Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

brought her there, after hours of walking and hiding. She repositioned herself and rubbed her right knee. She remembered how she’d hurt it from crouching in a weedy ditch as a car went by. Was it her mother?
    At that moment things could have been different. She could have called out. She could have ended everything right then and there. But she didn’t. She just crouched low and waited until the headlights became two red eyes fading into oblivion.
    She felt a breeze blow through the drafty building and she pulled herself together. She was a potato bug. Curled up. Protected from whatever dangers might befall her. Was this a dream? She started to shake. What am I doing here? She saw a rat and let out a scream.
    “Shhhhh! It’s all right. I’m not going to let anything happen to you!”
    It was him. It wasn’t a dream.
    “It’s a rat!”
    “Big mouse,” he said, trying to calm her. “Think a very, very big mouse”

Chapter Twelve
    Wednesday, 2:40, Cherrystone, Washington
    The wind kicked up and blew just enough dust across the parking lot in front of the safety building so as to make the hairs stand up on the back of Emily Kenyon’s neck. Jenna had been missing for thirty-two hours. Thirty-two hours is a lifetime. Life and death. Emily had cried until no more tears were left, but she also put on the kind of brave face that only a person who’d seen the worst humans can do to others can muster. It was a mask, she knew, but somehow it held her steady.
    Sheriff Kiplinger was elated when KREM TV from Spokane called saying the network honchos might want to do a story on the missing detective’s daughter. Emily was oddly ambivalent about the prospect. She’d been the first to jump at the chance when the media came-so concerned, so sincere-to profile a missing person. But not now. It felt more intrusive than helpful. She tried to explain herself to Kiplinger.
    “I want to find her,” she said, “not embarrass her to death”
    He didn’t get it. “That’s flat-out stupid, Emily.”
    “Tell me how you’d handle it if it was your daughter?”
    “I’d call out the cavalry,” he said. “You know I would.”
    Emily put that out of her mind. The day had become one of those evidentiary roller coasters or maybe a merry-goround, as it seemed to go in circles with no end. She’d been on the phone with the bank card company. Nope, Jenna hadn’t taken out a dime. She’d called every parent in the PTA phone book, grateful that it was still hard copy and not some goddamn online system. Old ways sometimes worked best. God knew if the Internet hadn’t been invented, her daughter probably wouldn’t be off who-knows-where with Batboy. She hoped, no she prayed, that Jenna had gone willingly.
    Jenna wasn’t Polly Klaas or Elizabeth Smart. No way. Emily hoped that there was some connection that was reckless and wrong, but ultimately less scary. She was living in a fool’s paradise and deep down she knew it. Shali’s printout from her computer was proof enough that something was terribly awry.
    Do you think that a love could be so powerful as to be sick?
    The words made Emily’s skin crawl. She knew there was only one answer for such a question: “In your case, yes. Yes. Yes”
    Jason Howard slipped into her office. He carried a pair of paper cups embedded in a cardboard tray.
    “Latte?”
    Emily barely nodded. “Thank you.”
    She pulled off the plastic lid and sipped.
    “Any news?” he asked.
    She shook her head, swinging her ponytail. It reminded her that she probably looked like garbage. Her hair was oily. Her makeup nonexistent. Looking good wasn’t on her mind. Only Jenna.
    “We’ll find her,” he said. “She’ll be all right.” “
    Emily stayed mute. She felt so empty, so devoid of feeling. She never knew how it felt to lose someone in the night. Others had. She always comforted them. But just as no one really knows what it is like to be a mother until she holds her first child, no one who hadn’t felt the sudden loss of a child could ever even approximate the stabbing ache that came with every breath.
    I know you’re not thinking about the Martin case right now,” he started to say.
    “Oh, but I am ” Emily cut him off, summarily snapping herself out of the pity that had mired her, sucked her down, into the depths of despair.
    “I know,” he said, his bright eyes, now surprisingly compassionate for a young man who couldn’t even begin to understand her pain. “I know … if we find