Heart of Ice

Chapter Forty-eight

It was 9 P.M. when Chris Collier showed up on Emily’s doorstep. She’d called him earlier in the day to share her worry that despite Mitch Crawford’s arrest, something didn’t feel right.

“How on earth did you get here so fast?” she asked, letting him in and embracing him in the foyer. “I’m going over to Seattle tomorrow.”

“Timing is everything,” he said, a broad smile on his face. “Caught a flight from Spokane and, voilà, here I am.” He set the rental car keys on the console by the door, next to her purse.

Chris followed Emily into the dining room where she had placed a box of case file folders. He took a chair and noticed the wine on the table. “Are you buying that by the case to boost the local economy?”

Emily smiled at his mention of the local vintner. “Maybe. I don’t know. I like it. Help yourself.”

Chris poured a glass and topped off Emily’s.

“I thought wine made you sleepy,” she said.

“Are you kidding? I drank about a gallon of coffee between the plane and drive up here. I’ll be wired until tomorrow.”

She smiled. “Good, because we have a lot to do.”

“All right. Let’s go over what you’ve got.”

“We have a pregnant woman murdered and dumped outside of town.’

“Cause of death?”

“Strangled.”

“Hands? Ligature?”

“We think hands. The body was in pretty good shape, but enough decomp around the fleshy parts of the neck to make it impossible to tell for sure. There were some marks, but Dr. Wilhelm thinks they were fingerprints.”

He sipped his wine. “OK. That’s the signature of a killer who likely knew his victim. It’s very, very hard to strangle someone. It takes some real effort and unless you’re coming from behind with a cord or something, you’re facing the victim until their lights go out.”

“Exactly. Must be a cold son-of-a-bitch to do that.”

Chris nodded. “That’s right. Especially to a pregnant woman. So taking that into consideration, we’re in agreement that the victim was likely known by her killer.”

“Yes. And the perp is probably a male or, if not, the strongest woman in Cherrystone.”

“That would be you.” Chris smiled at Emily and asked for a sheet of paper and wrote down what they’d agreed upon.

“I have all that in the Crawford Murder Book,” she said. “Let me get it.”

He watched as she opened the big black binder. “No offense to you and Camille Hazelton, but your Murder Book is part of the problem. We’re not looking at the evidence, but at what we think about it. You know? We have to look at each piece of evidence anew. OK?”

Emily didn’t like the idea and her face showed it. There were reams of documents to go through and the hour was getting late.

“OK,” she said, “no shortcuts. But I want to remind you that we have to give the defense notice about Tricia Wilson’s perjured deposition by five p.m. tomorrow. Camille is doing us, I mean me, a favor.”

“Then we better get going. What’s next, the DNA?”

Emily pulled up the lab work sent over by Dr. Wilhelm on the DNA swabbed from Mitch Crawford, and the victims, Mandy and Chrissy. The ME had attached a note written in his own handwriting, oddly legible for a doctor.

“There is absolutely no chance that this full-term female fetus was fathered by Mitch Crawford. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“I love his medical terminology,” Chris said.

Emily set down the file. “He’s a legend for about a million reasons.”

Chris wrote down on the paper: The baby’s father is the key.

“Look at it this way: Either Mitch killed Mandy because he caught her cheating, which I’d say is the best bet. Or the baby’s father killed her, for what reason, I don’t know.”

Emily could see the plausibility in either scenario. “We figured that. The big problem for us is that we’ve never been able to find out who fathered the baby.”

“Who was she seeing?”

“No one knows.”

“Friends? What about her girlfriends?”

“I’ve mined that field, Chris. No one seems to know anything. No one noticed anything strange.”

“What about coworkers? Sometimes a woman will share with those outside of her inner circle?”

Emily set down her wineglass and stared at Chris. “Wait a second. Her friend Samantha Phillips had a strange encounter with Mandy not long before her disappearance.”

“OK, Em, what did she say?”

“She told me two things that were interesting. One, that Mandy had told her the sex of the baby, but not her husband.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was something about how Mitch had wanted a son so much, but that it was a girl she was carrying.”

Chris wrote down: Baby not a boy? Did Mitch kill her because Mandy was having a girl?

“That’s a bit farfetched,” she said. “Even for around here.”

“Happens in China every day and probably a thousand times on Sunday.”

Emily looked upward and shook her head. “OK, fine. But I highly doubt it.”

“You never know. Anything more?”

“Let me see,” she said, looking through her notes from the first interview with Samantha Phillips. She used a pen to guide her tired eyes across the paper. “Here it is. She had an encounter with Mandy around Halloween. Nothing much here. Says that Mandy was acting evasive about something and gave her the bum’s rush at the door.”

Emily set down her notes.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, I got the distinct impression that Samantha was holding out on me. Like she’d suspected something was going on with Mandy when she went to her house.”

“Like what?”

“They were best friends. Samantha stopped by to check on Mandy and she didn’t invite her inside.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“She wasn’t alone, was she?”

Chris wrote down: Talk to Samantha Phillips. What does she know?

Next up was the Darla Montague file. It was a thin folder, with only two sheets of paper inside.

“This is the girl who had an affair with Crawford,” Emily said.

“Jesus, Emily, what kind of a town is Cherrystone, anyway?”

Emily knew what Chris was getting at, but she brushed it off. “Like every other town, I guess.”

They talked about Darla and how she’d had “one or two, well, two” sexual encounters with Mitch Crawford at the office.

“She’s a nice girl,” Emily said. “Mixed-up and stupid, but nice. She’s not a part of this. Just a bystander in the way of a man who takes what he wants no matter who gets hurt.”

“OK. I’ll accept your assessment on that. Let’s leave her alone tomorrow.”

It left one key witness, Tricia Wilson.

“I’ve got Tricia handled. I called in a favor to a buddy at one of the financial institutions. If I gave you the initials, you’d have to kill me, Emily.” He smiled and she returned the gesture. “I guess it’s good to have friends who can help out now and then.”

“Like you’re helping me.” She looked into his eyes. “Thank you, Chris. I really want to nail this bastard.”

“We’ll get him tomorrow. But we can’t do it unless we get some shut-eye.”

Emily looked at the clock. It was almost 1:00 A.M.

“Shit, I’ll look like hell tomorrow,” she said.

Chris completely disagreed. “You’ll always look beautiful,” he said.

With that, they turned out the dining room chandelier and padded down the hallway to bed. Too tired to make love, they snuggled together under the covers. As they drifted off to sleep, Emily found herself enjoying the closeness of the man she loved in a tender and gentle way. She breathed him in. The next morning, he returned to Seattle on the plane and she drove across the mountain pass.

She needed time to think. About Tricia. About Mandy. About Jenna. And even a little bit about herself.

Ten employees of Evergreen Marketing were huddled under a blue tarp on the west end of the company’s parking lot. Recent state law had shoved smokers far from the doorways and picnic tables by the Dumpsters where they’d once congregated. The tarp kept them dry as they smoked and chatted about how much they hated their jobs, their kids, their spouses. None ever seemed to say a word about their smoking shanty and the constant push to make their lives more miserable. Emily parked her car and glanced over. But no one in the smoking mass was Tricia Wilson.

Evergreen Marketing commanded a single floor of a five-story building in Renton, a city known for a Boeing plant and pretty views of Lake Washington. She presented her card to the receptionist. She smiled, and buzzed for Tricia to come to the front desk.

“You have a visitor. Please come at once.”

Patty emerged from a cipher-locked door. When her eyes met Emily’s it was with more a look of resignation than of concern. Her blond hair had been highlighted since Emily had last seen her. She also wore an exceptionally nice pair of camel slacks and a wheat-colored twinset, likely cashmere.

“Hello Sheriff Kenyon. After that DA creep tried to trash me, I sort of expected you’d come to see me.”

“I’m here, Tricia. Is there someplace we can talk?”

“Sure.” She turned to the receptionist. “Fatima, we’re going to use the Rainier conference room.”

“Very good,” Fatima said, logging a note into her PC.

“She’s here for training,” Tricia said softly as they walked toward the conference room. “She’s a VP with a company we’re working with. My guess is that we have about six months. Then, poof, our jobs are gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily said as Tricia flipped on the lights. “I’m grateful that no one has found a way to outsource the legal system.”

Patty smiled. “Just wait. I’m sure someone will find a way.”

They sat down in the windowless conference room with a massive mosaic of Mount Rainier, Washington’s tallest peak, covering an entire wall.

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

“I’m not sure. That depends.”

“On the truth, right?”

“Yes, the truth.”

Tricia swiveled in her chair and put her hands on the table. “OK. Well, what I told you wasn’t completely a lie. Mitch was an asshole. He treated me like dirt, and he did push me around a few times.”

Emily locked her eyes on Tricia’s. “Did he beat you?”

She looked down at the table. “Yes, he did abuse me. But not really, not physically.”

Emily pushed a little harder. She knew a crack in a story when she saw one. She needed to force the issue. “Does the name Maggie Emery ring a bell?” she asked, again her eyes fixed on Tricia’s.

Tricia’s face tightened at the mention of the name of her coworker from the dealership. Her blue eyes flashed.

“You talked to that bitch?”

“I didn’t. But one of Prosecutor Hazelton’s assistants did.”

“I can imagine what she told you. She hated me. She wanted Mitch for herself. I should have let her have him. That would have been sweeter revenge.”

“Has this been about revenge, Tricia?”

“Revenge would be too simple.”

“What about the photographs? Were those doctored?”

Tricia Wilson was trapped and she knew it. “OK. I did doctor my makeup and hair for those pictures. But I want you to know that he really did abuse me.”

Emily wanted to abuse the woman herself just then. She could barely keep her cool. “How, Tricia, how did he abuse you?”

Tricia swiveled in her chair again. “He was cheap. He never let me have a dime. He was, I swear to God, the biggest control freak this world has ever known. Everything had to be done his way. I just wanted to buy myself some new furniture. We had the money. But he said, no, no, no.”

“So you started to bleed the dealership.”

“I saw a lawyer so I know that the statute of limitations has run out on that, so yes. Yes, I did. I’m not sorry about it, either.”

Emily pushed herself back from the conference table and stood.

“Don’t you know what you’ve done?” Her voice was loud and she didn’t care. “Mandy Crawford was murdered. Mitch Crawford was arrested, in part, because of your fabricated statements. You’ve not only embarrassed me, but you’ve shamed yourself in the name of women who have been abused.”

“He was a jerk.”

“So get a divorce. A husband who doesn’t let you have new furniture is a lout, not an abuser!”

“You try living with a control freak.”

Emily let the words “been there, done that” play only in her mind. Her ex-husband had been a jerk, but she’d never give Tricia Wilson the satisfaction of knowing that they shared something in common.

“I’m done with you. Go back to your phones and think of Mandy Crawford and her baby and how you’ve single-handedly screwed up a double murder investigation.”

With that, Emily departed for the lobby, and made her way past the smokers’ tarp for her car.

Fatima pressed the mute button on the Rainier conference room to the OFF position. She looked down at the Cherrystone sheriff’s business card and scooted it under her telephone console.