Chapter 25

TWENTY-FIVE

FEbrUARY 2023

Whatcom County

"Mac" MacDonald and his partner were on the first direct flight from Cincinnati to Seattle the morning after Lucas's call. Lucas picked them up at the airport. Standing at arrivals, he spotted them immediately; cops always stuck out in a crowd, even two cops as visually distinct from one another as these two.

Detective MacDonald looked pretty much as Lucas would have guessed from hearing his voice. A big, barrel-chested guy in his early fifties with a shaved scalp and a suit that was a little too small for him. His partner was a petite woman with reddish brown hair, glasses, and a dark blue pant suit that somehow looked as though it had been freshly pressed, despite the fact she had stepped off a five-hour flight.

Lucas wasn't carrying a sign, but MacDonald immediately homed in on him when he saw him. They shook hands and MacDonald turned to his partner.

"This is…"

"…Detective Anderson," the petite woman said, extending her hand. "Kyra Anderson. Good to meet you."

Lucas took her hand and was struck by the smoothness of her skin as well as the firmness of the shake. Her gaze told him that she wasn't one for wasting time on pleasantries.

"Have you two eaten? We can grab something here before I take you to see the body."

"We're good," Anderson said.

"I could eat," Mac said, drawing a sharp look from his partner. "And we both need a coffee. But we'd like to see the dump scene first."

"Not a problem," Lucas said. "It's on the way."

They bought coffees to go at a place in the terminal, and Mac added a breakfast burrito to his order, paying for both of them with a crumpled twenty he dug out of his pocket. He was still eating it when they reached Lucas's car in the short-stay parking structure. Lucas had tried to slow the walk from the terminal down a little to avoid just this, but Detective Anderson had set the pace, striding forward, steadily clutching her go-cup like she was competing in an egg and spoon race.

Lucas wound his window down as soon as they got in and hoped Mac wouldn't drop any of the filling from his burrito in the passenger footwell. As it was, the car would be smelling of egg and grease for a week.

He pulled onto the on ramp for I-5 and merged into the northbound traffic. The sun was still low in the sky.

"First time in the Northwest?"

"First time for me," Mac said, then craned his neck around to address Anderson. "How about you?"

"Closest I've been is San Francisco," she said, staring out of her window.

Lucas let Mac fill him in on their activities since they had spoken the previous afternoon.

"We brought the husband in for questioning."

"How did he take it?" Lucas asked.

Mac shrugged. Neither of them had gone into this side of things in detail on the call yesterday, but that was because a lot of it went unsaid. Even in a homicide case with slightly more everyday parameters, the first person you look at is the victim's spouse. The fact he had apparently covered up his wife's disappearance made him look even guiltier, though Lucas was keeping an open mind until he spoke to the man personally.

"If he was acting upset, he's a good actor. We didn't have to say anything. He went to pieces when he saw us at the door. Didn't ask for a lawyer, either. Not at first."

"What's his story?"

"Same as it was a week ago, minus the part where his wife showed up safely."

Mac consumed the last inch and a half of the burrito in one mouthful, then crumpled the foil and the wrapper together and stuffed it into the pocket of his pants. He reached for his coffee in the cup holder and took a sip, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"She checked into the hotel and then vanished. The husband called everywhere he could think of and then contacted us. A couple of hours later somebody contacted him and told him to call us off, say his wife was back home." He turned to fix Lucas with a hard stare. "A couple of days after that they checked in again to make sure he wasn't going to spill. They made a compelling argument."

"His wife's little finger arrived in the mail?" Lucas asked.

"FedEx," Anderson said from the back. "The box arrived with the finger and a note with a phone number on it. Greenwood called it and they told him they had his wife and if he didn't want more digits arriving, he would call us off."

"When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight," Lucas said.

"What?" Anderson said.

"Before your time, kid," Mac said, before winking at Lucas. "The younger generation, huh?"

"Is he going to ID the body?" Lucas asked. He was interested in the answer.

"He assumed it was being transported back to Cincinnati. When I told him it was staying here for the foreseeable, he demanded to come with us. Thankfully I got to pass on that. He's on his way out here."

They ran out of shop-talk after a while, and Mac started talking about his hobby of breeding pit bulls. Lucas tuned him out and made the occasional comment to make it seem like he was paying attention. Detective Anderson didn't even try to pretend she was interested, tapping out emails on her phone from the back seat the whole time.

Eventually they reached the outskirts of Bellingham and the dump site. The creek ran across the county, passing under a bridge on a back road. As Lucas slowed, he could see that the area around the bridge was taped off, even though the forensic work had been completed and there was no longer anything to see here.

He parked in the wide spot at the side of the road, and the three of them got out.

Lucas led them to the start of the slope down to the creek and indicated the spot where the body had been found, and told them the timeline. The initial discovery by the kids, the 911 call, Deputy Cooney attending, and then Lucas and Longbow arriving at the scene.

The two Ohio detectives did just as Lucas had done the morning before. They took a moment to take in the immediate surroundings, judged why the site had been chosen for a body dump, then climbed down to the spot where Olivia Greenwood's body had been found. Anderson asked a couple of questions relating to timings: if they knew roughly how long the body had lain there before discovery, whether there was any clue on the vehicle that had been used to transport her here; and Lucas told her what he had been able to discern, which wasn't a lot.

It was a good dump site: miles from anywhere, no cameras or tolls, no mud on the road to show up tracks, and the creek could have carried away trace evidence remaining on the body. The coroner's best guess was that time of death was at least twenty-four hours before the body had been found. The body could have been left in the creek at any time in that window, though logically overnight would have been the safest time for the perpetrator to do that.

"All right," Mac said, clearly bored already but satisfied that he had checked one item off his itinerary, "let's go say hello to the deceased."

They got back in the car and Lucas drove them into Bellingham.

Ten minutes later, they pulled up outside the coroner's office. Longbow's SUV was parked outside. As Lucas pulled into the next bay, the driver's door opened and the sheriff stepped out.

The three of them got out of Lucas's car, and Lucas made brief introductions. He knew Longbow was no great fan of other cops on his patch, even those with good reason, but he disguised it well.

"Good to welcome you both to Whatcom County," he said. "I hope your trip is worthwhile."

The coroner showed them into the chiller room and pulled out the drawer that was Olivia Greenwood's temporary resting place. He pulled back the sheet that was covering her enough to expose her head and shoulders and stood back. Lucas suppressed a shiver and hunched his own shoulders, longing for the relative warmth of the office.

The two Ohio cops took their time looking at the body, then exchanged a glance.

"Husband'll do the official ID later today, but that's her," Mac said.

"Okay, that's out of the way," Lucas said. "So perhaps you can help us out with why your kidnap victim ended up in a creek all the way out here."

"That's what we're going to work out," Mac said.

Lucas exchanged a glance with Longbow across the body. The sheriff got the message and cleared his throat.

"And is that going to be ‘we we', or ‘you we', Detective?"

"This is CPD's case," Anderson said. She had been crouched to examine some dirt under the corpse's fingernails but straightened up to look Longbow in the eye. "Victim is from Cincinnati, she was abducted in Cincinnati, maybe even killed in Cincinnati for all we know."

Lucas doubted the latter piece of speculation, but he ignored that in favor of his strongest hand. "…and the body was dumped right here, in Whatcom County Sheriff's Department jurisdiction."

Mac held a hand up to stop his partner from answering. "I don't think we need to get into a pissing contest here. From what I've seen, this is either going to be straightforward or it's a mess. Either way, we all have to pitch in on this. We have work to do here and back home. We can waste a bunch of time fighting over who gets the credit—if there is any—or we can cut to the chase and get working."

There was a silence. The four of them standing on opposite sides of a cold body. Finally, Longbow broke the silence.

"Sounds fair to me. Sergeant Lucas and I will help you out however we can here, but we want to be kept in the loop." He held up a finger. "Don't go Big City Cop and jerk us around on this, Detective MacDonald."

"Likewise," Mac said. "If we can skip the part where the locals bitch about their turf, I'll be a lot happier."

Anderson said nothing, but Lucas noticed she had the air of a long-suffering spouse waiting for her husband to finish dickering over a hotel bill.

There was a knock on the door. The receptionist appeared, head tilted, lowering her voice like she was interrupting a small group of mourners in the waiting room of a crematorium.

"Mr. Greenwood is here to identify the body."