forces conspired to pile on tragedy. It was more than someone being on the track to disaster; it was like the skids were greased and it was harder and harder to avoid calamity. It had nothing to do with socioeconomic status. The Roses were upper middle class. Arthur Rose had had a good-paying job. Tracy had been a straight-A student at Stadium High School. Father and daughter had been coming home from Spanaway. Tracy had been attending orientation at Pacific Lutheran University, where she’d intended to enroll the next fall.
They were T-boned by a drunk driver and the downward spiral, a hurricane of bad luck and disaster, sucked the life and the joy from what had once seemed the perfect life. Perfect girls. Perfect husband. Perfect house. Everything anyone would have wanted. And now, all that was left of it was the perfect house.
“Ms. Rose,” Grace said, close enough to the trembling mother to touch her, but feeling reluctant to do so. “We haven’t found Emma, but we found this and we need you to identify it.”
Grace looked over at Paul and he handed her a plastic bag. It was plain its contents were familiar to the missing girl’s mother. It was a powder-blue T-shirt with faded graphics depicting a circle of seven dolphins swirling around S AVE THE S OUND logo.
“That’s Tracy’s,” Diana said, reaching for it, feeling the crinkling plastic as she massaged the garment through its protective covering.
“You mean Emma’s?” Paul asked.
Grace shot him a look, one that she hoped conveyed that he’d promised that she could run the investigation insofar as victims’ families were concerned.
“It was Tracy’s. She bought it the year before she and my husband were killed in the accident. Emma wore it. Often. It was kind of her way of staying close to her sister,” she said, moving her gaze from the detectives to the photograph of the sisters on Mount Rainier. “They both loved the mountains and water. They were close.”
Grace didn’t say so right then, probably because Paul was incapable of understanding just what that might feel like. She easily could.
My sister is gone, too.
Grace gently pulled the bagged and tagged garment from the fingers of the grieving and anxious mother. “You said she was wearing a white blouse when she went to work. Was she wearing this, too?”
Diana snapped her attention back to the detectives, and shook her head. She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her temples.
“I can’t be sure,” she said, her words now coated in the distinct aguish of a mother who doesn’t know where her child is. “I mean, I’m sure that the T-shirt was hers, was Tracy’s. Where did you find it?”
Grace set the bag on her lap. “Some blues found it a quarter mile from the latte stand,” she said.
Diana looked confused. “Blues?”
“Sorry,” Grace said. “Patrol officers.”
Diana didn’t ask the question that both detectives were sure she was thinking. If her daughter was wearing a blouse with the blue T-shirt as an extra layer underneath, how was it that the T-shirt was no longer on her body? Had she taken it off? Or had someone else?
“May we see her room?”
“You think someone took her, don’t you?”
“We don’t know what happened, Ms. Rose,” Grace said.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
It was obvious it was hard for Ms. Rose to let that phrase pass her lips, but she managed. It was almost like she was practicing. Preparing. Not wanting it to be true, but given the way her life had been going for the past two years, it was so sadly possible.
“Can we see her room?” Paul asked.
Diana got up and the detectives followed.
Emma’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It was painted a peachy pink, a color that was somewhere between a little girl’s dream hue and a more sophisticated young woman’s idea of what was pretty. The room had a large bay window that overlooked the garden with just a hint of a view of Commencement Bay. The bed was an antique, painted white iron with small shabby-chic flecks of the metal showing. On the right side of the headboard someone had tied streamers of blue and white ribbons. Grace wondered if Emma had been a bridesmaid earlier that spring.
“Do you want me to leave?” Diana asked.
“Whatever makes you the most comfortable,” Paul said.
“You speak,” the mother said.
“When she lets me,” he said, looking over at Grace, who had moved to the desk across from the bed. She was either engrossed in something or pretending not to hear. Diana left the room.
“What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.
Grace turned over some cards and papers on the desk, but didn’t look up.
“If we’re going to find her, we need to know her. And if…” She hesitated and looked over at her partner, making sure that the mother was gone. “… and if she’s the victim of an abduction of some kind we will need to know why she was picked up.”
“If she was.”
“Right. If.” She held out a card. On the front was a photograph of a kitten sniffing a white rose.
“Cute,” Paul said, though he really didn’t think so.
“Ms. Rose?” she called out. A beat later, Diana Rose stood in the doorway. Her red eyes gave her away. She’d been crying quietly in the hallway.
“Did you find something?”
“Who is Alex?”
“Her boyfriend. They only dated a few months. She broke it off with him.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. I think she was tired of being tied down. She wanted to go out with other guys. Have fun. You know, you remember when you were a teenager, don’t you?”
Grace nodded. “Barely. But yes, I do. Why did she keep this card if she was so over him?”
Diana took the card and looked at it. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen this before. Where did you get it?”
“Just here.” Grace pointed to the desk.
“May I see it?” Diana said, not really waiting. She took the card and her eyes met the detective’s. “You don’t think he had anything to do with her disappearance, do you?”
“I don’t know. We’ll check it out. What is Alex’s last name? And do you know where he lives?”
“Morton. He lives a few blocks over.”
“Palmer Morton’s son?” Paul asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
“ The Palmer Morton?” Grace asked, though she knew by the way the mother and her partner were acting that it had to be the very same. Everyone in Tacoma knew Palmer Morton. He owned about a third of the downtown retail core, including a steak house named Morton’s. He’d sued the famous Morton’s chain and won a provision that there would be no Morton’s steak house in Tacoma that wasn’t his. Chicago. New York. L.A. But not in Tacoma.
Palmer Morton was that kind of a guy. Both detectives knew his son’s reputation, too. He’d been picked up for shoplifting at the Tacoma Mall, a case that had been conveniently dropped. Something about a file being lost, though no one in the department thought it was anything other than a favor called in by a fellow who knew something about favors.
Before they got to the car, Grace turned to Paul.
“You know what it means?” she asked.
“That Morton kid is a creep?”
“Maybe. But not that. The T-shirt was Emma’s. That means whoever killed Kelsey has Emma. Whoever killed Lisa killed Kelsey. The girls are linked. There’s no doubt.”
And there was no doubt that they didn’t have much time.
