The Girls in the Snow: A completely unputdownable crime thriller (Nikki Hunt Book 1)

by Stacy Green

  Nikki stepped forward. “He’s Agent Wilson. He was at your house when Amy overdosed. How is she?”

  “Okay,” John said. “She’s trying to focus on Bailey. Have you found something? Or are you here about the autopsy results so we can finally bury Madison?”

  Nikki sat down in the big leather chair in front of John’s desk and Liam took the other one. The corner office had an impressive view of the snow-covered park surrounding the campus. “Director of Sales and Marketing for big pharma. That’s pretty high up in the food chain.”

  “I guess.” John rested his chin on his hand. “Why are you here?”

  “The autopsies aren’t complete yet,” Nikki said. “I’m here about the murder of Janelle Gomez.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman found in the park,” Nikki said. “You told me you didn’t recognize her.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, I’m exhausted. Haven’t been sleeping much.” John rubbed his eyes. “What about this woman?”

  “Her boss at The Doll House is the one who identified her,” Liam said.

  John nodded. “I know that place.”

  “We know,” Nikki said. “Two of the dancers said you’re a morning regular.”

  He sighed and reclined in his chair. “Look, I’m not proud of it. Things haven’t been great between Amy and me since Madison disappeared. I go a few times a week to blow off steam. But I don’t pay for sex.”

  “I really don’t care about your personal affairs,” Nikki replied. “I do care that you’re the common denominator between Madison, Kaylee and Janelle.”

  John paled. “You’re not suggesting I hurt Maddie, are you? I would never.”

  “We cross-referenced Janelle’s shifts with the girls’ accounts. We know you’ve been at the club during her shift. And we’re getting a warrant for the security videos from inside the club. The owner says they cover every angle. So, you might as well tell the truth now.” Nikki placed Janelle’s promo picture onto his desk. “You don’t recognize her? That’s the story you’re going with?”

  “I don’t remember seeing her there. I only interact with a couple of girls,” John said. “The rest are just in the background.”

  “When was the last time you went to the club?”

  “The day Madison and Kaylee were found. In the morning, before we got any news.”

  “And you haven’t been there since?”

  “No.” He slumped back in the chair. “I’m too damned numb to do anything but come to work and try to be present at home.”

  “We’ll see you on the security videos. You might as well be honest now and stop wasting our time.”

  “Christ.” John slammed his hands on the desk. “I’m telling the truth, Nikki. Why are you on my ass about this?”

  “I’m doing my job.”

  “Then you’re doing a pretty bad job of it. You’re here, wasting time on me instead of looking for the bastard who killed my daughter.” His hard eyes focused on Nikki and a feeling of anxiety seeped through her. “You’re supposed to be one of the best. Or is the media right? Are you too focused on Mark Todd to do your job?”

  “The media has no idea what they’re talking about.”

  “Then why are you going around asking about your blood test? And hanging out with his brother?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t think I’d find out about that? Stillwater’s still a small town, and I’ve got connections everywhere. People think you’re trying to butter up Rory because you’re afraid your reputation’s going to be ruined.”

  Nikki had been stupid to think John had changed. He was still the same guy who wanted to keep control. But she wasn’t the same insecure girl who dutifully gave in to him.

  “I have zero worries about my reputation. I just want to make sure the right man is in prison.”

  “You know he is, for Christ’s sake. Rory’s manipulating you to feel sorry for his brother.”

  “That’s not what he’s doing.”

  “Then what is it? Why are you hanging out with him instead of looking for Maddie’s killer? Are you that hard up for a man’s attention? Just like old times, then.”

  Nikki bristled. John’s demeanor had changed so quickly, but something about his reaction felt normal to her. “We have reason to believe Janelle might have been drugged. Would you know anything about that?”

  Liam stiffened but didn’t call her bluff.

  “Why?” John snapped. “Because I work at a pharmaceutical company?”

  Nikki stared at him, letting the implication linger.

  John’s face reddened, a flicker of nerves in his eyes. “Get out of my office.”

  Nikki stood, turned on her heel and walked out with Liam beside her. Her hands trembled with anger. How had she forgotten John’s manipulative side? Nikki knew exactly how to deal with people like him, but she’d allowed him to back her into a corner.

  Liam walked in silence next to her until they reached the elevator. “What’s this about drugs?”

  She didn’t want to tell him about her conversation with Rory, especially after John’s accusation. “Just a hunch. I wanted to see his reaction.”

  “You definitely ticked him off,” Liam said. “Why didn’t you put him in his place for talking to you like that?”

  Nikki pushed the button and then shoved her hands in her pockets. She couldn’t meet Liam’s gaze. “I did.”

  “Did you not hear him imply something was going on between you and Rory? Or that you weren’t doing your job?”

  “John thrives on the power he gets from drawing people into arguments and then twisting things around to be their fault. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.” Nikki wished she believed her own reasoning.

  “Is that what he was like when you two dated?”

  “Yes, and it appears he hasn’t changed all that much.”

  “You do realize he’s scared of you, right?” Liam asked as the doors opened. “Maybe he used to manipulate you out of insecurity or whatever, but he’s scared of you. He knows you have the power to make his life miserable.”

  “Only if he’s done something.” Nikki changed the subject before her emotions overwhelmed her. “You sent the security videos to the geeks at the office, right?”

  “They’ll be finished by tomorrow afternoon.”

  John’s proclivity for strip clubs and possible adultery still didn’t give him a motive to hurt Madison and Kaylee. Kaylee had tried to blackmail Ricky; would she do the same thing to her friend’s father? What if John had gone after Kaylee and Madison had been collateral damage?

  And where did Janelle Gomez fit into the picture, if she even fit at all? Maybe she really had been killed by someone else who’d been smart enough to use the current interest in Frost to cover his tracks.

  John claimed he’d started hitting the strip club after the disappearance, but Nikki had her doubts. The Stillwater-Hudson area had at least ten so-called gentlemen’s clubs. Janelle working at John’s strip club of choice couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “Dig into John’s extracurricular activity. Find out if he’s a frequent flyer anywhere else and if he’s really as hands-off as he says. Check public record and see if he and Amy have ever been legally separated or a motion filed. I want to know how good his marriage actually is, and neither one of them is going to be honest.”

  “Any suggestions on where to start?”

  “The strippers,” Nikki said. “He came to them for comfort and to get his ego fed. If he talked shit about Amy, he said it to them.”

  Twenty-Six

  Nikki reset the house alarm and headed to her bedroom. She’d decided to swing by the house after the visit to Roan Pharmaceuticals to get some clean clothes and then stop at Tyler’s to surprise Lacey.

  Nikki wished she didn’t have to drive back to Stillwater. She’d kill for a night in her own bed. She sifted through her closet and chose two pairs of jeans, but all of her tops seemed frumpy. Not that her usual attire made her loo
k sloppy, but the jeans hugged her curves. She might as well find tops that did the same thing.

  “Who am I trying to impress?” she muttered. Before she allowed herself to think of the answer, the house plunged into darkness.

  Nikki shuffled across the room until her knees hit the bed. She felt around for her phone and then turned on the flashlight feature. The house seemed eerily quiet as she hurried down the hall to the front window. The neighbor’s lights were on.

  “So are my driveway lights.” She spoke to the empty space as she peered out of the front window. The lights were motion-sensored, but Tyler’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. Her garage only had one stall.

  Alarm bells were screeching in her head. The neighbors still had power, but she couldn’t see all of the houses on her side of the street. Maybe it was a partial outage and she just couldn’t see who else was affected.

  The circuit breaker was outside, protected by a padlocked cover. The padlock was key coded, so picking it was impossible. Nikki didn’t even know the code by heart.

  Her security system had a backup battery that would supposedly last at least twelve hours in an outage. The panel by the front door indicated the alarm was still on. Nikki had no idea if the security cameras were still recording.

  She peeked around the window, searching for signs of an intruder. No fresh footprints in the snow, but the breaker was on the side of the house, just a few inches to the left of the dining room window.

  Nikki slipped around the table, dread settling into the pit of her stomach. Something wasn’t right.

  The window suddenly exploded, glass flying like shrapnel. Nikki raised her arms in front of her face, but pain burst across the side of her head. Her knees hit the floor hard.

  Twenty-Seven

  “So much for unbreakable glass.” Nikki pressed the ice pack against her head. The bleeding had stopped, but the wound still burned. Someone had broken into the protective cover on her house’s circuit breaker to cut the electricity. Her security cameras covered the front and back doors, along with the garage, but the shooter had avoided all of them. “It looks like whoever did this parked down the road and climbed over the fence and headed straight for the circuit breaker.”

  “Thank God it was only an air gun.” Tyler had been furious when he found out she had a head wound and still drove to his house to surprise Lacey. “How did they know you were even home?”

  “They didn’t,” Nikki said. “I didn’t even know I would be home until I was halfway to Roan Pharmaceuticals. And I didn’t tell anyone but Liam.” Knowing that someone had cut the power and then waited to see her moving through the house was bad enough, but what if Lacey had been home?

  Nikki had accepted the dangers of her job years ago, but the idea that her daughter could be in danger sent a wave of fear through her. The sight of her mother’s bandaged head had scared her, but Nikki distracted her with pizza. By the time they’d finished eating, Lacey seemed to have forgotten about the injury. She’d spent the rest of the evening snuggled in Nikki’s lap until her bath.

  “I suppose people use air guns for target practice.” Tyler leaned against the kitchen counter, arms across his chest.

  The .177 pellet had busted through the glass with precision, and the responding officer had told Nikki the air gun used was likely a higher-end model because of the likely distance between the snow tracks on the side of the house and the window.

  “My guess is the person came to send a message.” “Liar” had been spray painted in red across the siding, right above the circuit breaker. “It’s got to be one of those protesters. One of them caused a scene at the diner and shoved me. Miller kept him at the station for hours, but one of his buddies must have followed me home. The tracks in the snow look like generic snow boots, likely a man’s size ten or eleven.”

  “You didn’t say anything about having issues with the protestors.”

  “It isn’t any of your concern.” The words came out more harshly than she’d intended.

  “It is my concern when it puts our daughter at risk.”

  Nikki glared at him. “That’s why I’m staying in Stillwater, and I called you tonight. What else do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped. “I don’t understand anything you do anymore.”

  “I can’t do this with you right now. No one in Stillwater even knows I have a daughter. I’ve kept her completely out of this. And my address is unlisted. Someone either went to a lot of work to find me, or they followed me.”

  Unless Newport had done the dirty work, but as much as Nikki disliked the woman, she couldn’t see her sending her minions to commit violence.

  “Has anyone else been hanging around?”

  Nikki immediately thought of Rory and flushed. He wouldn’t do such a thing. “Not really.”

  “What about Frost?”

  “What about him?”

  “You’re letting the media imply he might be responsible for the Stillwater murders. If his ego is as big as you say it is, maybe he’s pissed and sending you a message.”

  Nikki had already thought about Frost and ruled him out. “This isn’t the sort of message he would send. It’s too crass. And he knows I don’t really think he’s the killer.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because it’s my job, Tyler.”

  “Yeah, well your job’s going to get you killed one day.”

  Nikki gritted her teeth. Tyler had never been comfortable with her working in the violent crime unit, and he wasn’t capable of fathoming her need to understand why people committed such terrible crimes. Nikki often wondered if his real issue was jealousy over the recognition she received for her work, but she didn’t dare bring the idea up. The argument always ended in a stalemate. “I can handle it.”

  “What about Lacey?” Tyler demanded. “If something happens to you, what am I supposed to tell her? That Mommy chose—”

  “Stop.” Nikki stood up, shaking with anger. “Don’t say another word.”

  Tyler’s cheeks reddened. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s what you always try to do when it comes to my job. This is what I do, and it’s not going to change,” Nikki said. “How many times do we need to have this argument?”

  The muscles in his jaw twitched. “No need to have it. You aren’t going to change.”

  “Neither are you.” Nikki gathered her coat and bag. “I’ll call Lacey tomorrow.”

  “You’re seriously driving back to Stillwater tonight? With a head injury?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Tyler closed his eyes for a moment. “Look, I know we’re mad at each other, but please stay in the spare bedroom tonight. It’s late, and you’ve got to be tired. I won’t bother you anymore tonight. And you can take her to school before you go to work in the morning. Lacey will be so happy.”

  Nikki wanted to tell him no, but her exhausted body overruled her emotions. “Okay, Tyler. But this doesn’t change anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I gave up on you changing a long time ago.”

  Twenty-Eight

  The air bullet had hit her hard enough to draw blood, but the wound was superficial. The bruise, however, was not. By the time Nikki arrived at the medical examiner’s office in St. Paul the next morning, the welt above her ear looked like the mark from a branding iron, and the two-inch-long purple bruise along her scalp was impossible to hide. But she had received the call from Liam just after she’d dropped Lacey off at school, and she knew now more than ever she needed to solve the case and get out of Stillwater. Time away from Lacey was tearing Nikki apart and she wasn’t any safer for it.

  The medical examiner’s office in St. Paul handled the death investigations of multiple smaller counties, including Washington County. Its location in the big medical complex in downtown St. Paul meant parking was usually hit and miss. Nikki finally found an open space in the east parking ra
mp. She walked as fast as possible in her heavy snow boots, and by the time she checked in with the front desk and joined Liam at the medical examiner’s office, her head had started to ache again. They walked in silence to the autopsy suite, Nikki’s nerves on edge. The fact that the chief medical examiner wanted to go over things with the bodies present was not a good sign, but at least she was finally getting answers now that Madison and Kaylee’s bodies had defrosted.

  Dr. Blanchard was already waiting for them, impatiently tapping her foot. “You’re late.” Melissa was the state’s first African-American chief medical examiner. Nikki had worked with her on several cases, and while her no-nonsense approach intimidated some, Nikki appreciated it.

  “My fault,” Nikki said. “I’m sorry.”

  Blanchard raised an eyebrow. “You run into a door?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Right,” Blanchard said. “First, Janelle Gomez. Her family wants to give her a proper Catholic funeral, so I’ve released the body. She was hit with a blunt round object. The lamp you found at the motel is the likely culprit.”

  “Did she die instantly?”

  “No, given the level of frostbite on her body, I think she was alive for at least a couple of hours after she was dumped,” Blanchard said. “X-rays show a lot of healed breaks, so she’s definitely been battered. But no sign of sexual assault and nothing to suggest she had sex prior to her death.”

  Nikki felt a surge of relief that Janelle hadn’t been sexually assaulted. The way she’d died, alone and in the freezing cold, was bad enough. “If her ex did this, I would expect signs of a beating. What did the Eau Claire police say?” Nikki asked Liam.

  “Still looking for him as of late last night,” Liam said. “I planned to call for an update after we finished here. Dr. Blanchard, when do you expect the toxicology report?” Liam asked.

  “I’ve asked the lab to rush it, but you know how that goes. As for Madison and Kaylee, you need to see the bodies.”