to keep her cool, “she’s worried about her daughter. She loves her daughter. She wants to know where she is. You know, most people in your position would feel the same way.”
“You don’t know how I feel,” he said.
“Come in and tell me.”
Mitch let out an exasperated sigh. “This is stupid. But I’ll be there.”
Back in her office, the smells of a burning coffeepot and popcorn emanated from the break room. Emily dialed the prosecutor’s office and was patched through to Camille’s desk.
“Hazelton,” Camille said, her voice throaty from a cold that had declared war on her immune system.
“I ran into Mitch Crawford,” Emily said. “He’s agreed to come in for an interview. Thought you’d like to know. You’ll never believe what he was concerned about.”
“Try me.”
“He’s worried about his mother-in-law and car sales. He barely even mentions Mandy.”
Camille let out a laugh, which started a series of coughs. “Sorry. Working on a cold. That’s priceless. Remind me never to buy a car from that guy. I’d hate to boost him in a time of real need.”
“Do you want to be there?”
“No. Too formal. Just chat with him. Press him gently—and I know that will be hard because I’d like to shove him against a barbed-wire fence until he screams.”
“You must be sick,” Emily said. “You’re holding back now, Camille.”
“Just a little. You know what I mean.”
Emily did. The two women talked a moment longer. Emily told the prosecutor that she intended to videotape the interview with Mandy’s husband.
“I’m not sure he’ll go for it,” she said.
“If he likes what he’s wearing today,” Camille said, “I’ll bet he says yes.”
An eleven-year-old snowboarder noticed the gleam of silver under a pile of snow on the back end of a Walmart parking lot near Spokane. Casey Broder’s mother wouldn’t let him go to the slopes with his older brother and friends, so the kid took to the heap of snow plowed into a minimountain behind the store. It wasn’t much of a slope and he cursed his mother for not letting him do what he wanted to do.
All of that changed, when the sun hit the minimountain just right and a small mirror blinked right at him.
Casey thought it was a girl’s compact at first. He bent down to pick it up, but it was frozen into the minimountain. Using his board, he started to chip away at the crust of snow. A couple of whacks and he discovered that the mirror was attached to a car.
A silver Camry.
Casey told the Walmart greeter what he’d found and the man called the police. Within an hour, the police arrived and determined that the car belonged to a missing woman from Cherrystone.
“They found Mandy’s car behind a Deer Lake Walmart,” Jason said, catching Emily in her office. “The store’s snowplow operator has lousy peripheral vision and buried the car by mistake. It sat there because no one complained their car was missing.”
She could read her deputy like a book. There was neither sadness or hope in his words, just the rote recitation of the facts.
“She wasn’t in the car, was she?”
He shook his head. “Nope. State police will process for trace.”
Emily had a sinking feeling. “Thanks, Jason. I’ll tell Mitch. I’ll bet you a beer that the vehicle’s clean.”
“You’re on.”
If there had been any hope that Mandy had left on her own, it evaporated with the discovery of her Camry. She might have had plenty of reasons to escape her husband—last trimester or not—although it seemed unlikely that she’d vanish from a Walmart parking lot.
“She’s not the Walmart type,” he’d said.
Chapter Six
Mitch Crawford’s eyes were bottomless. Flinty. Cold. Sheriff Emily Kenyon felt the sparse hairs on the back of her neck rise. She’d been close to evil too many times to discount the feelings that niggled at her. It was as if somewhere inside there was a malevolent barometer telling her to be just a little more wary.
But not so wary that you let fear stymie you.
On the credenza behind her, the face of her daughter, Jenna, beamed in her graduation photo. Nearby, a little pink purse decorated with an eyeless flamingo and filled with pennies served as a paperweight.
And as a touchstone to terrible things in the past. Things that made Emily and Jenna closer than ever.
“I’m surprised at you,” she said, as they faced each other from across her desk. “You seem…” She paused to irritate him.
“What’s the word I’m looking for? Indifferent. That’s what I’m feeling from you here.”
It was a lie, and a strategic one.
Mitch, however, didn’t blink.
“Are you expecting me to cry?” Mitch asked.
“Some emotion would be nice, Mitch.”
He gripped the stack of fliers that he’d had made at the copy center. They were facedown, but through the cheap goldenrod-colored paper the photo of a woman was visible. The headline in squat block letters was also bold enough that it could be read backward through the paper: MISSING.
Mitch kept his arms folded tightly across his chest. The muscles that enveloped his sturdy frame like cables spun around a rigid spool tensed beneath a powder blue Hilfiger lamb’s wool sweater. He didn’t smile.
“Look,” Emily said, still sizing him up, “I don’t want anything from you but the truth.”
Mitch clutched his papers and stood up. “Jesus, Sheriff, you know me. You know my family. You know that I didn’t do anything to her.”
She asked if he’d mind if they spoke in the conference room.
“I’d like to record our conversation,” she said, waiting for him to decline.
But he didn’t.
“I have nothing to hide. You wouldn’t know it by the way you are treating me.”
She wondered if it spoke of arrogance or innocence, his willingness to be filmed.
With the stationary video camera recording, Emily sat across from Mitch so that she could meet his gaze head-on. She noticed how he hadn’t yet said Mandy’s name. She stayed quiet, hoping that her silence would invite the man with the ever-so-slowly-receding hairline and beefy biceps to reveal something of use in the investigation.
