A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  Olga Morris-Cerrino was already waiting out front of the big white house, the chief benefit of a very long driveway. Standing over the sink in the kitchen window, one could see a car coming two minutes before it arrived. There was always time to do a little urgent straightening of the house and a cursory check in the mirror to see if the hair looked all right.

  “You made good time,” Olga called out, walking toward the car. “Perfect timing. Minestrone sound good?”

  Emily shut the car door and extended her hand. “You must be Italian.”

  Olga ignored the hand, and embraced Emily with a warm hug. “Don’t let the last name fool you,” she said, with a laugh. “I married into that one. And the minestrone? It’s my mother-in-law’s recipe. I claim nothing.”

  “It is so beautiful here,” Emily said, looking around at the garden as they walked toward the open front door.

  Olga bent down to pick up the cat.

  Emily smiled. “That must be Felix.”

  Olga nodded and the cat purred. “He’s probably the only one who knows the real me. I’m not a cook. Not Italian. And until I married Tony, I thought dirt was something disgusting. Now look at me. I can’t keep my fingernails clean.” She flashed her nails, edged in garden soil. “I never wear gloves. Love the feel of the soil on my hands. You’d laugh if you knew me before I ended up all the way out here. Couldn’t keep a houseplant alive.”

  “My silks even die,” Emily said. And they both laughed.

  The kitchen was authentic in every way. It wasn’t one of those new homes that tried to look old with beat-up butcher blocks and retrofitted stoves from the 1930s. An enormous pine table commanded the entire wall of windows on the south side. Light streamed in, bending and twisting as it flooded a row of colored bottles lined on a shelf that passed through the top third of the windows. It was like a prism, sending shards of color everywhere. A wooden bowl with apples sat in the middle of the table. Not wooden apples out of a Pottery Barn catalog, but the real thing. Above all, the kitchen smelled wonderful.

  “Sit, eat,” Olga said as she scurried to bring Emily a bowl of the steaming soup. Then she handed her a dish of powdery grated parmesan. “Sprinkle some of that on top. And if I overdid the oregano, shoot me with the gun on your hip.” She looked at Emily’s gun, revealed on her waistband as she sat down. “Just kidding.”

  “Thanks for that, and thanks for seeing me. I’m not too proud to tell you that I’m grasping at straws here, but, well . . .” She stopped and looked down at her soup.

  “I read about your daughter after we talked,” Olga said. “Let’s see if we can’t sort out some of this together.” She looked over at pile of file folders. “That’s Angel’s Nest and Dylan Walker. We’ll get to that after we eat.”

  “Dylan Walker?” The name had come from nowhere. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  Olga’s expression flat lined. “I’ll get to that.” She got up and retrieved a pitcher of ice tea from the counter and set it on the table. Emily shook her head when Olga indicated if she wanted some. “But since I’m retired, I don’t ever discuss politics or work at the table. Let’s eat. Now tell me all about your daughter. Did you bring pictures?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Saturday, 2:15 P.M., northeast of Meridian, Washington

  While Olga cleared the old table of the lunch dishes, Emily excused herself to return the flurry of calls that had kept her phone vibrating throughout the meal. Felix followed her out to the front porch, the screen door snapping on its rusted spring.

  She scrolled through the call list, Shali, Kip, David, Cary, and Candace Kane had called.

  That one’s not getting a call back. Neither is that one.

  She called Shali first, on the off chance that Jenna had made contact with her.

  “Not exactly, Mrs. Kenyon. She basically stole my car,” Shali said from the school cafeteria where she was stuck eating lunch. “Borrowed it, I guess. She did leave a note.”

  “Oh no! When?”

  “Not sure, but I think early this morning.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “ ‘You need to take the bus. Be back soon. Love, Jen.’ ”

  “Are you holding out? Now’s not the time, you know.”

  “I know. And I’m not.”

  Emily thanked her for the information, and just before she hung up, Shali Patterson added the little piece that she was, in fact, holding out.

  “My mom called the police. I guess you should know that.”

  Perfect.

  “All right. Call me if you hear from Jenna.”

  “She’s going to be okay, right?”

  “Yes. She’s going to be fine.”

  Emily didn’t believe her own words, but she didn’t want Shali Patterson running around talking to the police, the media, her mother.

  Next she pressed the speed dial for David, still set at number One. Need to change that. When he didn’t answer, she figured he was at the hospital in surgery or at one of those endless admin meetings. He’d never screen her calls. She left a short message.

  “I’m near Meridian. Call me. Jenna took Shali Patterson’s car.”

  She skipped most of Cary McConnell’s message.

  “Hey, sorry about everything. I’m in Seattle. We really need to talk—”

  Delete.

  When Kip didn’t answer his cell, she called Gloria, the dispatcher, who told her that Kip was talking with “a herd” of reporters. An FBI profiler was coming in that day to help with the case.

  “This is getting big,” she said. “The stuff they are saying around here would make you puke.”

  Emily scanned the garden. She could see where Olga had tilled and planted. She also noticed muddy footprints on the porch. Jeesh, the country’s messy.

  “Try me,” she told Gloria.

  “It’s this whole Romeo and Juliet thing. Emily, they are putting this off on Nick and saying that Jenna knew about it ahead of time or was even involved.”

  “That’s such bullshit,” Emily said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve known Jenna since she was three feet tall. The only thing she’s guilty of is having a good, trusting heart.”

  “Tell Kip I called. I’m with Olga now. We’re going over some of her case files. Might have something later. I’ll call him. Promise.”

  Emily looked around for the cat, but when Felix was nowhere to be seen, she went back inside without him.

  “I let the cat out,” she said, when she found Olga at the table, papers and folders spread out all over. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. He lives for the freedom of messing up my garden.”

  Olga motioned Emily to sit. She pointed to the ice tea and Emily shook her head.

  “Remember Dylan Walker?”

  “The serial killer? That Dylan Walker?”

  Olga nodded. “Is there any other?” She picked up a folder. “I’m going to give you the background first. Then we’ll see if we can connect the dots with what you’ve got happening over there in Cherrystone. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Over the next hour, Olga told Emily about the Meridian murders of Shelley Marie Smith and Lorrie Ann Warner. Although it had been years since it all happened, Emily could see that the retired detective was channeling deep, dark memories—as if she was watching a movie unwind in her mind. Everything, it seemed, was as vivid to Olga at that moment in her country kitchen as it had been back in the days when she first looked at the dead bodies of those college students, wrapped in an expensive plastic tarp on the sandbar of the Nooksack River. She talked about Dylan Walker and the other women that had crossed his path only to turn up dead. There was Brit Osterman, twelve; Tanya Sutter, twenty-four; and Steffi Miller, seventeen.

  Olga sipped her ice tea and pointed a finger at one of the news clippings in the file. “All these girls murdered by him—I don’t have to say allegedly now because I’m retired and I know what I know—and he turns into
some kind of Lothario for the lost and lonely.”

  Emily let out a breath. “I remember now. My girlfriends at the UW talked about how much more handsome Walker was than Ted Bundy.”

  “Bingo,” Olga said, no longer smiling. “I had to live with that during the trial.”

  Emily felt a little embarrassed. “But no one wanted to date him. It was just more like it was such a waste. Dumb, I know.”

  Olga sighed. “You were young. Others were older and should have known better. That brings me to Angel’s Nest.”

  “Right. That’s why I’m here. I don’t see the connection.” Emily looked at the papers as Olga spread them out. There were many. Felix, who’d managed to let himself in, took a spot on her lap.

  “He likes you,” Olga said. “Does that bother you?”

  Emily shook her head and massaged Felix under his chin.

  “Now,” Olga went on, “let’s discuss Angel’s Nest, which we nicknamed ‘Devil’s Best’ back at the office when the news first broke. God, we hated that place.”

  Olga recounted how the Seattle agency had been seen as a model of its kind, matching pregnant college students with prospective parents and generally living up to its business card motto: WE CREATE FAMILIES. No one knew exactly how many families were created through the agency, because even despite the court cases that ruined the place, such numbers were elusive.

  “Confidentiality laws work for criminals, too,” Olga said. “Keeps everyone in the dark. Even the grand jury that heard the case was clueless as to how big the scandal was.”

  “The scandal?”

  “Oh yeah, you want the good part.”

  “And the connection?”

  Olga nodded. “Right. I’ll jump right to it. Randall Wilson, the president of Angel’s Nest, was indicted, and convicted, on procuring babies for a fee. Big fees. He and his office had more demand for their services than babies, so over a six-year period—we don’t know for sure—they placed more than twenty babies for big bucks. They sold babies to desperate people.”

  Emily remembered the name Randall Wilson. “This was the ‘buy a baby’ case?” she asked.

  “That was what got the attention from the media. In the end it was true that we—and it was never my case—only convicted on those cases. They were just so much more obvious. The prosecutors in Seattle didn’t want to rip apart families that they didn’t have to and expose birth mothers who were local girls. It seemed too big and too wrong. Shutting down the agency was the ultimate goal.”

  “Look, Olga, I get that. What I don’t get is how you’re involved and how does any of this connect the dots?”

  “I’m sorry. I digressed. I don’t get many visitors out here.”

  Emily wished she hadn’t been impatient just then and she apologized. “It’s just that I’m worried about my daughter.”

  “I know.” She put her hand on Emily’s and patted it gently. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. It was clear that she meant it. “Okay, when I read about your case, I wasn’t thinking Angel’s Nest—you brought that up when you called. I was thinking about the signature of the crime. Mrs. Martin, nude, tied up, and shot. Maybe even strangled. It reminded me of my girls.”

  Her girls, Emily knew, were Lorrie and Shelley.

  “I didn’t think anything about it until you called.”

  “But I don’t see the connection,” Emily finally said.

  “During the Dylan Walker trial, and afterward, women from all over the country wrote to him. They came here. They visited him. One of them was a woman named Bonnie Jeffries. I would never have given her a second thought except that she worked for Angel’s Nest and was one of the chief witnesses against her boss.”

  “Where is Bonnie?”

  “Not sure. She faded away after the trial. Stopped going to see Dylan Walker at Monroe. She just disappeared. I made a couple of calls before you came, but no one knows what became of her. She hasn’t filed a tax return for years.” Olga looked through her notes, faintly yellowed with the passage of so much time. “I do remember one thing; she had a cohort that came with her to the trial. Let’s see. I have the name here somewhere.” She kept looking, flipping pages and at times getting lost in the memories of the case.

  Emily could not have been more disappointed. It seemed so thin. But it was all she was going to get.

  “Tina Winston. That’s her.” She tapped her finger on a page. “I remember reading about her a few years ago. Almost wanted to call her husband when I read in Seattle Magazine they had gotten married. In fact, I clipped the article.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Rod Esposito. The software guy. Big bucks. Wonder if he knows that she was once smitten with a serial killer?”

  Emily’s mood lifted; a slight smile came to her face. It was the part of detective work she loved the most—finding the leverage needed to get someone to talk.

  “Let’s see,” she said, letting her smile fade as Jenna’s whereabouts pulsed once more. “I have to make a stop at my ex-husband’s. Never fun, but I have a feeling he’s got a houseguest.”

  Saturday, 4:00 P.M., on the interstate just outside of Seattle

  Kip was Meeting with the FBI—a male and female agent from the Seattle field office—who had been the first to arrive to help with the Martin investigation. Gloria, stuck at the phones while all the excitement unfolded around her, assured Emily that he’d call as soon as he could break free.

  “They’re all over him like a dirty shirt,” she said, mimicking one of the sheriff’s favorite sayings.

  “Is Jason around?” Emily asked, wishing she had a hands-free phone as she dodged the Seattle traffic.

  “Nope. He’s hanging around the FBI, too. Says it’s a golden ‘training’ opportunity.”

  Emily turned off on the second Mercer Island exit, and drove south. Everything about the island said money. She couldn’t imagine David actually wanting to live there among the train of Mercedes and Lamborghinis that snaked along the surprisingly forested roads that passed from one McMansion to the next. His values had flipped. Long gone were the days when he measured success with the lives he’d saved, not the money he made.

  “Gloria, do you know if an APB went out on Shali’s car?”

  “Didn’t David tell you? His squeeze Dani called earlier. Said the kids were with them and she’d see that they were brought in. The APB is out, but Kip said we’d follow David’s lead. The FBI lady says they don’t think the Martin boy was the shooter.”

  “She said what?” The mention of David’s bride-to-be stung more than it should have. Emily thought she was over it. She looked for a place to pull over. What made her angry just then wasn’t the comment about Nick Martin not being the killer of his parents and brother, though she’d get to that. It was Dani’s interference in their lives.

  “First off, she’s not his wife. And second, what did she say?” Emily parked the Accord in front of a shady driveway that led up a steep, fern-fanned incline to a faux chateau huddled next to a tennis court and pool.

  “She said she was concerned for her safety. Jenna and Nick had showed up and she felt uneasy, you know, scared.”

  “Jesus,” was all Emily could say. If she needed another reason to hate Dani Brewer, she had one now.

  Gloria sighed sympathetically. “Anyway, I said that you were en route to Seattle and you’d handle things. I told her, ‘isn’t it better to keep things in the family?’”

  “That was good.” Emily was still fuming, but she’d take care of Dani soon enough. She put the car back into drive and got ready to exit back onto the road. “Okay, what about Nick?”

  “The FBI’s being cagey—you know how they are—all I’ve been able to pick up is that the killings match the signature of some other family murders out of state.”

  “Did they say how?”

  “I’m the dispatcher, remember. All I get around here is what I pick up on the radio or when Kip is telling me to bring him coffee or a Payday bar.”

  “I k
now. I’m sorry. Have him call me. One more favor, okay?”

  Gloria let out an exaggerated sigh. “You want coffee, too?”

  Emily laughed. “Do me a favor. Contact Parole and find out where Dylan Walker is living now.”

  “Kip told me about Walker. Kind of blew me away. You know, that he got out of the Jersey prison after that prison bed swap completely under the radar,” Gloria said. “I’ll dial up Parole and see where’s he’s at.”

  She thanked Gloria and looked at the directions she’d printed from the hotel’s front desk computer. Another turn and she’d be at David’s.

  “Take it easy, Emily. Hang in there. Dani fits the profile, you know. A second wife is always a bitch. I ought to know. I’m one myself.”

  Emily laughed a little more, said good-bye, and snapped her cell phone shut. Gloria had already married Dani off to Dave.

  Dani? Let see. Serial killer. New wife. Serial killer. New wife. Toss-up.

  Dani Brewer opened the front door with a stenciled-on smile that could have not been more false. Lancôme Retro Rouge? Emily suspected that Dani had seen her car pull up and hurried to the mirror to see what kind of affect she should wear on her reasonably pretty face. She had long brown hair, tousled in a messy bun. In all fairness, her pregnancy did give her the characteristic glow that made plain women appear pretty, and already pretty women undeniably ravishing.

  She’s somewhere between pretty and beautiful on her very best day.

  “Oh, Emily, please come in,” Dani said, stepping back and letting the door skim her bulging belly. “I talked to your office. They said you were over here.”

  Emily hadn’t really waited for the invitation; she was already inside. The foyer was cold gray stone, slate. Cold like Dani.

  “Is Jenna here? Nick? How about David?” Emily’s words were rifle shot and she scarcely allowed a breath to intercede.