A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  Jenna, how I love you. I let you down.

  Sunday, 8:50 A.M.

  “Why are you ignoring me?”

  In the crystal-chandeliered lobby of the Westerfield Hotel, Emily Kenyon, making her way to the coffee shop for a quick breakfast, turned around to the sound of a familiar voice. It was not the voice of someone she wanted to see. Then or maybe ever. But there he was. The blood had pumped Cary McConnell’s face into mass of red and blue veins. Even his eyes seemed rosy, instead of blue. If he’d ever been handsome in his life, it would have been impossible to say for sure just then. He looked like a pinstripe-suited monster, puffed up and in a fury. His red tie was a blood-hued spike that hung from his neck.

  “Are you stalking me? I said it was over,” she said.

  Emily Kenyon stood face to face with her former lover and she felt nothing but revulsion. He’d never been what she thought he was—the knight in shining armor who was going to save her from her fractured marriage, the whirlpool, sucking her down. Drowning her. As he stood there in the hotel lobby, the concierge, a thin, fey man with wing-shaped sideburns looking on, Cary McConnell was nothing that she thought he was.

  “You sleep with a woman, you think she cares to know you,” he said. His words were angry and possessive but his expression was one of worry.

  “I don’t know why you’re here.” Emily hurried toward the elevators and McConnell followed. “I have enough on my mind. There’s no room for you.”

  He touched her shoulder and she spun around.

  “Emily, I’m here to tell you I’m sorry. And to tell you something you need to know.”

  She stopped and turned toward him. His anger had ebbed slightly. “What is it?”

  “It’s about Dylan Walker.”

  Emily had never mentioned the name to Cary. He’d had no clue that she was searching for Walker. “What about him?”

  “He’s my client.”

  “The serial killer is your client?”

  “Look, I’m not sure he’s a serial killer. But even if he is, he’s entitled to legal representation. I can’t disclose why he contacted me. I’m in murky ethical waters just telling you he’s my client.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” she said. “What did you do for him?”

  “I’m not playing games here. I’m telling you . . . more than I should. I care about you, Emily. I do. You know that. I wanted to warn you.”

  “Warn me? About what?”

  “About Walker. Look, I can’t be any more blunt than this. He asked about you. About Jenna.”

  By now Emily was furious. “What did he want to know?”

  Cary took a step back. His face was flushed now. He appeared embarrassed, like a kid caught doing something wrong and lying about it. He muttered something ineffectual, but Emily couldn’t quite grasp it.

  “What are you saying?”

  He looked at her. He seemed almost sorry.

  “I can’t say. But be careful.”

  She wanted to threaten to call the police, but she was the police. “Go. Get out of here.” The elevator door glided open and she stepped inside. As the two brass-plated halves began to come together she saw Cary for what she hoped was the last time. He stood staring with what seemed like a genuinely remorseful look on his face.

  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.

  BOOK THREE

  Sins of the Father

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Sunday, 10:30 A.M., Seattle

  Emily Kenyon held her breath as she drove over the two-tiered 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 first-floor 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-to-ceiling 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 she’d 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.

  As Christopher Collier started down the hall, Emily did the only thing that came to her fragile mind just then. She put the tiny coin purse in her jacket pocket. She breathed in deeply. She heard Christopher and the other detectives as they moved about the back bedroom. She heard a photographer taking pictures. What had happened here? What had Nick and Jenna done? She closed her eyes.

  “You all right?” It was Christopher. His voice snapped her back.

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  “You look as pale as a ghost.”

  Emily tried to shake it off. “I don’t know. I guess you just never really get used to this stuff. Not if you’re human,” she said. The pink edge of the purse protruded slightly from her pocket, and she gently pushed it out of sight. Her heart was a bass drum. She felt sweat work its way down her temples.