by Gregg Olsen
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Tiffany said, sitting next to a leaffilled pool, “I’ve been studying my butt off tonight.”
“That’s why you’re there, honey.”
“I know.” Tiffany rolled her eyes.
“I called earlier because I wanted to let you know I can come a day early for Moms Weekend.”
“How early, Mom?” Tiffany was annoyed and had no problem letting her mother know. “You know I have a lot of responsibilities.”
“I know you do, Tiff.”
“Just a minute,” she said cutting off her mother. She took her phone from her ear.
“Do I know you?”
Mrs. Jacobs tried to speak to her daughter again, but Tiffany was arguing with someone. She couldn’t make out anything that was being said. The tone of it, however, seemed angry, confrontational.
“Tiff? What’s going on? Tiffany?”
No answer.
“Tiff?”
Then the phone went dead.
Cherrystone, Washington
Derek Edwards’s eyes were two black, bottomless spheres. To look deep into those eyes would be to fall into darkness. Sheriff Emily Kenyon felt the faint hairs on the back of her neck rise. She’d been close to evil too many times to discount the feelings that came to her. It was as if somewhere inside there was a malevolent barometer telling her to be just a little more careful.
But not so careful that you let fear stymie what you need to do.
“I’m surprised at you,” she finally said. “You seem . . .” she paused to irritate him. “What’s the word I’m looking for? Indifferent. That’s what I’m feeling from you here.”
It was a lie, but a strategic one.
Derek Edwards, however, didn’t blink.
“Are you expecting me to cry?” he asked, four feet away, across her desk. The face of her daughter, Jenna, now 22, beamed in her graduation photo from Cascade State University. Nearby, a little pink purse decorated with an eyeless flamingo was filled with pennies and acted as a paperweight.
And as a touchstone to terrible things in the past, things that made Emily and Jenna closer than ever.
“Some emotion would be nice, Derek.”
He shrugged. On his lap was a stack of flyers that he’d had made at Kinko’s. They were facedown, but through the cheap goldenrod colored paper the photo of a woman was visible. The headline in squat, block letters, was also bold enough that it could be read backward through the paper.
MISSING
Derek kept his papers balanced on his lap. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. The muscles that enveloped his sturdy frame like cables spun around a rigid spool, tensed beneath his vintage Green Day concert T-shirt. He didn’t smile. There was nothing about him that seemed vulnerable.
As a man might seem when his pregnant wife vanished.
“Look,” Emily said, still sizing him up, “I don’t want anything from you but the truth.”
Derek clutched his papers and leaned forward then stood up. “Jesus, Sheriff, you know me. You know my family. You know that I didn’t do anything to her.”
Emily stood so that she could meet his gaze head-on. She noticed how he hadn’t yet said Mandy’s name. She stayed quiet, hoping that her silence would invite the 30-year-old man with the ever-so-slowly receding hairline and beefy biceps to reveal something of use in the investigation. To spill more. It was a technique that had served her well in all kinds of interrogations as a Seattle cop, then as sheriff’s deputy, and finally, the sheriff. On the wall behind the man with the missing wife was a portrait of Brian Kiplinger, her predecessor and a friend she still mourned. Kip’s photo was comforting and distracting at the same time.
“You need to be forthcoming.” she said. “We understand that things weren’t that—and I don’t mean to be unkind here—that great between you,” she said, stopping herself and playing his game of not mentioning his wife’s name. “And your wife. You know your marriage was in trouble.”
Derek slammed the flyers on Emily’s desk, the heavy thud, knocking over Jenna’s portrait. It startled her.
“In trouble?” he asked. “We had problems, but not any more than anyone else around Cherrystone or anywhere in this country!”
She picked up the photo and righted it. “Yes, but she was going to leave you.”
Edwards’ face went completely red. “I’m sick and tired of all the innuendo coming out of your office. I loved my wife.”
My wife. As is she were some possession, Emily thought.
Five days earlier, Derek Edwards had called the sheriff’s department to report Mandy was missing. He was worried when she didn’t return from her scrapbooking group that evening.
“That’s not like her,” he had said. “Mandy wasn’t like that.”
The dispatcher had immediately seized on his words. “Mandy wasn’t like that.”
“He spoke of her in the past tense, Sheriff,” she told Emily. “Like she’s gone for good. Weird, huh?”
Emily gave a quick nod, but said nothing.
More than weird, she thought as she went back to her office. With her chief deputy, Casey Howard, out sick, Emily had made the first phone calls to other young women in the scrapbooking club and immediately determined that Mandy Edwards had never gotten that far.
“We gave up on her at eight,” said one member. “At first we thought she’d needed to stop at the store. It was her night for snack. We made do with coffee and shortbread cookies.”
Jesus, she thought. Some friends.
And now there was the husband sitting across from her.
Derek Edwards’s cold black eyes stared as Emily opened the folder and like a menu handed it to him. Inside was a photograph of a pretty blonde in a periwinkle sweater over a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Emily noted that Mandy was apparently a very traditional pregnant lady who had chosen the same look her own mother’s generation had sported—pregnant woman as child. Big bows. Babyish prints. None of the trendy hipster black pregnancy wear for her—no bumpclinging spandex tops revealing a thin slice of tummy.
“I know what my wife looks like,” he said.
“Say her name.”
Edwards shoved the folder back at Emily. “Damn you, Emily. Mandy! Mandy is her name! Was this some kind of a test here? Why are you so willing to let another person die under your watch?”
Emily knew he was baiting her with the old Kristi Cooper case, but she didn’t bite. She’d finally made peace with that. To do otherwise, she knew, would have killed her like a slowly bleeding wound.
“Calm down, Derek,” Emily said, her voice steady and commanding. “I want to find Mandy, too. I need some help here. Are you sure you’ve told us everything?”
Edwards turned away from her and headed for the door. “There isn’t any more to tell,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ve been to my place. You’ve interviewed everyone I’ve ever known. I’ll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing.”
From the hallway, Emily watched Derek Edwards’s retreating figure. It was more than a hunch. She knew it in her bones. Derek was holding back. Crime statistics indicated that Mandy was dead and that her husband had killed her. But there was no evidence. No blood.
“There’s a reason for that,” she told Casey Howard, her deputy.
“Yeah, he didn’t kill her.”
“But you saw the plastic bleach bottle in the trash.”
“Yeah, but if you went to my house you’d find two bottles in our trash. Bleach kills germs. I’ve got two germy kids.”
Emily smiled. “I don’t know. Something’s with this guy.”
“Yeah, he’s full of himself, for one. His home gym is the biggest room in the house. The baby’s room is the size of a closet.”
“Not hard to tell his priorities,” she said.
“Anyway, Sheriff, just because the dude is a self-absorbed ass doesn’t make him a killer.”
She smiled.
Patrice Fletcher had left the potato chips in the trunk.
“You always leave the boys with me. You ought to pay me, Mom. I’m the live-in sitter around here.”
Patrice pretended not to hear Stacy rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. She’d thought of asking Stacy to get the chips, but she knew she’d complain about that, too.
“You use me like a slave, Mom!”
Patrice and her children had packed up early that morning for a fall picnic at Brier Lake, just to the west of Cherrystone. She knew that cold weather would come in a flash and that day might be the very last day before rain, snow and bundle-up weather. Patrice was 35, with red hair that she wore long, with bangs that made her daughter cringe whenever they were out in public.
“You need a makeover, Mom!” Stacy said. Although mostly teasing, she wouldn’t have minded if her mom did change her hair from her decidedly un-chic ’80s hairdo.
“Oh, I don’t know, I think I look hot.”
The response brought an exaggerated gasp.
“No one’s mom is hot,” Stacy said, with a smile more mean than sweet.
Patrice made her way across the almost deserted field that bordered the parking lot. No more than a half dozen cars huddled by the main pathway down to the lake. Her silver Prius gleamed in the sun, screaming out loud to the world that she loved the earth.
She pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. She stared into the blackness below and her heart sank.
“What the—?”
The chips were gone. She had left them at home on the kitchen counter.
“This is the kind of day I’m having,” she said, closing the lid. “Stacy’s going to blame me for this.”
As she slammed down the trunk, she heard a scream.
“Mom!”
It was Stacy’s voice. She turned around and looked for her daughter.
“Mom! Come here quick!”
Patrice squinted into the late afternoon sun, the light blinding her with the shimmer of gold off the lightly rippled surface of Brier Lake.
Something was wrong.
“Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!” Patrice called out. She started running to the spot where she had left her children, but they weren’t there. Instead, about fifty yards away, she saw them huddled at the water’s edge. The low sun had wrapped them in a halo of light. Were all three there? She ran as fast as she could, losing a flip-flop in the process.
“What is it? Brandon? Kevin?”
“We’re fine, Mom,” Stacy called out, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her mother. “Oh, Mom!” She lunged for Patrice, who gladly held her daughter. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the space of the time it took for Patrice to go to the car, Stacy was once more a little girl—a scared little girl. She started to cry and pointed to a lily-pad-tangled spot about ten yards from shore.
Floating among the degraded greenery of a fall patch of aquatic plants was the swollen figure of a child, a teenager. She was facedown, her blonde hair swirling around her in the water. Her skin looked waxy and white. Patrice craned her neck to get a closer view.
No, it wasn’t a child, but a woman. She could see a wristwatch and wedding band.
The boys just stood there, their eyes fastened on the floating corpse.
“Want me to poke her with a stick?” It was Kevin, her 8-year-old, who she once caught eating canned dog food off the broken end of a hula hoop—with his older brother Brandon urging him on.
“I’ll get a stick for you,” Brandon said.
Patrice’s heart was racing just then. She shook her head and gently pulled her brood away from the frothy edge of the lake.
“Let’s go back to the car,” she said. “I need to call the sheriff.”
Emily’s cell phone vibrated on her desk and she looked down at the small LCD screen. An electronic envelope rotated across the screen. She had a new text message. She snapped open the phone. It was from Jenna. She knew so even before she opened it. No one else sent text messages to her. Certainly no one over 25 could even work the tiny keys and create a message.
One of our BZs drowned last night. At the Kappa Chi house. Call u tonight. Strange.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2008 Gregg Olsen
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2922-8