by Gregg Olsen
Emily Kenyon felt lousy just then. The kid was flustered. He was doing what the sheriff had told him.
“Emily, err, Detective, there’s one thing you ought to know,” he said. She was so mad at him, he could feel it. He didn’t wait for her response. “I saw the same wound on Mr. Martin. I think he’s been shot, too. So do the guys from Spokane.”
Emily paused. She hadn’t expected that. Adrenaline pulsed. “Jesus, Jason,” she finally blurted, “what the hell happened out there? Are you sure? And where are the boys? Have you seen any sign of them?”
“No. Nothing. Backhoe’s on its way. We’re taking video and stills as soon as the light’s a little better here. Then . . .” he caught himself. “When you get here and give us the go ahead we’ll see if we can find them. I remember reading about a kid who survived longer than a week . . .”
She cut him off. “Yes, you told me, in Pakistan.”
“It was India,” Jason said, slightly glad he could trump her on something. She’d hurt his feelings and it was a tiny payback. It felt just a little bit good.
Emily Kenyon got that, even on the tiny cell phone.
“Yes, India,” she said. “I’m on my way. Be there ASAP.”
She hung up, put on a shirt, and ran a brush through her hair. A rubber band was the only remedy. The ponytail was ridiculous at her age, and Emily knew it. But there was no time for anything like washing and blow-drying, which on a good day was a fifteen-minute chore. Not when there were two bodies west of Cherrystone and two kids missing.
Need to cut this mess, she thought, thinking of her mother’s advice that a woman should cut her hair when she reaches forty. And, if you ask me, that’s stretching it, Emily, her mother had added.
She didn’t have the heart to wake Jenna as she passed her room. Leaving her alone again wasn’t right, but Jenna had school. Besides, somebody deserved some rest around there. She wrote a note and stuck it on the refrigerator—the first place Jenna was sure to go.
“Come home right after school. Serious case. Love, Mom”
And Emily was out the door.
Chapter Four
Tuesday, 7:35 A.M., Cherrystone, Washington
Jenna Kenyon grabbed a Stawberry Pop-Tart and started for the door. There was no time for the toaster to do its thing that morning. She’d have to eat it gummy and cold. Jenna hastily wrote, “See you after school. I love you, too, Mom,” and added a smiley face to the note her mother had left on the fridge.
It was after seven and Shalimar Patterson, her best friend since she moved to Cherrystone, was never late. Jenna locked the door behind her, and stood in front of the old house on Orchard wondering just what her mother had been up to all night and this morning. The past few days had been anything but routine. With school and work, routine was always a little on the fragile side. But the storm was completely unexpected, and her mother had thrown herself into a 24-7 schedule. What with her breakup with that jerk Cary, and her dad’s constant button pressing, Jenna knew her mother was enduring what she called a “bad patch.” It would pass. They always did.
Shali’s classic VW bug—cream with a slightly tattered black ragtop—lurched into the driveway. The car radio’s volume was cranked up loud enough for Jenna to make out the song lyrics from the Kenyons’ front door. Not good. But that was Shalimar Patterson to the nines. In your face, but forgivably so. Jenna hurried to the car. A half-empty bag of kettle corn and a backpack occupied the passenger seat. She was also anything, but neat.
“Sorry about that.” Shali revved the engine. “Oops, foot slipped.”
Jenna smiled and scooted both items to the backseat. Popcorn fell on the driveway.
“Birds will eat it,” Shali said.
“Yeah. Hey, something’s up at Nicholas Martin’s place.” Jenna slid into the duct-tape-repaired bucket seat as Shali, a decidedly ordinary girl with a name that always promised so much more, grinded the gears as she found reverse.
“You mean that freak with the black eye makeup?”
Jenna fished for the seat belt, wincing as her fingertips touched an apple core stuck between the door and the seat. Got it. She pulled the belt across her lap. Her mom was a cop and she followed every rule. It irritated some of her friends, but that’s the way it had to be.
“I had that art class with him,” Jenna said. “He was kind of cool in the obviously tortured-soul-seeking-attention way.”
Shali checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, permanently tilted toward her for just that purpose. The blush on her right side was heavier than the left, so she evened it out with her palm.
“What did he do? Meth?” she asked.
Jenna shrugged, but Shali kept pushing for details. She did that even when she didn’t know Cherrystone’s criminals and losers, but had merely read their names in the paper and knew that Jenna’s mom had the dirt on someone.
“I’ll bet it was meth.” She spat out the words. “Or pot. He comes to school baked half the time. Must have been doing a lot of it if your mom’s on the case.”
Shali’s Volkswagen sped by kids without wheels who’d lined up to catch the bus to the high school a few miles away. A few stared hard at the car as if they could stop it and get a ride. Anything was better than the bus—even a ride with Shali Patterson behind the wheel.
“Probably. But I don’t know. My mom’s been out there all night.”
“Yeah? Cool.” Shali scrunched her long dark hair, overgunked with a hair product she’d ordered from a TV shopping channel. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and a baby-T, cropped pants, and chunky gold ankle bracelet (also from the home shopping channel) she had put on in the car. Jenna wore her uniform—7 blue jeans and a sweater. If Shali was the ho’ in the video—or at least an all-talk wannabe—Jenna was the good girl who never got any airtime.
Their friendship worked because Jenna was confident about who she was. A friend like Shalimar Patterson could be over-the-top annoying, the type that sought the spotlight whenever she could find it. Jenna wasn’t like that. She just didn’t feel the need to sell herself so hard. Shali did.
Jenna changed the subject. “Want to get a latte? I could use a boost.”
“No kidding. Me, too. A white chocolate soy mocha sounds kind of good.”
Shali pressed the pedal to the floor as they drove the short stretch of roadway to the school. They passed a place where the twister had set down. Shali scrunched her hair again and made a face as the splintered house zoomed from view.
“Never liked the color of that house anyway,” Shali said. “What were they thinking?”
Jenna nodded in slight agreement, though she hadn’t really felt that way. Shali could be such an idiot. The people who owned that house were without far more than good taste. They no longer had a place to live.
“You can be such a bitch,” she finally said.
Shali knew that. This almost a game between the two best friends. She smiled.
“You got a problem with that?”
“No. Not really.” Jenna hesitated. “Maybe sometimes.”
“Make up your mind.”
Jenna reached for her coffee card as they pulled up to the window of Java the Hut.
“Just sometimes. Like after a tornado trashed someone’s house. Times like that.”
“I can be harsh. But that’s why you love me.”
Jenna looked out the window as Shali gave the kid at the drive-through their espresso orders. Her thoughts had turned back to her mother. She must be beyond frazzled. She got that way every now and then. As cool as her mom could be, she could also unravel. She did that more than once during the divorce. It might have been justified but even so it wasn’t pretty. She hated seeing her mother cry or talk bad about herself and her life. It stung deeply. She wished she could run a triple tall latte to her. She’d need it. What was going on over at the Martins’?
Tuesday, 7:46 A.M., Martin farm, east of Cherrystone
The morning sunlight poured itself slowly over the striated hillside l
ike syrup, exposing the shattered ruins of the Martin house and a parking lot of Cherrystone police cars, two aid cars, and assorted sedans, including Emily Kenyon’s much-maligned Honda (“an American cop ought to drive an American car,” Sheriff Kiplinger had said, but didn’t press it further because the officer’s car allowance was less costly than leasing a new vehicle). None of the observers of the scene had ever taken in such a disturbing sight as the remains of Mark and Peg Martin’s farmhouse.
And it was about to get worse. Far worse.
“Can I get the photog over here?” a call came from one of the Spokane police techies. He was about thirty-five, tall and lanky, and had arrived on the scene with a pristine lab kit and an unmistakable countenance of superiority. The look on his face just then, however, was utter horror. He stood about twenty-five yards into the debris pile on the southwest side of the property.
“Pretty ugly,” he said recoiling at what he was seeing. “Looks like his arms were pulled off.”
Emily Kenyon balanced herself on a large piece of Formica countertop from what had once been a seventies-era kitchen. It annoyed her that the Spokane tech was taking over the scene. She moved closer, to claim her turf.
Mark Martin had been a handsome man, in good physical condition for someone in his early fifties—lean and muscular. He worked for the local power utility as its chief engineer and was known to bike the dozen miles to the office in the summer. His curly silvering hair was matted with mud. His blank eyes stared into nothingness.
“Let’s shoot stills and video and get him with his wife,” Emily said, kneeling by the body and studying every inch of its battered form.
Peg Martin’s body was already ziplocked and ready for the ambulance and the ride to Spokane where she’d be processed as if she were nothing. Not the bake-sale lady. Not the woman who did everything for the community whenever anyone asked. Peg was an apparent murder victim. Emily looked at Mark Martin’s battered and nearly sanded-off skin. He had on boxer shorts and a single sock. He might have had on a shirt, but it was gone with his arms.
She was sure he, too, had been the victim of a gunshot wound. A scenario played in Emily’s mind. It was a familiar one. She’d worked at least three cases of similar presentation back in Seattle. She thought about the position of the wounds and whether or not they were dealing with a murder/suicide. She hadn’t heard there were any problems between the Martins. She had checked. There had never been a single domestic violence call from their residence to the sheriff’s office. Not a single one. They had seemed a happy couple, though they did tend to stick to themselves. Peg did her school stuff like a trooper, but Mark was a more introspective type—the typical engineer.
“The kind that snaps,” Emily said to herself.
A gentle breeze blew from the north, picking up a little dust and fiber. The scene was not really the type to yield much in the way of trace forensics. A tornado had likely stripped away any scraps of evidence. The processing going on now was more about documenting that everything had been done properly when the defense got Emily on the stand. She doubted it would ever get that far, though. It seemed like the shooter was dead. The only question was where were the boys?
Emily caught the loose tendrils of her long ponytail and stuck them behind her ear. The wind blew harder. It seemed that time stood still. People were frozen in their duties, digging through the debris, ferrying a body bag to the second victim. Even the flashing lights atop the cruiser seemed to become still. Her heart stopped, too. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something she didn’t want to see.
She knew they had to be there.
Where else could they be?
“Please, no,” she said softly as the world started to crank back into action, at first in a stop-start fashion like one of those old school filmstrips. Then faster. Then finally at normal speed. She turned her attention to a chunk of dry wall with some obvious blood spatter. It was about ten feet from where she stood.
“What is it?”
The voice was Jason Howard’s. The earnest deputy could see that Emily was frozen in her tracks. Stiff. Intent on something in the remains of the house.
“He’s over there,” she said, indicating the drywall.
Jason walked closer, but didn’t see what Emily had discovered.
“Help me move this,” she said. The pair bent over and lifted the chalky board. It was like turning a rock at the beach to see what might scurry out to get away from the exposure of the light of day. Yet nothing moved.
“It’s Donovan, I think. Maybe Nicholas,” she said. “I saw the tips of his fingers.”
“Jesus, Detective,” Jason said, remembering how touchy Emily had been. The boy was in jeans and a button-down shirt. Remarkably, he was intact. Even his face, which struck Emily as resembling his mother’s so much that it was disconcerting, was untouched. It was almost like he was asleep.
“I know him,” Jason said. “He’s in my little brother’s Cub Scout troop. Nice kid.”
Emily waved the techies over. “Let’s process this area as best as we can and get a board over here and get him out of here.”
“He looks so peaceful,” Jason said.
Photo flashes ricocheted off the boy’s pale skin. Two coroner’s employees hoisted him on to the stretcher, which they had spread with a midnight-blue body bag. Handles for easy transfer flapped in the wind.
“Wonder if he died of internal injuries related to the storm,” Jason added.
Emily was wondering the same thing, but not for long. The two coroner assistants, both young men from Spokane, set the body on the bag and started zipping, working from the feet toward Donovan’s angelic face, white and calm.
“What?” the younger of the two said to his partner, as his gloved fingertips slipped from the zipper.
“Your hands are covered in blood,” Emily said. “Where did all that come from?”
She stared at the dead boy.
“Roll him over.”
“We’ll look at him in the lab,” the other said.
“You’ll roll him now.”
“Not protocol, sorry.”
“Maybe you don’t hear too well up in Spokane,” she said, almost amused with herself that she’d now felt more of a kinship with the tiniest of law enforcement operations.
“This is our scene, my scene, and you’ll follow my orders.”
“Someone’s cranky.” It was Sheriff Brian Kiplinger, lumbering his meaty frame across the debris field. Emily and Jason were so involved with what they were doing that neither had heard him arrive. He just appeared in the morning light.
Emily acknowledged her boss with a nod.
“Someone hasn’t had a good night’s sleep for I don’t know how long,” she answered. She shifted her weight and waited for the sheriff to blast her, but he didn’t.
“Tell me about it.” He fixed his steely eyes on the coroner’s assistant with the bloody glove and the bad attitude. “I was speaking to him.”
The young man sank into the mud.
“I’m trying to preserve the evidence.” He was embarrassed and defensive.
“What evidence? This is a goddamn disaster zone. If the lady . . . If my chief detective wants to see the backside of this kid, she’s gonna.”
The chief was a nice save from the “lady” comment. She was the only detective in the office.
It flashed in the young man’s mind to roll his eyes, but he refrained. Instead he rolled the body to the side.
“Good enough?” He fought once more to suppress a smirk. Lucky for him, his effort worked.
“Yes, thank you.”
With the sheriff, Jason, and the two interlopers from Spokane looking on, Emily lowered her gaze to the darkened backside of Donovan Martin. His shirt was stiff and shiny. It was soaked in blood.
“Can’t say for sure,” she said. “But it looks like we’ve got another homicide victim here.”
“Jesus, that makes three.”
“Or four?”
“Depending on where we find Nicholas’s body.”
Sheriff Kiplinger watched as Emily followed the dead boy to the coroner’s van. The panel doors were open. A set of steel racks filled the back end. There were no seats. It was more a hearse with a lab destination than a family vacation van headed to Yellowstone, which it closely resembled. A mountain scene was painted on the spare tire cover. The Spokane County coroner approved the secondhand purchase of the van and liked the airbrushed painting. Not only did the coroner have a bad eye for artwork, he was cheap to boot.
By 10:15 A.M., it was tragically clear that there were no bodies left in the wreckage of the home. Dogs had been used in the surrounding field and back wooded area that fed off the creek. But nothing was found. No sign of anyone. No sign of Nicholas Martin.
Sheriff Kiplinger pulled his smokes from his breast pocket. “I hate to say it, Emily, but it looks like Nick Martin has some explaining to do.”
An hour later, Sheriff Kiplinger and Emily Kenyon stood in front of a pair of cameras from two of the three Spokane TV stations. For the second time in a week, Cherrystone had made the news. First the tornado and now a triple homicide.
Twenty years of nothing happening around here and now this, Emily thought as she stood next to the sheriff and the cameras recorded the story for the evening news. The attention was unwanted for a couple of reasons. One deeply personal. The other had to do with pride. Both were rooted in an incident that had shaken the foundation of her life and sent her to Cherrystone to start over. To hide. And if this story gets picked up by the Spokane station’s sister station in Seattle they’ll think I’ve let myself go.
“We don’t know exactly what happened or even when it happened,” the sheriff said. “It appears Mark and Margaret Martin and their son Donovan are the victims of a brutal homicide.”
“What about Nicholas? The oldest Martin boy?” The reporter shoved her microphone as if it were a fire poker. She wanted Kiplinger to spill some major news.
“Is he a suspect?”
Emily took that one. “No. We do, however, consider him a person of interest. If anyone knows of his whereabouts, please contact the sheriff’s department.”