A Cold Dark Place (6 page)

"Wonder if he died of internal injuries related to the storm,"
Jason added.

Emily was wondering the same thing, but not for long.
The two coroner assistants, both young men from Spokane,
set the body on the bag and started zipping, working from
the feet toward Donovan's angelic face, white and calm.

"What?" the younger of the two said to his partner, as his
gloved fingertips slipped from the zipper.

"Your hands are covered in blood," Emily said. "Where
did all that come from?"

She stared at the dead boy.

"Roll him over."

"We'll look at him in the lab," the other said.

"You'll roll him now."

"Not protocol, sorry."

"Maybe you don't hear too well up in Spokane," she said,
almost amused with herself that she'd now felt more of a
kinship with the tiniest of law enforcement operations.

"This is our scene, my scene, and you'll follow my orders"

"Someone's cranky." It was Sheriff Brian Kiplinger, lumbering his meaty frame across the debris field. Emily and
Jason were so involved with what they were doing that neither had heard him arrive. He just appeared in the morning
light.

Emily acknowledged her boss with a nod.

"Someone hasn't had a good night's sleep for I don't
know how long," she answered. She shifted her weight and
waited for the sheriff to blast her, but he didn't.

"Tell me about it." He fixed his steely eyes on the coroner's assistant with the bloody glove and the bad attitude. "I
was speaking to him"

The young man sank into the mud.

"I'm trying to preserve the evidence." He was embarrassed and defensive.

"What evidence? This is a goddamn disaster zone. If the lady ... If my chief detective wants to see the backside of
this kid, she's gonna"

The chief was a nice save from the "lady" comment. She
was the only detective in the office.

It flashed in the young man's mind to roll his eyes, but he
refrained. Instead he rolled the body to the side.

"Good enough?" He fought once more to suppress a
smirk. Lucky for him, his effort worked.

"Yes, thank you"

With the sheriff, Jason, and the two interlopers from
Spokane looking on, Emily lowered her gaze to the darkened
backside of Donovan Martin. His shirt was stiff and shiny. It
was soaked in blood.

"Can't say for sure," she said. "But it looks like we've got
another homicide victim here"

"Jesus, that makes three"

"Or four?"

"Depending on where we find Nicholas's body."

Sheriff Kiplinger watched as Emily followed the dead
boy to the coroner's van. The panel doors were open. A set of
steel racks filled the back end. There were no seats. It was
more a hearse with a lab destination than a family vacation
van headed to Yellowstone, which it closely resembled. A
mountain scene was painted on the spare tire cover. The
Spokane County coroner approved the secondhand purchase
of the van and liked the airbrushed painting. Not only did the
coroner have a bad eye for artwork, he was cheap to boot.

By 10:15 A.M., it was tragically clear that there were no
bodies left in the wreckage of the home. Dogs had been used
in the surrounding field and back wooded area that fed off
the creek. But nothing was found. No sign of anyone. No
sign of Nicholas Martin.

Sheriff Kiplinger pulled his smokes from his breast pocket. "I hate to say it, Emily, but it looks like Nick Martin
has some explaining to do"

An hour later, Sheriff Kiplinger and Emily Kenyon stood
in front of a pair of cameras from two of the three Spokane
TV stations. For the second time in a week, Cherrystone had
made the news. First the tornado and now a triple homicide.

Twenty years of nothing happening around here and now
this, Emily thought as she stood next to the sheriff and the
cameras recorded the story for the evening news. The attention was unwanted for a couple of reasons. One deeply personal. The other had to do with pride. Both were rooted in an
incident that had shaken the foundation of her life and sent
her to Cherrystone to start over. To hide. And if this story
gets picked up by the Spokane station's sister station in Seattle they'll think I've let myself go.

"We don't know exactly what happened or even when it
happened," the sheriff said. "It appears Mark and Margaret
Martin and their son Donovan are the victims of a brutal
homicide."

"What about Nicholas? The oldest Martin boy?" The reporter shoved her microphone as if it were a fire poker. She
wanted Kiplinger to spill some major news.

"Is he a suspect?"

Emily took that one. "No. We do, however, consider him
a person of interest. If anyone knows of his whereabouts,
please contact the sheriff's department"

It was the biggest mistake of a very long day and Emily
knew it when she absentmindedly answered her cell phone
without looking at the caller ID panel. She just flipped it open
and there he was. It was Cary McConnell's husky voice. Her
heart plunged.

"I thought you were avoiding me," he said.

"I've just been busy," Emily lied.

"I know. I saw you on the Spokane news" He paused.
"Twice"

There was an awkward beat of silence as Emily toyed
with pretending that she had a bad cell and couldn't hear him.
She was more direct than that and as much as she was beginning to loathe Cary McConnell, he deserved to know the
truth.

"Yeah. Brian's hooked up with Diane Sawyer and I'm
stuck with Spokane TV talking to a reporter just out of communications school." She tried to inject a friendly tone in her
voice, but mostly Emily just wanted the call to be over. She
knew what he was after. But she was too tired to be quick
with an excuse as to why she had to cut the call short.

"Are you busy tomorrow night?"

Damn it, he asked.

"Now isn't a good time," she said, wishing she'd been
more direct and used "never is a good time."

"We have something, you know."

She found her footing. "No, Cary, we don't. We dated. It
didn't work out. And now the best we can be is good friends."

"We're not friends. Last time I looked, friends don't mess
around like we did."

Her skin crawled. Sleeping with any man who still used
the term "messing around" for making love was confirmation that she had, in fact, really made a mistake.

"Listen, Cary, I don't want to hurt you any more than I
apparently have. I didn't mean for things to go so far."

"So far?"

His voice became tight and she could imagine the veins
on his neck popping like night crawlers on a rainy pavement.

"You know what I mean. I'm not ready for a relation ship." Again, Emily censored herself. She didn't add the last
bit that passed through her mind: "with you. Ever."

"Don't do this. Let's talk."

"We already have"

"Let's work it out. Let's have a drink tonight so we can
talk."

Emily lost it. She felt like their roles had been reversed.
She was operating on logic and rational thought and he was
fluttering around with hurt feelings, treading water in a
stormy sea of emotions.

"I can't talk," she said. "Hear me on this. I don't want to
talk. I don't want to see you. It was a mistake, Cary. Let it go."

"I can't stop thinking about you," he said. "We had something and I'm not going to let it go. Why should I?"

"What do you mean? Are you forcing me to get a restraining order? Jesus, Cary. You're a goddamn lawyer. You
know you can't harass me"

She pulled the phone from her ear as Cary's voice carried
like a gunshot to the side of her head.

"You are a stupid bitch and you can't do this to me. You
belong to me.. ."

She pressed the CALL END button.

Java the Hut loomed like a mirage and Emily pulled in
and absentmindedly ordered the special of the day-a doubletall white chocolate mocha. She wondered about the wisdom
of making a mocha with white chocolate anyway. Was white
chocolate really chocolate after all?

The young woman at the window took her order.

"Make it a triple shot," Emily said. "And no whip."

Emily stared out the window and mentally sorted the preliminary findings phoned in from Spokane County's coroner's
office. The coroner's assistant talked with the dispassionate
voice of someone who worked with violence every day. She
rattled off the findings, laundry-list style, without taking a
single breath. None of what she said was earth-shattering,
but it was good that what Emily had seen at the crime scene
matched what the techies were finding in the dank, cramped,
and acrid-smelling basement lab. Observation and science
went hand in hand in the courtroom provided they ever got that far. It appeared that both of the parents had been shot at
close range, nearly execution style. The youngest victim was
shot in the back from some distance, perhaps indicating flight.
Maybe Donny had come across Nicholas as he fired away at
his parents? And in running to get help or save his own life,
he had been blasted by Nick with the shotgun? Their dressor lack of it-suggested evening or early morning as the time
of attack. Then again it could have been the raging fury of the
tornado, ripping off their clothes. Jason's plucked-chicken
comment came to mind.

The barista attempted to make small talk as the espresso
machine sent a cloud of steam into the interior of what had
once been a Fotomat.

"Busy day?"

"Absolutely killer," Emily said without an iota of sarcasm.

The young woman smiled and shrugged as the steam
forced its way through the tamped coffee.

"Tell me about it," she said. "I had to make seven drinks
for a lady who was taking them to her office. My lineup of
regulars was madder than you-know-what"

Emily smiled. She didn't say anything about the stupid
white chocolate coffee she was going to drink. She didn't say
anything about what she'd seen at the Martin place. Or who
she was looking for. People would find out soon enough.
Cherrystone, which had just dodged a bullet with the tornado
in terms of no loss of human life, was about to be put on the
map as the hometown of a gruesome and frightening family
murder.

Emily paid and drove over to the school. She told Sheriff
Kiplinger that she'd talk to the principal at Cherrystone High
about Nick Martin. The Spokane media was already swarming, and reporters from Seattle were also making inquiries
about hotel rooms. A triple homicide was big, fat, unbeliev able news. It was after lunchtime, and the usually tidy streets
of Cherrystone were oddly quiet, given the coming of the
second storm in a week the media storm.

Emily sipped her mocha and nearly gagged. It was sickeningly, almost throat burning, sweet. If she hadn't considered the combination of sugar and caffeine as a necessary
elixir given her past few days, she'd have tossed the paper
cup out the window. Damn the city's littering ordinance.

Her cell rang. It was David.

"Emily, we have to talk," he said, without so much as a
hello.

"David," she answered, her voice slightly brittle, "we don't
have anything to talk about. At least not now."

"Yeah, we do. We need to talk about Jenna. I don't want
her growing up in some Podunk town"

Her brow narrowed and she rolled her eyes. "Thanks. I
grew up here, David."

"No offense, but I'm sure you'll agree that Jenna deserves more opportunity."

"She'll get that opportunity when she goes to college. I
did. We all did." Given the circumstances of the last few hours,
she couldn't bring up her old argument that Cherrystone was
a safe haven. Seattle had a rave culture. Cherrystone was
still 4-H. Certainly there were drugs in the town that David
derided as "no more than a pockmark on the map," but Emily
knew more kids were concerned about showing how high
their sunflowers grew than how high they got. Seattle teens
got beaten and murdered and abused everyday of the week.

And now Cherrystone had a murder times three. The idea
pounded at her cranium. Was it lack of sleep or the realization that some kid had slaughtered his family for no apparent
reason?

"Really, David, I can't talk about this right now."

"Someone's dog loose? Cow get out of a pasture?" David could be cutting and never missed the chance to remind
Emily that she was slumming in Cherrystone.

Her head pounded. "I'd answer that, and since you'll probably relay everything back to Dani, I'd better use small
words so she'll understand" The second they spewed from
her lips, Emily wished she hadn't been so harsh and could
pluck them from the air before David heard them. If she hadn't
been under so much pressure because of the storm and now
the Martin murders, she'd have held it together.

"Now, I remember why I couldn't stand being around
'
you.

His words cut to the bone. She knew they'd been deserved, but she hated the idea of their entire life together
being cast in an odious light. They did, after all, have a few
good years earlier in their marriage. Maybe even more good
years than bad. And they did have Jenna.

"Sorry," she said. "I do have to go. David, I'll call you.
But for now, please understand that Jenna is going to see you
this summer-for the two weeks we've agreed upon in the
parenting plan. Nothing more"

"Dani and I think she's old enough to change her mind-"

Dani was David's girlfriend and Emily couldn't stand it
that she was closer in age to Jenna than she was to David.
They'd met once, not long after the divorce was final. Dani
had seemed nice enough. She wasn't particularly beautiful.
She wasn't even blond. And her chest? Just average for a
second wife, or at least what most men tend to go for when
they trade up. Emily hated the age disparity. It just seemed
wrong, ugly, and predictable. David was a lot of things in
their marriage, many of them annoying, but he'd never been
predictable.