A Cold Dark Place (26 page)

Remorseful, but pathetic. That's what he was. Truly pathetic.

The dark heart of true evil is a hammer on the soul. With
each beat, it pulses and sends the tainted blood throughout a
killer's body. Like a virus. Or a deadly and dangerous toxin.
Some killers know his or her bloodstream is poisoned with
wickedness. Most don't.

Not far from the chic comforts of the Westerfield Hotel,
one such person pondered the next move. The internal struggle against the heart of evil had been fought and lost. The
end was near.

Emily Kenyon held her breath as she drove over the twotiered viaduct that swept several stories above Seattle's waterfront alongside its shimmering harbor. It had long been
viewed as an unsound structure, destined to pancake if there
was a major earthquake. Given the tornado, the Martin murders, and the sad state of her personal affairs, Emily felt that
if the time had come for a big shake, it almost certainly would
occur when she was on that disintegrating elevated highway.
She held the steering wheel in a death grip.

Emily looked straight ahead, her peripheral vision barely
capturing views of a pair of ferries and a container ship as
they maneuvered in Elliott Bay. She was headed south to an
address in Georgetown, a scruffy but slowly gentrifying
neighborhood on the concrete edges of Seattle's industrial
district. Bonnie Jeffries's address, given to her by a resourceful Olga Morris-Cerrino, was a dark brown two-story that
along with a half dozen others were the holdouts of an old
family neighborhood that had seen far better times and hadn't yet been restored and revitalized. Black wrought-iron bars
more county jail than French Quarter-fortified the firstfloor windows of each house. One set of iron security grilles
apparently hadn't been enough of a deterrent; one window
had been replaced by a sheet of heavy plywood.

Emily pulled up next to the weedy sidewalk. These people should sell to some energetic young couples who want to
restore these places and will put up with crime and grunge
while they wait for the neighborhood to come back, she
thought as she made her way up the buckling front steps.
What could have been the world's oldest dog, a Norwegian
elkhound mix, barely looked up when the detective knocked
on the door and waited. No answer. She pressed the doorbell
but the silence that followed indicated it was out of order.
She strained to hear. She leaned close and pushed the ivory
button a second time. The door was ajar. She knocked and it
creaked open.

"Bonnie? Bonnie Jeffries?"

Silence. Maybe she was at church?

Emily entered the small foyer, startled by the sound of
broken glass under her feet. She turned to look behind her,
and for the first time noticed a small glass pane had been
shattered. Broken glass glittered on the shabby shag carpeting. What's going on here? She made her way toward the living
room. The residence smelled of one of those carpet cleaning
powders. Vanilla and lavender, she thought. The house was
deathly quiet.

"Ms. Jeffries? Bonnie? Are you home?"

Emily entered the living room, a cramped space of floor-toceiling bookshelves, knickknacks everywhere, and too much
furniture. It was tidy, but overloaded. It passed through her
mind that the furnishings were all from the overstuffed 1980s.
Bonnie hadn't always bought quality, and apparently had
never bothered to update.

Rust and green competed with mauve and gray as dueling
decades fought for her sense of style. Emily instinctively
patted her side, checking for her gun. She'd been in law enforcement long enough to get that sixth sense that something
was awry. The feeling was akin to paranoia, but it had been
always so deeply rooted in reality that she never disregarded it.

Something's wrong here.

Among the books that competed for space on Bonnie's
overflowing living room shelves were volumes about psychology, forensic science, and true crime. In other circumstances,
Emily wouldn't have thought twice about that collection. She'd
seen a best-selling crime author, a woman with an exceedingly sweet voice and a gentle manner, on a television show
talking about the psychographics of her readers. They weren't
a pack of blood-lusting housewives. Far from it. She insisted
that they were the "gentlest" people one could ever hope to
meet. "The kind of people who take a spider outside in a tissue," the author had said.

Never hurt a spider? But maybe fall in love with a killer?

Books and a tray table had been knocked to the floor. A
door in the sideboard that Bonnie Jeffries apparently used as
a secretary-bills and letters were stacked neatly on its luminous pecan surface-was open. Papers from within were
scattered. Someone had been looking for something.

Emily quickly sifted through the papers, but nothing
grabbed her.

The kitchen was next. It was clean and orderly, decorated
in a red apple motif that showed all the earmarks of a collector's
chief problem. Once collecting an item-owls, Scottie dogs,
and apples-every gift one receives is tied to the theme. Bonnie Jeffries had framed apple crate labels and apple-shaped
platters on the wall. Even the kitchen clock was faced with
an apple tree design. There was so much red in the room,
Emily didn't notice the red spatter on one of the McIntosh apple-crate label prints, a variety from a farm called Blossom Orchards. And there was an apple-shaped cookie jar on
the counter next to a big wooden knife block, just like one
that Emily had.

"Bonnie?" Emily's voice was now a whisper. She walked
down the narrow hallway, drew her gun, and turned toward
the open bedroom door. The room was still and dark. Music
from a bedside radio played low. The windows that faced the
street had been covered in sheets of aluminum foil, presumably to keep out the light. Emily knew from her conversation
with Tina Esposito that Bonnie worked nights as a janitor.
She slept during the day.

She clearly lived alone. Emily felt sorry for her. For a second, Emily felt the air move, then the hair on the back of
her neck prickled and rose. The sense of foreboding was palpable.

Something is terribly wrong here.

Emily flipped on the lights. In a sudden flash of illumination, there she was. Bonnie Jeffries, all 250 pounds of her,
was laid out on the bed. The sheets were streaked with so
much blood it made Emily gasp. Bonnie was facedown, her
nightgown-clad torso painted with her own blood. Adrenaline flowing, Emily scanned the room. Just Bonnie.

"Jesus Christ," Emily said, automatically reaching for her
cell phone and dialing 911.

What the hell happened here?

Emily spoke to the emergency dispatcher, identifying herself as a detective from another jurisdiction. Though her heart
pounded, her tone was surprisingly cool. She could act like
what she'd seen didn't upset her-thought the truth was far
the opposite.

"I'll secure the scene until Seattle PD arrives," she said.

"All right. Your name? Your affiliation?"

"Emily Kenyon. Cherrystone, Washington, Sheriff's Office"

"All right. Sit tight. Officers en route"

"I'll wait outside," Emily said. The smell of blood made
her nauseous. "Bring the coroner. No need for lights. This
lady's dead" Sadness swept over her. A woman's life had been
taken in the most brutal way imaginable. Emily had never
been so hardened by the experience of her job that she didn't
feel jabs to the heart at the sight of a murder victim. The
cramped house in the rundown part of Seattle's southern city
limits was now a crime scene.

On the way out, Emily noted that baby pictures stared
down from the walls, and she spotted a basket of yarn and an
unfinished sweater. Every outward indication of what Bonnie Jeffries was in life was at odds with her devotion to serial killer Dylan Walker. She was the Suzie Homemaker type,
but robbed of the joy that comes with it.

Maybe that's just the kind of person he wanted. Someone
he d be able to control?

Emily hurried to her car.

The story had been told often enough that Emily could almost live the rest of her life nearly believing that she'd moved
back to Cherrystone to take care of her parents, the house,
save her marriage, whatever had come to mind when someone asked why she'd returned.

But the reality was darker than that. As dark as night.
Emily sat behind the wheel in front of Bonnie Jeffries's sad
little house and knew that her past was about to catch up
with her. She had toyed with the idea of leaving the scene
and not making the call to 911. I could have left Bonnie for
someone else to find. But who? And when? Bonnie lived a solitary life. Maybe shed lie on that bloody bed until the
blowflies came and went, raising generation after generation?

Calling 911, doing her sworn duty to uphold the law, was
her only possible choice. Yet it came with a price. As the swarm
of vehicles converged all around her, Emily knew she'd have
to face head-on what she'd fought so hard to leave behind.

"Emily Kenyon?" the voice came from behind her. Emily
turned around to see a familiar face, an older one, but recognizable nevertheless. It was Christopher Collier, a detective
she knew from her days in Seattle. They'd shared many of
the biggest and toughest moments of her professional life.
Seeing him would be tough, too.

"I couldn't believe it when I heard your name," he said,
coming closer with a friendly smile on his handsome visage.

"Hi Chris," she said, letting the uneasiness that had gripped
her pass. "It has been forever"

"Yeah," he said, reaching out to shake her hand. Like her,
he had been nothing but green when they first knew each
other at the academy. His still-dark and wavy hairline had receded and he'd added some weight, but overall Christopher
Collier looked no worse for wear. "I heard you got your
shield. Read it in the Police Bulletin a few years back. Over
in Spokane, are you?"

Emily nodded. "Near there. In Cherrystone, where I grew
up. It's quiet. Nice place for me and Jenna" Saying her name
just then was hard, she hoped that it didn't prompt a question: "Saw that there's an APB out for your daughter, Jenna.
What's the deal with that?"

Thankfully, it didn't.

The pair went for the front door, as two blue uniforms
started unfurling plastic ribbons, yellow crime scene tape.

"So you called this in? What's goin' on?"

She liked Christopher. In a very real way, it was a gift from the Almighty that he'd been the one to respond to the
Jeffries crime scene just then. He wouldn't hurt her. He
wouldn't bring up any of the unpleasantness that had made
her flee Seattle. At least not to her face.

"Working a triple homicide back home" She could tell by
the look on his face, he already knew about all of that, but
she continued anyway. "One of the victims had a connection
with Jeffries and .. ." She stopped as they went inside the
front door. "Watch for the glass."

He looked down and acknowledged the sparkling shards.
"So, what's this Jeffries woman's deal?"

Christopher Collier was a patient man, a broad-shouldered
six-footer with a gentle countenance. He could be fierce when
needed, but generally was the kind of man who deliberated
on everything. Carefully. Thoughtfully. He never rushed. Emily
liked him for that very reason. But as she struggled to come
up with a good reason why she was there in a house with a
dead body, it felt a little as though he was letting her twist in
the wind. She told him about the Angel's Nest connection
with her homicides in Cherrystone and how she'd seen Olga
Morris-Cerrino, then Tina Esposito, which had led her to
Bonnie's house.

Bonnie 's corpse.

She led Christopher into the hazily lit living room. "I
found her down there in the bedroom. My guess is that she was
killed in bed. She sleeps days, works nights. The assailant
got in by breaking that window and turning the knob."

"Okay," he said. "Let's have a look."

Emily stayed where she stood. "Your case," she said. "I'll
stay here"

The Seattle police detective disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. Emily heard him speaking to another of
the detectives, a younger man, whom she did not know.

"Emily Kenyon," he said, his voice somewhat lower than normal. "She used to be one of us. Got her butt kicked hard
by the Kristi Cooper case"

"I remember studying that case at the academy. That's
her?"

"Yeah, she's okay. Been through a lot. I'll handle her.
Let's look at the vic"

Kristi Cooper. Kristi. The name nearly stopped Emily's
heart. If she lived to be one hundred years old, she'd still
never get over what happened with Kristi. It was clear that
others hadn't forgotten the name either. No one ever would.
Jesus, the police academy taught that? As Emily remained
frozen in the living room, a dead woman on the bed, a half
dozen police officers and detectives moved in and out of the
tattered brown bungalow. She found herself wishing she was
invisible.

But she wasn't.

What in the world? Emily stood in Bonnie's overstuffed
living room and tried to catch her breath. She shut her eyes
tightly and opened them. Something so bewildering it couldn't
be real. She couldn't believe her eyes. The coin purse on the
credenza was pink and beaded with the design of a flamingo
standing on one leg. It was so familiar. The flamingo was missing its eye. Couldn't be. She picked and pulled on the zipper
and opened it. The missing eye bead was still inside.

Jenna was here.

Emily steadied herself, resting the palm of her hand on
the back of the oak desk chair. She felt the floor move a little. It was the sensation that she'd endured during the Cooper
case so many years ago. She hadn't felt the shifting floor like
that in years. Not a panic attack. Her throat felt constricted
and her breathing grew shallow. What happened here? Her
sense of control fluttered. It was like the days after Kristi when she couldn't move, couldn't even drive. It was all she
could do to get behind the wheel of a car back then, only to
find she couldn't turn the key. No one who'd ever experienced a panic attack could ever understand how powerful it
could be. Get over it. Pull yourself together. None of that
worked.