Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

Birdy looked down at the visitor’s registration form, two things struck her. One, her eyes were slightly moist. She was no crier. She never had been. There was something about continually seeing the worst that human beings do to each other that forced a person to wall up their emotions. Protection mode , she called it. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt to see a strangled child, a mangled car crash teenager, or a woman beaten to death by her boyfriend. All of those things hurt like hell, but Birdy never cried about them. Not her job to cry, she told herself. Her job was about making sure that the prosecutors had all the evidence they needed to stop the perpetrators from doing it again.
    Birdy dried her eyes.
    The next thing she knew was she was reaching for a pen to fill out the form. It was as if Birdy’s response was completely automatic. There was no dissecting the pros and cons of seeing him. No need to analyze his invitation. And, she knew, it was more than curiosity that would take her there.
    She simply had to see him.

    The rental house on Beach Drive had been built in 1951 and it looked every bit of its vintage — asphalt shingles, aluminum-frame windows, and a screen door that couldn’t stop a sparrow. It was, in the kindest possible terms, cozy. It would take a coin toss to determine which of the two bedrooms was larger. The closets were miniscule. The kitchen had been built at the time when people gathered around a table in a little nook to discuss their days.
    Birdy, at thirty-four, lived alone. She had no one to gather around the built-in nook. While others considered her too smart, too pretty, too wonderful to be single, being single was just fine with her.
    She’d rented the bungalow with the idea that it was a temporary residence and she’d find something bigger, better, and more in keeping with her desires for privacy. She worked with a real estate agent to find a more permanent residence, but didn’t find what she wanted. The gray and white house facing Sinclair Inlet and Bainbridge Island was home. She’d clipped a few ideas from home-decorating magazines in hopes the Seattle owner would eventually decide to sell the house to her. She’d be ready.
    That night before she tucked in, Birdy went into the second bedroom. It was ceiling-high with boxes, books, and furniture that she still hadn’t found a place for since her move from Seattle. She’d planned on setting it up as a guest room, but the need for guests seldom materialized.
    Birdy flipped on the switch and scanned the overstuffed room for the box that held the odds and ends of cases that troubled her. Her father had made the box to hold the tools he used for carving toy figures he sold to tourists for extra money. The container was precious, but so were its contents. She looked inside at the file folders that filled a third of the box, the manila folders protruding like the spine of a dead animal.
    Not all these cases had been failures insofar as the courts were concerned, but something about each of them troubled her. There was the young woman who drowned in a boating accident off Agate Pass—her best friend and husband reportedly had done all they could to save her. The case troubled Birdy not for the facts as presented at the inquest, but for what happened two years later. The best friend and the distraught husband got married, left town, and used insurance proceeds to buy a ranch in Arizona. There had been no evidence to suggest that the woman who drowned had been murdered—at least not at the time of the inquest. Drownings without bruising to show a struggle or wounds to show a major fight were frequently difficult cases for prosecutors. It was never about the drowning, but about what happened before and after.
    Sometimes after was too late.
    Another case that had found its way into the cardboard box involved a teenage girl who was the purported victim of a serial killer. Tara Hanson fit the victimology of the three women who had been killed by a sexual sadist rapist and murderer named Percy Bosworth. She had been the right physical type (slender, blond, short hair). And like the other two victims, Tara had been a bit of a party girl, had lived alone, and had been abducted from a mini-mart—as all of Bosworth’s victims had been.
    And yet Tara didn’t quite fit in. She was like the jigsaw puzzle piece that is just close enough go in a particular spot, even when the imagery—the hot air balloon, the kitten with the ball