Heart of Ice

The ME’s assistant, a pretty young woman named Denise in a spotless white lab coat, offered coffee and Emily thanked her. She sipped it from a disposable cup and waited on the blue couch just outside Dr. Wilhelm’s door.

It was 8:45 A.M. When she called after Mandy’s body had been found, Dr. Wilhelm told her to be there at 8:30.

“Not a second later. We’ll start sharply.”

He’d said it with a short laugh. “You know, all autopsies start with something sharp—a scalpel.”

Emily resisted the eye roll at the time. “Yes, of course.”

“My grandson thinks it’s funny,” he said.

In reality, she didn’t think there was much to laugh at. A dead pregnant woman had been cracked out of the ice at Miller’s Marsh Pond. It was clear that she’d been murdered. No one ends up in a frozen lake in a sleeping bag in the middle of winter by accident.

All the while on the drive up, Emily considered every bit of the terror that Mandy had likely endured. She could see the young woman in her mind’s eye, battling the evil of a man who cared nothing for her life or the precious baby she carried. She could hear her voice as she screamed or begged.

I hear you, Mandy, she thought. We all do.

Dr. Wilhelm told her to be there sharply, but it seemed he was running late. She sat outside his office door, sipping on coffee Denise provided from a thermos carafe next to a counter crammed with medical supplies. She could hear his belly laugh as he talked with someone on the phone. Clearly, Dr. Wilhelm was a man who loved his work.

“Donut?” he said as he emerged from his office. “Denise! Get Sheriff Kenyon a goddamn donut to go with that lousy coffee of yours! I want one, too!”

He patted his protruding belly. “Like I need one more, you know.”

Emily took a donut, because to say she didn’t want one was akin to telling Santa to screw off.

“Delicious,” she said.

“Let’s get down to it. She’s prepped and on the table. Water’s running. Did you see Mr. Crawford?”

Emily looked puzzled. “When? I mean, not for a few days.”

The ME shrugged. “Half hour ago. Just before you arrived. He came in and did the ID.” The ME reached for a second—maybe a third—donut. Sugar rained on the floor and he pulverized it with his heel. “We tried to notify him that we might have found Mandy, but he wasn’t home.”

“But this hasn’t been on the news. Did you leave a message or something?”

Dr. Wilhelm swallowed his last bite. The man ate like a snapping turtle.

“Negative. He said he heard it on the scanner that a body had been found. He was sure it was Mandy. He drove up first thing. Denise almost decked him to get him to wait his turn. Wanted him to take a chill pill. Didn’t you, honey?”

Denise, a woman who a moment ago was a donut server, was a tough chick when she had to be.

“You got that right,” she said. “The prick went right around me and found her in two seconds flat. He didn’t want to follow procedure. Anyway, I don’t care. He ID’d her. Cried like a baby.”

The news surprised Emily.

“Really?”

“Yeah, you know the type. Big explosive sobs, followed by hacking and then the whole apology for being so ‘emotional.’ Jesus, the woman was his wife, pregnant with his baby. He had a right to fall apart.”

Emily hated Mitch Crawford, but she almost felt sorry for him just then. The way Denise described it, the fellow was distraught—as he ought to be.

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, you’ll love this. He says, ‘Why, Mandy? Why did you do this to me? I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.’”

Emily watched from the corner of her eye as Denise removed the pale gray drape that covered Mandy’s body. Although the baby had been removed, her abdomen was still distended.

“Do what?” she asked, suppressing the horror of what she was seeing. Somehow it helped to focus on anger at Mitch Crawford for something callous that he’d said, rather than the evil he’d done.

“I dunno. Die? But it bugged me that he seemed to blame her for doing something to him when she was laying there like a thawing turkey the day before Thanksgiving.”

“I know the guy. Enough said,” Emily said.

Chapter Twenty-six

Cherrystone

“You all right?”

Jason Howard stood in the doorway of Emily’s office, his head cocked in concern.

Emily smiled tentatively. “I’m fine. I’m going to dig into the case again. Camille’s out of town visiting her mother and I’m trying to button things down on Crawford before she gets back.”

“Can I help?”

Emily knew that her deputy only wanted to be useful, but his offer only annoyed her. It wasn’t that he wasn’t up to the task, it was more about the fact that she couldn’t piece together what was troubling her.

“No, I’m good,” she said, a little too dismissively. She saw the hurt in his eyes. “You grab some lunch.”

“Bring you back something? Going to the grill.”

Emily declined the offer. “No, I actually brown-bagged it today. Such a glamorous life I have as the Cherrystone sheriff.”

Jason tried to brush off the rebuke with one of his good-natured smiles. He buttoned up his heavy blue coat and left. Emily knew that he’d bring back one of those big pink frosted cookies that she once remarked she liked, but could really barely eat half of one. One more bite ensured a sugar overload and an afternoon of the crash-and- burn.

Pink icing can be a real killer.

Everything she had was in front of her. Emily looked at the sheaf of reports that she, her deputy, and the CSIs from Spokane had compiled on the Mandy Crawford missing persons case. There was nothing there. She wondered how an inch of paper could contain so little information. Mandy was at work one day. Gone the next. She’d been seen walking the dog by a woman who also misidentified the breed of the Crawfords’ canine. So that was no good. She hadn’t been observed by any of the clerks in Spokane at the mall. Her credit cards hadn’t been used.

She was gone. Poof. Mandy had vanished.

Every day put the young mother-to-be in greater and greater danger. Emily didn’t tell the media or the local women who’d come to help search for Mandy Crawford about the dire statistics behind the disappearance of any pregnant woman. Most were dead at the hands of their husbands, control freaks who refused to have the focus shift from their personal and sexual needs to a child who’d suck up every last bit of their wives’ attention. They viewed those babies growing inside the distended abdomens as parasites stealing the attractiveness of a body whose sole purpose had been to pleasure them.

Such murders were about rage fueled by envy.

She looked down at the paper with the stats from the coroner.

Name: Amanda Lynn Crawford

Height: 5'2'