Heart of Ice

Chapter Twenty-six

Cherrystone

“You all right?”

Jason Howard stood in the doorway of Emily’s office, his head cocked in concern.

Emily smiled tentatively. “I’m fine. I’m going to dig into the case again. Camille’s out of town visiting her mother and I’m trying to button things down on Crawford before she gets back.”

“Can I help?”

Emily knew that her deputy only wanted to be useful, but his offer only annoyed her. It wasn’t that he wasn’t up to the task, it was more about the fact that she couldn’t piece together what was troubling her.

“No, I’m good,” she said, a little too dismissively. She saw the hurt in his eyes. “You grab some lunch.”

“Bring you back something? Going to the grill.”

Emily declined the offer. “No, I actually brown-bagged it today. Such a glamorous life I have as the Cherrystone sheriff.”

Jason tried to brush off the rebuke with one of his good-natured smiles. He buttoned up his heavy blue coat and left. Emily knew that he’d bring back one of those big pink frosted cookies that she once remarked she liked, but could really barely eat half of one. One more bite ensured a sugar overload and an afternoon of the crash-and-burn.

Pink icing can be a real killer.

Everything she had was in front of her. Emily looked at the sheaf of reports that she, her deputy, and the CSIs from Spokane had compiled on the Mandy Crawford missing persons case. There was nothing there. She wondered how an inch of paper could contain so little information. Mandy was at work one day. Gone the next. She’d been seen walking the dog by a woman who also misidentified the breed of the Crawfords’ canine. So that was no good. She hadn’t been observed by any of the clerks in Spokane at the mall. Her credit cards hadn’t been used.

She was gone. Poof. Mandy had vanished.

Every day put the young mother-to-be in greater and greater danger. Emily didn’t tell the media or the local women who’d come to help search for Mandy Crawford about the dire statistics behind the disappearance of any pregnant woman. Most were dead at the hands of their husbands, control freaks who refused to have the focus shift from their personal and sexual needs to a child who’d suck up every last bit of their wives’ attention. They viewed those babies growing inside the distended abdomens as parasites stealing the attractiveness of a body whose sole purpose had been to pleasure them.

Such murders were about rage fueled by envy.

She looked down at the paper with the stats from the coroner.

Name: Amanda Lynn Crawford

Height: 5'2"

Weight: 100 lbs

Age: 29

Hair: Blond

Eyes: Brown

Marks/Tattoos: A pink rose on lower back.

External evidence of injury: Postmortem ligature on wrists and ankles. Markings correspond with chains recovered from the scene.

Cause of Death: Asphyxiation.

Special note: The victim carried a full-term fetus, a female.

Emily had seen the body at the coroner’s in Spokane, so she held the horrific visual whenever she went anywhere. Not just Mandy’s case. But the others, too. Emily sometimes saw blood spatter in pizza sauce. The sound of a chopping knife against a wooden cutting board often conjured up images of extreme brutality. One time, when she had the misfortune of running over an opossum, she felt the wheels crunch and she thought of a little boy that had been run over by his older brother.

“You have that look on your face,” her daughter Jenna had said one time when they were making stir-fry.

“What look?”

“Mom, the look. You know. The look that means you’re thinking about those celery sticks as something disgusting. Something dead. Bones or something.”

Emily tried to shake it off, protesting to Jenna that she couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Honey, I did have my mind on work, but not that. Something boring. No bones.”

But it was a lie.

In time, Emily improved upon masking the look. There was only one thing that troubled her more than the pictures and the thoughts of what sick men do to the weak and frightened. She loathed how a vital young woman like Mandy—after being brutally murdered—could face the further indignity of being nothing more than a few words on a report.

Name, height, weight, age, hair, eyes…cause of death.

She studied the pristine pages of the report. In time, they’d be covered with the oily spots of someone’s lunch, they’d be folded, maybe torn, as the days and the weeks of the investigation passed. Cherrystone was going to a computerized system in the new year, and no doubt Mandy Crawford’s murder would be the last of the old-school folders in the archive of a county that had seen only twenty-one murders in its entire history.

Emily looked at the photo of the body. There was a black swipe against Mandy’s wrists, ligature marks had been determined by the coroner to be postmortem. The killer had tied her to some chains in order to sink the corpse into the icy water.

Hoping, of course, that she’d stay put.

But Mandy didn’t. She literally rose from the dead.