Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

as it had been back in the days when she first looked at the dead bodies of those college students, wrapped in an expensive plastic tarp on the sandbar of the Nooksack River. She talked about Dylan Walker and the other women that had crossed his path only to turn up dead. There was Brit Osterman, twelve; Tanya Sutter, twenty-four; and Steffi Miller, seventeen.
    Olga sipped her ice tea and pointed a finger at one of the news clippings in the file. “All these girls murdered by him —I don’t have to say allegedly now because I’m retired and I know what I know-and he turns into some kind of Lothario for the lost and lonely.”
    Emily let out a breath. “I remember now. My girlfriends at the UW talked about how much more handsome Walker was than Ted Bundy.”
    “Bingo,” Olga said, no longer smiling. “I had to live with that during the trial.”
    Emily felt a little embarrassed. “But no one wanted to date him. It was just more like it was such a waste. Dumb, I know.” Olga sighed. “You were young. Others were older and
    should have known better. That brings me to Angel’s Nest” “Right. That’s why I’m here. I don’t see the connection.” Emily looked at the papers as Olga spread them out. There were many. Felix, who’d managed to let himself in, took a spot on her lap.
    “He likes you,” Olga said. “Does that bother you?”
    Emily shook her head and massaged Felix under his chin.
    “Now,” Olga went on, “let’s discuss Angel’s Nest, which we nicknamed `Devil’s Best’ back at the office when the news first broke. God, we hated that place.”
    Olga recounted how the Seattle agency had been seen as a model of its kind, matching pregnant college students with prospective parents and generally living up to its business card motto: WE CREATE FAMILIES. No one knew exactly how many families were created through the agency, because even despite the court cases that ruined the place, such numbers were elusive.
    “Confidentiality laws work for criminals, too,” Olga said. “Keeps everyone in the dark. Even the grand jury that heard the case was clueless as to how big the scandal was”
    “The scandal?”
    “Oh yeah, you want the good part.”
    “And the connection?”
    Olga nodded. “Right. I’ll jump right to it. Randall Wilson, the president of Angel’s Nest, was indicted, and convicted, on procuring babies for a fee. Big fees. He and his office had more demand for their services than babies, so over a six-year period-we don’t know for sure-they placed more than twenty babies for big bucks. They sold babies to desperate people.”
    Emily remembered the name Randall Wilson. “This was the `buy a baby’ case?” she asked.
    “That was what got the attention from the media. In the end it was true that we-and it was never my case-only convicted on those cases. They were just so much more obvious. The prosecutors in Seattle didn’t want to rip apart families that they didn’t have to and expose birth mothers who were local girls. It seemed too big and too wrong. Shutting down the agency was the ultimate goal.”
    “Look, Olga, I get that. What I don’t get is how you’re involved and how does any of this connect the dots?”
    “I’m sorry. I digressed. I don’t get many visitors out here”
    Emily wished she hadn’t been impatient just then and she apologized. “It’s just that I’m worried about my daughter.”
    “I know.” She put her hand on Emily’s and patted it gently. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. It was clear that she meant it. “Okay, when I read about your case, I wasn’t thinking Angel’s Nest-you brought that up when you called. I was thinking about the signature of the crime. Mrs. Martin, nude, tied up, and shot. Maybe even strangled. It reminded me of my girls.”
    Her girls, Emily knew, were Lorrie and Shelley.
    “I didn’t think anything about it until you called.”
    “But I don’t see the connection,” Emily finally said.
    “During the Dylan Walker trial, and afterward, women from all over the country wrote to him. They came here. They visited him. One of them was a woman named Bonnie Jeffries. I would never have given her a second thought except that she worked for Angel’s Nest and was one of the chief witnesses against her boss”
    “Where is Bonnie?”
    “Not sure. She faded away after the trial. Stopped going to see Dylan Walker at Monroe. She just disappeared. I made a couple of calls before you came, but no one knows what