Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

thought it would be so much harder to do”
    “Depends on how hard you want things.”
    Olga interrupted Dylan Walker and the now red-faced suburban mom who’d been caught flirting over a stack of travertine tiles.
    “Dylan, I could use some help, too,” Olga said.
    Even though he knew why she was there, he flashed his blazing white smile.
    “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.
    The woman with the shopping cart of travertine started to back off slightly. Olga was tiny, blond, quite pretty, and best of all, carried a badge. The shopper must have realized that those attributes easily trumped overweight, mousey, and an upper lip in need of bleaching.
    “Thank you,” the woman said, her smile now sagging and her cart inching down the aisle. “If I have any questions, can I ask for you, Dylan?”
    Walker stuffed his hands in his pockets; his jeans were loose around his thirty-four-inch waist. He turned and fixed his gaze on the detective. “What do you want now?”
    Olga’s eyes remained steely, completely unflinching. She let a slight smile part her lips. It was merely for effect and had nothing whatsoever to do with how she felt about him. They’d had it out during the first week of the investigation when he tried to suggest the missing girls were promiscuous.
    “They were always coming on to me,” he had said.
    Olga knew the guy was a creep and just looking at him sent a shiver down her spine.
    “You,” she said. “Dylan, just like everyone else around here, I want you”

Chapter Twenty
    9:15, nineteen years ago, Meridian, Washington
    The Whatcom County Superior Courthouse was the jewel of a revitalized Meridian, Washington. It was an old terracotta castle, with five gold-tipped spires that held court over a downtown that had seen a recession come and go, and a kind of renaissance emerge. The art museum had scored a major postimpressionists show-a coup for a city of Meridian’s size. Nordstrom store officials had vowed to keep their location just where it was, thus ensuring that the mall going up in the hinterlands of the county would never be more than a second-tier destination.
    It had been more than a year since the two Cascade University students were found on the sandbar. It had become a touchstone moment. Nearly every resident could recall where they had been when the news broke. The college had tightened security. The police stepped up neighborhood patrols. In a sense, the city dusted itself off and continued moving forward.
    There were problems in the courthouse with the Dylan Walker double-homicide case. What had seemed to have been an exceedingly strong case was imploding. Olga Morris, who’d made the collar for Meridian Police Department, sat stone-faced while lawyers argued about whether or not the defense’s theory of another perp could be heard by the jury. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been much of an issue. Blaming someone else had always been in the hip pocket of any half-good-and sometimes desperate-defense lawyer. But this one was tricky. No one could depose Tyler Ticen. No one could get him on the stand. This particular “I-didn’t-doit-he-did” target was stone-cold dead a suicide without a note.
    College student Ticen also worked at Builders’ Center. Detective Olga Morris wondered who didn’t work for Builders’ Center. Ticen let several coworkers know that he was interested in Lorrie. An examination of his room on campus showed an overt interest in criminology, sociology, and truecrime books-one of which was about a killer with the same ligature and torture MO.
    But he was dead. The suicide, the defense postulated, was a direct result of his growing guilt over the arrest of allAmerican charmer Dylan Walker. Walker enjoyed the volley of words as the lawyers pitted their wits against each other and case law. He sat somewhat smugly, Detective Morris thought, shifting his weight from one side to the other while keeping a slight smile on his handsome face. His hard brown eyes followed everyone in the courtroom like a roadside artist’s painting of Jesus, only creepier. There was nothing soft about Dylan Walker. Hard body. Heart of stone.
    All of that but no place to go but prison.
    Olga hoped Walker would be off at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla as someone’s bitch by month’s end. But the petite detective was nervous. Her blond hair was longer now; she absentmindedly pushed it behind her ear. She leaned closer to capture every word being said by the