another reason why no one should forgive him, or that he’d gotten what he deserved.
“I didn’t know she had another boyfriend,” Birdy said. “I’ve never heard that before.”
Iris’s eyes were back on Birdy’s. “Well, she did,” Iris said. “She had two guys on a string. Tommy and the other guy.”
Birdy got up. The intensity of what Iris was saying made her feel silly sitting in her chair while Iris stood, coat on, ready to drop the bomb and run away.
“Do you know his name? Was it someone from home?”
Iris shrugged a little. “I never saw him. She never said his name. Not to me. I don’t think he lived on the reservation, because I’d never seen him or his car. Whenever he came to get her, she had to walk all the way down the lane to be picked up. I don’t think she wanted our parents to meet him. Maybe he was black or something. I don’t know. My dad was kind of a racist and that wouldn’t go over real big with him.”
“What makes you think he was black?”
Iris looked around the room. “Nothing really,” she said. “I was a kid and I just tried to figure out why it was that my sister hid him from everyone in the family.” Iris shifted in her chair. She was on a roll now and Birdy wasn’t about to stop her. “I thought we’d meet him after she died, you know, he’d come over and pay his respects at the house. That never happened. We never saw him. Not even one time.”
“So you think Tommy killed her because he was jealous of this other man?”
“That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I remember my mom telling me that the police caught Tommy red-handed. He must have killed her for something. Anna Jo was hurt pretty bad. He must have been mad.”
“Did you ever see Tommy threaten her? Act jealous? Angry?”
“That’s the hard part. I always got the impression that he loved her, was gentle with her. The other guy always made her cry. One time I remember going into her bedroom when she was on her bed crying. I asked her what was the matter and she said she was in big trouble. I asked her what kind, and she said, ‘boyfriend trouble.’ ”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
“I don’t know. That was the last time I saw her. The next day she was dead.”
After Iris left, Birdy went home to the Bone Box.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next day Birdy Waterman got in her car to drive to the morgue. She hadn’t slept well. She’d been unable to shut down her thoughts about Tommy. Yet duty called.
A car accident the night before had taken the lives of a middle-aged couple from Bremerton. They had left a party in Port Orchard and the women crashed their late-model Jeep just outside of Gorst, a tiny town clinging to a hairpin turn of highway populated by a strip club and coffee stands with half-naked baristas. Investigators theorized that the driver had been drunk. Birdy Waterman would examine the bodies, take the blood, look at stomach contents, and send tissue to the lab to determine if alcohol had been a factor.
As she dressed for work, she kept thinking about Tommy. She’d called the prison to confirm his illness with the medical staff there-from one doctor to another. Just as Sgt. Holloway had, the doctor on call said how much everyone liked Tommy and how “it is a shame he never got out of here.”
Instead of turning up Division Street and heading toward the morgue, Birdy did something she’d never done in her entire life.
She called off work.
“Joe, you can handle the crash all right? I’m taking a personal day.”
Birdy despised the “personal” day excuse, but it seemed more legitimate than lying and saying she was ill.
“You under the weather or something?” the assistant asked.
Birdy pressed the gas pedal and headed toward Highway 16 along Sinclair Inlet.
“Or something,” she said, still refusing to out and out lie. “I should be in the office tomorrow.” She hung up her phone and started toward the highway for the long drive to the Makah Reservation near Neah Bay.
Birdy had two things on her mind, one trivial and one overriding. She was grateful she drove a Prius-gutless as it was, she’d been racking up the miles and was grateful that she needed to fill up only twice in the past week. Forensic pathologists are on a budget too. She was also thinking about the right starting point to find out what she could about Anna Jo Bonner’s murder and what role her cousin had truly had in it. Blood doesn’t lie.
It came to her that the person to see was none other than Clallam County Sheriff Jim Derby. Twenty years ago, Jim had been the lead detective, albeit a young and inexperienced one, on the Bonners murder case. Since that time, he’d made a name for himself. A very big name. For the past ten years he’d served as the sheriff, an elected position he won by a landslide. At the moment he was preparing to run for Congress. His campaign motto had already been trademarked on his website: CONGRESSMAN DERBY: WINNER TAKES ALL.
Jim Derby was a flinty-eyed man with angular features and Sharpie eyebrows that only added to the hard- liner-against-crime persona that he’d earned rather than manufactured over a decade of law enforcement. Property crimes and drug manufacturing had been his primary challenges in the county in the very northwest corner of Washington state. His thick wavy hair had receded a little, allowing his scalp to catch the light of the fluorescents, and his belly hung over his oversized belt buckle like a floating shelf. If he had any enemies in the community or in the sheriff ’s department, none were bold enough to speak out against him. Jim Derby didn’t suffer any fools, which was one of the reasons state Republican Party leaders thought he’d be the no-nonsense candidate to defeat Democrat Casey Laughton, who’d held the office for four terms.
Derby’s office was completely impersonal save for a portrait of Mrs. Derby and their son, and a row of bobblehead sports figurines that commanded the majority of a shelf next to the window. The joke in the sheriff’s office was that when “the sheriff talks, you just nod.”
Birdy had called ahead and Sheriff Derby had agreed to clear some time for her.
“I’ve followed your career,” he’d said. “Glad to see you made something of yourself.” The words tumbled out a little patronizingly, but Birdy took them at face value.
“Thanks,” she’d said, almost adding
“Not sure what I can tell you. Things change, time marches on, memories fade.”
“That’s fine. To be honest,” she’d said-a phrase she hated because it signaled that everything else must have been a lie-“I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”
It was true. She wasn’t. All she knew was that her cousin had compelled her to help him. She wondered if her own sense of guilt had driven her to. She’d never lied about what she’d seen, but her statement to the sheriff and at trial was crucial.
She’d read the statement before heading up to Clallam County.
I had been cutting wood for my family. It was around three p.m., but it could have been later. I don’t know the exact time because I don’t have a watch. I heard a noise of someone coming down the trail toward me. He was screaming. I didn’t know who it was at first. I was scared. I turned off my chain saw. I stared to run and then I heard my name. It was my cousin Tommy calling to me. I went to him. He was bloody. He was crying. He was saying that “she’s dead. It’s my fault. She’s dead.” I asked him who and he didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said it was Anna Jo Bonners. I started to cry and then I ran away. I was so afraid about what happened, I ran as fast as I could. I got home and my mom told me not to say anything. The next day the sheriff found my chain saw and questioned me. I agree that this is what happened and is true.
