Dark Prison: A Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller

by Lori Ryan

  DARK PRISON

  DARK FALLS, CO ROMANTIC THRILLER BOOK 9

  LORI RYAN

  CONTENTS

  Dark Falls

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Sample: Dark Falls

  Also by Lori Ryan

  About the Author

  DARK FALLS

  The DARK FALLS Series

  Dark Falls - Lori Ryan (Oct. 9, 2018)

  Dark Secrets - Savannah Kade (Oct. 9, 2018)

  Dark Legacy - Trish McCallan (Nov. 6, 2018)

  Dark Nightmares - Becca Jameson (Nov. 6, 2018)

  Dark Terror - Sandra Owens (Jan. 8, 2019)

  Dark Burning - Lori Ryan (Jan. 29, 2019)

  Dark Echoes - Savannah Kade (Feb. 26, 2019)

  Dark Memories - Sandra Owens (Mar. 26, 2019)

  Dark Tidings - Trish McCallan (June, 2019)

  Dark Prison - Lori Ryan (June, 2019)

  Copyright © 2019 by Lori Ryan

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to all the wonderful people who help me get my books out into the world! A.J. Scudiere, your expertise was invaluable. Thank you for being on call for me whenever I needed it!

  Thank you to Renita McKinney and Curtis Evans of A Book a Day Author Services for the sensitivity read, and to Steve Statham and Melanie Ulrich for always making sure my books go out in the best shape possible.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Eve Scanlon stood alongside two of her best detectives and wished she hadn’t eaten that day. She’d gotten used to autopsies a long time ago, but this was something altogether different. The corpse looked almost like what you would think a mummy would look like under its wrappings. The skin and even some hair was intact, but there was a sheen on the body as if it had been enclosed in wax.

  “What the hell are we looking at?” Eric Cantu wasn’t one of Eve’s more refined detectives and he didn’t hold back as they all stared at the corpse on Dr. Grundholt’s table. Eve couldn’t blame him.

  The medical examiner looked like the kind of older man you’d expect to find in a pediatrician’s office, not the city morgue. Still, he was good at what he did and she was glad to have him working the body. This case needed to be closed. Samantha Greer had gone missing twenty-one years ago. Finding the body now meant they might finally get some closure for the teenager.

  And for Eve, she might be able to get closure for her mentor.

  “Saponification. Otherwise known as a wax corpse. It’s not common, but the right conditions essentially cause the fat stored in a body to leak out through the pores, stopping decomposition. It means the body is basically preserved in a wax coating and we’ve got a pretty intact body underneath this.”

  He crossed his arms and frowned at the body.

  “I’ve confirmed what we talked about already,” he said, looking at the body instead of the people in the room with him. “This kind of saponification can happen under the right conditions. Just the right level of heat, the right humidity, and the right chemicals in the soil under or around the body.”

  John Sevier stepped closer. “This damage to the chest, was that all done pre or post?”

  Sevier was one of Eve’s best detectives and a man she respected a lot. He had the typical boy-next-door kind of looks with brown hair and brown eyes that made all the women fawn over him. Until recently, he wanted nothing to do with them. He’d had a bad divorce and wasn’t interested in women but his college flame had shown up in his life recently and was there to stay.

  His partner couldn’t be more opposite. He’d been the unit’s playboy and had taken it seriously, putting his dark Italian looks to good use at the local bar her detectives hung out at. He’d been tamed recently, though. Eve didn’t exactly sit around and gossip with her detectives about their social lives, but it was hard not to see the change in Cantu. Or miss the way the rest of the unit razzed him for the way he’d fallen for his girlfriend.

  Dr. Grundholdt pointed to the damage to the chest cavity. “This was done postmortem,” he said. “Very much post. That was courtesy of our grave diggers. One of them landed on the chest cavity when he jumped into the grave.” He pointed to the side of the skull where it had clearly sustained trauma. “This, though, happened at the time of death and is your COD.”

  The cause of death was an important part of any death investigation so Eve was glad to have it. “Any idea what caused the wound?”

  “None.”

  Cantu grinned at Eve. “That would have been too easy, cap.”

  She scowled. Nothing about this case had ever been easy, not in the twenty-one years it had been open, and nothing about it was going to change. She didn’t have the resources to go hard after this case. She and Sevier and Cantu would be working this between their other cases. If Grundholt didn’t come up with something for them to chase down, she might not have anything they could go forward with.

  “I can tell you it’s nothing obvious like a hammer or brick. The edges don’t match anything along those lines. I’ll see if there’s any residue in the injury that can clue us in on a weapon. And if you bring me something, I might be able to match it.”

  Eve didn’t tell him what she thought of that. She didn’t hold out hope they’d come across a twenty-one-year-old murder weapon for him to test.

  “I do have a few things for you,” the doctor said and Eve shot him a look.

  “You could have started with that.”

  “First, she wasn’t fifteen when she died. This is not the body of a teenager.”

  Eve took that news as the blow it was. “You’re sure this is Samantha Greer?” She’d already asked him that when he called her with the news.

  The look he gave her said she should stop asking the question. “Dental records don’t lie. This woman was in her late twenties or early thirties when she died. The skull sutures and wisdom teeth tell me that but I can’t give you a specific age.”

  Eve felt an ache form deep in her chest. “What dark prison were you in all that time?” She whispered the words, almost to herself. There was no point asking Samantha now. She wouldn’t be telling them her secrets.

  He kept going. “The fact the body has saponified is working in our favor.” He picked up a magnifying glass as he spoke but only held it as he spoke. “There are scars here…” he moved to the end of the table near Samantha’s legs.

  He pointed to a darkened area on Samantha’s ankle and held up the magnifying glass, letting each of them come in and see the marks. “These ar
e the ones that you can see most easily, but there are others on her wrists and other ankle. They were well healed up by the time she died. I can’t tell you exactly when her ankles and wrists were bound, or with what, but it was some time before death.”

  “Days, months, or years?” Eve asked.

  “Not days, not weeks. Possibly months. Possibly years. That’s as precise as I can be.”

  John Sevier spoke. “So we know she was bound long enough to leave scars on her skin but was free from her bindings for at least a period of months or years before she died?”

  “Fair statement,” the examiner said.

  “What else?” Eve asked.

  She wasn’t ready for what the doctor said next.

  “She gave birth at least once in her lifetime.”

  A soft oath escaped Cantu’s lips and Eve understood the sentiment.

  “Explain,” was all she said.

  “There are pock marks on her hip bones that are caused by ligaments tearing during pregnancy. I can’t tell you how many babies she had or how long ago she delivered them. Based on the state of the marks, I’m willing to say I don’t think it was immediately before death. But that’s all I can tell you.”

  Eve felt her blood run cold. “So we have a child of anywhere from four to twenty years old out there?”

  She didn’t say the rest. Out there in trouble? Out there going through God knew what. She didn’t want to think about what someone could be doing with a child that age.

  They all knew what went unsaid. That child could be in grave danger or already the victim of homicide, maybe worse. People who wanted a child no one else knew about might not have a need for that kid after a certain age.

  Eve looked at the remains on the table. They might not look anything like the pretty teenager who’d gone missing, but she could still picture the girl they’d been. Brown hair and big blue eyes. Freckles across her cheeks and nose. Samantha Greer had been beautiful.

  Had Samantha ever held her child? Had she died protecting her child? There were too many unanswered questions here. Too many things they might not ever know. The thought of it made Eve’s blood rage hot. She wanted justice for this girl.

  “One last thing,” Dr. Grundholt said, turning to a small tray on a table.

  Eve and the detectives moved to stand next to him. A small scrap of paper lay in a protective sleeve on the tray. It was nothing more than a corner of something, two inches, if that. Most of the ink was gone, washed away by the years. There was a small smudge of black at the top but she couldn’t make much out.

  “Where was it?” Eve asked, squinting at the letters.

  “In her pocket.” Dr. Grundholt turned to a computer and pulled up an image of the same piece of paper on the screen. A few strokes of his keyboard and the images on the page deepened, clearly showing them something he or one of his people had worked on previously. Eve wondered how long one of the interns had slaved over the paper.

  “Is that a cross?” John asked, pointing to the top of the scrap.

  “Yes,” Dr. Grundholt said. He hit a few more keys and another image was laid over top of the one on the screen. “It’s part of a logo we have on file from the Blessed Divine Church.”

  Eric frowned. “Why does that ring a bell?”

  Eve had the same question.

  Dr. Grundholt was the one with the answer. “Large church on the outskirts of the city. Forty or so years ago, they started out as a tent revival. Reverend Abel Richardson founded the church.”

  “Was Abel the good brother or the bad one?” Eric wondered.

  Eve answered but kept her eyes on the doctor, waiting for more. “The good one. Cain killed Abel.”

  The doctor kept going. “The church grew from a tent revival to one of the largest churches in town back then. They own a large compound where a lot of the congregation lives. Abel’s son Richard took over the church in the early eighties. For several years after that, it operated more as a cult and less as a church. Or at least, that’s what people said. We have a file on them because people said their members were brainwashed. Gave up all their worldly possessions to move onto the church property.”

  “Were you here then?” Eve asked. Dr. Grundholt had been the medical examiner since Eve had joined the force but she didn’t know how long he’d been here before that.

  “I was. As far as I know, there were never any charges filed against the church but the pamphlets were scanned in as part of the effort to digitize all of the archives. The church is nowhere near the size now that it once was. They don’t have as much land out there, but there’s still quite a compound. I remember one year they were using explosives to tunnel under the property. The church said they were building fallout shelters but the consensus was that the tunnel system was built to escape if the government raided.”

  He shrugged. “Nowadays, it’s a little more low key. If you go to the northwest farmer’s market on Saturdays you can buy cheese from the church. They don’t sell it under the church’s name, but it’s them.”

  Eve pointed to the computer screen. “And the paper in her pocket matches the pamphlet from the church?”

  Dr. Grundholt nodded. “It’s one of a few of them from the church we have on file. Back in the day, they’d stand on corners in town and proselytize, handing them out to anyone who would listen. If I’m remembering right, they’d take vans full of people back to the church for a hot meal and a sermon. It was usually homeless kids, people looking to kick a habit, or just make some kind of connection that might give them some hope.”

  Eve looked at the woman on the table. She could believe that maybe Samantha had found that appealing and gone with them. Still, Sara Curtis’s words echoed in her mind. The woman had been convinced Samantha was happy with her and Eve got the sense Sara knew her way around kids. She knew how to read them.

  But did she know how to read them as well twenty-one years ago? Or was she seeing things through rose colored glasses? Through the knowledge she had garnered over the years instead of the naiveté she’d had back then?

  Eve’s thoughts went to the child. It was possible they had a child out there in trouble. That made this case a whole other situation.

  She turned to John and Eric. “This just bumped up in priority. We need to see if we can find this woman’s child. She died a violent death and someone went to great pains to keep her body hidden. I don’t know why they moved her body now, but we need to find out what happened to Samantha Greer and her child.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eve pulled in front of the familiar house, knowing damned well it had been too long since she’d been there. She frowned, as she tried to track the last time she’d come to see him. She could count the times she’d been here in the last year on one hand and that didn’t sit well with her. Glenn had been her first partner when she’d made detective, but he hadn’t treated her like a rookie. He’d treated her with respect and taught her more than she could have ever hoped to learn on her own.

  But it had been all she could do lately to visit her own mom or make time for her nieces and nephews lately. Her former partner and mentor deserved more from her, but she felt that way about a lot of things lately.

  She wasn’t giving her all to anything anymore. She was too stretched thin for that.

  She cut the engine and pocketed her keys before securing her sidearm in the locked compartment in her trunk.

  Everything about the coming conversation had her dragging her feet up the front walk.

  She was on the first step of the small front porch when a car pulled in the driveway.

  Damn, she’d really hoped Kemal wouldn’t be around for this conversation. Saying her partner’s son was overbearing and controlling was putting it mildly. Since Glenn’s wife died two years before, Kemal seemed to think his dad needed to be protected from the world, and that included Eve.

  “Eve, everything okay?”

  Eve pasted a smile on her face and turned to Kemal. She couldn’t exactly say everything was
okay so she didn’t answer the question. “You’re home early, professor.”

  There was a time when Kemal Goodwin spent twelve or thirteen hours a day either at the community college where he taught history or at the community center volunteering with teenagers in his neighborhood.

  Kemal seemed to flinch at her comment. His eyes lacked their normal blaze and he looked tired. Normally, Kemal’s arrogance was well warranted. He was a damned good-looking man. If someone were describing him in plain basic terms, they’d say he was a tall black man with muscles to spare.

  And in the past, his eyes sparked with light and his skin had the seductive hues of a pecan shell.

  Lord, if Kemal ever developed the ability to read minds, she’d never live this down. He wasn’t a big fan of hers and her comparing him to a pecan wouldn’t bring them closer.

  But the point was, the man normally looked good. Very good. Right now, he looked like he wasn’t sleeping. Like he was carrying too much weight on his shoulders. He was strong, but Eve had a feeling he was carrying the weight of too many other people’s worries on his shoulders, and it was pulling him under.

  “I’ve cut my office hours this month.” Kemal stopped on the step below her, bringing them to the same height. “Tell me you’re not here to talk shop.”

  It was actually delivered as an order not a request. Shocker.

  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.