Closer Than Blood

“That makes number two,” she said, again doing some updating in the binder.

“She’s a very unlucky girl, our Tori O’Neal,” Adam said. Kendall looked at Adam. She knew he was making a statement swathed in irony, his forte since high school, but she didn’t like it.

“No one is that unlucky,” she said, unable to resist adding her two cents.

“Poor Lainie,” Adam said.

“Torrid was fun to watch in high school, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be her sister.”

“Her twin,” Penny said, drawing the connection even tighter.

“Yeah, that would totally suck.” Penny didn’t have a way with words, Kendall thought, but she was right. Tori O’Neal came with more baggage than an airport skycap.

“I wonder what happened this time?” Penny said.

“And where is she, anyway?”

“Tacoma,” Adam said. Penny was clearly surprised and there was no hiding it. Tacoma was across the Narrows from the peninsula, barely a half hour away from Port Orchard.

“That’s weird,” she said.

“I had no idea she was still in the area. I thought she’d left for California or Alaska or anywhere but around here. She hated it here.”

“Yeah, imagine that,” Adam said, looking at his phone as if it would force Lainie to send another text.

“Tori’s been hiding in plain sight.”

Kendall Stark returned to her office and dialed the number for the Tacoma Police Department. She identified herself and asked for the investigator in charge of the Connelly murder case, and Eddie Kaminski got on the line. She told him that Tori had roots in Kitsap and had been associated with the death of a young man, Jason Reed.

“You say it was a car accident?”

“Yes, but some things seemed odd about it.”

“Odd in what way?” Kendall didn’t have anything specific and she felt foolish just then.

“One witness said he was talking—alive—then suddenly, dead. Internal injuries can be like that. Other talk, too.”

“We deal with more than talk here in Tacoma,” Kaminski said.

“We deal with facts.” Her cheeks went a little pink.

“Of course. Did you know that her first husband died, too?” There was a short pause.

“It might have been mentioned to the other investigators,” he said.

“Yes, I think it was.”

“Can we meet? I could tell you more.” Again a slight pause.

“Hang on for a sec.” He put the phone on mute and returned a moment later.

“Busy here, sorry. Sure. Maybe you can come over this way?”

“All right. I’ll figure out a time and get back to you,” she said. After he hung up, Kaminski turned his attention to the medical examiner’s report on Alex Connelly. The sum of all the dead man had been reduced to the weights and measurements of his liver, his heart, his kidneys. His gunshot-addled brain. All were unremarkable. He was fit, healthy, and struck down in the prime of his life by a masked assailant. A bullet to the brain had killed him instantly. The second shot was merely icing on a murderer’s cake. He scanned the report— fifteen pages of diagrams and notes made by a pathologist who knew it was best to include every detail, mundane or not. Alex Connelly’s right earlobe bore the telltale puncture of a scarred-over piercing. As he read, Kaminski touched his own lobe, feeling the tiny lump of a scar from his own youthful indiscretion for the sake of fashion. Except for the fact that Connelly made five times Kaminski’s salary, the detective and the victim were so very much alike. Height and weight were the same. The victim had had a vasectomy. His tonsils had been removed. Check. Check. There was really nothing remarkable about Connelly, other than the horrific and violent way that he’d died. By the time the body was processed and released, his widow had already arranged for his cremation. It was as fast as one of those Pyrex commercials that crow about moving something from the freezer to the oven without a second in between.

CHAPTER SIX

Tacoma

It was the weary time of day when the world is sleeping and the digits on the clock are small and stand alone. Except for the crying from down the cavernous hallway toward the elevators, the fifth floor of St. Joseph Medical Center was quiet. No visitors. A nurse with a citrus yellow scrub over a red turtleneck studied the chart and checked the bag of fluids that circuited from a tube overhead into the vein of the woman everyone at the fifth floor nurses’ station was talking about. The gossip at the station centered on the tragedy that had unfolded on North Junett Street. Nurses have well-deserved reputations for caring and nurturing, but the reality of their world is that they see so much that it is hard to force a tear for every misfortune that rolls down the high-gloss linoleum floors. Diana Lowell, the nurse wearing the yellow smock, chatted a moment with a younger woman fresh out of nursing school. Her name escaped the veteran nurse, out of the unfortunate acceptance that young people came and went. Few became lifers like her. Diana was friendly, but only enough to get the job done. They spoke in hushed tones. It was the kind of casual chatter that characterized a lot of admissions at St. Joseph’s. Probably true of any hospital in any city. The exchange was somewhat lighthearted despite the subject matter at hand. Frivolity constantly played against tragedy at the nurses’ station.

“Her husband was shot,” Diana said.

“An intruder, I guess.”

“Yeah, right in the face, I heard,” Corazon White, the younger nurse, said.

“I have a friend in the morgue. I’ll ask for details.” Diana smiled slightly as she observed an exasperatingly slow computer screen morph from one patient’s file to the next.

“Nice to have friends in low places,” she said wryly.

“Yeah, I guess,” the newbie said without a trace of humor.

“Last person most of us see is the morgue attendant.”

“That’s why you must always look your best,” Diana said, playing with the girl now.

“Anyhow, is she going to be okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Barely a graze, really. Three stitches. Lucky girl, she is.” Diana picked up a clipboard, the last vestige of the days when she was in the newbie’s position. Several nurses carried electronic clipboards, but Diana was lagging behind on her required training. She started toward the corridor that led to Tori Connelly’s private room, 561D, arguably the best room on the floor. It was smaller than the others, and because of that it, was never converted to a tandem. There was no sharing of a bathroom. No feigned interest in one patient’s malady from across a curtain suspended by grommets and a steel tube. Diana Lowell let her eyes wander over the woman in the bed. She could tell that the patient was watching her every move, though her head stayed stationary. Diana could feel those eyes follow her as she rotated the bag containing clear liquid that was a mixture of saline and anti- anxiety meds. Not enough to knock her out. Not enough to keep her from complaining. If the woman in 561D was a complainer, that is. In time, most were. Diana flipped the crisp new pages of the printed chart and scoured its contents. Tori Connelly certainly had the pedigree to be a complainer. Her home address was an exclusive street in North Tacoma. Her hair was cut with the messy precision of a stylist who probably charged half of what Diana made in a day. The color was good, too. Blond, the hue of wheat on a bronze-lit summer day. Not the DIY color from the bottle that Diana and her sister used because they were “worth” it.

“How are we feeling?” Diana asked, catching the patient’s stare.

“You slept all day yesterday.”

“We,” Tori said, moistening her parched lips.

“We have been shot.” Diana smoothed a bedsheet.

“Of course, I know that. How is the pain? You know you can increase the dosage by pressing the button.” Tori was annoyed.

“You are pressing my buttons now,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“Just trying to be helpful.”

“I want to know if my husband’s okay. He was hurt, too.” Diana knew what had happened to the patient’s husband, of course, but it wasn’t her place to say anything. The doctor could tell the new widow. A cop could. She