Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

similar call. He would pick up right away. Unless he knew where Jenna was safely at his side.
    Wednesday, 7:45 RM.
    What had happened at the Martin place on the Thursday before the tornado? It was after hours, but there was no going home. There was no reason to. Jenna was gone. The phone was forwarded. And there was the matter of the Martin murders. Emily Kenyon studied the Spokane coroner’s autopsy report after it arrived bundled into one of those cheap accordion files. She’d always had a strong stomach and barely winced at the photographs that accompanied such files. But in the case of Mark, Peg, and Donovan Martin, Emily fixed her attention on the coroner’s schematics not the photos of their battered, bruised, and bloodied bodies. The schematics, the distillation of reality, were actually more telling. They were impersonal figures, no genitalia, no hair to suggest a woman or man’s body. Just delicate black lines in the shape of a human form on a plain white sheet of paper. There were three of them. Mark Martin’s wounds were the most severe. His limbs were absent from the schematics. An X drawn by the coroner indicated where he’d been shot in the upper back, probably at relatively close range. Peg Martin was next. Her wounds were beyond comprehension but it was there in black and white. She’d been shot in the chest. There was extensive damage to her torso-postmortem, the coroner noted. Finally there was the youngest, victim, Donovan Martin. Like his dad, Donny had suffered a single gunshot to the back. A big black X marked the spot where the bullet had entered, another where it had exited his frame.
    Emily set each of the sheets of paper across her desk. Muzak filtered in from the hallway and footsteps came and went, but never once did she look up. So much of what is routinely learned about what happened to each victim was quite literally gone with the wind. The tornado had swept away any trace evidence-fibers, hairs, even shell casings that had been left behind by the killer. Why had Mrs. Martin been found nude? Labs for the presence of semen came back negative. She hadn’t been sexually active that morning, and unless the killer had used a condom, she likely hadn’t been raped. The nudity was puzzling, however. Emily just couldn’t wrap her brain around what had taken place. Maybe she’d just gotten out of the shower? Or was in her robe? She’d been bound the only one of the three. From what Emily knew, Peg had called the schools and Mark’s office with the urgent message to get home. Had the killer used Peg to lure Mark upstairs after he’d placed that call to Mark’s office? There was no way of knowing.
    But at least one person probably had an inkling, if not a hand in it. Nicholas Martin. And Emily had only two questions to ask him: Why had he done this? And what did her daughter have to do with any of it?
    Reluctantly Emily went home to the empty house on Orchard Avenue, full of memories, but missing the one spark of life that was her daughter.
    God, where is she?

Chapter Thirteen
    Thursday, 8:42 A.M., Cherrystone, Washington
    When Marina Wilbur turned to greet Emily Kenyon, it was like seeing a ghost from an unsettled grave. The look of horror on the pretty detective’s face could not have been more disconcerting-and tragically obvious.
    “I’m sorry,” Marina said, standing to acknowledge Emily as she entered her office. “I guess I should have told your boss to warn you. Peg and I are…” She caught herself and the tears she had held in check since the ride from the Spokane airport began to rain down her cheeks. “Were,” she corrected herself as she fought to regain her shattered composure, “we were identical twins.”
    Emily, still caught off guard, set down her paperwork and lamely offered coffee. She was carrying her own from the coffee stand and felt awkward drinking in front of her.
    “It’s not bad for cop coffee,” Emily said, looking around for a tissue and hoping that Shali Patterson hadn’t used the last of them.
    Like her sister just like her sister-Marina Wilbur was a thin and shapely woman with honey-blond hair and, given a much happier time, mischievous green eyes. Emily thought of the school carnival and how Peg had given a kid an extra cookie. Her green eyes literally twinkled. But Marina’s eyes weren’t all that mischievous now. They were wrought with worry, dread, and unimaginable sadness. She had flown from Dayton, Ohio, to face the worst