Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

as the bird lifted a small salmon and carried it upward to the cloud-shrouded sun.
    Birdy Waterman was a scientist, a doctor. But she was a Makah and that meant a millennium of tradition and lore had been woven into her soul. Her connection to the water, the air, and the creatures that inhabited the natural world was different from that of people who didn’t depend directly on it for their very existence. She watched the eagle as it screeched skyward, its talons skewering the now motionless fish.
    Birdy felt a whisper come to her ears. It was gentle, like a breath of a lover.
    “I’m free,” the wind said.
    She cradled her eyes in the crook of her elbow and then looked out the windshield as she watched the young eagle fly away.
    Tommy was at rest. He, finally, was free. And so was Kenny Holloway. The prison guard from Walla Walla who’d set all the events in motion called her after his mother and stepfather’s arrest for murder and conspiracy. He wasn’t celebratory, just grateful for the outcome.
    “You meet all kinds of people in prison,” he said. “Some bad with no possibility of redemption. And then sometimes you meet someone like your cousin. If he’d given the slightest reason to continue the cover-up, I would have done so. My mother did what she thought she had to do and that monster she’s married to made it all happen. I wrote the letter to you, because I knew you’d be the one to help fix the big ugly mess.”
    “Why didn’t you just come out and tell me?” she asked.
    “Telling something to someone gets you nowhere. Your cousin had been saying all these years that he was innocent, yet no one listened. Someone like you had to find out what happened.”
    Kenny Holloway ended the call with a thank-you.
    “You did more for me than just about anyone,” he said. “Anyone but Tommy, that is.”

    Inside her house, the Bone Box was lighter than it had been. Tommy’s case file would not be thrown away, but no longer did it feel right to keep it there. There were the cases of a little girl found drowned off the fishing pier in Manchester; the two teenage boys from Bainbridge Island who had supposedly killed themselves in a secret pact; and so many others. It surprised her how many there were. How many times she second-guessed the results of the cases in which things just didn’t add up. All the cases were different. All deserved another look.
    Birdy turned off the light and slid under the covers. Her mother was right about one thing. She was never satisfied. That night as she went to sleep she remembered how she and Tommy had picked huckleberries and foraged for firewood. She imagined his laugh.
    She’d fish through that box again. If all else had failed, if someone had gotten away with murder, maybe she could put her intuition and forensic science to good use. For Tommy and the others whose voices were never heard—some living, some dead.

Keep reading for more excitement from Gregg Olsen!

    We hope you will enjoy this chapter from
    Fear Collector

    Coming from Pinnacle in August 2012 in both print and e-book formats

    Lisa Lancaster could not make up her mind. A willowy brunette with wavy shoulder-length hair and forget-me-not blue eyes stood outside of the student union building on the Pacific Lutheran University campus near Tacoma and tried to determine what she should do. With her hair. Her major. Her life.
    Lisa had been a history major, a communications major, a songwriter, a papier-mâché artist, and even a member of the university’s physics club. She thought her indecision had more to do with the wide breadth of her interests, but family members didn’t agree. Lisa was twenty-four and had been in college for six years. She’d leveraged her future with more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in student loans.
    And she still didn’t know what she wanted to be.

    Lisa was talking to her best friend of the moment, Naomi, when she first noticed a young man with a heavy backpack and crutches walking across the parking lot. It had rained earlier in the evening and the lot shimmered in the blackness of its emptiness. His backpack slipped from his shoulders and fell onto the sodden pavement.
    Lisa rolled her eyes and turned away.
    “Some dork with a broken leg or something just dropped his stuff into the mud,” she said.
    “This campus is full of dorks. Is he a cute dork?”
    “That’s an oxymoron,” Lisa said.
    “Oxy-what?” Naomi asked.
    Lisa rolled her eyes, though