Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

Hayley: LOL. Yes. Mine wz team Jacob. Don’t tell any1!

Colton: About team Edward?

Hayley: About me & twilight. That wz a long time ago.

* * *

Hayley looked up from her phone and faced her sister.

“I don’t like lying to Colton,” she said. “Not at all.”

Taylor nodded. “I know.”

The two of them sat on the floor in Taylor’s room, obsessing about Katelyn and what her mother had wanted to find on her laptop. Both girls knew the password as if it were their own. Somehow, when they touched the laptop, the password had imprinted on their minds.

“I just didn’t want him to struggle too much,” Hayley said. “Sure, he likes a challenge and he can do anything when it comes to computers. But, you know, we can help out, so why not?”

Taylor got up to fish a sweater from her bottom drawer. The walls of her bedroom leaked cold air like a crab pot leaked water, and she was freezing.

“Agreed,” she said, pulling out a gray oversize sweater with pilled, stretched-out sleeves and a couple of missing buttons. It was a favorite cast-off of her dad’s that she could never part with. “Totally.”

“Your sweater needs a shave,” Hayley said.

Taylor shrugged, and then put on a wicked grin, teasingly, of course. “I was thinking the same thing about your nasty legs,” she said.

* * *

Colton typed in the suggested password and… nothing. He thought for a moment and figured that if TEAM EDWARD was Katelyn’s password, she probably would have used a numeric sequence to make it less obvious.

That was easy to guess too. He typed in TEAMEDWARD23, the number for the Berkleys’ house. He’d used his own house number tagged on the end of plenty of passwords over the years. It was always easy to remember.

The computer rumbled softly and the screen opened wide, baring all of Katelyn’s secrets.

Got it, he thought.

No illicit software had been needed after all, and that made Colton feel a little better about what he’d been asked to do. It was one thing to password-crack a dead friend’s computer; another to enlist a skanky Internet tool to do the deed. It seemed cleaner somehow to do it with a guess-and-go technique. Less criminal. Hayley had given him more than half of what he needed and that brought a smile to his face.

Colton: success. Now wot?

Hayley: Copy her hard drive. Everything. I’ll explain l8r.

Colton: ???

Hayley: Katelyn wz in trouble. She’s dead because of it.

Colton: WTF?

Hayley: Explain l8r. Promise.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Birdy Waterman, Kitsap County’s forensic pathologist, had burned her tongue on coffee that she’d microwaved a minute too long. She looked out of the window of the green vinyl-floored kitchen on the main floor of the coroner’s office. The old house, which had been converted to the county morgue, probably had an impressive view of the Olympic Mountains to the west. Trees and the Kitsap County Courthouse now stood in the way. She was swishing cold water in her mouth when her annoying assistant Terry Morris told her that a woman was there to see her.

“She’s in a bad way,” he said, sculpting his short faux hawk. “Wants to talk.”

Dr. Waterman swallowed the water and pushed her disposable cup into the swinging lid of the kitchen garbage can. Without another word from Terry, she knew that it was the mother of a victim. Mothers can never let go. Fathers were different. Not all of them, of course, but most accepted scientific findings for what they were—clinical facts. Moms didn’t.

Dr. Waterman didn’t recognize the woman.

“I’m Birdy Waterman. Can I help you?” she asked.

Sandra Berkley was as she had been in the James’ living room—a disaster. Her hair, disheveled. Her makeup, scrawled on, not applied carefully. She was thin where she should have had some fullness to her face. She was puffy where the contours should have been more sculpted. It was the face of a mother who’d lost her baby.

Dr. Waterman had seen that so many—too many—times before.

“Can I help you?” she repeated.

“I hope so,” Sandra said, anxiously looking for a place to sit. Her knees shook just then.

“Let’s go into my office,” Dr. Waterman suggested, gently placing a hand on Sandra’s bony shoulder as she led her to what had once been a bedroom but now functioned as her office. In addition to the louvered closet doors along the farthest wall, the ceiling light above her was the only other remnant of the office’s original purpose. It was a glass fixture etched with figures of cowboys and their spinning lariats. It had been a child’s room.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Waterman said, moving things aside to clear more space across her desk, “I didn’t get your name.”

“Sandra Berkley. My daughter was Katelyn.”

Of course. Even though she’d only seen her laid out on her autopsy table, there was no mistaking the resemblance.

Dr. Waterman nodded. “I’m deeply sorry for your loss.”

Sandra started to cry. “Thank you.”

“Can I answer some questions for you?”

The words sounded flat, and not at all helpful, which was not the forensic pathologist’s intention. It was merely the fact that no words could ever seem right. There was not a damn thing she could do for that woman. No one could.

Finally, Sandra spoke. “Was my daughter pregnant?”

A little caught off guard by the question, Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, I would have noted that. It would have been in my report. Our exams are very, very thorough.”

Sandra winced a little, squeezing tears from her eyes as she reached for a tissue from a box on the doctor’s desk. Then she dug into her purse and pulled out a Ziploc bag containing the pregnancy test stick.

“I found this in her room. I thought… maybe that’s why she might have killed herself… because she didn’t want to disappoint me…” Her words trailed off into more sobs.

Dr. Waterman gently pushed the tissues closer.

“Mrs. Berkley, that wasn’t it at all. I examined your daughter. As I recall it didn’t appear that she was sexually active. Your daughter was more