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Back Snow Creek Save as PDF
Chapters (57)
  1. Books by Gregg Olsen
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-One
  25. Twenty-Two
  26. Twenty-Three
  27. Twenty-Four
  28. Twenty-Five
  29. Twenty-Six
  30. Twenty-Seven
  31. Twenty-Eight
  32. Twenty-Nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-One
  35. Thirty-Two
  36. Thirty-Three
  37. Thirty-Four
  38. Thirty-Five
  39. Thirty-Six
  40. Thirty-Seven
  41. Thirty-Eight
  42. Thirty-Nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty-One
  45. Forty-Two
  46. Forty-Three
  47. Forty-Four
  48. Forty-Five
  49. Forty-Six
  50. Forty-Seven
  51. Forty-Eight
  52. Forty-Nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Hear More from Gregg
  55. Books by Gregg Olsen
  56. A Letter from Gregg
  57. Acknowledgements

Superstar detective. Saw you on the tube.

Would like to see you. If you don’t answer, that’ll be your answer. Dan.

I pull over right away.

Would like to see you too.

Meeting some friends at Hops @7. Come.

Nervously, I push SEND. I don’t want to screw up my life by potentially ignoring anything that might be actually good for me. Next I text Mindy and tell her to meet me.

Safety in numbers.

She answers back right away and tells me to call her. So I do.

“I like him,” I say before Mindy says a word.

“I know you do, but it’s not about that, Megan. It’s about the Torrance case. Not something we’d want to bring up tonight. But wow.”

She is in full Mindy mode. I miss that. She is a consummate pro but couldn’t mask her sometimes gleeful interest in the macabre. She loves flowers and blood spatter with equal abandon. She wanted to name her shop Pushing Up Daisies though thought better of it.

“What have you got?” I ask.

She takes a deep breath and then unloads.

“The Torrance case is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. It’s reminiscent of the Carl Tanzler case out of Florida in the 1930s.”

Of course, Florida.

She goes on to tell me about the obsessive radiology assistant and how he preserved the body object of his affection, Elena Milagro de Hoyos.

“He kept her in his bed for seven years, like a dead sex slave.”

“Okay, that’s degusting.”

“I know,” she says, a little too emphatically, before continuing.

“Regina Torrance did something very similar to Amy. Her corpse was stuffed with activated charcoal and excelsior and stitched up by, get this, cat gut from an old tennis racket. She removed Amy’s knee and elbow joints and managed to replace them with springs and wire.”

I think of the wires and how Regina manipulated her wife’s body, but I don’t say anything. I let Mindy wind down, punctuating her stream of information with some wows and terribles of my own.

“You’re right,” I say. “We can’t talk about that in front of Dan.”

“Nope,” she replies. “See you tonight.”

Thirty-Seven

The office is quiet. Sheriff has been away on school visits out in the county. He loves talking to young people about responsibility and the law. Lately, he told me the other day, it’s been getting tougher to reach kids. In the past couple of years, he’s felt a shift from the police are your friends to distrust and skepticism. Even in places like uber liberal Port Townsend where very little violent crime takes place and where there is no racial profiling—at least none that I’ve heard about—there is a change in the air. Fewer acknowledgments, our blues say, when walking into a store for something after a shift.