Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

local TV reporter, the microphone so close to his angry mouth that he could have swallowed it in one gulp. “We don’t know where Kristi is and Emily Kenyon is the reason why.”
    The reason. The cause.
    Emily didn’t reach for the bottle like some cops who’d made mistakes they could easily live with. She did see a doctor and took some meds for anxiety, but only for a short time. She didn’t fall apart, at least not outwardly so. She had a husband and daughter who needed her. There was an investigation over what happened in the Cooper case. There were more media reports. She gave up her shield for thirty days. She tried to keep her mind on Jenna and David, but a girl she never met would not leave her mind. Even when she was engaged in a conversation with David, thoughts unspooled. She had screwed up. She hadn’t meant to, of course. But when she looked down at her hands, she knew they had been the inadvertent instrument of a little girl’s demise.
    God, please forgive me. God, give me the chance to make this right.
    Reynard Tuttle was wheezing, his lungs pierced by a single bullet from Emily Kenyon’s police-issue gun. It had all happened so fast —a racing speed that allowed not a second for introspection about what had just occurred. A dark spot of blood bloomed on his food- and sweat-stained white cotton T-shirt, and then oozed crimson to the cabin floor. He was only twenty or so, barely a man. Emily knelt beside him. He was trying to speak. She pushed his gun away and she leaned close.
    “Shouldn’t have done that,” he said, barely able to form his words.
    “Where’s Kristi?”
    “That’s for me to know and you to find out” His voice was a soft rasp.
    Emily knew he was dying, but his death went far beyond the tragedy of his own wasted life. He had to live to tell her what she needed to know. Adrenaline pulsed. She shook him. “Don’t fuck with me “
    “You’ll never find her.” Tuttle turned his head slightly and looked up. His eyes were beginning to roll.
    “Don’t leave!” she said. “Stay with me. You don’t want this to be what you’re remembered for. You don’t want to hurt Kristi. Where is she?”
    Collier rushed through the opened doorway. “Jesus, Emily, are you all right?”
    She glanced over her shoulder and with one quick nod, indicated she was unhurt. When she looked back down at Tuttle, his eyes had been emptied of life. They were the eyes of a cold, dead animal.
    “Come back here!” she said, tugging on his shoulders. “Goddamn you!” His head thumped on the cabin’s planked flooring. Hard. “Where is the girl?”
    “Emily, stop!”
    She couldn’t and Tuttle’s head smacked against the floor over and over. But he was gone. So was Kristi.
    A helicopter outfitted with an infrared camera worked a precise grid of forest and beachfront acreage in the vicinity of the Tuttle shooting. Tourists and homeowners watched the sky as the aircraft’s whirling blades rattled their windows. Everyone knew what the Seattle Police and FBI were looking for the telltale hot spot that indicated Kristi Cooper, dead or alive. At one point, a team was dispatched for followup on a glow of red picked up near Foster’s Pond. Working shoulder to shoulder in a squared-off line, almost fifty FBI agents, police, and Boy Scouts trained in a process of a detailed grid search marched lockstep toward the hot spot.
    “Anything and everything gets tagged,” a Seattle sergeant yelled across the front of the line as the teams began to walk. One kid dropped a marker at a smoked cigarette; another found a rotted sleeping bag.
    “Tag it!”
    About twenty-five minutes into the march, a female volunteer caught an acrid whiff of the instantly recognizable scent of death. She started coughing. She was sure that she’d found Kristi Cooper’s remains. Any hope that she was alive was erased by that terrible smell. That stench could only mean one thing. It was over.
    “Over here, my end of line,” the young searcher called. Two CSIs moved methodically toward the call for help. They stepped on the existing tracks of the search team. Each step was a shadow behind those who’d walked ahead.
    In front of the young woman, now doubled over in anticipation of vomiting, was a mass of undulating maggots.
    A CSI in a dark blue jumpsuit, bent down. “Dead fawn,” he said, not masking his disappointment. “No tag, but steer clear. Damn it. This must be our hot spot”
    For nearly two years, the dead deer