Heart of Ice

She gathered her lips in a puckered frown. “Sorry. How can I help you, Sheriff Kenyon?”

Emily held out a photograph from the county’s security badging office. In it, Mandy’s hair was a little longer, and her face a little thinner than when she’d last been seen. She set it on the counter and waited.

Caprice looked down at the image. Recognition came quickly. “She’s bigger now. Yes, she’s a customer. A good one with negligible taste, but charge cards with plenty of room. Amanda Crawford is her name.”

Caprice had insulted Mandy, but at least she had a good memory.

“Thank you. When did you see her last?”

“It’s been awhile. Not for a couple of weeks. I can check our records, if you want to wait a moment. I’m the manager here.”

Chimes sounded that indicated another shopper had entered and Caprice looked a little distracted as she kept her eyes on the teenager who started hovering by a hanging garden of baby dresses.

“Dior,” she said, whispering. “I have to watch that girl. You wouldn’t believe the number of shoplifters we get in here. Having a baby apparently means being a thief for some of these younger ones.”

Emily nodded, not because she believed for one minute what Caprice was saying, but because Caprice was the type of woman who needed to deride every person that came into her shop.

“Maybe you can arrest her if she steals something,” Caprice went on. “You know the type. Pregnant and stupid. Or stupid and pregnant.” When the shop manager took a breath, Emily steered the conversation back to Mandy.

“About Mrs. Crawford. Are you sure it has been a couple of weeks? You didn’t see her here yesterday?”

She let out a sigh. “I’m sure. Yesterday was slow. I could have used a new mom with a decent credit limit. I had a shipment of pink blankets from Paris that she would have liked—or that I could have sold her, anyway.” She laughed, like she was trying to be facetious. Emily knew better.

“She was going to have a girl?” Emily asked.

“Pink and lavender, that’s all she wanted to see.”

Emily thanked her and went down the mall to the Baby Gap.

No one had seen Mandy there, either. It was likely Mitch Crawford’s wife had disappeared before she ever made it to Spokane.

As Emily departed the mall, she wondered why a dour hard-liner like Caprice felt a need to run a place in which she loathed her clientele. What happened to the women who worked in such shops and radiated the joy of motherhood? Mandy wasn’t a missing woman to Caprice, but a missing customer.

Emily scoured the parking lot for her car. As she walked across the lot, she couldn’t help but think of her time in places like Chelsea’s when she was a young mother looking for the perfect little dress for the daughter who ultimately would always be the center of her life. She favored mint and lavender for her daughter, no pinks whatsoever. She wanted her to be the pretty little girl, Daddy’s Girl, as she’d been, but strong, too. She carried a bittersweet image of those early years with David and Jenna. He’d been the young, handsome intern and their baby had been a delightful surprise. In the beginning, as she worked her schedule as a Seattle Police detective around a new baby and a husband who was always at the hospital, she’d held out hope that easier times would come. All young couples struggle in the beginning.

Emily sat in her car, taking in the flood of memories. She watched a woman and her three children climb into the gleaming silver of their brand-new SUV. The car was expensive. More than fifty thousand dollars, she thought. She wondered if the husband part of that family’s equation was more welcoming of the children than David had been of Jenna.

David Kenyon could not take the spontaneity, the uncertainty that comes with a free-willed child. At the hospital, he was God; in control of the very lives of his patients. At home, he was a husband and a father. He couldn’t make the tiny pieces of a real, dynamic life fit in his ordered, unyielding world of medical emergencies. He couldn’t understand why Emily had wanted to catch the killer, put the baby rapist in prison, and stop the murder plot of an old man’s greedy family.

But most of all, he could never understand why Jenna had to come first.

She’d loved David so much back then. Deeply so. She’d seen his need to keep things ordered and under control as central to who he was as a doctor. But she had needs, too. Her life was about being a mother, a wife, a cop. She saw no shame in those ambitions, in that order.

She turned the key in the car and pulled into light traffic.

Chapter Four

“Sheriff Kenyon,” she said, holding the phone to her ear. Outside her office door, she could hear Gloria chatting with Jason about something—judging by their laughter, it had nothing to do with the case at hand. There was nothing to laugh about there. Just the uneasy feeling that Mandy Crawford’s vanishing act might not have been her own doing.

The person on the other line gasped. A crackle. Then, silence.

“Are you there?” Emily asked.

Another crackle.

“Hello?”

“Sheriff Kenyon? This is Hillary Layton. Mandy’s mother.” There was anguish in every syllable.

Emily had been expecting the call. She both dreaded and longed for such calls. They were always enveloped in worry, regret, and heartache, but they were necessary to move any investigation forward. She’d left messages at Luke and Hillary Layton’s Spokane home. The answering machine indicated that they’d be “in and out” but would be checking messages. Mitch Crawford had told Emily that Mandy’s parents were vacationing in Mexico and he had no way of knowing how to reach them.

“Mrs. Layton,” Emily said, “I’m so sorry.”

It wasn’t much, but it was heartfelt, and really, all she could say. Right then, they had not a scintilla of evidence pointing to Mandy’s whereabouts. The rest of the conversation would be driven by the mother of a missing young woman.

“Any sign of my daughter?”

Emily could tell that the woman, so far from the snowy Northwest, was about to shatter into a million pieces. “Nothing. But we’re working every lead we can. Where are you?”

“Puerto Vallarta. Mandy and Mitch sent us down here for a week—they have points in a timeshare. I didn’t want to go, because she’s so close to her due date. But she wanted us to go. She was so insistent. I can’t believe that she’s left him. She never told me anything.” Mrs. Layton took a deep breath. “Just a minute.”

Emily heard Mandy’s mother put her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone and say something to someone standing nearby. The break in the conversation gave Emily a split second to collect her thoughts. She wondered why Hillary Layton would leave her daughter with her first grandchild due any day. It seemed peculiar.

“That was my husband,” Hillary said, getting back on the line. “He wants me to tell you that he doesn’t trust Mitch as far as he can throw him.”

A man’s voice could be heard in the background. It was the heavy growl of a big man. An angry man.

“The guy’s a self-centered sack of crap!”

“Shhh! Luke. That’s not helping!”

Emily tried to defuse the anger, with a calming tone. “Mrs. Layton—”

“Hillary, please.”

“Hillary, then, where do you think Mandy might have gone? Are you close?”

“I don’t know where she is. And yes, we are extremely close. I saw her once a week and we talked on the