A Cold Dark Place (3 page)

Emily attempted to suppress a weary smile. "Uh, you're
kidding, right?"

"Yeah, I'm kidding."

"No need, honey. I'll handle it."

Emily parked in front of the house. The night air was
filled with the scent of white lilacs her mother had planted
when she was a girl. They were enormous bushes now, nearly
blocking the front windows. Emily didn't have the heart to give them a good pruning, though they desperately needed
it. She only thought of the job when springtime rolled around
and the tallest tips were snowcapped with blooms. The
memory brought a smile to her face that fell like a heavy
curtain with the ring of another call.

Sheriff Kiplinger, again.

She glanced at Jenna and flipped open her cellular. "Kenyon,
off duty," she said, putting a reminder of her status up-front.

"Emily, you'll need to go out to the Martin place tonight.
Jason will meet you there. Neighbors say they think the twister
might have touched down that way."

"Jesus," Emily said, waving Jenna inside. "Can't it wait
until morning? I'm about half dead right now."

"You know the answer. Once we get a call from a concerned citizen we have to act on it right away. Damned public relations. Damned lawyers."

Sheriff Brian Kiplinger had a point. An adjacent county
nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990s when a woman reported that her sister was being abused by her husband. When
law enforcement arrived two days later, the woman was paralyzed from a beating that happened after the sister phoned
in her concerns.

"All right," Emily said. "I'm going."

"Jason's already on his way."

Emily exhaled. She was needed. She told herself that
she'd be back home in bed within a couple of hours. She
grabbed one of Jenna's Red Bulls from the fridge, thinking
that the energy drink's sugar and caffeine could fuel her for
the drive out to the Martin ranch on Canyon Ridge, about fifteen miles out of town. Once there, she knew adrenaline
would kick in. So would Jason Howard's bottomless reserve
of energy. Jason was only twenty-five, a sheriff's deputy with
a four-year degree in criminology from Washington State University. He was single. Bright. Always up for anything.
Youth and enthusiasm counted during the grindingly long
hours after the storm.

She glanced at it, but ultimately ignored the red Cyclops
of the answering machine light. Whoever had called could
wait. She blew a kiss at Jenna, who was now in front of the
TV watching some trashy dating show set on a cruise ship.
Emily was too tired and too preoccupied-to say anything
about it. She clutched her purse and went for the door. The car
radio was playing a B. B. King song, which was like comfort
food for her soul. She loved that New Orleans sound-B.B.
was her favorite.

This, too, shall pass, came to mind as she drove.

The sky had blackened like a cast-iron pan, pinning her
headlights to the roadway. A tumbleweed, a holdout from the
previous season, skittered in front of the Accord. The wind
that had converged on Cherrystone and obliterated everything in its wake had become gentle, but was still present.
Dust and litter swirled over the roadway as she drove into the
darkness of a spring night. Lights off the highway revealed
the neat ranch homes amid fields of hops and peppermint
the two most important cash crops of the region. Emily felt the
buzz of the Red Bull's caffeine as she took a sharp left off
the highway.

The mailbox announced who lived there: MARTIN. She'd
been out there before, of course. She'd probably been to every
place in the entire county before she got her detective's shield
despite her big-city credentials. Growing up in Cherrystone
had also brought even more familiarity, though much of the
place had changed. She vividly remembered the Martin place
as a typical turn-of-the-century two-story, with faded red
shutters and gingerbread along a porch rail that ran the
length of the front of the house. The roofline featured a cupola
covered with verdigris copper sheathing, topped with an ele gant running horse weathervane. The house sat snugly in a
verdant grade etched by meandering, year-round Three Boys
Creek.

Emily pointed the Accord down the gravel driveway. Dust
kicked up and the sound of the coarse rock crunched under
her wheels. She was surprised by the contrail of dust following her car. It billowed behind her, white against the night
sky. She didn't think she was going fast and she didn't think
that any dust could have remained in the county. She negotiated the last curve and saw Jason's county cruiser, a Ford
Taurus made somewhat more legit by its black-and-white
"retro police" car livery. It was parked with its blue lights
stabbing into an empty darkness.

"What in the world?"

Emily Kenyon could barely believe her eyes the Martin
house was gone.

Those who saw it later considered it to be a scrapbook of
horror, a dark album of so much that could never be forgotten.
Why memorialize such things? Affixed to each black paper
page were the yellowed clippings of his unspeakable crimes.
The most notorious among the nine he claimed were the
ones for which he was convicted Shelley Marie Smith and
Lorrie Ann Warner. They were college roommates from Cascade University in Meridian, a midsize port city in the extreme northwestern corner of the state. Both girls worked at
a store that specialized in hardware and garden supplies.
Shelley had wanted to save the world one child at a time; elementary education was her major. Lorrie Ann had been less
sure of her future than her roommate. She'd bounced from
major to major, unable to decide her life's calling. She told
her parents that she was still "searching for a passion."

The young women were found bound, shot in the back of the head, dumped along a sandbar along the Nooksack River
late in the summer. An unlucky kayaker had found the dead
young women some three months after they'd been reported
missing. Their bodies were badly decomposed, but the telltale evidence of their horrific last hours had not been obliterated by the warm summer days or the icy mountain waters.
They had been sexually violated and tortured. It was the
most disturbing crime ever reported on the pages of the
Meridian Herald.

Yet they were not his first victims. Certainly not his last.
Even so, they held the distinction of commanding a full ten
pages of Herald clippings in the black memory album. It
might have been because there were two victims or because
they were so young. But when their photos and clippings
were pasted into the book, it told a story.

No one knew it, but it was a love story.

In turning the pages it was easy to see there was more to
come.

The temperature had dropped and Emily Kenyon felt the
chill of a late spring breeze nip at her. The strobe of blue
from the police light made her shudder and she grabbed a
jacket as she got out of the car. Jason Howard, his flashlight
like a light saber, raced toward her. Broken glass and splinters of wood were everywhere. It was like the heavens had
opened and snowed fragments of the Martin house all around
them.

"Glad you're here," Jason said, his flashlight's beam aimed
at Emily's face, making her look even more tired and almost
ghoulish. She blinked back the light and made a quick nod.
"I think I found Mrs. Martin," he said. Emily caught the fear
in his voice. She also saw it in his deep-set dark eyes, burrowed into his head under a characteristic knitted brow. The
kid is scared shitless.

Before she could say anything calming, her eyes followed
the swift movement of the young deputy's flashlight beam.

"She's over here," he said.

Amid the darkness, the light fluttered over the ground
like a moth. Emily's heart sank when a white figure popped
against the darkened backdrop.

"Oh, dear, there she is," she said, her voice catching slightly.

"I'm pretty sure she's dead."

"I can see that, Deputy."

Margaret "Peg" Martin was splayed out nude; her clothes
appeared ripped from her body by the fury of the storm. She
was facedown in the mud. Kitchenware was scattered helter
skelter. Broken dishes. Fiestaware, Emily thought. Shards of
glass glittered around her chalky frame. Pieces of fabric and
slivers of paper fluttered as the wind passed through the
gully that once held the pretty home. It was as if a bomb had
gone off. It was Bosnia. It was Baghdad.

It was Cherrystone, Washington.

"Jesus," Emily said, stooping next Mrs. Martin's lifeless
body. "We need some help out here. We need to find Mark
Martin and the kids."

Jason stood frozen, his brown eyes dilated to near black.
Perspiration rolled from under his thick, wavy hair.

"I heard that one time a chicken was plucked by a twister
in Arkansas," he said, a non sequitor that came from a nervous mind.

Emily knew he was rattled, so instead of saying, "What
the hell are you talking about?" she shrugged, and said,
"Heard the same thing." She retrieved a Maglite of her own
and pointed its beam over the wreckage, noticing for the first
time that the roof had been ripped from the house and planted
some twenty yards away. The walls had fallen like dominos,
one on top of the next. The light swept back over to the
naked body. Emily leaned closer and touched Peg's neck. It
was a formality, of course, but it had to be done. She was,
very sadly and very completely, dead.

"Calling the sheriff, now," Jason said, now with the cruiser's
radio in hand. A cat meowed, something shifted somewhere
in the dark, and Emily steadied herself. She turned toward
the noise. Glass crunched under her feet.

She couldn't think of the little Martin boy's name, but she
called out the others.

"Mark? Nicholas? Anyone? Can you hear me? Try to
move something, say something."

She stood still, but nothing. Again the cat yowled and
Emily found herself wishing the poor thing would stop.

Shhhh kitty, kitty, she thought.

"Ambulance is coming," Jason announced, inching his
way back toward the corpse.

Emily nodded. "The others have to be around here somewhere ""

"Mr. Martin?" Jason said, his voice thick with dread. He ran
his light over the debris field. "Are you here? Can you hear
me?"

Emily moved her light methodically over the remains of
the house. With each pass from north to south, she covered a
bit more ground. And with each swipe of the light, more of
what had once been was revealed. A chair. A tabletop. A
child's toy. Her heart nearly stopped when the light passed
over the blank-eyed stare of another woman. It was so fleeting that it took a second for it to register.

A magazine cover.

"I've heard of people surviving in India after an earthquake for up to ten days or more," Jason said from the other
side of the remains of the house.

"I've heard the same thing. Let's hope that they are that
lucky."

"Yeah, luckier than Mrs. Martin," he said.

"That goes without saying, Jason. You know, sometimes
you just don't have to say the obvious."

As soon as she said the words, she regretted it. She was
tired. So damned tired from the last couple of days. She had
done more than double duty. She was on edge.

"Sorry, Ms. Kenyon," he said. His apology was so genuine, so much like the way he was, that Emily felt like she
had kicked a puppy or something.

"No apologies needed. Been a long last few days, hasn't it?"

"Yeah. I haven't slept more than four hours since Sunday."

They continued to scour all that remained of the house,
but it was useless. There was so much of it and their flashlights were too weak for the task.

"We need to cordon off the area and look at first light,"
Emily said.

"Okay. Will do"

Emily looked down at her watch. First light was in five
hours.

"I hate to do this to you Jason, but after we transport Mrs.
Martin to the morgue, I'm out of here. I have to get home to
Jenna"

Jason didn't look happy about it, but he couldn't say anything. Motherhood was more important than hanging around
an accident scene. At least he figured his mother would say
so-and he still lived with her.

"Fine by me," he said. "I'll manage"

Emily stood still in the dark, scanning. Could there be
anyone alive? She called out for the Martins once more, but
her voice was mocked by the sounds of ambulance sirens
a faint wail in the distance at first, moving closer and closer.

"Donovan," she said to herself first, then over to Jason.

"Huh?"

She called out louder, irritated that she had to repeat herself. "The little Martin boy's name is Donovan. Donovan, are you out there, honey? Donny? Mark? Nicholas? Are any of
you out there?"

The ambulance swung down the driveway, moving faster
than it had to, of course. Ricky Culver was at the wheel, and
Ricky still thought that driving an ambulance was the next
best thing to NASCAR-his real dream. He parked next to
the cruiser and two paramedics, sisters Anna and Gina
Marino, jumped out of the vehicle.

"Where's the vie?" Anna asked. She grabbed her bag and
swung around looking into the rubble pile that had once
been such a pretty house. Something caught her eye. The
running horse weathervane had managed to stay put on the
cupola, which had been tossed aside like baggage in the
underbelly of an airplane.

"Better question," her sister, Gina, the older of the pair, a
petite young blonde, mused, "is where on God's green Earth
is the house?"

Her sister, who wore her curly dark hair short, almost a
white woman's 'fro, answered back.

"It's this pile of junk, all over the place. God, Gina, use
your head"

"Twister touched down here," Emily interrupted. She
waved over the darkened terrain. "You can see the path of
destruction. It must have landed here, then pulled up and
touched down right at the house and plowed across the field
like a sonofabitch."