A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  “I can’t believe your mother would say that,” he said.

  “What?” Jenna hadn’t made it that far into the article.

  “That!” He punched at the newspaper.

  “Hey! Knock it off!” Jenna yelled back. “I can’t read it if you rip it up.” She traced the columns of type with her now greasy finger.

  “Of course, we don’t know what happened, but we’re concerned about Nick. We want to find him before any more harm comes to him or someone else.”

  “See right there,” he said. “She thinks I’m the one.” His face was red and rage pooled in every fiber of his being. “Goddamn her!”

  “Chill, all right?” Jenna reached her arm around his shoulders, now slumped and shaking. “This isn’t good for you. You’ve been through so much. We just have to tell her what happened.”

  Nick extricated himself from Jenna’s arm. “Your mom will never understand. No one would. This is such a lame mistake, Jenna. All of this is bullshit. My family didn’t understand me. Your mom isn’t going to, either.”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I get it. I understand.”

  Nick got up and walked toward the fissure of light around the casing of the door.

  “Stop. I’m here for you,” she said.

  He turned around. He was more handsome than menacing, with dark eyes that sucked the life force out of the room. His hair was curly, dark, almost black, though he’d cajoled his mother, Peg, into using one of those home highlighting kits. The highlights were supposed to be golden, though they looked more like brass. He wore blue jeans low on his hips, revealing the black band of Joe Boxer briefs against his very white skin. A vintage Metallica T-shirt and scruffy black Doc Martens completed the look. A closer examination would reveal twin pinprick scars through his eyebrows; the only reminder of a piercing look that he didn’t think was cool anymore. Through the tears on his pallid face, he managed a smile.

  “I know. Now and forever,” he said. “You’re the only one I can count on.”

  Jenna pulled him closer. It was tentative. Not in the way that a woman pulls a man closer, but as a girl comforts a brother.

  “I have to talk to my mother,” she said.

  Nick pulled away, and took a step backward. His eyes followed Jenna as she slumped back down on the dirty sofa. “I don’t trust your mother. You know what she thinks about me. Everyone thinks that about me.”

  Jenna Kenyon knew that Nick was right. She wondered how she had gotten herself into such a mess, but more urgently, she worried if she was going to be able to get out of it in time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thursday, noon, Cherrystone, Washington

  Emily Kenyon hadn’t eaten much in almost a week. Her last real meal had been the pasta that Jenna had made the night before she disappeared. Emily’s clothes no longer flattered her figure; they draped limply. Her shoulders were wire hangers now. Aware of this, she smoothed out the wrinkles in the cotton blend skirt she’d put on that morning. But it was more than the forlorn fabric of the outfit that made her such a mess. It was her entire life. Her forever-marriage had been torpedoed by a husband who insisted his needs weren’t being met—and found a way to rally in the arms of another, a younger, woman. She’d thought that living in Cherrystone among old friends and familiar surroundings would be a tonic for her troubles. But she was wrong about that, too. Even living in the family home, as lovely and as steeped in cherished memories as it was, had been somewhat of a mistake. Old homes take a lot of new money, and a detective’s salary and the child support of a doctor-ex didn’t add up to nearly enough.

  Worst of all, Jenna was still gone. Emily had finally talked to David. She’d got her old friends in the Seattle PD to check it all out. And she was now convinced that David had been telling the truth. Jenna was on her own. Or worse. She was helping someone, she’d said. Emily knew it had to be Nicholas Martin.

  Despite every effort of the sheriff, and of law enforcement all over the state, there was no clue where they were.

  Emily had been adamant. She didn’t want the public to know that her daughter was with Nick. That would make her personal involvement in the case a liability. It might tempt him to hurt her. So while there was a concerted effort to find Nick and ask him about his dead family, no one in Cherrystone except Shali and a few kids at school knew with certainty that Jenna was missing. Instead Emily had explained she was with her dad for a while.

  When Randazzo’s office at Cherrystone High demanded to know if Jenna was coming back, Emily said she would let them know what the situation was when she knew, that the family was working through some issues, and that her investigation of the Martin homicides had made the situation even more difficult. Randazzo had had the decency to back off.

  So there Emily sat in her office, fishing through messages from the media, amid fermenting latte cups in the trash, and a legal pad headed with “Call Today” on her desk. She tapped her pen against the paper. She felt empty, depressed, and heartbroken. On some level the Martin case would have been a detective’s dream—a puzzler that required both wits and work, but she was short on both just then. Her litany of reasons to hate her life was topped off with the deep hurt she felt that Jenna had called David instead of her.

  She had been a good mother. She was sure of it. She thought she and Jenna had been exceptionally close, a kind of personification of the old Helen Reddy chestnut, “You and Me Against the World.” She wondered how she could be so wrong with her assessment. So blind. What had been going on between them? How could she have missed any warning signs that things were awry? She remembered all the times she’d passed by Jenna’s bedroom and saw her typing away on her Mac. Emily had thought Jenna was doing her homework. Was she chatting with Batboy? Why hadn’t Jenna told her about him?

  She wrote on the pad in front of her: school, friends, teachers, neighbors. Who held the key? Who knew?

  There was nothing in Nick Martin’s background to indicate he’d be capable of killing his entire family. As Emily now worked her way through the rest of the rather thin green school district file, a reasonably positive picture of the missing teenager came into focus. His grade in Speech Communications was his lowest, a C+. He’d had mostly As and Bs. There were no teacher comments, but to Emily’s way of thinking, Nick Martin was probably shy, uncomfortable in front of a group. Most kids were. As Jenna had told her, Nick was artistic; high marks in four different art classes bore witness to the idea that he was one of those creative types that are often ostracized in the high school culture that praised athletes over artists. In fact, nowhere on his transcript could she find that he’d been involved in sports. He wasn’t a Columbine kid—one of those disenfranchised malcontents that stormed around the high school campus in a black trench coat bemoaning the world that had kicked him to the curb.

  Emily’s stomach growled and she pressed the palm of her hand against her abdomen to stifle a noise she was sure Kip could hear in the office down the hall. She’d had nothing but coffee all day. She thought of what Peg Martin’s sister, Marina, had said about the problems that had seemed to be brewing between father and son. What was going on at home that caused both Nick and Mark Martin to leave school and work? Had a confrontation between father and son escalated to such a degree that escalated into a bloodbath that wiped out the entire family?

  Except one. Except Nicholas Martin, the missing.

  The only thing that kept Emily from sinking into the floor in utter despair as she worked on the threadbare case was the phone call Jenna had made to David. That alone allowed her to sharpen her focus after Kip had suggested she drop the case because of “personal” reasons. Emily understood where the sheriff was coming from, but Kip had underestimated her—or what she wanted to be. Indeed, what she had been before returning to Cherrystone.

  They talked after Marina Wilbur left the office to complete funeral arrangements for her sister, nephew, and brother-in-law.

  “Look,” he said, folding his big mitts on her desk, �
��I don’t think Jason’s ready for this by a long shot, but I don’t know that you can take on what needs to be done here. I might need to, you know, elevate his role here.”

  “Jason?” Emily could scarcely believe her ears. “He’s only a deputy and he’s barely out of diapers,” she shot back, knowing at once that she’d been on the borderline of insubordination. It was more of an overreaction to demonstrate as clearly as possible that she was capable of doing her job. It was the one thing about which she felt confident at that moment, now that “wife” and “mother” seemed no longer in play.

  “I’ve thought about turning it over to Spokane for an assist,” he said. “We’re not staffed for this kind of event here.”

  Kind of event? He was talking media-speak and it irritated her that much more. Her face grew hot.

  “How can you say that? I have more experience than any of those grandstanders from Spokane. You know that. Jesus.”

  “Chill. Deep breath, Emily. Can’t you acknowledge that you’re under an inordinate degree of stress? Maybe so much that you really can’t perform your duties?”

  Emily bit her lip. What she wanted to say right then could get her fired and she knew it. She counted to three.

  “Brian,” she said, using his first name, a technique she employed while cozying up to a suspect she wanted to win over, “I admit I’m under stress. Okay? I concede that point. But I know I can do my job. Jason’s not ready and since when did we ever want to get Spokane involved in our affairs? And—” She hesitated, realizing that she was on dangerous ground again. “I’m sorry. Give me a break, Okay?”

  Kip groped for a pack of cigarettes in his jacket, and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. It dangled from his lip as he started to speak, “I will. You deserve it. I’m going outside to puff and think. Let’s talk about the case when I get back.”

  Emily turned her attention back to her notes and the file. “All right. I’ll be ready.” She knew a few moments cooling off were a gift and she was going to take advantage of it. She opened her case notebook and looked at her notes when the phone rang.

  It was a reporter from a Spokane radio station.

  “We’ve had a couple of sightings of the Martin boy,” the young woman, with the unfortunate name, Candace Kane, said. “Care to comment? I’m recording now. Okay?”

  “No, not okay,” Emily said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t comment on anything I don’t know about.”

  Candace barely took a breath, and then started chirping again. “But I need a quote for the news. Here’s what we know. We got a call from a couple listeners who saw him shopping at the Riverside Mall at the Nordstrom.”

  Emily wanted desperately for it to be true but she didn’t even attempt to hide her skepticism. “I doubt it’s Nick Martin,” she said. “Frankly, he doesn’t impress me as the Nordstrom type.”

  There was silence from the other end of the line.

  “Ms. Kane, are you still there?”

  “Sorry. Yes. I was writing that down. Old school, since you won’t let me record your comments for our air. Anyhow, that’s what I thought about the Martin boy, too. The photo they ran of him in the paper made him look like a real space case. More grungy Mervyns than Nordstrom.”

  Emily didn’t know that a photo had made it into the media. “Spokane paper?” she asked.

  “Yeah, you can see it online. Pull it up on your computer. Just go to www dot—”

  “Thanks,” Emily said, but she was already tapping the keyboard as Candace Kane offered a minitutorial on how to access the station’s Web site. She pulled down her “favorites” menu on her toolbar and clicked on the Spokane paper. An image of Nick in what obviously was a yearbook photo, the same thing that had appeared on Good Morning America when the sheriff stammered his way through that interview, popped into view. The portrait had a “painterly” background and the harsh flash of a photographer working on an assembly line. Nick’s skin looked so pale, his hair nearly black. Emily leaned closer to the screen. Was he wearing eyeliner? Didn’t Jenna and Shali call it guyliner? The quality of the image was pretty good, but she couldn’t be sure. Her eyes progressed to the headline: SEARCH IS ON FOR KILLER. But then something else caught her eye. There was a sidebar to the main article: WHEN A BOY KILLS HIS FAMILY.

  “You still there?” It was the voice of the radio reporter who interrupted Emily’s immersion in the article. Her eyes continued to scan the content flickering on her computer screen.

  “Yes, but I have to go,” she said. “If I can make a statement later, I’ll make it on your air first.”

  She didn’t wait for the reporter to answer. She hung up the phone and looked back at the screen. It wasn’t the main story that intrigued her—it was a mishmash of what neighbors had to say about how “things like that don’t happen around Cherrystone” and some reminiscences about how kind Peg Martin had been to so many people. It fit what Emily knew to be true, not one of those post-death do-overs of someone’s character. Emily didn’t know Peg raised champion Russian Blues. Mark was a watercolorist. Donny had been named Cub Scout of the month by his pack, three times. None of that riveted her like the accompanying story. The editors had packaged the Nick Martin story with a broader theme: Boys Who Are Bad. They highlighted a case in Des Moines, Iowa, where, a month prior, a boy named Aaron Collins had shot and killed his parents before raising the barrel of a gun to his own temple. Emily remembered the story. There had been great controversy about the Collins case because school officials had seen some warning signs, but apparently disregarded them.

  “That kid never fit in,” the boy’s maternal grandfather was quoted as saying. “He was so preoccupied with finding his birth parents in Seattle that he scarcely gave my daughter and her husband the time of day. He actually ran away a month before the murders. They should have let him run.”

  Adopted? The word hung in Emily’s memory. She glanced at the clock; it was after six. Ordinarily she’d be hurrying for the door by then. Hoping that whatever she’d planned for dinner would still come together quickly for Jenna. She wondered if she’d put too much on Jenna. Too much responsibility. Too much of a need to excel and hold it together when her own life had crumbled.

  The last face she expected, wanted to see, appeared in the doorway just then. It was Cary McConnell. He was a handsome man, with piercing blue eyes and wavy dark hair, the kind of coloring that had made Emily’s heart beat faster even in high school. He had that handsome lawyerly look that made him the star of the courtroom. Nice suits cut by a Korean tailor in a time where almost everyone bought off the rack also distinguished him in style and attitude. Cary owned the ground he walked on. He was a control freak, sure. But a very handsome one.

  “You haven’t called me back,” he said, inviting himself into a seat across from her desk. “I’ve been worried.”

  “Look,” Emily said, “I’ve been through a lot. It wasn’t personal.” She lied, and Cary was too stuck on himself to sense it.

  “I know,” he lied right back to her. “Any news on Jenna?” He leaned back.

  He was getting comfortable. Damn.

  “She called David. She’s helping a friend.” Emily started pulling files together. She opened her briefcase. She was getting ready to leave, each cue was meant to tell Cary to back off. Go home.

  “You want to get a drink and talk?” When Emily didn’t respond right away, Cary pressed again. “Just a drink. Nothing more.”

  Emily didn’t want to go home alone. She didn’t exactly want to go off with Cary McConnell either. Kip had invited her to have dinner with him and his wife, but she felt that he just wanted to “observe” her to see if she was too messed up to carry on with the Martin investigation.

  “All right,” she finally said.

  Cary McConnell flashed his faultless smile. “Good. Just friends.”

  Later that night, after a couple of salt-rimmed margaritas and dinner at Rosario’s Cantina, Emily Kenyon wondered how she’d been so wea
k, so foolish. Cary’s stealthy charm and undeniably practiced compassion had worked on her frayed emotions. It was like sleeping with the enemy; a betrayal of what was really going on in her life. She buried her face against his lightly hairy chest and took in a deep breath. Her cheeks were damp from silent tears that predictably went unnoticed. Cary smelled of Calvin Klein’s Obsession cologne. She found herself wishing that she actually loved him, but the thought was transitory. As the digital clock spun into the late hours, she had only one thing that was on her mind: Jenna.

  Where are you, baby? Come home. Come home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday, 6:45 P.M., Ogden, Utah

  Spring and summer in Ogden, Utah, are hotter than hell, but few of those living there would ever deign to use such a vulgar metaphor when describing what they knew to be the Promised Land. Ogden was a burgeoning Mormon enclave of pristinely maintained homes set behind sidewalks that had never seen a chalk mark since the day Mexican workers poured them. Lawns were green and weed-free. Sprinklers on timers sprayed their staccato blast of water only at night. Everything was perfectly ordered and ordered perfectly.

  But something was awry on Foster Avenue. Newspapers had piled up on the steps that set the stage for an imposing double front door. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. The Salt Lake City Tribune was literally loitering on the ideal tableau of a good Mormon home.