Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

finish the letter he was writing. But he was neat. He didn’t like to rush. Every stroke held some kind of power.
    … I long for a friendship with someone like you. I’ve added your name to the visitation list. If you come, please tell them you are a lifelong friend.
    Peace, Dylan Walker
    By the time Boomer arrived at Walker’s holding cell, he had finished addressing the envelope. He wanted it to get out in the day’s mail. The letter was addressed to a woman in Acton, California.
    “Here you go, Boomer,” Walker said, his smile reflecting the dim light of the buzzing fluorescent tubes that hung from ceiling chains over the corridor. “Just ten to go out today. I’m behind.” He laughed a little and handed over a stack of letters, envelopes of varying sizes, postage affixed by the senders in response to the jail’s request for self-addressed, stamped envelopes for inmate mail.
    Boomer opened the canvas bag and started feeding mail to Walker. “If you thought you were behind before, meet your future bout with writer’s cramp”
    Walker beamed as letter after letter was passed through the bars.
    “This is stupid,” he said. “You should just give me the damn bag”
    “You know the rules. They consider you a suicide risk. The drawstrings might be too tempting for a guy like you”
    “Tempting? Why would I ever want to hurt myself? I’ve never felt more wanted in my life.” He topped off his revelation with a big smile.
    I’ll bet you do, you psycho, Boomer thought. Instead he said, “That’s it for today. Better get busy. The mail train from Seattle’s running tonight. You’re getting another load tomorrow, hot stuff.”

Chapter Twenty-two
    Friday, 2:26, Cherrystone, Washington
    Emily knew the name, Angel’s Nest, because it had been in the news intermittently when she was a student at the University of Washington in the early 1980s. In the almost twenty years since then, she hadn’t given it a single thought. She turned on the teakettle and waited for the whistle. Angels Nest. What was that all about? Cary had said it was a “blast from the past.” She remembered that the agency had been in the news. There had been some kind of scandal. When the boiling water rumbled, and then whistled, she dropped a bag of chamomile and a squeeze of honey from a plastic teddy bear bottle into a cup. Steam rose up from the spout as she poured. Everything that could be wrong, was just that, wrong. She was still jittery and angry at Cary, heartbroken that Jenna wouldn’t just come home, and a wreck over the whole idea that she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought she had. How could she have been so blind? How can they seem so close one day, and the next be separated by a triple homicide? Herbal tea, something her mother pre scribed for everything from a broken date to a hysterectomy, sounded good.
    She sipped it from the cup Jenna had painted at the Ceramic Castle; orange poppies spun around the rim. She was unsure exactly what had been the source of the agency’s troubles. She’d called David to see if he remembered anything, but she got his answering machine-his voice sounding puffed up and all-important, even when he wasn’t there to speak. She left a message. Next she did a quick search of the Internet, which only turned up the scantest of information. Angel’s Nest was an adoption agency shut down in the mid-1980s over charges that its president had not only misappropriated funds but also somehow snipped through government regulations when it brought babies into the country. One woman from Tacoma even had to give her baby back.
    But how would Nick Martin have been involved with this agency, anyway?
    Taking her steaming cup down the hall to her office, Emily lingered in the doorway of Jenna’s bedroom. Her old bedroom. The screensaver on the Mac was a digital aquarium with a pair of pink kissing Gouramis doing what they did best, over and over. Emily flopped herself on the pineapplepost bed, patting the pink-and-yellow quilt her grandmother had made. Memories of her daughter flooded the room. She could smell Jenna’s Vanilla Fields perfume, a gift from Shali that Christmas. Over the bed was a framed print of The Little Mermaid, a souvenir from a trip to Disneyland. Beanie Babies left over from the long-abandoned collecting craze took refuge on a shelf. A purple Princess Diana teddy bear was the prize, a plastic “tag protector” dangled from its paw. So innocent then. All of us