Page 100 of Water's Edge

“I thought that Clay was investigating her murder,” she asks.

“We’re a team,” I said. Clay’s words, not mine.

“What do you need to know? We’re pretty busy right now, so I can’t talk but a second.”

“I just need a few minutes. Did you give a statement to Detective Osborne?” If she did, Clay didn’t mention her in his file.

“You don’t have it?”

She’s the kind of person who answers a question with a question. I dislike that very much. I do that when I don’t want to answer a question.

I look at her name tag. “Bonnie, I need to ask some questions. If you don’t want to talk here, we can do it back at our office in Port Hadlock.”

She looks uncertain. I don’t have the authority to take her to Port Hadlock, but she doesn’t know that.

She decides to play it safe. “She was a good kid. Kind of messed up, but who isn’t these days?”

“What do you mean ‘messed up’?” Ronnie asks.

Bonnie leads us to the corner of the deck where no one is close and lowers her voice.

“I actually did talk to the detective, but he only asked my name and when I was off work. He never tried to find me, so I thought this was all over.”

We wait. Ronnie doesn’t ask a question. She has picked up one of my tricks.

“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.” She looks from one of us to the other and realizes we are going to keep at her. “Okay. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. I heard from one of the other girls that Dina had been stealing.”

“Explain, please,” I say.

“She was taking down credit card numbers,” Bonnie says, keeping her eyes on us. “I’m sure she was running the credit card twice and pocketing the money. I liked her, but that’s a big no-no in this business. Customers don’t always complain, but they don’t come back. That’s for sure.”

“That’s not what you’re worried about, though, is it?” I ask.

Sometimes it helps to push.

She closes her mouth, a true sign that she’s afraid she’ll let something slip.

“You’re going to find out anyway,” she finally says. “I heard that the manager told Clay about some other times she’d done it. Timmy—that’s the manager—warned her a couple of times but felt sorry for her because she’d just had a baby. Then we found out that she gave the baby up. That didn’t sit so good with most of us, especially the manager. Very religious. Dina didn’t steal again that I know of, but I know the manager talked to some cop about it.”

“Do you know who the cop was?”

“No,” she says. “Then that detective came in and we found out she’d been killed. We were all feeling guilty about the way we’d been treating her. I didn’t want to talk about Dina, so I took off early. I should have told the detective what I knew, but what good would it do? She was dead.”

“You sure you don’t know who the cop was?” I ask. “The one the manager talked to about her stealing?”

“He’s not in here much unless he’s at the bar. Good-looking guy. I mean, movie star handsome, if you can believe that. I knew he was a cop only because they always give him his meals and drinks for free.”

Forty-Nine

Ronnie is quiet in the car as I drive back to the Sheriff’s Office. It feels strange, as her incessant prattling has become background noise that I’ve become accustomed to. But now she’s thinking. That’s good. She’s putting together the pieces.

A lot of pieces.

She’s also wondering whether or not this is the job for her.

We talked to the manager, another waitress, and a bartender. They all verified what Bonnie had disclosed. It all fit now. I am sure if we got a DNA sample it would match all the victims but Margie. I am sure Larry screwed up the DNA on that one, but I don’t know how he could have gotten his hands on it. Normally those things are collected by Crime Scene, the coroner, or a pathologist. Larry might have had friends who helped him out. Especially if he convinced them that Margie had gotten what she deserved. Larry couldn’t be the only cop who felt like the end justified the means. I wasn’t one to talk. I hadn’t planned on taking the killer alive. But at least I was doing it for a better reason than to cover up an affair.

The cop whom Timmy, the manager, had talked to was Captain Marvel. I didn’t know exactly what his reason would have been for killing these women. For torturing them. Was it trauma from the death of his wife and baby? PTSD? I didn’t know his past. I wondered if there were more victims than we knew about.

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