White Out: A Thriller (Badlands Thriller)

by Danielle Girard

  Lily waited, gooseflesh trailing her arms like something sticky.

  Danson’s gaze settled on a far wall. “Sometime in the night, Derek Hudson had cut out the pig’s entrails and climbed inside the cavity to stay warm. They found him half-frozen and covered in pig’s blood.”

  Lily didn’t need to close her eyes to picture a skinny boy inside the body of a pig. Was it any wonder that Hudson had grown into a monster?

  CHAPTER 45

  KYLIE

  By the time she was nearing Glendive, Kylie had started to doubt the intelligence of coming. She should have been at the scene of Tanner’s death when the coroner arrived, and she wanted to be the one to arrest Larson. Instead, she was on a rough two-lane highway, driving fifty behind some idiot in a diesel truck, while someone else—probably Carl Gilbert—made the arrest and met the coroner.

  The entire drive she’d been making phone calls and leaving messages. Ten minutes outside of Glendive, her phone rang with a Bismarck exchange.

  “Milliard,” she answered, unsure who would be calling her on a Saturday morning.

  “This is Dr. Sarah Glanzer. I’m a senior criminalist up in the state lab. I got a call from your sheriff to touch base on the evidence on the Abigail Jensen case.”

  “In on a Saturday?”

  Glanzer let out a short laugh. “Yep. Most of them, actually. We’ve got a huge backlog, and thankfully the state compensates us for the extra hours—to a point, anyway.”

  Milliard wished she were getting overtime, especially on this case. Since this whole thing had started, she’d done nothing but work, and she didn’t see an end in sight. “Do you have news for me?”

  “Actually, I do. I just called your department, and your dispatch gave me your number. Are you the right one to talk to?”

  “Yes. I’m the lead detective.”

  “That’s what Dispatch told me, but I had a different name written down. C. Gilbert?”

  “He’s in our office, but I’m the person you want.” Kylie felt the edge creep into her voice and forced a smile, even though Dr. Glanzer couldn’t see her. “I’m point on this one.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m just following up a couple of pieces of evidence that came in from the Jensen case.”

  “What did you find?” Kylie asked. Grateful that the diesel truck had turned off the highway, she sped up.

  “There was a glass in the bar’s office. According to the collection notes, they found it in a desk drawer. It had two sets of prints. Iver Larson’s and prints of someone by the name of Kevin Clouse. He’s in our system for an old D and D.”

  Drunk and disorderly. “Makes sense,” Kylie said. “Clouse is one of the bartenders.”

  “That glass contained a residue of a drug—flurazepam.”

  “Huh,” Kylie said.

  “That mean something to you?” Glanzer asked.

  Kylie checked her rearview mirror. “That same compound was present in a suspect’s toxicology screen.”

  “An unusual choice for a party drug,” Glanzer commented.

  “How do you mean?” Kylie asked.

  “Side effects are impaired motor coordination and severe sedation. It’s what you give someone who has anxiety about being in the hospital before minor procedures. Some dentists administer it, too. But a patient is never allowed to drive afterward. It’s not quick to wear off.”

  Almost exactly what the doctor had said. Prescott. “Anything else?” Kylie asked.

  “We’ve got two fibers we’re studying, but they’re from different sources.”

  An old Ram truck roared by with a blast of thick black smoke. Kylie glanced at her speedometer. She was going sixty, which meant that asshole was going eighty-five or more. She brought her attention back to the call. “Fiber, right. One was found in a truck?”

  “Yes. The other came from the victim’s blouse.”

  “And they don’t match?”

  “No. Similar color, but that’s about all. The one from the woman’s blouse is PET, or polyethylene terephthalate—otherwise known as polyester. The one from the truck is a cotton-wool blend. The two are actually almost nothing alike.”

  That meant no good connection existed between Iver Larson and the victims. Except the boots in his truck. “What about the victim’s shoes?”

  Glanzer was quiet a moment.

  “The ones that were found in the truck toolbox,” Kylie added.

  “Yeah, I remember those,” Glanzer said. “Hang on.”

  Another moment passed, and Kylie sensed that something was wrong.

  “Detective, we sent those findings in our preliminary report.”

  Kylie sat upright in the seat. “Preliminary report?”

  “It was sent to your office yesterday before noon. Went to Deputy Gilbert.” Glanzer paused. “Oh, C. Gilbert.”

  “Before noon?” When she’d met with Gilbert and the others yesterday afternoon, Gilbert had said he didn’t expect the report until Monday, at the earliest. “When did the shoes make it to your lab?”

  “Friday, around ten a.m. The preliminary report only takes a few hours. I finished it before lunch.”

  Heat seared Kylie’s chest. Gilbert had sat in that meeting yesterday afternoon and lied right to her face. He’d already gotten Glanzer’s report, but he’d told her it would take at least two more days before they’d know anything. Which meant he was keeping her out of the loop.

  The sound of papers shuffling filtered through the line. “They were processed first thing Friday—priority for the double homicide.”

  Double homicide. Abigail Jensen and Jenna Hitchcock? Of course, she suspected that the two murders had been committed by the same person, but she wouldn’t have called it a double homicide. “Can you send me that initial report? I never got it.”

  “Sure. I’ll email it to you now, and my number will be in the email, so call if you have any questions. What’s your email address?”

  Kylie gave Glanzer her email address and listened as she repeated it back. “That’s it.”

  “Sending it now. And sorry about that. Hope it wasn’t a screwup on our end,” Glanzer added.

  “No. I’m guessing it wasn’t,” Kylie said, wondering why Gilbert would have intentionally held back the report. It was possible he’d been busy with other things yesterday and hadn’t checked his email. Unless he’d hoped to present it privately to Vogel and Davis himself and, what, try to steal the limelight?

  “I can tell you we didn’t find anything useful on the shoes,” Glanzer said. “They were really wet, so the partial prints on the soles and the heels were too compromised to make a match, and we didn’t find any fibers. We swabbed them for DNA, but—”

  Heart pounding, Kylie jerked the car onto the shoulder of the road. A car blared its horn and swerved around her. “Wait. You said the shoes were wet?”

  “Oh yeah. Soaked.”

  Abigail Jensen’s shoes had been soaked.

  “How about her pants?”

  “She was probably lying in the snow before the killer dumped her,” Glanzer said as though it was obvious.

  “But when you say her shoes were wet, you mean all the way up? Or just at the bottom, near the ground?”

  “Hang on. Let me pull up the images.”

  There were several moments of silence, the only sound the clicking of a keyboard. “Looking at pictures, the boots look soaked. The suede—or fake-suede material—is saturated front and back, almost to the top of the boot.” Another click, then a few more, and she said, “It’s hard to tell from the images, but it looks like the bottoms of her jeans were also wet—not just up the back where she’d been lying in the snow but all the way around the bottom.”

  “Like she’d been walking through the snow,” Kylie said.

  “That would match the findings.”

  Abigail Jensen had been walking in the snow and gotten her shoes and pants wet. When Lily Baker had woken in Brent Nolan’s car, she’d noticed her shoes and the bottoms of her pants, near
the hems, were wet. Kylie had remembered thinking there was no running water near the site of the accident. And no snow.

  But there was standing snow behind Skål, lots of it.

  Kylie gripped the steering wheel. Lily Baker had been in the same place as Jensen. They’d been together at the bar. But then, somehow, Baker had gotten in Brent Nolan’s car.

  Why would she have done that? Had she been running from something? Or toward it?

  And if Lily Baker couldn’t remember that night, how could Kylie figure out what had happened?

  CHAPTER 46

  LILY

  The image of a skinny boy frozen inside a dead pig was as clear in Lily’s head as any image she’d seen since her arrival in Molva.

  “It’s a terrible thing to imagine,” Melinda Danson said.

  Lily only nodded. She wanted to get up and leave, go back to Hagen and bury herself in a normal life. Her job at the hospital . . . but that was all she had. There were no friends, no family.

  “Before you go, you ought to look at those.” Ms. Danson pointed to the shoebox Andy had set on the low coffee table. “Those are my son’s pictures.”

  “Pictures?” Lily reached for the box, then hesitated. The boy in the dead pig still lingered in her mind.

  “My boy Matty took those before he died. Pictures of Molva,” she added, waving at Lily to open the box. “Matty loved taking pictures,” she said, her eyes glazed and soft. “There are some from that day. It was quite an event here in Molva, as you can imagine.”

  The words buzzed in Lily’s head. Her escape from sixteen months of captivity had been “quite an event.”

  “Go ahead and look, dear,” Ms. Danson urged, and Lily lifted the box, surprised by its weight. With the box in her lap, she removed the lid and stared down at hundreds of photos. “These are all from that day?”

  “No, no. Those are all the pictures he took his last couple of years of high school. They’re pretty well organized, though.” She shifted forward in her chair, her motions shaky and unstable. “I think you’ll find the ones from Hudson’s death right at the front, separated by a marker. There might be a few more after that first marker. A bunch were real out of focus, but I never could bring myself to throw them out. Can’t seem to get myself to throw out anything of his.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said.

  Ms. Danson waved a shaky hand through the air. “Don’t you worry about me, dear.”

  Returning her attention to the box of photographs, Lily located the thin white divider and pulled out the images ahead of it. She recognized the cabin in the first pictures from the newspaper stories. Unlike the chilling, empty black-and-white photographs that had accompanied the news articles, Matt Danson’s were filled with people who moved around the cabin. She scanned them, her heart trilling in her ears as she looked for her own face. But the faces were unfamiliar.

  “You find them?”

  “Yes,” Lily said, forcing her fingers to shuffle to the next image. She moved through them slowly, fighting against tremors in her hands. She had survived. Escaped. She was no longer that girl. And the more images she saw, the more that terrifying place looked like a normal cabin. Mostly. The dark windows, which were spray-painted or hung with heavy curtains, would have cast the interior in absolute darkness. She shivered as though remembering something, but then it was gone. It didn’t have the texture of memory. Maybe it was no memory at all but her imagination filling in the terror of the dark.

  But you were held in the dark, even if you can’t remember.

  Slowly the images lessened their hold, and her breathing grew easier as the cabin vanished, and instead she was staring at the photographs of people. Several were local police officers, identifiable by the same brown uniforms that Andy had worn today. A couple of others wore suits, and Matt Danson had captured them as they interviewed people in the crowd. Likely state investigators or perhaps FBI, though it was hard to imagine the FBI in a town like Molva. But that case surely had brought the FBI.

  Several pictures in a row featured a man in a suit, who appeared to be interviewing a number of the people in the crowd, a notebook in his hand. Then Lily came upon a dozen images of the surrounding woods, empty and dark. Matt Danson must have found them especially interesting, because he’d taken a number of photographs that were almost identical, variations of a clump of trees, thick with undergrowth. It was only in the last images that Lily noticed the shape of a person standing among the trees.

  Lily brought the photograph closer. The shape was lean and tall, a young man from the look of it. She wished there were a way to zoom in. She flipped to the next picture and found herself staring at the same patch of trees, close up. She scanned for someone hiding there, but it was just trees and shrubs. The next image showed more trees, but the one after that was mostly black, a thin patch of light in one corner.

  “You find something, dear?” Danson asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Lily shook off the chill she felt. It wasn’t so strange to think some kid had hidden among the trees to watch the police investigate a murder. What did she expect to find in these pictures? These were not people she’d known. She’d never lived in Molva.

  Studying the dark and light shadows, Lily flipped the photograph over, wondering why Matt Danson would have kept it.

  When she turned it upright again, the image changed for her. She saw that the black was something over the lens, the light filtering in where it wasn’t covered. A hand, she thought.

  The next image showed fingers, the hand coming off the lens. The next showed a section of wrist, the skin still blurry. Then the last one of the group had captured a close-up of an arm, a section of forearm that was, like the others, mostly out of focus.

  She puzzled over it, squinting to try to bring the fuzzy image into focus. There was something there, across the skin. She shuffled the pictures, returning to the man in the woods, and studied them side by side. The fuzzy images were part of the same series—blown-up sections of the picture of the man in the woods. Matt Danson must have seen something there, and the man had tried to stop him. She shivered at an invisible draft as she circled back through the images slowly. She studied each, stopping at the one filled with forearm. The trees made a green haze around the focus on Matt Danson’s image.

  A gasp caught at the back of her throat.

  There, on the surface of the man’s skin, was what Matt Danson must have seen.

  “Are you all right?” Ms. Danson asked.

  But Lily couldn’t answer. She was staring at a full-frame image of forearm. Even out of focus, the horizontal lines that crossed the skin were now recognizable.

  They were tiny slices as though made by a light touch with a scalpel.

  She felt a blindfold slip away.

  Her eyes watered from so many days without light. His bulk pressed behind her as she hunkered down, knees to her chest. Then a motion flashed in front of her eyes, the sensation of sight overwhelming. In the shadowed room, a man’s arm passed through her vision. His hands grabbed the blindfold and lifted it to her face.

  She put the photograph down, her hands shaking.

  Because she remembered.

  Cuts, hundreds of them. Cuts lined his left forearm, identical to the ones she’d felt on her back.

  CHAPTER 47

  KYLIE

  Five miles outside of Glendive, Kylie called Pete McIntosh, who gave her directions to the park where Hitchcock’s body had been found. As she pulled into the semicircle parking area, her head swam with thoughts of Lily Baker’s wet shoes, of the preliminary evidence report that she’d never received from Gilbert.

  From the raised lot, the recreation area—a large frozen meadow—was visible below. Tall grasses stood in frozen clumps, interspersed by a handful of small fishing ponds, currently solid sheets of ice. A winding trail system stretched out for acres, dirt trails that ran through the brush. She left the engine running, comfortable behind the steady stream of warm air as she opened the mail app on he
r phone and looked for Glanzer’s email.

  As promised, Glanzer had sent it while they’d still been on the phone. She clicked on the attachment just as a gray Silverado pulled in beside her. The man in the driver’s seat raised a hand. In it was a deputy’s badge. Kylie nodded and pulled on a hat and gloves before shutting off the engine. Already she could feel the outside air leach into the car.

  Zipping up her coat under her chin, she climbed out into the cold.

  “Detective Milliard?”

  “That’s me,” she said, extending a hand to the deputy. “You must be Pete McIntosh.”

  “One and the same,” he said. McIntosh had a firm handshake and a full head of red hair that ran down the sides of his face into a neatly trimmed beard. He wore no hat and no gloves and didn’t look the least bit uncomfortable with the freezing temperatures. Beneath one arm he’d tucked an accordion folder, probably images and reports on the scene.

  “Thanks for coming down.” He nodded to the park. “I thought we’d take a walk down to where we found Hitchcock. Then I can show you what we’ve found.” He studied the park in silence a moment as though it were a friend who’d disappointed him greatly. “I don’t know if it’ll help any,” he added, returning his gaze to Kylie. “You said you have a suspect in custody?”

  She nodded. “We do. I can tell you about him, but the case doesn’t feel solid yet. You know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s go have a look, then.”

  McIntosh glanced at Kylie’s shoes as though wondering if they were appropriate for walking. They weren’t hiking boots but sturdy street shoes, and he didn’t comment as he started for the park. Kylie followed, and they made their way down a series of switchbacks to arrive at the trail entrance. A map of the area hung on a wide board along with information about trail maintenance and cleaning up after pets. The walk to the scene took about ten minutes, and as they went, McIntosh asked questions about Jensen’s death and how the Hagen police had come across a suspect.

  “Shoes in his toolbox,” McIntosh repeated when she told him about the evidence.