“Scorching.”
“Sure you don’t want us to take you to the airport?”
“Too late, babe. I’ll park at Thrifty and take the shuttle.” Kendall hated lying to Steven. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and tell him just why she was going, where she was going, and that she just couldn’t let Tori get away with murder. Not again. She got out of her car on the Southworth ferry for the crossing to West Seattle, and went upstairs to the passenger deck. She let the wind wash over her, blowing her hair, caressing her like the love of a lifetime ago. I’m sorry, Steven. I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you everything. 
The telephone conversation didn’t go well but Parker Connelly could have guessed that would be the case. He knew by his mother’s overwrought, and judgmental, reaction that he’d screwed up big- time. Murder was big, indeed. Pour a big heap of suspicion coming from the Kitsap detectives on top of that and he knew he was in deep trouble.
“You did what?” Tori repeated.
“It was a packet of money and I took it.”
“Are you stupid because you’re young or just plain stupid?”
“Don’t treat me like this,” he said, his voice low because he didn’t want his mom to hear him arguing with his lover. His stepmother. There was silence on the line and Parker pleaded a second time.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What did Kendall and her partner say?”
“They thought we were sleeping together, but I convinced them otherwise. They are going to get a warrant or something, at least that’s what Mom thinks.” She seethed on the other end of the line, doing her best to maintain control. Finally, Tori spoke.
“We’re going to have to speed up our plans,” she said.
“Use the ID I gave you and check in to a motel in South Tacoma. A rat hole. A place where no one is going to pay attention to you. I’ll come and get you,” she said, hanging up. Parker grabbed his car keys, his laptop, and a jacket and climbed out the window. He was gone.
Tori rolled over and raked her fingernails down the chest of her lover.
“You have been working out,” she said.
“Yeah, I have,” he said.
“We have a problem,” she said.
“So I heard.” She scooted closer.
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Honolulu
As Kendall Stark sat on the overnight flight for Honolulu, she knew she was an anomaly among the other travelers. She wasn’t going to Hawaii to celebrate a wedding anniversary, a birthday, a honeymoon. She was going there to find out what, if anything, had been missed when Tori Connelly’s first husband died there. Of course, there’d been an investigation. A cursory investigation at best, Kendall thought. A retired Honolulu detective named Rikki Tyler had sent her a portion of a minuscule case file as a courtesy. It consisted of two witness statements. One was from a bystander who’d come across Tori on the beach as she screamed that something was wrong. It was to the point.
“The woman in pink was on her knees yelling about her husband. I saw the body in the surf and I pulled it ashore. I don’t know CPR. The lady was too upset to do anything. I think the man was already dead. I don’t know what happened. I am very sorry that the man died.” Tori’s own statement was a little longer and it pretty much echoed what she’d told her sister when she called the evening of the accident. Lainie told Kendall how she was at the P-I working on an article about incorporating vegetables in the Northwest landscape—a very Seattle kind of story. The kind she never wanted to write in the first place. The kind she would kill to write if only the paper had not gone under and left her jobless and now consumed by what her sister might have done. Lainie told Kendall how the newsroom seemed to go silent and how the air thickened when her sister told her.
“Zach is dead! He died in an accident! I’m coming home.”
“Oh my God, Tori. What happened?” Tori sobbed a story into the phone and, despite her being a reporter, Lainie asked no questions. It was so much of a shock that she could barely catch her breath and tell Tori that she’d be all right. Everything would be okay. She wrote down the flight number for Tori’s return the next day.
“I’ll pick you up,” Lainie said.
“I have to go now,” Tori said.
“I have to make arrangements for Zach.” Lainie wanted to ask if that meant she was shipping the body back, but it seemed too touchy, too painful a thing to bring up. Yet Tori answered the question before her sister asked it.
“I’m having him cremated and his ashes spread over here. He loved Hawaii. I don’t want him to ever have to leave.” The scenario played in her mind those many years later. This was a second dead husband and a second rush to the crematory. Why the hurry? she wondered.
As the jet engines droned outside her window, Kendall finished her complimentary mai tai and looked down at Tori’s statement, given the day of the accident. A few things leaped off the pages.
“I told him that the surf was too rough. You’d think he’d listen to me. I’m an expert swimmer. I could have been on the Olympic team if I’d put my mind to it.” It was true. Tori was a great swimmer. Maybe not Olympic material, but knowing Tori as Kendall did, there was nothing she couldn’t excel at—swimming included. She recalled how Lainie told her that she didn’t even try to compete in swimming at South Kitsap. She didn’t have Tori’s speed, but she was a better diver. That rankled her sister a little and she appeared to love it. It was always hard to get the best of her if she decided she was going to do something. Piano. Cooking. Public speaking. Kendall knew Tori as the one who showed the instructors how things were done. She didn’t care if they hated her for it. She never cared what anyone thought.
“We’d taken the boogie boards out after lunch. It was about 2 P.M. My husband was an experienced surfer, having summered with his grandmother in Huntington Beach, California. I’d been on a board a time or two myself. . . .” Kendall wondered what “time or two” she was referring to? When she was younger? Always bragging about something. So very Tori. Also, Tori seemed to speak in a vocabulary that suggested the O’Neals were blue bloods from the East Coast. Summered? Did she really say that? Kendall turned her attention back to the report.
“My husband proceeded to swim out about a quarter of a mile from the shore. It might not have been that far. The sun was bright in my eyes and I lost track of him. I was paddling around when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of an enormous rogue wave. It must have been twenty feet or maybe thirty. It is hard to tell with any certainty. It happened so fast. When the wave got to me, I hung on to my board for dear life. I didn’t see what happened to Zach. I found him ten minutes later on the shore.” That was her statement. The case was closed. The Hawaiian authorities wrote it off as a tragic accident. Detective Tyler, who’d agreed to meet with her on the island, had included a truncated version of the coroner’s findings: “Victim died from blunt force trauma to the head while surfing.” There were four photos in the file. Only four, which in itself was surprising. There was a shot of the beach, the color of raw sugarcane, with barely a footprint to mar its smooth, broad nothingness. Off to one side of the image, she saw a paddle and a pair of sunglasses. Across the bottom of the scan was a notation that the photo had been taken at 4 P.M., “near the location of the accident.” Two others came without any notation. One was the image of young man, Asian or Hawaiian. He wasn’t posing, but it was clear the image was taken near the beach. Coconut palms were visible in the background. The next also included the young man, this time in front of a car with a Hawaiian plate. What does this have to do with Zach? The final photo was a picture of Tori, her blue eyes caught in a frightened, terrified gaze. The shiny glaze of her tears streaked her lightly tanned face. It wasn’t a face that Kendall would have ascribed to Tori. The woman in the photograph was in complete anguish. There was no way of faking that look. Kendall finished her drink. She was tired but too stressed to sleep. She only had two appointments—the owner of the house where Zach had last been seen alive and the retired cop. It wasn’t much, she knew, but if there had been a pattern of murder, Zach Campbell
