Emily agreed. “Reliable people don’t run off.”
“Not without a reason, they don’t.”
She locked her eyes on Chris. “You don’t think she left him, do you?”
“Not at all. But I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”
“The more I get to know him, the more I wonder
“You know the answer, don’t you?” He looked over at Jenna’s portraits taken with Santa Claus from babyhood to high school. They were set in a row on the mantel among sprigs of holly Emily had plucked from the backyard before she’d given up on fighting the couple across the street for best decorated house on Orchard Avenue.
Emily followed his eyes to the pictures.
“Of course,” she said. “She wanted a baby. She’d waited for the SOB probably to tell her when the right time would be for her to have one. Not the right time for her. But—”
He cut off Emily. “Right. The time that suited
“Maybe there was no right time.”
“Exactly.”
“Most pregnant women who are murdered are victims of the men who fathered their babies.”
Chris finished his wine. “He didn’t want that baby, did he?”
Emily set her glass down, too. “He probably never wanted the competition a baby would bring.”
Emily Kenyon adored Chris Collier. She loved being with him, loving him. That part of their relationship had always been fulfilling, exciting, and something that fueled all of her fantasies when she was alone and longing for his touch. He was her dream. He was a broad-shouldered six-footer, with lively eyes and wavy dark hair that had begun to silver at the temples.
“I like it this way,” he once told her, “kind of reminds me of my dad. He was gray by fifty-two.”
Chris had often told Emily that after he retired, he wanted to sell his downtown condo and buy a farm in the rural part of the state.
“Maybe I could find a place out near you?”
“Are you a stalker or just looking for cheap real estate?”
He winked at her. “Oh, a stalker, for sure.”
Emily knew that she’d once used Jenna as an excuse to forestall talk that she and Chris should be something more than lovers. There had been very good reasons for the delay of her own personal happiness. Jenna was sixteen when she’d been traumatized by the bizarre events that led her into the web of a serial killer. That crime had brought Chris and Emily back together after having been partners on the Seattle police force earlier in their careers. She loved Chris, there was no doubt about that. Loving him, however, meant carrying that old burden.
But Emily also knew that Jenna was right, that Chris was good for her, and she for him. Listening to a twenty-two-year-old never seemed like a good idea, but Emily knew her daughter never failed when it came to wanting Emily to find the joy in her life that had eluded her since she and David divorced.
Chapter Seventeen
At twenty-two, Cherrystone Reserve Deputy Ricardo Gomez was a techno-geek who knew his way around computers like Emily Kenyon knew her way around motherhood and blood spatter evidence. In a very real way, his high-tech prowess was a curse. Whenever anyone had problems with their home PCs, it was Ricky who’d get the desperate call for troubleshooting.
Sometimes he’d even be asked to come over to make a house call. Doctors didn’t make house calls, but a guy who knew the difference between byte and bite me did. He often wondered if anyone had heard of a help-desk phone number, but he never said no. He’d graduated from Cascade University with Emily’s daughter, Jenna, and went looking for a job before going back to school for a master’s degree in knowledge management and criminal justice. He’d been hired on a one-year contract to work with the software company to move the Cherrystone Sheriff’s office from paper to paperless.
Ricky looked like anything but a nerd. He worked out three days a week, kept his longish black hair styled, and wore dark jeans and a sport coat every day. He was handsome, with brown eyes and teeth so white they almost glowed.
Since Ricky was trained and had been deputized, he fit within the standard protocol for chain-of-evidence rules. That was good. Cherrystone couldn’t afford an outside lab to go over the Crawfords’ laptop computer. After all, they’d barely had enough dough for a year-end holiday celebration. Emily had Ricky in mind when she needed someone to take a look at the computer that Mandy Crawford used before she vanished.
“You won’t find anything on it,” Mitch Crawford had said as he watched Emily and Jason Howard carry it off on the Friday after his wife disappeared. “We’re pretty good about wiping out most of the websites we visit, no cookies saved either. We’re not going to be victimized by some crook trying to steal our information by spying on us. We use CompuClean every Sunday on an automated cycle.”
Emily felt like saying something along the lines of “how convenient,” but she held her tongue.
Nevertheless he must have read her mind.
“Well,” Ricky said when Emily handed off the laptop, “it’s not exactly the latest and greatest.”
Emily knew he was right. The laptop was at least seven years old, which made it nearly a relic as such things go. It was the size of a small attache case, not one of the slim little notebooks that students and executives have made the day’s status quo. She told Ricky how Mitch used a program to lessen the risk of spyware.
“Or so he told me,” she said, her tone sardonic at best.
“I can poke around. Give me an hour or so and I’ll pick the low-hanging fruit. If I think there’s more there, and I can’t get to it, I’ll let you know. I’m not going to try to play superstar info finder here. Let’s leave that to someone with real experience. OK?”
“Fair enough,” she said. She watched as he booted up the machine and started clicking through the icons on the desktop. “I’ll leave you to your work. Come and get me if you find something.”
“Sheriff Kenyon?” Ricky Gomez stood in the doorway of her office, with the look of a man who’d won a drawing for a new car or maybe a trip to Hawaii—excited and satisfied.
Emily looked up from her paperwork. “What is it?”
“I think you’ll want to see,” Ricky said, barely able to contain his excitement.
“You’re not a good poker player, are you, Ricky?”
He laughed. “No one thinks so.”
Emily set aside her papers and followed Ricky to his office at the end of the hall. It wasn’t much of an office. Before he moved inside with a telephone and cables that ran from four computers, it had been an employee smoke break room. It still smelled of it, years after the ban on smoking in the workplace. His mom brought in a faux Oriental rug to cozy up the gray and white speckled linoleum floor.
It was a thoughtful attempt, but the big sink behind Ricky’s desk let it be known that this office wasn’t an office in its former life.
Emily peered over Ricky’s shoulder as he navigated the Crawfords’ desktop.
“Check this out,” he said, clacking at the keyboard and looking up at the sheriff at the same time.
“Here are her favorites, not really erased by the file cleaner,” he said.
Amanda’s favorites on her Internet navigation tab were an odd mix of household management websites and scrapbooking resource pages that she hit routinely as she downloaded stencils and design ideas. Emily could see that Amanda hadn’t finished the template for the Christmas scrapbook that she’d ordered online.
