“I’ll let you know,” Devon said. “We’re super short-staffed today. Besides Emma, I have another no-show today. Gotta go.”
“Wait!” Diana said, nearly yelling into the phone.
“What? I’m, like, super busy.”
“Call me as soon as she gets in.”
“Okay. Will do. Thank you for calling Starbucks.”
It was early evening when Diana phoned her husband, Emma’s stepfather. Dan Walton answered on the first ring. From the background sound, it was obvious he was in his car heading home.
“Need something from the store?” he asked.
“Honey, Emma didn’t show up for work today. I don’t think she came home last night, either.”
“What do you mean, didn’t come home?”
She looked around the room. “I really can’t tell for sure, but I called Starbucks and they said she didn’t make it to work today. We have to call the police. We have to find out where she is. This isn’t like her. Something bad happened to her. I know it.”
“Calm down,” Dan said. “I’ll be home in five minutes. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“Hurry,” she said. “Please, Dan. Get here as fast as you can. Something is very, very wrong. I’m her mother. I feel it.”
Dan promised he would. He dialed 911 and explained the possible emergency to the dispatcher. He gave his address and said he was headed home.
“My wife is there now,” he said, running a hard yellow light-something Cautious Dan would never have done. “I’ll be there in three minutes.”
“We’ll send a car out,” the dispatcher said.
Dan Walton had an uneasy feeling, too.
At 6:45 a Tacoma police officer named Antonio Lorenzo knocked on the Roses’ front door. He was a young officer, barely thirty. He had warm eyes and an instantly soothing countenance that no doubt served him well responding to calls such as the one made by Dan Walton.
“Let’s back up a little,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on with your daughter.”
“Emma didn’t show up for work today,” Diana said, her words coming out in quick gulps. She hadn’t cried yet, but Officer Lorenzo could easily see she was on the verge.
“May I come inside?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” Dan said. “I’m Dan Walton. This is my wife, Diana. Our daughter is Emma Rose. We didn’t see her last night after work and they said she didn’t show up today.”
Officer Lorenzo had a kind, calm face, which in that moment and in the hundreds of others that preceded it, was put to good use.
“Is this unusual for Emma?”
Diana’s face tightened. Not facelift smoothed out, but stretched with worry. “ Very. Of course it is. We wouldn’t have called the police if it was commonplace, now would we?”
Dan, now sitting next to his wife on the sofa facing the officer, who’d taken a seat on the brown leather recliner in the living room, put his hand on her knee. He patted her a few times to remind her to stay calm. Thinking the worst was ludicrous. Their daughter was a good girl. An environmentalist. A great student. If she’d gone off somewhere they were going to hear from her.
“Are you sure she didn’t come home last night?” the officer asked.
“I didn’t hear her come in. I’m a very, very light sleeper,” Diana said.
Officer Lorenzo made some notes.
“Are all of you getting along?” he asked, his voice soft and nonjudgmental.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Dan asked.
“Just asking. Just need to know if there were any problems here at home. Were all of you getting along with Emma?”
Dan leaned closer. His brow narrowed. He didn’t want to be angry just then, but the implication of the police officer’s words seemed directed at him.
“Do you mean to suggest she’s run away, left home?”
“Did she, Dan?”
“There would be no reason I could think she would do that. She is our only child and we’re a very close family,” Dan said, still stiff with resentment.
“My husband is right. We are extremely close. Sometimes too close, I think. Emma didn’t go to college this year because of my illness.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m cancer free now,” she said. “But the past couple of years have been rough and Em didn’t want me to go through it all on my own. Even though the surgery was a year ago and I’m fine, she just decided to postpone college for a year. Does that sound like a girl who would run away?”
“No, I don’t think so,” the officer said. “Is it possible that all the responsibility became too much for her and she needed a break?”
“But I am fine now! Look at me! My daughter even got me Mocha when she’s so allergic because she knows how much I love cats,” Diana said, looking over at Mocha as the furry feline wandered across the living room floor, her dust mop tail pointing upright like a skunk’s.
Officer Lorenzo took a few more notes about Emma’s height and weight, and asked for a picture. Diana got up to get one off the bulletin board in the kitchen.
“We can’t report her as missing until she’s been gone for twenty-four hours,” he said.
Dan looked at his watch, an old Seiko that had belonged to his father. “Well, as far as we know, that’s in two hours. She closed up the Lakewood Mall Starbucks last night. She gets off between nine and ten, depending on how much cleaning is needed after a day of coffee drinkers.”
Diana returned and handed over a five-by-seven.
“Her senior photo,” she said.
Officer Lorenzo looked at the photo and then looked up quickly. He didn’t want to say what he was thinking, so he said something else.
“She looks like a very nice girl,” he said.
“She is. Very nice,” Dan answered.
“She’s everything to us. She would never not come home. She would never not call us. Never,” Diana said.
The officer got up, still looking at the photo.
He didn’t know Emma Rose, of course. But he’d seen her face before. The nineteen-year-old was a ringer for Lisa Lancaster and Kelsey Caldwell. All three wore their dark hair long, parted in the middle. Kelsey’s was slightly wavy, but her mom said she’d taken a flatiron to it over the past year to give her the long, straight look that she’d sought. It was very, very seventies, which in turn, was very, very cool.
“I’m going to make a run over to Starbucks to see what I can find out,” he said. “It will be close to nine when I get back to the department. When I do, I’ll make the report. One of our detectives will get with you for a more detailed follow-up.”
Diana, so wrapped up in her deepening worry, didn’t get the change in mood just then, but Dan did. There had been a seismic shift. If the officer with the kind manner had been calm and professional when he first arrived, he no longer seemed quite so composed. There was something about the photograph that seemed to change everything.
Smaller bones likely meant-though he was inexperienced and unsure-an easier go of it in the basement when he went about the business of butchering her. Butchering her, by the way, was as far as he would ever go.
The idea of sex with a corpse sickened him. The idea of visiting human remains in the woods of the Pacific Northwest was wholly unappealing. This wasn’t about some psycho sexual conquest, but about control and technique.
He wanted to take what had been done before and improve it. As if he was revising code on a slow-moving,
