Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

Felix, and put the teakettle on. She’d dialed Emily three times, but kept getting “customer out of service area” She turned on her computer and let the old PC rumble to a live screen. She logged on and the dial-up connection choked and coughed before she could log on to the archived files of the Retired Police Officers Association of the Northwest and put in her password.
    She found Reynard Tuttle and started printing. Olga never doubted that Dylan Walker was a killer, despite her failure to have him put away for the rest of his life. It hadn’t been her failure alone. The police in Seattle, Tacoma, and Nampa, Idaho, had also come up with nothing. Even the FBI had been unable to do what was needed to catch a killer. But no one, not a single law enforcement organization, had thought that the Reynard Tuttle/Kristi Cooper case had been related to Dylan Walker. In many ways, it didn’t really seem to fit. None of the victims had been held captive anyplace-at least not that they were aware. When Olga pondered the Idaho case of Steffi Miller, she wondered if the girl hadn’t been found because she’d been hidden somewhere. Somewhere besides a grave. Kristi had likely been disregarded be cause she’d been so young. But Olga knew that Walker was a cross-generational killer. He killed women of all ages.
    She began seeping the Tuttle printouts. Now it was her turn to see photographs of Emily Kenyon when she was younger, before her downfall. There was no mention of Walker, of course, but there was a very small detail that leapt off the laser-printed page. The address of the McDonald’s where Kristi Cooper had last been seen: 513 Winchester Avenue. Olga almost did a double take and then immediately went to the phone.
    “Answer. Answer,” she said, as Emily’s phone rang and went to voice mail. “Damn it.”
    She waited for Emily’s greeting to give way to the beep. At least she could leave a message, all staccato and full of excitement. “Emily, Olga. I’ve been poking around some. Got some interesting info from our favorite society gal, Tina Esposito. Bonnie had three kids, at least that’s what Tina says. Three by Walker. Ugh. Anyway, call me. Also, found something interesting about Walker and your Cooper case. He lived a block from the restaurant…”
    Olga wanted to say more, but the phone connection failed. Cheap piece of garbage, she thought. Hope she got all of that.

Chapter Thirty-five
    Monday, 8:35, on the Pacific coast of Washington
    It had started raining early in the day and hadn’t let up. Couldn’t let up. The sky was a pewter lid smacked down over the ocean and the coast. Dunes with cockscombs of sea grasses held off the foamy surf. Rain pelted the windshield with relentless force as Emily followed the two-lane seaside road to the address on the card. She turned on her wipers to maximum speed, but she could barely see. The defroster was blowing at full bore, but it couldn’t keep up with the damp air that circulated through the soggy Accord. Emily opened the driver’s-side window to suck out the warm, moist air, but it just sent needles of rain against her left cheek. With her eyes fixed on the road, she leaned over and pulled some tissues from the glove box and started to wipe. Better. A sign flashed by the window: WELCOME TO WASHINGTON’S COAST. She looked in the rearview mirror and squinted at the bright headlights that had trailed her since she left Seattle.
    I’ll need to tell Christopher to get those lights adjusted.
    Whenever Emily thought of Kristi Cooper, she thought of Reynard Tuttle. That was long before she had any inkling that Dylan Walker could have been involved. So sure was she of Tuttle’s guilt that she completely dismissed the Tuttle’s family’s feeble protestations that he was innocent. Reynard Tuttle’s sister and ex-wife were united in their insistence that Tuttle, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic when he was twenty-two, was innocent of the Cooper kidnapping. “He’s not capable of hurting an innocent little girl,” Delilah Tuttle Lewis, his sister, told a TV reporter not long after the shooting. “He was crazy, but a gentle crazy.”
    Tuttle’s background had suggested as much. He’d been arrested only once for loitering in front of the King County courthouse. With the ACLU by his side, the charges were dismissed. His lawyers said that since he usually was seen holding a placard espousing hatred for the police whom he accused of conspiring against