A Cold Dark Place Read online

  High Praise for Gregg Olsen and A Cold Dark Place

  “You’ll sleep with the lights on after reading Gregg Olsen’s dark, atmospheric, page-turning suspense . . . if you can sleep at all.

  —Allison Brennan

  “A stunning thriller—a brutally dark story with a compelling, intricate plot.”

  —Alex Kava

  “A page-turner. . . . Olsen brings his vast knowledge of the criminal mind to the fictional stage, deftly combining just the right mix of plot and characterization to create a work of dark, gripping suspense.”

  —Anne Frasier

  “This stunning thriller is the love child of Thomas Harris and Laura Lippman, with all the thrills and the sheer glued-to-the-page artistry of both.”

  —Ken Bruen

  “A great thriller that grabs you by the throat and takes you into the dark, scary places of the heart and soul.”

  —Kay Hooper

  Praise for A Wicked Snow

  “Complex mystery, crackling authenticity . . . lurid, carefully distributed details . . . will keep fans of crime fiction hooked.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Real narrative drive, a great setup, a gruesome crime, excellent exploitation of an other-worldly location, fine characters. . . . As good as it gets.”

  —Lee Child

  “A taut thriller.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Wickedly clever! Gregg Olsen delivers a finely crafted, genuinely twisted tale.”

  —Lisa Gardner

  “Gregg Olsen’s riveting debut is an outstanding addition to the suspense genre.”

  —Allison Brennan

  “An irresistible page-turner. A Wicked Snow grabs you on page one, and never lets go until the heart-pounding finale.”

  —Kevin O’Brien

  “A top-notch thriller. Unpredictable plot twists, realistic characterization, and an authentic portrayal of police procedure make it a powerhouse of a book.”

  —Donna Anders

  “Vivid, powerful, action-packed . . . a terrific, tense thriller that grips the reader.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A Wicked Snow keeps the reader guessing and gulping from the very first page. A very nifty brainteaser of a thriller.”

  —Jay Bonansinga

  “Tight plotting drives the story in an almost hypnotic way. Nerve-wracking suspense and a wonderful climax make this debut a winner.”

  —Crimespree magazine

  “Wonderful. . . . This one will keep you riveted and guessing, right to the end.”

  —Seattle Mystery Bookshop

  “Olsen writes a real grabber of a book. If you’re smart, you’ll grab this one!”

  —Linda Lael Miller

  “I literally could not stop reading. ”

  —mysteryone.com

  “A compelling story, tightly woven, that kept me riveted to the final page.”

  —Susan R. Sloan

  “Olsen blends solid storytelling with true-crime attention to details. He has made the transition from true crime to fiction effortlessly.”

  —Spinetingler magazine

  “A Wicked Snow’s plot—about a CSI investigator who’s repressed a horrific crime from her childhood until it comes back to haunt her—moves at a satisfyingly fast clip.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Suspense-filled, believable.”

  —iloveamysterynewsletter.com

  ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN

  A Wicked Snow

  The Deep Dark

  If Loving You Is Wrong

  Abandoned Prayers

  Bitter Almonds

  Mockingbird (Cruel Deception)

  Starvation Heights

  Confessions of an American Black Widow

  A Cold Dark Place

  GREGG OLSEN

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  High Praise for Gregg Olsen and A Cold Dark Place

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE - The Eye of the Storm

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  BOOK TWO - A Desperate Love

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  BOOK THREE - Sins of the Father

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Heart of Ice

  Copyright Page

  For Kathrine

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wanted to take a moment to thank some of the people who have been so amazing with their support and advice as I wrote A Cold Dark Place. Naturally, none of it is possible without the support and love of my family—Claudia, Morgan, and Marta.

  Thanks also to the best thriller editor and the best thriller agent in the business: Michaela Hamilton, executive editor of Kensington, and Susan Raihofer of David Black Literary. What a team you two make!

  I’d like to acknowledge the writers that have been so helpful to me recently. All of the Killer Year members and friends have been great, but I especially want to spotlight JT Ellison, Bill Cameron, and Sandra Ruttan for their wonderful support and partnership over the past year. My Killer Year mentor, Allison Brennan, has no peer when it comes to writing pulse-pounding suspense and encouraging new (even old!) authors.

  Thanks to Kathrine Beck, Tina Marie Brewer, Charles Turner, Bunny Kuhlman, and Matt Phelps for their much-appreciated guidance along the way.

  There are many behind-the-scenes people who help shape the final product that you now hold in your hand. I want to publicly thank Lou Malcangi for his terrific cover design and Diane Burke for her thoughtful copyediting. If I wore a hat, I’d take it off to you!

  Finally, to my readers. Thanks so much for following me from true crime to fiction. Your e-mails, letters, and posts on Crime Rant mean the world to me.

  Prologue

  4 P.M., nineteen years ago

  Women with transparent vinyl purses that exposed the shredded remainders of coin wrappers stood in line. They took deep breaths as the uniformed prison matron with icy hands prepared to probe their bodies. Talc-dipped rubber gloves snapped. It was humiliating in every sense of the word. The matron, a woman with ashen skin, pencil-thin lips, and with glasses on a cheap silver chain around her neck, knew those waiting to leave the institution felt her power, her supreme authority, and it made her smile. The women had lined up to leave after a long day of tears and excuses in the high school cafeteria mili
eu of the visiting room—a cavernous space of bolted-to-the-floor tables and fixed-position chairs. The matron’s husky voice intoned them to “cool their jets” and “wait your turn or I’ll have something to say about it.”

  And so the women lingered, each feeling violated and angry. Having a husband, boyfriend, or brother inside the razor-wire-trimmed walls of Bonneville Maximum Security was bad enough. Being told with unfettered contempt by someone to wait your turn in the processing line was ptomaine gravy over a bad slab of beef. And they had to eat it. Every goddamned bite.

  “Are you going to be a problem for me?” the matron asked, her gray eyes as sharp as awls pitched firmly at the distressed gaze of a young woman. The younger woman let out a measured sigh. She’d spent all day trying to tell her wannabe-drug-lord husband that she was thinking of moving back east to Indiana. She wanted to be free. All of them did.

  “Uh? Me?” the younger woman answered. She was barely twenty and still wore her chestnut hair in a ponytail, but she held a kind of weariness on her face that indicated she’d seen it all. She faked a smile of recognition at the matron. She knew when someone had it in for her. It had been her life since she left home. Ran away. Met the wrong man. Trashed her future. She could hear her mother’s words echo at that moment. You’ve thrown away everything your father and I had hoped for you. You screwed up, Donita. You really botched it.

  “Yes, you, Ponytail,” the matron said, nodding in her direction. The rest of the women felt relief wash over them. Good, the bitch found someone else to bother. She motioned for her to step forward. “I need you to spread your legs. You’ve done it before, I’m sure. Wider.”

  The young woman silently seethed, but she acquiesced. She had no choice.

  “You know, if I can’t get my mitts between your thighs, either you’re gonna have to go on a diet or you’re gonna have to practice your splits in the back room. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and I think you’re carrying some contraband on your person. I just feel it.”

  The back room was a dimly lit hospital-style space where women were forced to endure indignities based on their physiology. Flat on their backs, legs apart, feet stuck in metal stirrups.

  “I’ll do better,” she said, all the while wondering what it would be like if she’d been an actual prisoner there, not a lowly visitor?

  The altercation caught the attention of a chubby-faced woman in the back of the line. Her strawberry-blond shag had matted unflatteringly to her forehead. Her pulse quickened, but she kept her affect blank. She didn’t want to stand out and she didn’t want a trip to the back room for any kind of exam. She carried something so precious, so vital, that its discovery would ruin everything.

  Be cool, Ponytail’s taking the heat. Thank you, Jesus.

  She concealed her prize in a place she hoped no one would dare probe. Inside. Personal. Private. Besides she knew the matron only groped because she got off on it. No one was looking for someone to take much of anything out of here . . . they mostly watched for contraband coming in to the visiting room.

  The matron fixed her eyes on the strawberry blonde with the secret. Her eyes held her with unyielding grip. She waited a beat.

  “You can go,” she said.

  The woman with the secret acknowledged the command and started walking in the direction of the lockers in which she had stored her coat and car keys before going under the arbor of razor wire, through the gate, to the visiting room.

  “Wait a minute,” the matron said.

  It felt like her heart stopped beating. She was going to die. Going to be caught. Adrenaline kicked her ticker back into play. She’s going to take me in the back room. She’s going to ruin everything.

  “Did you hear me?”

  She slowly turned.

  “Are you speaking to me?”

  “No, I’m talking to the man in the moon.”

  She stared. Her heart bounced. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “Get over here.”

  She stepped back toward the matron.

  “You forgot your purse.”

  Her hands were sweating now, so much so, she thought the vinyl zippered purse would slip from her fingers. She reached for it and acknowledged the gesture with a quick smile.

  “Oh, thanks.”

  Like others who had been around the matron, she faked a smile.

  The woman smiled, hers strangely genuine. “No problem. And you have a nice day.”

  With that, the strawberry blonde hurried to the lockers. Soon she’d be home, and in time destiny would come to pass.

  BOOK ONE

  The Eye of the Storm

  Chapter One

  Monday, 5:36 P.M., Cherrystone, Washington

  Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse, and walked toward the front door. She turned to view the end of Orchard Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was safe. Unscathed. Not a single fish-scale shingle from the three-story painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint, but enough of a reminder that across town homes and cars had burned.

  It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came almost without warning and left a jagged swathe of destruction that stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten minutes’ time. Roofs had been peeled off. Play sets and bicycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose house had been spared and whose hadn’t. Destruction reigned on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side remained pristine. Across the street from a home that had been nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled over its chipped stone rim.

  No one died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed up in her bathroom was in bad shape and had been hospitalized. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would survive despite her trauma. The lady was a retired junior high social studies teacher with a classroom assignment that indicated she was tougher than most. After all, if she could endure teenagers of the 1960s, she’d survive the tornado, too.

  Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her detective’s badge holder slipped out along with a pink lipstick she wished she’d used up and could toss. But she was thrifty and, despite the fact that it didn’t really work with her dark brown hair and eyes, she’d wear it until it was gone. She scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch and called out for her daughter.

  “Jenna? I’m home.”

  The scent of cinnamon toast and an empty glass of milk on the counter indicated Jenna was somewhere in the house. Emily didn’t wait for a response.

  “I’m going to take a shower. Then let’s go out and get something to eat.”

  “Okay, Mom,” a voice finally came from down the hall. “I’m on the phone. I’ll talk to you when you’re out. I’m hungry. Take a fast shower!”

  Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left for Seattle and become a somewhat shadowy figure since the divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men— even a kind of serious affair with a local lawyer. Cary McConnell was too possessive and controlling and Emily had enough of that with her first—and only—marriage. Cary still called but she avoided him whenever she could. That wasn’t easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less than 15,000 people. She was in the courthouse two or three times a week. So was he.

  Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty, which she was approaching on her next birthday. She twisted the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C was moved a quarter turn.
The old pipes clanked and steam swirled. Emily liked hot water.

  “Pietro’s?” she called out before stepping inside the white-and-black tiled interior. “I’m thinking pizza.”

  Of course she really wasn’t. She was thinking of the tornado and its aftermath. Twisters were rare occurrences in Washington state. Only a handful of damaging storms had been recorded there; the worst had been one that killed eleven people near Walla Walla in 1952. The twister that came to Cherrystone on Saturday had howled in the darkness and snatched up all in its wake. Houses and cars were shredded in a giant steel-toothed blender. A dairy near the junction of Wayne Road and U.S. 91 had been so pulverized that a magnifying glass was needed to determine what color the barn paint had been before the storm. The Cherrystone Granary was flattened, which meant already scarce jobs instantly had become even more limited. Five trucks, carefully parked in a row after the shift change, had been tossed to their absolute ruin. Power lines snapped like frayed jute. A semi was lifted more than a hundred yards and slammed into a hillside.

  Emily tilted her head backward; hot water beyond a temperature most could endure flowed over her body, sending the stress of the freak storm, and the worries of a long day, down the drain. Stepping from the shower, Emily wrapped a thick cotton towel around her body. She bent over, wrapped a second one around her head, then flipped her hair back. She called once more to Jenna.