Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

were. Jenna was smart. She was capable. She cared about doing the right thing. Emily sat still, breathing in her daughter, then went to her office and sat in front of her computer.
    You’ll be home soon, she thought. I’ll never be too busy to listen.
    The screen snapped to life and she typed in the web address for a Seattle daily paper and clicked on the link for the archives. She typed in “Angel’s Nest,” hit Search, and two small items popped up. One was a brief mention in a column, quoting a detective who had worked a homicide case that had tangential ties to Angel’s Nest. The other was an item that indicated that all the assets seized by the government had been dispersed at auction, five years after the scandal. Emily thought there would be more; it had seemed like a bigger story. She searched again, but nothing more came up. It was then that she noticed the archives only went back to 1990.
    What was it?
    She tapped out the name of the detective quoted in the article: Olga Morris.
    Friday, 3:39 PM, Salt Lake City airport
    The reader of the newspaper wadded it up and threw it into an airport trash receptacle. A teenage girl chatted with her boyfriend on her cell phone. A woman scrounged through her purse to come up with enough change for an Orange Julius. A businessman’s fingers worked over the keyboard on his laptop, something apparently so important that it couldn’t wait. Amid the blase world of the airport concourse, the reader of the newspaper wanted to scream. The article that so enraged the reader was an account of the Cherrystone murders, discovered after the tornado had swept through parts of the eastern Washington town. The story recounted how Mark and Peg Martin, and their son, Donovan, had been shot and left for dead. The storm had taken what was likely a family rampage and twisted it into a perfect crime.
    Perfect crime? Not even close. Perfect screwup was the real truth.
    Missing from what had once been the Martin family home was the eldest boy, Nicholas. Also missing was the chief detective’s daughter, Jenna.
    Find the cop’s daughter. Find the boy. Finish the job.
    Friday, 6:50 RM, northern Washington
    Running a rototiller at fifty-one was not easy. with a smile on her face, Olga Morris-Cerrino cursed her late husband’s idea that they should move out to the country, till the land, raise exotic sheep.
    “It will make us more interesting,” Tony Cerrino had joked when he sold her on the idea of the mini farm on the outskirts of Whatcom County. “You know … gentleman farmer types “
    Easy for you to say, she thought back then. Even more so now.
    Olga brushed the sweat from her brow, leaving a muddy streak on her already tanned forehead. How she missed him. How she wished that he hadn’t taken that business trip that icy November.
    “Damn you,” she said softly, standing in the cookie-batter soil of what would have been her husband’s best year ever gardening. “I loved you so much” Her arms ached, but she wasn’t unhappy about what she’d accomplished. Her eyes ran over the plot of creased earth behind her. The rows were perfectly straight.
    “No need for strings if you have a good eye,” he had told her that first day they’d planted. “And you have a good eye, my dear.”
    She’d sowed popcorn, sweet corn, and a brand-new variety of buttercup squash that early evening. She’d planted more than she could use. That was by design. She knew the old women at the Whatcom Food Bank would be pleased when harvest came that fall. She’d arrive with a red wagon of produce fit for the tables of the finest restaurants in the county. But it would be for those who really needed it. Doing that would be hard this fall. It would be the first without him.
    Olga Morris-Cerrino watched the sun dip below her white clapboard house, as a chilling breeze worked its way across the meadow, then closer, to the garden where she stood. She zipped up her jacket and checked the tiller for gas. It was getting dark, but once she got going it was hard to stop. Evenings in the country were like that. Tony knew it. He loved it. And despite everything she had once thought about herself, she’d grown to love it, too. Yet the breeze right then was like an icy hand on her neck. When she heard the phone ring she set the tiller down and used the intrusion as the excuse she needed to go inside.
    She swung open the gingerbread-framed screen door and went to the antique wall phone that Tony had