“That figures.”
“...but right now we’re focused on Dirty Hairy. He’s good in these woods and it’s a big area, but we’ve got dogs and we’ll get him sooner or later.”
“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind, Sheriff.”
“We’ve got his prints — good sets — from inside the cabin, and he knew her body was in that hot tub — those wildflowers didn’t grow on that lid — so what do you think?”
My eyes drifted up to the cloud-shrouded mountain, and I imagined the scene unfolding there.
“Listen,” Stender said thickly.
I listened.
“Reason I called was to let you know,” he spoke with reluctance, then stopped.
“Go on.”
He sighed. “Autopsy was done and the results were leaked, and I didn’t want you to just get it from TV or something—”
I waited.
“It’s not good,” he said.
It wouldn’t be, I thought.
“Both legs and one arm were broken,” he told me. “Skull was fractured. Her nose and cheeks also had fractures.”
“He beat her hard,” I said.
“Thing is,” he went on with more hesitance, “she went into that hot tub alive.”
“What?”
“Couple of fingernails were broken off and there were deep scratches in the wood seat inside the tub, so... well, it’s pretty much certain, that... you know.”
“She drowned?”
He sighed, then said, “Analysis of tissue, lungs, and the condition of her brain makes it almost certain she... boiled.”
“Jesus.”
“There’s a safety breaker, that should have kicked in when the water temp reached a hundred five. It had been forced open...”
“Christ almighty!”
“I know.”
“I didn’t realize...”
“I know.”
Jesus, I thought. Poor Carole.
“Anyway,” he said, “the report was leaked. We got a call from the Times looking for confirmation, and I figured you should be told.”
“I appreciate it.”
“She had no family, apparently, except her ex-husband?” He’d made the statement a question.
“I don’t know anything about any family she might have had,” I told him, then I remembered. “Oh, Jess Collier, her agent, they were friends as well. She needs to be notified.”
“Seattle P.D. talked with her today,” he assured me. “She thinks it was Dorin, by the way.”
Which, alibi or not, was what I still thought.
After hanging up, I sat on the screened porch of my cabin, drinking bad coffee and thinking hard thoughts about Carole’s last minutes alive. Thoughts I didn’t want to think but that came to mind anyway. Around two P.M., which is when I decided I’d need fresh clothes if I were to stay on in Ashford for the rest of the weekend, I decided to drive back up to Seattle that afternoon.
In the same way that thoughts of Carole’s death came uninvited to mind, I turned my eyes toward my truck, parked only a few feet from the screen door, and there was, on the windshield, a shape that didn’t belong. Something...
Rather damp, folded twice, and tucked under the driver’s side wiper with a wildflower on the inside — a charcoal drawing of Dirty Hairy.
Unmistakably him, complete with Mets baseball cap, his eyes wide, staring out from the hair that crowded and obscured the rest of his face. The portrait was unsigned, but the style of it was definitely Carole’s.
Handling it with care I took it back into the cabin, found a plastic trash bag in which to keep it, then grabbed my binoculars and went out again, where I scanned the woods around me, watching for any movement, for almost fifteen minutes.
If Dirty Hairy was near, he was too well hidden, so I gave that up and got out my cell phone to call Stender. He was out, and when I asked to speak with someone who was connected with the investigation, I got a frustrating fifteen-minute runaround. I hung up, deciding there was, after all, no hurry about reporting my find just then.
Thinking that the dampness of the paper suggested it had been left in the early morning rain and that Dirty Hairy — if he was the one who’d left it for me — would by then be long gone. And there was at least a small chance that the portrait I had was not done by Carole.
Besides, in my own mind, Dorin was a far better suspect than Dirty Hairy still, and this was evidence that might close off any other direction the investigation might take.
So for the moment I decided I would get it confirmed that the portrait had been done by Carole — and Jess Collier should be able to do that.
When I got to Seattle, and her office, and showed her the drawing, she did.
“Oh, this is Carole’s, I’m sure,” Collier said.
“I thought so, too.”
We were in her wide-open-spaces office, standing at her desk, with the drawing of Dirty Hairy open on it.
“And he just left it for you?”
“He’d seen me the day I found Carole’s body.”
She sat and sighed raggedly. “It must’ve been horrible.”
“It wasn’t pleasant,” I agreed.
She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed but hard, and shook her head. “That... bastard!”
I knew whom she meant. “Apparently, Dorin has an alibi.”
She frowned, so I explained, and she saw the problem as I had.
“That newspaper business means nothing. He could’ve still killed her when he got out of jail. The fact that newspapers dated later than the sixteenth hadn’t been looked at may only mean Carole hadn’t been home, for God’s sake!”
“They haven’t ruled Dorin out as a suspect, but they are focusing on Dirty Hairy.”
“Well, he certainly looks like a crazed killer,” she said, looking down at the drawing. “Does he have a name?”
“John McGowan,” I replied. “He has a minor police record, but nothing violent.”
She studied the drawing a moment longer, then tears started falling. “Charcoal was becoming Carole’s forte,” she told me hoarsely. “The last work she brought to me was a charcoal sketch.”
“Oh?”
She nodded, dabbing her eyes with tissue, then stood and stepped over to a mirrored cabinet and pressed a corner of the door. When it opened, she slid out an unframed canvas sketch, which she stood on her desk.
“It might be the best she ever did,” she said thickly.
It was a sketch of the mountain, viewed from the creek bed outside Carole’s cabin, drawn on a much better day than when I had stood there. Rainier was full up and clear in the sky beyond the trees, the wooden footbridge, and the dry creek bed, that lay like a rocky carpet thrown down to where Carole had to have been.
I pointed to the broad split stone at the base of footbridge. “The detail is wonderful.”
“She always knew,” Collier agreed, “just what belonged and what didn’t.” She shook her head, adding thickly, “I’m taking this home — I’ll never sell it.” She faced me then, and her teary, angry eyes glittered. “I want to kill him, Mr. Virginiak. I really, really do.”
She meant Dorin, of course, and I could understand her. Carole Dragnich had been her friend as well as her client, and wanting her killer’s death was the least she could do.
I felt something along the same lines, I suppose, and after taking my sketch and leaving her, after picking up my clothes at my condo, and then on the road back to Ashford, in the driving rain and growing dark, I did what I could to see Jess Collier’s wish come true.
I focused my thoughts on seeing that Carole’s killer was arrested and convicted. The death penalty was alive and well in Washington State, and the arrest and conviction of such a crime would almost certainly make the killer a candidate for the hangman.
And because Carole Dragnich had been my friend, it was the least I could do.
But by the time I hit Eatonville — probably the result of having seen my own anger at Phil Dorin reflected in the angry eyes of Jess Collier — I had given Dorin and what I knew of him a lot of thought and decided he was probably not the killer after all.