A Cold Dark Place (16 page)

"Miss you?" Emily wanted to lunge for him. "I could
goddamn kill you"

Cary told the caller on the phone that "an upset client"
had just arrived. "Unannounced. I'll call you later." He put
the phone down, got up and shut the door behind Emily. She
was seething.

"What's going on? Why are you angry at me?"

"Cary, look at my face. This isn't mad. This is furious.
Why didn't you tell me you had information about the Martin case?" She felt her hands clench. She wasn't a person
who ever thought of hitting anyone, but at that moment Cary
McConnell nearly had it coming. If anyone ever did.

"Look, I can't talk about it," he said. "Anything I know is
"
privileged."

"Privileged? My daughter is out there and you're going to
use that law crap on me?"

"Emily," he said, putting his hands on her shoulders.

"Don't even think about touching me."

He removed his hands and took a step backward. He
looked through the floor-to-ceiling sidelight next to his door.
The young blonde was watching from the receptionist's desk.
Cary slid out of view.

I wanted to tell you, but you know I can't. You wouldn't
respect me if I did."

"Respect you? I hate you. I can't believe that I slept with
you again. That's a joke. I'm so stupid. God, I really know
how to pick them"

"Let's not get personal," he said.

Wrong words, Emily thought.

"Personal? My daughter is off with some creepy kid. You
know something about what's going on in his family. And
you don't tell me? No. In fact you take me out for a couple
of drinks and go back to my house ... God, I'm so stupid!"

The blonde was standing up by then. She held the phone
up and pointed at it, signaling to Cary that she could call
someone if he gave her the word. She mouthed: "Police? "

Emily almost laughed at that. Emily was the police.

"You're not stupid," Cary said. "And I am sorry. You know
me better than that. I care about you. I care about Jenna."

Emily could see this was going nowhere. Everything he
said now was some cheap way of trying to calm her so he could get rid of her. Get on with his day. Make some important deal. Screw the blonde. Whatever.

"Okay," she said. "Can you at least confirm something?"

"Maybe. Try me ""

"Was Nick's dad your client?"

Cary shook his head.

"Did another client talk to you about Nick's adoption?"

Cary, now sitting on the edge of his enormous mahogany
desk, looked down at the floor. His face was completely
grim. Saying anything was a breach of legal ethics.

"All right. I'll tell you this. My client is another lawyer,
working for another party. I don't know the name. I can't
give you the lawyer's name, either. But yes, it was about the
adoption."

Emily moved closer. "Cary, please" She stared at him,
imploring with her eyes to tell her what she needed to know.

"I don't know the client. But I'll tell you this. I think it
has something to do with Angel's Nest in Seattle."

"Angel's Nest?" The name was vaguely familiar. Emily
ran it through her memory. "Angel's Nest?"

"Yeah. Can you believe that? Talk about a blast from the
past. That's all I can tell you I know."

Emily turned for the door. The fact that he held information that could have helped the case, could have shed light
on Jenna's whereabouts, was bad enough. That he was so
damn weak that he caved in and told her anything at all, was
proof positive he was the biggest loser she'd ever slept with.

"Dinner tonight?" Cary asked.

Emily stopped and spun around and stood there. If ever
she needed Botox it would be from the hostile glance she
gave Cary McConnell. She held it longer than any expression she'd ever directed at anyone.

Finally she spoke. "Go screw yourself," she said.

It began like most grisly discoveries. A hapless individual
wanders upon the unthinkable in a place where nothing sinister has ever transpired, where it is completely unexpected.
The heart skips a beat. The eyes strain to see through the
mind's protective shield of disbelief.

It was that way for Jeremy Landon, a seventeen-year-old
from Meridian, Washington. He was paddling the Nooksack
River, a meandering waterway that ran lazily from the crispedged Northern Cascades to Puget Sound, when a flash of
white against a gray sandbar caught his eye. He paddled closer
and maneuvered around a fallen cedar that dipped into the icy
and swift-moving waters. Incredulity kicked in and adrenaline pumped like a spigot cranked on all the way. Jeremy
knew what he'd seen before he poked the large plastic cocoon with a paddle. Hair protruded from an opening on one
end. It was long and blond. A mahogany hand with fingertips
still accented by cherry-red nail polish fell from a tear in the midsection of the cocoon. He rocked the large bundle with
his paddle and yelled, this time, even louder.

"You okay?"

His kayak nudged the sandbar, a grating noise of gravel
against the fiberglass hull and the rushing water was the only
answer. He kept poking and calling out.

But nothing. The plastic-wrapped package just lay there.
He knew. He'd found what everyone in the Northwest had
been looking for, because it was clear the bundle contained
two people. He felt a shiver deep in his bones. It was better
than 80 degrees that sunny afternoon, but he was shaking
like it was a midwinter snowstorm. The smell of death blew
over the water, just under the summer breeze.

"Hey, you all right?" he said, his voice almost a prayer by
then. Soft. Pleading. Yet, at the same time, knowing the
worst had come to pass.

"Not sure why I called over to them," he told his dad, crying, some days later. "I know it seems stupid and wrong, but
I really didn't want it to be those girls. I was hoping it was a
couple of store mannequins wrapped up in a painter's tarp"

Shelley Marie Smith and Lorrie Ann Warner had been
found.

Olga Morris moved methodically through apartment 703
in the monolithic redbrick building that Cascade University
students called "Bucky Towers" or "BT." Buchanan Towers
was the kind of building that could only have been dreamed
up by architects working on a bare-bones state budget.
Floors were warrens of studio and double units. Windows
were tiny vertical slots and rooms were sparsely furnished
with bunk beds, desks, and a pair of chairs. Upholstered love
seats dominated the living room/kitchen combinations.

Olga Morris was a detective for the Meridian Police De partment and the irony of the task at hand weighed heavily
on her. She was there investigating the murder of two coeds,
across the hall from the same apartment that she had lived in
when she was a student.

Olga was barely five feet tall, a sparkplug of a woman with
short-cropped blond hair and a confident presence that always made her seem taller. Even though a decade had passed
since she had lived in the building, it felt exceedingly, and
painfully, familiar. The faucet dripped in 703 as it had in her
apartment. Blue mineral deposits corroded what was supposed to be a stainless steel sink. The ventilation was poor
and she cranked open one of the narrow windows. A faint
breeze moved the miniblinds.

Morris retreated to the bedroom. Shelley had the bottom
bunk; Lorrie, the top. The bedding had been removed by the
crime scene investigators and had been processed for fibers
and hairs. Semen and pubic hairs that weren't Lorrie's were
found on her sheets, a cheery lemon and orange percale that
her mother had bought for her junior year.

Her mother, Morris thought as she pulled a desk drawer
open, seemed more upset that her daughter had a boyfriend
and was sexually active than the fact she was missing.

But she was no longer missing. She and Shelley, or rather
their remains, had been discovered by a kayaker on the
Nooksack River.

"Find anything?" It was Tammi Swenson, the resident
aide, who apparently had the uncanny ability to come into
any room unnoticed. "How's the case going?"

Olga looked up and managed a smile. She shut the drawer.
Tammi was one of those upbeat young women who talked in
the peppy cadence of a cheerleader.

"Fine, Tammi. We'll catch whoever it was that killed the
girls. You can count on that"

Tammi sipped her lemon-flavored Pepsi Lite, her blue eyes widening. "I hope so. I mean, I know you will. I feel like I'm
way out of line, but my supervisor wanted me to ask you
again-nicely-when you're gonna release the room. I have
two girls on the wait list and they're really nice. I mean, a
good fit for the floor."

Detective Morris nodded. "I see. Well, tell your manager--2'

"-he's just a supervisor. He thinks he's a manager,
though"

"As I was trying to say," the diminutive detective continued, "the room is available. We've processed everything.
Nothing left. This wasn't the crime scene-be sure to tell the
new girls that, okay?"

Light streamed through the slashes of glass and the blinds
moved once more. Music rumbled from down the hall. It
was Fleetwood Mac with Stevie Nicks doing her best to rock
Bucky Towers.

Tammi brightened for a moment. "Good to know. Thanks!
Can I ask you a question?"

Olga nodded. "Sure, I'll try to answer."

Tammi took a deep breath. The detective had seen that
move a time or two, usually when a suspect is being questioned and is suddenly ready to reveal something they think
will help throw the interrogator off the track.

Tammi wasn't trying to do that, of course. Instead, she
was summoning the courage to ask a question to which she
had no business knowing the answer.

"Was it true what the papers said about Lorrie and Shelley?"

"What, specifically?"

"They were, you know, violated."

The detective looked directly into Tammi's vapid blue
eyes.

"Dear," she said, "we can use the word rape"

Tammi sighed. She seemed emboldened by the detective's clarification and her precision.

"Okay, were they raped? Because that's what I read."

It dawned on the detective that the girl wasn't in search of
salacious details. The look on Tammi Swenson's face was
utter fear.

I can't say one way or another; the case is ongoing. But I
will tell you this. Don't go out alone at night. Check your car
before you get in it. Don't talk to people you don't know."

The college student stepped backward, toward the door.
Olga Morris continued her litany of warnings.

"Be careful. Tell your friends. Tell every girl on the floor,
okay? We'll catch him, but we won't catch him until he makes
a mistake. And, Tammi, we don't want that mistake to be any
more dead girls, okay?"

Tammi gulped hard. Her bulging eyes shifted nervously
away from the detective's piercing gaze. "Okay."

What neither Olga nor Tammi knew was that the mistake
had already been made.

Coffee rings and a spherical grease spot indicating a
doughnut had been consumed while someone reviewed the
autopsy report turned Olga Morris's stomach. She wondered
if she'd ever get to the place where'd she be so callous as to
be able to eat breakfast over the kind of descriptions and images that came with such reports. In her office at the Meridian Police Department, she spread the pictures and documents
across her desk. Photos of Lorrie here. Shelley there. A stack
of the medical examiner's reports, the interviews conducted
by the police in the early stages of the case-when it had
been a missing persons case and not yet a homicide. She
squared up the edges of each pile of papers and photos. It dawned on her as she moved from one stack to the next that
it almost looked like she was playing some freakish version
of solitaire.

She knew then the images would never leave her. The
bodies, wrapped in plastic, and out in the sun had swelled
and burst. Water had chilled the exposed body parts-Shelley's right hand, in particular. Clumps of hair had fallen from
her head. Decomp was a nightmare far beyond the imagination of anyone who'd never seen a rotting body.

Who had the stomach to eat an old-fashioned doughnut
and look at these?

As she scanned the color 8 x l Os, Olga noticed that a ligature of some kind the ME thought that the marks, smooth,
but with a single striation down the center, indicated an electric cord had cut so deeply into Shelley's wrists that her
hands were nearly severed. Lorrie's body had incubated in
the plastic wrap, so it was harder to tell. It appeared she'd
suffered the same fate. Both had been brutally raped and
shot in the back of the head in what laypeople always called
execution-style.

Some execution, Olga thought as her unblinking eyes
scanned. With what these girls went through they probably
were grateful for it to end.

The ME suggested that both women had died about the
same time-but not right after their disappearance. It was
tough to pinpoint exactly when they did die. Because of the
plastic tarp, the sun had literally cooked their bodies, the
greenhouse effect accelerating the decomposition process.

Based on the ME's guess-blowfly larvae, tissue decay,
and a copy of the Meridian Herald dated July 18, the girls
had been dead only a month when discovered. Maybe six
weeks. The newspaper, Olga and others surmised, had been
used to absorb a puddle of blood-probably at the scene.
Since neither victim's head held a single bullet, ballistics would be of no use in tracking the killer. The gun was probably in the bottom of the river, or somewhere. Olga was fixated on the cording used as the ligature.

Find the cord, find the killer.

The detective knew that in most instances when a killer
used electrical cording it was either an extension cord or
some cut from a table lamp or other small household appliance. It was usually just the right length-three feet to tie up
a victim.