Heart of Ice

by Gregg Olsen

  “So what did AICB really turn up?” Jason asked.

  “Nothing. I highly doubt that a man like Mitch Crawford would break a sweat, let alone kill his wife, for seventy-five grand.”

  Jason agreed. “Maybe ten times that.”

  Emily nodded. “I’ve never thought this was about money, but now I’m certain that it isn’t. This man was all about convenience.”

  Later that afternoon, the office phone rang. To Emily’s utter surprise, it was Mitch Crawford. He was huffing and puffing mad, but she was glad for the call.

  The more you talk, the more you’ll hang yourself, she thought.

  “How can I help you, Mitch?” she said.

  “Help me? You have to be kidding. You could stop harassing me, for one.”

  Emily swiveled her chair and looked out the window. Cars passed by. “You’ll need to be more specific. No one here is intending to harass you.”

  “My insurance guy just called me saying that you put out a goddamn alert on me. Like you think I killed Mandy for insurance money. What a laugh!”

  “I’m sorry you think this is so funny.”

  “You know what I mean. I know that you sent out a bulletin to everyone in the country asking if I had policies on Mandy’s life. Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  “You haven’t exactly been cooperative, Mitch.”

  “I’ve done what you wanted me to do. Nothing more. I think you’re wasting my time. You’re wasting Mandy’s time, too.”

  “You don’t happen to know where she is?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  She thought he’d hung up, but he was only gulping a breath of air to fuel his rage.

  “I’m so sick of you and your office. If you had asked me, I would have told you that she only had one stupid policy from that cheap-ass county. There would be no windfall in Mandy’s death.”

  “I don’t know. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  “To you maybe, but not to me. I haven’t done anything wrong and you’ve been treating me like trash. What’s with you? I know you’re single. Man-hater? I’ve heard some things about you.”

  From Cary, no doubt.

  Emily hated losing her cool. It took some doing, but she held it.

  “This isn’t about me, Mitch. This is about you and your missing wife. Let’s remember that. All right?”

  The phone went dead with the sound of a thunderclap.

  Imagine that, Mitch Crawford, mad enough to slam down his phone. Nice.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Garden Grove

  They were a beautiful young couple, by any measure. Michael Barton, almost thirty, had an athletic build with penetrating brown eyes and dimples that never looked childlike or silly. Only disarmingly handsome. He was more reserved than shy, though he could come into his own when the situation demanded it. The only problem with Michael was that he was only able to reflect the moods of others. He seldom seemed comfortable enough to make the first move when it came to displays of warmth or charm.

  Olivia Barton was a stunning Latina with smoky brown eyes that never needed shadow or mascara, and full lips that she enhanced—when she had time—with a pretty plum-colored gloss.

  When Michael and Olivia bought their house in Garden Grove, they knew the first bit of remodeling would be the basement that the previous owner had outfitted with a cheesy, knotty-pine bar and air hockey table. Olivia saw the bulk of the dingy downstairs real estate as a potential playroom for the kids. Michael knew that he needed a home office.

  Yet they had a son, Danny, and shortly thereafter, a daughter, Carla.

  So of course, he and Olivia compromised. The bar was ripped out; the space that housed the air hockey table was replaced by a playhouse and the other side of the room was set up with a desk, PC, fax, printer, and telephone. Two slits of glass let in the sunlight of the outside world. Whenever Michael worked, he did so with the chirpy noise of the children and their friends. He didn’t mind. In fact, their little voices, their happy little voices, seemed to make his day.

  Laughter like that was completely unknown after he and his sister had been abandoned by their mother. Certainly, he had been miserable in Portland. As his own kids played, little Lego-like pieces of his past would snap into place and he’d remember a few of the things that led to his desertion by his mother.

  With the perspective that comes with time, Michael began to see that his mother, Adriana Barton, had probably done the best that she could. He didn’t even call her “Mom” in his mind when he thought of her anymore. It was always just Adriana. It was like she was some mythic, albeit vile creature. She was colored in his memory as the darkest shade of evil, a woman worse than Snow White’s wicked stepmother, or any of the Disney bitches.

  Die, Adriana, die. I hate you.

  When he was being abused by the adult who’d preyed on him when he was only a child, he wondered where Adriana had been. She should have been there. With him. With his sister. Had she left him and Sarah to endure this kind of an existence?

  An existence like her own? Had she left them so she could be free?

  Sometimes tears came when he thought about Portland and how Adriana had been beaten by Sarah’s father so badly that everyone thought she’d die. He remembered the time she came to see him at school and the teacher told her she had to leave.

  “You’re scaring the other children,” the teacher had said.

  Adriana had black-and-blue eyes that day. She’d tried to cover them with makeup, but she was never really good at such subterfuge. Her flinty eyes were incapable of lying. In fact, the only time she was ever successful in making up a story was the one about the ride to Disneyland.

  “We are going to have the best time there,” she said. “I haven’t been there in a long time, but I’ve wanted to go on Space Mountain.”

  “The Haunted Mansion and the pirate ride, too,” Michael said.

  “All of that. Just us three.”

  Later, when he revisited the trip from Portland to L.A., he remembered how they hadn’t brought any luggage. He remembered how Adriana had only thought to bring a carton of cigarettes for herself, and nothing for him or for Sarah. She cracked the window an inch as they drove over the snow-coated Siskiyou Mountains. The icy air reached inside the car.

  “Mom, we’re cold,” he told her.

  She just stared straight ahead.

  “Mom!”

  She pulled the cigarette from her lips and jabbed it at him. He pulled back, whimpering.

  Adriana turned on a Dolly Parton tape and the little girlish voice of the country singer kept them company the rest of the way there.

  He looked at the small circular scar on the back of his wrist. Adriana had left him with more than memories. She had left him with her mark. It was faint, but it never tanned, so it never really went away.

  Down in his basement office so many years later, the PC whirled as it booted up. The screen rolled and a desktop messy with Word files, jpegs of the kids, came into view. Michael pulled down the Favorites tab and hit the bookmark named: Jenna’s BZ Blog.

  An icon of a little yellow face with a frown advertised her mood. Her latest entry had been made earlier in the day.

  Michael’s anger swelled; his brown eyes were pools of incontrovertible anger. He knew that he’d screwed up badly, but somewhere along the way he thought that just maybe the news reports were wrong. That he’d truly done what he’d set out to do.

  Danny came from around the partition.

  “I need new batteries,” the boy said, holding up a laser gun.

  Michael opened a drawer. Paper clips, staples, even masking tape. No batteries.

  “Sorry, pal. Better tell your mama. I’m all out.”

  The little boy shuffled up the stairs and Michael returned his gaze to the computer screen. The mask that he fashioned for his son’s benefit melted from his face. It was like a shade that he could pull up and put down. He knew there was falseness to half of what he did. It wa
s mimicry. Sometimes, he’d look over at parents with their children, knowing that the connections they felt were different than his.

  It hurt. And the hurt gave him hope.

  Just maybe I’m not the monster I think I am.

  Olivia Barton carried a laundry basket heaped with dirty clothes down to the basement, past Michael’s office and over a carpeted floor littered with red, green, and blue cardboard bricks that were the obvious remnant of a hastily built and destroyed fort. Danny and Carla! Holding the basket against her hip, she opened the laundry room door and went inside the dark little room. A lightbulb illuminated by a pull of a chain swung as she turned it on.

  With Michael at work, she went about her Tuesday routine, sorting the whites from the darks. Each item of the kids’ clothing was like a memo of what their day had been. The food they ate. The grass stains. The pet hair. Whatever had been the activity was there waiting for a spray of prewash and the hope of a mother that the stain would get clean.

  It irritated her that Michael never seemed to get the hang of making sure his clothes were right side out before he unceremoniously dumped them into the laundry basket on the floor of their bedroom closet.

  The least he could do… Olivia’s thoughts trailed off and she noticed a dark, reddish smear against the white of one of Michael’s usually pristine T-shirts. The T-shirt had been nestled inside a blue pullover shirt. She pulled the shirts apart and looked at the smear. He wore that Tuesday…what did we have for dinner? Spaghetti? Tacos?

  She looked closer. The stain wasn’t hot sauce. She remembered they’d had a shrimp salad that night. No red sauce.

  She ran her fingertips over the stain, about the size of a half dollar. It was smooth, penetrating the fabric like a dye stain of color. No lumps. No bumps. She wondered if it was blood. If it was, she didn’t recall him saying that he’d injured himself.

  “Honey,” she asked later that night as they prepared for bed, “did you get cut or something?”

  Michael seemed unconcerned. “Not lately. Why?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought I found some blood or something on a dirty shirt of yours.”

  “Nope. I’m fine.” His reply was brisk. Curt. It was almost as if he thought his short denial was all he needed to say to stop her brain from ruminating on whatever it was that spun over and over.

  Leave me alone. Leave me be. You can’t know everything about me. I won’t let you.

  He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

  Why is she pushing me? Why is she ruining what we have?

  Olivia stood outside the bathroom door. No water was running. No sound of him urinating into the bowl. Silence.

  What is wrong with my husband? They lay side by side, drifting off to an uneasy sleep.

  Olivia woke as the moonlight poured though the slats of the miniblinds and fell on Michael’s bare upper torso. He’d gone to bed with a T-shirt on, but in the heat of the night, he’d shucked it from his damp skin. The retrofitted central air-conditioning of their bungalow was just that…central. It was barely a puff by the time it reached the master bedroom in the back of the house. Olivia shifted her weight and lifted her head from the pillow. Gently. Slowly. It hadn’t been a dream that stirred her from her restless sleep, but the worry that sometimes crept up in the dark of night.

  You really don’t know him. No one really knows him.

  Michael was on his back; blades of light played over his muscled chest. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and shifted a bit closer.

  The injury was the color of rust, jagged and positioned just below his collar bone.

  Michael’s brown eyes snapped open and Olivia let out a gasp. “What are you looking at?”

  “You scared me! I just couldn’t sleep,” she said, recoiling into the sheets.

  Michael stared hard at her before turning his back and facing the window. “Oh. Me, too. Hot in here. All I can do is rest my eyes.”

  Olivia pulled the blankets up around her neck. Suddenly, she felt a chill in the air.

  The two of them lay side by side, the digital clock rolling over to morning.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cherrystone

  The silvery fringes of his thick, wavy hair askew from the winter wind, Chris Collier stood at Emily Kenyon’s front door, a smile on his face and an overnight bag in hand. With barely a hello, Emily planted a deep kiss on his lips and led him inside. He smelled of the cologne she’d given him for his birthday. She was happy to see him for a thousand reasons, not all of them business, of course.

  But business was on her mind.

  “You feel like a movie?” Emily asked, pouring a glass of garnet-colored merlot from Stone Ridge, a local vintner that had once won a gold medal at a competition in Napa. It was the first winery in Cherrystone to be so honored. After a bacterial blight killed the largest of six remaining cherry orchards in the 1980s, some farmers jumped on the grape bandwagon. Signs were encouraging. Cherrystone might soon be better known for something other than cherries.

  A glass for her. A glass for him.

  Chris grinned. “I know what movie you’re talking about,” he said. “And I thought you were going to try to get me drunk.”

  Emily retrieved a DVD from her purse and slipped the disk into the player. “I don’t need to get you drunk for that.” Their eyes met and she smiled back. “But I thought I might have to in order to get you to look at this Crawford interview with me.”

  The blue screen of the flat-screen TV—which had been her sole splurge the previous year—turned black, then the image of Mitch Crawford came into view. She picked up the remote control and pressed the button that froze the image.

  “You already know that I think he’s your guy,” Chris said, settling on the couch, facing the TV. The Christmas tree twinkled from across the room.

  “We all think so,” she said.

  Emily pressed PLAY. The video display showed a small conference room with acoustic-tiled walls and an oversize clock. A voice—Emily’s—could be heard, but it was slightly out of range. It seemed she was giving instructions on where Mitch Crawford was to sit.

  “Nice interrogation room,” Chris said. It was a gentle jab, meant to make Emily smile.

  It did. “Thanks. We try out here in Podunkville.”

  Mitch took a seat facing the table-mounted camera.

  “He looks like he’s ready to go out to dinner or something,” Chris said, noting the man’s deep gray suit, red silk tie, and silk pocket square. “Who wears a pocket square, anyway?”

  “Except to a wedding.”

  “Or maybe a funeral.”

  From the couch, the pair sipped their wine from large balloon goblets and watched as Mitch Crawford alternately kept and lost his cool as Emily, off camera, asked him about Mandy’s disappearance.

  “He’s a peach all right,” Chris said. “The last bit was interesting to me.” He reached for the remote and backtracked on the DVD.

  It was Emily’s voice asking the question. “I need to know more about Mandy. Did she ever leave like this before?”

  “No. She was very reliable.”

  “Why did she leave, Mitch?” Again, Emily.

  Mitch’s eyes darted to something off screen. There appeared to be a slight wetness on his upper lip.

  “I have no idea.” He hesitated. “This interview is over. I’ll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing.”

  Chris got up and poured himself some more wine, and then returned to the couch. Mitch Crawford’s face was frozen on the flat screen. “All right. He’s everything you’ve said he was, including a world-class liar. He’s holding it together pretty well, but you can see he’s starting to sweat. That’s probably the reason he ended the interview—not that you weren’t pushing him hard, because you were.”

  “I tried. I think I did push too hard,” Emily said. “His holier-than-thou attitude brings out the worst in me.”

  Chris shrugged. “No worries, Em. I find it interesting that
he never mentions the baby.”

  “Me, too. It’s as if the baby doesn’t figure into his worries whatsoever.”

  “I also noticed how he says Mandy is so reliable, yet says he has no idea where she’d go, and that she’d never done that before.”

  Emily agreed. “Reliable people don’t run off.”

  “Not without a reason, they don’t.”

  She locked her eyes on Chris. “You don’t think she left him, do you?”

  “Not at all. But I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”

  “The more I get to know him, the more I wonder why she stayed with him at all.”

  “You know the answer, don’t you?” He looked over at Jenna’s portraits taken with Santa Claus from babyhood to high school. They were set in a row on the mantel among sprigs of holly Emily had plucked from the backyard before she’d given up on fighting the couple across the street for best decorated house on Orchard Avenue.

  Emily followed his eyes to the pictures.

  “Of course,” she said. “She wanted a baby. She’d waited for the SOB probably to tell her when the right time would be for her to have one. Not the right time for her. But—”

  He cut off Emily. “Right. The time that suited him.”

  “Maybe there was no right time.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Most pregnant women who are murdered are victims of the men who fathered their babies.”

  Chris finished his wine. “He didn’t want that baby, did he?”

  Emily set her glass down, too. “He probably never wanted the competition a baby would bring.”

  Emily Kenyon adored Chris Collier. She loved being with him, loving him. That part of their relationship had always been fulfilling, exciting, and something that fueled all of her fantasies when she was alone and longing for his touch. He was her dream. He was a broad-shouldered six-footer, with lively eyes and wavy dark hair that had begun to silver at the temples.

  “I like it this way,” he once told her, “kind of reminds me of my dad. He was gray by fifty-two.”

  Chris had often told Emily that after he retired, he wanted to sell his downtown condo and buy a farm in the rural part of the state.