Heart of Ice

Chapter Thirteen

Cascade University, south of Spokane

He’d been watching her all night. She never paid him a single glance. Her sole focus seemed to be on herself. She’d made several trips with her carbon-copy sisters to the Kappa Chi upstairs bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder like she was headed into battle. In a way, she was. The frat bathrooms were notoriously filthy. No TP. Just squat, do your business, and flush with a well-placed foot. If not too drunk, of course. When she and the pack returned to the party they were giddier than ever, with lips lacquered and hair fluffed up to look messily styled.

Bet she loves the bedhead look, he thought. Bet she’s not as hot as she wants everyone to believe.

Tiffany Jacobs brushed right by him as she made her way to the basement. She could feel the heat of a hundred bodies rise in the dank passageway. She caught the peculiar blend of odors—vomit, beer, pot.

Guys are so gross, she thought.

The frat boys were playing boat races with some of the other drunken sorority girls down there. Upturned plastic drinking cups floated on a slimy beer surface on a sheet of plywood suspended between a pair of sawhorses procured for the game. Drink. Slide the cup. Push it to the edge. Drink. With each heat, a cheer erupted with the kind of enthusiasm that might have greeted the winner of the America’s Cup.

But this was the big blue plastic beer cup.

The room was crowded and the walls were so hot, they practically wept condensation. Tiffany’s rubber flip-flops stuck to the concrete floor from the coating of spilled beer that shined like shellac.

“I’m going to get some air,” she told her crew, all teetering woozily on a chilly night of beers. One of her Beta Zeta sisters, an unfortunate girl with brown hair and teeth that had never seen the benefits of orthodontia, started to follow. She was one of the four Lindseys who had pledged that year. Tiffany knew she was a mistake, but they needed another girl to make their quota. Lindsey S. wasn’t really BZM—Beta Zeta Material—but she had a high grade-point average.

“No, Lindsey S. I’ll be back. I’m going to call my mom. You stay here.”

Lindsey S., drunk and bored, complied and returned to the boat races.

Tiffany shimmied through the tightly woven human mass on her way to the door. Her mom had called earlier in evening—twice.

He was right behind her, just close enough to keep her in his sightline, but not enough to make her feel uncomfortable.

The cool night air blasted her face and sent a welcome chill down her body.

If Satan threw a party, he’d have it at Kappa Chi, Tiffany thought, as she walked up the concrete steps from the basement to the yard. Bits of broken glass shimmered.

She could hear the sound of a couple making out by a massive oak tree that sheltered much of the yard. She went the other direction, toward the pool, reached for her cell phone, and dialed the speed number for her mother.

“Hi, honey,” her Mom said. “I wondered if you’d call me back tonight.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Tiffany said, sitting next to a leaf-filled pool. “I’ve been studying my butt off tonight.”

“That’s why you’re there, honey.”

“I know.” Tiffany rolled her eyes.

“I called earlier because I wanted to let you know I can come a day early for Mom’s Weekend.”

“How early, Mom?” Tiffany was annoyed and had no problem letting her mother know. “You know I have a lot of responsibilities.”

“I know you do, Tiff.”

“Just a minute,” she said cutting off her mother. She took her phone from her ear.

“Do I know you?”

Mrs. Jacobs tried to speak to her daughter again, but Tiffany was arguing with someone. She couldn’t make out anything that was being said. The tone of it, however, seemed angry and confrontational.

“Tiff? What’s going on? Tiffany?”

No answer.

“Tiff?”

Then the phone went dead.

Emily Kenyon’s phone vibrated and she looked down at the small LCD screen. An electronic envelope rotated in the window. A new text message had arrived. She snapped open the phone. It was from Jenna. She knew it even before she opened it. No one else sent her a text message.

“Tiffany Jacobs is missing. I’ll call u in a few. Something’s not right.”

Jenna was working at the Beta Zeta chapter at the university in Knoxville and wasn’t expected home for a couple of weeks. She told her mother in a memorable text message that the chapter was one of the better ones in her region.

“No trouble, these girls. Only one drunk and one bulimic. Might be new low record.”

About an hour later, Emily answered the phone. It was Jenna.

“Mom, can you believe it about Tiffany?”

“Hi, honey,” Emily said, flipping through a notepad on which she’d logged a few details. “I really don’t know much. I checked the police logs for Cascade and they indicated Tiffany disappeared from a frat party two days ago. They don’t even know that she’s really missing.”

“She is. I know she is, Mom. I know Tiffany.”

Emily met Tiffany only once when visiting Jenna at Cascade. Both Tiffany and Jenna were involved in BZ recruitment the year before. Tiffany, as Emily recalled, was a smarter girl than her fluffy-headed name suggested. She was a stunning girl with piercing blue eyes and a pretty, slightly turned-up nose. She was studying to be a pharmacist; a job that she teased “would let me know what’s wrong with my friends and neighbors without even having to ask.”

“What makes you think she didn’t run off somewhere?” Emily asked.

“Two things, Mom. One, she’d never leave without a bunch of clothes. The girls at the BZ house there say she didn’t pack anything.”

“OK. Maybe spur of the moment.”

“No, Mom, that’s not it. The other thing is that the police found her phone outside of the Kappa Chi house. That pink razor was like her other brain. Tiff wouldn’t be caught dead without her phone.”

Jenna’s own words stopped her cold. The expression had slipped from her lips merely to prove a point, not to make a prediction.

“Jenna?”

“Yeah, Mom,” her voice now deflated.

“I called down to the university police. I offered to help, of course. I told them pretty much what you’ve said. Tiffany was a good girl. This could be very, very serious.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Garden Grove, California

The concerns about where he would kill his prize came at him like a drumming rain on a tin roof. Her mother was a cop. Her mother’s boyfriend was a cop. Those two elements upped the ante considerably. It would be harder to capture her, slit her throat, and rip out her insides when Mom and the boyfriend lurked around Cherrystone, Washington. He was anxious to get things going. It was, after all, a very busy time of year.

He smiled. Hard to fit in Christmas shopping and another sorority bitch.

“You look happy,” his wife said, handing him a platter of tamales her mother had made.

His smile stayed frozen, but it was tolerably real-looking. “You know how I feel about mama’s tamales. I think they’re the best in the world.”

She smiled back. “Me, too.”

He took the platter, wondering why the woman who knew him better than anyone knew nothing about him at all.

He decided he’d take Lily Ann Denton next. She was but a day trip away. So convenient; a drive-through window kind of a killing. Jenna Kenyon would be the finale. And as much as he’d love her mother to find her blood-drained body on Christmas Day, he knew that killing her in Cherrystone was too great a risk.