Heart of Ice

Chapter Nineteen

Cherrystone

The greasy smell of french fries and buffalo chicken wings hung in the overheated air. It was 1:15, just after the lunch rush, when Jason Howard stomped snow off his feet in a puddle inside the door and hurried into Cherrystone High School’s cafeteria/auditorium. The lights were dim, but he could see Emily sitting in a metal folding chair on the stage at the far end of the cavernous room. Seated next to her were the principal, Sal Randazzo, and a teacher he didn’t recognize. And also a girl he expected was the student the office staff had said they were gathered to honor.

Dr. Randazzo stood up and took the microphone.

“Nothing is more important than the safety of our students,” he said, as a slide show of young faces played out on a giant pull-down screen behind him. “We’ve gathered here today to honor Naomi Frye for her heroic actions that saved the lives of two of our students….”

Very quietly, Jason went up the steps to the stage and cupped his hands around his mouth.

“Sheriff Kenyon,” he whispered.

Emily didn’t appear to hear him.

Dr. Randazzo put his hand on Naomi’s shoulder.

“…This young woman stopped at the scene of a terrible car accident and administered CPR.”

Jason leaned in just little farther, trying his best to avoid being seen by the student-body audience who’d gathered, however begrudgingly, to honor one of their own. He called once more. This time he caught Emily’s attention.

“E Mer Gen Cee,” he mouthed at her.

As gracefully as she could, Emily said something to Randazzo and took Naomi’s hand to congratulate her. She walked calmly across the stage, trying not to disrupt the occasion for which she’d been asked to speak.

“What is it?” She was clearly concerned. It made no sense for Jason to show up in the middle of a school event. For goodness sake, he could have waited an hour and she’d have been back in the office. She wondered if it was Jenna. “Has there been an accident?” Her heartbeat quickened. It was far from routine having Jason interrupt a public event.

“No. It’s pretty bad. We might have found Mandy.”

Emily knew by his dire tone that he didn’t mean Mandy Crawford had been found alive. “Her body?”

“Yeah. Dumped off the highway by the old Highline.”

An icy wind that felt like raptor claws on the back of a neck blew down the ravine behind the Highline Tavern, ten miles out of town on the Cherrystone-Spokane Highway. The tavern was nothing more than a biker bar, a place with six pool tables and a bathroom that had seen a flood of vomit and misaimed streams of urine. The dive had been closed for two years, having failed to hang on to the Goldwingers and Harley wannabes that came from Spokane on the weekends in their Citizens jeans and Ralph Lauren leather jackets.

Two cars from the Washington State Patrol were parked out front. Shane Packer and Ron Oliver, both well known to Emily, had kept the area clear from the inevitable stream of lookie-loos hovering nearby. Such gatherings were always part of any major crime scene in small-town America, where police scanners still sell and where middle-aged men still live out the dream they’d be smarter than Columbo or Jessica Fletcher.

“Sheriff,” said Shane, a tall black man with strikingly handsome features and cannonball biceps that made most women feel a little flap of flirtatious energy whenever he was around.

“Officer,” Emily said. Her expression was grim. There were no real smiles for old friends at a time like this. “What do you have?”

He motioned over in the direction of the patrol car, lights flashing. “Ron’s got the witness in his vehicle taking a statement now.”

She looked over and saw Ron Oliver, a sandy-haired cop who’d become nothing more than Shane’s sidekick. He was busy making notes on his state-issue pad while a young man, not more than eighteen, talked animatedly about what he’d found.

Emily turned back toward Shane. “What have we got?”

He motioned for Emily and Jason to follow. “Kid was looking for bottles for recycling and found her. Follow me.” They walked from the parking lot, through some garbage left by the previous owner. Emily couldn’t help but notice that a baby crib had been trashed and left in the blackberry brambles. It seemed odd to her that there’d ever be a need for a baby crib in a biker bar.

What’s this world coming to?

The three of them stood on the edge of the ravine.

“Down there.” He pointed to the figure of a young woman, her body wrapped in what appeared to be a sheet. But on closer examination, it seemed more likely that it was a painter’s drop cloth. Her hand protruded from the covering, almost as if to call out to the world, Come here. Find me.

“Techs are coming from Spokane,” Shane said. “Called you, Emily, because of your missing woman.”

Shane’s words were meant to affirm what all of them knew. Cherrystone had no standing there. The body was found in Spokane County. Outside of Mandy Crawford, Cherrystone had no reports of anyone else missing—man or woman.

With Jason just behind her, Emily looked down the ravine. She estimated it was about a seventy-foot drop, maybe eighty. The incline was layered with dollops of snow and a tangle of thistles and blackberries. A deer trail to the bottom cut a zigzag path from where they stood.

Emily steadied herself as she made her way down toward the body, with the sick feeling that came with the sad realization that someone’s daughter had been murdered and dumped like garbage. The cold weather had been in their favor. There was no stench, no flies buzzing around the corpse.

She knelt next to the body. It took only a second and the abruptness of her own words surprised even herself.

“This isn’t Mandy Crawford,” she said.

“How can you tell? You can’t even see her face,” Jason said from two steps behind her.

Emily looked up at her deputy, and then locked her eyes on the arm sticking from its frozen wrapping.

“Mandy doesn’t have a tattoo around her wrist.”

Jason’s mouth was a straight line as he looked at what was so sadly, but concretely, evident. A chain of blue violets spun around the dead girl’s wrist. They were faded, having lost the crispness of a new inking.

“Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t Mandy.”

Emily and Jason knew that Amanda did, in fact, have a tattoo. But it was a pink rose on her lower back.

The pair climbed back up to the edge of the ravine. Shane Packer was smoking a cigarette and stubbed it out into the half-frozen ground.

“Still trying to quit,” he said.

Emily nodded. “She’s not ours. Someone’s heart will be broken tonight. But she’s not Cherrystone’s missing mother-to-be, that’s for sure.”

The three of them talked a bit more. Jason said he was so glad that he’d never started smoking, though it seemed to go with a law enforcement job.

“No groups smoke more than cops and doctors,” he said.

“You got that right,” Emily said, without offering up that she and her ex, a doctor, had been heavy smokers back in the day. Both had stopped smoking before they had Jenna.

On the drive back to Cherrystone, snow skittered over the now-dry and bare highway. Emily was heartbroken with the realization that a dead girl’s mother would be getting the worst-possible phone call once identification had been made. How that would hurt. Emily would probably never know the end of that story. She couldn’t follow every case. She had her own, of course.

“You know Mandy’s dead, right?” Jason asked.

Emily let out sigh. “We think she’s dead. The absence of her body makes this difficult, of course.”

“Not impossible. I mean, why can’t Hazelton just indict that SOB of a husband of hers?”

Emily shook her head. “Because she’s up for reelection next year and she wants to win. She doesn’t want an opponent wagging a finger at her come election time saying that we rushed to judgment and arrested the wrong guy.”

“A lot of other prosecutors would indict him now just to make him squirm a little, you know, see what he does once he makes bail—because you know he would.”

“I’m sure. Camille isn’t going to let us down. Once we find Mandy, or have some physical evidence of foul play, she’ll indict.”

Jason looked squarely at Emily. She faced the darkening roadway, one hand on the steering wheel and the other fishing for a lemon drop from the tin she kept in the cruiser.

“You thought that was her at first, didn’t you?”

She let her eyes light on him for a second. “I did. I hoped it was and I hoped it wasn’t. I don’t think she’s alive, but, I guess, I’m praying something like this will come to an end.”

“Yeah. Some news is always better than no news.”

Emily didn’t agree. She hated not knowing where Mandy Crawford was, of course. But she loathed more than anything the duty that fell on her shoulders when the worst outcome in a missing person’s case came into play.

“Try telling yourself that when you have to make a death notification to a dead girl’s mother and father.”

Jason knew just what she was talking about. “Where in the world are you?” he asked, looking out at the dormant vineyards and their spiderweb rows of grapevines as they whizzed by in the speeding cruiser, the rows fading in the early evening. “Where did he put you, Mandy?”