Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place, page 1
A COLD DARK PLACE
Gregg Olsen
Copyright © 2013 GREGG OLSEN
Cover Art: BEAUTeBOOK
Original photograph: Anu Länsisalmi
For Kathrine
PROLOGUE
4 PM, nineteen years ago
Women with transparent vinyl purses that exposed the shredded remainders of coin wrappers stood in line. They took deep breaths as the uniformed prison matron with icy hands prepared to probe their bodies. Talc-dipped rubber gloves snapped. It was humiliating in every sense of the word. The matron, a woman with ashen skin, pencil-thin lips, and with glasses on a cheap silver chain around her neck, knew those waiting to leave the institution felt her power, her supreme authority, and it made her smile. The women had lined up to leave after a long day of tears and excuses in the high school cafeteria milieu of the visiting room-a cavernous space of bolted-to-the-floor tables and fixed-position chairs. The matron’s husky voice intoned them to “cool their jets” and “wait your turn or I’ll have something to say about it.”
And so the women lingered, each feeling violated and angry. Having a husband, boyfriend, or brother inside the razor-wire-trimmed walls of Bonneville Maximum Security was bad enough. Being told with unfettered contempt by someone to wait your turn in the processing line was ptomaine gravy over a bad slab of beef. And they had to eat it. Every goddamned bite.
“Are you going to be a problem for me?” the matron asked, her gray eyes as sharp as awls pitched firmly at the distressed gaze of a young woman. The younger woman let out a measured sigh. She’d spent all day trying to tell her wannabedrug-lord husband that she was thinking of moving back east to Indiana. She wanted to be free. All of them did.
“Uh? Me?” the younger woman answered. She was barely twenty and still wore her chestnut hair in a ponytail, but she held a kind of weariness on her face that indicated she’d seen it all. She faked a smile of recognition at the matron. She knew when someone had it in for her. It had been her life since she left home. Ran away. Met the wrong man. Trashed her future. She could hear her mother’s words echo at that moment. You’ve thrown away everything your father and I had hoped for you. You screwed up, Donita. You really botched it.
“Yes, you, Ponytail,” the matron said, nodding in her direction. The rest of the women felt relief wash over them. Good, the bitch found someone else to bother. She motioned for her to step forward. “I need you to spread your legs. You’ve done it before, I’m sure. Wider.”
The young woman silently seethed, but she acquiesced. She had no choice.
“You know, if I can’t get my mitts between your thighs, either you’re gonna have to go on a diet or you’re gonna have to practice your splits in the back room. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and I think you’re carrying some contraband on your person. I just feel it.”
The back room was a dimly lit hospital-style space where women were forced to endure indignities based on their physiology. Flat on their backs, legs apart, feet stuck in metal stirrups.
“I’ll do better,” she said, all the while wondering what it would be like if she’d been an actual prisoner there, not a lowly visitor?
The altercation caught the attention of a chubby-faced woman in the back of the line. Her strawberry-blond shag had matted unflatteringly to her forehead. Her pulse quickened, but she kept her affect blank. She didn’t want to stand out and she didn’t want a trip to the back room for any kind of exam. She carried something so precious, so vital, that its discovery would ruin everything.
Be cool, Ponytail’s taking the heat. Thank you, Jesus.
She concealed her prize in a place she hoped no one would dare probe. Inside. Personal. Private. Besides she knew the matron only groped because she got off on it. No one was looking for someone to take much of anything out of here … they mostly watched for contraband coming in to the visiting room.
The matron fixed her eyes on the strawberry blonde with the secret. Her eyes held her with unyielding grip. She waited a beat.
“You can go,” she said.
The woman with the secret acknowledged the command and started walking in the direction of the lockers in which she had stored her coat and car keys before going under the arbor of razor wire, through the gate, to the visiting room.
“Wait a minute,” the matron said.
It felt like her heart stopped beating. She was going to die. Going to be caught. Adrenaline kicked her ticker back into play. She’s going to take me in the back room. She going to ruin everything.
“Did you hear me?”
She slowly turned.
“Are you speaking to me?”
“No, I’m talking to the man in the moon”
She stared. Her heart bounced. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Get over here”
She stepped back toward the matron.
“You forgot your purse”
Her hands were sweating now, so much so, she thought the vinyl zippered purse would slip from her fingers. She reached for it and acknowledged the gesture with a quick smile.
“Oh, thanks”
Like others who had been around the matron, she faked a smile.
The woman smiled, hers strangely genuine. “No problem. And you have a nice day.”
With that, the strawberry blonde hurried to the lockers. Soon she’d be home, and in time destiny would come to pass.
BOOK I
The Eye of the Storm
Chapter One
Monday, 5:35, Cherrystone, Washington
Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse, and walked toward the front door. She turned to view the end of Orchard Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was safe. Unscathed. Not a single fish-scale shingle from the threestory painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint, but enough of a reminder that across town homes and cars had burned.
It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came almost without warning and left a jagged swathe of destruction that stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten minutes’ time. Roofs had been peeled off. Play sets and bi cycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose house had been spared and whose hadn’t. Destruction reigned on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side remained pristine. Across the street from a home that had been nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled over its chipped stone rim.
No one died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed up in her bathroom was in bad shape and had been hospitalized. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would survive despite her trauma. The lady was a retired junior high social studies teacher with a classroom assignment that indicated she was tougher than most. After all, if she could endure teenagers of the 1960s, she’d survive the tornado, too.
Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her detective’s badge holder slipped out along with a pink lipstick she wished she’d used up and could toss. But she was thrifty and, despite the fact that it didn’t really work with her dark brown hair and eyes, she’d wear it until it was gone. She scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch and called out for her daughter.
“Jenna? I’m home”
The scent of cinnamon toast and an empty glass of milk on the counter indicated Jenna was somewhere in the house. Emily didn’t wait for a response.
“I’m going to take a shower. Then let’s go out and get something to eat”
“Okay, Mom,” a voice finally came from down the hall. “I’m on the phone. I’ll talk to you when you’re out. I’m hungry. Take a fast shower!”
Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left for Seattle and become a somewhat shadowy figure since the divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men even a kind of serious affair with a local lawyer. Cary McConnell was too possessive and controlling and Emily had enough of that with her first and only-marriage. Cary still called but she avoided him whenever she could. That wasn’t easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less than 15,000 people. She was in the courthouse two or three times a week. So was he.
Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty, which she was approaching on her next birthday. She twisted the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C was moved a quarter turn. The old pipes clanked and steam swirled. Emily liked hot water.
“Pietro’s?” she called out before stepping inside the whiteand-black tiled interior. “I’m thinking pizza.”
Of course she really wasn’t. She was thinking of the tornado and its aftermath. Twisters were rare occurrences in Washington state. Only a handful of damaging storms had been recorded there; the worst had been one that killed eleven people near Walla Walla in 1952. The twister that came to Cherrystone on Saturday had howled in the darkness and snatched up all in its wake. Houses and cars were shredded in a giant steel-toothed blender. A dairy near the junction of Wayne Road and U. S. 91 had been so pulverized th
Emily tilted her head backward; hot water beyond a temperature most could endure flowed over her body, sending the stress of the freak storm, and the worries of a long day, down the drain. Stepping from the shower, Emily wrapped a thick cotton towel around her body. She bent over, wrapped a second one around her head, then flipped her hair back. She called once more to Jenna.
“You never answered, honey. Is Pietro’s all right?”
Again, silence.
Steam swirled and Emily flipped on the bathroom fan. A moment later, she slipped on a terry robe and padded down the hall to Jenna’s room-a space that had been her own bedroom when she was a girl. A rectangle of yellowed glue on the door revealed the spot were she’d once put up a “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign to keep her little brother, Kevin, at bay. With each step, a memory. Through a knife-slit of light in the doorway, she could see Jenna typing out a message on her silvery Apple iBook computer. Jenna was a little small for her age. Her stature didn’t diminish her; it only made her stand out. Long hair like her mother’s framed her delicate heart-shaped face. Her eyes were blue, the cool color of the Pacific. She tapped on the keyboard with frosted pink fingernails, chipped and ready for another mother/daughter manicure session in front of one of the Law and Orders on TV
Emily pushed open the door, startling Jenna, who looked up with a frozen smile.
“Oh, Mom, I didn’t hear you” She closed the chat window and swung around to face her mother.
“Are you up to no good?” Emily asked, allowing a smile to come to her lips. Deep down, the very idea of her daughter chatting with anyone was more than she could take. She’d seen the way perverts worked the keyboards of personal computers and stalked their prey-unsuspecting children in seemingly safe and cozy homes all across America.
“Just talking with Shali,” she said. “And yes, we were up to no good. There’s a nice guy who wants to meet us at the Spokane Valley Mall next weekend. He says he looks like Justin Timberlake and Jude Law. Combined.”
Emily sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing out the sateen spread.
“He does, does he?” She knew when her daughter was pulling her leg and she started to play along. “Maybe I could meet him, too?”
Jenna shook her head. “Sorry, Mom, but you’re too old for him. Shali and I are probably too old for him. He seemed to lose interest when we said we were old enough to drive.”
“That’s not funny”
“Sick, I know.”
“You know how I worry.”
“And you know that you don’t have to worry about me. I know the drill. I don’t make mistakes. My mom is a cop, you know.”
“So I’ve heard” Emily removed the towel from her head and shook out her hair. “I’m not going to dry this mess. Let’s get out of here and eat. I’m beat”
Jenna grinned. “Okay. Jude Timberlake can wait.”
With that, Emily returned to her bedroom, where she put on a pair of faded jeans and a cream-colored boatneck sweater. She looked in the mirror and gave herself a once-over.
“Not bad for almost forty,” she said, loud enough for Jenna to hear, which, of course, she did. “Maybe this Jude Law lookalike of Jenna’s would be interested in an old chick like me”
Jenna appeared in the doorway and put her hands on her hips.
“You’re disgusting,” she said, a smile widening on her pretty face. “Shali and I had him first”
Monday, 7:16 EM.
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a maroon and black vinyl booth at Pietro’s, the only place in Cherrystone that made pizza that didn’t taste like it came from the frozenfood section of the Food Giant. Emily was grateful that Jenna had outgrown the “cheese-only” topping option for something a little more adventurous pepperoni and black olives. Emily ordered a beer and Jenna nursed a soda.
“You know, you don’t need to order diet cola, honey.”
Jenna swirled the crushed ice with a pair of reed-thin plastic straws. “You mean I’m not fat? Yeah, I know. But I’m hedging my bets. I’ve seen the future. Look at Grandma Anna”
“Jenna! That’s not nice.” Emily tried to act indignant, but Grandma Anna was her ex-husband’s mother and it was true that she had thick thighs. “Besides, your body shape is more from my side of the family.”
Jenna drew on her straws and nodded. “Thank God”
The pair sat and ate their pizza, but their mood shifted when the conversation turned to the storm. “We are lucky. All of us. The tornado ravaged those homes on Hawes, but no one was killed.” Emily swallowed the last of her beer, regarding the foamy residue coating the rim of the schooner. “I don’t use the word lightly, you know, but it was a bit of a miracle, really.”
“I know. Shali and I were talking about that,” Jenna said. “Now you know that Jude Law Timberlake is not real. Nice fantasy, though”
Emily managed a faint smile. “I’ll say.”
Emily Kenyon was a homicide detective, not an emergency responder, but Ferry County was so small that when the storm hit she immediately reported to work to do what she could. She had to do something. Anything. She’d grown up in Cherrystone and it was her town. Always would be. The house on Orchard Avenue had been her childhood home. Her parents, who died in a tragic car accident, had left the family home to Emily and her brother. Since only one could live there, Emily bought out Kevin with savings and took a small mortgage. The house, with its bay windows and highpitched roofline, was the reason she returned to Cherrystone. Not the only reason. Her divorce from David, a surgeon with a quick wit and an even faster fuse, was the other. The divorce made him mad. Emily made him mad. The world was against him. Cherrystone was about as far away as she could go for the safety net of feeling like she belonged somewhere. Leaving a detective’s position in Seattle wasn’t easy, but the move was never in doubt. It had been the right thing.
Of course, in the middle of it all was Jenna. She loved both her parents, but felt her mother needed her more than her father. At sixteen, the courts allowed her to schedule her own visitation with her father. She saw him once a month, usually in nearby Spokane. And that, she was sure, was enough.
Emily asked for a pizza box to take home the remainder of the pie.
“We can have it for breakfast,” she said.
“Only if it lasts that long.”
Emily’s cell phone rang, its dorky ring tone of Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” chiming from her purse. The number on the LED was dispatch-the sheriff was calling.
“Kenyon,” she said.
Her mother’s hands full, Jenna picked up the flat carton and they walked toward the door. With her free hand, she fished some Italian ice peppermints from a bowl by the hostess lectern and offered one to her mother.
Emily shook her head, her ear pressed tightly to her flip phone as they walked to the car.
“I see,” she said. Her tone was flat, like someone checking a list for which there was no need. “All right. Okay. Got it. I can take a drive out there tomorrow, first thing.”
Emily looked irritated as she put away her phone.
“Do you know Nicholas Martin?” she asked.
“Sure. Who doesn’t? He’s a senior and besides, he’s kind of a freak”
Emily turned the ignition and the Accord started. She put it into drive.
“Freak? In what way?”
“You know, one of those country kids who didn’t get the memo that the Goth look was so last millennium.”
“Black clothes? White face?”
“And eyeliner, Mom, even eyeliner. But what about him?”
Emily sighed, glad she didn’t have a son to deal with.
“Did you see him at school today?”
“I don’t know. Although, if I did see him, I’d probably remember. He’s the memorable type. What’s up, Mom?”
“Probably nothing. His aunt in Illinois has called the office a couple times. She’s panicking because she hasn’t been able to reach anyone from the family since the storm. The big cell tower past Canyon Ridge was knocked out in the twister. Sheriff wants me to drive out to their place tomorrow morning and have a look around”
