Heart of Ice

Chapter Six

Mitch Crawford’s eyes were bottomless. Flinty. Cold. Sheriff Emily Kenyon felt the sparse hairs on the back of her neck rise. She’d been close to evil too many times to discount the feelings that niggled at her. It was as if somewhere inside there was a malevolent barometer telling her to be just a little more wary.

But not so wary that you let fear stymie you.

On the credenza behind her, the face of her daughter, Jenna, beamed in her graduation photo. Nearby, a little pink purse decorated with an eyeless flamingo and filled with pennies served as a paperweight.

And as a touchstone to terrible things in the past. Things that made Emily and Jenna closer than ever.

“I’m surprised at you,” she said, as they faced each other from across her desk. “You seem…” She paused to irritate him.

“What’s the word I’m looking for? Indifferent. That’s what I’m feeling from you here.”

It was a lie, and a strategic one.

Mitch, however, didn’t blink.

“Are you expecting me to cry?” Mitch asked.

“Some emotion would be nice, Mitch.”

He gripped the stack of fliers that he’d had made at the copy center. They were facedown, but through the cheap goldenrod-colored paper the photo of a woman was visible. The headline in squat block letters was also bold enough that it could be read backward through the paper: MISSING.

Mitch kept his arms folded tightly across his chest. The muscles that enveloped his sturdy frame like cables spun around a rigid spool tensed beneath a powder blue Hilfiger lamb’s wool sweater. He didn’t smile.

“Look,” Emily said, still sizing him up, “I don’t want anything from you but the truth.”

Mitch clutched his papers and stood up. “Jesus, Sheriff, you know me. You know my family. You know that I didn’t do anything to her.”

She asked if he’d mind if they spoke in the conference room.

“I’d like to record our conversation,” she said, waiting for him to decline.

But he didn’t.

“I have nothing to hide. You wouldn’t know it by the way you are treating me.”

She wondered if it spoke of arrogance or innocence, his willingness to be filmed.

With the stationary video camera recording, Emily sat across from Mitch so that she could meet his gaze head-on. She noticed how he hadn’t yet said Mandy’s name. She stayed quiet, hoping that her silence would invite the man with the ever-so-slowly-receding hairline and beefy biceps to reveal something of use in the investigation. To spill more. It was a technique that had served her well as a Seattle cop, then as a sheriff’s deputy, and finally as the sheriff.

“You need to be forthcoming,” she said. “We understand that things weren’t that—and I don’t mean to be unkind here—great between you,” she said, stopping herself and playing his game of not mentioning his wife’s name. “And your wife. You know your marriage was in trouble.”

The veins in his neck started to plump. “We had problems, but not any more than anyone else around Cherrystone or anywhere in this country!”

“Yes, but she was going to leave you.”

Mitch’s face had gone completely red. “I’m sick and tired of all the innuendo coming out of your office. I loved my wife.”

Loved, past tense.

Emily opened the folder and handed it to him like a menu. Inside was a photograph of a pretty blonde in a periwinkle sweater over a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Emily noted that Mandy was apparently a very traditional pregnant lady, in that she had chosen the same look her own mother’s generation had sported—pregnant woman as child. Big bows. Babyish prints. None of the trendy hipster black pregnancy duds for her—no bump-clinging spandex tops revealing a thin slice of tummy.

“I know what my wife looks like,” he said.

“Say her name.”

Mitch shoved the folder back. “Damn you, Emily. Mandy! Mandy is her name! Is this some kind of a test here?”

“Calm down, Mitch,” Emily said, her voice steady and commanding. “I want to find Mandy, too. I need some help here. Are you sure you’ve told us everything?”

Mitch turned away from her and headed for the door. “There isn’t any more to tell,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ve been to my place. You’ve interviewed everyone that I’ve ever known.”

“OK, then a few questions for you. I’m wondering why it is that you didn’t know where your in-laws were.”

“Because I didn’t.”

“You sent them there, Mitch. Essentially paid for it.”

“Look, I didn’t. Mandy did. Mandy decided to give them a free ride on our dime. I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know they’d gone to Mexico until after they got there. I was so pissed off at Mandy, I didn’t want the details of Luke and Hillary sipping margaritas. That trip was for Mandy and me.”

“I see. Seems like you don’t like anyone much, Mitch.”

“What’s the big deal? So what if I don’t get along with them? I’m not the first husband to have a lousy relationship with his in-laws.”

“Fair enough,” she said, not doubting that the Laytons didn’t care much for Mitch, but still unsure if he was being honest. Mitch Crawford was that kind of guy, overselling his story like he was trying to upgrade her into a car she couldn’t afford. “I need to know more about Mandy. Did she ever leave like this before?”

“No. She was very reliable.”

“Why did she leave, Mitch?”

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

From the hallway, Emily watched Mitch Crawford’s retreating figure. It was more than a hunch. She knew it in her bones. Mitch was holding back. Crime statistics indicated that Mandy was dead and that her husband had killed her. But there was no evidence. No blood.

“There’s a reason for that,” she told Jason.

“Yeah, he didn’t kill her.”

“But you saw the plastic bleach bottle in the trash.”

“Yeah, but if you went to my house you’d find two bottles in our trash. Bleach kills germs. I’ve got two germy nephews.”

Emily smiled. “I don’t know. Something’s with this guy.”

“Yeah, he’s full of himself, for one. I’ll bet his home gym is the biggest room in the house.”

“Wouldn’t be hard to guess his priorities,” she said.

“Anyway, Sheriff, just because the dude is a self-absorbed ass, that doesn’t make him a killer.”

Emily wasn’t so sure. “That remains to be seen.”

Across town, in the floodlit darkness of a snow-clad backyard of weed-free grass and four thousand daffodils yet to bloom, a man’s voice called out.

“Toby! Here, boy! Toby! Come!”

Mitch Crawford’s voice was nearly raw from calling. He’d turned on the pool lights and the patio lights, even the up-lights that forced a cheery, warm glow up the trunks of artfully grouped aspen and birch.

He banged a metal food dish against the flagstone patio that ran from a pair of ten-foot-tall French doors to the edge of a lapis-tiled pool. It being winter, the pool was entombed in a covering of blue plastic bubble wrap. A crust of ice formed in patches where it had splashed on the patio.

“Toby!” A wisp of white vapor rose from the edges where the warm water seeped against the pool’s lapis tile work. “Where are you?”

Something seemed odd, and Mitch moved closer to the pool. A piece of the bubble-insulated sheeting had curled along its edge. The covering was custom-made for a perfect fit and he wondered if he should ask for his money back. He bent down and started to adjust it, when a shadowy figure caught his eye.

A cat wandered across the white-dusted lawn. Balls of snow clung to its furry belly.

“I guess you haven’t seen Toby, have you?”

The cat barely regarded the man and continued on its path over the grass, onto the flagstone, and then off under the dark green of a precision-trimmed yew hedge.

“Toby!” he called once more. “Where are you, boy? Come here. Come home!”

Mitch pulled the covering taut and pulled himself to his feet.

As Mitch turned to go inside his oversize empty house, an indistinguishable dark shadow at the bottom of the pool near the cascading Jacuzzi caught his eye. What the? At first he thought it was a pile of leaves that had somehow become sucked under the plastic overlay. He ran to the electrical panel next to the cabana and turned on the overheads. Flash! The yard lit up like a high school football game. He bent down and lifted the plastic.

“Oh God! No!” he cried out. “Please!”