Bakker: “Hope you get here soon. Never seen anything like this before, and I’ve been around awhile. Seems like a TV show or something.”

Even before meeting him, I could make some assumptions about Axel Bakker based on his call. He was older: his voice was fractured by age and shaky with emotion. He’d been thrust into the unthinkable. Despite his age, his only frame of reference for something like what he’d witnessed was TV. And he was a decent, caring soul. He felt it was necessary to provide the dispatcher with his dog’s name.

Montrose and I were working a burglary case near Alderbrook when we stopped what we were doing and responded to the scene. Even so, it took us twenty minutes.

We arrived at 12:04.

It is interesting that the first caller, Teresa, didn’t see anything transpire and was just relaying what Adam had told her. Axel had seen the crime occur but called in a couple of minutes after Teresa.

I wonder why that was.

Montrose pokes his head into my office.

“Connor and Kristen Moss are here,” he says.

I grab my notepad, hoping to fill it with an explanation for the unthinkable. “Right there.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

LEE

Connor and Kristen Moss are an undeniably good-looking couple. He’s dark, with almost-black wavy hair that is cut shorter on the sides, although not in a Third Reich style. His handsome features are angular, and his arms, bare in a UW T-shirt, are more sinewy than muscular. His wife is the opposite. She’s a stunner. Of the pair, she’s by far the more intense. Around her neck dangles a platinum-and-sapphire art deco pendant. It amplifies the blue of her eyes. As Montrose and I take seats across from them in our too-bright interview room in the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, I thank them for coming. It’s near the dinner hour. Montrose likes to eat at the same time every day. That’s not going to happen.

“You could have just called,” I tell them.

Kristen answers right away. “Of course. But as an officer of the court, it’s my duty to ensure that you have everything you need. Not that I”—she stops a beat and self-corrects—“not that we know anything.”

“Of course not,” I say, though I get to decide that. Not them.

“The lady in the little cabin next door filled us in on more of the details. Stuff that’s not on the news,” Connor says. His voice is quieter than his wife’s. “A total shocker.”

“Yeah,” Montrose finally pipes up. “I hate the old shopworn expression ‘Things like that don’t happen around here,’ but it’s right on the nose. They don’t.”

“Yeah,” Connor says. “That’s what Kris and I were talking about all the way here. Sure, back in Seattle, but not here. We’ve been coming out here for years. Kind of our place, and now this.”

“Makes me rethink where we spend our long weekends. Maybe we should scratch the cabin off our list and start going to Hawaii for our vacations like everyone else,” Kristen adds.