Текст книги "Envy"
Автор книги: Gregg Olsen
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
chapter 31
HAYLEY RYAN AND COLTON JAMES WERE IN HIS BEDROOM—with the door open—as the teenager with a mass of dark hair proudly demonstrated an app that he’d finished programming the night before. Although Colton had been up all night, his energy level was completely unfettered. The app might not be a million-dollar idea, but it was definitely a viable one. He was hoping to make enough to buy a new car. Maybe he could convince his mom that the car she never drove could be traded in too. He was thinking big, and Hayley was suitably impressed.
“It is a simple idea,” he said, “using existing police-scanner information that’s already out there on the Net. I had to link up with a bunch of guys with servers in their basements. That was kind of tough, but I managed. I think they think I’m a lot older than I am.”
Hayley sat on a stool next to Colton’s ginormous computer screen. She inched herself a little closer than necessary to see, but that was only so she could be close to him. He smelled delicious. Like Colton.
“How does it work?” she asked, brushing a stray blond lock from her forehead as she leaned a smidgen closer—close enough to brush against him a little. Sure they were dating, but nothing other than a once-a-week make-out session had transpired between the pair. She wanted to go further—not as far as they could go—but it just didn’t seem like they were there yet. She liked everything about Colton, but she wasn’t convinced she was in love with him.
Hayley wasn’t sure what that kind of love really felt like. She tried to dissect it in the analytical way that she did with a lot of things. She tried to measure her feelings for Colton against the feelings she had for her mother, father, and sister. Of course, those feelings weren’t the same kind of love, and she accepted that she’d know when the time was right and if the feelings she had were of the depth needed for the most intimate experience she could imagine. She’d dreamed about it more than once, especially after they’d kissed the first time behind the twin 50,000-gallon water towers on the edge of Port Gamble’s business district. She could still feel his lips on her from that encounter. All other kisses would be measured by the first one. She was glad Colton had been the boy of her dreams.
Colton flashed a big, white smile. “Users select the location that they want to keep tabs on. It allows them to listen in as the police, fire, and other emergency responders chat in a monotone about people and their messed-up lives. I’m not kidding about messed up. Seriously messed up.”
Hayley was interested. “Like what?”
“Like a guy was in trouble because his wife or girlfriend kicked him out of the house with nothing but his cell phone.”
“So what’s the big deal?” she asked.
“I mean nothing,” he said, laughing. “Dude was butt naked.”
Hayley laughed too. “Okay, that is messed up.”
Colton’s mom, Shania, appeared in the doorway. She was a pretty woman with dark hair like her son and the S’Klallam Indian lineage that she could trace back to the days before Port Gamble was known as Memalucet. Though she seldom left the house, she never failed to dress up for the day as if she was going to the office or even a casual lunch out. Her clothes were almost all in earth tones. The only concession to glitz was the entwined ropes of liquid silver that wrapped around her neck. Colton confided to Hayley it was to hide a jagged scar, something his mom never, ever talked about.
“Colton?” she asked, her dark eyes heavy with concern. “Katelyn’s mom is here. She wants to talk to you.”
Hayley’s mind stumbled a little on what Shania James just said. It was true that Sandra Berkley was Katelyn’s mom, but, she wondered, if there was no daughter anymore, was she still a mom?
Colton and Hayley followed his mother down the hallway.
Shania lasered her eyes on her son and in mime-fashion mouthed the words: “She’s been drinking.”
Duh.
Sandra was a disheveled mess plunked down on the sofa in the front room. Her hair needed brushing, maybe even washing. She wore skinny jeans and a black cardigan sweater. On her feet were slippers, not shoes.
Yet it was what was sitting in her lap, gripped tightly by her chewedto-the-nub fingertips, that commanded Hayley’s full attention.
Katelyn’s laptop.
“Hi, Mrs. Berkley,” Colton said.
“Hi,” Hayley echoed.
Sandra glanced up at the teenagers, then back down at the laptop. She locked eyes with Hayley briefly.
Hayley recalled the incident in Katelyn’s bedroom. She felt uneasy.
“Hayley?” Sandra asked, never sure which girl it was and in that moment not really caring. “Colton. I’m sorry, Colton,” she said, her voice soft and a little unsteady. “I know this will sound stupid.”
The teakettle whistled from the kitchen.
Shania looked at Sandra with the compassionate eyes of someone who’d seen her own share of pain.
“Sugar and milk, if I remember?” Shania asked, turning to leave her son and his girlfriend alone with the mess of a woman who’d come calling.
“Yes,” Sandra said, managing something of a smile.
That Shania recalled how Sandra liked her tea was a reminder of how they’d been close once, when their children were babies, and before the incident at the Safeway.
Shania left the room and Sandra held up the laptop.
“Colton, I want to know what’s inside this thing,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked, though he knew the answer. Her daughter was dead and she wanted to know more about the child that she’d lost. Most parents would probably do the same thing.
“I don’t think I could do that,” he said. “It seems kind of private.”
“I don’t want you to read what’s in her laptop. I want to do that. I want to know everything I can, but I don’t …” She trailed off, trying her best not to cry.
Her obvious pain made Colton feel uncomfortable. He hated seeing anyone cry, especially another kid’s mom.
“You need the password, right?”
Sandra nodded. “That’s right.”
“You want me to hack it?” Colton said. “Seems kind of wrong to me.”
“What’s wrong is that Katelyn’s dead,” she said.
Shania returned with a couple of teacups on a tray. The smell of chai perfumed the air.
“You two want anything?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. James,” Hayley said. “I’m heading home now.”
Colton took the laptop and followed Hayley to the back door, as she slipped on her jacket and they went outside. Though he was barefoot and wore only jeans and a Green Day T-shirt, he didn’t seem to mind the chill. Hayley pulled her zipper up to her neck, bracing herself for the onslaught of the cold winter air.
“Okay,” he said. “That was weird.”
“Yeah, she looks terrible.”
“I’m not really a hacker, you know that, right? People think because I’m playing with my computer all night that I could crack the Da Vinci Code.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said.
“I guess I can try.”
A large flock of Canada geese flew overhead, honking as they headed away from Port Gamble. Hayley wondered for only a second if Katelyn was somewhere up there too, watching, hoping, urging someone to tell her story.
Hayley looked around before planting a kiss on Colton’s cheek.
“I have faith in you,” she said.
“Nothing like a little pressure.”
She waved at him and walked across the now snow-crunchy yard between their houses. Hayley knew Katelyn’s password, but to say so would be too hard to explain to the boy she really, really liked.
No one, certainly no teenager, was normal or felt they were. Everyone wore a kind of mask that kept people from really seeing what—or who—was inside. Katelyn did. Starla did. And as she walked to her own back porch, Hayley Ryan knew that she and her sister kept things secret too. She didn’t grasp all that they were or what they could do. She knew that even people she cared about—her father, her mother, Colton James—probably never could comprehend it.
After all, it happened to her and her sister, and they couldn’t understand it.
chapter 32
COLTON JAMES’S BEDROOM was one of three in house number 17, a light-yellow one-story with a low roofline that might have had one of the best views of the bay in Port Gamble, but otherwise was not so special. The house wasn’t even really that old, having been barged over by the lumber company from Port Ludlow in the 1920s. His parents had the largest room, the one closest to the only full bathroom in the house. The other bedroom was used by his mom as an office. It had floorto-ceiling shelving overloaded with catalogs that she’d collected in the years before the Internet became her lifeline to the outside world. Shania James, not surprisingly, did most of her shopping via catalogs. The UPS man and the FedEx lady had made so many trips to the Jameses’ house that both had been to Colton’s birthday parties, family barbecues, and other gatherings.
If one hadn’t noticed that Shania James stayed in the house ninetynine percent of the time, they’d never have thought there was anything strange about her.
Colton’s own room was organized chaos. His often-away fisherman father had installed Peg-Board above the teenager’s desk. Wires were coiled on hooks, and jars of teeny, tiny computer components hung above the workspace. Colton seldom used those things anymore; they were left over from the days when he built his own computers.
That was then. Now he was all about apps. While he was sure that Steve Jobs would bring him on to Apple one day—any day—he focused on coding, design work, and learning the business of being an entrepreneur at age fifteen.
To see him hunched over his computer at night, Coke can at the ready, Cheese Nips open and available for serial consumption, was to witness a boy’s true intensity. Code was beautiful to Colton. It was elegant. It was nearly a living, breathing thing.
And yet, Colton James was no geek. He was fit, handsome, and could actually talk to adults while looking into their eyes. None of that “are you talking to me or the floor?” for Colton.
Colton’s screen saver was a picture of him and Hayley that Taylor took on her phone when the three of them were out on his father’s boat, the Wanderlust. The quality wasn’t the best, but the look in Hayley’s eyes was priceless to him. It was, he was sure, the look of a girl who really got him.
He scooted his keyboard aside and set Katelyn’s laptop on the desk. He was plugging in the power cord when his phone buzzed.
HAYLEY: BREAK THE DA VINCI CODE YET?
COLTON: JUST STARTED. GIVE ME 10 SECS.
HAYLEY: 
Katelyn’s laptop whirred on and Colton put on some music while he waited for the log on window to pop open. Colton didn’t like the idea of cracking Katelyn’s password so her mother could do some postmortem eavesdropping on her life. Yet, he’d seen the tears in Sandra’s eyes, the longing she had for what was never coming back, and he knew he had no choice. Password cracking was never really that easy. He knew a kid in school who used jailbreak software to crack his mother’s password so he could get into the system and disable the Net Nanny tool that he’d found so humiliating.
“I’m not doing anything that bad,” the kid had said. “Looking at porn is normal. It isn’t like I’m paying for it on their credit card. It’s free. They’re like porn Nazis.”
Colton thought about the last time he’d seen Katelyn. It was in the school cafeteria. She was sitting alone, looking over at the group of Buccaneers cheerleaders and the second-string players who couldn’t manage a ride off campus. Starla was there, the center of it all.
“Hey,” he had said to Katelyn on his way to the trash can.
She nodded.
“You got plans for the holidays?” he asked.
When he played back the conversation he knew that it was a lame attempt to engage someone he no longer really knew.
“Grandparents are coming over. Nothing great. You?”
“We’re going out of town to spend some time with my dad’s family in Portland.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “Your mom going too?”
“Yeah. She’s pretty freaked about it, but my dad’s got a plan.”
Katelyn smiled. “I like your mom.”
Colton appreciated Katelyn just then. He could tell that something was troubling her, but no matter what it was, she still had it within her to be kind to someone.
Hayley texted again.
HAYLEY: TRY TEAM EDWARD. JUST A WILD GUESS.
COLTON: LKE TWILITE?
HAYLEY: LOL. YET. MINE WZ TEAM JACOB. DON’T TELL ANY1!
COLTON: ABOUT TEAM EDWARD?
HAYLEY: ABOUT ME & TWILIGHT. THAT WZ A LONG TIME AGO.
HAYLEY LOOKED UP FROM HER PHONE and faced her sister.
“I don’t like lying to Colton,” she said. “Not at all.”
Taylor nodded. “I know.”
The two of them sat on the floor in Taylor’s room, obsessing about Katelyn and what her mother had wanted to find on her laptop. Both girls knew the password as if it were their own. Somehow, when they touched the laptop, the password had imprinted on their minds.
“I just didn’t want him to struggle too much,” Hayley said. “Sure, he likes a challenge and he can do anything when it comes to computers. But, you know, we can help out, so why not?”
Taylor got up to fish a sweater from her bottom drawer. The walls of her bedroom leaked cold air like a crab pot leaked water, and she was freezing.
“Agreed,” she said, pulling out a gray oversize sweater with pilled, stretched-out sleeves and a couple of missing buttons. It was a favorite cast-off of her dad’s that she could never part with. “Totally.”
“Your sweater needs a shave,” Hayley said.
Taylor shrugged, and then put on a wicked grin, teasingly, of course. “I was thinking the same thing about your nasty legs,” she said.
COLTON TYPED IN THE SUGGESTED PASSWORD and … nothing. He thought for a moment and figured that if TEAM EDWARD was Katelyn’s password, she probably would have used a numeric sequence to make it less obvious.
That was easy to guess too. He typed in TEAMEDWARD23, the number for the Berkleys’ house. He’d used his own house number tagged on the end of plenty of passwords over the years. It was always easy to remember.
The computer rumbled softly and the screen opened wide, baring all of Katelyn’s secrets.
Got it, he thought.
No illicit software had been needed after all, and that made Colton feel a little better about what he’d been asked to do. It was one thing to password-crack a dead friend’s computer; another to enlist a skanky Internet tool to do the deed. It seemed cleaner somehow to do it with a guess-and-go technique. Less criminal. Hayley had given him more than half of what he needed and that brought a smile to his face.
COLTON: SUCCESS. NOW WOT?
HAYLEY: COPY HER HARD DRIVE. EVERYTHING. I’LL EXPLAIN L8R.
COLTON: ???
HAYLEY: KATELYN WZ IN TROUBLE. SHE’S DEAD BECAUSE OF IT.
COLTON: WTF?
HAYLEY: EXPLAIN L8R. PROMISE.
chapter 33
BIRDY WATERMAN, KITSAP COUNTY’S FORENSIC pathologist, had burned her tongue on coffee that she’d microwaved a minute too long. She looked out of the window of the green vinyl-floored kitchen on the main floor of the coroner’s office. The old house, which had been converted to the county morgue, probably had an impressive view of the Olympic Mountains to the west. Trees and the Kitsap County Courthouse now stood in the way. She was swishing cold water in her mouth when her annoying assistant Terry Morris told her that a woman was there to see her.
“She’s in a bad way,” he said, sculpting his short faux hawk. “Wants to talk.”
Dr. Waterman swallowed the water and pushed her disposable cup into the swinging lid of the kitchen garbage can. Without another word from Terry, she knew that it was the mother of a victim. Mothers can never let go. Fathers were different. Not all of them, of course, but most accepted scientific findings for what they were—clinical facts. Moms didn’t.
Dr. Waterman didn’t recognize the woman.
“I’m Birdy Waterman. Can I help you?” she asked.
Sandra Berkley was as she had been in the Jameses’ living room—a disaster. Her hair, disheveled. Her makeup, scrawled on, not applied carefully. She was thin where she should have had some fullness to her face. She was puffy where the contours should have been more sculpted. It was the face of a mother who’d lost her baby.
Dr. Waterman had seen that so many—too many—times before.
“Can I help you?” she repeated.
“I hope so,” Sandra said, anxiously looking for a place to sit. Her knees shook just then.
“Let’s go into my office,” Dr. Waterman suggested, gently placing a hand on Sandra’s bony shoulder as she led her to what had once been a bedroom but now functioned as her office. In addition to the louvered closet doors along the farthest wall, the ceiling light above her was the only other remnant of the office’s original purpose. It was a glass fixture etched with figures of cowboys and their spinning lariats. It had been a child’s room.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Waterman said, moving things aside to clear more space across her desk, “I didn’t get your name.”
“Sandra Berkley. My daughter was Katelyn.”
Of course. Even though she’d only seen her laid out on her autopsy table, there was no mistaking the resemblance.
Dr. Waterman nodded. “I’m deeply sorry for your loss.”
Sandra started to cry. “Thank you.”
“Can I answer some questions for you?”
The words sounded flat, and not at all helpful, which was not the forensic pathologist’s intention. It was merely the fact that no words could ever seem right. There was not a damn thing she could do for that woman. No one could.
Finally, Sandra spoke. “Was my daughter pregnant?”
A little caught off guard by the question, Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, I would have noted that. It would have been in my report. Our exams are very, very thorough.”
Sandra winced a little, squeezing tears from her eyes as she reached for a tissue from a box on the doctor’s desk. Then she dug into her purse and pulled out a Ziploc bag containing the pregnancy test stick.
“I found this in her room. I thought … maybe that’s why she might have killed herself … because she didn’t want to disappoint me …” Her words trailed off into more sobs.
Dr. Waterman gently pushed the tissues closer.
“Mrs. Berkley, that wasn’t it at all. I examined your daughter. As I recall it didn’t appear that she was sexually active. Your daughter was more than likely still a virgin.”
Sandra stopped her tears. “Then why would she have this?” she asked, waving the wand once more.
A somewhat startled Dr. Waterman shook her head. It was a very, very good question.
“No idea,” she said. “Maybe she and her boyfriend messed around and thought she might be pregnant. I don’t know. Kids are funny. When I was young, I almost believed you could get pregnant from a French kiss.”
“If she had a boyfriend, her father and I never met him.”
You wouldn’t be the first mother who had no idea what her daughter was doing when she was out of your sight, Dr. Waterman thought.
“I know that none of this is easy and there’s nothing I can do to make you feel better,” she said.
It was all she could say.
Sandra Berkley stood. She was sad, hurt, and mad at the same time.
“I will never feel better again,” she said.
“I understand, Mrs. Berkley. Really, to the best of my ability, I do.” Dr. Waterman reached for a tablet and a pencil. She jotted down a phone number. “I know an excellent grief counselor in Poulsbo. Maybe you could talk to her? It might help.”
“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Sandra said, her voice louder than needed. “I want my daughter back. I want to watch her graduate from high school. Go to college. Get married.”
Birdy Waterman let her go on. Nothing short of an AK-47 could halt the mother of a dead teenager as she grieved for all that had been lost.
chapter 34
SHE MAY HAVE BEEN FUELED BY VODKA or it might have been only the enormous sadness of her loss, but Sandra Berkley made a beeline for Katelyn’s phone when she got home from the Kitsap County morgue. How could I not know my own daughter? How could it be that she didn’t tell me?
First on the list was Starla Larsen.
It didn’t ring and went immediately to voice mail.
“Starla, this is Sandra, Katelyn’s mom. Call me back when you get this.”
A few minutes later she tried again, with the same results. Sandra had half a mind to just go next door and confront Starla face-to-face, but she thought better of that. She didn’t want to fall apart in front of Mindee and Jake. They’d avoided her lately with the kind of sad, frightened look parents sometimes give others whose children had special needs, or died—suicide or otherwise.
Next she tried Hayley Ryan.
She and her sister were nosy enough to snoop in Katelyn’s room. Maybe one of them knew something.
Hayley was nearly done with the forensics book when she looked down at her vibrating phone. Her face went nearly white. It was as if she’d seen a ghost. In a very real way, with Katelyn’s name popping up on the caller ID, it was a ghost.
“Hello?”
“Hayley, this is Sandra Berkley. I have something I need to talk to you about. Maybe your sister too. I’ve tried to reach Starla, but she’s probably out running the universe.”
There was genuine sarcasm in Sandra’s voice. Hayley liked that.
“What is it?”
“It’s private. Can you come and see me?”
“Sure. Shall we come to the restaurant or your house?”
“I’m home.”
“Okay, what’s it about?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Bring your twin.”
Bring your twin. That didn’t sound good.
Hayley hung up and went looking for her sister. Whatever it was, this was big. It had to be, because the last time the two of them had interacted with Sandra Berkley, she’d wanted to bite off their heads and toss them out of her daughter’s second-floor bedroom.
Ten minutes later, Hayley and Taylor Ryan stood on the Berkleys’ front doorstep, bracing themselves from the cold and for whatever it was Katelyn’s mom wanted to say to them.
Sandra opened the door and wasted no time getting to the heart of the matter. There was no offer to take their coats, of a warm beverage, or anything like that. Not that they’d wanted anything, but still it was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. She’d barely invited them in when she dropped the bomb.
“Who was my daughter sleeping with?”
“Huh?” Taylor asked, looking at her sister.
Hayley looked clueless.
Sandra had planted herself right in front of the twins and didn’t step back. She was totally invading their personal space.
“Do you know who Katie was having sex with?” she asked, her eyes fierce and angry.
It was a look neither girl had seen from Sandra, who had always seemed so fragile.
Hayley shook her head. “As far as I know, she wasn’t. And if she was, it was none of our business when she was alive.”
“Or now, when she’s, you know, not alive,” Taylor said.
Sandra’s eyes were stony. She was upset. Cold. Livid.
“Dead is the word you’re looking for, Taylor,” she said.
Taylor felt her face go pink. “Right. Dead. Well, we honestly don’t know.”
Sandra was on a mission. She needed to know. “Did she have a boyfriend?” she asked.
Hayley took that one. Taylor was unusually flustered. “She might have had someone she was talking to online.”
“This is more than online,” Katelyn’s mother said, backing up and going toward the coat tree. She started fishing through her coat pockets.
“Damn,” she said. “I can’t find it.”
“Find what?” Hayley asked.
“The pregnancy test she took,” Sandra said, now digging through her purse but coming up empty-handed. “Must have left it in the car.”
Taylor looked over at Hayley. She didn’t say it, but she was thinking that nobody takes a test for having online sex. If people did, grocery and drugstores would be selling the kits by the cartful.
“Look, Mrs. Berkley,” Taylor said. “We didn’t know her that well. Not like we did when we were little. But I’m pretty sure Katelyn would have told you if she thought she was pregnant.”
Taylor’s words seemed to soften Mrs. Berkley’s features.
“Maybe so,” she said. “At least, I hope so.”
She opened the door, which was their cue to leave. As it swung shut, the twins looked at each other.
“What you just did was very nice,” Hayley said as the pair hurried down the steps to the sidewalk in front of house number 23.
Taylor shrugged off the compliment. “That’s not why I did it. It was the truth. Mrs. Berkley and Katelyn were close. Close enough to make me wonder what it would be like if it was just me and Mom.”
“Instead of you, me, and Mom?”
“Right.”
“That’s a nice thought. Thanks for that.”
“Oh, come on. Like you haven’t wondered what it would be like as a singleton.”
Just then they noticed Teagan, loitering in the alleyway with his BB gun and a coffee can that he’d been using for target practice. Both girls thought it, but didn’t say it: Who buys coffee in a can anymore?
“Starla home?” Taylor asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “The little B is upstairs.”
“You mad at her?” Hayley asked.
Teagan lowered his BB gun. “Not really. Or maybe yes. She’s always telling me what to do. Even when I’m not mad at her, I have to get ready to be mad.”
He kicked the coffee can.
“Aren’t BB guns illegal?” Hayley asked.
“You going to tell on me?”
“No. I’m just asking.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care if they are. It’s fun to shoot stuff. One time I knocked a robin out of a tree. That was cool.”
“Actually, that’s not cool at all,” Hayley said.
“Whatever. I’m going inside. Come on and I’ll let you in.”
