Authors: Gregg Olsen
April 13, 4 p.m.
Port Orchard
Donna Solomon did not fit the profile of a mother of a prostitute. She had never had any problems with men, drugs, or the law. To look at her was to see the very image of professionalism and personal accountability. At fifty-two, Donna worked as a charge nurse in the maternity ward of Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton, a job she’d held for more than fifteen years. She was a round presence with stick legs and a slight bulge around her tummy and a butt far bigger than she wanted. Heredity, she figured, thinking of her own mother and the scourge of a large buttocks and piano legs. She worked out four days a week at the Port Orchard Curves, doing a mild weight circuit and twenty-five minutes of cardio to Moby songs. Her butt was always going to be big, but she didn’t think it had to get any bigger. And yet despite all the things she tried to do to better herself—Curves, continuing education classes at Olympic College that had nothing to do with nursing and the
New York Times
crossword puzzle online every day—she had her hard luck too.
She divorced her husband, Zachary, after their adopted daughter, Marissa, put them through the wringer in ways that no parent could or should endure. Marissa had set a fire in the kitchen when she was six, run away from home at ten. By thirteen there was no more room for pretending that there was anything they could do to be the close family they had desired when they had brought her home in a private adoption from a Russian orphanage.
Donna Solomon rarely spoke of Marissa, although hospital administrators and other nurses at Harrison would happily have lent a sympathetic ear. When Marissa, who stopped using her given name in favor of Midnight Cassava, was arrested in a Bremerton Police Department prostitution sting at a local park, she was given her second chance. It turned out she wasn’t the target of the sting, but a Bremerton cop had been. Midnight was one of the chief witnesses in a case and ended up with a lightning-fast plea deal.
What should have been a gift was turned into a sense of invincibility. Midnight had convinced herself that she was able to do whatever she wanted. She continued working the streets, the ferry, wherever she could score a john, partying the money away and doing whatever it was she wanted. It was the ultimate F-U to her mother, of course. Donna accepted that the daughter she chose to love had abandoned her. She could not return any of the love she received. Everything was about money, blame, and the choices others made.
When Midnight was seven months pregnant, she showed up at the nurses’ station looking for her mother. It was the first time she’d been to the hospital since she was a teen and was determined, it had seemed, to make her mother’s life as miserable as possible. She had left with a physician’s bag of drug samples. No charges were pressed because Donna was able to retrieve the missing samples. Donna had been pulling strings for Marissa since the day they brought her home from the agency.
After Midnight’s return and the impending pregnancy, however, things started to change. It started with a few phone calls. Mother and daughter met for lunch a couple of times at a drive-through in Navy Yard City, on the edge of downtown Bremerton. By the time Tasha was born, her mother and grandmother had come to an understanding: if the little girl was to have any semblance of a home life, they’d have to work together.
Donna never knew who the father was, and understood that it was probably something her daughter didn’t know for sure. She told herself that it didn’t matter. No man was needed. She’d help out however she could, and she’d be there whenever Midnight needed her, no matter the conditions. The terms, as she eventually learned, were to watch the baby on weekends and after shifts—but only when asked.
“I’ll call you when I need you, Mother. Don’t think about interfering with my life or my daughter’s. As long as you get that, we’ll be fine.”
Donna didn’t argue. She knew that Midnight had no real job. The money that she used to pay for her apartment over one of Port Orchard’s downtown junk shops was from prostitution. Or maybe selling drugs. Whatever it was, it was bad news. Over the first few months of Tasha’s life, Donna could see a change in her troubled daughter, and she held out hope that someday things would work out after all.
Not only for the baby but for her own broken heart.
It was Tuesday, and Donna Solomon hadn’t heard from her daughter since Saturday. She knew the rules. She knew that trying to involve herself in Tasha’s life was a risk. Too much interest might feel like a hard shove to a daughter whose love she wanted more than anything.
After work, she parked her car in the lot behind the aptly named Pack Rat’s Hideaway and climbed the stairs to her daughter’s apartment and knocked.
No answer.
She pushed the bell.
Again, nothing.
She listened, and she could hear the sounds of a baby crying.
“Tasha?”
No answer.
“Marissa!”
A man wearing oil-soaked blue jeans and a red flannel shirt poked his head out of the apartment next door. His face was the picture of annoyance and anger, a pinched mouth and eyes that told Donna Solomon that a smart person wouldn’t mess with him.
“Can you tell that ho to keep her kid quiet?” he asked. “Jesus, some of us have real jobs and need to get some shuteye. The kid’s been crying all night. Day and night. I don’t give a shit about the day, but I don’t like putting up with some brat squawking when I need to get some sleep. I get up at four a.m. Kid’s going all night.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll tell her,” Donna said, defusing the man’s anger with complete understanding.
“You better. That’s what I say.”
“I will. I said so.”
“Fine. That bitch is a piece of work, you know.”
Donna shot the man a cold stare. “Yes, I know, sir. That bitch, as you call her, is my daughter.”
The man, slightly embarrassed, retreated into his apartment.
Donna tilted her head and listened as the sound of a cry emanated from inside the apartment.
“Marissa! Open up!”
She jiggled the doorknob.
Locked.
The sound of the crying grew louder. With a surge of adrenaline—the type that turns a frightened mother or grandmother into Wonder Woman—Donna rammed her shoulder against the hollow-core door with such force she could feel the frame bend and break.
And she nearly dislocated her shoulder in the process.
“Marissa!”
Once inside, Donna hurried into the expected disorder of the living room. If Donna kept a spotless home, her long-troubled daughter was the opposite. Things were never filthy, but nothing was put where it ought to be. Magazines and clothes were piled up on the coffee table in front of the TV. A bouquet of wilting red roses sat on the TV next to a small framed photo of Tasha.
“Marissa?” Donna’s heart was thumping, and the pain in her shoulder nearly made her cry. Obviously something was very, very wrong. She hurried to the apartment’s sole bedroom, the one that Marissa shared with her daughter.
Tasha was standing in her crib. She’d somehow shredded her diaper and her little body was smeared with feces and her bedding soaked in urine. Seeing her grandmother, the little girl let out an even louder wail.
“Oh, baby, it’s all right. Grandma’s here.” Donna scooped up Tasha, shivering and crying. She didn’t think twice about how filthy the child was. She held her close. “It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”
She spun around the room dreading the bathroom, as it was the only place in the apartment where her daughter could be.
The door was open a crack, and she moved it open with her feet.
“Marissa, are you in here?”
But she wasn’t.
It was only her and Tasha. She grabbed a baby blanket and wrapped it around the crying baby. The stench was nearly overpowering. The white mattress cover was stained with a dark pool of urine, nearly the color of strong black tea. Tasha’s lips were dry and cracked. But despite her crying, no tears came to her eyes.
“Oh, my sweet baby, you’re dehydrated. How long have you been alone? Why did your mother leave you?”
She looked around for a bottle but found none. She went in to the kitchen and dampened a towel with tap water. She dabbed at Tasha’s dry lips, letting some moisture into her mouth.
“Marissa, what did you do? Marissa, where are you?”
She reached for her cell phone and dialed 911, first requesting an ambulance, then a police officer.
Josh Anderson responded to the call to the apartment above Pack Rat’s Hideaway, joining officers from the Port Orchard Police Department, who had the jurisdiction for the city limits. The city police and the Sheriff’s Office had a long history of cross-training and cooperation. Josh was on the roster to join in that Tuesday. By the time he arrived, child welfare caseworkers had already followed Tasha’s ambulance to the hospital. Donna Solomon didn’t fuss about it. She needed immediate medical assistance. If Donna hadn’t come when she had, the worst possible outcome would have been likely.
A day later, and Tasha might not have survived.
“My daughter has her problems,” she told the Kitsap County detective as they stood by his car in the parking lot off Bay Street, “but she wouldn’t leave Tasha for any real length of time—never long enough for the baby to be in jeopardy. Something has happened to her.”
Josh knew Marissa by reputation and rap sheet. Most local cops did.
“But your daughter does hang out with unsavory types, doesn’t she?”
Donna knew he was trying to be kind. He probably knew plenty about her daughter. The distraught mother and grandmother could appreciate his kindness, of course, but she wasn’t looking for that just then.
“You know very well that she does,” Donna finally said, her voice rising with more emotion than she wanted to reveal. “But it didn’t mean she isn’t a good mother—that she doesn’t love her child. She would never leave her for more than a minute or two.”
“Point made. Was the baby’s father involved in her life?”
It was clear just then that he knew what kind of life Marissa had. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have referred to the “baby’s father” he would have presumed that Marissa had a husband.
“Look, my daughter and I seldom talk about anything of importance, except for Tasha. Not for years. I don’t know who the ‘man in her life’ is, and she never told me. Frankly, I never asked.”
“Do you know who her friends are? Maybe someone who knows her better than you do?”
Donna had held it together pretty well. She’d been through tough times, the late-night phone calls from drug dealers demanding to know where Marissa had gone. But the truth hurt. She knew nothing much about her daughter.
Nothing at all.
A single tear rolled down her cheek, but she flicked it away so quickly she hoped that Josh Anderson hadn’t seen it.
“She might have been seeing someone,” Donna said. “I saw some flowers in a vase. She’s not the
Better Homes & Gardens
type to have fresh flowers from the market. But, as I’ve said, I don’t know my daughter very well. Really, you have to believe me: she loves her baby girl. I see the look in her eyes. I see the way she held her. She wouldn’t leave her.”
“I’m sorry,” Josh said. “We’ll do our best to find her.”
“Do you need me to make a statement or anything? You’re treating her as a missing person, right?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Fine. Then you’ll need this.” She reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and found a photograph. “This was taken three weeks ago. Look at that mother with her baby. Tell me…Tell me…” She stopped to compose herself. “You know that she loves her daughter.”
Josh looked at the photo. It was a color image printed at Wal-Mart. It showed Midnight Cassava, a.k.a. Marissa Solomon, with Tasha on her lap. They were sitting in a booth at a restaurant. The table had two plates of food. Two cups of coffee. One was positioned in front of Marissa and the baby. The other was in the immediate foreground.
“You take this shot?”
Donna shook her head.
Josh tapped his finger on the photograph, noting the obvious. “I guess your daughter has some friends,” he said. “Someone took this picture, right?”
Donna Solomon turned away. She knew nothing about any friends. She was happy, though, that Marissa had any at all. She wondered if being a mother had become too much and Marissa had run off somewhere, but she never said so. She thanked the detective and went with a Port Orchard police officer to give her official statement.
A half hour later, Josh found Kendall in her office.
“How’d it go downtown?”
“A lot of to-do about nothing. Hooker went on a bender or ran off. Feel sorry for her mom, though. Nice lady. Kids are so much work, and you never know what you’re going to get.”
Kendall turned her attention toward her computer screen.
“You’re right about that,” she said quietly.
The conference room suddenly felt very uncomfortable as Josh Anderson broached the subject of recording and running a tap on the phone calls Serenity was receiving from the supposed killer. He conceded that the calls might be untraceable, but it was an option on an investigative list that was short.
Too short.
Charlie Keller, however, would have none of it.
“We believe in cooperation, but that’s a violation of our rights to gather news independently. We don’t want Big Brother looking over our shoulders.”
“We could get a court order,” Josh said.
“We’ll fight it,” Charlie said. “And we’ll win.”
Serenity looked at Kendall, but both stayed quiet.
“Maybe,” Josh said, raising his voice a little. “But if there is a serial killer at work around here, your paper will look like you don’t give a crap about anything but your precious rights.”
Charlie’s face was red and the veins in his neck, night crawlers. “They are pretty precious. In this day and age, there’s no doubt that the government has its fingers everywhere they want to be. Get your disgusting wiretap. Get your court order. We’re not saying yes to anything.”
He looked at Serenity, who appeared anxious as she took in her boss’s tirade. She moved her gaze from one person to the next.