A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  The words pierced Olga’s broken heart. She knew they’d failed those girls. Now the worst kind of human being—the kind who can only mimic compassion or approximate the affect of humanity—was getting the biggest break of his life.

  “As I said, I’m so, so sorry.”

  The line went dead. Mrs. Smith had hung up without saying good-bye.

  Two weeks later insult was added to injury when sentence was passed. Twenty years to life for each girl’s death. The absolute blow: The sentence was concurrent. Dylan Walker would likely see the light of day.

  “Ready?” Tina Winston looked suspiciously at Bonnie Jeffries standing in the doorway wearing her nearly threadbare quilted bathrobe. “You don’t look it.”

  Bonnie was perplexed. She drew her robe belt tighter and opened the door wider to let Tina inside.

  “God, you can be so obtuse, Bonnie.”

  Tina breezed into the foyer and shut the door behind her. “We’re going up to Meridian today, right?” Tina put her hand on her hip and regarded her friend impatiently. She was nearly giddy. She tried to fake a frown, but she was obviously so excited about something she couldn’t even be in a teasing mood.

  “Dylan Walker wants to meet me. He sent me a personal letter.” Without taking her eyes off Bonnie, now sitting on the living room sofa, Tina unclasped her Louis Vuitton handbag. With the flourish of a waiter presenting some fabulous meal under a crystalline dome, she handed Bonnie an oversized envelope.

  It was addressed to Tina Winston. The return address was D. Walker, c/o Whatcom County Jail, Meridian.

  “He actually wrote to you?”

  Tina grinned broadly. “Finally. I sent him at least three notes of encouragement throughout that travesty of justice up there in Meridian.” She slid down next to Bonnie and, unable to wait a second longer, pulled the letter from the envelope like it was a Christmas present she’d been dying to open.

  “This is stupid, Tina,” Bonnie said flatly.

  “Maybe you won’t think so when you read it.”

  Bonnie was skeptical, but she put on her red-framed readers anyway. Dylan Walker’s handwriting was surprisingly crisp, nearly feminine. It looked almost as if he’d never developed a style of his own after learning penmanship in third grade. Ascenders and descenders were perfect in form and angle.

  Dear Tina: Your letters have been so welcome and I’m sorry there has been delay in my response. You cannot believe how much mail I get here. There’s no way I could answer each and every note, but your sincerity and genuine interest in my case really touched me. I’ve suffered more than any man I’ve ever known. I’m not one for pity, but I have no idea why God would do this to me. All I’ve tried to do is live a good, honest life. See where it got me? Thank you for the photo . . .

  Bonnie looked over the top of her glasses and made a face. “You sent him your picture?”

  Tina shrugged as if no defense was needed.

  “So? Even if he’s guilty—which he’s most definitely not—he’s headed to prison. He’s not going to hurt anyone from there. I’m more worried about him than anything. I don’t have to remind you that famous people are victimized in prisons across this country every day. They’re targets of the riffraff incarcerated there.”

  Bonnie kept her mouth shut. What could she say? Dylan Walker was not some innocent man pulled off the street and tried for a double homicide on a whim. He was the goddamn riffraff. Tina Winston was smitten with Walker, and he was playing her for all she was worth, which was considerable. She went back to reading the note. She breathed in, catching a slight whiff of cologne, which surprised her. She didn’t think prisoners were allowed to wear cologne.

  . . . you are lovely, if you don’t mind my saying so. You also look like the kind of person who can see into someone’s soul. I long for a friendship with someone like you. I’ve added your name to the visitation list. If you come, please tell them you are a lifelong friend. I am not allowed to meet with anyone I didn’t know before my arrest. I hate to ask you to lie, but it is the only way. Fridays are good. I’ll be here another month before being transferred to the prison in Shelton.

  Peace, Dylan Walker

  Bonnie took off her glasses and shifted her quilted bulk. The couch creaked. She was fatter than she’d ever been and she hated herself for it. She looked into her friend’s eyes with utter disbelief. Tina was a stunner. She had a successful business. Her figure? She loathed it when Tina showed up in some crop top and shorts in the summertime weather. Her legs were impossibly long. She actually had ankles. As far as Bonnie Jeffries could imagine, there was no one on the planet who had more going for her than her friend, Tina Winston.

  “I’m uneasy about this,” Bonnie finally said. “I don’t think this is a good idea whatsoever.”

  “Are you judging me?”

  “No, I’m worried about you.”

  “Worried or jealous?”

  “Jealous of your relationship with a serial killer? Jesus, Tina.”

  Tina reached for the envelope and Bonnie handed it over.

  “Look, I’m going up to see Dylan and I need your support. I’ve been there for you, haven’t I? When you had problems with your car, who picked you up and drove you to the grocery store?”

  “That’s hardly the same thing,” Bonnie sniffed. “We’re talking about hanging out at a jail, not going to Safeway’s frozen-food aisle.”

  Tina giggled. “Come on,” she said. “It’ll be so fun.”

  “I can see it will be fun for you. But what do I get out of it?”

  “Lunch at the new restaurant . . . and better yet, you get to live vicariously through me.”

  The last words almost made Bonnie cry. She’d lived vicariously through Tina Winston for most of her adult life. But the promise of the advertised ninety-nine-item salad bar won out over her good sense and bruised ego.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll go with you.”

  Tina flashed her disarming smile. “You won’t regret it,” she said. “I promise.”

  The jail trusty was a man in his fifties who had practically made a second home of the Whatcom County Jail. He’d never done anything that sent him up to Washington’s prisons in Walla Walla, Monroe, McNeil Island, or Shelton. He was what the jail called the ultimate boomerang. In time, he was known merely as Boomer, a name that was laughable considering his rail-thin frame. Sticks or even Humpback would have been more apropos. He pushed a metal librarystyle cart with the day’s mail from one cell to the next, passing out love letters, legal missives, and even the penny shopper.

  “Want this magazine?” He said to a hollow-eyed kid in on a drug possession charge, a misdemeanor.

  The kid accepted the rolled-up magazine, a copy of Discover . “Hell no, I don’t like that shit. Science kept me from my GED. Besides, isn’t that a federal offense?”

  “Huh?” Boomer said, his cart now squarely in front of the punk’s cell.

  The kid poked the magazine back through the bars. “Giving out someone’s mail, man?”

  Boomer let out big laugh. “What are they going to do? Send me to jail?” The kid had set him up with a joke. Nice.

  “All that shit for Walker?” The kid pointed to a bloated canvas bag resting on the bottom shelf of the cart.

  Boomer nodded. “Yeah, Mr. Hollywood gets more fan mail than that twink Tom Cruise. Sends out more than anyone here, too. Should probably have a personal postmark by now. Maybe even a stamp with his mug on it?”

  The kid did his best to look cool and tough. He was neither. “Yeah, you lick the back of it and die.”

  Halfway down the corridor, Dylan Walker could hear the exchange between the trusty and the young inmate. It didn’t make him angry, though if he was in closer range and he thought Boomer and the punk knew he heard them, he’d have put up some kind of a fight. But not then. Instead, he hurried to finish the letter he was writing. But he was neat. He didn’t like to rush. Every stroke held some kind of power.

  . . . I long for a friendship with someo
ne like you. I’ve added your name to the visitation list. If you come, please tell them you are a lifelong friend.

  Peace, Dylan Walker

  By the time Boomer arrived at Walker’s holding cell, he had finished addressing the envelope. He wanted it to get out in the day’s mail. The letter was addressed to a woman in Acton, California.

  “Here you go, Boomer,” Walker said, his smile reflecting the dim light of the buzzing fluorescent tubes that hung from ceiling chains over the corridor. “Just ten to go out today. I’m behind.” He laughed a little and handed over a stack of letters, envelopes of varying sizes, postage affixed by the senders in response to the jail’s request for self-addressed, stamped envelopes for inmate mail.

  Boomer opened the canvas bag and started feeding mail to Walker. “If you thought you were behind before, meet your future bout with writer’s cramp.”

  Walker beamed as letter after letter was passed through the bars.

  “This is stupid,” he said. “You should just give me the damn bag.”

  “You know the rules. They consider you a suicide risk. The drawstrings might be too tempting for a guy like you.”

  “Tempting? Why would I ever want to hurt myself? I’ve never felt more wanted in my life.” He topped off his revelation with a big smile.

  I’ll bet you do, you psycho, Boomer thought. Instead he said, “That’s it for today. Better get busy. The mail train from Seattle’s running tonight. You’re getting another load tomorrow, hot stuff.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Friday, 2:26 P.M., Cherrystone, Washington

  Emily knew the name, Angel’s Nest, because it had been in the news intermittently when she was a student at the University of Washington in the early 1980s. In the almost twenty years since then, she hadn’t given it a single thought. She turned on the teakettle and waited for the whistle. Angel’s Nest. What was that all about? Cary had said it was a “blast from the past.” She remembered that the agency had been in the news. There had been some kind of scandal. When the boiling water rumbled, and then whistled, she dropped a bag of chamomile and a squeeze of honey from a plastic teddy bear bottle into a cup. Steam rose up from the spout as she poured. Everything that could be wrong, was just that, wrong. She was still jittery and angry at Cary, heartbroken that Jenna wouldn’t just come home, and a wreck over the whole idea that she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought she had. How could she have been so blind? How can they seem so close one day, and the next be separated by a triple homicide? Herbal tea, something her mother prescribed for everything from a broken date to a hysterectomy, sounded good.

  She sipped it from the cup Jenna had painted at the Ceramic Castle; orange poppies spun around the rim. She was unsure exactly what had been the source of the agency’s troubles. She’d called David to see if he remembered anything, but she got his answering machine—his voice sounding puffed up and all-important, even when he wasn’t there to speak. She left a message. Next she did a quick search of the Internet, which only turned up the scantest of information. Angel’s Nest was an adoption agency shut down in the mid-1980s over charges that its president had not only misappropriated funds but also somehow snipped through government regulations when it brought babies into the country. One woman from Tacoma even had to give her baby back.

  But how would Nick Martin have been involved with this agency, anyway?

  Taking her steaming cup down the hall to her office, Emily lingered in the doorway of Jenna’s bedroom. Her old bedroom. The screensaver on the Mac was a digital aquarium with a pair of pink kissing Gouramis doing what they did best, over and over. Emily flopped herself on the pineapple-post bed, patting the pink-and-yellow quilt her grandmother had made. Memories of her daughter flooded the room. She could smell Jenna’s Vanilla Fields perfume, a gift from Shali that Christmas. Over the bed was a framed print of The Little Mermaid, a souvenir from a trip to Disneyland. Beanie Babies left over from the long-abandoned collecting craze took refuge on a shelf. A purple Princess Diana teddy bear was the prize, a plastic “tag protector” dangled from its paw. So innocent then. All of us were. Jenna was smart. She was capable. She cared about doing the right thing. Emily sat still, breathing in her daughter, then went to her office and sat in front of her computer.

  You’ll be home soon, she thought. I’ll never be too busy to listen.

  The screen snapped to life and she typed in the web address for a Seattle daily paper and clicked on the link for the archives. She typed in “Angel’s Nest,” hit Search, and two small items popped up. One was a brief mention in a column, quoting a detective who had worked a homicide case that had tangential ties to Angel’s Nest. The other was an item that indicated that all the assets seized by the government had been dispersed at auction, five years after the scandal. Emily thought there would be more; it had seemed like a bigger story. She searched again, but nothing more came up. It was then that she noticed the archives only went back to 1990.

  What was it?

  She tapped out the name of the detective quoted in the article: Olga Morris.

  Friday, 3:39 P.M., Salt Lake City airport

  The reader of the newspaper wadded it up and threw it into an airport trash receptacle. A teenage girl chatted with her boyfriend on her cell phone. A woman scrounged through her purse to come up with enough change for an Orange Julius. A businessman’s fingers worked over the keyboard on his laptop, something apparently so important that it couldn’t wait. Amid the blasé world of the airport concourse, the reader of the newspaper wanted to scream. The article that so enraged the reader was an account of the Cherrystone murders, discovered after the tornado had swept through parts of the eastern Washington town. The story recounted how Mark and Peg Martin, and their son, Donovan, had been shot and left for dead. The storm had taken what was likely a family rampage and twisted it into a perfect crime.

  Perfect crime? Not even close. Perfect screwup was the real truth.

  Missing from what had once been the Martin family home was the eldest boy, Nicholas. Also missing was the chief detective’s daughter, Jenna.

  Find the cop’s daughter. Find the boy. Finish the job.

  Friday, 6:50 P.M., northern Washington

  Running a rototiller at fifty-one was not easy. with a smile on her face, Olga Morris-Cerrino cursed her late husband’s idea that they should move out to the country, till the land, raise exotic sheep.

  “It will make us more interesting,” Tony Cerrino had joked when he sold her on the idea of the mini farm on the outskirts of Whatcom County. “You know . . . gentleman farmer types.”

  Easy for you to say, she thought back then. Even more so now.

  Olga brushed the sweat from her brow, leaving a muddy streak on her already tanned forehead. How she missed him. How she wished that he hadn’t taken that business trip that icy November.

  “Damn you,” she said softly, standing in the cookie-batter soil of what would have been her husband’s best year ever gardening. “I loved you so much.” Her arms ached, but she wasn’t unhappy about what she’d accomplished. Her eyes ran over the plot of creased earth behind her. The rows were perfectly straight.

  “No need for strings if you have a good eye,” he had told her that first day they’d planted. “And you have a good eye, my dear.”

  She’d sowed popcorn, sweet corn, and a brand-new variety of buttercup squash that early evening. She’d planted more than she could use. That was by design. She knew the old women at the Whatcom Food Bank would be pleased when harvest came that fall. She’d arrive with a red wagon of produce fit for the tables of the finest restaurants in the county. But it would be for those who really needed it. Doing that would be hard this fall. It would be the first without him.

  Olga Morris-Cerrino watched the sun dip below her white clapboard house, as a chilling breeze worked its way across the meadow, then closer, to the garden where she stood. She zipped up her jacket and checked the tiller for gas. It was getting dark, but once she got going it wa
s hard to stop. Evenings in the country were like that. Tony knew it. He loved it. And despite everything she had once thought about herself, she’d grown to love it, too. Yet the breeze right then was like an icy hand on her neck. When she heard the phone ring she set the tiller down and used the intrusion as the excuse she needed to go inside.

  She swung open the gingerbread-framed screen door and went to the antique wall phone that Tony had re-outfitted for the modern age. The change kept with the integrity of the home, he’d say. But it was wall mounted and hard to get to. So much for modern.

  “Hello?” Olga said, into the mouthpiece, out of breath.

  “Olga Morris?”

  She pulled the zipper on her jacket. “Who’s calling?”

  “I’m Emily Kenyon, sheriff’s detective, Cherrystone.”

  Sliding off one sleeve, then the other, Olga sighed. “Oh, I’m sorry, but I’ve already made my donations for the year.”

  “Detective Morris, I’m not collecting for anything. I’m calling for your help.”

  “It’s Cerrino now, and I’m retired.” The cat jumped on the kitchen counter and Olga frantically shooed it down. “Down, Felix!”

  “Huh?”

  “The cat. Never mind. You’re calling about?”

  “It’s about an old case you worked,” Emily said. “Do you have a moment?”

  The cat was now on the floor, and Olga was at ease. She took a seat on the old oak stool and absentmindedly started straightening the paper clips, tape holders, and scrap paper she kept by the phone. Felix yowled, his Siamese lineage coming through loud and clear.