Heart of Ice

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jason’s cruiser as he parked fifty yards away.

As she walked down the path, the light dipping low behind a grove of alders draped with new catkins, Emily wondered how she could have been so stupid. How she had wanted to believe something about Mitch Crawford so onerous, so unforgiving, that she’d trapped herself. Camille had pushed hard, of course, but the blame wasn’t hers alone. Emily was the investigator. She had been in pursuit of a killer to avenge a woman’s and a baby’s deaths.

This case went too far too fast. It was like we just wanted it to be Mitch. So neat. So much easier.

It wasn’t Donna she saw at the water’s edge. When she saw him, everything crystallized. Emily remembered the monograms on the guest towels in his mountain cabin in Idaho, at his big house in Cherrystone. She remembered how she shopped for a tie tack with the letter M because Cary hadn’t wanted any jewelry unless it was personalized in some way.

“Why wear anything if it doesn’t say something about you?” he asked her back then when they were dating.

All of it was from a time she wished she could sift from her memory.

Cary McConnell was facing the water. He turned around when he heard Emily approach, as her steps echoed softly on a boardwalk weekend fisherman had laid over the sodden path. She kept one hand close to her gun, its cold barrel reminding her of the danger of the moment.

“There’s nowhere for me to go, Emily,” he said. His eyes were red. He might even have been crying before she got there.

“You can come clean, Cary.”

He turned away from her and looked at the water, dotted with ripples of gold. “No. No, I can’t.”

“You can. Tell me. What happened with you and Mandy?”

He answered, with his back still toward her. “It isn’t so hard to figure out. You are pretty smart. Not smart enough to avoid getting involved with me, though.”

She chose her words carefully. “That was awhile ago.”

But I was smart, she thought, I dumped you.

“What happened with Mandy?”

“It was stupid. She was the wife of my biggest client. She was lonely. I was lonely. It was wrong, I know that.”

“This is more than an ethical violation, Cary. Mandy’s dead. What happened?”

Cary looked over the water, now cast in the yellow light of a very late afternoon. “She wanted to tell her husband. She wanted to be with me. Jesus, I didn’t want that. I told her to stick with Mitch. Let him think the baby was his. She kept telling me that she didn’t love him, that she could make a life with me. Right? Like I could give up my biggest client for her and that baby.”

It was the first time he mentioned the baby.

Emily inched a little closer. She wasn’t afraid. “What did you do, Cary? Tell me what happened.”

“It was stupid. She made me mad. I don’t like to be pushed. She kept pushing. She even started to call Mitch and tell him. I couldn’t have that. I put my hand around her neck. She clawed at me. But I had to shut her up.”

For the first time, Emily noticed the barrel of the gun that Cary pulled from his coat pocket. She hadn’t expected that and she took a slight step backward. She pulled her own gun.

“Drop it,” she said. “You don’t want to do that.”

“You don’t know what I wanted. I wanted you, remember that? I loved you, Emily. If you hadn’t broken up with me, none of this would have happened.”

“I’m sorry. I wish things could have been different.”

It was such a hollow lie that she was sure he could see right through it. But it was the first thing that leapt to her mind. Promise the potential suicide anything. Stall for time. Time might save a life.

“You’re a good man,” she said. Again, another lie, one so egregious she nearly choked on her words.

The barrel of the gun moved slightly.

“I’m garbage. Everyone says so. I couldn’t even manage to cover up my own mess.”

“But you did a good job. You paid off Tricia, didn’t you?”

A near smile came over his face. “That was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

“Brilliant. Now, please set down the gun.”

A flock of ducks flew overhead, and for a second, Emily moved her eyes from Cary. In that very instant, he pulled his arm from his body and in one rapid move pointed the weapon at his face.

“No!” she screamed.

A gunshot sounded, and blood spatter sprayed over a stack of firewood someone had assembled like a giant Jenga game. Cary slumped to the muddy ground.

“You shot me!” he said.

Jason was right behind Emily, a curl of smoke drifted from the nose of his Cherrystone Sheriff Department issue.

Cary writhed in agony. His shoulder had been pierced by Jason’s bullet. A cleaner shot had never been fired. Emily picked up Cary’s gun, its handle gleaming with engraved lettering: CAM. She put it out of reach.

“Where’s Donna?” she asked. She was cool, direct. She meant for the son-of-bitch coward slumped in front of her to give her an answer. “Tell me. Now.”

Cary’s eyes were ice. “You think I will tell you?”

“Don’t mess with me, Cary! Where is Donna?”

Cary put his left hand on his right shoulder as blood oozed through his wound. He struggled to pull himself together as if he’d just been stung by a bee.

“You’ll find her when the time is right. Like the others,” he said.

Cary’s words took Emily’s breath away.

Like the others? Mandy? Donna? Who else?

“Ambulance will be here in five minutes,” Jason said.

Emily looked at Cary, then at Jason. “Tell them no need to rush. Maybe he’ll bleed out.”

Cary McConnell just smiled.

Two hours later after gunfire sounded across the waters of Miller’s Marsh Pond, Chris Collier showed up at the sheriff’s office in his rental car. He was agitated, sweaty. Cursing the airline for its delays, the rental car company for putting him in a car that smelled like an ashtray. That was small stuff, of course. The real reason his blood pressure soared was because he hadn’t been where he’d wanted to be. With Emily. To make sure she was safe.

He’d picked up most of the information on the shooting from talking to Gloria on the drive from the Spokane Airport.

“Jason picked Cary off in the shoulder just as he was about to blow his own brains out. Jason’s too good of a shot if you ask me,” Gloria said. “Idaho police are up at the cabin, but no sign of Donna.”

“Emily’s OK, isn’t she?”

“She’s been through worse. You know that better than anyone. She’s tough. She made me call Jenna and fill her in on everything, of course. She didn’t want her to worry in case the news started churning out stories about the shooting up at the pond.”

Gloria said that Emily was holed up with Camille Hazelton and the investigators from the state were on their way to make sure that Jason Howard’s shooting of the suspect was clean.

When Chris arrived at the sheriff’s office, Gloria was on the phone. She waved him past her, mouthed “media,” and rolled her eyes. He poked his head in Jason’s office to thank him, but he was gone. When he turned around, Emily was right behind him. Without a word, she melted into Chris’s arms. Emily didn’t cry, but she could feel his strength and it soothed her, making her feel that as horrific as the day had been, it would not always be that way.

“He said there were others, Chris. I think he killed someone besides Mandy and Donna.”

“I know,” he said, letting her go so he could look into her eyes.

“You know?”