Heart of Ice

Weight: 100 lbs

Age: 29

Hair: Blond

Eyes: Brown

Marks/Tattoos: A pink rose on lower back.

External evidence of injury: Postmortem ligature on wrists and ankles. Markings correspond with chains recovered from the scene.

Cause of Death: Asphyxiation.

Special note: The victim carried a full-term fetus, a female.

Emily had seen the body at the coroner’s in Spokane, so she held the horrific visual whenever she went anywhere. Not just Mandy’s case. But the others, too. Emily sometimes saw blood spatter in pizza sauce. The sound of a chopping knife against a wooden cutting board often conjured up images of extreme brutality. One time, when she had the misfortune of running over an opossum, she felt the wheels crunch and she thought of a little boy that had been run over by his older brother.

“You have that look on your face,” her daughter Jenna had said one time when they were making stir- fry.

“What look?”

“Mom, the look. You know. The look that means you’re thinking about those celery sticks as something disgusting. Something dead. Bones or something.”

Emily tried to shake it off, protesting to Jenna that she couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Honey, I did have my mind on work, but not that. Something boring. No bones.”

But it was a lie.

In time, Emily improved upon masking the look. There was only one thing that troubled her more than the pictures and the thoughts of what sick men do to the weak and frightened. She loathed how a vital young woman like Mandy—after being brutally murdered—could face the further indignity of being nothing more than a few words on a report.

Name, height, weight, age, hair, eyes…cause of death.

She studied the pristine pages of the report. In time, they’d be covered with the oily spots of someone’s lunch, they’d be folded, maybe torn, as the days and the weeks of the investigation passed. Cherrystone was going to a computerized system in the new year, and no doubt Mandy Crawford’s murder would be the last of the old- school folders in the archive of a county that had seen only twenty-one murders in its entire history.

Emily looked at the photo of the body. There was a black swipe against Mandy’s wrists, ligature marks had been determined by the coroner to be postmortem. The killer had tied her to some chains in order to sink the corpse into the icy water.

Hoping, of course, that she’d stay put.

But Mandy didn’t. She literally rose from the dead.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Lewiston, Idaho

Nothing much ever happened in that remote patch of Idaho. But that day was to be different.

Every morning for the past decade or so, Leroy Evans pulled a cowboy hat over a stocking cap and saddled up his old bay mare, named Screamin’ Demon, to survey the security of the fence that ran the boundary of his eighty- two-acre ranch just east of Lewiston, Idaho. Neighbors four miles away had crossed their German shepherds with wolves for some goddamn stupid reason. Ever since then, a pack ran free in the fields looking to wreak havoc and make a meal out of someone’s livestock.

Leroy had raised sheep and cattle to great success, and had even dabbled in ostriches and emus. The mammoth birds were a complete bust—their low-fat meat and supple leather never really caught on with butchers or mass-market shoe manufacturers. He had kept only about fifty of the birds, and gathered their eggs for a fellow who etched them with tribal designs that didn’t mean a darn thing but were hot sellers at craft shows.

It was cold that morning. Icy. Most mornings that time of year were. Leroy went east first, so he could catch the slight warmth of the rising sun on his face as it tripped over the Sawtooth Range. About ten minutes into his ride, at the point where his property hit the main highway, he stopped Screamin’ Demon.

Strange place for an O egg, he thought, as he dismounted, then bent down to pick it up. Something wasn’t quite right. He pushed back some bunched-up dead ryegrass with the toe of his range- scarred boots.

“Hey!” he said, loud enough to echo.

It wasn’t an ostrich egg. At least, none that he’d ever seen had long strands of dark hair attached.

“Come on, SD,” he said as he jumped back on her. “We got a call to make.”

Leroy Evans didn’t know it, but he’d found the skull of Tiffany Anne Jacobs.

The Idaho state crime lab in Boise made a quick study of the teeth and the dental work of two missing persons from that region. Tiffany Jacobs had lost a back molar when she cracked a tooth on a corn nut when she was fourteen. She had a dental implant to replace the tooth. The silver post gleamed under the lights of the lab.

Crime scene tape flapped in the wind as the sun went down on the day of the discovery of Tiffany Jacobs’s skull, two ribs and a femur. Cops and crime scene investigators from Lewiston PD and the Idaho State Police canvassed the area, hoping to find more.

“Body must have been dragged around by coyotes or a pack of those ornery wolf-dog hybrids,” one of the investigators said as he returned to his car. “She might have been dumped out here. Or she could have been dumped a mile from here and dragged. Damn coyotes are pretty strong.”

From a vantage point on the highway, a TV camera focused its lens on the ongoing investigation. News reports had already leaked the discovery of the missing young woman.

A sorority sister still at Cascade called Jenna with the news. It hit her like a hard swung sap to the stomach. The truth of what happened to Tiffany had finally come; it was ugly and final. She was still processing the information when her mother came home.

“Did you hear the news?” Jenna said, not waiting a split second for Emily to shed her heavy woolen coat and set her purse down on the foyer table.

Emily wondered if Mitch Crawford had made another plea for the cops to back off. “What news?”

Jenna started to cry. “Oh, Mom! They found Tiff’s body in Lewiston. Mom, she’s dead.”

Emily knew about Tiffany’s disappearance, of course. But she’d almost half believed that she’d run off with someone. It was the story given by an old boyfriend, one usually not believed. Emily knew that Jenna and Tiffany were not particularly close. Even so, the information was devastating.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I hadn’t heard,” she said, wrapping her daughter in her arms. “That’s forty miles from the university.”

Jenna gulped a breath. “I know. She’d been there all the while.”

Emily could feel Jenna relax a little, comforted by her touch, as always. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

“Mom, I sort of hoped…You know, I hoped that she’d just come back. That she’d played a trick on us or maybe was just being a flake.”

Emily, still holding Jenna, stepped back and looked in her daughter’s eyes. “Is there anything I can do for you? I don’t really know Mrs. Jacobs, but I could call her.”

“No, that’s OK, Mom. I’ll do that. I’ll find out when the funeral is. Can you keep an eye on the investigation? I