Olga moved past the plumbing supply section, sinks and toilets displayed with pencil-point lighting that made them look like objets d'art. The smell of gardenias from a shipment of plants in the nursery hung in the soggy air of the rainy day. As she rounded the corner at the end of the aisle, she could hear a woman twittering about something.
". . . Oh really? I thought it would be so much harder to do""
"Depends on how hard you want things."
Olga interrupted Dylan Walker and the now red-faced suburban mom who'd been caught flirting over a stack of travertine tiles.
"Dylan, I could use some help, too," Olga said.
Even though he knew why she was there, he flashed his blazing white smile.
"That's what I'm here for," he said.
The woman with the shopping cart of travertine started to back off slightly. Olga was tiny, blond, quite pretty, and best of all, carried a badge. The shopper must have realized that those attributes easily trumped overweight, mousey, and an upper lip in need of bleaching.
"Thank you," the woman said, her smile now sagging and her cart inching down the aisle. "If I have any questions, can I ask for you, Dylan?"
Walker stuffed his hands in his pockets; his jeans were loose around his thirty-four-inch waist. He turned and fixed his gaze on the detective. "What do you want now?"
Olga's eyes remained steely, completely unflinching. She let a slight smile part her lips. It was merely for effect and had nothing whatsoever to do with how she felt about him. They'd had it out during the first week of the investigation when he tried to suggest the missing girls were promiscuous.
"They were always coming on to me," he had said.
Olga knew the guy was a creep and just looking at him sent a shiver down her spine.
"You," she said. "Dylan, just like everyone else around here, I want you"
Chapter Twenty
9:15 A.m., nineteen years ago, Meridian, Washington
The Whatcom County Superior Courthouse was the jewel of a revitalized Meridian, Washington. It was an old terracotta castle, with five gold-tipped spires that held court over a downtown that had seen a recession come and go, and a kind of renaissance emerge. The art museum had scored a major postimpressionists show-a coup for a city of Meridian's size. Nordstrom store officials had vowed to keep their location just where it was, thus ensuring that the mall going up in the hinterlands of the county would never be more than a second-tier destination.
It had been more than a year since the two Cascade University students were found on the sandbar. It had become a touchstone moment. Nearly every resident could recall where they had been when the news broke. The college had tightened security. The police stepped up neighborhood patrols. In a sense, the city dusted itself off and continued moving forward.
There were problems in the courthouse with the Dylan Walker double-homicide case. What had seemed to have been an exceedingly strong case was imploding. Olga Morris, who'd made the collar for Meridian Police Department, sat stone-faced while lawyers argued about whether or not the defense's theory of another perp could be heard by the jury. Ordinarily that wouldn't have been much of an issue. Blaming someone else had always been in the hip pocket of any half-good-and sometimes desperate-defense lawyer. But this one was tricky. No one could depose Tyler Ticen. No one could get him on the stand. This particular "I-didn't-doit-he-did" target was stone-cold dead a suicide without a note.
College student Ticen also worked at Builders' Center. Detective Olga Morris wondered who didn't work for Builders' Center. Ticen let several coworkers know that he was interested in Lorrie. An examination of his room on campus showed an overt interest in criminology, sociology, and truecrime books-one of which was about a killer with the same ligature and torture MO.
But he was dead. The suicide, the defense postulated, was a direct result of his growing guilt over the arrest of allAmerican charmer Dylan Walker. Walker enjoyed the volley of words as the lawyers pitted their wits against each other and case law. He sat somewhat smugly, Detective Morris thought, shifting his weight from one side to the other while keeping a slight smile on his handsome face. His hard brown eyes followed everyone in the courtroom like a roadside artist's painting of Jesus, only creepier. There was nothing soft about Dylan Walker. Hard body. Heart of stone.
All of that but no place to go but prison.
Olga hoped Walker would be off at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla as someone's bitch by month's end. But the petite detective was nervous. Her blond hair was longer now; she absentmindedly pushed it behind her ear. She leaned closer to capture every word being said by the lawyers with their backs like a wall in front of the crammed courtroom of spectators. The judge was actually listening to the public defender, a windbag who made grandstanding look like a classy move.
"Your Honor, it is my client's right to present an alternative theory of this case and you know it."
The judge, an old-timer with a bird beak nose and halo of gray hair, frowned. She turned to the prosecutor, a veteran of the worst criminal cases the region had seen, but who wanted to win this one to cap off a relatively distinguished career.
"I don't like this one bit, but I'm allowing it."
The prosecutor kept up a front of righteous indignation.
"Your Honor!"
"Can it!" The judge didn't bother looking at him; she turned her attention back to the bailiff and sighed. "Now let's bring out the jury and finish this case."
Olga felt her stomach dive. This BS is coming in? When there was so much that wasn't going to be presented to the jury. It was the system, she knew. But it still felt like a hard kick to the memory of those who'd come across Dylan Walker never to be heard from again. Although the case of the two dead college girls had led him to that courtroom, there were three others that hovered like apparitions throughout the proceedings. One was only twelve years old, a redhead named Brit Osterman.
Her case didn't fit the profile that the FBI had originally crafted for Meridian PD when the two Cascade coeds first went missing. Too young, they insisted. But then again, Olga knew, Dylan Walker was sixteen at the time. Maybe she was his first? The first sip of bloodlust had to come from someplace. Olga was all but convinced he killed the sixth grader.
The strongest link between Walker and a victim was a Seattle woman who went out for a jog in Walker's neighborhood. Tanya Sutter never came back. Her body was found a week later in a thicket of blackberries and fireweed off the old highway between Seattle and Tacoma. She had been wrapped in plastic. Bound. Shot. Dumped. Too much time had passed on that one and though interrogators tried to break Walker to force a confession, the man was Teflon. Nothing seemed to faze him. His gaze was cool, smug, almost indifferent. Not one ounce of indignation.
"I'm not a guy," Olga Morris had told the chief after that interrogation, "but if I were, I'd want to pop anyone who even made the suggestion that I brutalized some woman for kicks. But not this self-absorbed charmer. He just smiled those pearly whites and shrugged. It was like we were cutting into his time to kill."
There was suspicion of another victim, a girl named Steffi Miller who went missing while Walker attended a church youth camp in Nampa, Idaho, the summer of his senior year in high school. Her body was never found. In all, Dylan Walker had been linked to five dead or missing: Brit, Tanya, Steffi, Lorrie, and Shelley.
Unluckiest man in the world or serial killer? The press had already decided. More than a hundred reporters had descended on the gold-pinnacled courthouse to write about the nation's most handsome killer. Most were women. All wanted an exclusive interview, but Dylan Walker played hard to get.
"I'd love to, Connie," he'd say, "but my lawyer is dead set against my talking to anyone right now. But if I did give an interview, I'd do it with you"