by Gregg Olsen
“If they can find her.”
“Right. That’s right. They didn’t find the other, did they?”
“They don’t have a clue. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”
He could feel his own lips moving as he had the conversation with himself, but he knew he wasn’t really uttering any of the words. He wasn’t crazy like that. They were only playing in his head. Over and over. The conversation sustained him, fueled him, as he waited for Lily Ann to drink a few beers and move on to the party. To move on to her final destiny. The one he’d scripted all on his own. Talking to himself, even silently, took the ennui out of the business of murder.
“Yeah, the truth is that killing is hours of boredom with ten seconds of ecstasy.”
A couple of girls, both long and lean, with dark hair that curled past their necklines, walked past. One carried a coat, the other wore one. They were in a hurry. He watched as they headed up the steps to the house where Lily Ann was holding court. He checked his watch. They were punctual. The time for the pre-party drinking was half past the hour.
They’d drink for an hour.
And he’d kill Lily Ann Denton, put her in the trunk, and go to Arby’s.
God, he was hungry.
Chapter Nineteen
Cherrystone
The greasy smell of french fries and buffalo chicken wings hung in the overheated air. It was 1:15, just after the lunch rush, when Jason Howard stomped snow off his feet in a puddle inside the door and hurried into Cherrystone High School’s cafeteria/auditorium. The lights were dim, but he could see Emily sitting in a metal folding chair on the stage at the far end of the cavernous room. Seated next to her were the principal, Sal Randazzo, and a teacher he didn’t recognize. And also a girl he expected was the student the office staff had said they were gathered to honor.
Dr. Randazzo stood up and took the microphone.
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our students,” he said, as a slide show of young faces played out on a giant pull-down screen behind him. “We’ve gathered here today to honor Naomi Frye for her heroic actions that saved the lives of two of our students….”
Very quietly, Jason went up the steps to the stage and cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Sheriff Kenyon,” he whispered.
Emily didn’t appear to hear him.
Dr. Randazzo put his hand on Naomi’s shoulder.
“…This young woman stopped at the scene of a terrible car accident and administered CPR.”
Jason leaned in just little farther, trying his best to avoid being seen by the student-body audience who’d gathered, however begrudgingly, to honor one of their own. He called once more. This time he caught Emily’s attention.
“E Mer Gen Cee,” he mouthed at her.
As gracefully as she could, Emily said something to Randazzo and took Naomi’s hand to congratulate her. She walked calmly across the stage, trying not to disrupt the occasion for which she’d been asked to speak.
“What is it?” She was clearly concerned. It made no sense for Jason to show up in the middle of a school event. For goodness sake, he could have waited an hour and she’d have been back in the office. She wondered if it was Jenna. “Has there been an accident?” Her heartbeat quickened. It was far from routine having Jason interrupt a public event.
“No. It’s pretty bad. We might have found Mandy.”
Emily knew by his dire tone that he didn’t mean Mandy Crawford had been found alive. “Her body?”
“Yeah. Dumped off the highway by the old Highline.”
An icy wind that felt like raptor claws on the back of a neck blew down the ravine behind the Highline Tavern, ten miles out of town on the Cherrystone-Spokane Highway. The tavern was nothing more than a biker bar, a place with six pool tables and a bathroom that had seen a flood of vomit and misaimed streams of urine. The dive had been closed for two years, having failed to hang on to the Goldwingers and Harley wannabes that came from Spokane on the weekends in their Citizens jeans and Ralph Lauren leather jackets.
Two cars from the Washington State Patrol were parked out front. Shane Packer and Ron Oliver, both well known to Emily, had kept the area clear from the inevitable stream of lookie-loos hovering nearby. Such gatherings were always part of any major crime scene in small-town America, where police scanners still sell and where middle-aged men still live out the dream they’d be smarter than Columbo or Jessica Fletcher.
“Sheriff,” said Shane, a tall black man with strikingly handsome features and cannonball biceps that made most women feel a little flap of flirtatious energy whenever he was around.
“Officer,” Emily said. Her expression was grim. There were no real smiles for old friends at a time like this. “What do you have?”
He motioned over in the direction of the patrol car, lights flashing. “Ron’s got the witness in his vehicle taking a statement now.”
She looked over and saw Ron Oliver, a sandy-haired cop who’d become nothing more than Shane’s sidekick. He was busy making notes on his state-issue pad while a young man, not more than eighteen, talked animatedly about what he’d found.
Emily turned back toward Shane. “What have we got?”
He motioned for Emily and Jason to follow. “Kid was looking for bottles for recycling and found her. Follow me.” They walked from the parking lot, through some garbage left by the previous owner. Emily couldn’t help but notice that a baby crib had been trashed and left in the blackberry brambles. It seemed odd to her that there’d ever be a need for a baby crib in a biker bar.
What’s this world coming to?
The three of them stood on the edge of the ravine.
“Down there.” He pointed to the figure of a young woman, her body wrapped in what appeared to be a sheet. But on closer examination, it seemed more likely that it was a painter’s drop cloth. Her hand protruded from the covering, almost as if to call out to the world, Come here. Find me.
“Techs are coming from Spokane,” Shane said. “Called you, Emily, because of your missing woman.”
Shane’s words were meant to affirm what all of them knew. Cherrystone had no standing there. The body was found in Spokane County. Outside of Mandy Crawford, Cherrystone had no reports of anyone else missing—man or woman.
With Jason just behind her, Emily looked down the ravine. She estimated it was about a seventy-foot drop, maybe eighty. The incline was layered with dollops of snow and a tangle of thistles and blackberries. A deer trail to the bottom cut a zigzag path from where they stood.
Emily steadied herself as she made her way down toward the body, with the sick feeling that came with the sad realization that someone’s daughter had been murdered and dumped like garbage. The cold weather had been in their favor. There was no stench, no flies buzzing around the corpse.
She knelt next to the body. It took only a second and the abruptness of her own words surprised even herself.
“This isn’t Mandy Crawford,” she said.
“How can you tell? You can’t even see her face,” Jason said from two steps behind her.
Emily looked up at her deputy, and then locked her eyes on the arm sticking from its frozen wrapping.
“Mandy doesn’t have a tattoo around her wrist.”
Jason’s mouth was a straight line as he looked at what was so sadly, but concretely, evident. A chain of blue violets spun around the dead girl’s wrist. They were faded, having lost the crispness of a new inking.
“Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t Mandy.”
Emily and Jason knew that Amanda did, in fact, have a tattoo. But it was a pink rose on her lower back.
The pair climbed back up to the edge of the ravine. Shane Packer was smoking a cigarette and stubbed it out into the half-frozen ground.
“Still trying to quit,” he said.
Emily nodded. “She’s not ours. Someone’s heart will be broken tonight. But she’s not Cherrystone’s missing mother-to-be, that’s for sure.”
The three of them talked a bit more. Jason
said he was so glad that he’d never started smoking, though it seemed to go with a law enforcement job.
“No groups smoke more than cops and doctors,” he said.
“You got that right,” Emily said, without offering up that she and her ex, a doctor, had been heavy smokers back in the day. Both had stopped smoking before they had Jenna.
On the drive back to Cherrystone, snow skittered over the now-dry and bare highway. Emily was heartbroken with the realization that a dead girl’s mother would be getting the worst-possible phone call once identification had been made. How that would hurt. Emily would probably never know the end of that story. She couldn’t follow every case. She had her own, of course.
“You know Mandy’s dead, right?” Jason asked.
Emily let out sigh. “We think she’s dead. The absence of her body makes this difficult, of course.”
“Not impossible. I mean, why can’t Hazelton just indict that SOB of a husband of hers?”
Emily shook her head. “Because she’s up for reelection next year and she wants to win. She doesn’t want an opponent wagging a finger at her come election time saying that we rushed to judgment and arrested the wrong guy.”
“A lot of other prosecutors would indict him now just to make him squirm a little, you know, see what he does once he makes bail—because you know he would.”
“I’m sure. Camille isn’t going to let us down. Once we find Mandy, or have some physical evidence of foul play, she’ll indict.”
Jason looked squarely at Emily. She faced the darkening roadway, one hand on the steering wheel and the other fishing for a lemon drop from the tin she kept in the cruiser.
“You thought that was her at first, didn’t you?”
She let her eyes light on him for a second. “I did. I hoped it was and I hoped it wasn’t. I don’t think she’s alive, but, I guess, I’m praying something like this will come to an end.”
“Yeah. Some news is always better than no news.”
Emily didn’t agree. She hated not knowing where Mandy Crawford was, of course. But she loathed more than anything the duty that fell on her shoulders when the worst outcome in a missing person’s case came into play.
“Try telling yourself that when you have to make a death notification to a dead girl’s mother and father.”
Jason knew just what she was talking about. “Where in the world are you?” he asked, looking out at the dormant vineyards and their spiderweb rows of grapevines as they whizzed by in the speeding cruiser, the rows fading in the early evening. “Where did he put you, Mandy?”
Chapter Twenty
Gloria brought in three tins of assorted Christmas cookies—some she made and others she conceded were “filler”—as her countdown to the holiday kicked into high gear. She kept the Spokane radio station that played “holiday favorites” on low.
“Less than a week of shopping,” she said, with a good-natured smile. “Still time to get me something I can’t live without.”
“Someone here to see you, Sheriff,” she said, as Emily breezed in with latte in hand.
Emily looked down the hall, and mouthed, “Who?”
Gloria lip-synched back, “Wouldn’t say.”
The woman waiting outside of Emily’s office was a wisp; a good wind and she’d blow away. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, barely a hundred pounds after a full meal. She had strawberry blond hair that she wore cropped at the shoulder; bangs framed her blue eyes. It looked as if she’d been crying. Her mouth was taut, frozen in a kind of grimace that appeared to indicate that her reason for being there was a painful one.
“I’m Sheriff Kenyon,” Emily said. “Gloria says you’re here to see me.” She waited for the woman to say something, before adding, “But she didn’t say why.”
The woman stood up. She wore boot-cut jeans with heels, a stylish sweater and blouse. The sweater was jade-colored and expensive. In her arms she held a gray coat that probably weighed more than she did.
“Sheriff, I’m not a gossip,” she said.
“Good. We don’t have much use for gossip, around here. Gossip works better for the newspaper, anyway.”
It was a lighthearted comment that was meant to relax, but it fell flat. Emily noticed for the first time that the small woman in front of her was shaking. Her hand holding her car key trembled noticeably.
“Are you all right?” She waved her inside. “Come in. Sit down.”
The woman took a seat across from Emily’s desk.
“I’m fine, and thank you.”
“Who are you?”
“Tricia Wilson.” She paused and looked nervously around the room.
She was afraid of something. Or someone.
“I used to be Patty Crawford.”
Emily’s eyes widened a little. While the last name rang alarm bells, the first meant absolutely nothing.
“I’m sorry. Are you a relative of Mandy’s?”
Her visitor shook her head and set down her black leather satchel. Emily noticed a large envelope protruding from the silver jaws of its clasp.
“Not exactly. More like a kindred spirit, I’d say. I know what it’s like to be married to Mitch Crawford. And I know now that I’m a lot luckier girl than Mandy is. I got away from that bastard alive.”
Emily tried to keep her face from betraying her feelings. She could have kicked herself right then. How stupid they’d been not to know that Mitch had been married before.
“We didn’t know how to reach you,” she said. She felt foolish for lying, but she hated not knowing something that she should have known.
Tricia stayed expressionless. “I’m sure. If you even knew I’d existed, you’d have had a hard time finding me. I’ve changed my name, my hair, my address. I never wanted to be found by anyone from my old life as Mitch’s wife. It was a complete and utter nightmare.”
Again, Emily waited. Waiting always brought better results than peppering a person for the details. Tricia Wilson had come to Cherrystone with a reason. She was the ex-wife. Emily knew she might be there to settle the score, to get some payback for a bad marriage. Maybe she’d been dumped by Mitch. Emily didn’t know. She wanted Tricia to do the talking.
They’d fill in the gaps later.
“I married Mitch when I was eighteen. He was ten years older. He was handsome. Fun. We had a lot of money. We had his parents’ place on the Oregon coast any weekend we wanted. He was the dream. Hell, we were living the dream.” She looked wistful as she remembered the good times.
Without taking her eyes off Tricia, Emily unbuttoned her coat and slid out of the arms.
“What happened? It sounds like things were good.”
“Things are always good in the beginning.”
Emily nodded, thinking of David and the early days of their marriage. Things had been good once between them.
“I feel stupid for even being here,” she said, making a movement that suggested she might get up and leave.
Emily put her hand on her desk, a gesture indicating to stay.
“But what happened? You’re here because you want to tell me something. Did you know Mandy?”
“No. But I know Mitch.”
“I’m sure you do. Tell me. Have you talked to him about Mandy?”
“Not at all. I haven’t spoken to him since the day we divorced.”
Tricia stopped herself again.
“Go on.”
“Sheriff Kenyon, I was afraid he’d kill me. I really was.”
Emily felt a rush of sympathy. She’s worked terrible abuse cases in Seattle. She’d seen women who shuddered with fear even when the man in question was safely behind bars.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked.
Tricia started to cry and reached for her purse. Emily looked around for a tissue, and she’d assumed that Tricia was doing the same. Instead, she produced a large gray envelope and scooted it on top of Emily’s desk.
“Open it. I want you to see. I’ve never let anyone see this before.�
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Emily undid the little brass clasp and reached inside. She found three Polaroid photographs.
The first showed a very young Patty Crawford facing the camera. She had a black eye that a prizefighter might have bragged about. Her cheeks were streaked with tears; her hair pulled back over one shoulder. She looked fearful that at any second there could be another attack.
“Oh, my,” she said, looking up. “Mitch did this to you?”
Tricia dabbed at her eyes with a tissue she’d retrieved from the bottom of her purse.
“Yes,” she said.
The next image was similar to the first, but not nearly as brutal. Emily hated that she’d even made a judgment about the severity of the injury. No injury was acceptable. It was clear that this was a different incident than the first photograph. Tricia’s hair was longer, and styled differently. Her gaze was less fearful, almost resigned.
Emily glanced up for a second, then picked up the next photograph. She found herself suppressing a gasp.
The final image was the most brutal. Tricia was naked from the waist up. It looked as if there was a large gash on her forehead. She had two softball-sized bruises across her rib cage. The framing of the photo was askew, as it had been in the other two, indicating more than likely that Tricia had taken the photos of herself.
“Dear God,” Emily said, “what did the police say?”
Tricia avoided Emily’s eyes. She kept her sightline fixed on the floor. Or the tissue in her hand.
“I didn’t tell. I couldn’t.”
“But the photos? You must have taken them to prove what had happened?”
“This is very difficult. I know now that none of this makes sense. But at the time I only took them so that in case he killed me, someone would know it wasn’t my fault. That he’d done this to me.”
She was sobbing now, and Emily got up and shut the door. She took the seat next to Tricia and put her hand on her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve this, Tricia.”
“That’s not why I’m crying. I’m so damned embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t do anything. But I was so afraid of him. He told me over and over that if I told anyone what he’d done that he’d kill me and go have a big fat breakfast to celebrate. He told me that people would stop asking about me fifteen minutes after I’d been gone.”