Closer Than Blood

screen. She pushed the send button and closed the window.

“Sorry. No harm. No foul.”

She couldn’t blame it on the food at Bite that evening. But once more Lainie couldn’t sleep. Her eyelids popped up like pulled window shades with broken springs. Lainie O’Neal shifted under the covers and lamented how the drama of the past days had beaten her back to the familiar point of exhaustion and sleeplessness. She still had not renewed her sleeping pill prescription, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Her doctor had said that her inability to sleep might be rooted in some unchecked psychological problem. It wasn’t the first time that she’d heard that.

“A pill will only mask the problem, Lainie. You need to address what is eating at you day and night,” he said. She would change doctors again. In the meantime, she knew the pattern of the past few nights would play out again. Sleep would come after 3 A.M. and so would the nightmares. By 4 A.M. she’d be awake, shivering, and alone to try to come to terms with what she’d seen in her dreams, dreams that always included her sister. Finally, darkness and slumber came. She followed the sound of angry voices down the hallway of the house in Port Orchard. She was in a pale pink nightgown, following the sound into her parents’ room. She stood there in front of her mother, her fists balled up and tears streaming down her face. As she took it all in, her mind floated to the ceiling where she looked down at the scene playing underneath her. A curtain fluttered. Her blond head from above. Her mother in the bed looking at her, her head propped up on a satin pillow.

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“You looked at me like I did. That’s enough.”

“A look isn’t the same as an accusation, Tori.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Mom.”

“No, you don’t. I told you what I thought, and you seem to think that I’ve said something otherwise.”

“I hate you. I hate her. I hate him.”

“Hate is an ugly word.”

“You are ugly. You are stupid. You are boring.” The insults were the trifecta of teenager insults at anyone, especially mothers.

“I’m not having this conversation. If you can’t be nice now, come back when you can. We’re done here. Leave.”

“I wish you were dead.” Their mother closed her eyes and exhaled a sigh.

“I will be someday. I might even be dead now.” The scene stalled, and then crackled like an old 1960s TV clip as the imagery went from color to black-and-white. Lainie watched from above, her back pressed against the popcorn ceiling. A male’s voice interrupted the single moment of quiet.

“What’s going on here?” It was the familiar voice of their father.

“Nothing. She’s being mean.”

“I’m being truthful and she knows it.” As the images faded and she began to wake, her body drenched in sweat, Lainie could not be sure who had said what. She got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She looked down at her hands, still balled up in a rage for which she had no control. Slowly and deliberately she unfurled her fingers. There was nothing inside but lozenge- and circular-shaped indentations. Lainie wondered if she was awake or asleep. If she’d seen herself or her sister. More than anything, she wondered if there was a message coming from Tori at that very moment as she slept and dreamed in the bedroom down the hall.

“Tori,” she said aloud, “what is this all about? Tell me. What did you do?”

Tori sat straight up in the big Rice bed. The clock was ticking toward a deadline that mattered. Not like the seemingly arbitrary IRS deadline of April 15, or the kind of line in the sand that someone adheres to when they insist something has to be done by a certain time. This deadline wasn’t like that at all. In fact, some might see it as a time of celebration. A rite of passage. It was only a few days until Saturday. Once the clock struck midnight, everything would be exactly as she’d wanted. As they dreamed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Port Orchard

Kendall looked over reports from the night of the shooting in Tacoma and the preliminary report Birdy Waterman had completed on the stabbing of homicide victim Mikey Walsh in Kingston. They were not related by methods of homicide, by geography or socioeconomic status. Yet Kendall didn’t believe in the concept of coincidences. Certainly there was a random order to the universe, but when it came to evil there often was a connection. Evil is rare and not that random. In instances in which a crime had been staged by a perpetrator, items were often scattered willy-nilly. In fact, overscattered . If Tori Connelly had fabricated the events of the evening, she’d exercised considerable restraint in her coverup. That very little in the house was disturbed bolstered her contention that an intruder had entered the residence and panicked after coming across Alex watching TV. Any killer who makes the mistake of doing the deed in their own home usually stages every aspect of the crime to ensure that even the greenest detective or crime-scene investigator sees each clue as it is hurtled at them. Drawers pulled out. Coffee table overturned. Jewelry littering the floor like bread crumbs to the front door. All of those things were right out of the mostly caught killer’s playbook of greatest mistakes. Yet very little of that, aside from a single pulled-out drawer and an overturned potted fern, had been found at the scene of the Connelly murder. Alex Connelly was killed execution-style. But if so . . . who? And why? Mikey Walsh had been on the scene of a fatal traffic accident fifteen years ago. Within days of the body of the victim being exhumed, he’s stabbed to death. Susan Piccolo, the church secretary, indicated that some money was missing. But was that merely staging, too? Liver temperature put Mikey’s death on Monday. The report also noted that he’d been stabbed five times, though Birdy considered two of the wounds as “tentative” in nature. Afraid? Weak? Uncertain? Josh appeared in the hallway and Kendall called out to him.

“I think the cases are related,” she said.

“Of course you do,” he answered.

“You like that sort of thing.” Just when she thought he’d be a decent person, the old Josh was back.

“Why are you being dismissive?”

“Look, I know a big conspiracy theory is a lot of fun. But there’s no way your Tori stabbed that preacher.” Kendall shook her head.

“I didn’t say she stabbed him. What if someone is helping her?”

“Why would that be? And who?” It was clear that Josh was only playing along.

“I don’t know, but Tori is in the thick of this. I can feel it.” Josh picked up the autopsy report and turned toward the door.

“What if we look for a meth head that needed some dough and the preacher was a good target?” Kendall didn’t agree at all.

“You’re the lead on this one,” she said.

“You figure it out.”

“Tracked down the source of the red tape. It’s nothing professional, like I hoped. It’s sold only in craft stores. Our killer might be Martha Stewart.” Kendall didn’t say a word.

“That was a joke,” he said.

“I just forgot to laugh,” she said.

“It might be because there isn’t anything funny about a minister who’d been gutted, Josh.”

“I’m afraid.” Parker Connelly’s adolescent voice came over the phone like a leaky bicycle tire, soft, fading. He was in his bed, the covers thrown over his head like an army-issue pup tent. He had called Tori to pledge his love, to tell her that he missed her. He’d hoped that they’d share a little phone sex. His hand was in the waistband of his Diesel boxers when he dialed, but as the conversation moved from pleasure to murder, he vacated that idea.

“You should be,” she said, her voice cool and direct, “afraid that you will never, never have my legs wrapped around you again.” Parker’s muscles tensed a little and he rolled over toward the wall, his body wrapped in a cocoon of fabric. It was the kind of position that suggested a desire for protection. He could feel his stomach churn in the way that it did when he had to give a speech in front of the class—times one million.

“That’s not what I was talking about, Tori,” he said.

“I don’t know why we’re even talking. Period. Every day that this goes on you prove to me that you’re not the man that I thought you were.” She paused a moment as if to reconsider her statement.