Closer Than Blood

you?” Point made.

“Yeah, I guess I would.”

With the new widow still in the hospital, Eddie Kaminski returned to the scene of the shooting on North Junett. He’d noticed a koi pond near the walk up to the Connellys’ front door the night of the shooting, but it wasn’t because it was sinister. His former wife, Maria, had wanted to have a goldfish pond installed in their backyard early in their marriage. When they couldn’t afford a landscaper, she dug the pond herself, shovel by shovel. Kaminski remembered coming home from a long day on patrol, and how happy she was that the inexpensive feeder goldfish she’d bought by the bucket had laid eggs. It wasn’t the only news she had to share. She was pregnant. It was the happiest day of his life. The last time he saw the pond was moving day, when all the happiness had literally drained from the Kaminskis’ life. The pond had turned green and was full of Douglas fir needles, a decaying symbol of their dying marriage. He walked up the pathway to the door of the stately Victorian and the koi pond. Just below the surface a fragment of red and white caught his attention. Kaminski bent down to get a better look. It was the edge of a plastic bag. The red, a half circle filled with another, smaller one, appeared to be the familiar logo of Target. He wondered what was more incongruent—a Target bag in that neighborhood or the presence of plastic refuse in a pristine pond. He looked around for something to help retrieve the bag. The yard was perfectly landscaped with not a tool lying around, not even a garden shed. Nothing was handy, so the detective did his best to wrestle with some bamboo that had been artfully planted along the pond’s farthest edge. Another reason to hate this annoyingly invasive plant, he thought. A piece snapped in his hands, and he poked the end through a small void in the lily pad–studded surface. It took some finessing, and he figured ice fishing north of Spokane with his dad had served him well when he snagged the bag and managed to pull it out. It was heavy. It didn’t belong there. He knew what he had. The bag conformed to the shape of its contents. A gun.

“Not just any gun,” Kaminski said to himself, his heart pumping with a little more vigor.

“The murder weapon.”

It had started in the kitchen with his back to the soapstone island. Tori wore a thin blouse that allowed her nipples to show. She opened the refrigerator and let the cold air pour over her body. As if she needed to call attention to what she was selling and how good it would be. Is there a more beautiful woman on the face of the earth? Not in magazines. Not on TV. The movies. Nowhere, she thought, always the best marketer of her own charms. She spun around and latched her hands around the small of his back, pulling gently, teasingly.

“You seem a little excited,” she said, looking at her lover.

“That’s lovely.” He wanted to speak, but he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She was in control and he was going along for the ride, happily, hungrily. Her fingertips slipped under his shirt and caressed his chest. He leaned backward, pushing his pelvis toward her.

“I know what you want,” she said. Her voice was soft, yet playful.

“Yes, I know you do,” he said. She undid his belt, then his jeans. Her fingers found his zipper and she pulled.

“A little tight,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, dropping to her knees. He was breathing heavy by then. He closed his eyes and she put her mouth on him. She stopped.

“Keep going,” he said.

“I will. I’ll get you there. Just let me do what I do best.” And she did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kitsap County

Cooking dinner in the Stark household was the kind of communal endeavor that artists so charmingly sketched for the Saturday Evening Post and that modern-day advertisers with buckets of guilt and products to sell still employed to remind people that the family that ate their meals together stayed together. Kendall and Steven alternated the roles of sous chef and head chef. On days when she was up to her neck with criminal investigations and the people who populated the files of her in- basket at the sheriff’s office, Kendall liked the feel of a sharp knife in her hands as chief chopper. She enjoyed the way carbide made its way through a potato or an onion. The cut felt good. A release. The day had been consumed by thoughts of the reunion, Lainie, and, of course, Tori. That her partner Josh Anderson was coming to dinner might drag the day to a new low. She pulled herself together. Focus, Kendall. Good things. Happy things. She looked around the kitchen. Things didn’t get much better than what she saw. It was—her son, her husband, her home—what she had dreamed about as a girl in Port Orchard. The Starks had recently remodeled the kitchen, with Steven doing most of the work except the fabrication of the limestone slab countertop. Kendall sanded the cupboards before Steven lacquered them with a creamy white, but quickly learned that there was no glory in sanding. Increasingly, it was clear that the kitchen had been designed with Steven’s preferences in mind, anyway. Kendall didn’t care. The backside of the new island had, by default, become her domain. She prepped the salad—a mix of arugula, romaine, and fennel—and looked at the clock.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked. Steven stirred the contents of a saucepan.

“You mean an evening with To-Know-Me-Is-to-Love-Me?”

“I felt sorry for him,” Kendall said.

“Josh almost cost you your job. But, no, if you can forgive him, I can, too.” Kendall turned to Cody, who was sitting at the kitchen table working on arranging dried pasta into an intricate design that suggested both chaos and order. Kendall was unsure if it was a road in a mountainous landscape or something else. Pasta was linked up, one piece after another, and fanned out into a kind of swirling shape. Cody had always been adept at puzzles— sometimes putting them together with the reverse side up, using only shapes and not imagery to fit each piece together.

“You doing okay, babe?” Kendall asked. Cody looked up, a faint smile on his round face. Whatever he was thinking about at that moment was a pleasant thought. It might have been dinner. It could have been the stars in the sky. Cody spoke, but not often. He was not an alien like some spiteful people consider those with autism, but a gentle spirit who had an awareness of everything around him—even when it seemed he let no one inside.

“Good. I’m good,” he said.

“I know you are,” she said. Cody had become more verbal in the past few months. And while his responses weren’t exactly lengthy, they did get the point across, and they gave his parents and doctors hope that his particular form of autism might not be as severe as once thought. It was true that he’d likely never be able to function without continued support and guidance; he wasn’t going to end up in some hospital somewhere. He was only nine, of course, but the Starks feared the day that they were gone and what their son would face in life without the love of those who knew him.

“Lasagna’s ready to come out,” Steven said. Kendall squeezed a lemon into the salad dressing she was mixing with a wire balloon whisk in a small glass bowl. She dropped in a little Dijon, some minced shallots, and a sprinkle of cayenne. With the tip of a spoon, she tasted the dressing, made a face, and added another squeeze of honey from a plastic bear-shaped bottle.

“Perfect timing,” she said, catching the sight of a BMW as it moved into the parking area behind the house.

“Josh is here now.”

Josh Anderson had been an infrequent guest in the Stark residence for the past year. He’d heard about the remodel and had even offered to help out, but his proposal was halfhearted and the relationship was somewhat strained following their last major case, the so-called Kitsap Cutter, and subsequent media brouhaha. He stood at the doorway, bottle of Oregon pinot noir in hand and a somewhat nervous smile on his face. At fifty-two, Josh no