the circuitous schematics of the Winchester Mystery House. Go down the hall, around the corner, double back, turn another corner, and a visitor could easily lose his or her way. Drop bread crumbs. Carry a cell phone. Pay attention. The hodgepodge was the result of making do as the always cash-poor county grew in size.
Kendall breathed a sigh of relief when she found a parking space behind the building—something she wouldn’t have even attempted if she’d arrived first thing in the morning. The expansion of the county jail a few years prior had consumed much of the on-site parking for Sheriff’s Office employees. But it was 10 A.M., and she knew that coming in that time of day was occasionally rewarded with a spot vacated by someone off to a meeting or out on a call.
The fifteen-minute drive from her son’s parent-teacher conference had been full of introspection, soul-searching, and heartache. It was partially, Kendall felt, the same battle other working mothers waged every day. Do I do enough for my child? It was a conflict that she was sure should have been resolved with her mother’s generation. Yet it was a debate that still plunged a hot needle into her skin. No mom could ever really think she’d done enough—especially if she did anything for herself. That included pursuing a meaningful career, of course. Anyone without a special-needs child is always at the ready to tell those who have one what they ought to do.
At thirty-one, Kendall Stark had been in law enforcement for a decade, having started as a reserve officer for Kitsap. Next had come a three-year stretch as a Washington State Patrol trooper assigned to her home region. She returned to the Kitsap Sheriff’s Office to live and work in a community she loved. She’d moved up to detective after only six years, the result, she felt, of PR-motivated affirmative action by the previous sheriff, who ran for office with the pledge to see more women in higher positions. She was smart, attractive, and a very good investigator. She was the poster girl for the future of an office that had battled an “old-boys’ network” image that rankled the Democratic base of a county in search of change.
Kendall told herself over and over that how she had gotten there, how she leapfrogged over a couple of other candidates, didn’t matter. Ultimately, she’d proven herself and won the respect of most of the Sheriff’s Office. The sole exception was a small cadre of women: a pair from the records department and an icy brunette who ran the supply functions for the detectives unit. Those three seldom gave Kendall a break. The week before, she overheard them bashing her when she slipped into the break room, the sound of the old microwave popping corn masking her presence.
“She obviously hasn’t put her son first. What kind of woman would work these hours when her little one is in such need? I know it isn’t PC, but it says a lot about a woman who doesn’t nurture her own.”
Kendall pretended that she hadn’t heard a word.
“Hi, ladies,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t be making popcorn, unless you make some for everyone.” Her smile was frozen.
“Oh, hi, Detective,” said the one who’d been talking. She always said “detective” with a slight coating of sarcasm, as if Kendall should be behind a keyboard doing administrative work rather than out in the field dealing with the worst crimes committed against human beings.
“Blame Deb,” the other chimed, her face suddenly scarlet. “I’m on Weight Watchers, and I can’t even have this stuff. Movie-butter style, no less!”
Kendall took a Dr Pepper from the machine. “Tell me about it.”
She left the women in the break room that afternoon and took the longest, most serpentine route back to her desk in her dank, windowless office. She needed every moment to compose herself, to deflect the intentional cruelty of the “Witches of Kitsap,” as her husband liked to call them. Kendall would fight for Cody’s future with all that she possessed, but ultimately she knew that there likely was no magical fix for her seven-year-old. It left a hole in her heart. She saw her detective’s gold star as a means to fill it by doing something worthwhile. To stop pain elsewhere. And in Kitsap County, there had been more than enough.
Some cases never left her. The baby that had been dropped on his head by his Bremerton shipyard worker father, the little girl who’d been offered up for sex to an online predator by her Port Gamble mother. The young man from Seabeck who’d been in and out of the county jail so often he thought he’d be able to leave some belongings behind for his next stretch of incarceration.
That Monday morning she’d resisted the urge to go home and tell Steven face-to-face what the teacher had said. Having their son in a regular classroom for most of the day had fueled hope that he’d be able to live as others did when he was grown, when they were gone. That had faded, and she couldn’t break the news to Steven in person and see in his eyes the pain of the loss of hope once more.
Before collecting her things and locking her car, Kendall punched the speed-dial number for Steven. When he didn’t pick up, as she knew he wouldn’t, she left a message:
“Honey, bad news. We’ll need to check out Inverness for Cody. Ms. Bertram was very nice, but they just can’t help him there. Not the kind of help he needs. I’m not angry. Just sad. See you tonight.”
Rain started to fall. She looked up and regarded the crack in the gray sky. It was spring, and the weather had—in typical Pacific Northwest fashion—forgotten the season. The wind kicked up a little, sweeping maple-tree pollen in a pale orange swirl over car windshields and against the curb. Across the parking lot, under the overhang where a couple of corrections officers had left a pair of plastic office chairs, she saw Josh Anderson and the glow of a cigarette.
“You really should quit, Detective,” she said as she approached him.
He nodded. “I would if I could, but I blame the county. They used to let us smoke at our desks, you know.”
“So I’ve heard. They used to let you shoot seagulls at the dump too.”
Josh crushed out his smoke. “Those were the good old days.”
Kendall smiled. “Let’s go inside.”
At fifty, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Josh Anderson had turned the corner. Every day that he looked in the mirror he could see that he was no longer the man that he used to be. Lines now creased what had been an exceedingly interesting, if not handsome, face. It had been the kind of visage that telegraphed sexuality and vitality. A look. A wink. A smile. Yet that was fading, and fading fast. His black hair was snowy at the temples, and his hairline was marching backward. His nose seemed longer at the tip. The hooded eyelids that had once given women sighs of desire were now the slightly fleshy bags of a man growing older.
Josh had been married and divorced three times. The last time, to a county deputy prosecutor, ended in a bitter and very public sideshow nine years earlier. Although Washington was a no-fault divorce state and his peccadilloes were therefore irrelevant, they did matter when his wife sued for sole custody of their son, Drew. Everyone in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office knew he couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, but the public soon found out. The local paper latched on to the story, and when Josh Anderson went down, it was with a resounding thud. He lost his position as president of the Deputy Sheriffs Guild, or union, and did a two-year stretch as a civil deputy before crawling back to detective. He acted as though he was unrepentant. His ex-wife was a “bitch and a ballbuster.” He used to joke that he was a serial philanderer or that women were like items on a buffet line just waiting for him to sample.
“I can’t help myself . . . and, apparently, they can’t, either,” he once told Kendall in a revealing bit of introspection.
This guy’s ego is ten times the size of the brain in his pants, she had thought, almost saying it aloud.
As the years ticked by, Josh Anderson felt the kind of niggling self-loathing that told him he was a “three-time loser.”
What a difference a decade made.
Anyone passing by the adjacent offices occupied by Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson could see the distinct differences in the two detectives’ personalities and habits. There was a wall between them, but with