Victim Six by Gregg Olsen Read Free Book Online

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 in 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