Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

lawyers with their backs like a wall in front of the crammed courtroom of spectators. The judge was actually listening to the public defender, a windbag who made grandstanding look like a classy move.
    “Your Honor, it is my client’s right to present an alternative theory of this case and you know it.”
    The judge, an old-timer with a bird beak nose and halo of gray hair, frowned. She turned to the prosecutor, a veteran of the worst criminal cases the region had seen, but who wanted to win this one to cap off a relatively distinguished career.
    “I don’t like this one bit, but I’m allowing it.”
    The prosecutor kept up a front of righteous indignation.
    “Your Honor!”
    “Can it!” The judge didn’t bother looking at him; she turned her attention back to the bailiff and sighed. “Now let’s bring out the jury and finish this case.”
    Olga felt her stomach dive. This BS is coming in? When there was so much that wasn’t going to be presented to the jury. It was the system, she knew. But it still felt like a hard kick to the memory of those who’d come across Dylan Walker never to be heard from again. Although the case of the two dead college girls had led him to that courtroom, there were three others that hovered like apparitions throughout the proceedings. One was only twelve years old, a redhead named Brit Osterman.
    Her case didn’t fit the profile that the FBI had originally crafted for Meridian PD when the two Cascade coeds first went missing. Too young, they insisted. But then again, Olga knew, Dylan Walker was sixteen at the time. Maybe she was his first? The first sip of bloodlust had to come from someplace. Olga was all but convinced he killed the sixth grader.
    The strongest link between Walker and a victim was a Seattle woman who went out for a jog in Walker’s neighborhood. Tanya Sutter never came back. Her body was found a week later in a thicket of blackberries and fireweed off the old highway between Seattle and Tacoma. She had been wrapped in plastic. Bound. Shot. Dumped. Too much time had passed on that one and though interrogators tried to break Walker to force a confession, the man was Teflon. Nothing seemed to faze him. His gaze was cool, smug, almost indifferent. Not one ounce of indignation.
    “I’m not a guy,” Olga Morris had told the chief after that interrogation, “but if I were, I’d want to pop anyone who even made the suggestion that I brutalized some woman for kicks. But not this self-absorbed charmer. He just smiled those pearly whites and shrugged. It was like we were cutting into his time to kill.”
    There was suspicion of another victim, a girl named Steffi Miller who went missing while Walker attended a church youth camp in Nampa, Idaho, the summer of his senior year in high school. Her body was never found. In all, Dylan Walker had been linked to five dead or missing: Brit, Tanya, Steffi, Lorrie, and Shelley.
    Unluckiest man in the world or serial killer? The press had already decided. More than a hundred reporters had descended on the gold-pinnacled courthouse to write about the nation’s most handsome killer. Most were women. All wanted an exclusive interview, but Dylan Walker played hard to get.
    “I’d love to, Connie,” he’d say, “but my lawyer is dead set against my talking to anyone right now. But if I did give an interview, I’d do it with you”
    He’d used the same line, or a variation thereof, over and over. “There’s plenty of me to go around, once I’m exonerated,” he said more than once.
    Olga Morris sat still in her spectator’s chair just behind the prosecution’s table, her blood boiling. She’d already testified so she had nothing more to say officially. But she could barely contain herself as she overheard the twitters of Walker’s burgeoning fan club. No one called him “Dylan Daniel Walker” in the three full-names fashion that was usually accorded to the suddenly notorious.
    Instead they dubbed him “Dylan” or “Dashing Dylan,” which finally morphed in to just plain “Dash”
    The adulation made her skin crawl in unqualified revulsion. She knew that part of the problem was America’s fascination with a handsome killer. The media fostered that kind of twisted thinking. Victims were pretty. Killers were ugly. But every once and a while the good-looking stumble. Ted Bundy was often described in press accounts as handsome and charming. But Dylan Walker was no Ted Bundy. Or rather, Ted Bundy was no Dylan