She realized that she was breathing hard. Fast, out of fear. She told herself to slow down. She didn’t want to pass out. Not like before.
She remembered his hand reaching around her as he held her from behind. He’d had what looked like a dirty T-shirt balled up in his fist. At that moment she had known she was probably going to die.
He had pinched her neck and pressed the fetid cloth to her mouth and nose. Tequila? Cleaning fluid? Acetone? She felt the wooziness that comes with too much to drink and maybe too little sleep. She felt her knees starting to bend, although she commanded them to stay locked. The world around her started to grow faint. She couldn’t even hear his breathing, at once so labored and hot against the back of her neck.
I don’t want to die. Why are you doing this to me? Who… what are you?
Of course, no words came from her bruised and bloodied lips. Her interior monologue was screamed through the fear in her eyes only. She was falling. The lights were going out.
Help me. Please, someone.
Then nothing.
Her last thoughts were the darkest that had ever gone through her mind.
I hope he only rapes me. Yes, only rapes me.
Her wits were nearly gone, but she knew the ridiculousness of her thoughts. She had a friend who’d been raped in a restaurant parking lot. It was nothing to wish for, but in that moment it was the only hope that she had.
She wanted to live.
PART ONE
Celesta
Doing what I do is hard enough….
Finding the right girl, the one who knows her place, that’s damn near impossible these days.
—FROM AN E-MAIL RECOVERED FROM THE SUSPECT’S COMPUTER
Chapter One
March 29, 8 a.m.
Near Sunnyslope, west of Port Orchard, Washington
The early mornings in the woods of Kitsap County, Washington, were wrapped in a shiver, no matter the season. The job required layers and tools. The smartest and best-prepared brush pickers started with an undershirt, another shirt on top of that, a sweater or sweatshirt, and a jacket. Gloves were essential too. Some were fashioned with a sewn-in cutting hook to expedite the cutting of thinner-stemmed plants like ferns. A sharp knife or a pair of good-quality loppers made easier the business of cutting woody stems like evergreen huckleberry, salal, and in the Christmas-wreath season, fir and cedar boughs. As the day wore on, pickers shed their clothing, a layer at a time. Picking was hard work, and a good picker was a blur, cutting, fanning, and bundling, before bagging floral gleanings in thick plastic bags.
Instead of garbage in those bags, of course, there was money.
Pickers often left indicators they’d been through an area. Empty bags of chips emblazoned with Spanish words that touted the snack’s flavor. Sometimes they left torn gloves or leaky boots in the forest. Some left nothing at all.
Sunday morning Celesta Delgado—along with her boyfriend, Tulio Pena, and his two younger brothers, Leon and Reno—left the mobile home they were renting in Kitsap West, a mobile home park outside the city limits of Port Orchard, just before first light. Behind the wheel of their silver-and-green 1987 Chevy Astro van, Tulio drove northeast toward state-owned property near Sunnyslope where they held permits for brush picking. Celesta and Tulio also worked at a Mexican restaurant in Bremerton, but this being Sunday, they had the time to earn—they hoped—about $60 apiece for a day’s work in the woods. The center seats of the van had been excised so they’d be able to haul their gleanings back to the brush shed, or processing plant, off the highway to Belfair. The two younger ones sat in the backseat amid supplies and the cooler that held lunch.
Celesta, at just five feet tall, was a fine-boned woman with sculpted cheeks and wavy black hair that she wore parted down the middle and, only at the restaurant, clipped back because it was required. She adored Tulio and tolerated his younger brothers with the kind of teasing repartee that comes with both love and annoyance.
“You boys are lazy! Help your brother fix the van.”
“Hey, Celesta, you take longer with your hair than Shakira!”
At twenty-seven, Tulio was five years older than the love of his life. He was a compact man with the kind of symmetrical muscular build that suggested he worked out to look good, rather than worked hard with his body. The opposite, of course, was the truth.
Tulio parked the van adjacent to a little crease of pathway into the forest, the entrance to