Heart of Ice

by Gregg Olsen

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Cary McConnell stood in front of her next to her car. It obviously wasn’t a court day for Cherrystone’s brashest and most self-absorbed lawyer. He wore indigo-dyed jeans, a tan jacket over an olive-colored button-down shirt. The cut of everything he wore was athletic—tight enough to show the world what he had, but not so to reveal an extra pound if he’d eaten too much for lunch. The cold breeze mussed up his hair, and for once, he didn’t seem to care. She thought the clothes he was wearing were too thin for the winter weather, but she loathed him so much, she considered him nearly reptilian anyway.

  Cary folded his arms. “That’s not a very nice greeting for an old friend.”

  Emily reached for her car keys and pulled them from her purse. “Is that what you’re calling me these days?”

  He stepped a little closer. “Very funny. Seriously, Emily, this whole Crawford thing is pitting us against each other. I don’t like the guy any more than you do. He’s a client.”

  “I’d love to quote you on that,” she said.

  Cary smiled. It was a grin as dazzling as ever. It didn’t melt Emily’s heart like it once did, but it was, without a doubt, completely disarming. “Look,” he said, “I feel really bad about my behavior back when we were seeing each other, and even more recently.”

  “You should feel bad, Cary. You were a Class A jerk.”

  “All right, guilty as charged. I’m here because Cherrystone is too small of a town for us to be bitter about the past. I want you to forgive me. OK?”

  Emily pushed the button for the Crown Vic’s automatic locks and they popped up like soldiers at attention. She reached for the door handle. “We’re OK.”

  “No, really, I wanted to talk about Mitch. Do you have a minute?”

  Emily waved her hand at him, pushing him back from her personal space. “We can’t talk about that. I mean, you don’t want to talk to me about it. Do you?”

  “Some things are bothering me. You know, I care about the truth. That’s why I went to law school.”

  Emily seriously doubted the revisionist rationale for the profession he chose. She figured that Cary McConnell had gone to law school to make big bucks.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Cary looked around, his dark eyes finally landing back on hers. “I don’t want to talk about it here. Trust me. I’m very concerned.”

  Trust him? Emily felt a flutter of anxiousness. Camille would pitch a fit if Cary had some kind of information that he’d offered up on a silver platter and she turned a deaf ear to it. Even so, the conversation should be between the prosecutor and the defense lawyer—not the sheriff and the man with whom she’d had an affair.

  “You really ought to tell Camille.”

  “I don’t know her like I know you.”

  The comment made Emily’s skin crawl. She wondered if he was referring to the fact they’d had sex, and not the bond of a long-term friendship.

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  “Follow my truck, OK?”

  “I didn’t know you were driving a pickup. What happened to the Mercedes?”

  The question was meant to sting a little because all that Cary used to talk about was how expensive his car was and how it was “the most kick-ass car in Cherrystone.”

  Cary ignored the intent of her remark. He was good at that, she thought.

  “I like hauling stuff around on the weekends,” he said.

  “I’ll pass on following you, Cary. Thanks,” she said. Cary was a jerk, maybe as much as his client Mitch Crawford, but he was also an astute judge of people. She remembered how when they were dating he pegged a local mail carrier as Cherrystone’s panty thief—a man who broke into women’s bedrooms to steal their underwear. Cary’s reasoning was a little disturbing at the time, when she thought back on it. All he said was: “I know the type.”

  But he had been right. If there was something that was troubling him about the Crawford case, which she assumed he was intimating, then she ought to hear it.

  “What’s with you and Chris Collier?” he asked.

  The question was out of bounds, inappropriate, pushy. Very Cary.

  “None of your business,” Emily said, turning her attention to her Crown Vic and getting inside.

  “Sounds like you still care,” he called out.

  Emily didn’t bother opening her driver’s window, something she would have done to give a homeless person a five-dollar bill despite the icy weather. She merely mouthed the words she hoped he could read: “The only thing I care about is forgetting that you ever laid a hand on me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cascade University, south of Spokane

  He’d been watching her all night. She never paid him a single glance. Her sole focus seemed to be on herself. She’d made several trips with her carbon-copy sisters to the Kappa Chi upstairs bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder like she was headed into battle. In a way, she was. The frat bathrooms were notoriously filthy. No TP. Just squat, do your business, and flush with a well-placed foot. If not too drunk, of course. When she and the pack returned to the party they were giddier than ever, with lips lacquered and hair fluffed up to look messily styled.

  Bet she loves the bedhead look, he thought. Bet she’s not as hot as she wants everyone to believe.

  Tiffany Jacobs brushed right by him as she made her way to the basement. She could feel the heat of a hundred bodies rise in the dank passageway. She caught the peculiar blend of odors—vomit, beer, pot.

  Guys are so gross, she thought.

  The frat boys were playing boat races with some of the other drunken sorority girls down there. Upturned plastic drinking cups floated on a slimy beer surface on a sheet of plywood suspended between a pair of sawhorses procured for the game. Drink. Slide the cup. Push it to the edge. Drink. With each heat, a cheer erupted with the kind of enthusiasm that might have greeted the winner of the America’s Cup.

  But this was the big blue plastic beer cup.

  The room was crowded and the walls were so hot, they practically wept condensation. Tiffany’s rubber flip-flops stuck to the concrete floor from the coating of spilled beer that shined like shellac.

  “I’m going to get some air,” she told her crew, all teetering woozily on a chilly night of beers. One of her Beta Zeta sisters, an unfortunate girl with brown hair and teeth that had never seen the benefits of orthodontia, started to follow. She was one of the four Lindseys who had pledged that year. Tiffany knew she was a mistake, but they needed another girl to make their quota. Lindsey S. wasn’t really BZM—Beta Zeta Material—but she had a high grade-point average.

  “No, Lindsey S. I’ll be back. I’m going to call my mom. You stay here.”

  Lindsey S., drunk and bored, complied and returned to the boat races.

  Tiffany shimmied through the tightly woven human mass on her way to the door. Her mom had called earlier in evening—twice.

  He was right behind her, just close enough to keep her in his sightline, but not enough to make her feel uncomfortable.

  The cool night air blasted her face and sent a welcome chill down her body.

  If Satan threw a party, he’d have it at Kappa Chi, Tiffany thought, as she walked up the concrete steps from the basement to the yard. Bits of broken glass shimmered.

  She could hear the sound of a couple making out by a massive oak tree that sheltered much of the yard. She went the other direction, toward the pool, reached for her cell phone, and dialed the speed number for her mother.

  “Hi, honey,” her Mom said. “I wondered if you’d call me back tonight.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Tiffany said, sitting next to a leaf-filled pool. “I’ve been studying my butt off tonight.”

  “That’s why you’re there, honey.”

  “I know.” Tiffany rolled her eyes.

  “I called earlier because I wanted to let you know I can come a day early for Mom’s Weekend.”

  “How earl
y, Mom?” Tiffany was annoyed and had no problem letting her mother know. “You know I have a lot of responsibilities.”

  “I know you do, Tiff.”

  “Just a minute,” she said cutting off her mother. She took her phone from her ear.

  “Do I know you?”

  Mrs. Jacobs tried to speak to her daughter again, but Tiffany was arguing with someone. She couldn’t make out anything that was being said. The tone of it, however, seemed angry and confrontational.

  “Tiff? What’s going on? Tiffany?”

  No answer.

  “Tiff?”

  Then the phone went dead.

  Emily Kenyon’s phone vibrated and she looked down at the small LCD screen. An electronic envelope rotated in the window. A new text message had arrived. She snapped open the phone. It was from Jenna. She knew it even before she opened it. No one else sent her a text message.

  “Tiffany Jacobs is missing. I’ll call u in a few. Something’s not right.”

  Jenna was working at the Beta Zeta chapter at the university in Knoxville and wasn’t expected home for a couple of weeks. She told her mother in a memorable text message that the chapter was one of the better ones in her region.

  “No trouble, these girls. Only one drunk and one bulimic. Might be new low record.”

  About an hour later, Emily answered the phone. It was Jenna.

  “Mom, can you believe it about Tiffany?”

  “Hi, honey,” Emily said, flipping through a notepad on which she’d logged a few details. “I really don’t know much. I checked the police logs for Cascade and they indicated Tiffany disappeared from a frat party two days ago. They don’t even know that she’s really missing.”

  “She is. I know she is, Mom. I know Tiffany.”

  Emily met Tiffany only once when visiting Jenna at Cascade. Both Tiffany and Jenna were involved in BZ recruitment the year before. Tiffany, as Emily recalled, was a smarter girl than her fluffy-headed name suggested. She was a stunning girl with piercing blue eyes and a pretty, slightly turned-up nose. She was studying to be a pharmacist; a job that she teased “would let me know what’s wrong with my friends and neighbors without even having to ask.”

  “What makes you think she didn’t run off somewhere?” Emily asked.

  “Two things, Mom. One, she’d never leave without a bunch of clothes. The girls at the BZ house there say she didn’t pack anything.”

  “OK. Maybe spur of the moment.”

  “No, Mom, that’s not it. The other thing is that the police found her phone outside of the Kappa Chi house. That pink razor was like her other brain. Tiff wouldn’t be caught dead without her phone.”

  Jenna’s own words stopped her cold. The expression had slipped from her lips merely to prove a point, not to make a prediction.

  “Jenna?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” her voice now deflated.

  “I called down to the university police. I offered to help, of course. I told them pretty much what you’ve said. Tiffany was a good girl. This could be very, very serious.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Garden Grove, California

  The concerns about where he would kill his prize came at him like a drumming rain on a tin roof. Her mother was a cop. Her mother’s boyfriend was a cop. Those two elements upped the ante considerably. It would be harder to capture her, slit her throat, and rip out her insides when Mom and the boyfriend lurked around Cherrystone, Washington. He was anxious to get things going. It was, after all, a very busy time of year.

  He smiled. Hard to fit in Christmas shopping and another sorority bitch.

  “You look happy,” his wife said, handing him a platter of tamales her mother had made.

  His smile stayed frozen, but it was tolerably real-looking. “You know how I feel about mama’s tamales. I think they’re the best in the world.”

  She smiled back. “Me, too.”

  He took the platter, wondering why the woman who knew him better than anyone knew nothing about him at all.

  He decided he’d take Lily Ann Denton next. She was but a day trip away. So convenient; a drive-through window kind of a killing. Jenna Kenyon would be the finale. And as much as he’d love her mother to find her blood-drained body on Christmas Day, he knew that killing her in Cherrystone was too great a risk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cherrystone

  That Mitch Crawford seemed solely motivated by money raised the very dark possibility that the car dealer might have placed a value on having a dead wife. The specter of an insurance payout could not be ignored.

  “So you still think he did this for the money?” Jason asked Emily as they went over the timeline of Mandy’s disappearance for the umpteenth time. They had several sheets of computer printouts and note cards that outlined what they knew so far. It was old-school police work, but the new system was still in transition. New technology usually came to Cherrystone when it wasn’t quite so new.

  Jason had duplicates of the printouts as they faced each other across Emily’s desk, but he left the highlighting up to his boss.

  Emily conceded that money did run Mitch’s world, but she was unsure if they could really fix the motive in that direction.

  “First of all, he has assets far beyond what most people around here have. Let’s see, three houses, a yacht, a fleet of classic cars, and more gold around his neck than a hip-hop star.”

  “No kidding. I didn’t notice the gold chains.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Men don’t pick up on it, I guess. Nothing turns off a woman more than ropes of gold nestled in a thick patch of chest hair.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Jason said, touching his shirt’s top button, and then laughing.

  “Sorry,” she said, smiling back. “No offense meant. Back to Mitch. If his balance sheet showed some irregularities, I’d be more concerned about the possibility of money being the motive here. So far, we know that the dealership is doing just fine and that he’s not leveraged to the hilt on his other assets.”

  “It makes me hate him even more,” Jason said.

  “Tell me about it. I’d like to get a new car, but I really shouldn’t. Anyway, I’d say money is too obvious a motive.”

  But what was the reason? Jason didn’t quite get it. He had a wife. He had kids. He couldn’t imagine another man snuffing out all that was so dear to him personally.

  “If not money, what?” he asked.

  Emily selected the pink highlighter. It was dry, so she took the cap off the yellow one. “I’m getting the distinct feeling that Mitch Crawford has other agendas when it comes to his wife,” Emily said.

  “An affair, maybe?”

  Emily ticked off bullet points on the printout.

  “Maybe he was tired of her?” she asked. “Maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered being a dad.”

  “Like Tony Ryan?”

  Emily put down her pen. “Yes, exactly. Like Ryan.” It was, she thought, a pretty good example.

  Tony Ryan was a Seattle beer truck driver who made local, and then national, news after his wife went missing two years ago. Carly Ryan was pregnant with the couple’s first baby. Friends said that Tony didn’t want to be a father; that he preferred spending his time away from work playing Xbox and hanging with his buddies. He repeatedly made remarks that indicated that he felt having a son or daughter made him “old” and moved him up to adulthood in an irrevocable way that he just didn’t want. One of the key lines from the trial came from Carly’s sister, Miranda. She told the court that Tony “told me that having a baby made his needs irrelevant. He was pissed off that he might not get all of Carly’s attention. He actually told me that ‘if she thinks for one minute that I’m not gonna have sex when I want it because of some brat wanting her attention, she’s dead wrong.’”

  Dead Wrong, of course, was the phrase used by headline writers the next day.

  The jury found Ryan guilty of murdering Carly and their baby. That sad story would have been nothing more than a repugnan
t footnote in the annals of crime, if not for the theory of the case. The prosecution and the media ratcheted up the stakes by casting the killer as the bone-chilling representative of young men who assumed that the world revolved around them, as it had in sports, high school, and at the gym.

  Mitch Crawford didn’t really fit that profile. Not very neatly, anyway. Sure, he was self-absorbed and filled his three-car garage and off-site garage with the spoils of a lavish lifestyle. He ran his office as more a king than a manager, demanding employees do things that had nothing to do with their jobs. Emily learned how workers were told to detail his personal cars once a week, pick up his dry cleaning, even shine his shoes.

  And while he seemed spoiled and entitled to all that he could see, he did actually have a work ethic. If his father had created the dealership from nothing, then Mitch Crawford wanted to make sure everyone in the region knew that he’d taken it much further.

  “My dad had a vision, but my eyesight’s a lot sharper,” he used to tell people when they came in for a test drive.

  As far as the Crawford case was concerned, Emily felt, insurance didn’t appear to be the motive.

  Cherrystone used the American Insurance Control Bureau as its primary tool in determining when and if crimes could be linked to an insurance motive or fraud. AICB was little more than an end run around a subpoena. Carriers liked it because it helped connect the dots when a person involved in a potential crime procured multiple policies. In the old days, law enforcement agencies had to issue a subpoena for each insurance company—and the defendant was not obligated to say even which company he or she might have procured a policy. It was shooting in the dark. With AICB, an alert would be sent out to all members—most of the insurance industry—and they’d be able to chime in with a yes or no.

  In Mandy’s case, there were no other policies outside of the one she held from her job at the county. Her life was worth $75,000. Her baby held no value. A baby isn’t worth anything because it isn’t drawing an income and it doesn’t have a dependent.