Dark Prison: Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 9

by Ryan, Lori

  She could do it, but it would be a lie. “I need to see him, Kemal.”

  He shook his head. “Not a good time, Eve.”

  Now he moved to the step above her, as though he’d block her entry to the home he now shared with his dad.

  Glenn Goodwin had retired from the force in 2009. He and his wife had enjoyed that retirement for five years before she started a long, drawn out battle with cancer. She lost that battle two years ago and Glenn hadn’t been doing well since then. He was now fighting a war of his own against depression and there were times it seemed to be taking him down.

  Kemal was Glenn’s protector, always trying to make sure nothing happened in his dad’s world that wasn’t designed to pull his dad out of the spiral that seemed to be pulling him down, drowning him bit-by-bit, day-by-day.

  As one of Glenn’s best friends despite the gap in their age, Eve was all for anything that would pull Glenn back to a place where he could find some peace in the world, but she and Kemal differed on how they thought that plan should go.

  She wanted to pull Glenn back to what he loved doing. He might be retired, but that didn’t mean he stopped being a cop. She thought consulting on cases would be good for him. The last time she’d tried, Kemal had made it clear he didn’t want her making any more efforts in that vein.

  He tried it again now. “Eve, he doesn’t need to be stressed out right now. Between the depression and his heart, pulling him into cases isn’t going to help.”

  “What’s wrong with your dad’s heart?” Eve cursed herself again for not coming around more. For not paying attention to what was happening with Glenn.

  Kemal’s jaw ticked but he unclenched it and answered her. “He’s had some bad test results lately. The doctor is worried he’s headed for a heart attack.”

  Eve rubbed her forehead and promised herself she’d be by weekly from then on. “Talking about a case will remind your dad he’s alive. He needs that more than anything now. I know you don’t get it. You’re not a cop. You don’t get that it’s in his blood, it’s who he is. If anything is going to get him to care about living again, it’ll be getting his mind working.”

  He stepped closer to her, using the height he held over her to his advantage. “He’s not the man you used to know, Eve. That man died with my mom.” He always made a point to remind her that she used to know his dad.

  Normally, she’d backed off for a while. But she couldn’t back off today. Not this time.

  Eve sometimes couldn’t believe the man Glenn’s son had become. There was a time she was welcomed here for Sunday dinners with the family. A time they all used to laugh around the table, taking a much-needed break from the hell she and Glenn were immersed in at work. Kemal was a different man then. Dahlia Goodwin’s death had left a gash so deep and so painful in this family, it was struggling to survive.

  Still, today wasn’t a day when she could let him have his way. And she knew what it would take to get in the door. “Sorry, Kemal, but this can’t wait. We just identified the body of Samantha Greer.”

  She didn’t need to tell him who Samantha Greer was or why it mattered to his dad.

  He knew the name Samantha Greer as well as she did. Not because he’d known Samantha. Not because she’d been anything more than a runaway teen to him, but because his dad had never stopped looking for the girl the rest of the city had thrown away.

  Glenn Goodwin had never forgotten the case. Twenty-one years hadn’t changed the fact he’d committed to bringing the lost girl home someday.

  Kemal wasn’t swayed. “He’s having a bad week. Things will turn around in a few days. You can come back then.”

  Eve tried to relax her jaw. Her dentist had told her she had to stop clenching it so tightly or he wouldn’t be able to undo the damage she was doing to her teeth. Let the man try dealing with Kemal Goodwin, then he could talk to her about meditation and relaxation.

  “We’ve got a body now. We’ve got new evidence. Do you know what that means to a cold case? I can’t wait a week, Kemal. I need to move now.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. Was he really pulling this crap with her?

  “Do you really want to do this? Do you need me to pull out my badge and remind you that it’s a crime to interfere with a police investigation?”

  The anger that crept over his face was harsh, taking what had been dull, tired eyes and making them crystalline chips of granite.

  Eve blew out a breath and softened her tone. “Don’t let your dad have to read about this in the paper. How do you think he’ll feel when he knows I didn’t come straight to him with this the minute we found her?”

  Kemal scrubbed his hands over his hair and then down the back of his neck, looking at the ground, not at her.

  “I’m sorry, Kemal. If I thought it would be better not to tell him, I’d do that, but he needs to know this.”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak. With a final breath out, he walked up the steps and unlocked the door, swinging it wide to let Eve enter first.

  The house was dark and quiet. “He’s probably still in bed,” Kemal said quietly, moving past her. “I’ll get him. Help yourself to a drink in the fridge.”

  He took the stairs two at a time and Eve made her way through the living room to the kitchen at the back of the house. She opened curtains as she went. The house was neat and clean, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t be if Kemal hadn’t moved in with his dad.

  She put her fingers to the photos of Kemal’s mother that lined the hallway as she passed them. She had liked Dahlia a lot. It would kill Dahlia to see Glenn like this.

  Eve started a pot of coffee. It was already past noon, but she could use it and she had a feeling Kemal and Glenn could too.

  It was ten minutes before she heard them coming back down the stairs. She wasn’t prepared for seeing Glenn. Kemal was right. It wasn’t a good time. The man who’d always been meticulous about his clean-cut hair and shaved jaw was now sporting an ungroomed beard of a couple of inches and his hair looked like he hadn’t combed it in a week.

  He wore sweatpants and a t-shirt and he tried for a smile when he saw her.

  He glanced at the coffee pot. “Sorry, Eve. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tried…” He seemed at a loss and she wondered if he was trying to figure out what he would have tried to do to prepare for her.

  She moved to him and put a hand on his upper arm, giving a squeeze. “I never need you to put yourself out for me, Glenn. I’m sorry I stopped by without calling first.”

  Eve didn’t mess around with any more niceties. She dove right in. “We recovered the body of Samantha Greer.”

  She watched the blood drain from Glenn’s face. He closed his eyes for a second before opening them and sinking into one of the chairs at the counter island that took up much of the room.

  “Where was she?”

  “There’s a small cemetery on the upper west side of the city.” She could feel Kemal’s eyes on her as she spoke. He might be pouring coffee, but he was listening. “A grave was dug four days ago in preparation for a funeral. When the workers uncovered the plot the following day for the burial they realized it wasn’t as deep as it should have been. They hopped in to finish the job.”

  “Wasn’t empty?” Glenn asked.

  Eve accepted the cup of coffee Kemal handed her and sipped. The man made a damned good cup of coffee. “No. Someone had dumped a body and put enough dirt over it to cover it, probably hoping they’d just put the coffin in and fill it without noticing.”

  Eve hated the look on Glenn’s face. He’d looked so long and hard for Samantha after her disappearance. She was a foster kid most people had written off as a runaway, but not Glenn. Eve had a feeling he’d always held out hope she would turn up somewhere, alive and well.

  Glenn cleared his throat as if prepping himself for his question. “Cause of death?”

  “Blunt force trauma to the head.” She took a deep breath. “Glenn, she didn’t die when she was fifteen. We’ve go
t a rock-solid ID from her dental records so we know it’s Samantha Greer, but she was somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.”

  Glenn was struggling with the news and she didn’t blame him. The look on his face was haunted. “She was alive. We could have found her.”

  Eve didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything she could say that would alleviate the guilt he would carry over that. She could tell him he’d done all he could, and she knew that was the truth. He’d never given up. But there were some burdens words wouldn’t alleviate.

  Glenn looked to her. “Where was she all those years? And where has her body been all this time?”

  Samantha Greer had vanished twenty-one years ago at age fifteen. So, she’d been somewhere for ten to fifteen years before she died, give or take based on the pathologist’s estimate of her age.

  “And where was her body before it was moved?” Eve asked, knowing he wouldn’t have any more answers than she did.

  Glenn’s eyes flashed dark. “She wasn’t a runaway and this proves that, Eve. You need to fight to reopen this case and give it the attention it never got. She deserves that much. Hell, she deserves more.”

  Eve raised a hand, palm out to stop him. He was one of the few people who could get away with talking to her like that, but still, his ire was misplaced. “We’re reopening the file. She’s got head trauma we need explained and someone dumped her body. There are things here that need answering. I’ll make sure that happens. In the meantime, can I call you when I have questions about the case?”

  She saw Kemal stiffen but ignored him. He was wrong if he thought working on something like this was bad for his dad.

  Glenn gave a curt nod. “Yeah. You can call me. You tell Sara yet?”

  Eve knew who he meant. Sara Curtis had been Samantha’s foster mom for all of two weeks before she went missing, but the woman had always seemed to care as though Samantha was one of her own children.

  “I’m headed there next.” She shook her head when Glenn stood as though he’d go with her. “I can’t have you out in the field, Glenn. You can consult but you’re not working this in the field.”

  “The hell I can’t. This is my case, Eve.”

  “And no one knows it better than you. I got that. But that doesn’t mean you can be out on the streets working it. I’ll call you when I have something and I’ll be in touch if I have anything that you might be able to give me input on, but that’s the best I can do.” She looked to Kemal. She’d already broken every damned protocol in the book by having Kemal there.

  “This can’t leave this room, Kemal. You need to keep quiet about this. I wanted you here as a courtesy but nothing I’ve shared with you is ready to be public yet.”

  He waved a hand at her as if to cut her words off. “Yeah, got it. Ongoing investigation. Keep the public in the dark.”

  Eve stood, hands on hips. Kemal taught history at the community college and she knew he had strong feelings at times about the police and government. She didn’t need that coming into play here.

  “There are reasons for that. Damned good ones. Don’t make me regret letting you be here.” She already did.

  Glenn spoke up. “He knows how to keep his mouth shut, Eve. Knock it off Kemal.” The older man looked like he wanted to slap Kemal on the back of the head, but he didn’t. He looked back at Eve. “He’s just messing with you.”

  Kemal gave a lazy one-shouldered shrug.

  Eve pointed at her former partner. “You wait to hear from me.”

  She knew damned well the man would do no such thing. He and his son were both the same. Stubborn to the core. Glenn Goodwin would be working this case, same as she was. And Kemal would be throwing roadblocks up for him every step of the way.

  Chapter Three

  From the looks of the house in front of Eve, Sara Curtis was still fostering children. The postage stamp yard boasted a tricycle and a scooter, the latter turned on its side in the middle of the walkway. Eve bent and lifted it out of the way before moving to the front door.

  Her knock was answered by a slim woman in her fifties that Eve recognized from the photo in the Greer file. As Glenn’s former partner, she’d read the file more than once and knew Glenn had stayed in touch with Sara Curtis over the years, but she’d never met the woman in person.

  “Sara Curtis?”

  The woman nodded her head, a polite smile in place. A child cried out from in the house and Sara called over her shoulder. “I’m coming, baby.”

  She looked back at Eve. “I’m sorry. She’s not settled in yet. Only got here a few days ago, so I need to get to her.”

  Eve showed the woman her badge and identified herself. “I need a few minutes to talk to you about Samantha Greer.”

  The woman’s face transformed into one of sorrow, her round eyes softening even more. “Come in.”

  Eve followed Sara as she moved through the house to the kitchen, where a boy of about ten was showing a toy to a toddler who sat crying on the floor. Sara scooped up the little girl and ran a hand over the boy’s close-cropped curls.

  The boy gave Eve a guarded look and then spoke to Sara. “She don’t want food or her toy.”

  Sara bounced the girl on her hip. “I know, hon. She’ll settle in soon, won’t she?”

  He nodded at her words and something in the way of it said he’d helped Sara get other kids settled in.

  Sara tipped her head to the back door. “Run over to Mrs. Milton’s for me and tell Carter he needs to be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make lunch and then we’ll do math and science.”

  The boy ran out the back door and Sara gestured to a chair at the kitchen table for Eve, sinking into one of her own and bouncing the fussy girl on her lap. The child was no longer crying, but she wasn’t looking happy.

  Eve looked around the room and saw a shelf with tidy piles of workbooks and teaching materials. “You homeschool the kids?” She couldn’t help but wonder how the woman did it all.

  Eve’s sister had two girls and a boy, and even with two parents in the home, it often seemed like they never stopped running to keep up. Eve loved her nieces and nephews but they could wear a person out. Eve knew from her file that Sara was a single parent and she had a lot on her plate.

  Sara nodded, following Eve’s gaze to the shelf. “Yes. I used to foster more kids and send them to public school, but when Carter and Kyle came into the picture, things changed.”

  Eve looked to the back door where the young boy had gone minute before. “Kyle and Carter are brothers?”

  “Yes. They were neglected and barely talking by the time they came to me. They had their own language, almost like twins do, even though they’re two years apart in age. The school tried to fit them into a mold. Wanted them to learn the same way other kids did. That wasn’t going to happen.” Sara looked down at the little girl in her arms and smiled as the face beneath her began to melt into sleep. “After one too many blowouts, I decided I needed to keep them here and teach them, even if that meant I didn’t take any other kids in for a long time.”

  Eve nodded at the little girl. “But now?”

  Sara smiled. “The boys are doing great. I adopted them two years ago and they’ve become my everything. We take another foster child in now and then, but not as many as I used to. They like it, once we get past this stage.” She looked at the girl. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ll just lay her down and then we can talk.”

  Ten minutes later, Eve had filled Sara in on the discovery of Samantha’s body. She watched as the woman brushed tears from her cheeks.

  Sara shook her head as though trying to shake off the news. “Even though I told the police I didn’t think she’d run off, I think a part of me had begun to hope for that. That maybe she was out there somewhere and somehow things had turned out okay for her.”

  Eve had a feeling Sara knew better than many that things didn’t turn out well for runaways a lot of the time. “Glenn said Samantha was new in your home when she went missing?” Sh
e wondered if Samantha had been going through her own settling in period like the little girl she’d just seen.

  Sara seemed to pick up on Eve’s line of thought. “She was new in the house, but she was a teenager. When they come into a home, they aren’t like a toddler. They’re often angry or they’ve given up. They know the chances of someone loving them, really caring about them and wanting them at that stage of the game are slim. Samantha wasn’t like that. She’d been in a large group home for kids. One with counselors and paid employees who had to referee between all the teens living in it. She was moved after she was targeted by a couple of the girls because she was small and didn’t always stand up for herself. When one of them broke her arm, the whole place was put under review and she was moved out.”

  Sara traced a pattern on the table in front of her with her fingers, but she kept her eyes on Eve as she spoke. “She was happy to be out of there. She took to a few of the younger kids here and would play dolls with them or have pretend tea parties after school. When she came in, she was a ball of tension, on alert all the time. Within days, that was gone. Believe me, it should have taken longer for that after what she’d been through, but it didn’t. The kid bounced back.”

  “Where was the group home she’d come from?” Eve remembered the case file vaguely from the time she’d looked through it when she was partnered with Glenn. He’d done an annual review of the file looking for anything he might have missed. The last time Eve had looked at it had been over five years back, when she’d reviewed it as part of a cold case update the department had undertaken.

  She would be pulling it back out now. As captain, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence for Eve to work a case, but she owed it to Glenn to work this one.

  There was no reason for her to think Glenn would have missed something all these years, but she wanted to hear as much of this story from this witness as she could. Maybe there was something Sara had held back or hadn’t thought to tell the police.

  “Clear across the state,” Sara said. “None of those kids could have been involved. They would have had to drive four hours and these aren’t kids who would have access to a car.”