Closer Than Blood

Ronnie Jonas had no idea that the kettle was over a flame.

“I want you to come back here tonight. I will have something for you to do.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” he said.

“Baby, you don’t have anything to worry about.” She turned and walked away. If the boy came as she thought he might, everything would be perfect. Taking another party into her plan had really no risk. The other party would never live long enough to say a word. Tori knew that she’d made a mistake on Banner Road. She would think twice about letting a witness live again.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Haleiwa

The present

In her room at the Haleiwa Beach Inn Kendall fiddled with the AC, which someone had set on chill-blaster mode. She’d gone from 90 degrees to 55 and was shaking from the unpleasantly cold air. She’d packed light, too light. She found a beach towel and wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl. All she’d learned that day was that no one liked Lainie’s sister, and her husband had died in a tragic accident. Things she already knew. She changed into an ice blue sundress and sandals and touched up her makeup. A few hours on the beach and she’d already lost the pallid skin that characterizes those from Seattle or the undead. Not a burn, but almost. Even so, she looked pretty good. Rikki Tyler, the retired Honolulu detective who had investigated the Zach Campbell beach accident, had agreed to meet her for dinner in the bar at Haleiwa Joe’s. She took the towel-shawl off her shoulders, stepped into the warmth of a beautiful Hawaiian evening, and made her way to the restaurant. Tyler, half English and half Hawaiian, had all the good attributes of both. His hair was jet black and thick, and his brown eyes sparkled with intelligence. Kendall introduced herself at the hostess station. She explained the situation with Jason Reed and her role in the investigation in Kitsap County. By way of full disclosure, she also confirmed that she had gone to high school with the O’Neal sisters.

“I used to be a friend of Tori’s,” she said.

“Well, I used to be a cop,” Rikki said, his white teeth gleaming in the dim light of the restaurant.

“Until my wife told me she’d had enough. She wanted to return to Idaho. We moved. But Idaho is no place for a Hawaiian boy.” Kendall understood completely.

“There’s no ocean beach, for sure.”

“That’s why I’m back here, working at the Walmart in Aiea as a security guard. You caught me on my day off and, frankly, you reminded me of a case that I always wondered about.”

“What did you wonder about, Rikki?” she asked as they took their seats next to a boisterous group from the mainland. He shook his head.

“Want a drink?” Kendall ordered a Blue Hawaiian.

“When in Haleiwa,” she said. Rikki might have been retired, but he was still very interested in Tori Campbell.

“What happened after your friend returned to the mainland?” Kendall studied her unnaturally blue drink, fiddled with the pink paper umbrella that came with it, and took her time answering.

“Good question. She put the house she and Zach shared up on the market within the first day or two. She sold it in a week. She bought an expensive house on Oyster Bay about three months later. It was way more money than I thought she had, but of course I hadn’t considered the life insurance.”

“Do you know how much she got?”

“Not really. Lainie was working at the P-I then. She told me she asked a friend on the business desk to look into the real estate deal. This was prior to the whole world being at your fingertips on the Internet. When a cell phone was only good for calling someone. She paid cash.”

“Must have made some major dough selling the first place,” Rikki said.

“Not really. They owed a lot on it. She maybe came away with a few thousand.”

“How much was the new house?”

“Four hundred grand. That’s chump change for a place here, but in Bremerton, we’re talking a Bill Gates–type property.” She paused a second, rethinking her statement.

“Maybe not quite Gates.”

“She paid for it with insurance proceeds,” he said. She nodded.

“I guess so.” Rikki gulped the last of his drink, and motioned to the bartender for another.

“What’s the victim in Tacoma worth to her?”

“Two million.”

“She’s trading up, isn’t she?”

“Tori was always was that kind of a girl.” They talked a bit more after a waitress left a plate of coconut shrimp and mango chutney—just delicious enough to halt the conversation a moment.

“You brought something for me,” Kendall said, indicating his briefcase.

“Like all retired detectives working at Walmart,” Rikki said with a self-deprecating smile, “I have photocopies of some of my old cases stashed at home. The criteria, not surprising to you, I’m sure, were the cases that I felt would be the subject of interest someday.

“How many of those? Just four. Your friend’s sister’s case made the cut.” He opened his beat-up alligator briefcase and produced a small stack of papers. Lainie could see a few more than what she’d found in the North Junett house.

“What did you make of the crime scene?”

“Other than what I wrote?”

“Right. I mean you mention the terrain, the wide grooves in the sand, but you don’t really say what they were. Or if it was related.” Rikki nodded.

“Yeah, the grooves in the sand, as you call them, were strange indeed. They led from the parking lot to where they were sitting on the beach. We thought there might have been a cooler or a board dragged, but we couldn’t track ’em.”

“How come there were no photos showing them?” Rikki fanned out the remaining pages.

“I guess I blame myself for that. We didn’t do a good job securing the scene. We focused on the body and recovering it, not the entire stretch of beach. It is, after all, a pretty big beach.” Kendall, adept at reading upside down as any reporter, noticed the toxicology report.

“What did tox say?” she asked. Rikki flipped through the three pages that were the sum of the finding from the lab in Honolulu.

“Alcohol in his system, some trace of a sleeping pill, and—this was the only interesting part—there was some chlorine in the seawater in his lungs.”

“Chlorine?”

“Trace, really. But interesting.”

“Yeah, I mean, you keep Hawaii’s beaches spotless, but not that clean.” Rikki laughed nervously, then became completely serious.

“I think it was an error at the lab, Kendall. We were going through a bad time back then. Had a flake in the lab who thought that processing evidence was ignoring it.” Kendall understood. While Kitsap County had never had such a scandal, other jurisdictions had a rash of them.

“Tell me about her. Tell me about your interview with her.”

“Memorable,” he said, grateful for the change in topic.

“Do you mean to make me cry? Do you get off on seeing a girl tormented for no reason?” Rikki Tyler rolled his eyes and sipped his iced tea. The air-conditioning in the police station was working overtime, sending a cool stream throughout the space. After her husband’s body was recovered, the young woman with the stunning tan, blond hair, and slender body had exhibited enough evasive and combative behavior that an interview off scene was in order.

“You are something else, aren’t you?” Tori Campbell looked at the mirrored surface of the window behind him. She knew there were prying eyes looking at her, studying her like she was an exhibit in a greenhouse or maybe even a zoo. Yes, that’s how they’d been treating her. Like a caged animal.

“Do you mean to offend me, officer? I’m a visitor here in your so-called island paradise and my husband has died.”

“Detective,” Tyler said, now drilling his stare into her blue swimming-pool