Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

with the old Kristi Cooper case, but she didn’t bite. She’d finally made peace with that. To do otherwise, she knew, would have killed her like a slowly bleeding wound.
    “Calm down, Derek,” Emily said, her voice steady and commanding. “I want to find Mandy, too. I need some help here. Are you sure you’ve told us everything?”
    Edwards turned away from her and headed for the door. “There isn’t any more to tell,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ve been to my place. You’ve interviewed everyone I’ve ever known. I’ll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing”
    From the hallway, Emily watched Derek Edwards’s retreating figure. It was more than a hunch. She knew it in her bones. Derek was holding back. Crime statistics indicated that Mandy was dead and that her husband had killed her. But there was no evidence. No blood.
    “There’s a reason for that,” she told Casey Howard, her deputy.
    “Yeah, he didn’t kill her.’
    “But you saw the plastic bleach bottle in the trash”
    “Yeah, but if you went to my house you’d find two bottles in our trash. Bleach kills germs. I’ve got two germy kids.”
    Emily smiled. “I don’t know. Something’s with this guy.”
    “Yeah, he’s full of himself, for one. His home gym is the biggest room in the house. The baby’s room is the size of a closet.”
    “Not hard to tell his priorities,” she said.
    “Anyway, Sheriff, just because the dude is a self-absorbed ass doesn’t make him a killer.”
    She smiled.
    Patrice Fletcher had left the potato chips in the trunk.
    “Watch the boys, Stacy,” she told her daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of 14. “I’m going back to the car to get the chips.”
    “You always leave the boys with me. You ought to pay me, Mom. I’m the live-in sitter around here”
    Patrice pretended not to hear Stacy rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. She’d thought of asking Stacy to get the chips, but she knew she’d complain about that, too.
    “You use me like a slave, Mom!”
    Patrice and her children had packed up early that morning for a fall picnic at Brier Lake, just to the west of Cherrystone. She knew that cold weather would come in a flash and that day might be the very last day before rain, snow and bundle-up weather. Patrice was 35, with red hair that she wore long, with bangs that made her daughter cringe whenever they were out in public.
    “You need a makeover, Mom!” Stacy said. Although mostly teasing, she wouldn’t have minded if her mom did change her hair from her decidedly un-chic ‘80s hairdo.
    “Oh, I don’t know, I think I look hot”
    The response brought an exaggerated gasp.
    “No one’s mom is hot,” Stacy said, with a smile more mean than sweet.
    Patrice made her way across the almost deserted field that bordered the parking lot. No more than a half dozen cars huddled by the main pathway down to the lake. Her silver Prius gleamed in the sun, screaming out loud to the world that she loved the earth.
    She pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. She stared into the blackness below and her heart sank.
    “What the—? “
    The chips were gone. She had left them at home on the kitchen counter.
    “This is the kind of day I’m having,” she said, closing the lid. “Stacy’s going to blame me for this.”
    As she slammed down the trunk, she heard a scream.
    “Mom!”
    It was Stacy’s voice. She turned around and looked for her daughter.
    “Mom! Come here quick!”
    Patrice squinted into the late afternoon sun, the light blinding her with the shimmer of gold off the lightly rippled surface of Brier Lake.
    Something was wrong.
    “Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!” Patrice called out. She started running to the spot where she had left her children, but they weren’t there. Instead, about fifty yards away, she saw them huddled at the water’s edge. The low sun had wrapped them in a halo of light. Were all three there? She ran as fast as she could, losing a flip-flop in the process.
    “What is it? Brandon? Kevin?”
    “We’re fine, Mom,” Stacy called out, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her mother. “Oh, Mom!” She lunged for Patrice, who gladly held her daughter. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the space of the time it took for Patrice to go to the car, Stacy was once more a little girl-a scared little girl. She started to cry and pointed to a lily-pad-tangled spot about ten yards from