Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

collection. She’d seen a best-selling crime author, a woman with an exceedingly sweet voice and a gentle manner, on a television show talking about the psychographics of her readers. They weren’t a pack of blood-lusting housewives. Far from it. She insisted that they were the “gentlest” people one could ever hope to meet. “The kind of people who take a spider outside in a tissue,” the author had said.
    Never hurt a spider? But maybe fall in love with a killer?
    Books and a tray table had been knocked to the floor. A door in the sideboard that Bonnie Jeffries apparently used as a secretary-bills and letters were stacked neatly on its luminous pecan surface-was open. Papers from within were scattered. Someone had been looking for something.
    Emily quickly sifted through the papers, but nothing grabbed her.
    The kitchen was next. It was clean and orderly, decorated in a red apple motif that showed all the earmarks of a collector’s chief problem. Once collecting an item-owls, Scottie dogs, and apples-every gift one receives is tied to the theme. Bonnie Jeffries had framed apple crate labels and apple-shaped platters on the wall. Even the kitchen clock was faced with an apple tree design. There was so much red in the room, Emily didn’t notice the red spatter on one of the McIntosh apple-crate label prints, a variety from a farm called Blossom Orchards. And there was an apple-shaped cookie jar on the counter next to a big wooden knife block, just like one that Emily had.
    “Bonnie?” Emily’s voice was now a whisper. She walked down the narrow hallway, drew her gun, and turned toward the open bedroom door. The room was still and dark. Music from a bedside radio played low. The windows that faced the street had been covered in sheets of aluminum foil, presumably to keep out the light. Emily knew from her conversation with Tina Esposito that Bonnie worked nights as a janitor. She slept during the day.
    She clearly lived alone. Emily felt sorry for her. For a second, Emily felt the air move, then the hair on the back of her neck prickled and rose. The sense of foreboding was palpable.
    Something is terribly wrong here.
    Emily flipped on the lights. In a sudden flash of illumination, there she was. Bonnie Jeffries, all 250 pounds of her, was laid out on the bed. The sheets were streaked with so much blood it made Emily gasp. Bonnie was facedown, her nightgown-clad torso painted with her own blood. Adrenaline flowing, Emily scanned the room. Just Bonnie.
    “Jesus Christ,” Emily said, automatically reaching for her cell phone and dialing 911.
    What the hell happened here?
    Emily spoke to the emergency dispatcher, identifying herself as a detective from another jurisdiction. Though her heart pounded, her tone was surprisingly cool. She could act like what she’d seen didn’t upset her-thought the truth was far the opposite.
    “I’ll secure the scene until Seattle PD arrives,” she said.
    “All right. Your name? Your affiliation?”
    “Emily Kenyon. Cherrystone, Washington, Sheriff’s Office”
    “All right. Sit tight. Officers en route”
    “I’ll wait outside,” Emily said. The smell of blood made her nauseous. “Bring the coroner. No need for lights. This lady’s dead” Sadness swept over her. A woman’s life had been taken in the most brutal way imaginable. Emily had never been so hardened by the experience of her job that she didn’t feel jabs to the heart at the sight of a murder victim. The cramped house in the rundown part of Seattle’s southern city limits was now a crime scene.
    On the way out, Emily noted that baby pictures stared down from the walls, and she spotted a basket of yarn and an unfinished sweater. Every outward indication of what Bonnie Jeffries was in life was at odds with her devotion to serial killer Dylan Walker. She was the Suzie Homemaker type, but robbed of the joy that comes with it.
    Maybe that’s just the kind of person he wanted. Someone he d be able to control?
    Emily hurried to her car.
    The story had been told often enough that Emily could almost live the rest of her life nearly believing that she’d moved back to Cherrystone to take care of her parents, the house, save her marriage, whatever had come to mind when someone asked why she’d returned.
    But the reality was darker than that. As dark as night. Emily sat behind the wheel in front of Bonnie Jeffries’s sad little house and knew that her past was about to catch up with her. She had toyed with