A Cold Dark Place

Chapter Twelve

Wednesday, 2:40 n.M., Cherrystone, Washington

The wind kicked up and blew just enough dust across the parking lot in front of the safety building so as to make the hairs stand up on the back of Emily Kenyon's neck. Jenna had been missing for thirty-two hours. Thirty-two hours is a lifetime. Life and death. Emily had cried until no more tears were left, but she also put on the kind of brave face that only a person who'd seen the worst humans can do to others can muster. It was a mask, she knew, but somehow it held her steady.

Sheriff Kiplinger was elated when KREM TV from Spokane called saying the network honchos might want to do a story on the missing detective's daughter. Emily was oddly ambivalent about the prospect. She'd been the first to jump at the chance when the media came-so concerned, so sincere-to profile a missing person. But not now. It felt more intrusive than helpful. She tried to explain herself to Kiplinger.

"I want to find her," she said, "not embarrass her to death"

He didn't get it. "That's flat-out stupid, Emily."

"Tell me how you'd handle it if it was your daughter?"

"I'd call out the cavalry," he said. "You know I would."

Emily put that out of her mind. The day had become one of those evidentiary roller coasters or maybe a merry-goround, as it seemed to go in circles with no end. She'd been on the phone with the bank card company. Nope, Jenna hadn't taken out a dime. She'd called every parent in the PTA phone book, grateful that it was still hard copy and not some goddamn online system. Old ways sometimes worked best. God knew if the Internet hadn't been invented, her daughter probably wouldn't be off who-knows-where with Batboy. She hoped, no she prayed, that Jenna had gone willingly.

Jenna wasn't Polly Klaas or Elizabeth Smart. No way. Emily hoped that there was some connection that was reckless and wrong, but ultimately less scary. She was living in a fool's paradise and deep down she knew it. Shali's printout from her computer was proof enough that something was terribly awry.

Do you think that a love could be so powerful as to be sick?

The words made Emily's skin crawl. She knew there was only one answer for such a question: "In your case, yes. Yes. Yes"

Jason Howard slipped into her office. He carried a pair of paper cups embedded in a cardboard tray.

"Latte?"

Emily barely nodded. "Thank you."

She pulled off the plastic lid and sipped.

"Any news?" he asked.

She shook her head, swinging her ponytail. It reminded her that she probably looked like garbage. Her hair was oily. Her makeup nonexistent. Looking good wasn't on her mind. Only Jenna.

"We'll find her," he said. "She'll be all right." "

Emily stayed mute. She felt so empty, so devoid of feeling. She never knew how it felt to lose someone in the night. Others had. She always comforted them. But just as no one really knows what it is like to be a mother until she holds her first child, no one who hadn't felt the sudden loss of a child could ever even approximate the stabbing ache that came with every breath.

I know you're not thinking about the Martin case right now," he started to say.

"Oh, but I am " Emily cut him off, summarily snapping herself out of the pity that had mired her, sucked her down, into the depths of despair.

"I know," he said, his bright eyes, now surprisingly compassionate for a young man who couldn't even begin to understand her pain. "I know ... if we find Nick, we might find Jenna"

"We'll find her," she corrected. She looked down at her latte, trying hard not to cry.

Jason spoke to fill the awkward silence. "Anything more off Shalimar Patterson's computer? Jenna's Mac?"

"Not a goddamn thing. Both girls use something to avoid spyware, viruses, and all the rotten stuff out there. I can't even tell what sites she visited. She must have cleaned it just before the chat with Batboy."

"Nick. Nick Martin."

"Right, Nick." Jason hesitated a moment. "I know I'm just a deputy around here," he said. "But I did call the Spokane ME about the Martin case. For an update. I know it isn't my job, but you and the sheriff were so busy with Jenna stuff. Are you mad?"

Emily sighed and leaned forward. She even managed a little smile. Despite all that was going on Jason Howard was still doing his job. That was good. She regretted how she'd chewed him out at the crime scene. It was like shooting the Easter Bunny.

"That's good, Jason. Did they have anything for us?"

The young man pulled up a chair. He tried to temper his excitement, but he was bursting with the news.

"Yes, they did. They told me that the victims had probably been tied up before they were shot"

With those words, Emily found herself back at the crime scene. The bodies had been such a mess. So battered by the debris of the tornado, she doubted that outside of the gunshot wounds there'd be little in the way of forensics. But this was good. This was real information.

"Bound? Then murdered?" she asked. Her bloodshot eyes widened. She looked down at her cup, already empty. She hadn't even remembered drinking it, let alone sucking it down as she apparently had.

"Yup. That's what she said. Paperwork's on its way. Some sick puppy really did a number on that family. They were held captive, like animals. Maybe he tortured them, too. Maybe he made them really, really suffer."

Sick puppy. The term was not only at odds with the deed, but it lessened the truth of what the killer had done. A puppy doesn't rage. A puppy doesn't do the unthinkable. But a Batboy just might.

Emily's thoughts swung back to Jenna. It was like Jason Howard had slammed a door in her face. He didn't mean it. But she wondered why it hadn't dawned on him that the socalled sick puppy was Nick Martin. And that the sick puppy might be holding her daughter.

Jenna! Where are you?

"I'm going over to the high school," she said, abruptly rising. "I need-we need every bit of information we can get about Nick." She drummed her fingertips on a manila folder on her desk.

Inside was a copy of Judge Crawford's subpoena for all of Nick's school files.

Wednesday, 3:25 P.M.

As she walked from her car to the school's administration office, Emily Kenyon was acutely aware of the looks of concern coming at her from in every direction. Kids she didn't know, but who probably knew Jenna and why her mother the cop was there, were fixated on her. They stared, mouths slack jawed. Only one had the courage to come forward, a boy of about sixteen. He had tiny white shells strung on jute around his neck. A chain dangled from his belt loop to his pocket. He'd been fighting acne and the smell of the ointment he used was heavy.

"Sorry 'bout Jenna. She's a good girl," he said.

Emily nodded. She could have said something, but she just had no words. Her silence seemed to make the boy step back. He looked suddenly insecure and awkward.

"Everyone liked her," the boy added, looking down at the ground.

"Likes her," Emily finally said, correcting his tense. "I'll find her. She'll be home. She is a good girl."

"Yup. Just wanted you to know."

Emily swung from mom to detective mode. "Who are you?"

"Kev Bonnets," he answered, this time, looking her in the eye.

"Do you know my daughter?"

He shifted his weight and looked down. "Not really. But she's talked to me a few times. Nice. Always nice to everyone"

"Do you know Nick Martin?"

"Hell, I mean heck no. The guy's a freak"

Emily stared hard at the boy. His blotchy face. His gangly arms. He was only a notch above Nick Martin on the lowest rung of the high school's social ladder. Yet in his own somewhat earnest manner, he was trying to help.

"It's been awhile since I was here, but all of us have had our turn being a freak," she said. "That's just the way high school is, or was"

"Guess so," he said.

She fake smiled before turning away and walking into the office.

"I'm back with the court order for Nick Martin's student file," Emily told the secretary. She could see the top of Sal Randazzo's beaconlike pate as he looked up from his desk. He got up and started toward her. His mouth was a straight line. His dark eyes sparked.

"Let me see that," he said.

Emily slid the subpoena across the counter. A couple of girls tabulating the day's absences pretended to be busy at work. When one looked over and caught Emily's gaze, she smiled.

Making Randazzo squirm was fun.

"Is Jenna going to be okay, Mrs. Kenyon?" said a pretty blonde with a mouthful of metal.

Emily recognized her from the intramural basketball team that Jenna had been on a few years ago. She was a nice girl. God, the whole school was filled with nice boys and girls. Why this? Why did her daughter find the only bad apple in the barrel?

"I'm sure we'll get it all sorted out," Emily said. She shifted her attention back to the principal, who by then was done reading the paperwork.

"I'll get you the files myself," he said. With an irritated look on his face, Randazzo vanished around the corner to the file room. He returned with a green folder. A very thin green folder.

"Is that it?" Emily asked.

He shrugged, and she opened it. There were no more than ten sheets inside. One was a permission slip from Peg Martin for her son's participation in a field trip to a dairy outside of the county. A few pages indicated some visits to the nurse. Finally, the basics of his life-his gender was male, he was born in Seattle, his parents' names and occupations.

Nothing more. Nothing at all.

What did I expect? Emily asked herself. He was a kid. He didn't have a life yet.

"This is it?" she repeated.

`.. Fraid so," Randazzo said, impatiently. "We don't carry a lot of paper on our kids. I'm surprised that the permission slip for the trip to Clover Dale Farms is in there. That should have been purged long ago"

Emily looked up from the minidossier on a troubled high school kid. She held her tongue. The pretty blonde looked over. A beat of silence. It wasn't Randazzo's fault that he was complete nincompoop. He probably was born that way.

"Judge says I can take these" She turned for the door. In doing so she caught the eyes of the girls working at the attendance office one last time and smiled in their direction. It was an invitation for them to come speak to her if they wanted, but they just went back to their work.

Emily felt the buzz in her purse, and then came the muffled, but familiar ring. She had begun to hate the Elvis Costello ringtone Jenna had downloaded as a surprise. What had once seemed so silly that it made them laugh until their sides ached now seemed derisive and a sad reminder.

"Hey Emily, can you come back to the office?" It was Kiplinger. His normally gregarious nature was masked by concern. "Marina Wilbur is here to see you"

Emily searched her memory, but nothing came up. She didn't know anyone by that name. Before she said so, Kip offered up more information.

"She's Peg Martin's sister. From back east. She's here to make arrangements"

"I'll be right there" Emily flipped her phone shut and sat in her car. The seat belt warning pinged, but she paid it no mind. She turned the ignition and looked in the rearview mirror, catching her own reflection for the first time. Her eyes were underscored with dark circles. This is what a mother looks like who has lost her daughter. The face is mine.

Emily engaged the seat belt, which stopped the pinging. She wanted to cry.

Wednesday, 4:45 P.M.

Kiplinger was as grim-faced as Emily had ever seen him and they'd been through some pretty bad cases, though nothing of the magnitude of the Martin murders. He met her in the parking lot in front of the Public Safety building in downtown Cherrystone. His anxious countenance disturbed Emily to such a degree, she didn't turn off the ignition. The Accord idled. She pushed the button and the window slid down.

"I wanted to catch you before you came inside. Didn't want to have this conversation on the phone," he said. "Can I get in?"

Emily indicated all right with a quick dip of her head.

"What is it, Kip?" She called him by his nickname, rather than the more formal "Sheriff" that she used around the office. This felt exceedingly personal. "Have you heard something about Jenna?"

He shut the door and struggled to adjust the front seat to accommodate his six-foot, 200-plus-pound frame.

"No. Let's drive away from here"

Without speaking, she put the car in gear and it rolled from the lot to the main street.

"Let's go to the park and talk. And no, I haven't heard anything about Jenna. But that's what I want to talk about"

"You're scaring me," she said, her eyes switching from the road to Kip, then back again.

"Don't be scared. We're just going to talk and we just can't do it at the office. Too many people listening all around"

A spot under a willow that hung over the street like an archway. She parked and they walked over to a picnic table. A couple of preschoolers played nearby on a jungle gym, their mothers fixated on their every flip and twirl. A poodle was tethered to the slide. It barked sharply. It was a sunny morning and for a moment it seemed like any other day.

But that was all about to change. Kip lit up a smoke and faced Emily, his big brown eyes full of concern.

"Look," he said, "I know this is awkward. But I need to know how you and Jenna were getting along."

Emily knew where he was going and she didn't like it one bit.

"How can you even say that to me? You know we got along. Are you trying to suggest that she ran away?"

Kip narrowed his gaze. "That's right. There really isn't anything to suggest that she left against her will. You know that. She wasn't abducted"

"We don't know that. We don't know anything for sure. And where is this coming from?" Emily stood up. She wanted to leave. It felt so insulting that her boss, her friend, a man that she trusted more than just about any other would sit there and utter such a cruel lie.

"I talked to David. He said that Jenna wanted to come live with him. You'd argued about it. Isn't that right?"

The poodle got off his leash and started running through the park. One of the mothers was frantically chasing him, while calling over her shoulder for her daughter to stay put.

The distraction was only momentary, and Emily's anger was a volcano.

"Goddamn that David! What an idiot! He thinks his backbiting comments against me are helpful in his daughter's disappearance? What kind of a man would put his hate toward his ex-wife over the love of his own little girl?"

"David called us. He talked to Jenna late last night. She called him. She's fine. She's-"

It was a molten iron spike to her heart. "What? He talked to her? Why didn't he call me? Where is she? What did she say to him?"

Kip motioned for her to be seated. "Take a breath. One question at a time, all right?"

Emily planted herself on the rough-hewn wooden bench, her heart pounding and sweat dampening her underarms. She was mad and relieved at the same time. Jenna was alive. She wasn't Polly Klaas. Jenna Kenyon was alive!

"Please," Emily said, "tell me everything my daughter said."

Kip exhaled a stream of smoke. "David told us she called last night about midnight. Said she was calling from a pay phone-the caller ID indicated she used a calling card-I knew you would ask. She was a little shaken. She said she'd be home soon. She was helping a friend in trouble."

"What friend?"

"She didn't say. David pressed her for more details and she was pretty adamant that none would be coming. She did say one thing for you, though. `Tell mom, I'm doing the right thing."'

Emily flashed to the sheet metal sign that hung in her daughter's bedroom. It was the same sign that she'd displayed when that room was hers. It was made to look like a NO PARKING sign and read:

DO THE RIGHT THING -EVEN IF IT HURTS.

"What else did she say?"

Kip shook his head. "Nothing. That's all. David said she was on the phone no more than a minute, if that long."

Distrust won over relief. "I don't believe him. That bastard's got her. My daughter is not a runaway." She didn't even care that Kip was right next to her and was going to hear intimate family business.

She flipped open her cell phone and punched the code for David. It rang five times then the recording came on. Jenna must be with him. If she was with anyone else, if that ridiculous story about a mysterious phone call was true, then David would be standing by waiting for another call or even news from Emily in case she had received a similar call. He would pick up right away. Unless he knew where Jenna was safely at his side.

Wednesday, 7:45 RM.

What had happened at the Martin place on the Thursday before the tornado? It was after hours, but there was no going home. There was no reason to. Jenna was gone. The phone was forwarded. And there was the matter of the Martin murders. Emily Kenyon studied the Spokane coroner's autopsy report after it arrived bundled into one of those cheap accordion files. She'd always had a strong stomach and barely winced at the photographs that accompanied such files. But in the case of Mark, Peg, and Donovan Martin, Emily fixed her attention on the coroner's schematics not the photos of their battered, bruised, and bloodied bodies. The schematics, the distillation of reality, were actually more telling. They were impersonal figures, no genitalia, no hair to suggest a woman or man's body. Just delicate black lines in the shape of a human form on a plain white sheet of paper. There were three of them. Mark Martin's wounds were the most severe. His limbs were absent from the schematics. An X drawn by the coroner indicated where he'd been shot in the upper back, probably at relatively close range. Peg Martin was next. Her wounds were beyond comprehension but it was there in black and white. She'd been shot in the chest. There was extensive damage to her torso-postmortem, the coroner noted. Finally there was the youngest, victim, Donovan Martin. Like his dad, Donny had suffered a single gunshot to the back. A big black X marked the spot where the bullet had entered, another where it had exited his frame.

Emily set each of the sheets of paper across her desk. Muzak filtered in from the hallway and footsteps came and went, but never once did she look up. So much of what is routinely learned about what happened to each victim was quite literally gone with the wind. The tornado had swept away any trace evidence-fibers, hairs, even shell casings that had been left behind by the killer. Why had Mrs. Martin been found nude? Labs for the presence of semen came back negative. She hadn't been sexually active that morning, and unless the killer had used a condom, she likely hadn't been raped. The nudity was puzzling, however. Emily just couldn't wrap her brain around what had taken place. Maybe she'd just gotten out of the shower? Or was in her robe? She'd been bound the only one of the three. From what Emily knew, Peg had called the schools and Mark's office with the urgent message to get home. Had the killer used Peg to lure Mark upstairs after he'd placed that call to Mark's office? There was no way of knowing.

But at least one person probably had an inkling, if not a hand in it. Nicholas Martin. And Emily had only two questions to ask him: Why had he done this? And what did her daughter have to do with any of it?

Reluctantly Emily went home to the empty house on Orchard Avenue, full of memories, but missing the one spark of life that was her daughter.

God, where is she?