“Thanks, Mom.”
Garden Grove, California
The concerns about where he would kill his prize came at him like a drumming rain on a tin roof. Her mother was a cop. Her mother’s boyfriend was a cop. Those two elements upped the ante considerably. It would be harder to capture her, slit her throat, and rip out her insides when Mom and the boyfriend lurked around Cherrystone, Washington. He was anxious to get things going. It was, after all, a very busy time of year.
He smiled. Hard to fit in Christmas shopping and another sorority bitch.
“You look happy,” his wife said, handing him a platter of tamales her mother had made.
His smile stayed frozen, but it was tolerably real-looking. “You know how I feel about mama’s tamales. I think they’re the best in the world.”
She smiled back. “Me, too.”
He took the platter, wondering why the woman who knew him better than anyone knew nothing about him at all.
He decided he’d take Lily Ann Denton next. She was but a day trip away. So convenient; a drive-through window kind of a killing. Jenna Kenyon would be the finale. And as much as he’d love her mother to find her blood-drained body on Christmas Day, he knew that killing her in Cherrystone was too great a risk.
Chapter Fourteen
Cherrystone
That Mitch Crawford seemed solely motivated by money raised the very dark possibility that the car dealer might have placed a value on having a dead wife. The specter of an insurance payout could not be ignored.
“So you still think he did this for the money?” Jason asked Emily as they went over the timeline of Mandy’s disappearance for the umpteenth time. They had several sheets of computer printouts and note cards that outlined what they knew so far. It was old-school police work, but the new system was still in transition. New technology usually came to Cherrystone when it wasn’t quite so new.
Jason had duplicates of the printouts as they faced each other across Emily’s desk, but he left the highlighting up to his boss.
Emily conceded that money did run Mitch’s world, but she was unsure if they could really fix the motive in that direction.
“First of all, he has assets far beyond what most people around here have. Let’s see, three houses, a yacht, a fleet of classic cars, and more gold around his neck than a hip-hop star.”
“No kidding. I didn’t notice the gold chains.”
She rolled her eyes. “Men don’t pick up on it, I guess. Nothing turns off a woman more than ropes of gold nestled in a thick patch of chest hair.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jason said, touching his shirt’s top button, and then laughing.
“Sorry,” she said, smiling back. “No offense meant. Back to Mitch. If his balance sheet showed some irregularities, I’d be more concerned about the possibility of money being the motive here. So far, we know that the dealership is doing just fine and that he’s not leveraged to the hilt on his other assets.”
“It makes me hate him even more,” Jason said.
“Tell me about it. I’d like to get a new car, but I really shouldn’t. Anyway, I’d say money is too obvious a motive.”
But what was the reason? Jason didn’t quite get it. He had a wife. He had kids. He couldn’t imagine another man snuffing out all that was so dear to him personally.
“If not money, what?” he asked.
Emily selected the pink highlighter. It was dry, so she took the cap off the yellow one. “I’m getting the distinct feeling that Mitch Crawford has other agendas when it comes to his wife,” Emily said.
“An affair, maybe?”
Emily ticked off bullet points on the printout.
“Maybe he was tired of her?” she asked. “Maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered being a dad.”
“Like Tony Ryan?”
Emily put down her pen. “Yes, exactly. Like Ryan.” It was, she thought, a pretty good example.
Tony Ryan was a Seattle beer truck driver who made local, and then national, news after his wife went missing two years ago. Carly Ryan was pregnant with the couple’s first baby. Friends said that Tony didn’t want to be a father; that he preferred spending his time away from work playing Xbox and hanging with his buddies. He repeatedly made remarks that indicated that he felt having a son or daughter made him “old” and moved him up to adulthood in an irrevocable way that he just didn’t want. One of the key lines from the trial came from Carly’s sister, Miranda. She told the court that Tony “told me that having a baby made his needs irrelevant. He was pissed off that he might not get all of Carly’s attention. He actually told me that ‘if she thinks for one minute that I’m not gonna have sex when I want it because of some brat wanting her attention, she’s dead wrong.’”
Dead Wrong, of course, was the phrase used by headline writers the next day.
The jury found Ryan guilty of murdering Carly and their baby. That sad story would have been nothing more than a repugnant footnote in the annals of crime, if not for the theory of the case. The prosecution and the media ratcheted up the stakes by casting the killer as the bone-chilling representative of young men who assumed that the world revolved around them, as it had in sports, high school, and at the gym.
Mitch Crawford didn’t really fit that profile. Not very neatly, anyway. Sure, he was self-absorbed and filled his three-car garage and off-site garage with the spoils of a lavish lifestyle. He ran his office as more a king than a manager, demanding employees do things that had nothing to do with their jobs. Emily learned how workers were told to detail his personal cars once a week, pick up his dry cleaning, even shine his shoes.
And while he seemed spoiled and entitled to all that he could see, he did actually have a work ethic. If his father had created the dealership from nothing, then Mitch Crawford wanted to make sure everyone in the region knew that he’d taken it much further.
“My dad had a vision, but my eyesight’s a lot sharper,” he used to tell people when they came in for a test drive.
As far as the Crawford case was concerned, Emily felt, insurance didn’t appear to be the motive.
Cherrystone used the American Insurance Control Bureau as its primary tool in determining when and if crimes could be linked to an insurance motive or fraud. AICB was little more than an end run around a subpoena. Carriers liked it because it helped connect the dots when a person involved in a potential crime procured multiple policies. In the old days, law enforcement agencies had to issue a subpoena for each insurance company—and the defendant was not obligated to say even which company he or she might have procured a policy. It was shooting in the dark. With AICB, an alert would be sent out to all members—most of the insurance industry—and they’d be able to chime in with a yes or no.
In Mandy’s case, there were no other policies outside of the one she held from her job at the county. Her life was worth $75,000. Her baby held no value. A baby isn’t worth anything because it isn’t drawing an income and it doesn’t have a dependent.
“So what did AICB really turn up?” Jason asked.
“Nothing. I highly doubt that a man like Mitch Crawford would break a sweat, let alone kill his wife, for seventy-five grand.”
Jason agreed. “Maybe ten times that.”
Emily nodded. “I’ve never thought this was about money, but now I’m certain that it isn’t. This man was all about convenience.”