by Elle Keaton
Accidental Roots Boxed Set Volume 1
Storm Season, No Pressure, Convergence Zone
Elle Keaton
Dirty Dog Press
Copyright © 2020 by Elle Keaton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All cover art by Cate Ashwood Designs
All Editing by Alicia Z. Ramos
Created with Vellum
Contents
Storm Season
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Did you enjoy Storm Season?
No Pressure
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
A Thank You From Elle
Convergence Zone
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
A Thank You From Elle
Also by Elle Keaton
About Elle
The Highway to Elle, an irreverent missive
Copyright © 2019 by Elle Keaton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Dedication and Acknowledgements:
Thank you to my children, Zoë and Harper, who have been incredibly patient with me during this endeavor, as well as being my most enthusiastic cheerleaders. It is pretty awesome when your kids think you hang the moon and the stars.
Thank you to Sherri Jordan Asble; she read this first and wasn’t afraid. I so appreciate that you read a complete stranger’s manuscript and urged me to continue.
An enormous thank you goes out to Alicia Z. Ramos, who edited the heck out of this manuscript, over and above the call of duty. Any errors are mine alone. Alicia probably tried to talk me out of them, yet I insisted.
The town of Skagit and the wonderful (and not so wonderful) people who inhabit it exist only in my imagination.
This book is a work of fiction and should be treated as such.
This book is intended for adults aged eighteen and over due to sexual content, language, and other matters adults are supposed to know about (but most of us don’t).
Pontiac, Camaro, GTO, and Dodge Charger are all copyrighted names that do not belong to me, and I thank the companies in advance for letting my characters use them.
Anyone I have neglected to acknowledge is my fault alone.
* This edited version of Storm Season does not stray from the original in any significant manner except, hopefully, better grammar.
Cheers and thank you for reading!
Elle Keaton
Created with Vellum
One
One
Adam Klay pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He was cold. He was irritable. He was incredibly tired. Of bureaucratic excuses, cold coffee, and things that made his heart hurt.
A crime scene like this one often started with some variation of “Woman Walking Dog.” It was a little-discussed yet widely experienced phenomenon that a perfectly good walk would be ruined by a gruesome discovery. Today, “Woman Walking Dog” featured a dead body just off the artist’s canvas, but viewers would sense its macabre presence nonetheless.
Staring down at what remained of the tiny body (birds, small animals, and insects had all arrived more quickly than he had), Adam visually cataloged everything he could without further disturbing the scene or the photographer who had arrived only five minutes earlier. Anger, sadness, and weighty futility threatened his normally calm demeanor. Young children weren’t supposed to end up dead in deserted fields.
As he turned his back to the photographer in an attempt to block out the dispassionate snicking sound of the camera lens logging evidence, a flash of color caught his eye. Crouching in the viscous mud and dense bramble, he spotted a single grubby pink athletic shoe peeking from a tangled blackberry thicket threatening to overgrow the crime scene. Adam wished he smoked so he would have an excuse to step further away.
The dog-walker had trudged into this blackberry jungle in pursuit of Rufus or Spot, only to discover the rotting corpse of what had once been a human child. She had known this because the tattered remains of clothing were still attached to the victim.
The body appeared to be that of eight-year-old Rochelle Heid. Rochelle had last been seen three months earlier, playing outside her home in Muncie, Indiana, sixteen hundred miles to the east. Adam had been working the case since almost the beginning. Her identity hadn’t officially been confirmed yet, but Adam had bought his ticket to Ringling, Montana, immediately. Ringling, eighty miles or so from Montana’s capital, Helena, had never been on his bucket list. Hell, he had never even heard of the place before. Most of the places he traveled to were not on his bucket list.
Rochelle’s case had made the news because a neighbor boy saw her getting dragged into a car and gave chase on his bicycle for several miles before he was knocked down at an intersection by another car and lost the trail. By the time the police got his story and verified it via a panicked call from Rochelle’s mother, the snatcher had been long gone.
Adam hated this kind of case, and not just because of the nausea establishing a stronghold in his gut. Monsters who killed children reserved themselves a one-way ticket to a special circle of hell. Adam’s reputation as an unemotional investigator and exacting partner was hard-won. He would see this case through regardless of the deep sense of discontent he’d been experiencing recently; would still hate every minute of it. Closure for victims’ families was satisfying, but he could do without the bodies of children haunting his dreams.
When Adam arrived in Ringling that morning, rampant rumor and wild speculation had a trucker serial killer who trafficked in women and children using Ringling as his dumping ground. Adam disagreed. In his experience, traffickers held onto their inventory; they were in it for profit. Time spent getting rid of bodies was time and money lost. Besides, Ringling was not on a major highway. He’d looked up its history, and the town’s last claim to fame was when it had been a station stop on the transcontinental main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in the 1800s. He seriously doubted they had a long-distance trucker using a flyspeck on I-89 for a human dumping ground and not one of the nosy citizens had noticed him coming and going. Plus, there were no other bodies. Cadaver dogs had been brought in; Rochelle’s remains were the only human ones in that meadow.
The file he’d flipped through on the plane had been brief, but Adam felt that Ringling had merely been convenient. He’d learned a long time ago to pay attention to his gut. Details on the initial disappearance were vague; not unusual. Rochelle’s mother had been ambiguous about why the child was outside so late at night; follow-up revealed Rochelle also had spotty school attendance. Judgmental eyebrows were raised. When the boy on the bicycle had finally been interviewed by police, they had all but accused him of the crime, and the kid had clammed up. Adam didn’t blame him. Adam and his agency were brought in because the City of Muncie was getting its ass sued for racial profiling and generally being high-functioning douchebags.
The Muncie police had had a chance to catch this guy and blew it, then blew it more by trying to deflect blame onto the mother and the kid who’d tried to save Rochelle. Who the fuck cared if Rochelle didn’t always get to school? Her mother had a hard time making ends meet and worked a lot of nights. As a janitor, the American dream.
The dog-walker, Jeannette Graves (the irony), had recognized Rochelle’s clothing from the media coverage after the kidnapping. Rochelle disappeared after the news coverage of a huge plane crash but before the big push to defund Planned Parenthood. The media had grabbed her story and run with it for a few days, saturating viewers with clip after clip of her with a sweet, gap-toothed smile and pink tennis shoes that lit up when she walked.
His slight headache erupted into a full frontal-lobe throb.
Less than a day in Ringling and Adam officially loathed the town. To be fair, he hated small towns on general principle; in his experience they lived down to their reputation. Small-minded people living in a small world thinking small thoughts. Reactions were ludicrously predictable: They prejudged victims, they failed to keep privacy protocols, and inevitably someone would complain about the investigation’s cost to the taxpayers.
“Ya think you got anything?” The sheriff’s voice pulled Adam away from his pessimistic thoughts.
“Sheriff Woods, no, not really a lot to go on. I can’t comment anyway.” Woods was glad Adam had flown in. That was nice. Usually there was a big pissing contest about who was top dog. They should understand, Adam was always top dog.
They’d both been at the damp crime scene for hours before retreating to the sheriff’s office. Between the dog rooting around, the dog-walker tossing her cookies, and the deputies tromping over everything before he’d arrived (didn’t they watch CSI out in the boonies?), there had been nothing to be found other than the small corpse and pink shoe.
It had rained on and off while they were processing the scene, and Adam had stood around in his dress shoes and third-best suit waiting for Weir to show up. For some reason Mohammad thought fit to assign the both of them to this case. Adam was not pleased; Weir wasn’t such a bad partner, but he was just a kid. As Weir liked to point out, he was so young they’d had to bend the rules to bring him aboard. As if that made him a better investigator.
Carroll Weir was young, cocky, and sensitive: a terrible combination. On their last case together, Weir had made some rookie assumptions—the kid was too smart for mistakes. When Adam had called him out in front of their team, Weir had felt publicly humiliated and asked to be partnered with someone different. Wonder boy had never been called on the carpet before. Adam had felt a little remorseful; he didn’t hate the kid, after all.
Adam shouldn’t hold it against him, but Weir fit a certain stereotype. Didn’t help that he’d grown up in SoCal and had mannerisms that ticked Adam off. Adam could never tell whether the kid was taking him seriously or not. Weir needed to decide if he was going to be an investigator or king of the boards. “Dude” was not a word Adam associated with a fed.
Adam’s phone buzzed against his thigh. Again. When he fished it out of his pocket, the screen showed the same unknown number it had the last three times. Also a call from his mother, no message there, and a call and voice mail from Mohammad. Adam needed coffee before he dealt with any phone calls.
Leaning tiredly against the huge metal desk in Sheriff Woods’s rumpled office while Woods went to grab them coffee, Adam was ready to put Ringling behind him. Woods seemed like a decent person, but Adam didn’t have anything to tell him that the guy didn’t already know.
He’d be leaving tomorrow or the next day, unless Weir did some data magic and discovered a link between trucks and pink tennis shoes. There was nothing else to find in Ringling. The cute retro (but the real thing) ice-cream parlor and new golf course for retiring boomers held no undiscovered clues related to Rochelle Heid. The ladies’ knitting circle was not a hive of septuagenarian killers.
His phone buzzed again. Fucking relentless. Woods came back into the little room with a mug of steaming coffee in each hand.
“You gonna get that? Mr. Azaya just called my phone and said to, and I quote, ‘encourage’ you to answer your phone.”
It had been a long time since Mohammad had circumvented Adam’s phone to get in touch with him.
“Yeah, I’m going to step outside for this,” Adam grumbled.
The late-afternoon gloom pressed against Adam’s shoulders while he huddled under the peeling eaves of the Meagher Springs County Sheriff’s Department building. Pulling his phone back out, he called back a number he knew by heart.
Later, on the tiny tin-can plane carrying him to Skagit, Washington, he worried about who was going to take care of Rochelle.
Two
TWO
Micah was feeling a little more lost than normal, or wherever his personal bell curve averaged. He�
�d been working all morning on a file for one of his oldest customers without making much progress; he just couldn’t get his head in the game. When he felt this way, the best thing was a change of scenery. He packed his laptop and notes into his messenger bag, hoping a brisk walk to his favorite coffee shop–slash–office would clear his head enough so he could get some work done.