A Cold Dark Place

Chapter Twenty

9:15 A.m., nineteen years ago, Meridian, Washington

The Whatcom County Superior Courthouse was the jewel of a revitalized Meridian, Washington. It was an old terracotta castle, with five gold-tipped spires that held court over a downtown that had seen a recession come and go, and a kind of renaissance emerge. The art museum had scored a major postimpressionists show-a coup for a city of Meridian's size. Nordstrom store officials had vowed to keep their location just where it was, thus ensuring that the mall going up in the hinterlands of the county would never be more than a second-tier destination.

It had been more than a year since the two Cascade University students were found on the sandbar. It had become a touchstone moment. Nearly every resident could recall where they had been when the news broke. The college had tightened security. The police stepped up neighborhood patrols. In a sense, the city dusted itself off and continued moving forward.

There were problems in the courthouse with the Dylan Walker double-homicide case. What had seemed to have been an exceedingly strong case was imploding. Olga Morris, who'd made the collar for Meridian Police Department, sat stone-faced while lawyers argued about whether or not the defense's theory of another perp could be heard by the jury. Ordinarily that wouldn't have been much of an issue. Blaming someone else had always been in the hip pocket of any half-good-and sometimes desperate-defense lawyer. But this one was tricky. No one could depose Tyler Ticen. No one could get him on the stand. This particular "I-didn't-doit-he-did" target was stone-cold dead a suicide without a note.

College student Ticen also worked at Builders' Center. Detective Olga Morris wondered who didn't work for Builders' Center. Ticen let several coworkers know that he was interested in Lorrie. An examination of his room on campus showed an overt interest in criminology, sociology, and truecrime books-one of which was about a killer with the same ligature and torture MO.

But he was dead. The suicide, the defense postulated, was a direct result of his growing guilt over the arrest of allAmerican charmer Dylan Walker. Walker enjoyed the volley of words as the lawyers pitted their wits against each other and case law. He sat somewhat smugly, Detective Morris thought, shifting his weight from one side to the other while keeping a slight smile on his handsome face. His hard brown eyes followed everyone in the courtroom like a roadside artist's painting of Jesus, only creepier. There was nothing soft about Dylan Walker. Hard body. Heart of stone.

All of that but no place to go but prison.

Olga hoped Walker would be off at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla as someone's bitch by month's end. But the petite detective was nervous. Her blond hair was longer now; she absentmindedly pushed it behind her ear. She leaned closer to capture every word being said by the lawyers with their backs like a wall in front of the crammed courtroom of spectators. The judge was actually listening to the public defender, a windbag who made grandstanding look like a classy move.

"Your Honor, it is my client's right to present an alternative theory of this case and you know it."

The judge, an old-timer with a bird beak nose and halo of gray hair, frowned. She turned to the prosecutor, a veteran of the worst criminal cases the region had seen, but who wanted to win this one to cap off a relatively distinguished career.

"I don't like this one bit, but I'm allowing it."

The prosecutor kept up a front of righteous indignation.

"Your Honor!"

"Can it!" The judge didn't bother looking at him; she turned her attention back to the bailiff and sighed. "Now let's bring out the jury and finish this case."

Olga felt her stomach dive. This BS is coming in? When there was so much that wasn't going to be presented to the jury. It was the system, she knew. But it still felt like a hard kick to the memory of those who'd come across Dylan Walker never to be heard from again. Although the case of the two dead college girls had led him to that courtroom, there were three others that hovered like apparitions throughout the proceedings. One was only twelve years old, a redhead named Brit Osterman.

Her case didn't fit the profile that the FBI had originally crafted for Meridian PD when the two Cascade coeds first went missing. Too young, they insisted. But then again, Olga knew, Dylan Walker was sixteen at the time. Maybe she was his first? The first sip of bloodlust had to come from someplace. Olga was all but convinced he killed the sixth grader.

The strongest link between Walker and a victim was a Seattle woman who went out for a jog in Walker's neighborhood. Tanya Sutter never came back. Her body was found a week later in a thicket of blackberries and fireweed off the old highway between Seattle and Tacoma. She had been wrapped in plastic. Bound. Shot. Dumped. Too much time had passed on that one and though interrogators tried to break Walker to force a confession, the man was Teflon. Nothing seemed to faze him. His gaze was cool, smug, almost indifferent. Not one ounce of indignation.

"I'm not a guy," Olga Morris had told the chief after that interrogation, "but if I were, I'd want to pop anyone who even made the suggestion that I brutalized some woman for kicks. But not this self-absorbed charmer. He just smiled those pearly whites and shrugged. It was like we were cutting into his time to kill."

There was suspicion of another victim, a girl named Steffi Miller who went missing while Walker attended a church youth camp in Nampa, Idaho, the summer of his senior year in high school. Her body was never found. In all, Dylan Walker had been linked to five dead or missing: Brit, Tanya, Steffi, Lorrie, and Shelley.

Unluckiest man in the world or serial killer? The press had already decided. More than a hundred reporters had descended on the gold-pinnacled courthouse to write about the nation's most handsome killer. Most were women. All wanted an exclusive interview, but Dylan Walker played hard to get.

"I'd love to, Connie," he'd say, "but my lawyer is dead set against my talking to anyone right now. But if I did give an interview, I'd do it with you"

He'd used the same line, or a variation thereof, over and over. "There's plenty of me to go around, once I'm exonerated," he said more than once.

Olga Morris sat still in her spectator's chair just behind the prosecution's table, her blood boiling. She'd already testified so she had nothing more to say officially. But she could barely contain herself as she overheard the twitters of Walker's burgeoning fan club. No one called him "Dylan Daniel Walker" in the three full-names fashion that was usually accorded to the suddenly notorious.

Instead they dubbed him "Dylan" or "Dashing Dylan," which finally morphed in to just plain "Dash"

The adulation made her skin crawl in unqualified revulsion. She knew that part of the problem was America's fascination with a handsome killer. The media fostered that kind of twisted thinking. Victims were pretty. Killers were ugly. But every once and a while the good-looking stumble. Ted Bundy was often described in press accounts as handsome and charming. But Dylan Walker was no Ted Bundy. Or rather, Ted Bundy was no Dylan Walker. If a photo lineup was made of Tom Cruise, a young Robert Redford, or Paul Newman, Dylan Walker, and Ted Bundy and a woman was requested to pull out the most handsome and least handsome in the array, Bundy and Walker would be the ones pulled-and Bundy would be on the losing end of the deal.

Even though there had been endless discussion about Walker, most of it was based on his looks, not his life. Not much was known about him. He'd been raised by a grandmother in Seattle. He was an only child. He had excelled at school, but barely graduated. He'd been deeply religious. And after those formative years, the trajectory of his life became exceedingly murky. Olga dug in deep but since he never held a job very long, never filed a tax return, didn't have any credit cards, and never had any close relationships, no one could really track where he lived at any given time.

Or what he d been doing.

Olga thought of him as one of those sharks she'd seen at the Vancouver Aquarium about two hours' drive from Meridian. He commanded the tank with stunning and relentless evil, cold eyes following every twitch of movement in the swirling clear waters of the expansive tank. Slowly he swam, almost bored and disinterested. He worked alone. Quietly. Stealthily. It was as if he wasn't even paying attention to anything at all. But he was. He did what he was born to do: kill. He did so quickly, effortlessly, and then moved on, crimson staining the water. As if it was nothing. He was an evil thing of beauty; lean and streamlined. That's what Dylan Walker was, the detective believed, a cunning predator with no attachment to anyone or anything. He was a killing machine.

7:15 A.M., twenty-one years ago, Seattle

"You know you want to go with me tomorrow."

Tina Winston was shy about going to the Walker trial all by herself. Sure she was an independent woman, but she also knew that joining the media circus was out of character. She thought she could summon the courage only if one of her best friends, Bonnie Jeffries, came along. Plus the long drive, about two hours, would be more fun with Bonnie in tow. She even dangled an offer of dinner at the new restaurant just south of Meridian.

"Come on," Tina pleaded. "It will be fun. The place is absolutely spectacular. The chandelier in the lobby is made of one thousand Waterford goblets turned upside down. It sparkles like diamonds against velvet."

Bonnie made a face. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "I have a lot to do around here tomorrow." Carrying her handheld phone, she wandered her living room, and then down the hall to the laundry room as she listened to Tina try to convince her. Even so, her mind was elsewhere. She wondered how one person could make such a mess. She worked four 10-hour days to ensure that she'd have Fridays to get the place ready for the weekend.

"My days off are precious, you know."

Tina pressed Bonnie. "What have you got planned?"

"Nothing much. I've got a ton of cleaning to do"

"Precious days off? So you want to spend it cleaning your house?"

Bonnie let out a little laugh. "Not everyone can afford a housekeeper." It was a bit of a dig. Bonnie was a low-level manager. Tina ran her own gift-basket business and she was making big money doing it, having landed an upscale retailer as a major account.

"Not fair. You could have joined me, you know," Tina said referring to her offer of a partnership four years ago.

"Don't remind me" She pinned the phone between her chin and shoulder and reached for the laundry basket. She turned on the water.

"Don't you ever feel you're in a rut?" Tina was going for the kill. She knew that Bonnie's life was work and nothing else. She didn't have a boyfriend. No kids. No social scene to speak of outside of church.

Bonnie watched the washer tank fill. She measured the detergent.

"Okay, you got me," she said. "I'll do it. Let's go check out Dylan Walker. He's cute for a killer."

"Stop that. He's not convicted. And I don't think he will be. He's a victim of an overzealous police department. You know the type that wants to put someone-really anyone behind bars"

Bonnie dumped her clothes into the washer. The lid bounced shut. "That's your theory."

"Yes, and I'm sticking to it," Tina said, her mood now elevated because Bonnie had agreed to go. "See you at seven"

Bonnie looked at herself in the mirror. She dropped her robe and stared hard. She was fifty pounds overweight, with a roadmap of stretch marks across her abdomen. In the dim light of evening, she tried to imagine herself as someone prettier. Like Tina. But Bonnie knew that the god of good genes had saddled her with her mother's nondescript fea tures and her father's big-boned frame. She had a plain face, pleasant brown eyes, and dark curly hair. Tina was pencil thin and strawberry blond. Whenever they went out together, men gravitated toward Tina. Bonnie had tried all diets from Weight Watchers to a liquid protein shake to the Scarsdale diet. She'd try in earnest for a couple of weeks, but in the end she'd give up. She'd been to so many free makeovers at cosmetic counters across downtown Seattle that she probably could work for any of the big makeup manufacturers. She hated how she looked. Part of her also hated Tina.

What does one wear to a murder trial? Bonnie Jeffries mulled it over for a minute, searching for control top underwear and her best bra. She selected a pair of black slacks and an aqua blouse; both were loose enough to make her have that just-lost-weight sensation that she welcomed above anything. Loose clothing was like dieting without having to do without. Bonnie was barely thirty, but she looked like someone's middle-age mother. She stacked up her clothes for the next morning on her dresser and trotted off to the kitchen. Rum Raisin ice cream out of the carton sounded so good.