Heart of Ice

by Gregg Olsen

  “She would never want to be cremated. She was raised in Catholic schools, for goodness sake. I mean, we weren’t Catholic, but a lot of that rubbed off on her anyway,” Hillary Layton told Emily as they talked in her office, the morning of the ceremony at the Methodist Church.

  “I know it feels wrong to you, but he is her husband. He has the power.”

  “I know. But it has to stop, Sheriff. You have to make him pay.”

  More than four hundred people showed up in the church that held so many memories. Mandy’s wedding, her vigil, and now her funeral service. Mitch Crawford followed her family to the front row, but there might as well have been a force field between them. They didn’t speak. They didn’t sit close. No one knew that the pale pink casket was empty. People who filed up spoke to Mandy and her baby.

  “God is watching over you both now,” said Samantha Phillips, Mandy’s closest friend, her big green eyes raining tears. “I love you, Mandy. I love your sweet baby, your sweet Chrissy.”

  The Laytons went next. Mr. Layton rested his big hands on the casket and began to caress it.

  “I had two dreams in my life, Mandy. Both of them involved you and your mother. No man, no father, could have ever asked for more. You’re alive in my heart as you were the day we brought you home from the hospital.” He had a million more things to say, but no more words came from his lips. Mrs. Layton took her husband by the hand and led him back to his chair.

  As the Laytons huddled together in the front pew, a mass of grief and unfulfilled dreams, the entire congregation watched as Mitch Crawford walked up to the casket. His gait had lost its swagger and he dissolved into tears as he placed two white roses on the blue casket. He said only three words that anyone could hear.

  “I’m sorry, baby.”

  The only real piece of evidence—outside of Mandy’s body and the chains that had failed to weight her body into the mud of the Miller’s Marsh Pond—was the down-filled sleeping bag that had encased her remains like a big, blue pupa. Jason visited all the local sporting goods stores in Cherrystone, and based on the photos Mountain Mania was identified as the manufacturer. The model—a down-filled, mummy-bag style—had been discontinued for at least ten years.

  “It had leather ties,” a clerk at the Big Five Sports Center said, while tapping on the photocopy that Jason slid onto the clerk’s counter. “Now the ties are nylon. Vegans, I’m told, like to camp, too.”

  Later that afternoon, Jason arrived at the sheriff’s office with tired feet and little to show for his long day of digging for something to tie Crawford to the murder of his wife. He found Emily in her office finishing up a phone call.

  “How’d the bag ID go?” she asked, placing the phone in its cradle. The brightness in her face faded as she read her deputy’s transparent expression of defeat.

  “About what we expected. Old bag,” he said. “No one’s sold one around here—around anywhere probably—for more than a decade.” Jason slumped in a chair facing Emily’s desk. He took a peppermint from her covered dish and popped it inside his mouth.

  “State crime lab says that fibers on the bag are consistent with an array of GMC and Ford interiors—in reality just about every car company uses the same carpet suppliers, it seems,” Emily said, taking a mint for herself. “Who knew that global outsourcing would trickle down to be a problem for forensics?”

  “We’re basically screwed on that, aren’t we?” he asked.

  Emily didn’t want to say so aloud, but inside she agreed. “Nope,” she said, “we’ll find out where this bag came from and then we’ll find our killer.”

  A search warrant served the day Mandy Crawford’s body was found had turned up nothing to connect the sleeping bag with the Crawford residence.

  “Mitch Crawford isn’t the camping type,” Emily said.

  “Yeah, he’s a condo time share or, better yet, a summer-place-on-the-lake kind of fellow.”

  She nodded. “That sounds about right.”

  The only other remotely remarkable identifier of the bag was a five-inch, nearly square hole at the top of the bag, near the ties. The lab team was unable to conclude when the tear had been made and if it had any relevance to the homicide.

  The chains were so mundane, so heartbreakingly average, they could have been from anywhere in the country. There was nothing on them—no paint chips, no oil, no patterned markings—that could trace them to any life they might have had before they were wrapped around Mandy’s corpse. It was as if Mandy’s killer had been extremely careful, cunning, and deliberate.

  Or, Emily thought, very, very lucky.

  PART TWO

  The Other Pretty Girls

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  San Diego

  Two members of a litter crew from a San Diego youth detention home found Lily Ann Denton’s body, the day after it was dumped in a gully behind the restroom of a rest stop. At first the boys who found her thought she was a blow-up doll that had been coated in ketchup.

  “Dude, check this out. Some sick shit over here. One of those plastic chicks guys bone when they can’t get a real chick.”

  The older boy, a Mexican gangbanger with an ironic name—Angel—bent down to take a look.

  “Shit, that’s no doll, dude. That’s a dead ho.”

  “I’m not baggin’ that. Let’s get the boss over here.”

  “Bitch must have really pissed off her pimp.”

  “Yeah, stupid ho.”

  The young men went back to the van. Within twenty minutes, the rest stop was bathed in the blue light of ten squad cars and the red light of an ambulance—as unneeded as it was. An hour later, a coroner’s van from the city of Rialto showed up.

  “A mile west, and the dead girl would have been in San Diego County,” one cop said to another as they watched Rialto’s finest bag the body for transport. “Getting murdered is bad enough, but Jesus, to end up in penny-pinching Rialto’s system. That’s just insult to injury.”

  Someone’s daughter had been brought in the night before, unceremoniously dumped in the chiller until that morning. Dr. Kenneth Jensen looked at the body on the autopsy table, water running from a rubber hose around the figure like a bloody moat. Every now and then, water pressure would ebb and the bloody moat would drain completely to reveal the gleam of the stainless-steel construction. The table was a thing of beauty. Brand-new. Never been used.

  Because of his age—fifty-nine—Dr. Jensen saw every young woman as a “girl” when she was splayed out and presented for the last conversation she’d ever have with another human being.

  That it was a one-way conversation was irrelevant. Even though she couldn’t say a word, her body told him so much. It was almost funny that way. But as he looked over the body, he could almost hear the voice of the girl telling him in breathless detail who she was and what had been done to her.

  What had led her to his table for that last conversation?

  She was white. Thin, but well-nourished. Her hair was shaved in strips, hastily so. She had the remnants of blond hair that had been bleached at a salon—a good mix of colors, not the cheap from the bottle look. She had perfect teeth, undoubtedly aided by expensive orthodontia. He noticed the front teeth had been fronted by porcelain veneers, again a sign of a person with means and with the desire for perfection. Her jeans, Sevens for All Mankind, were unbuttoned and dropped far below her waist. Her thong underwear had been torn at the crotch, so its waistband rode up high like a bloody and tattered ribbon around her waist.

  Who was this pretty girl? he wondered.

  Dr. Jensen spoke into his microcassette recorder, which rested on the dissecting tray that swiveled over her lifeless body. He gave his sad and final description of what he saw, the details as cold and clinical as they had to be. Earlier in his career, he’d made the mistake of showing emotion and his transcriber asked him about it. Emotion, he learned, had nothing to with medicine for the dead or the living.

  He shut off the recorder.

  “Now, my d
ear, tell me, what happened to your hair?”

  It was a good question, of course. Her head had been crudely shaved. By her? By her killer? And why? He thought of the pop star who in some fit of lunacy had pulled into a California hair salon and grabbed the clipper and shaved her head. In two minutes, she’d turned from a beautiful young woman to a sad-looking alien being. She had gigantic eyes and a dome head that was the sickly whitish grey of a body drained of life, of blood. Pundits said that the pop star had been crying for help or had sought to cleanse her mixed-up life by shearing her locks and starting over. Renewal. New beginnings.

  Balderdash, Dr. Jensen thought.

  In this case, he doubted that the woman had cut her own hair. She was a girl, it appeared, who was very concerned about her looks. The killer must have done the hasty clip job. Track marks where the clipper hadn’t done its job left a few thin bands of long hair. Those hairs, more so than the stubble, indicated that she had been a blonde in life. But the killer had taken all of that away. It was as if killing her hadn’t been enough.

  The killer.

  Yes, it was obvious it was a homicide. The cause of death was staring him right in the face and it was incontrovertible. Even though it wasn’t his job—that was the bailiwick of the detectives—he wanted more than merely the cause. Dr. Jensen was all about the why.

  Fixing her weight at 110 was easy; a scale was built into the table. Height was easy, too. She was 5 feet 3 inches. There was a centimeter option, too. But he ignored it.

  This is America, for God’s sake! he thought.

  Working from her feet to her waist, the medical examiner used heavy shears to snip through the fabric of her dark-dyed jeans. The shear’s tips were bull-nosed so as not to snag her flesh. The poor girl had been through so much already. No need to add insult to injury.

  A song came on the radio he piped into the autopsy suite and he pinpointed the artist and the date: Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” 1972. He smiled. He had a grim job, and with no money in the budget for an assistant, the radio kept him company.

  “You weren’t even born when this was a hit,” he said to the dead girl.

  She was completely nude now. Jeans cut off. The tattered thong was snipped away and placed into a stainless-steel tub along with the jeans. She had been topless when she was found. No jewelry. Nothing else on her body.

  He probed her mouth, vagina, and anus with three clean swabs. It was hard to tell if this girl had been raped. There were no injuries to those orifices, but the lab guys would be able to determine if there was any semen, any killer’s DNA.

  Gilbert O’Sullivan’s depressing little ditty had ended and the radio offered up news about the weather. It wasn’t what the ME wanted to hear. Shit, more rain, he thought. What happened to “It never rains in Southern California”?

  Albert Hammond. He was unsure if the year was ’71 or ’73.

  He made a mental note to remind himself to cancel Saturday’s tee-time at the links. He hated playing golf in the rain and he didn’t care who thought he was a pussy.

  So there she was, this baldheaded girl on a stainless-steel table. Her eyes stared into the space of the autopsy suite. He turned the overhead light toward her exposed breasts and the hideously large gash in her chest.

  He lifted a flap of skin, and water and blood squirted at him.

  “Damn it,” he said, taking a step backward, before resuming his exam.

  The wound was enormous. It had been cut crudely, not in the fashion that had been suggested by the cops who’d found the body.

  He cut a wider incision and reached for the rib spreader.

  “Wonder if someone harvested her kidney or something. You know,” the cop who helped transfer the body to the ME’s office had said, “one of those black market deals.”

  The ME didn’t think so. If someone had sought the girl’s kidneys, they didn’t do a good job. Both kidneys were in place.

  More fluid oozed. It wasn’t blood. It appeared to be bloody water, a kind of watered down Bloody Mary that came from a sprinkler system that had rained on her since she died.

  Mary, he thought, I’ll call her Mary. Until we find her folks.

  The music playing was a Mariah Carey song, one of those in which the singer contorted her voice to such a degree that to Dr. Jensen’s old-school way of thinking, he could no longer make out the tune. He didn’t play his date-the-song game when Mariah came on the radio.

  The rib spreader moved easily. Too easily. Normally, it took some force to pull apart the bones so that the ME could have access to the vital organs. They all waited there, in their protective cage to be plucked out, examined, weighed and photographed like an organic and hideous still life.

  Something was wrong. The ribs on the right side of the body had been snapped. Car wreck? Beaten in the chest with a baseball bat?

  No bruising to indicate that at all.

  Dr. Jensen went inside. Something was missing. Yes, the kidneys were there. He aimed a light toward the right of the dark red cavity that was the girl’s chest. It was empty. Dark. A void.

  “I’ll be,” he said out loud, “the cop might be right, after all.”

  The girl’s heart was gone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dixon, Tennessee

  Even though she lived in the inland region of Washington, Jenna Kenyon knew she was a kind of a geographic snob when it came to her idea of natural beauty. After her parents tried to make a last stand in their marriage by leaving Seattle for her mom’s childhood home in Cherrystone, she reluctantly allowed herself to see some beauty in the arid part of a state split in two by the jagged edge of the Cascade Mountains.

  Before she started traveling and actually seeing the “middle” parts of the country, she figured there was no compelling reason to go there. If there wasn’t a coastline, what was there to look at? When she took the job with Beta Zeta national offices, she had her eye on the West Coast. She imagined herself touring campuses in California, Oregon, Arizona, and even Washington. She thought of foggy days in San Francisco, surfing in Malibu, hiking in the Sierras. Shopping in Portland, where there was no sales tax, was also very, very appealing to a young woman on a squeaky-tight budget.

  It just didn’t work out that way.

  “Congratulations, Jenna, we want you to be our newest national consultant,” the call from some woman in the personnel offices of the headquarters. “We have a very special assignment for you, my dear.”

  Jenna, who was at home when the call came through, motioned to her mother and mouthed the words “I got the job.”

  Emily put her arms in the air and mouthed back “wonderful.”

  Jenna’s face fell as the woman on the phone detailed the specifics.

  “You’ll be the consultant for the Southern region, including Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky.”

  “But I applied for the West Coast,” Jenna said, barely concealing her disappointment.

  “I know, dear. But we’re trying to lead the way in geographic diversity. Diversity of all kinds is important to being the best we can be.”

  At first it almost seemed an offer she could refuse. Alabama? Mississippi? Neither were places she’d ever imagined visiting if she lived to be a hundred. She’d have considered giving New Orleans a shot, but Katrina and the fact that there were no BZ houses on any campus there kept her from at least a little bit of Southern glamour.

  Six months into the job, Jenna knew how foolish she’d been. She’d come to appreciate the warmth of the people of the South, a region in which it seemed there were no strangers. She loved the food, too. If eating real-crispy-buttermilk-soaked fried chicken and corn cakes meant an extra lap at the track that was fine with her.

  With her mother immersed in the Mandy Crawford case, Shali drove Jenna to the Spokane airport for the flight to Nashville. It was a Friday morning and the next day had a full slate of things that needed her attention.

  “I’d like to tell those old lad
ies in the BZ office that these girls have no interest in being the best sorority in America.”

  “When we were at Cascade, we didn’t care either,” Shali said, digging a candy bar from her purse with both hands—while she drove.

  “Right. I know.”

  “You don’t have to do this much longer.” Shali pulled over at the passenger drop-off zone. A taxi honked and she resisted the urge to raise her middle finger.

  Jenna smiled at her best friend. “I know. See you in a couple of weeks. Hey, maybe we’ll have a wedding to plan for the spring.”

  Shali looked very interested. “Your mom’s going to finally say yes to Chris?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  “If she doesn’t I might. He’s old, but he’s kind of hot, don’t you think?”

  Jenna rolled her eyes. “Shali, what am I going to do with you?”

  Shali grinned and checked her makeup in the mirror. “Same thing as always. Keep an eye on me.”

  Jenna hugged her best friend and disappeared into the airport with a smile on her face and the feeling that despite her faults, her inappropriateness, her over-the-top behavior, Shali Patterson was a pretty good friend.

  Jenna Kenyon had checked out the Dixon campus online and surfed a little on the Web about the region. Of course, all the images were of summer festivals, baskets of flowers, green lawns, and rose-covered fences. Even in the dead of winter, she could see that the rolling hillsides and massive oaks were the bones of a scenic region. Dixon, a town of 30,000, was halfway between Nashville and Knoxville on Interstate 40.

  Jenna was more indie rock than Carrie Underwood, but she let the radio feed her the local flavor as she drove east. It wasn’t a hard job that she had to do, and it wasn’t the end of all of her career aspirations.

  The flight from Spokane to Seattle to Nashville took forever and by the time she’d picked up her car from the Alamo lot and drove to the campus, she was beat. Although it was dark, a fresh layer of snow brightened the somewhat familiar drive. Last time she’d been to the house there, it had been summertime. It was actually easier to make out where she was with the canopy of leafy trees that were now dormant. Giant red oak trees defiantly clung to their shriveled, leathery leaves. She turned off the highway and drove toward campus.