“Something has happened to Celesta,” Pena said. “Please help me find her. I am—we are—very, very worried.”
If you’ve seen Celesta Delgado, please contact the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Detective Kendall Stark this newspaper.
Serenity finished the article by writing extensive captions to accompany the photos. By providing the text with the images of Celesta, it would ensure that the overburdened copydesk would publish the pictures, at least online. She’d made a few calls to the numbers that Tulio provided. It seemed that everyone—the police, her employer, and her friends—believed that it was possible she left the country for her mother’s home in El Salvador
Everyone considered it an option but Tulio Pena. He complained to his brothers when he read the paper the next morning: “They are treating Celesta like she doesn’t matter. Like we don’t know her. It is not right. She’s lost, or she’s been taken.”
Or, as he was about to find out, something far worse.
He looked at the article that Serenity Hutchins had published in the paper. Sure, it was only a small-town paper, but in time he’d see his hobby find a place in the pages of newspapers far bigger. More important. Serenity would get something out of that too, and she’d have him to thank for that, of course.
He ran his fingertip over her byline, smudging it into oblivion.
The blood flowed from his heart to his genitals, and his erection throbbed until he could take it no more. He slipped his hand under the waistband of his underwear.
He knew what he liked.
He pulled up Facebook, logged on with a bogus name and e-mail address, and went to the group called “Girls Who Want Adventure.”
The young woman who’d posted the day before had taken the bait and answered his e-mail offering a job on a boat in Seattle. She was blond, blue-eyed. She had the kind of all-American-girl good looks that advertisers selling cornflakes and diet soda love to feature. He leaned close to the screen as he ejaculated.
Both a methodical hunt and a surprise ambush had their distinct appeal, but this one would be different.
He’d set a trap.
He reached for a Kleenex to mop up the evidence of his arousal.
Yes, she’d be just fine. But when? Timing, as he knew, was everything.
Chapter Ten
April 4, 10 p.m.
Port Orchard
Serenity Hutchins set down her phone and looked at her notepad. She noticed for the first time that she’d been crying as she wrote down an anonymous caller’s deluge of cruelty. Everything he had said in a flat, barely audible voice had revolted her. She was sick to her stomach. Tears had spattered the top sheet of her reporter’s notebook, sending the blue ink into a swirling bloom. She took a sheet of paper towel and blotted it. The transfer of ink and tears reminded her of blood.
She dialed her editor’s home number.
Charlie Keller was in the middle of a model of a steamship, Virginia V, one of the last of the famed Mosquito Fleet that flitted from Sinclair Inlet east to Seattle and points southward too. He’d painstakingly created the model himself, out of balsa and fir. His dining room table had been converted to a mini-shipbuilder’s workspace since he’d returned to Port Orchard. It was the only hobby that kept his attention and kept him out of the Indian casinos. His house was a modest one tucked in the ivy-infested woods off Pottery Avenue. It was a three-bedroom with dinged-up wooden floors, a cracked tile countertop in the kitchen, and not a window treatment to be had. Mrs. Keller was missed for many reasons, and the lack of window treatments was somewhere near the bottom on the list of a lonely man. His dog, Andy, a smooth-coated and very overweight dachshund, was curled up on a sofa cushion that Charlie had removed and placed on the floor.
The phone rang, Andy lifted his head, and Charlie got up to answer. It was after ten. As he ambled over to his cell phone on the kitchen counter, he wondered who’d be calling him at this late hour.
It was Serenity.
“Kind of late for a call,” Charlie said somewhat gruffly. He slumped back into his chair and rubbed his socked foot over Andy’s protruding belly.
“I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to know what to do here.”
Her voice was shaky. Charlie Keller’s annoyance at the intrusion turned to concern.
“You sound stressed. You okay?”
“No. I’m not. I’m scared. Charlie, I just got off the phone with some freak who says he’s a killer. He said he killed Celesta Delgado. He also said he had plans for another girl.”
Charlie sat down next his model of the Virginia. “Probably a crank. Don’t sweat it. I talked to five Zodiac wannabes when I was down in San Francisco.”
Serenity didn’t think so. “He was so direct about what he did to her. He told me things that he did to the body. Disgusting things.”
“I see,” Charlie said, adjusting some line that he’d coiled on the deck of the boat model. “I’m not saying, Serenity, that he’s absolutely not the killer. But I’d bet this house that it was a crank caller. What exactly did he say?”
“He started by telling me how he subdued her, how she begged him to let her go.”
“Who?”
“Celesta, I guess. Maybe another girl. I don’t know. He says he held her for three days. He . . .” Serenity looked down at her notes as if she needed to see the words in order to repeat what the caller had said. As if his words could be erased from her mind. “He said he penetrated her with a rolling pin. He said he put a vacuum cleaner hose onto her nipples. He said that he choked her while she begged for her life.”
Serenity stopped. She was sobbing, and she hated that she’d fallen apart, even if it was just on the phone.
Charlie wanted to say something gruff and inappropriate about the caller being a Martha Stewart hater or something, but he held his tongue. The young reporter was crumbling.
“Kid, it’ll be all right,” he said, trying to comfort Serenity, and yet glad that he was on the phone with her and not searching for a tissue in his office.
“I guess so,” she said, regaining a measure of composure. “What should I do? Call the sheriff?”
“You could. But let’s hold off until tomorrow. First, you don’t know if his info is genuine. Chances are, like I said, it isn’t. Let’s run down the story tomorrow, first thing.”
“I don’t know. I mean, are you sure we shouldn’t call Detective Stark?”
“Look,” he said, “we all have jobs to do. We’ll work the story tomorrow.”
Serenity didn’t want to argue. “If you say so.”
“That I do. Now, are you going to be all right?”
“I think so. Good night, Charlie.”
“Good night, Hutchins.”
He hung up, a slight smile on his face. It wasn’t that he was happy about the fear in her voice. It was the memory of his experiences as a young reporter.
Those days were long gone.
Serenity thought of calling someone else just then, maybe her sister. But she dropped the notion. She was still unnerved by the creepy caller, but her editor was probably right. It had been a crank call. Part of her reasoning was that killers don’t often call to brag about what they’d done. But why her?