by Gregg Olsen
For a girl with pink hair, that was saying a lot and Jenna smiled. She’d dyed her hair black the summer before college, thinking that she needed a change. It also fit her mood at the time. She just didn’t want to look like the girl who’d been held captive. Eventually she let it return to her light brown. That fall, for the very first time, she colored it blond.
“Being a blonde isn’t edgy, but I think it suits me. It kind of makes me feel, I don’t know, a little invincible, when I go after what I want.”
Shali brightened. “A little blonde ambition is a good thing.”
“I guess.” Jenna set down the brush, pulling some long golden strands from the bristles and dropping them in the trash can. She thought about Shali’s “blonde ambition” comment for a second. It was a very good line. She’d use it in her next Beta Zeta blog post.
Jenna had no idea that a thousand miles away, a man in his basement office was eagerly waiting for her next blog post. He was counting on Jenna to be as thorough as ever—detailing where she was going to be, who she was going to see.
It was all about timing.
Chapter Twenty-three
Miller’s Marsh Pond, outside of Cherrystone
The thought of a decomposing body is enough to make the skin crawl on the living. But decomp is always the natural outcome of a death. A stealthy decomp is the killer’s hope for lifelong freedom. Maybe even life itself.
A grave, not the proverbial shallow one, is always the best course of action. Bury the corpse deep enough in a remote location, scatter debris over the surface in a haphazard manner, and hope that no one stumbles upon it. That’s been a successful path for all of the murderers no one has ever heard about.
Dismemberment works well, too. Chop up the corpse in the bathtub, disperse the bits and pieces as convenience allows, and keep fingers crossed.
The killer of the woman in the water had done a mental pros-and-cons chart and decided that while enhancing the convenience of disposal, dismemberment was too messy a course of action. Blood spatter from a power saw almost always goes in a place that escapes detection by the killer with a scrub brush. Luminol with its eerie blue glow is a chemical finger that points right at the killer.
When a human body is surreptitiously dumped in the water, it becomes food for fish, turtles, and the other scavengers of the dead. If the body doesn’t get consumed, gases swell in the tissues and fill the cavities, distending the organs. Enough time in the water turns a dead person into a balloon, bringing it to the surface for discovery by a boater or in the nets of an unlucky fisherman.
Dead bodies and water don’t mix.
In Florida, a body can be consumed by alligators in a sunny afternoon. In the open sea of the Pacific, sharks dine on the fleshy morsels of what had once been a human being with the kind of glee that brings to mind the phrase feeding frenzy. In particularly pure and deep waters like Washington State’s Lake Crescent, bodies have been found preserved decades after they’d been hidden there.
That wasn’t going to happen with the body that he’d dumped that flat, moonless night. That body wasn’t going to be eaten, weighed down, or preserved at the depths.
The weather warmed and for a short time, the snow turned to rain. Mandy was about to make her return.
Chapter Twenty-four
Jack Fletcher had left his youngest son’s tackle box in the trunk. All bundled in heavy coats, hats, and gloves, Jack and his kids had made it halfway down the path toward Miller’s Marsh Pond. There, ice fishing was the order of the afternoon in the days after Christmas. Damn, the weather had likely ruined this year’s outing. A seesawing patch of weather had brought a thaw and then another hard freeze—it was an unusual occurrence that the big-city weatherman liked to call “Pineapple Express” to indicate that the genesis of the storm had come from Hawaii. It meant a lot of rain on the western part of the state and snow on the eastern region, including Cherrystone. This season, the Pineapple Express blew through with a hot breath that drove temps up to 55 degrees for forty-eight hours.
And now it was back down below freezing. New snow was coming that evening and winter was headed back with a vengeance.
“Watch the boys, Stacy,” Jack told his daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of fourteen. “I’m going back to the car to get Brandon’s tackle.”
“You always leave the boys with me,” she said. “You ought to pay me, Dad. I’m the live-in sitter around here.”
Jack pretended not to hear her rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. He’d thought of asking Stacy to get the tackle back at the car, but he knew she’d complain about that, too.
“You use me like a slave, Dad!”
The Fletchers had packed up early that morning for their annual post-Christmas fishing trip, just to the west of Cherrystone. It was Dad’s time with the kids. His ex-wife, Sherry, had a new beau and between the holidays the pair headed off for a vacation in Hawaii. Jack was Mr. Mom just then and he didn’t mind it one bit. He knew that cold weather would come back in a flash and that day might be the very last one before rain, snow, and bundle-up weather. Jack had black curly hair he fluffed up to camouflage a receding hairline. He had a stocking cap, leaving his curls as fringe.
He made his way down the path toward the car. Only one other car was parked in the lot, indicating to him that the place would pretty much be all theirs that day. He smiled. Jack Fletcher’s silver Prius gleamed in the winter sun, screaming out loud to the world that he loved the earth.
He pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. He stared into the blackness below and his heart sank.
“What the?”
He moved a blanket, just in case. But it was obvious. The box was gone. He’d left it at home on the kitchen counter.
“This is the kind of day I’m having,” he said, closing the lid. “Stacy’s going to blame me for this.”
As he slammed down the trunk, he heard a scream.
“Dad!”
It was Stacy’s voice. He turned around and looked for his daughter.
“Dad! Come here quick!”
Jack squinted into the sun, the light blinding him with the shimmer of gold off the icy surface of the water.
Something was wrong.
“Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!” He called out. “I’m coming.” He started running to the spot where he left his children, but they weren’t there. Instead, about fifty yards away, he saw them huddled at the edge. The sun wrapped them in a halo of light.
Were all three there?
“What is it? Brandon? Kevin?”
“We’re fine, Dad,” Stacy said, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her father. “Oh, Dad!” She lunged for him, and he gladly held her. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the time it took for her father to go to the car, she was once more a little girl. A scared little girl.
“What is it, honey?” he asked.
She started to cry and pointed to a spot about ten yards from shore.
Partially cemented in the cracking ice among the degraded greenery of a winter-dead patch of aquatic plants was the swollen figure of a child, a teenager. It appeared she’d been wrapped in a dark blue blanket, maybe a sleeping bag. She was facedown in the water, her hair swirling like a halo on the re-frozen surface. Her ice-sheathed skin looked waxy and white. He didn’t like what he was seeing, but Jack craned his neck to get a closer view.
No, it wasn’t a child, but a woman. He could see a wristwatch and wedding band.
The boys just stood there, their eyes fastened on the corpse.
“Want me to poke her with a stick?” It was Kevin, the eight-year-old, whose mother once caught him 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.
Pinpricks of sweat beaded on Jack’s brow. He gently pulled his kids away.
“No stick. Let’s go back to the car,” he said. “I need t
o call the sheriff.”
It was almost dark when Emily Kenyon and Jason Howard, along with two patrol officers, arrived at Miller’s Marsh Pond.
His kids in a warm cruiser with a patrol officer, Jack Fletcher led the sheriff and her deputy to the body, half frozen, facedown in a sheath of ice and snow.
“How are your children?” Emily asked. “It must have been quite a fright for them.”
“It was, but they’ll be OK. I think my oldest—the girl, Stacy—is the most shook up over this. The boys wanted to prod the body with a stick to see if it was a doll or something.”
“Not a doll, that’s for sure,” Emily said, as she bent closer to the still-frozen edge. She saw the watch and the ring on the hand that was curled slightly upward. She could see that the woman was likely clad in jeans or a different, softer fabric. Through the layer of ice that covered the torso like a shield, she could make out a bra and the fragments of a torn blouse.
It had to be her.
“Mr. Fletcher,” she said, “we’ll need to get a statement from you. But we don’t need it tonight. Take your kids home and come down to the station tomorrow, first thing. Can you work that out?”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. We came here for a memorable day, you know, a tradition with Dad. A day that we’d remember.”
Emily knew where he was going and her heart went out to the children. “They’ll never forget what they saw and I’m sorry for that. They’ll always remember how their dad kept his cool and called the police, just like he should.”
He smiled. “Hope so.”
Emily turned her gaze toward her earnest deputy.
“Let’s cordon off the area, Jason. Spokane crime scene techs are on their way, but this dead girl’s not going anywhere. We’re going to have to chip her out and that’ll take time and daylight.”
Emily didn’t say so to Jason and he didn’t say it to her. But as they stood there watching Jack Fletcher and his family drive away, both had a pretty good idea whose body they just found. Even without the face, the long swirls of reddish blond hair were a big indicator, but there was something else that both of them had seen. The waistband on the trousers was elastic.
The dead body was wearing maternity pants.
It had to be Mandy Crawford.
The two Spokane crime techs set up a string grid that ran from the path by the shoreline to about four yards past the dead body in the ice. It was painstaking work and the wind nipped hard at their unprotected faces. They ran infrared lights over the soil, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The snow had come and gone, so it wasn’t likely that any trace could be found, but the two women who’d come down to process the scene for Cherrystone left not one single inch undisturbed.
Chapter Twenty-five
Spokane
Casper Wilhelm had been Spokane County medical examiner for decades. So long that Emily Kenyon was sure he had to have been the ME when she was in high school, and she didn’t want to do the math on that one. Dr. Wilhelm was white haired, foul mouthed, and as brilliant as could be. His reputation outside of the region was so stellar that many thought there had to be something wrong with him because he’d never left for a bigger city.
“Hell,” he said, quite plainly at a conference in Chicago, “dead is dead. Doesn’t matter much where you live when you die. A body’s a damn body. I like Spokane. What’s more, my wife does.”
The ME’s assistant, a pretty young woman named Denise in a spotless white lab coat, offered coffee and Emily thanked her. She sipped it from a disposable cup and waited on the blue couch just outside Dr. Wilhelm’s door.
It was 8:45 A.M. When she called after Mandy’s body had been found, Dr. Wilhelm told her to be there at 8:30.
“Not a second later. We’ll start sharply.”
He’d said it with a short laugh. “You know, all autopsies start with something sharp—a scalpel.”
Emily resisted the eye roll at the time. “Yes, of course.”
“My grandson thinks it’s funny,” he said.
In reality, she didn’t think there was much to laugh at. A dead pregnant woman had been cracked out of the ice at Miller’s Marsh Pond. It was clear that she’d been murdered. No one ends up in a frozen lake in a sleeping bag in the middle of winter by accident.
All the while on the drive up, Emily considered every bit of the terror that Mandy had likely endured. She could see the young woman in her mind’s eye, battling the evil of a man who cared nothing for her life or the precious baby she carried. She could hear her voice as she screamed or begged.
I hear you, Mandy, she thought. We all do.
Dr. Wilhelm told her to be there sharply, but it seemed he was running late. She sat outside his office door, sipping on coffee Denise provided from a thermos carafe next to a counter crammed with medical supplies. She could hear his belly laugh as he talked with someone on the phone. Clearly, Dr. Wilhelm was a man who loved his work.
“Donut?” he said as he emerged from his office. “Denise! Get Sheriff Kenyon a goddamn donut to go with that lousy coffee of yours! I want one, too!”
He patted his protruding belly. “Like I need one more, you know.”
Emily took a donut, because to say she didn’t want one was akin to telling Santa to screw off.
“Delicious,” she said.
“Let’s get down to it. She’s prepped and on the table. Water’s running. Did you see Mr. Crawford?”
Emily looked puzzled. “When? I mean, not for a few days.”
The ME shrugged. “Half hour ago. Just before you arrived. He came in and did the ID.” The ME reached for a second—maybe a third—donut. Sugar rained on the floor and he pulverized it with his heel. “We tried to notify him that we might have found Mandy, but he wasn’t home.”
“But this hasn’t been on the news. Did you leave a message or something?”
Dr. Wilhelm swallowed his last bite. The man ate like a snapping turtle.
“Negative. He said he heard it on the scanner that a body had been found. He was sure it was Mandy. He drove up first thing. Denise almost decked him to get him to wait his turn. Wanted him to take a chill pill. Didn’t you, honey?”
Denise, a woman who a moment ago was a donut server, was a tough chick when she had to be.
“You got that right,” she said. “The prick went right around me and found her in two seconds flat. He didn’t want to follow procedure. Anyway, I don’t care. He ID’d her. Cried like a baby.”
The news surprised Emily.
“Really?”
“Yeah, you know the type. Big explosive sobs, followed by hacking and then the whole apology for being so ‘emotional.’ Jesus, the woman was his wife, pregnant with his baby. He had a right to fall apart.”
Emily hated Mitch Crawford, but she almost felt sorry for him just then. The way Denise described it, the fellow was distraught—as he ought to be.
“Did he say anything?”
“Yeah, you’ll love this. He says, ‘Why, Mandy? Why did you do this to me? I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.’”
Emily watched from the corner of her eye as Denise removed the pale gray drape that covered Mandy’s body. Although the baby had been removed, her abdomen was still distended.
“Do what?” she asked, suppressing the horror of what she was seeing. Somehow it helped to focus on anger at Mitch Crawford for something callous that he’d said, rather than the evil he’d done.
“I dunno. Die? But it bugged me that he seemed to blame her for doing something to him when she was laying there like a thawing turkey the day before Thanksgiving.”
“I know the guy. Enough said,” Emily said.
Chapter Twenty-six
Cherrystone
“You all right?”
Jason Howard stood in the doorway of Emily’s office, his head cocked in concern.
Emily smiled tentatively. “I’m fine. I’m going to dig into the case again. Camille’s out of town visiting her mother and I’m trying to but
ton things down on Crawford before she gets back.”
“Can I help?”
Emily knew that her deputy only wanted to be useful, but his offer only annoyed her. It wasn’t that he wasn’t up to the task, it was more about the fact that she couldn’t piece together what was troubling her.
“No, I’m good,” she said, a little too dismissively. She saw the hurt in his eyes. “You grab some lunch.”
“Bring you back something? Going to the grill.”
Emily declined the offer. “No, I actually brown-bagged it today. Such a glamorous life I have as the Cherrystone sheriff.”
Jason tried to brush off the rebuke with one of his good-natured smiles. He buttoned up his heavy blue coat and left. Emily knew that he’d bring back one of those big pink frosted cookies that she once remarked she liked, but could really barely eat half of one. One more bite ensured a sugar overload and an afternoon of the crash-and-burn.
Pink icing can be a real killer.
Everything she had was in front of her. Emily looked at the sheaf of reports that she, her deputy, and the CSIs from Spokane had compiled on the Mandy Crawford missing persons case. There was nothing there. She wondered how an inch of paper could contain so little information. Mandy was at work one day. Gone the next. She’d been seen walking the dog by a woman who also misidentified the breed of the Crawfords’ canine. So that was no good. She hadn’t been observed by any of the clerks in Spokane at the mall. Her credit cards hadn’t been used.
She was gone. Poof. Mandy had vanished.
Every day put the young mother-to-be in greater and greater danger. Emily didn’t tell the media or the local women who’d come to help search for Mandy Crawford about the dire statistics behind the disappearance of any pregnant woman. Most were dead at the hands of their husbands, control freaks who refused to have the focus shift from their personal and sexual needs to a child who’d suck up every last bit of their wives’ attention. They viewed those babies growing inside the distended abdomens as parasites stealing the attractiveness of a body whose sole purpose had been to pleasure them.