“Kayla didn’t exactly confide in me. We just knew each other from work. We didn’t hang out or anything.”
He continues as if I haven’t said anything. “Maybe even a couple of guys together?”
“No. She never said anything. And she never acted like anyone made her nervous.” Kayla always seems to have a good time at work. The truth is, I always like working with her. Sure, it’s still work, but she makes it fun, too. I kind of wish Kayla was my friend. But even though she’s always nice to me, she already has a bunch of friends at school.
“Now, we understand from your boss that you switched schedules with Kayla so that she worked on Wednesday when you normally would have. Whose idea was that?” His eyes drill into me.
I feel guilty, even though it wasn’t my idea. “Kayla wanted Friday off. I was fine with it, because I didn’t have plans.” Which is an understatement.
He makes another note. “So she was going on a date?”
“She didn’t say, but I thought she was.” Kayla had pursed her lips and smiled after she asked me if I could do her a “big, big favor.” Looking like she had a happy secret.
“Then you don’t know who she was going to go out with?” Sergeant Thayer raps out. “Do you have any guesses?”
“Half the school and half our customers wouldn’t mind dating Kayla Cutler,” I say. I’m still trying to take it in. The pizza boxes scattered on the ground. The car door open, but nobody there. I try to think of Kayla dead. But it’s impossible. I can see her in my mind’s eye, make her tip her head back while she laughs, hear her humming an old Green Day song, see her bend down to get something from the cooler while half the customers appreciatively watch her butt. If you stand right next to her making pizzas, mixed with the smell of tomato sauce and pepperoni is Kayla’s own faint scent, a sweet smell like vanilla.
I knew Kayla a little from school, but it was only at Pete’s that I really got to know her. You can’t help but know Kayla. She talks nonstop. Not just about herself. She also wants to know about you.
“So is it true what I heard—that you’re going to Stanford?” she asked me one slow Saturday afternoon. It was too late for the latest lunch and too early for even old people to eat dinner.
“Yeah.” I duck my head.
“I hear so many people apply there that they take the stack of admission forms and throw them down a flight of stairs,” she says. “And they only look at the ones who make it to the bottom.”
I can’t tell if Kayla really believes that, but it makes as much sense as anything. I shrug.
“And major in premed?”
“I guess.”
Kayla tilts her head. “You don’t sound really excited.”
“It’s just that I’m not sure I want to be a doctor.”
“Because of all the blood and guts? You’re a vegetarian, right?”
“That’s not it.” I’m surprised she remembers. “It’s more that my parents are surgeons, and that’s their whole life. They don’t have room for much else. I’d like to design stuff, like the things we use every day, you know, like forks and light switches, but my parents say that’s not a real job.”
Her brows pull together. “Why not?”
“I guess they don’t want me to be a starving artist. They say I could always make stuff on the side.”
She looks skeptical. “While going to medical school? I’ll bet there’s not any time on the side for years and years. How long do you have to go to school for, anyway?”
“Four years to get your undergrad, then four of med school, and then at least two years as a resident.”
“Ten more years?” Grinning, Kayla shook her head. It was clear that she wanted to be someplace real in ten years, not just starting out.
But now what? She must be dead, or she will be soon. That’s what happens when a girl gets taken. Maybe her body is already in a shallow mountain grave. Isn’t that what they always call it in the paper? A shallow mountain grave. Kayla won’t be laughing or humming anymore. And her smell will be of something else.
Only I don’t believe she’s dead. Something inside of me says No. But that’s just stupid. I hear my mother’s voice. It’s irrational. The greatest sin, in my parents’ eyes—being irrational. Of course Kayla is dead. She must be.
The shaking is getting harder. My arms are trembling no matter how hard I squeeze my hands together. Sergeant Thayer’s eyes bore into me.
“What about Brock Chambers? We understand Kayla had recently broken up with him. Do you know if he was angry about that?”
“Brock? I just know who he is, that’s all. I’ve never even talked to him. Kayla didn’t seem like she was upset or worried or anything, though.”
Sergeant Thayer asks me a few more questions, but it’s clear I don’t know anything, and it’s also clear he’s getting frustrated.
When I walk back into class, everyone stares at me.
And I keep thinking about what Drew said. About how the guy asked for me. It should have been me, down by the river. It should have been my purse on the seat, my hat on the ground. He wanted me. I don’t care what Sergeant Thayer said. This guy wanted me. The girl in the Mini Cooper. He wanted me first.
Maybe he still wants me.
Found on Kayla’s Dresser
Evidence
The Third Day
Gavin
EYES OPEN, EYES CLOSED. It doesn’t matter. This is a black dive. With his bare fingers, Gavin sifts through mud and silt as he crawls along the bottom of the Willamette River, looking for Kayla Cutler’s body.
People don’t understand if you tell them there is no visibility at the bottom. They picture scuba divers in the ocean surrounded by schools of colorful fish. They still think you can see your hand if you hold it in front of your face.
No. You can see nothing. Carry a powerful dive light, and you can’t see its beam even if you place it in front of your mask.
In the blackest black, Gavin is deprived of every sense except touch. His entire body has become a giant eye as his mind connects his fingertips, toes, and everything in between to create a picture of what he is touching.
Sometimes the touch is horrifying. He still remembers the feel of a human hand against his throat as he searched the murky depths of Blue Lake in 1999. He had finned directly into the outstretched arm of a dead six-year-old girl. She had drowned at a church picnic.
Gavin is part of the Multnomah County dive team, which is called out a couple of times a month. Drownings, suicides, murders, missing persons, vehicle crashes, dumped vehicles, evidence searches, and the occasional Homeland Security directive.
But most of it involves people. He has lost track of how many bodies he has recovered in the last eleven years. A baby thrown from a bridge. An old man who took his last fishing trip. Airplane crashes; those are the worst. The bodies shattered beyond belief—missing arms, legs, heads. And then there are the suicides who jump from one of Portland’s eleven bridges. From fifteen stories up, the height of the Fremont bridge, the water is rock hard. The impact rips off clothes and blasts leg bones up into the torso.
Sometimes the team looks for evidence instead of people. On his last dive, Gavin used an underwater metal detector to find a chrome .357 handgun that had killed a clerk at a Deliteful Donuts. Even with the detector, it took four hours. Once he located the gun, Gavin sealed it in a watertight container with the barrel pointing up. The gun stayed in the water until it went to the crime lab, where it was dried and processed. A lot of people think fingerprints and gunpowder residue will be washed away by water.
This is a myth, as the man who is now facing murder charges has learned.
Right now, pawing the darkness, Gavin doesn’t know where the shore is, where he himself is, where he has been, or where he is going.
That’s why Gavin has Jack, his tender. Unlike Gavin, Jack can see where Gavin is and where he is going by watching his bubbles, the angle of his line against shore landmarks, and how the line moves. Next to Jack, the b
ackup tender is drawing every move Gavin makes, creating an underwater map showing obstructions and entanglement risks, as well as what areas have been searched. And in an emergency, it will also show Gavin’s last known location.
Gavin’s line is secured to a post driven into the riverbank, and Jack controls him with a series of tugs and jerks. These signals are their only form of communication, orientation, safety. Through the line, Jack can tell him to go up or down, left or right, or ask if he is okay. And Gavin can tell Jack if he is entangled but okay, okay but needs assistance, or, if worst comes to worst, in immediate danger. Some dive teams only have one signal for trouble. Which is just asking for trouble, in Gavin’s opinion.
Jack has adjusted the girth strap so that Gavin can still breathe, but it’s tight enough that he feels every twitch. The tether point is slightly off center to keep the line from going between his legs. All Gavin’s gear is trim, nothing dangling. Entanglement is the number one cause of death in this line of work. He has his quick-release pony bottle and shears and wire cutters. Knives might puncture him, his equipment, or the body.
Gavin has two jobs: to search for Kayla’s body and to maintain a taut line. If he feels slack, it means Jack wants him to go farther out. If Jack wants Gavin to come back, he’ll reel him in.
Besides the backup tender, there is also a backup diver and a 90-percent-ready diver. Rather than sending all three divers into the water, where they would face the same risk of entanglement, entrapment, or just plain fatigue, it’s far better to have warm, rested, and ready-to-go divers with full tanks.
Gavin pats and paws, his fingers translating what he touches into images. Stones, a branch, gravel, mud, an old tire. In other words, nothing. Jack pulls him in another two feet and he starts over. Dives are exhausting, using up every bit of physical and mental energy. Gavin thinks about the girl they’re looking for. He saw her picture in the paper. And he knows they found a bloody rock right at the edge of the river, the bank all torn up. It looks like she struggled, the attacker hit her, possibly raped her, dumped her in the river, and she died. None of those things necessarily in that order.
So what they are looking for is a body. Earlier, they had the cadaver dogs out in boats, but they didn’t alert to anything. The body could have been pushed far downstream, or it could be caught on a strainer—brush or a fallen tree that traps debris while letting the water rush through. If that happened, Gavin hopes the girl was dead long before she reached it. Otherwise, the water pressure would hold her in place against the strainer until she slowly drowned.
With luck, the body is still on the bottom within reach. It takes a week or longer for a floater to pop up. Underwater, a body has an effective weight of about five pounds. If he finds her, she’ll still be easy to maneuver, at least until he gets her into the air.
The worst thing is that the parents are on shore and have refused to leave. If Gavin doesn’t find anything, they won’t understand. Won’t understand that it’s like searching on your hands and knees—blindfolded. You can pass by something two inches away and never know you missed it. Besides, in a fast-water environment like this one—made worse by recent heavy rains—the girl is probably long gone. Miles downriver. Washed out to the ocean. Unless she got snagged on something.
And if Gavin does find this girl? That will be worse. The parents screaming and tearing at their hair as he drags what was once their baby onshore.
But at least they’ll have an answer.
The Third Day
Gabie
“YOU’RE NOT GOING to work,” my mom says when I come downstairs wearing my red polo shirt with pete’s pizza embroidered on the left side. Her tone is halfway between a question and a command. The kitchen counters are covered with black cloth grocery bags from New Seasons.
“I have to. I’m on the schedule for today.”
“No one will be expecting you to go in. Not after what happened.” She slides a gallon of organic skim milk into the refrigerator, and then another.
“I can’t just sit around here thinking. I’d rather be busy and keep my mind off it.”
She plucks two green cardboard cartons filled with tiny strawberries from the top of a bag. “How can you keep your mind off it when you’re going to be right where it happened?”
“But it didn’t happen at Pete’s,” I tell her as she carefully washes one strawberry, pulls off the green cap, and pops it in her mouth. “It happened down by the river. Miles away.” Mom doesn’t know that the guy asked for me first. She doesn’t know because I haven’t told her.
Mom and Dad don’t even know that I deliver pizzas. The car sign attaches with magnets, and there’s two signs in the storeroom at work. Well, one I guess, since the police probably kept the one that was on Kayla’s car.
My parents are all about avoiding risks. The key doesn’t get turned in the car’s ignition until all the seat belts are buckled. Even though they live on their cell phones, my parents never answer them when they’re driving. And don’t even think about riding a bike without a helmet. I got the condom lecture when I was thirteen, and Mom kept talking, even though I begged her to stop. I’m expected to eat at least seven servings of fruit and vegetables a day, plus three glasses of skim milk. The few times there’s ice cream in the freezer, it’s always reduced fat, and the “butter” in the fridge is something made with an ingredient from pine trees to lower cholesterol.
Being careful is a great way to run an operating room. But I’m not so sure about life.
“I don’t know.” Mom picks up an empty bag, revealing a long smear of scarlet on the pale gray granite counter. She clucks her tongue and grabs a sponge. A strawberry must have gotten stuck underneath the bag. It looks like blood.
I wonder where Kayla is now. She must be dead. But I can’t make myself believe that. Something inside of me still says no.
My parents believe in being responsible, so I say, “Pete called me during lunch period to make sure I’m coming to work. He says they really need me. They’re asking extra people to work, it’s so busy. So it will be safe.” I take a deep breath. “Come on—I want to be around other people. If I stay home, I’ll just sit around and lose my mind.”
Mom purses her lips. “How about if I take you to work and your dad picks you up?”
“But if you guys get called into surgery, I’ll be stuck at Pete’s without a ride home,” I point out. “It’s better if I take the Mini.”
The only reason they let me have the Mini was because it had good ratings for head injuries, “thoracic trauma,” and risk of rollover. Plus I had to promise that I would never drink before driving it, never transport more than one friend, and never speed.
“This goes against my better judgment,” Mom finally says, “but all right. Be sure and keep your phone on. Text me when you get there and when you leave.”
“Thank you!” I give her a hug. It’s only when she hugs me back that I feel how hard it is for her to let me go. She runs her fingers along my shoulder blades and takes a sniff of my hair before she finally releases me.
SERGEANT THAYER is sitting right outside the front door of Pete’s in an unmarked cop car. The car is one of those nondescript brown four-door Fords with a light bolted next to the driver’s-side mirror and a short antenna sticking up from the trunk.
It might as well be painted blue and white and have a light bar on the top.
He’s watching the front door with a notebook in his hand. And there’s a lot to look at. A line of people spills out the door and winds all the way past the front windows. I’ve never seen this many people at Pete’s, not even on Super Bowl Sunday. Flyers have been taped up in every window. All I can see is a photo and a block of words, but I know they must be asking for people’s help in finding Kayla.
I go around back to park, then use the employee door. After putting my purse in a cubby, I grab a baseball cap and apron from the boxes in the break room. No one’s there because it’s so busy. When I walk out into the kitchen area, pepperoni p
ieces and cheese shreds dot the black and white floor. Pete does not believe in waste, so that’s almost as big a surprise as the people waiting in line.
Pete’s wife, Sonya, who normally just does the books at their house, and sometimes works delivery, slams the cash drawer closed with one hip while at the same time counting out some guy’s change. Drew, Courtney, and Pete are making pizzas. Pete’s hands are a blur as he scatters mushrooms with one hand and black olives with the other. And he’s not using the scale—another first.
“Where do you want me?” I ask Pete. “On the register or here?”
At the sound of my voice, Drew turns and smiles, one side of his mouth lifting higher than the other. Then he grabs a wooden paddle and opens the oven door. I tell myself it’s the five-hundred-degree ovens that make my cheeks get hot.
Pete’s hands never stop moving. “Help Sonya until we get caught up with orders.”
I go to the front and grab a pad and pen. “Who’s next?”
A girl with frizzy red hair, wearing a tie-dye shirt, says, “I think I am.”
“What would you like?”
Instead of answering, she says, “So this is where she worked, right? Kayla?”
“Yeah,” I say, biting off the word and not making eye contact. Maybe my mom was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come to work.
“So have you heard anything? Anything at all?”