Heart of Ice

Chapter Twenty-eight

Cherrystone

Hillary Layton plopped herself down in the visitor’s chair facing Emily Kenyon’s desk.

“I left my husband in the car,” she said.

The last time the mother of the murder victim and her baby and the sheriff who had vowed to catch the killer had met was at the church vigil more than a month before. Mrs. Layton wore charcoal pants and a heavy red wool coat. Peeking out from the triangle of fabric by her neck was a silver sweater with flecks of metallic yarn. It had probably been a Christmas sweater meant for an occasion far different than the one she was observing at that moment. She brought with her a small Monarch Vodka box, its top cut off on three sides and flapping at its hinge as she took a seat.

“Tell him to get in here,” Emily said. “It’s so cold outside.”

Hillary brushed off the suggestion as she unzipped her coat. Sparkly drops of water fell to the floor. The snow on her coat had melted. “He’ll lose it if he comes in here.”

“Lose it?”

“You know, he loses his temper. He’s got a pretty mean one.”

Emily tried not to let her worry betray her. Nothing hurt more than attacks from a victim’s family. She tried to keep a reassuring countenance on her face, but she could feel the knife being inserted.

The knife cut.

“I see,” was all she could say.

Hillary Layton was a kind woman. Everything about her said so. She’d taught school. She’d volunteered for the state Democratic Party when they pushed for health care for children who weren’t covered. She had six cats and a bird.

But she no longer had her only child. Mandy was gone.

“Look,” Hillary said. “I know you are doing your best. But tomorrow we bury Amanda and Chrissy.”

Emily hadn’t heard that a name had been picked out by either Mitch or Mandy. She wondered if Hillary had taken it upon herself to name the dead baby. She said nothing, though. She let the woman talk.

“I know Mitch killed them. I know that you know he did. What I don’t get,” she said, her voice cracking, despite her attempts to hold it together, “is why you aren’t doing more to nail the bastard.”

“Mrs. Layton,” Emily said, using as calm a voice as she could, “You certainly know better than that.”

Hillary fidgeted with the box. “I know you’ve tried. But that smug ass is running around acting as though he doesn’t have a care in the world. By the looks of it, I’d say he’s right.” Her gaze narrowed on Emily.

The knife was cutting.

“I know you want details, but we’re not there. I know you are frustrated. I get that. We all do.”

“You know something, Sheriff Kenyon?”

“What?”

“I really expected more than this from you. I remember reading about your daughter’s disappearance and how you went after the killer with everything you had. You got him, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m asking for the same here. I…I…I know we can’t bring Mandy or Chrissy back from the dead. I know that with every fiber of my being. But I still hear my daughter’s voice when I pick up the phone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emily said.

“When I hear a baby cry, I wonder what Chrissy’s cry might sound like. Would it be like her mother’s? Mandy had a wail that could crack plates when she was a baby.”

The tears rolled down, but Mrs. Layton ignored them.

Emily handed her a tissue, but she refused it.

“I want your officers, your staff, here to see my tears. I want people to know that my heart is broken.”

“We all know it. We all are devastated by your loss.”

“Can I say something to you, mother to mother?” Mandy’s mother asked.

“Of course.”

“Did you let it pass through your mind even once when your daughter was missing that she might be dead?”

Emily’s response was immediate. “Yes, I did.”

“Did you ever imagine that you might never see her again?”

“It was my darkest thought, yes.”

“Hold on to that. Take that deep inside, Sheriff. That’s how I feel right now. I know that there is no end to it. Luke and I will never, ever hold our daughter again. We will never know what kind of joy a little girl like Chrissy might have brought to our lives. To the lives of others.”

“We will not rest until justice has been brought in your daughter’s case,” Emily said, wishing she could reel back the words. The phrase sounded so cold and impersonal. “I will not rest,” she said as if the echo of her own sentiments would resonate with the grieving mother.

“My husband thinks that you will do your best. He also thinks that Mitch is probably smarter than you. I don’t know about any of that. All I know is that I need you to fully understand that I will be a thorn in your side for the rest of your life.” Hillary looked down at the contents of the box, then looked back at Emily.

Emily locked her eyes on Mandy’s mother. “Mrs. Layton, I am good at my job. I will do my best.”

“I know. I know. We had to make an appointment to come to the house to pick up some photos and things for the funeral tomorrow. We wanted to set up a memorial board and table at the front of the church so people could pass by and see the little pieces of our daughter’s life. Small stuff. But the fragments of her life cut short.”

Emily wanted to do more than just offer words to comfort the grieving woman sitting across from her, peering into a box of all she had left of her daughter. But protocol, laws, and common sense made it clear that boundaries were more important that being human. She hated that part of her job. Words were the only salve.

“That must have been so very hard,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“He—I hate saying his name—put what he thought we wanted to collect in this box and set it outside the front door.” She reached inside the liquor box and pulled out a few photos of her daughter. “She was seven in this photo,” she said, pointing to a vacation shot taken on a gray, windswept beach. “You can tell we’re in Washington because she’s wearing a coat with her bathing suit,” she said. A faint smile crossed her lips, and then faded.

Next she pulled out a Beanie Baby, a red bull. The smile returned, this time more pronounced.

“This is Tabasco. She got him after she was injured so badly in a car wreck when she was twenty. My husband bought it from the hospital gift shop. Told her not to put up with anyone’s BS about her injuries.”

Emily took the red plush toy from her hand.

“She had four cracked ribs and a shattered pelvis. They said she might never have kids, but she proved them…almost proved them wrong, didn’t she?”

“She did. She really did.”

The unspoken part of the conversation was the fact that the baby that she’d so wanted had been killed, too.

“He abused her in life. He abused her in death. You know what he did, don’t you?”

The cremation was troubling. Emily knew that the family had been extremely upset by what Mitch Crawford had authorized when the ME released the bodies.

“She would never want to be cremated. She was raised in Catholic schools, for goodness sake. I mean, we weren’t Catholic, but a lot of that rubbed off on her anyway,” Hillary Layton told Emily as they talked in her office, the morning of the ceremony at the Methodist Church.

“I know it feels wrong to you, but he is her husband. He has the power.”

“I know. But it has to stop, Sheriff. You have to make him pay.”

More than four hundred people showed up in the church that held so many memories. Mandy’s wedding, her vigil, and now her funeral service. Mitch Crawford followed her family to the front row, but there might as well have been a force field between them. They didn’t speak. They didn’t sit close. No one knew that the pale pink casket was empty. People who filed up spoke to Mandy and her baby.

“God is watching over you both now,” said Samantha Phillips, Mandy’s closest friend, her big green eyes raining tears. “I love you, Mandy. I love your sweet baby, your sweet Chrissy.”

The Laytons went next. Mr. Layton rested his big hands on the casket and began to caress it.

“I had two dreams in my life, Mandy. Both of them involved you and your mother. No man, no father, could have ever asked for more. You’re alive in my heart as you were the day we brought you home from the hospital.” He had a million more things to say, but no more words came from his lips. Mrs. Layton took her husband by the hand and led him back to his chair.

As the Laytons huddled together in the front pew, a mass of grief and unfulfilled dreams, the entire congregation watched as Mitch Crawford walked up to the casket. His gait had lost its swagger and he dissolved into tears as he placed two white roses on the blue casket. He said only three words that anyone could hear.

“I’m sorry, baby.”

The only real piece of evidence—outside of Mandy’s body and the chains that had failed to weight her body into the mud of the Miller’s Marsh Pond—was the down-filled sleeping bag that had encased her remains like a big, blue pupa. Jason visited all the local sporting goods stores in Cherrystone, and based on the photos Mountain Mania was identified as the manufacturer. The model—a down-filled, mummy-bag style—had been discontinued for at least ten years.

“It had leather ties,” a clerk at the Big Five Sports Center said, while tapping on the photocopy that Jason slid onto the clerk’s counter. “Now the ties are nylon. Vegans, I’m told, like to camp, too.”

Later that afternoon, Jason arrived at the sheriff’s office with tired feet and little to show for his long day of digging for something to tie Crawford to the murder of his wife. He found Emily in her office finishing up a phone call.

“How’d the bag ID go?” she asked, placing the phone in its cradle. The brightness in her face faded as she read her deputy’s transparent expression of defeat.

“About what we expected. Old bag,” he said. “No one’s sold one around here—around anywhere probably—for more than a decade.” Jason slumped in a chair facing Emily’s desk. He took a peppermint from her covered dish and popped it inside his mouth.

“State crime lab says that fibers on the bag are consistent with an array of GMC and Ford interiors—in reality just about every car company uses the same carpet suppliers, it seems,” Emily said, taking a mint for herself. “Who knew that global outsourcing would trickle down to be a problem for forensics?”

“We’re basically screwed on that, aren’t we?” he asked.

Emily didn’t want to say so aloud, but inside she agreed. “Nope,” she said, “we’ll find out where this bag came from and then we’ll find our killer.”

A search warrant served the day Mandy Crawford’s body was found had turned up nothing to connect the sleeping bag with the Crawford residence.

“Mitch Crawford isn’t the camping type,” Emily said.

“Yeah, he’s a condo time share or, better yet, a summer-place-on-the-lake kind of fellow.”

She nodded. “That sounds about right.”

The only other remotely remarkable identifier of the bag was a five-inch, nearly square hole at the top of the bag, near the ties. The lab team was unable to conclude when the tear had been made and if it had any relevance to the homicide.

The chains were so mundane, so heartbreakingly average, they could have been from anywhere in the country. There was nothing on them—no paint chips, no oil, no patterned markings—that could trace them to any life they might have had before they were wrapped around Mandy’s corpse. It was as if Mandy’s killer had been extremely careful, cunning, and deliberate.

Or, Emily thought, very, very lucky.