Highest Praise for Gregg Olsen
Closer Than Blood
“Olsen, a skilled true-crime writer and novelist, brings back Kitsap County sheriff’s detective Kendall Stark in his fleet-footed novel Closer Than Blood.”
—The Seattle Times
“A cat-and-mouse hunt for an individual who is motivated in equal parts by bloodlust and greed.... Olsen keeps his readers Velcroed to the edge of their seats from first page to last.... By far Olsen’s best work to date.”
—Bookreporter.com
“An exciting tale . . . surprising twists and suspenseful spins.... Olsen keeps the reader hooked.”
—Genre Go Round
“Fantastic, awesome . . . exciting twists and turns and an explosive, unexpected ending . . . the best suspense thriller I’ve read all year!”
—Friday Fiction
Victim Six
“A rapid-fire page-turner.”
—The Seattle Times
“Olsen knows how to write a terrifying story.”
—The Daily Vanguard
“Victim Six is a bloody thriller with a nonstop, page-turning pace.”
—The Oregonian
“Olsen is a master of writing about crime—both real and imagined.”
—Kitsap Sun
“Thrilling suspense.”
—Peninsula Gateway
“Well written and exciting from start to finish, with a slick final twist.... a super serial-killer thriller.”
—The Mystery Gazette
“Gregg Olsen is as good as any writer of serial-killer thrillers writing now—this includes James Patterson’s Alex Cross, Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhymes and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter. . . . Victim Six hooks the reader . . . finely written and edge-of-seat suspense from start to finish . . . fast-paced . . . a super serial-killer thriller.”
—The News Guard
Heart of Ice
“Gregg Olsen will scare you—and you’ll love every moment of it.”
—Lee Child
“Olsen deftly juggles multiple plot lines.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fiercely entertaining, fascinating . . . Olsen offers a unique background view into the very real world of crime . . . and that makes his novels ring true and accurate.”
—Dark Scribe
A Cold Dark Place
“A great thriller that grabs you by the throat and takes you into the dark, scary places of the heart and soul.”
—Kay Hooper
“You’ll sleep with the lights on after reading Gregg Olsen’s dark, atmospheric, page-turning suspense . . . if you can sleep at all.
—Allison Brennan
“A stunning thriller—a brutally dark story with a compelling, intricate plot.”
—Alex Kava
“This stunning thriller is the love child of Thomas Harris and Laura Lippman, with all the thrills and the sheer glued-to-the-page artistry of both.”
—Ken Bruen
“Olsen keeps the tension taut and pages turning.”
—Publishers Weekly
A Wicked Snow
“Real narrative drive, a great setup, a gruesome crime, fine characters.”
—Lee Child
“A taut thriller.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Wickedly clever! A finely crafted, genuinely twisted tale of one mother’s capacity for murder and one daughter’s search for the truth.”
—Lisa Gardner
“An irresistible page-turner.”
—Kevin O’Brien
“Complex mystery, crackling authenticity . . . will keep fans of crime fiction hooked.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Vivid, powerful, action-packed . . . a terrific, tense thriller that grips the reader.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Tight plotting, nerve-wracking suspense, and a wonderful climax make this debut a winner.”
—Crimespree magazine
“A Wicked Snow’s plot—about a CSI investigator who’s repressed a horrific crime from her childhood until it comes back to haunt her—moves at a satisfyingly fast clip.”
—Seattle Times
Also by Gregg Olsen
THE BONE BOX
BETRAYAL
ENVY
CLOSER THAN BLOOD
VICTIM SIX
HEART OF ICE
A COLD DARK PLACE
A WICKED SNOW
A TWISTED FAITH
THE DEEP DARK
IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG
ABANDONED PRAYERS
BITTER ALMONDS
MOCKINGBIRD (CRUEL DECEPTION)
STARVATION HEIGHTS
CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN BLACK WIDOW
FEAR COLLECTOR
GREGG OLSEN
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Highest Praise for Gregg Olsen
Also by Gregg Olsen
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE - GIRLS GONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART TWO - PEACE, TED
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PART THREE - SON RISING
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
EPILOGUE - BONES TO DUST
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
For Rebecca Morris,
who arrived at just the right time.
PART ONE
GIRLS GONE
“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”
—TED BUNDY
CHAPTER 1
The teenagers had been waiting for the mother and her two children, a towheaded boy and girl, both of whom had found a million things to cry about all afternoon, to finally leave. It was after six and the sun was beginning to dip downward in the late summer sky. Across from Point Defiance, where Samantha Maxwell and Brant Logan were sitting in a tangle of driftwood, they watched the sun as it inched lower to the tops of the craggy Olympic Mountain range, the western-most reaches of the United States. They’d been drinking beer smuggled from Samantha’s father’s supposedly secret stash in the garage refrigerator. It was better beer than they were used to, and there was no denying they were feeling the effects of the alcohol.
“I thought they’d never go,” Brant said, running his fingertips along Samantha’s inner thigh. He grinned at her in that dopey way that he did when he’d been drinking.
Samantha pushed his hand away. “Hey,” she said, “I’m not that drunk.”
/> “But you look so unbelievably hot,” said Brant, a lanky six-footer, said, rolling on his side on the blanket, throwing his leg over hers. “And I’ve been good all day.”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” Samantha said, pulling away, and applying the last bit of coconut-smelling lotion to her lightly browned skin. She pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail and got up. “I’m going in,” she announced, getting up and starting toward the cold blue water.
Brant rolled his eyes in a very dramatic manner. “You’re crazy. Freaking cold out there,” he said.
“Then you should come with me,” Samantha said, turning back to look at him. The sun framed her head like a halo. “You need to cool off.”
“Oh, I do, do I?” he said, his brow arched as he shielded his eyes from the sun. “You really want me to cool off?”
By then Samantha was already halfway to the water’s edge.
“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” she said, laughing at the absurdity of the statement. Why a rotten egg? Who but my mother comes up with these dorky sayings?
Brant watched his girlfriend step into the clear, cold Puget Sound, but with the sun in his eyes, he turned away and put his head back on the blanket. He put his earbuds in and turned up the volume on his iPod. Soon his feet were twitching as he listened to Nickelback’s newest music. Not classic. But good enough, he thought.
Good enough, he’d later think, to lose track of the time.
About an hour later, Brant sat up with a start. He’d drifted off to sleep. He looked at the spot on the blanket next him, but Samantha wasn’t there.
He looked toward the water. “Sam?” he called out, getting up to see where she’d gone. “Where the hell are you, babe?”
He looked south, then north. The pebbled stretch of the beach was deserted. Maybe she’d gone off to the restroom? Brant slipped a T-shirt over his head and started walking up the beach toward the restrooms. He called out Sam’s name several more times, but there was no answer. His eyes scanned the shore. There was no one to ask if he or she had seen Samantha. There was no reason to worry, really, but he did anyway. Later, he would say he’d just “had a feeling” that something was very wrong. He couldn’t explain it; it just was something deep inside telling him over and over that Samantha was gone.
Where is she?
The restroom by the parking lot was smelly and empty. Adrenaline and beer made him feel anxious and woozy. He planted himself in front of the urinal, reading graffiti and wondering where Sam went. A second later, he was out the door and back where they’d spent the day. He told himself that she’d be back any minute. By the time the sun started to slide behind the Olympics, however, Brant’s worry increased tenfold.
He picked up his phone. No messages. No calls. He dialed Sam’s number, and her phone, still in her purse, rang next to him. He told himself he wouldn’t mention that he’d left her purse unattended.
Sam wouldn’t have gone off somewhere without her phone. Brant knew that. The phone was almost a part of her. Next, he pressed those three digits, in that sequence that sends a palpable wave of anxiety through the phone lines. It was the number no one ever wants to need to call.
“My girlfriend is missing,” he said to the 911 operator, after giving his name.
“Okay,” the operator said, “missing. What do you mean by that?”
“Samantha is gone. I can’t find her.”
“You two have a fight?”
“No,” he said, suddenly feeling defensive. “I fell asleep. I’m kind of worried about her.”
“Did she go off with someone?”
Why is she saying that? Sam would never. We’re in love. Have been since we were sixteen.
Brant bristled a little. “She would not do that. That’s not Sam.”
The operator kept on questioning Brant. Her tone cool and clinical. Brant wondered if she would act that same way if a caller was inside a burning house. Didn’t the operator grasp the urgency of the situation? Sam was gone!
“When was the last time you saw her, exactly?” she asked.
Brant continued to scan the beach. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe an hour or two hours ago? She went swimming in the sound. Like I said, I fell asleep and when I woke up she was gone.”
“Are you sure she just didn’t leave, Brant?”
Again, why was the operator acting like that?
“Without her purse? Without her phone? Not Samantha. No way. What girl would?”
“All right. Sit tight. Police are on the way.”
A half hour later, a team of first responders arrived at the beach to mount a search-and-rescue effort. It had turned to dusk by then and a helicopter hovered along the shoreline with a searchlight punching through the thickening air. Someone gave Brant a blanket and he wrapped it around his shoulders. As he watched everyone, he thought to himself that it was like some kind of scene out of a movie. Not real. Just pretend. No one used the words “possible drowning,” but all of them figured that was likely what had happened. To their credit, the searchers showed no sign of fatigue. Even as the stars replaced the pink hue of sunset, they gamely continued doing what most all of them knew was futile.
If Brant’s story was true, Samantha had been yanked from the shore by the swift water.
No one needed to point out the obvious. Ten feet from where the teens had put their blanket and pilfered beer was a sign: DANGER! NO SWIMMING! RIP CURRENTS!
Every day for the five years since her husband left her for their dog sitter, Abby, Colette Robinson had walked a stretch of beach along the southern end of Puget Sound. Low tide. High tide. When the shore was pelted with raindrops the size of dimes. Or, the best of all, when the sun lit up the edges of the water like a fuse. It didn’t matter what time of year, there was always something to stick into her bag. Colette collected bits of beach glass that she’d used to fill four mason jars in the window of her bathroom. She’d recovered enough fishing floats to string a garland over the fireplace in the living room, too. Every time she ambled over the rocky shoreline near Tacoma, Colette found at least one thing that got her blood pumping with the excitement of discovery.
That day her eyes caught an out-of-place hue a few yards down the beach. It was a fragment of pink and white, absolutely not colors evocative of the Pacific Northwest, a brooding landscape fashioned of grays, blues, greens, and blacks. This was a spray of light against the dingy, dark backdrop of a cliff.
What was it?
She turned away from the water’s foamy brink and started toward the base of the cliff. As she drew closer, she set down her Albertsons plastic grocery bag of sea glass and bone-white sand dollars. This is special. She’d read in the paper how the flotsam and jetsam of the tragic Japanese tsunami was headed for Washington’s coast. Among the silver mass of driftwood that barricaded the cliff from the water, Colette saw the arm of what she was all but convinced was a doll. She ventured a bit closer. Not a mannequin, smaller, maybe a doll. It was white with amber-colored fingernails. Pretty, but creepy. Twenty feet away from what she was all but certain was the find of the day—find of the week even—Colette stopped and screamed. It wasn’t just an arm. The arm was attached to a body. A girl’s body. Nearly out of breath, she dug her phone from her pocket and called 911.
Colette Robinson had found Samantha Maxwell. That wasn’t all she discovered. Colette didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Samantha wasn’t alone. She had company.
Tacoma Police Detective Grace Alexander braced herself against the suddenly very cold wind coming off Puget Sound. Summer was over. The weather had turned nasty in the afternoon in the way that it does in Washington whenever a rare sunny day managed to sneak in to bring sunburns and happy memories. The sky looked more silver than gray, but make no mistake about it, rain was coming. Rain had always been the price for the green surroundings and everyone who lived there knew that all too well. Grace was an attractive woman, small in stature, but with the kind of open face that invited people into her
brown eyes. She had the eyes of someone who had seen a lot, more than most, but still invited people inside. Her ability to remain open was her greatest gift when interviewing witnesses.
She brought empathy. With empathy, came trust.
The petite brunette detective bent down, setting her right knee on the driftwood log that had caught the girl’s other arm and kept her body from being pulled away by the outgoing tide.
The victim was wearing a bright yellow one-piece bathing suit that had somehow managed to stay in nearly pristine condition in the tides that had carried her away, then brought her back. Neither detective touched the body, but it was clear by its position tucked in among the logs that rigor had come and gone. She was not a floater, or bloater, a puffed-up figure, a kind of gas-filled balloon that a body becomes when left out in the elements. She looked like a young, albeit slightly blue and white, teenager. It was as if she’d been tossed there and then fallen asleep.