“She can get a job,” Dani had told David. “I had to.”
Emily played that back in her mind, and almost lost the feeling of joy she had at hearing her daughter’s voice.
“P.S., Mom, these girls are driving me crazy. They really are the worst. Ever!”
“How so?”
“Mostly the same old, same old. Disorganized. Selfish. Boyfriend troubles. One told me she thinks two of her old boyfriends have joined forces to stalk her. I mean really, Mom, how self-absorbed do you have to be to think that one stalker isn’t enough?”
Her daughter’s comment amused Emily. “I didn’t know stalking could be a group activity.”
Jenna laughed. “That’s what I thought. There’s also this girl who spends all day crying that her brother gets all the attention, and her dad, some meatpacking bigwig out of Oklahoma, doesn’t do anything but send her money.”
“I wish someone would send me money,” Emily said, teasing Jenna.
“Gotta go. I have a P.S. for you.”
“What’s that?”
“P.S., I had an airport layover in Chicago and got you your Christmas present.”
“A snow globe or a Graceland T-shirt? I know,” she said drawing out her words as she pretended to ponder it, “a Graceland snow globe. Will I love it?”
“Did you raise me right?” Before Emily could answer, Jenna cut in. “Love you, Mom. Back to the bitchfest in the dining room.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Good luck with the case, Mom. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
Luck would be good, Emily thought, snapping her phone shut. A pregnant woman doesn’t just evaporate into thin air. Amanda Crawford had to be somewhere.
By the end of the day, Mitch Crawford had found himself on all three Spokane TV affiliates with news feeds across the Northwest. Emily, Jason, Camille, Gloria, and all the others working the case let their jaws fall to the floor when he uttered a line that surely had to qualify for a place in the annals of crime reporting.
“I’m a successful businessman, a very successful businessman,” he said, dead-eyed to the camera. “Guys like me don’t kill our wives. We trade ’em in and get a new one.”
“He thinks she’s a used car,” Emily said, staring at the TV. “Unbelievable.”
Chapter Eight
The number on the minuscule screen of her cell phone had long been committed to memory.
She answered it immediately. Before she spoke, she heard his voice.
“Your Crawford case is making noise all the way over here in Seattle.”
It was Chris, of course.
“No kidding,” she said. “Gloria’s been fielding calls from the Seattle media like nobody’s business,” she said, almost feeling a little awkward. She was unsure if he’d called to talk shop—or to ask her to reconsider his proposal. She felt her face grow a little warm and looked around her office to make sure she was really alone just in case the conversation veered toward the personal.
“I hope some of the media attention does us some good out here.”
“Reporters are like maggots on a corpse,” he said. “They have a job to do.”
Emily let out a laugh. Chris always had a kind of cut-to-the-chase perspective when it came to everything. She watched as a pair of reserve officers walked by her office window. She waved at them. The sight of the young men snapped her out of the place that she was revisiting in her mind.
“Em?”
“I’m here. Just thinking. Sorry. Chris…” She let her words trail off to a whisper. “I miss you.”
“I know. Me, too. I’m coming to Cherrystone this weekend. I thought maybe this would be a good time to see where we stand.”
“In the middle of a possible murder investigation?”
“You were always best when you were on the hunt for a killer,” he said.
She laughed. “I think you might have something there. I know that I’m always happiest when I’m going after the bad guy.”
“Yup. And the guy you have in Cherrystone is as rotten as they come.”
“Mitch Crawford is really something, isn’t he?” she said. “What did you think of his TV performance? Made me sick to my stomach.”
“We only got a snip of it on the Seattle news, but yeah, made me sick, too. He seems preoccupied with how clever he is, how much dough he has in the bank, and absolutely everything in the world except for one thing.”
Emily nodded as he spoke, before interjecting, “Mandy.”
“He’s your guy, all right.”
“I can take care of this on my own, you know.”
“Of course you can. But you know how much fun we’ll have going after him,” he said. “And, Emily, don’t worry about my fee. Dinner with you will be satisfactory.”
“Let me think about that,” she said, kidding him to within in an inch of his life. “OK. Sounds good. When can you get here?”
“In my car now.”
Emily heard a car honk and she spun around and looked in front of the sheriff’s office.
Chris Collier, his lightly graying hair framing a handsome face that still retained the chiseled good looks of his youth, smiled and offered a quick wave through an open window.
Gotcha! He was already here.
While she was glad and surprised to see him, Emily felt a weird flutter of annoyance come over her. Had Chris come because he thinks I can’t work the case without him? Did he think I was too proud to ask for help on my own, when I determined I could use some?
His smile disarmed her and she glanced at her schedule to make sure nothing was pressing. Good. Quit overthinking, Emily, she thought.
On the way over to Cherrystone, a simple phrase reverberated during the drive. There was no other life without Emily. No other life he wanted. Chris Collier felt twinges of that from the day they’d reconnected after all those years of being apart—years of being married to the wrong people. Emily had David, the doctor. He had Jessica, the librarian. Neither spouse was the right match. And neither could be.
From his own failed marriage, Chris knew both the joy and the heartache of trying to make two people into an unbreakable unit. The love he had for his ex-wife had been lost long before Emily came back into Chris’s life. At first, he figured he could chalk up his mistakes to the fact that the life of a cop held little room for anything that resembled a real life. He’d been called away on a murder investigation in the middle of his oldest son’s Little League game—the game in which the boy had pitched a near perfect game. For the rest of his son’s life, there would always be the idea that “your job always came first.” Jessica Collier would not have a problem concurring when her son said those things. She, too, had felt the chilly glow of a cop’s blue light.
“I can’t compete with a dead girl. No woman can,” she told case-obsessed Chris the morning she packed her bags, took the kids, and returned to Idaho where she had family.
Chris said he understood, but at the time he was so wrapped up in a murder investigation that he really didn’t process his own personal loss—or the truth behind his wife’s analysis of the state of their marriage.