Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  PRAISE FOR IT ENDS WITH HER

  “Once in a while a character comes along that gets under your skin and refuses to let go. This is the case with Brianna Labuskes’s Clarke Sinclair—a cantankerous, rebellious, and somehow endearingly likable FBI agent with a troubled past. I was immediately pulled into Clarke’s broken, shadow-filled world and her quest for justice and redemption. A stunning thriller, It Ends With Her is not to be missed.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author

  “It Ends With Her is a gritty, riveting, roller-coaster ride of a book. Brianna Labuskes has created a layered, gripping story around a cast of characters that readers will cheer for. Her crisp prose and quick plot kept me reading with my heart in my throat. Highly recommended for fans of smart thrillers with captivating heroines.”

  —Nicole Baart, author of Little Broken Things

  “An engrossing psychological thriller filled with twists and turns—I couldn’t put it down! The characters were filled with emotional depth. An impressive debut!”

  —Elizabeth Blackwell, author of In the Shadow of Lakecrest

  ALSO BY BRIANNA LABUSKES

  It Ends With Her

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Brianna Labuskes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503959750 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503959759 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503902282 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503902285 (paperback)

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  First edition

  To Raegan and Gracie,

  my shining girls made of stardust and lightning and wind—

  you are the very best of this world.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  August 5, 2018

  Seven days after Ruby Burke’s kidnapping

  Charlotte Burke blinked, her lashes heavy so that they rested against her cheeks for a heartbeat longer than normal. Then her eyes snapped open.

  When they did, all she saw was red. It was thick and ruby in color and tacky on her hands, on her arms, on her clothes.

  The blood was on the carpet, too. If the fabric had been plush once, now it was drenched, the slash of color obscene against the whiteness.

  Her brain struggled to catch up to what was happening, but she couldn’t think. She blinked again, but nothing came into focus.

  Except . . . except the weight against her thigh. A gun. Her fingers tightened around the grip, more instinct than deliberate thought.

  The pieces began slotting themselves together. She looked around, wishing the fuzziness at the edge of her vision would dissolve.

  The light that was pouring in through the curtain hinted at morning, but early morning, when the sun was just starting to rise. It cast shadows into the room.

  She pressed a shaky palm to her sternum, and it was then that she noticed the gash on her arm. It was jagged, as if the skin had been sliced with broken glass. There wasn’t any pain, though, despite the freshness of the wound.

  Adrenaline.

  It was pouring through her still. That had to be why her arm didn’t hurt, why her thoughts were so slow, why her legs trembled with the effort to keep her upright.

  Oblivion begged her to sink into darkness and forget everything that had just happened. But she needed to see; she needed to make sure.

  Because there was a body. There had to be. There couldn’t be this much blood and not be a body.

  She dropped her chin to her chest, her eyes on the floor.

  Charlotte noticed the hand first. It was outstretched, reaching for her even in its stillness. A sob caught in the back of her throat, full and wet and painful where it lodged.

  The first tear slipped from the corner of her eye just as a door burst open somewhere down the hallway. She didn’t move, didn’t hide. Just stood there, the tips of her toes brushing against a thigh that had gone limp against the floor.

  The cops crashed into the room, weapons drawn, faces tight. Their lips moved, but she didn’t hear any of them. Only one voice cut through the white noise.

  “Drop the gun.” Detective Nakamura was loud, urgent.

  Charlotte brought her elbow up to bury her eyes in the crook of her arm and shield herself from the brightness of the other officers’ flashlights. There was movement, yelling, as if they thought she was about to shoot them.

  “Drop the gun, Charlotte,” Nakamura said again. Some of the panic had slid from his voice, but there was a sadness in it now.

  This time the command traveled down her nerves to her fingertips, which obeyed. The metal clattered to the floor, and she put her hands in the air, palms out.

  “There we go,” he said.

  Then there were hands on her, rough palms against her wrists, pulling her shoulders into odd angles.

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right . . .”

  CHAPTER ONE

  ALICE

  August 2, 2018

  Four days after Ruby Burke’s kidnapping

  They were snapshots, those moments. Like Polaroids. The flash, the pop, the heartbeat between breaths as the white dissolved into a fully formed picture of a memory caught in ink.

  For Detective Alice Garner, it was the last glimpse of pigtails; the push of a heavy woman drenched in Chanel No. 5, clutching a bedazzled sweater in her chubby arms; the unrelenting glare of fluorescent bulbs on tired eyes; the Christmas music that played at full volume despite the fact that it had been only early November. Every moment of that day her daughter disappeared was etched deep into her memory. Except the one that mattered.

  For Charlotte Burke it would be different. Perhaps the smell of sal
t air would now be enough to send her body into dry heaves, like that perfume did for Alice. Or maybe it would be the sound of gulls that became fingernails clawing on the thin membrane of her eardrums. The roiling blue green of the ocean that drew out a thin sheen of sweat along her temples.

  “Hey.” Detective Joe Nakamura bumped into Alice’s shoulder, but his attention wasn’t on her. It was on the beach where the crowd was gathered. The techs and some uniforms were monitoring the scene, waiting on them to get there. “You okay?”

  Coming from anyone else, the question would prod at the hackles that were always poised to rise along her back.

  There was a script she was supposed to follow, lines she could read that would ensure the person who asked felt validated in their concern but not burdened by her emotions.

  For Nakamura it didn’t seem like the verbal tic it did for everyone else. They’d been partners for only six months since she’d moved to Florida, but she liked him. And she didn’t like many people.

  The older detective had come to St. Pete by way of South Central LA, and there were still ghosts in his eyes five years later. He didn’t talk about them, and she appreciated that. She knew she had ghosts in her eyes as well.

  Are you okay?

  “Yeah,” she finally murmured. Lying came too naturally these days.

  Shitty Dollar Store aviators blocked his reaction, but she saw him slide her a look from the side. He didn’t believe her. He shouldn’t.

  Still, he let it drop.

  He took the last swallow of his coffee, then dumped the cup in the trash at the edge of the dunes. “Let’s go.”

  The sun was just rising, cut in half by the sharp line of the horizon, turning the sky golden and pink against the green moss of the water. It was pretty. Far too pretty for what they were walking into.

  Ruby Burke. For so many, for the countless millions across the country who had watched every move of the investigation unfold over the past four days, there’d been hope the St. Petersburg police would find little Ruby alive. Volunteers had flocked in to offer their services, searching wetlands and the long stretches of beach up and down both coasts of the miniature peninsula, each one hoping to be the person who returned with a bright-eyed girl in their arms. Each one hoping to soothe the nerves of the parents who desperately wanted this to be a case of an adventurous child who had wandered off. Otherwise, what stopped this from happening to their own girls?

  Nothing, Alice wanted to tell them each time the media hounded her for an interview. Happy endings didn’t exist.

  “A jogger found her?” Alice asked, mostly just to talk. To fill the silence around them with something other than the wild tangle of thoughts running along the inner part of her skull. Her hands shook, and she jammed them into the pockets of her jeans.

  The beach was up the coast from the city’s public ones. The fact that it was waterfront property gave off the air of upper middle class or lower upper class, but the houses, with their gaudy colors and cutesy names painted across the fronts, screamed vacation rentals.

  “Yup.” Nakamura slipped a piece of gum between his teeth in that way of his. He’d hold it there, gripped lightly between thin lips like a cigarette. Constantly trying to quit, or so he told her. “About an hour ago. They recognized her from the pictures on the news.”

  That’s when Alice had gotten the call. The phone had buzzed where it lay against her chest, loud in the quiet darkness of her bedroom. She’d been staring at the thin cracks that ran the length of her ceiling.

  “Isn’t this private property?” She scanned the long expanse of fine, white sand that gave way like powdered sugar beneath her boots. It was all trod upon now. Though the CSI techs did try, there was nothing worse than sand when it came to preserving a crime scene.

  It was perfect in the eyes of a killer.

  “No one listens around here.” Nakamura shrugged.

  It was hard not knowing a place. It was what made the best cops—knowing the people, knowing the streets, knowing the rules that were always broken just because. There weren’t a lot of things she missed about DC, but she missed that.

  Alice still couldn’t get a handle on St. Petersburg, and she wondered if she ever would. The small city—which she thought of as Tampa’s strange, alcoholic cousin—was an odd mix of overtanned, middle-aged Jimmy Buffett wannabes who beer-bellied up to the open bars that were a dime a dozen downtown, and smooth, moneyed upper-class families who jockeyed for prominence over pearls and finger sandwiches.

  And then there was South St. Petersburg. The nonwhite, nonrich part of town that scared both the Miller Lite–swigging retirees and the pampered Southern ladies.

  The combination gave Alice cultural whiplash. And made figuring out the underlying social currents harder to do.

  “They called from a cell phone?” She paused, then clarified: “The jogger.”

  “Nah, didn’t have it on him.” Nakamura slowed his pace as they neared the police chief and the other officers huddled around the small bundle right at the edge of the water. The tide was coming in.

  Nakamura nodded back toward the dunes. “Ran up to the house. Left the scene for about ten minutes before he came back with the owner to wait for the officers.”

  The owner. The jogger. She started a list of all the players in the game. It would add to the one she’d already been working on in the four days since Ruby Burke had gone missing.

  “Was it the actual owner of the house or someone on vacation?” Alice asked. She could see it. Rent a place for a week under a fake name, pay in cash, drop the girl, and leave town. There would be no trace left other than a ghost who never existed in the first place.

  “It’s his,” Nakamura said. Killers didn’t tend to leave the bodies of their victims right outside their back door for the world to find.

  She slipped her own sunglasses down to cover her eyes when the chief caught sight of Nakamura.

  “The mother?” she murmured, one last question under her breath. Another player. At the top of the list. At the top of everyone’s list. They always were in cases like this.

  Nakamura tipped his chin toward the woman huddled against the early-morning wind coming off the ocean.

  Charlotte Burke.

  Her red hair tangled into itself around a pale, tear-streaked face. She wore light tan linen pants and a blue blouse beneath a cashmere cardigan. The ensemble was probably more expensive than Alice’s car.

  She looked away.

  “Nakamura.” The chief’s deep-bass rumble cut through the background chatter and roar of the pounding waves. He glanced at her. “Garner.”

  Alice was still an afterthought to the big man. It didn’t bother her. She liked that his eyes sometimes stopped before they reached her, that his thoughts didn’t immediately include her, that she slipped like a shadow behind her partner.

  It was preferable to the scrutiny she’d faced in DC, where her every move had been watched by those who had previously considered her one of their own. She’d been stamped with a reputation for being erratic and had never been able to shake the eyes that followed her with wary expectation after that.

  Being overlooked wasn’t so bad, really.

  They didn’t go through the niceties but simply nodded in greeting.

  Then all that was left to do was look at the body. The reason they were there. The reason the entire city, the nation, hadn’t breathed for the past four days.

  “Ruby Burke,” Chief Deakin said, putting voice to the thing no one wanted to name.

  “A positive ID?” Nakamura asked, as they all stared at the tiny body crumpled just beyond their feet.

  The five-year-old was wrapped in a peach silk sheet that was speckled deep orange from the mist coming off the ocean. Just her purple shoes with Velcro straps stuck out from beneath the fabric.

  The shoes Alice’s daughter had loved had been blue and white, with the face of the latest Disney princess smiling on the sides of them. Lila would wear them even with her fanciest dres
ses.

  Alice wished she had a cigarette, even though she didn’t smoke. It would give her something to do with her hands. Instead, she pinched at the fleshy skin of her upper thigh through the pocket of her jeans. If only she could draw blood.

  “The mother,” the chief confirmed. Like it was nothing. Like it was a throwaway.

  “Charlotte,” Alice said. Both men looked at her. “The mother’s name is Charlotte.”

  The space between them stretched taut at her reminder. Then they nodded, and Deakin cleared his throat, running a hand over his smooth, shaved head. In her mind, she heard the whispers that still clung to her even states away. Emotional. Erratic.

  “It’s Ruby Burke,” Deakin said. “She’s identifiable. There wasn’t much . . . damage.”

  They all paused to absorb that.

  Then Nakamura broke the silence. “Has the grandfather been contacted?”

  Another player on the list. Judge Sterling Burke, St. Petersburg’s reigning king. If he wanted to, he could have all their jobs, and he’d made that very clear several times over the past four days that his granddaughter had been missing.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with a threat like that. DC was the land of lawyers and politicians, where what you did and whom you could intimidate were the only currencies that really mattered. This was the first time that an entire police station gave two shits about what some blowhard thought, though.

  The power of Judge Sterling Burke was not to be underestimated.

  Deakin checked the time on his phone, then sighed. “He’s on his way.”

  The chief said it with the resignation of someone who had long acquiesced to the inevitability of the interference.

  “Head him off, yeah?” Nakamura directed.

  “You guys have”—the chief glanced down again—“six minutes. Tops.”

  At that warning, Alice shut everything out—the low hum of unease that fluttered along the particles in the air disrupting the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck, the broken sobs coming from the now-broken woman to her left, the smack of Nakamura’s gum in her ear. Everything other than Ruby.

  She slipped evidence gloves on with no intention of touching anything and then squatted down to sit on the backs of her heels. At thirty-three, it was no longer an easy position, but she ignored the screaming in her tight thigh muscles just like the rest of the distractions.