Bet she loves the bed-head look, he thought. Bet she's not as hot as she wants everyone to believe. Bet she's cold as ice. Like the others.
Tiffany Jacobs brushed right by him as she made her way to the basement. She could feel the heat of a hundred bodies rise in the dank passage way. She caught the peculiar blend of odors vomit, beer, pot.
Guys are so gross, she thought.
The frat boys were playing boat races with some of the other drunken sorority girls down there. Upturned plastic drinking cups floated on a slimy beer surface on sheet of plywood procured for the game. Drink. Slide the cup. Push it to the edge. Drink. With each heat, a cheer erupted with the kind of enthusiasm that might have greeted the winner of the America's Cup.
But this was the big, blue, plastic beer cup.
The room was crowded and the walls were so hot, they practically wept condensation. Tiffany's rubber flip-flops stuck to the concrete floor from a coating of spilled beer that shined like shellac.
"I'm going to get some air," she told her crew, all teetering woozily on a night of beers. One of her Beta Zeta sisters, an unfortunate girl with brown hair and teeth that had never seen the benefits of orthodontia, started to follow. She was one of the four Lindseys who had pledged that year. Tiffany knew she was a mistake, but they needed another girl to make their quota. Lindsey S. wasn't really ZBM Zeta Beta material-but she had a high grade point average.
"No, Lindsey S. I'll be back. I'm going to call my mom. You stay here"
Lindsey S., drunk and bored, complied and returned to the boat races.
Tiffany shimmied through the tightly woven human mass on her way to the door. Her mom had called earlier in evening-twice.
He was right behind her, just close enough to keep her in his sightline, but not enough to make her feel uncomfortable.
The cool night air blasted her face and sent a welcome chill down her body.
If Satan threw a party, he d have it at Kappa Chi, Tiffany Jacobs thought, as she walked up the concrete steps from the basement to the yard. Bits of broken glass shimmered.
She could hear the sound of a couple making out by a massive oak tree that sheltered much of the yard. She went the other direction, toward the pool, and reached for her cell phone and dialed the speed number for her mother.
"Hi honey," her mom said. "I wondered if you'd call me back tonight."
"I'm sorry, Mom," Tiffany said, sitting next to a leaffilled pool, "I've been studying my butt off tonight."
"That's why you're there, honey."
"I know." Tiffany rolled her eyes.
"I called earlier because I wanted to let you know I can come a day early for Moms Weekend"
"How early, Mom?" Tiffany was annoyed and had no problem letting her mother know. "You know I have a lot of responsibilities."
"I know you do, Tiff."
"Just a minute," she said cutting off her mother. She took her phone from her ear.
"Do I know you?"
Mrs. Jacobs tried to speak to her daughter again, but Tiffany was arguing with someone. She couldn't make out anything that was being said. The tone of it, however, seemed angry, confrontational.
"Tiff? What's going on? Tiffany?"
No answer.
"Tiff?"
Then the phone went dead.
Cherrystone, Washington
Derek Edwards's eyes were two black, bottomless spheres. To look deep into those eyes would be to fall into darkness. Sheriff Emily Kenyon felt the faint hairs on the back of her neck rise. She'd been close to evil too many times to discount the feelings that came to her. It was as if somewhere inside there was a malevolent barometer telling her to be just a little more careful.
But not so careful that you let fear stymie what you need to do.
"I'm surprised at you," she finally said. "You seem. . " she paused to irritate him. "What's the word I'm looking for? Indifferent. That's what I'm feeling from you here"
It was a lie, but a strategic one.
Derek Edwards, however, didn't blink.
"Are you expecting me to cry?" he asked, four feet away, across her desk. The face of her daughter, Jenna, now 22, beamed in her graduation photo from Cascade State University. Nearby, a little pink purse decorated with an eyeless flamingo was filled with pennies and acted as a paperweight.
And as a touchstone to terrible things in the past, things that made Emily and Jenna closer than ever.
"Some emotion would be nice, Derek."
He shrugged. On his lap was a stack of flyers that he'd had made at Kinko's. They were facedown, but through the cheap goldenrod colored paper the photo of a woman was visible. The headline in squat, block letters, was also bold enough that it could be read backward through the paper.
MISSING
Derek kept his papers balanced on his lap. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. The muscles that enveloped his sturdy frame like cables spun around a rigid spool, tensed beneath his vintage Green Day concert T-shirt. He didn't smile. There was nothing about him that seemed vulnerable.
As a man might seem when his pregnant wife vanished.
"Look," Emily said, still sizing him up, "I don't want anything from you but the truth"
Derek clutched his papers and leaned forward then stood up. "Jesus, Sheriff, you know me. You know my family. You know that I didn't do anything to her."
Emily stood so that she could meet his gaze head-on. She noticed how he hadn't yet said Mandy's name. She stayed quiet, hoping that her silence would invite the 30-year-old man with the ever-so-slowly receding hairline and beefy biceps to reveal something of use in the investigation. To spill more. It was a technique that had served her well in all kinds of interrogations as a Seattle cop, then as sheriff's deputy, and finally, the sheriff. On the wall behind the man with the missing wife was a portrait of Brian Kiplinger, her predecessor and a friend she still mourned. Kip's photo was comforting and distracting at the same time.
"You need to be forthcoming." she said. "We understand that things weren't that-and I don't mean to be unkind here that great between you," she said, stopping herself and playing his game of not mentioning his wife's name. "And your wife. You know your marriage was in trouble."
Derek slammed the flyers on Emily's desk, the heavy thud, knocking over Jenna's portrait. It startled her.
"In trouble?" he asked. "We had problems, but not any more than anyone else around Cherrystone or anywhere in this country!"
She picked up the photo and righted it. "Yes, but she was going to leave you"
Edwards' face went completely red. "I'm sick and tired of all the innuendo coming out of your office. I loved my wife."
My wife. As is she were some possession, Emily thought.
Five days earlier, Derek Edwards had called the sheriff's department to report Mandy was missing. He was worried when she didn't return from her scrapbooking group that evening.
"That's not like her," he had said. "Mandy wasn't like that"
The dispatcher had immediately seized on his words. "Mandy wasn't like that"
"He spoke of her in the past tense, Sheriff," she told Emily. "Like she's gone for good. Weird, huh?"
Emily gave a quick nod, but said nothing.
More than weird, she thought as she went back to her office. With her chief deputy, Casey Howard, out sick, Emily had made the first phone calls to other young women in the scrapbooking club and immediately determined that Mandy Edwards had never gotten that far.