Heart of Ice

Chapter Fourteen

Cherrystone

That Mitch Crawford seemed solely motivated by money raised the very dark possibility that the car dealer might have placed a value on having a dead wife. The specter of an insurance payout could not be ignored.

“So you still think he did this for the money?” Jason asked Emily as they went over the timeline of Mandy’s disappearance for the umpteenth time. They had several sheets of computer printouts and note cards that outlined what they knew so far. It was old-school police work, but the new system was still in transition. New technology usually came to Cherrystone when it wasn’t quite so new.

Jason had duplicates of the printouts as they faced each other across Emily’s desk, but he left the highlighting up to his boss.

Emily conceded that money did run Mitch’s world, but she was unsure if they could really fix the motive in that direction.

“First of all, he has assets far beyond what most people around here have. Let’s see, three houses, a yacht, a fleet of classic cars, and more gold around his neck than a hip-hop star.”

“No kidding. I didn’t notice the gold chains.”

She rolled her eyes. “Men don’t pick up on it, I guess. Nothing turns off a woman more than ropes of gold nestled in a thick patch of chest hair.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jason said, touching his shirt’s top button, and then laughing.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling back. “No offense meant. Back to Mitch. If his balance sheet showed some irregularities, I’d be more concerned about the possibility of money being the motive here. So far, we know that the dealership is doing just fine and that he’s not leveraged to the hilt on his other assets.”

“It makes me hate him even more,” Jason said.

“Tell me about it. I’d like to get a new car, but I really shouldn’t. Anyway, I’d say money is too obvious a motive.”

But what was the reason? Jason didn’t quite get it. He had a wife. He had kids. He couldn’t imagine another man snuffing out all that was so dear to him personally.

“If not money, what?” he asked.

Emily selected the pink highlighter. It was dry, so she took the cap off the yellow one. “I’m getting the distinct feeling that Mitch Crawford has other agendas when it comes to his wife,” Emily said.

“An affair, maybe?”

Emily ticked off bullet points on the printout.

“Maybe he was tired of her?” she asked. “Maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered being a dad.”

“Like Tony Ryan?”

Emily put down her pen. “Yes, exactly. Like Ryan.” It was, she thought, a pretty good example.

Tony Ryan was a Seattle beer truck driver who made local, and then national, news after his wife went missing two years ago. Carly Ryan was pregnant with the couple’s first baby. Friends said that Tony didn’t want to be a father; that he preferred spending his time away from work playing Xbox and hanging with his buddies. He repeatedly made remarks that indicated that he felt having a son or daughter made him “old” and moved him up to adulthood in an irrevocable way that he just didn’t want. One of the key lines from the trial came from Carly’s sister, Miranda. She told the court that Tony “told me that having a baby made his needs irrelevant. He was pissed off that he might not get all of Carly’s attention. He actually told me that ‘if she thinks for one minute that I’m not gonna have sex when I want it because of some brat wanting her attention, she’s dead wrong.’”

Dead Wrong, of course, was the phrase used by headline writers the next day.

The jury found Ryan guilty of murdering Carly and their baby. That sad story would have been nothing more than a repugnant footnote in the annals of crime, if not for the theory of the case. The prosecution and the media ratcheted up the stakes by casting the killer as the bone-chilling representative of young men who assumed that the world revolved around them, as it had in sports, high school, and at the gym.

Mitch Crawford didn’t really fit that profile. Not very neatly, anyway. Sure, he was self-absorbed and filled his three-car garage and off-site garage with the spoils of a lavish lifestyle. He ran his office as more a king than a manager, demanding employees do things that had nothing to do with their jobs. Emily learned how workers were told to detail his personal cars once a week, pick up his dry cleaning, even shine his shoes.

And while he seemed spoiled and entitled to all that he could see, he did actually have a work ethic. If his father had created the dealership from nothing, then Mitch Crawford wanted to make sure everyone in the region knew that he’d taken it much further.

“My dad had a vision, but my eyesight’s a lot sharper,” he used to tell people when they came in for a test drive.

As far as the Crawford case was concerned, Emily felt, insurance didn’t appear to be the motive.

Cherrystone used the American Insurance Control Bureau as its primary tool in determining when and if crimes could be linked to an insurance motive or fraud. AICB was little more than an end run around a subpoena. Carriers liked it because it helped connect the dots when a person involved in a potential crime procured multiple policies. In the old days, law enforcement agencies had to issue a subpoena for each insurance company—and the defendant was not obligated to say even which company he or she might have procured a policy. It was shooting in the dark. With AICB, an alert would be sent out to all members—most of the insurance industry—and they’d be able to chime in with a yes or no.

In Mandy’s case, there were no other policies outside of the one she held from her job at the county. Her life was worth $75,000. Her baby held no value. A baby isn’t worth anything because it isn’t drawing an income and it doesn’t have a dependent.

“So what did AICB really turn up?” Jason asked.

“Nothing. I highly doubt that a man like Mitch Crawford would break a sweat, let alone kill his wife, for seventy-five grand.”

Jason agreed. “Maybe ten times that.”

Emily nodded. “I’ve never thought this was about money, but now I’m certain that it isn’t. This man was all about convenience.”

Later that afternoon, the office phone rang. To Emily’s utter surprise, it was Mitch Crawford. He was huffing and puffing mad, but she was glad for the call.

The more you talk, the more you’ll hang yourself, she thought.

“How can I help you, Mitch?” she said.

“Help me? You have to be kidding. You could stop harassing me, for one.”

Emily swiveled her chair and looked out the window. Cars passed by. “You’ll need to be more specific. No one here is intending to harass you.”

“My insurance guy just called me saying that you put out a goddamn alert on me. Like you think I killed Mandy for insurance money. What a laugh!”

“I’m sorry you think this is so funny.”

“You know what I mean. I know that you sent out a bulletin to everyone in the country asking if I had policies on Mandy’s life. Why didn’t you just ask me?”

“You haven’t exactly been cooperative, Mitch.”

“I’ve done what you wanted me to do. Nothing more. I think you’re wasting my time. You’re wasting Mandy’s time, too.”

“You don’t happen to know where she is?”

“You know I don’t.”

She thought he’d hung up, but he was only gulping a breath of air to fuel his rage.

“I’m so sick of you and your office. If you had asked me, I would have told you that she only had one stupid policy from that cheap-ass county. There would be no windfall in Mandy’s death.”

“I don’t know. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“To you maybe, but not to me. I haven’t done anything wrong and you’ve been treating me like trash. What’s with you? I know you’re single. Man-hater? I’ve heard some things about you.”

From Cary, no doubt.

Emily hated losing her cool. It took some doing, but she held it.

“This isn’t about me, Mitch. This is about you and your missing wife. Let’s remember that. All right?”

The phone went dead with the sound of a thunderclap.

Imagine that, Mitch Crawford, mad enough to slam down his phone. Nice.