was my first good look at the body. Or what was left of it.
Her right arm was missing at the shoulder. Both legs had been stripped down to the bone. Huge chunks of flesh had been ripped from her torso. The remaining flesh was a chalky purple, and the exposed bone was stained a deep red. It was evident the body had been attacked by something. Mauled. I’d said sharks earlier, but a more likely scenario was killer whales. They were abundant in these waters and, although it was rare, they did attack humans. But the odds were this woman was dead hours, or even days, before the feast.
I jumped down the last couple feet and huddled behind a large boulder. The blast came, showering me in salt water. I wiped my eyes and waited for the woman to resurface. She popped up and I took the four strides to the edge of the churning Sound. I could hear the next wave making its approach, but I was at the point of no return. I lowered myself onto the rock and wrenched my arm under the woman’s remaining arm.
The body rose with the incoming wave, and I pulled the woman up and out of the water. The blast came, spraying the two of us in a couple thousand gallons of sea water. Freezing would be an understatement. It was a biting cold, one that clawed at your very insides.
I coughed a couple dozen times before pushing myself off the rock. I then dragged what was left of the woman to a haven behind a large boulder.
My chest was heaving as I turned and looked out on the dark water. The sun was gone, a faint reddish glow all that remained.
I turned my attention to the body. The woman was even worse off than at first glance. Maybe a third of her body remained, reduced to mere bones and torn flesh. Half her torso was eaten down to the ribs, and her entrails spilled out through her lower abdomen. Her head and neck had, for the most part, been spared. I brushed the woman’s dark hair from her face.
If I had my doubts that this woman had been killed by Shamu and friends, now I was positive she hadn’t. I’d only heard of a handful of killer whale attacks, and I’d never heard of a killer whale carrying a gun.
There, just above the woman’s left eye, was the distinct fingerprint of a bullet. A small, black hole.
Chapter 4
I considered draping the corpse over my shoulder, but the thought was fleeting. The chances of going up the way I’d come down were slim, so I reluctantly started down the path of route B. I found the trail and slowly began picking my way through the rocks.
As if the traverse weren’t hard enough in the pitch dark, ten minutes into my hike it started raining. Which quickly turned to hail. Awesome. Twenty minutes and 2,548 little hail daggers later, I pulled myself under the railing to the viewing platform. This particular scenic overlook was fairly popular, and there was a small covered veranda illuminated by a handful of dimly lit bulbs. Informative posters clinging to the walls displayed what exactly people were paying fifty cents to look at. Another wall housed dozens of pamphlets promoting different ferries, tours, whale watching excursions, and various other ways for tourists to waste their money. Attached to the veranda was a public restroom as well as a pay phone.
I picked up the phone and dialed 911.
I was asked if it was an emergency and I decided it wasn’t, seeing as how the lady had probably already been digested by whatever had eaten her, and I was put on hold. I perused a pamphlet on the San Juan Islands as I waited. Apparently, it had never been a better time to visit the San Juans. I flipped over the pamphlet and read the copyright: 1992.
The woman came back on the line and after a short conversation told me, and I quote, “Being that it’s Thanksgiving and all, it will be about an hour before we can get anybody out there.” I told her I didn’t think the dead lady with the bullet hole in her forehead cared what day it was and hung up.
I trekked the half mile back to my place.
I pulled off my soaked garments, tossed them on the floor, and made my way upstairs into the bathroom Lacy and I had shared as children. My sister had a thing for flamingos, and they were everywhere. Toothbrush holder, shower curtain, Kleenex box. You name it and it had a flamingo on it. There was a flamingo-pink rug as well as a matching flamingo-pink toilet seat cover. Two towels hung from a towel rod and each was adorned with—you guessed it—a giant fucking flamingo.
I had just wrapped a towel around my waist and was heading for my dad’s closet for some duds when I heard a knock at the door. It’d only been twenty minutes since I’d spoken with one of Seattle’s finest, but I wasn’t expecting anybody else, so I was led to believe someone of the law enforcement variety was standing on my doorstep. I waddled down the stairs.
I’m not sure who I’d been expecting on the other side of the door, but I can assure you it wasn’t this. This being a woman clad in a red turtleneck sweater—the tight fitting kind, mind you—black pleated pants, and a standard issue .45 holstered on her right hip. From my experience, oil and vinegar mix better than women and guns. Just saying.
I noticed the car on the far side of the street. It was an unmarked car, tan, probably a Chevy. So she either worked for the IRS or she was a homicide detective.
The woman raised a badge to eye level and said, “Detective Erica Frost, Seattle Police Department.”
So I wasn’t getting audited after all.
I asked, “Did you guys get new uniforms or something?” If they had, bras were apparently optional. I mean, she looked like she was smuggling honeydews. Not that I was complaining.
She glanced down at her sweater. “I was at a Thanksgiving get-together.” Raising her eyes to check out my damp, towel-clad form, she added, “You obviously were not.”
“I ordered pizza.”
She stared at me.
“I went with the Hawaiian.”
No response.
“That’s pineapple and Canadian bacon to the layman.”
Again, just stared.
“Domino’s.”
A little nod.
“The kid on the phone talked me into getting the cinnamon breadsticks.”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“Me too.”
I should mention that Detective Erica Frost was attractive in that tongue-hit-your-boot sort of way. Of course, if she’d been ugly, I would have been slightly less annoying. Slightly. She had wavy brown hair, light brown, almost hazel eyes, and looked like a poster girl for pilates. I should also mention I was mesmerized by her sweater. It was my hero.
She was eyeing my towel again and said, “Nice flamingo.”
I looked myself up and down. “Frank.”
She looked confused.
“Frank the flamingo.”
Eye roll.
“You came alone?”
She nodded.
“Where’s your partner?”
“I didn’t see any reason to call him.”
“What if I was a bad guy?”
Erica Frost probably felt lik
e I was patronizing her, but I wasn’t. At least not completely. A few years back, I’d come across a serial killer who would report a crime, then ambush the first officer to arrive. He killed four officers and two detectives before we caught him.
I couldn’t help but notice Erica’s hand was now resting on the butt of her pistol. I think she was toying with the notion of shooting me. She wouldn’t be the first. Or the last. She asked, “Well, are you a bad guy?”
“No. But people say I can be an asshole.”
“Imagine that.” Apparently, she’d already come to this conclusion on her own, but she stepped into the foyer nonetheless. “Are you going to tell me your name, or am I just supposed to guess?”
Frosty, this one.
Get it.
I answered, “Thomas.”
“Thomas what?”
“Just Thomas. They ran out of last names before they got to my family. We’re on a waiting list.”
She sighed, a heavy one. “Well, Thomas, do you want to show me to this body?”
“Sure thing. But we’re going to need flashlights.”
“I have a couple in my car.”
She ran out to get them and I ran upstairs. I grabbed an old pair of my dad’s gray sweat pants and a red, hooded sweatshirt.
Erica was standing in the foyer when I made my way downstairs. She didn’t comment on the fact that I looked like an ad for Russell Athletic.
She thrust a flashlight in my hand, and we made our way outside. The storm had subsided, but it was still drizzling, which didn’t seem to bother Erica in the slightest. Although, to be fair, to your native Seattleite, drizzle was about as mundane as breathing.
I flopped up the hood on my sweatshirt and said, “Nice night.”
She didn’t comment on this and I took her silence as agreement. As we started around back, I informed Erica of the options for getting to the body. She lobbied for the quickest path and I went on to explain the dangers. I did a bit of exaggerating, a decent amount of embellishing, and even a couple of outright lies. And yes, when I was finished, route A did carry a remarkable likeness to that of the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride. But I’d already risked my life twice in a day I’d been penciled in to do so zero times.
Again, she thought I was mocking her and started picking her way down the bluff.
I yelled that I’d meet her down there in about half an hour.
She scoffed. “C’mon, it’s a little hill.”
One, this thing ate hills for breakfast. Two, it was pitch dark. Three, it had been hailing for the past thirty minutes. And four, there were quicksand pits and R.O.U.S. Hadn’t she been listening?
She shrugged and said, “Suit yourself.”
She continued down, and I reluctantly started after her. When I caught up with her, I said, “That’s a pretty spiffy sweater. I’d take it off if I were you.”
“How ‘bout not?”
“Worth a try.”
“Stop trying.”
“Noted.”
I thought perhaps Erica would have let me take the lead seeing as how: 1) I’d done this only hours earlier, 2) this was my backyard, 3) I knew the best path to the water, and 4) I had a penis. She veered off to the left and found a trail. I guess not.
I said, “It’s better to stay in the trees.” It was more difficult and time-consuming, but if you fell in the trees there was something to hang onto.
Erica cut her eyes at me and said, “Thanks, but if I want your help, I’ll ask for it.”
Yikes.
After two or three minutes, Erica had a substantial lead on me. I could see the beam of her flashlight bobbing and weaving thirty feet below me. I grabbed hold of the trunk of a large madrone and lowered myself down a couple feet. The soil was slippery, and I nearly lost my footing. When I righted myself, I noticed the beam of Erica’s flashlight was no longer visible. I called her name but only a dull echo responded. I’m not sure if she was physically unable to answer or if her pride was caught in her throat.
I picked my way down to where I’d last seen her and continued to shout her name. After a couple seconds, I heard a faint, “Over here!”
I headed in that direction. After about thirty seconds of “Marco Polo,” I found her. I shined my flashlight in her face. She squinted her eyes against the light. “You okay, sport?” I tried for my most concerned tone.
She’d slid about twenty feet down and was hanging onto an exposed root jutting from the ground. Half her body dangled off a steep drop-off. I watched as she attempted to pull herself up, but the incline was too steep and she couldn’t get a footing.
I inched closer and shined the flashlight down on the terrain below. If she lost her grip she was going to go for quite the tumble. It would go something like crash, bang, slice, snap, splash, gurgle, eulogy.
She forced a smile. “Never better.”
“Really? Because you don’t look like you’re all right.”
She made a noise.
“Did you know you’re dangling off a fifty-foot drop-off?”
“I’m aware of that.” She had an underlying defiance in her voice that I didn’t appreciate.
“Have you ever seen The English Patient?”
“The movie?”
“Yeah, the movie The English Patient. The one where the guy goes to the desert and gets sick.”
“Sure. Yeah. Sounds familiar.”
“Man, does it take him a while to die. What, like, almost four hours?”
“Uh. Yeah, long, uh, long movie.” She glanced at her fingers. They appeared to be tiring.
“What do you suppose he had?”
“Who?”
“The guy from that movie. What do you suppose he had? You know, to make him so sick?”
She opened and closed her eyes a couple times. I could tell she was really racking her brain for this. Or maybe she was getting exhausted from hanging off a cliff. Probably a combination of the two. Finally she said, “Um, he had cancer. Yeah. Some sort of cancer.”
“Cancer, huh? You sure? I’m thinking it was some sort of pox. Chicken or small.”
“Could have been.” Her fingers were going frantic, slipping, readjusting. She looked up. The defiance was gone, swapped for pure and utter panic. She said, “Um, listen, do you suppose you could lend me a hand here?”
I bent down, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up. She was surprisingly light.
Her flashlight had come to rest about six feet from her. I plucked it from the mud and wiped the lens clean with my sleeve. I handed it back to her, gave her a soft pat on the shoulder, and started picking my way down the bluff. Through the trees, of course.
From that point on, Erica followed behind me.
Chapter 5
After a couple minutes of silence, I turned and asked the detective, who was nipping at my heels, “Do you mind my asking how old you are?”
“Yes.”
I waited for her to elaborate. She did not.
I turned and stared at her.
She said, “I’ll be 26 in two weeks.”
“You’re 25?”
She nodded.
“Isn’t that pretty young for a detective?”
She shrugged. “I guess so. The rule of thumb is usually three years working the beat, but when the position opened up, I was the obvious choice.”
I knew the rule of thumb. “And when was this?”
“About ten days ago.”
I stopped and turned. “Are you shitting me?”
“Nope.”
I wanted to tell Detective Erica Frost what I used to tell my students on the first day of class: “Don’t do this. Walk out that door right now and find something else. It will ruin you. It will eat you up from the inside. It will rip out your heart and poison your brain. You’ve all seen Ghostbusters? It’s like where they put all those ghosts. You store them in this little part of your brain, a part you can’t see, a part they don’t have a name for, a part that won’t show up on a CAT sca
n. And you lock them away. Now, it might be thirty years from now, but eventually something is going to flip that switch and let all those ghosts loose. And you can’t put them back. You can’t ever lock them up again. Do yourself a favor, get up, walk out that door, and never look back.” In three semesters only one kid left. He became a real estate agent. Then one of his clients killed him. Life’s funny sometimes.
Erica snapped me from my reverie. “And what do you do for a living?”
“I’m retired.”
“Well, what is it you used to do?”
“I used to be a party planner.”
“Really? You don’t strike me as the type.”
“Yep. I specialized in Retirement and Going Away.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah. Why? You need something planned? I also do Graduation and Coming Out.”
“Not right now. But if I do, you’re the first person I’ll call.”
We made it to the small landing where I’d stopped earlier. We both swept our flashlights over the dark water. The tide had gone out and had taken the white water with it. Erica moved her flashlight to the area just to our right and said, “Is that a wallet?”
She knelt down and pulled my wallet from where I’d hid it just an hour earlier.
“It’s probably the killer’s.” Figured I’d throw that out there.
She ignored me.
She flipped the wallet open and shined her flashlight on the license. She looked from the license to me, then back to the license, then back to me. “Six foot. Brown hair. Blue eyes. 180 pounds.” She flipped the wallet closed and handed it to me. Then she said with a smirk, “Consider yourself a suspect, Mr. Prescott.”
I smiled, took the wallet from her, and put it in my pocket.
The body was where I’d left it. Erica sidled up to what was left of the woman, training her flashlight on the partially devoured flesh. She went down on her haunches, wrinkling her nose in the process. I guess the smell was getting to her. She looked up at me and asked, “What do you suppose happened to her?”