A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  “FBI here. Can’t talk,” Gloria whispered. “Call back in an hour.”

  “All right.” Emily shut her phone and looked at the black album. The image of a little blond girl came to mind. She was laughing. She was on a swing. She was running in a field. And she ended up in the cold darkness of hole in the ground, a root cellar, a grave.

  If Dylan Walker was responsible for Kristi’s death, then how was Reynard Tuttle involved? She flipped through the pages. What happened?

  But more than anything, where was her daughter?

  Christopher’s number lit up the LED display and her phone vibrated.

  “I’m on my way back to the hotel,” he said. “Em, I have some news.” His voice was mixed with dread.

  “What is it?” Emily asked.

  “Better if I talk to you about this in person.”

  “Chris,” her unsteady voice was ten times louder, now. “Don’t do this. Tell me. Am I in trouble?”

  Christopher hesitated. “No, not you. Not directly.”

  “Please.” Emily was begging then. She never begged. “Is it Jenna?”

  “All right. Be calm. Sit tight. I’ll tell you.” His words came in a machine gun fashion, a breath between each staccato utterance. “Shali Patterson’s car’s been found. The one Jenna and Nick Martin were driving. There’s blood on the steering wheel.”

  “Were they in an accident?” The remark was merely her best reaction to what he was saying, partly a cover for what she already knew. It was also hoped. The color had drained from her face. “What hospital?” The phrase ended with the up tick of a question. It was spoken by a mother with hope—at least a mother wanting to believe that everything was all right.

  “Jenna and Nick are missing. The VW was found behind a grocery store not far from Jeffries’s place.”

  There was silence. He waited for Emily to say something. “Are you all right?”

  “Dear God,” she said. “Where are they? What happened?”

  “There’s more, Emily.”

  “Yes?” She steadied herself. What more could there be?

  “There was a note.”

  “A note?” From Jenna? “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ll figure it out. I’m turning in to the garage now.” Silence followed and Christopher thought maybe the phone had lost its cell.

  “Emily?”

  “Yes. Yes,” she repeated.

  “You need to know something. The note was addressed to you.”

  Emily put her hand out for the card. There was a slight tremor in her grasp, but she kept her eyes riveted on Christopher Collier as he entered her hotel room. There was a strange look on his face, and she couldn’t quite determine what it was. Look at me, her dark brown eyes pleaded. Show me. She took the card. It was plain, white, and carried in a clear glassine envelope.

  On its slick surface it read:

  EMILY KENYON: YOUR TURN NOW

  The words were handwritten, with a distinct and printing cursive combination that looked like what they’d seen at Tina Esposito’s house and in the black album. She noticed some smudges on the other side. It had already been processed for latents by the crime lab.

  “When did you get this?” she asked.

  “Two hours ago. Yes, it’s been processed. Unfortunately, it’s clean.”

  Still holding the card, Emily sat down. “How could you? Why didn’t you call me right away?”

  Christopher moved closer. “We think it’s about Jenna’s disappearance.”

  The air was sucked out of her lungs, and she could barely speak. She forced the words from her lips. “No. No it’s not.”

  Christopher shook his head and tenderly took her hand. “Look, Em, it seems to be. The card came for me. It was in my mail slot downtown. No one saw who brought it. It had no envelope, just the card.” He could see that Emily was crying then, though she was doing it silently, in that way that he came to know when they worked together. When the case went bad. When the murder scene involved children. She was tough and smart, but she had her breaking point. A lot of cops did. Some reached for the bottle. Some smoked like there was no tomorrow. Emily Kenyon cried it out, very quietly.

  “Look, there’s something else you should know,” he said. “The blood in the car was Bonnie’s and another person’s.”

  “Jenna’s?” Her face froze.

  He shook his head. “We typed her through your old HR records. Not her. We think Nick Martin’s, but that’s just a stab in the dark.” He regretted his word choice right away and backpedaled. “You know, just preliminary. Could be anyone.”

  Emily got up and opened a bottle of water. She took a couple of aspirins.

  “All right,” she said. “The card is the same as the one we saw at Tina’s. The writing is the same.”

  He nodded and let her talk.

  “Someone wants to hurt me, right?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. That’s likely the message here, about it being your turn.”

  “Right. My turn to suffer? My turn to die?”

  “Maybe. But we don’t know.”

  “But we do know one thing. My daughter is missing. Some sicko is playing some game with me. I don’t know if it is Nick or Dylan or Tina’s husband or who might want to do this.”

  She went for the crumpled Macy’s bag and pulled out the papers she’d smuggled from the hospital. It was all she had. Doing something always won out over tears and frustration. She and Christopher spread them out on the hastily made bed.

  “I’ve started dividing by year,” he said, “I found the one with Tina Winston’s daughter listed.” He held up a printout. “Says the father is Eddy Bunt, thirty-three, born in Tacoma.”

  Emily took her notebook to Christopher and wrote down the name. She reached for one of the papers and started scanning.

  “We’ll figure this mess out. We always could, you know.”

  She looked up and smiled. “I know. I just want to know where my daughter is.”

  “Me, too.”

  Her eyes stopped cold on one of the printouts. The mother’s name was listed as Bonita Jeffries. The father was Herb La Sift. But that wasn’t what nearly cut off her air supply. The birthday was Columbus Day, October 12, the same year as Nick Martin’s birth date.

  She pointed to the document. “This could be Nick. Same birthday. I know that from the school records I looked at.”

  “No shit? There’s another here. Bonita Jeffries is the mother and Johnny “Ace” Wage is the father. Same DOB as La Sift.”

  “Boy? Girl?”

  “This one’s a boy.”

  Emily set down her pen, her eyes fastened on Christopher’s. “There’s someone else with that birthday, you know.”

  He nodded. “Dylan Walker.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What a lonely woman won’t do for love.”

  The remark made Emily bristle slightly. She’d made some bad choices, too. “What a cruel game a sick manipulator like Dylan Walker plays with a lonely woman.”

  Christopher seemed to understand. “The only problem with this is that Bonnie Jeffries never had any kids of her own. Black market babies?”

  “I’m not sure. But she did have those baby pictures. Remember? There were photos of kids that meant something to her.”

  “A lot of adoption agency people keep a wall of fame. You know the place where they can stick up all the photos so they can feel good about what they’ve done.”

  “Yes, but this was at her home. That makes it even more personal.”

  Emily looked down at the names in her notebook: Herb La Sift, Eddy Bunt, Johnny “Ace” Wage. “Maybe there is a little game of sorts going on here.” She and Jenna had played Scrabble every night when Jenna was in seventh grade and going through that awkward “no one likes me” phase that afflicts so many prepubescent girls. That all changed, good or bad, when Shali Patterson decided to make Jenna her “new” best friend.

  “Eddy Bunt is an anagram for Ted Bundy,” Emi
ly said.

  Bundy, of course, was the superstar serial killer of the 1970s, having been the prime suspect in dozens of murders of pretty young women from the Northwest, Colorado, and eventually Florida where he met his fate strapped into Old Sparky, the electric chair. She glanced over at Christopher, who had a dumbstruck look on his face. “Remember her book collection? How her reading material seemed to indicate a preoccupation with serial killers?”

  He did—the mostly red and black volumes filled the dead woman’s shelves—Lethal This, Deadly That, Fatal Whatever. “To know one is to love one, I guess. And yes, I remember. You get that by just looking at the letters?”

  Emily shrugged; it wasn’t exactly a gift, but merely a practiced ability.

  “Yes, but the others are more difficult. Nothing’s popping out at me. She tore some squares of paper and wrote one of each letter of Johnny “Ace” Wage’s name. “You work this one.”

  He took the pieces of paper and stretched them out on the floor.

  “I’ll do Herb La Sift,” she said.

  “You’re not going to time me, are you?”

  “No.”

  He grinned. “Good, because I’m not a right-brain guy.”

  “I know.” Two minutes later, Emily had her puzzle figured out. “I think I took the easy one,” she said. “This one’s Albert Fish.”

  “Fish?” Christopher looked at her blankly. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “He should. Think fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

  “Hannibal Lecter?”

  “Yeah, the original. He was convicted in the thirties. Killed a dozen or more boys and ate them.”

  “Lovely.”

  She looked over Christopher’s shoulder. “I ought to be on Wheel of Fortune or something. I’ve got yours done.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” he said. “Who’s this gem?”

  “John Wayne Gacy.”

  “Jesus, everyone’s favorite clown, that one.”

  He was right. At least every psycho’s favorite clown. Gacy was the suburban Chicago serial killer who had raped and murdered thirty-three young men and boys. While he was hobnobbing with the Jaycees and donning his clown costume he wore to visit sick children, he was burying body after body in his crawl space.

  “Seems like Bonnie was the creative type,” Emily said.

  Christopher scooped up the slips of paper. “More like deranged.”

  Emily searched Christopher’s dark eyes. If she was looking for comfort, she found it. Understanding, too. But she also felt something just then that she hadn’t counted on. For the first time, she saw him as man, not a coworker. A supporter, not a colleague helping her because he’d been paid to do so. She knew the rest of the world viewed law enforcement as one big club bound forever in blue, but that wasn’t always so. As in any profession, insecurities, competitiveness, and jealousies play a role in how those with a badge treat one another.

  After the Kristi Cooper debacle, Emily Kenyon had learned how frail support and loyalty really could be. It was like a thin string, stretched and snapped. Several of her friends made derisive comments about her during the investigation, which ultimately exonerated her. In a way she learned how hard it was for a defendant to recover his or her good name after an acquittal. Once the bell has rung, it can never be completely silenced. Even David made cruel remarks about how she’d let the heat of it all steal her wits, how she shouldn’t have done what she did.

  But never Christopher. He was true blue from the moment Reynard Tuttle was shot, to the dreadful discovery of Kristi Cooper’s body by those boys out with their BB gun, to the departmental investigation by her supposed friends and colleagues.

  “What is it about you?” she asked. “Why did you stick up for me?”

  Christopher set his hand on her shoulder. “Look, what happened to you could have happened to me. To anyone. You were doing your job. You have always been a million times better than that one incident. What happened never defined you for a second. Not to me. Not to anyone who really knows you.”

  But to David, it was the crack that grew to a chasm.

  Without saying a word, her eyes now cast downward, Emily started to sob. She didn’t want to cry in front of Collier just then, but her emotions were so jagged, she just let go.

  Christopher put his other hand on her opposite shoulder and gently turned her to make her face him dead on. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up again.”

  She shook her head slightly. “I don’t know.” She knew she couldn’t change what had happened to Kristi, but she wondered how much that played into Jenna and Nick’s disappearance. She was thinking of her daughter just then, not Kristi.

  “What if we don’t find Jenna?” she asked.

  Christopher wrapped his strong arms around her. He didn’t hold her too long, or too tightly. “We will,” he said softly in her ear. “We’re going to get her and bring her home.”

  A voice called out into the darkness. It was indifferent. Barely louder than a whisper. A voice of ice. Just words strung together. “Hey. You. Hey?”

  It came from a slit of light, across the blackened space.

  Is this God? Am I dead?

  In an instant the light was snuffed out with a thunderclap, like a trapdoor into another world. Darkness consumed the space. Jenna Kenyon couldn’t move. She hurt everywhere. She wanted to touch the back of her head; she was sure she’d been injured somehow. The pain was disorienting. The darkness didn’t help. Maybe hit over the head? Blacked out? But she didn’t know. When she went to move, she found her arms, and then her legs, were paralyzed. She was supine on a cot or mattress, smelly and damp. She was so unsettled, so confused, that she had no clue where she was or how she got there. After the light went out, she felt the presence of another, somewhere in the room, the cave. Wherever she was.

  “Hello?” she asked, her voice trembling with fear. She heard something, but it was behind her and she was unable to turn. “Hello?” She twisted her body and tried to squirm into a sitting position, but it was no use. Her limbs were bound tightly by rope or cording.

  Then he spoke. “Jenna?” His voice was recognizable, but her thoughts were so hazy, Jenna couldn’t say who it was just then. “Are you all right? I’m over here.”

  She tried to follow the sound with her eyes, searching through the blackness of the smelly black place. She knew for sure that she wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t sure if she should feel relief or fear. Her memories were hazy and as she slowly regained consciousness, her terror began to spike.

  “Nick?” she asked, barely able to keep from crying. His name came from her lips with more hope than confidence. “Are you here?”

  A muffled noise. Then an answer.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m over here. I’m tied up with some tape or something. I can’t move. You free?”

  Jenna let her tears flow. It wasn’t possible to hold them any longer. Not there in the dark. “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Can you move?” Nick’s voice was stronger just then. He was being stronger for her.

  “I don’t think so. I think my legs are broken.” She heard scraping sounds above. Maybe they were in a basement somewhere and someone above was moving furniture about the house. “Where are we?”

  She could feel him, his breath, his voice as his words came to comfort her. He was maybe five feet away. Close. The space wasn’t as large as she’d first thought.

  “I don’t know. I think we’re underground somewhere. I can feel dirt against the palm of my hand.”

  Jenna was shaking. “I’m cold.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared, Nick.”

  “I am, too,” he said. “We’ll get out of here.”

  “Who did this to us?”

  “I didn’t see,” he said. “Did you?”

  Just then, a brilliant flash of light flooded the space, and something skidded across the floor. She could see Nick, though her eyes were burning and she was crying. He was supine,
too, about four feet away. In the same flash, she saw the walls were concrete for the most part, but bricked over in sections. It was so fast, like a flashbulb exploding in someone’s face and blinding them temporarily, that she couldn’t be sure of what she’d seen. She thought she caught a glimpse of a bucket, a hammer, and some baling wire. Maybe a ladder and some rope, but it all happened so fast it would be hard to say for sure.

  In the same flash there was the echo of breaking glass. Someone had thrown something into their prison. Maybe a bottle shattering on the hard, stony floor? Then a strange odor. Jenna had smelled that scent. And then nothing. Everything was in the darkest shadow as though a heavy curtain had been hastily thrown over the entire space. The light was gone. The air was still.

  Not far from Nick and Jenna, there was more scraping, followed by the rapid thud of hurried footsteps, and then absolute silence.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Monday, exact time and place unknown

  A pinprick of light like a tiny star came from the doorway. Jenna lay still and stared at it for the longest time, her mind trying to focus on where she was and how she got there. She felt woozy and nauseous. Look at that pretty little star, she thought. Twinkling. A nursery rhyme streamed through her consciousness, but she shut it out of her mind. She tried to concentrate on what she last remembered. But it was all foggy, drowsy.

  “Jenna? You awake?”

  It was Nick’s voice, huskier and raw.

  “Yeah. What happened?” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Someone chucked something in here. We passed out. Are you okay?”

  “I’m sick,” she said. “I feel like puking.”