Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

her. He seemed almost sorry.
    “I can’t say. But be careful.”
    She wanted to threaten to call the police, but she was the police. “Go. Get out of here” The elevator door glided open and she stepped inside. As the two brass-plated halves began to come together she saw Cary for what she hoped was the last time. He stood staring with what seemed like a genuinely remorseful look on his face.
    Remorseful, but pathetic. That’s what he was. Truly pathetic.
    The dark heart of true evil is a hammer on the soul. With each beat, it pulses and sends the tainted blood throughout a killer’s body. Like a virus. Or a deadly and dangerous toxin. Some killers know his or her bloodstream is poisoned with wickedness. Most don’t.
    Not far from the chic comforts of the Westerfield Hotel, one such person pondered the next move. The internal struggle against the heart of evil had been fought and lost. The end was near.

BOOK III
    Sins of the Father

Chapter Twenty-seven
    Sunday, 10:30 A.M., Seattle
    Emily Kenyon held her breath as she drove over the twotiered viaduct that swept several stories above Seattle’s waterfront alongside its shimmering harbor. It had long been viewed as an unsound structure, destined to pancake if there was a major earthquake. Given the tornado, the Martin murders, and the sad state of her personal affairs, Emily felt that if the time had come for a big shake, it almost certainly would occur when she was on that disintegrating elevated highway. She held the steering wheel in a death grip.
    Emily looked straight ahead, her peripheral vision barely capturing views of a pair of ferries and a container ship as they maneuvered in Elliott Bay. She was headed south to an address in Georgetown, a scruffy but slowly gentrifying neighborhood on the concrete edges of Seattle’s industrial district. Bonnie Jeffries’s address, given to her by a resourceful Olga Morris-Cerrino, was a dark brown two-story that along with a half dozen others were the holdouts of an old family neighborhood that had seen far better times and hadn’t yet been restored and revitalized. Black wrought-iron bars more county jail than French Quarter-fortified the firstfloor windows of each house. One set of iron security grilles apparently hadn’t been enough of a deterrent; one window had been replaced by a sheet of heavy plywood.
    Emily pulled up next to the weedy sidewalk. These people should sell to some energetic young couples who want to restore these places and will put up with crime and grunge while they wait for the neighborhood to come back, she thought as she made her way up the buckling front steps. What could have been the world’s oldest dog, a Norwegian elkhound mix, barely looked up when the detective knocked on the door and waited. No answer. She pressed the doorbell but the silence that followed indicated it was out of order. She strained to hear. She leaned close and pushed the ivory button a second time. The door was ajar. She knocked and it creaked open.
    “Bonnie? Bonnie Jeffries?”
    Silence. Maybe she was at church?
    Emily entered the small foyer, startled by the sound of broken glass under her feet. She turned to look behind her, and for the first time noticed a small glass pane had been shattered. Broken glass glittered on the shabby shag carpeting. What’s going on here? She made her way toward the living room. The residence smelled of one of those carpet cleaning powders. Vanilla and lavender, she thought. The house was deathly quiet.
    “Ms. Jeffries? Bonnie? Are you home?”
    Emily entered the living room, a cramped space of floor-toceiling bookshelves, knickknacks everywhere, and too much furniture. It was tidy, but overloaded. It passed through her mind that the furnishings were all from the overstuffed 1980s. Bonnie hadn’t always bought quality, and apparently had never bothered to update.
    Rust and green competed with mauve and gray as dueling decades fought for her sense of style. Emily instinctively patted her side, checking for her gun. She’d been in law enforcement long enough to get that sixth sense that something was awry. The feeling was akin to paranoia, but it had been always so deeply rooted in reality that she never disregarded it.
    Something’s wrong here.
    Among the books that competed for space on Bonnie’s overflowing living room shelves were volumes about psychology, forensic science, and true crime. In other circumstances, Emily wouldn’t have thought twice about that