Emily Kenyon 01 - A Cold Dark Place

or something he could use to extricate his buddy from the darkness below. “Hang on!”
    “Get me out of here! Tyler!”
    As his eyes adjusted to the dim and dank surroundings, Mason’s terror escalated. He was unsure of what he saw at first. Was it real? Was it a joke? He moved closer and gasped.
    “There’s a bed down here and some other stuff. Hey, I think there’s a dead body down here”
    “No shit?”
    “Yeah, there are bones,” he said, cupping his hands to amplify his voice in the darkness. The makeshift covering of rotting boards shoved aside, a stream of light found its way to the floor of the twelve-foot-deep hole. “There’s blond hair, too!”
    “Whoa! Cool!”
    “You wouldn’t think so if you were stuck down here. Come on!”
    Mason Davidson didn’t know it right then, of course, but he’d solved a mystery that had haunted the Pacific Northwest for two years.
    He’d found Kristi Cooper.
    Sunday, 11:00 Pm
    In the same red pencil Emily noticed that someone had underlined Reynard Tuttle’s name in an article that detailed how Emily had shot him in the ill-fated raid on the cabin. There was also an annotation. The words were tiny and in grammar school perfect script: Poor Dope.
    Emily found her footing and spoke. “I don’t know what to say.”
    “I don’t know what any of these means,” Christopher said, releasing his slight embrace. “And you know how much I hate to admit that”
    “I’ll never forget the day those boys found her”
    “I know. Whenever I see fall colors, I think of her, too”
    “Whoever wrote in this book-Bonnie, I guess-wants us to think that Tuttle wasn’t Kristi’s captor.”
    “But he was,” Christopher insisted.
    Emily had always had her doubts. It was something she never spoke about to anyone, not David, not Christopher. It was the small voice she’d heard in the back of her head whenever she thought of Kristi and how she died. The voice she heard was never answered out loud. To do so, would bring home what she’d done.
    “As far as we knew,” she said. “I mean, there was nothing that tied him to the body, once we found her. No trace. No DNA”
    His eyes were penetrating. “We can’t second-guess what we did now.”
    “But you’ve brought this to me for a reason. You think there’s something there”
    “There’s a link between Bonnie and Walker.”
    “She was his number-one fan,” Emily said. “I talked with her girlfriend, Tina Esposito. She said she and Bonnie were best friends and had a major falling-out over Walker. Bonnie basically stole Walker from Tina. God knows why. They hadn’t spoken in years”
    This clearly interested Christopher. “Fighting over a serial killer?”
    “You could put it that way. It wasn’t that he was a serial killer. They believed he wasn’t. Both of them. In fact, there was a legion of Bonnies and Tinas out there that lined up to see Walker during and after the trial.”
    He let out a sigh. “Another prison groupie, Jesus. What’s with these women?”
    Emily narrowed her gaze. “It isn’t simple. I fought over a two-timer,” she said, letting her guard down a little. “I lost. Some women love a guy they can’t have” Emily looked over to the minibar. Another drink was against her better judgment, but the memories of Kristi Cooper and the possibility that she actually hadn’t shot her captor called for something to thwart her creeping doubt. She opened the minibar.
    “I‘11 have what you’re having,” Christopher said.
    She opened a couple of mini Chivas Regal bottles. “No ice. No mix. Okay?”
    He agreed and she poured. They sipped the smooth, smoky whiskey. “Perfect,” he said. “Now let’s get down to business. I’ve saved the best for the last.”
    “Better than Kristi?”
    “Better”
    “What are these?” Emily asked. Christopher was holding several slips of paper that had been kept in the back of the black album as precious souvenirs.
    “Letters from Bonnie’s boyfriend.”
    Emily pulled them out and looked at the signature on the last page of the first missive.
    “Dylan Walker?”
    “Yeah, and it’s the typical sick stuff that these creeps send to women on the outside.”
    “The lonely and desperate or the desperately lonely.” Emily started to scan the pages. “The handwriting appears consistent with the penciled notations in the album,” she said, flipping back to the “Me” and “Poor Dope” written on the news clippings.
    “That’s what I thought. I