"No need, honey. I'll handle it."
Emily parked in front of the house. The night air was filled with the scent of white lilacs her mother had planted when she was a girl. They were enormous bushes now, nearly blocking the front windows. Emily didn't have the heart to give them a good pruning, though they desperately needed it. She only thought of the job when springtime rolled around and the tallest tips were snowcapped with blooms. The memory brought a smile to her face that fell like a heavy curtain with the ring of another call.
Sheriff Kiplinger, again.
She glanced at Jenna and flipped open her cellular. "Kenyon, off duty," she said, putting a reminder of her status up-front.
"Emily, you'll need to go out to the Martin place tonight. Jason will meet you there. Neighbors say they think the twister might have touched down that way."
"Jesus," Emily said, waving Jenna inside. "Can't it wait until morning? I'm about half dead right now."
"You know the answer. Once we get a call from a concerned citizen we have to act on it right away. Damned public relations. Damned lawyers."
Sheriff Brian Kiplinger had a point. An adjacent county nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990s when a woman reported that her sister was being abused by her husband. When law enforcement arrived two days later, the woman was paralyzed from a beating that happened after the sister phoned in her concerns.
"All right," Emily said. "I'm going."
"Jason's already on his way."
Emily exhaled. She was needed. She told herself that she'd be back home in bed within a couple of hours. She grabbed one of Jenna's Red Bulls from the fridge, thinking that the energy drink's sugar and caffeine could fuel her for the drive out to the Martin ranch on Canyon Ridge, about fifteen miles out of town. Once there, she knew adrenaline would kick in. So would Jason Howard's bottomless reserve of energy. Jason was only twenty-five, a sheriff's deputy with a four-year degree in criminology from Washington State University. He was single. Bright. Always up for anything. Youth and enthusiasm counted during the grindingly long hours after the storm.
She glanced at it, but ultimately ignored the red Cyclops of the answering machine light. Whoever had called could wait. She blew a kiss at Jenna, who was now in front of the TV watching some trashy dating show set on a cruise ship. Emily was too tired and too preoccupied-to say anything about it. She clutched her purse and went for the door. The car radio was playing a B. B. King song, which was like comfort food for her soul. She loved that New Orleans sound-B.B. was her favorite.
This, too, shall pass, came to mind as she drove.
The sky had blackened like a cast-iron pan, pinning her headlights to the roadway. A tumbleweed, a holdout from the previous season, skittered in front of the Accord. The wind that had converged on Cherrystone and obliterated everything in its wake had become gentle, but was still present. Dust and litter swirled over the roadway as she drove into the darkness of a spring night. Lights off the highway revealed the neat ranch homes amid fields of hops and peppermint the two most important cash crops of the region. Emily felt the buzz of the Red Bull's caffeine as she took a sharp left off the highway.
The mailbox announced who lived there: MARTIN. She'd been out there before, of course. She'd probably been to every place in the entire county before she got her detective's shield despite her big-city credentials. Growing up in Cherrystone had also brought even more familiarity, though much of the place had changed. She vividly remembered the Martin place as a typical turn-of-the-century two-story, with faded red shutters and gingerbread along a porch rail that ran the length of the front of the house. The roofline featured a cupola covered with verdigris copper sheathing, topped with an ele gant running horse weathervane. The house sat snugly in a verdant grade etched by meandering, year-round Three Boys Creek.
Emily pointed the Accord down the gravel driveway. Dust kicked up and the sound of the coarse rock crunched under her wheels. She was surprised by the contrail of dust following her car. It billowed behind her, white against the night sky. She didn't think she was going fast and she didn't think that any dust could have remained in the county. She negotiated the last curve and saw Jason's county cruiser, a Ford Taurus made somewhat more legit by its black-and-white "retro police" car livery. It was parked with its blue lights stabbing into an empty darkness.
"What in the world?"
Emily Kenyon could barely believe her eyes the Martin house was gone.
Before the tornado, exact time and place unknown
Those who saw it later considered it to be a scrapbook of horror, a dark album of so much that could never be forgotten. Why memorialize such things? Affixed to each black paper page were the yellowed clippings of his unspeakable crimes. The most notorious among the nine he claimed were the ones for which he was convicted Shelley Marie Smith and Lorrie Ann Warner. They were college roommates from Cascade University in Meridian, a midsize port city in the extreme northwestern corner of the state. Both girls worked at a store that specialized in hardware and garden supplies. Shelley had wanted to save the world one child at a time; elementary education was her major. Lorrie Ann had been less sure of her future than her roommate. She'd bounced from major to major, unable to decide her life's calling. She told her parents that she was still "searching for a passion."
The young women were found bound, shot in the back of the head, dumped along a sandbar along the Nooksack River late in the summer. An unlucky kayaker had found the dead young women some three months after they'd been reported missing. Their bodies were badly decomposed, but the telltale evidence of their horrific last hours had not been obliterated by the warm summer days or the icy mountain waters. They had been sexually violated and tortured. It was the most disturbing crime ever reported on the pages of the Meridian Herald.
Yet they were not his first victims. Certainly not his last. Even so, they held the distinction of commanding a full ten pages of Herald clippings in the black memory album. It might have been because there were two victims or because they were so young. But when their photos and clippings were pasted into the book, it told a story.
No one knew it, but it was a love story.
In turning the pages it was easy to see there was more to come.
Chapter Two
Monday, 10:48 n.M., Cherrystone, Washington
The temperature had dropped and Emily Kenyon felt the chill of a late spring breeze nip at her. The strobe of blue from the police light made her shudder and she grabbed a jacket as she got out of the car. Jason Howard, his flashlight like a light saber, raced toward her. Broken glass and splinters of wood were everywhere. It was like the heavens had opened and snowed fragments of the Martin house all around them.
"Glad you're here," Jason said, his flashlight's beam aimed at Emily's face, making her look even more tired and almost ghoulish. She blinked back the light and made a quick nod. "I think I found Mrs. Martin," he said. Emily caught the fear in his voice. She also saw it in his deep-set dark eyes, burrowed into his head under a characteristic knitted brow. The kid is scared shitless.
Before she could say anything calming, her eyes followed the swift movement of the young deputy's flashlight beam.
"She's over here," he said.
Amid the darkness, the light fluttered over the ground like a moth. Emily's heart sank when a white figure popped against the darkened backdrop.
"Oh, dear, there she is," she said, her voice catching slightly.
"I'm pretty sure she's dead."
"I can see that, Deputy."
Margaret "Peg" Martin was splayed out nude; her clothes appeared ripped from her body by the fury of the storm. She was facedown in the mud. Kitchenware was scattered helter skelter. Broken dishes. Fiestaware, Emily thought. Shards of glass glittered around her chalky frame. Pieces of fabric and slivers of paper fluttered as the wind passed through the gully that once held the pretty home. It was as if a bomb had gone off. It was Bosnia. It was Baghdad.