Friday, December 19
Jimmy and I somehow arrive at Hangar 7 the next morning before Diane—unusual for her as she’s almost always the first to arrive and the last to leave. Her absence leaves the place feeling a bit hollow, or out of tune, like a radio with the channel not dialed in quite right.
The long mahogany table in the conference room is entirely covered by reports, photos, and other case information, so Jimmy and I start poking through it. We’re careful to replace each page or folder exactly where we found it so as not to disrupt Diane’s system … which is a good way of ensuring we don’t disrupt Diane.
“Looks like BrightPath paid off,” Jimmy says, hoisting a manila folder aloft and then laying it open in his hands as he begins to sift through. We have time to skim a handful of reports before the hangar door opens and we see Diane scurrying in our direction, her purse in one hand and yet another stack of folders in her other.
She makes for the stairs to her office, but then sees us through the glass wall of the conference room. With a look of surprise mingled with embarrassment, she changes direction in mid-pace and blows into the room like a northeaster.
“Good morning,” Jimmy and I say, our greetings overlapping and echoing.
“Sorry I’m late,” Diane blusters. “I was up late going over the files. The alarm clock went off, but I must not have heard it.”
“Did you get enough sleep?” Jimmy asks, looking her up and down.
She gives him a searing stare and then glances at her watch, only to realize she left it on the vanity at home. “What time is it?”
“Eight forty-five.”
“Then I got about five hours,” she replies tersely. “More than enough.”
It doesn’t look like enough, but neither Jimmy nor I are stupid enough to put the thought into words. If she saw herself right now she’d probably flip, so we’ll keep her away from mirrors until she’s finished with the briefing.
“You could have slept a little longer,” Jimmy says. “A few hours aren’t going to hurt the investigation.”
She waves off the concern with a flick of her hand. “I’m fine. I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to. Besides, all the heavy thinking should be behind us.”
Jimmy and I exchange a hopeful glance, but before we can ask her for the Onion King’s home address, she plows on. “I see you’ve been perusing the stacks. Would you like to continue, or do you want the CliffsNotes version?”
“CliffsNotes,” we say in unison.
With words and images, Diane introduces us to twenty-six-year-old Melinda Gaines, who parted with friends on Wednesday night and hasn’t been seen since. A copy of the Tacoma police report lies unopened on the table before her as she recites the details of the skimpy file. “SPD believes it was well organized, precise, and swift in its execution.”
“And they know that how?” Jimmy asks.
“Because she walked home from a place just blocks from her home on a well-lit street, yet no one saw or heard anything. From what the police report says, this is a neighborhood where people look out the window if a door slams too hard or a car backfires, so if she’d gotten off a scream, someone would have noticed. But like I said, no one saw or heard anything.”
“Where was she coming from?”
“A place called Biscuits. She was meeting a couple friends. They’ve both been interviewed and said it was just a normal evening. A couple guys asked them to dance, but they weren’t interested. Melinda drank Sprite and was happy and stone sober when she left.”
“And just vanished,” I add.
Diane lifts an eyebrow and nods.
“Nothing else?” I say. “No creepers hanging around, guys eyeballing them, or getting offended if they wouldn’t dance?”
“No,” she replies, glancing at her notes. “The girls said one guy was a sniffer, but that’s about it.”
“Sniffer?”
She nods. “He was talking to Melinda at the bar, before they moved to a table, and when she looked away he leaned over and smelled her. It’s not uncommon, I suppose, though usually they’re looking at you when they do it and follow it up with a compliment on your perfume.”
“Odd, though, right?”
“It’s odd only because, according to her friends, Melinda wasn’t wearing perfume; though I suppose he could have gotten a whiff of body lotion, hair spray, dryer sheets—who knows?”
Standing suddenly, I start sifting through the piles, knocking two of them over and making a mess of the third before Diane grabs both my hands and demands, “What are you looking for?”
“The Charice Qian report.”
Releasing me, she holds up a finger, looking for a moment like my mother, and moves down the table to a folder near the end. “Charice Qian,” she says as she hands it to me.
It takes me a couple minutes, but I find what I’m looking for in the transcript of Charice’s second interview. Diane and Jimmy have moved on without me by this time, so I place the open folder in front of Jimmy, underlining a passage with my finger.
He reads the sentence and then the paragraph. Then he backtracks and starts two paragraphs up, rereads it just to make sure he hasn’t missed something, and then reads the relevant sentences aloud: “I was on the ground and he pulled me toward him by the leg, dragging me right up to the bars on the cell. Holding me at the ankle and under the knee, he smelled my leg. He smelled down the whole length of my lower leg, the way you do to see if meat has gone bad.”
I cross my arms and lean back against the glass wall. “So maybe he’s not just a sniffer—at least a normal sniffer, if there is such a thing.”
“Well, he’s not a cannibal,” Diane replies.
“That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s something else going on that we’re not seeing. Charice said that she was raped once—and that was the day before he dumped her in the woods. So why would he keep her almost two weeks and then rape her once and discard her? The abduction-rapists that we’ve dealt with before have all raped their victims repeatedly throughout their captivity. So why’s this guy different?”
“And you think smell has something to do with it?” Jimmy confirms.
“I do. Charice says she was fed well while she was held, but it was always fruits and vegetables. No meats, not even fish.”
“Please don’t say he’s vegan,” Diane practically groans.
I shake my head. “That’s not what I’m saying. But what if there’s a certain smell he’s going for—or one he’s trying to eliminate? If we were able to talk to the other victims, I bet they’d tell us the same thing, that they were fed a special diet and held for a week or two before being raped and dumped in the woods for Murphy to find.”
“The guy’s a freak,” Jimmy says impatiently. “How does that help us catch him?”
I hesitate and then grudgingly admit, “It doesn’t.”
Jimmy studies me a moment and then motions for Diane to continue with her review—and then something occurs to me: “It means we have time,” I interrupt. Turning on Diane, I ask, “When was Melinda taken?”
“Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.”
“Don’t you see? If he repeats the same ritual with Melinda as he did with Charice, he’ll keep her a week or two before killing her or handing her off to another Murphy Cotton.”
“So, she’s alive, but maybe only for another five or six days,” Jimmy says.
I’d like to say for certain that she’s still alive, but I haven’t seen her shine yet. Nonetheless, I’m sure the theory is correct, so I nod my head, and with as much conviction as I can muster, I say, “She’s alive.”
The discussion about Melinda Gaines is downright depressing, but the meeting takes on a different tone as Diane starts detailing the BrightPath Wellness data. It turns out that all the victims except Sheryl Dorsey had been treated by BrightPath.
We can’t tell Diane that we’re not surprised, that we figured she’d be different. We can’t tell her the Onion King was a frequent guest at Sheryl’s house, because how would we explain that? Instead, we just nod at the interesting deviation and tell her to keep looking for a link.
The problem with the BrightPath Wellness connection is that most of the women used separate clinics, some of them hours apart. There are two exceptions.
“Debra Mata and Erin Yarborough went to the same clinic in Seattle,” Diane says, “and during the same general time frame. I couldn’t find any overlapping appointments, so it’s unlikely they ever met, but they did share the same counselor, a Dr. Jeffrey Mills.”
“Jeffrey?” Jimmy says, looking up sharply. “Didn’t Nate say that Melinda’s friends thought the sniffer introduced himself as Jeff?”
Diane scans the report quickly and confirms.
“Could it be that simple?” I ask.
“Why not?” Jimmy says. “BrightPath has seventeen clinics, but it’s still only one company. They probably move staff around, just like any other business. That would explain the different locations. After all, we’re talking about, what—a three-year period?”
“Six or seven different clinics,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s a lot of moving around, even over three years.”
“And that’s assuming it’s him,” Diane says. “I’m guessing the counselors aren’t the only ones who move around and fill in for other employees.”
Jimmy nods his understanding.
“What about that other name I gave you?” I ask Diane.
“I was wondering when you were going to ask about that.” She pulls a stapled batch of pages from the back of the BrightPath folder and hands it to me.
“What other name?” Jimmy asks, leaning over and trying to peek at the pages.
“It was just a hunch,” I tell him, “but it looks like it paid off.” Realizing that I can either spend the next ten minutes reading the report or have Diane summarize, I hand the papers back to her and give her a nod.
“What name?” Jimmy says again, more irritated this time.
Before answering, Diane tucks the pages back into the manila folder and places it on the table in the exact spot she removed it from. Finally, agonizingly, she brushes her pants smooth and clasps her hands in front of her.
“I’m afraid your partner has outdone you on this one,” she acknowledges, giving me a princess-like nod. “He figured out something that you missed.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“How the Onion King picked Murphy Cotton.”
Jimmy is silent a moment, digesting the statement, and then it dawns on him. “He was a patient at BrightPath?”
“He was, but at the Port Orchard branch.”
“But Murphy said he’d never met the Onion King; he was adamant about it, probably would have pissed himself if he had.”
“I’m sure that’s what Murphy believed,” I say, “but what if they had met and he just didn’t know it? What if the Onion King was his counselor, or a fellow patient, or—I don’t know: the receptionist? The other option doesn’t make sense.”
“What other option?”
I rise from my seat and start pacing the floor. “The Onion King is smart, right? Or at least we think he’s smart based on how he operates. So why would he recruit someone off the dark web, someone he hadn’t vetted, and have him dispose of his victims? Seems kind of risky, don’t you think? Wouldn’t he want to know everything about Murphy before approaching him? In fact, he’d have to know Murphy pretty well if he wanted to tap into his—what did you call it—delusions of grandeur?”
“No, I think that was Star Wars.”
“Right, but it was something like that.”
“I can’t diagnose Murphy—” Jimmy begins.
“Yeah, yeah, we know,” I say, cutting him off. “But you thought he might have some rare type of mental illness.”
“Grandiose delusional disorder.”
“There it is,” I say, as if I’d just extracted a bullet fragment from the depths of a four-hundred-pound cadaver. “So how did the Onion King know about Murphy’s disorder?”
“You’re assuming he did.”
“He played into it pretty well. In fact, he pushed all the right buttons, didn’t make a single misstep. How’d he do that without knowing Murphy’s condition?”
Jimmy doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s starting to make sense.
“And if the Onion King is an employee, as we suspect, he had access to that kind of information—or at least he had ways of accessing it.” My next words come out quiet, contemplative. “I guess breaking a few HIPAA laws doesn’t mean much to a serial kidnapper and rapist.”
When Jimmy raises his eyes again, his entire focus is on Diane. “This Dr. Jeff you were talking about, did he ever work at the Port Orchard branch?”
She presses her lips tightly together, perhaps thinking, and then shakes her head.
Diane takes another ten minutes to wrap up the presentation, and then we all sit around the table in silence, staring at each other. The eyes of the dead women peer out from the photos before us, silently demanding justice that has so far been denied.
One thing has become crystal clear in the last half hour: BrightPath Wellness is the key to this investigation.
We just don’t know what door that key opens.
By ten A.M., Jimmy and I are preparing to head south once more, though with a different agenda this time. Extracting a Glock 26 from the gun locker in his office, Jimmy slaps in a loaded magazine and chambers a 9mm round. When he holds the Austrian-made handgun out to me, I grudgingly take it, hoping I won’t have to use it. He hands me two spare magazines and then closes the locker.
Diane walks us out to the parking lot and tells us to be careful. The sight of Jimmy handing me a gun has her on edge, though she’ll never admit it. She’s still standing there as we pull out and head for I-5 south.