Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

wasn’t trying to do that, of course. Instead, she was summoning the courage to ask a question to which she had no business knowing the answer.
    “Was it true what the papers said about Lorrie and Shelley?”
    “What, specifically?”
    “They were, you know, violated.”
    The detective looked directly into Tammi’s vapid blue eyes.
    “Dear,” she said, “we can use the word rape”
    Tammi sighed. She seemed emboldened by the detective’s clarification and her precision.
    “Okay, were they raped? Because that’s what I read.”
    It dawned on the detective that the girl wasn’t in search of salacious details. The look on Tammi Swenson’s face was utter fear.
    I can’t say one way or another; the case is ongoing. But I will tell you this. Don’t go out alone at night. Check your car before you get in it. Don’t talk to people you don’t know.”
    The college student stepped backward, toward the door. Olga Morris continued her litany of warnings.
    “Be careful. Tell your friends. Tell every girl on the floor, okay? We’ll catch him, but we won’t catch him until he makes a mistake. And, Tammi, we don’t want that mistake to be any more dead girls, okay?”
    Tammi gulped hard. Her bulging eyes shifted nervously away from the detective’s piercing gaze. “Okay.”
    What neither Olga nor Tammi knew was that the mistake had already been made.
    Coffee rings and a spherical grease spot indicating a doughnut had been consumed while someone reviewed the autopsy report turned Olga Morris’s stomach. She wondered if she’d ever get to the place where’d she be so callous as to be able to eat breakfast over the kind of descriptions and images that came with such reports. In her office at the Meridian Police Department, she spread the pictures and documents across her desk. Photos of Lorrie here. Shelley there. A stack of the medical examiner’s reports, the interviews conducted by the police in the early stages of the case-when it had been a missing persons case and not yet a homicide. She squared up the edges of each pile of papers and photos. It dawned on her as she moved from one stack to the next that it almost looked like she was playing some freakish version of solitaire.
    She knew then the images would never leave her. The bodies, wrapped in plastic, and out in the sun had swelled and burst. Water had chilled the exposed body parts-Shelley’s right hand, in particular. Clumps of hair had fallen from her head. Decomp was a nightmare far beyond the imagination of anyone who’d never seen a rotting body.
    Who had the stomach to eat an old-fashioned doughnut and look at these?
    As she scanned the color 8 x l Os, Olga noticed that a ligature of some kind the ME thought that the marks, smooth, but with a single striation down the center, indicated an electric cord had cut so deeply into Shelley’s wrists that her hands were nearly severed. Lorrie’s body had incubated in the plastic wrap, so it was harder to tell. It appeared she’d suffered the same fate. Both had been brutally raped and shot in the back of the head in what laypeople always called execution-style.
    Some execution, Olga thought as her unblinking eyes scanned. With what these girls went through they probably were grateful for it to end.
    The ME suggested that both women had died about the same time-but not right after their disappearance. It was tough to pinpoint exactly when they did die. Because of the plastic tarp, the sun had literally cooked their bodies, the greenhouse effect accelerating the decomposition process.
    Based on the ME’s guess-blowfly larvae, tissue decay, and a copy of the Meridian Herald dated July 18, the girls had been dead only a month when discovered. Maybe six weeks. The newspaper, Olga and others surmised, had been used to absorb a puddle of blood-probably at the scene. Since neither victim’s head held a single bullet, ballistics would be of no use in tracking the killer. The gun was probably in the bottom of the river, or somewhere. Olga was fixated on the cording used as the ligature.
    Find the cord, find the killer.
    The detective knew that in most instances when a killer used electrical cording it was either an extension cord or some cut from a table lamp or other small household appliance. It was usually just the right length-three feet to tie up a victim.
    She looked around her office. A poster of Mt. Baker hovered above her desk, its white conical form silhouetted against a fiery sunrise. The