Winslow.â
âYou grew up on Bainbridge Island? I didnât know that.â Iâd always pictured Carla as a city girl, not from an island in Puget Sound.
She laughed. âOh fuck yeah, honey, donât you know Iâm just a redneck chick at heart?â She stuck out one leg with a heavy boot on the foot. âEven got the shitkickers.â Tenderly she decanted the milk onto the coffee and sprinkled powdered chocolate on top. âCraig wouldnât have taken heroin. He liked to get wasted, but not that.â
âHe was using last year,â I said.
She stopped what she was doing. âBullshit! Are you for real?â
âThatâs what I was told. But heâd quit.â
She shook her head again. âI donât believe that crap.â Her denial was furious, her face set hard. âLook, I knew the guy, anything with needles seriously freaked him. One time, I guess we were in our senior year, we were down at this house in Aberdeen and some guy got ready to shoot up. Craighad to walk out. He was shaking so bad I thought he was going to faint or throw up.â
âPeople change, Carla,â I said softly.
She leaned against the cart, under the shade cast by the large umbrella that stood over it. âBullshit,â she said again, and stared at me. âLook, this guy was my friend just about my whole life.â
âHad you seen him much in the last few years?â
âNo,â she admitted. âBut we still ran into each other, and no way was that guy shooting up. For Christâs sake, Laura, Iâve known junkies. Craig wasnât one.â She ran a hand across her eyes to brush away the tears that were starting to form. âSorry,â she muttered, âbut itâs all wrong.â
I gave her a gentle hug then walked slowly back up the hill sipping on the coffee and thinking. Iâd known a few people who were clean one day and junkies three months later. Craig could easily have started using again; so many did. I sighed. This was going to be very different from anything Iâd done before. I was going to have to work my ass off.
At home I dug out the records that would be Craigâs legacy, two singles and an LP. Snakeblood was emblazoned in blood red on the front of the album, with fangs on either end of the S. I put the record on the turntable and lowered the needle. The sound was a touch of glam, a touch of metal, lots of melody and that voice. It was arrogant, it was knowing and seductive, it grabbed the attention and wouldnât let it go. They could have been huge. Everyone in town had been saying so for a year or more. And now the voice had been silenced.
Three
People forgot just how young Seattle was. It was only back in 1851 that the first white settlers had staggered off their boats on to Alki beach. A few years later it had been a wide-open town, where the loggers and the prospectors heading for the gold rush in Alaska spent their money in the brothels and bars around Pioneer Square and invented the term Skid Row. It was strangely gratifying to know that hadnât all disappeared yet as yuppies ate up the neighborhoods. Even now you could drive up Aurora and see plenty of hookers looking for business. The Seattle Police Department seemed to leave them alone, like a reminder of the cityâs wild past that kept the place human.
The cops were generally good. They treated people fairly and looked after all the burglaries, thefts and assaults, and dug into the few murders we had every year. That didnât mean they were helpful, though. When I called the sergeant at West Precinct he explained he wasnât authorized to give me any information about Craigâs death, sounding overly patient just in case I couldnât understand him because I was female. Instead he directed me to the information officer downtown.
She was nothing more than a PR person in a uniform, friendly enough, but a practiced stonewaller