Dark Skies: A Fox County Forensics Lesbian Romantic Suspense

by Malone, Cara

  For the rest of the visiting hour, even though they were just whispering counterfeiting steps, he felt loved. Wanted. Seen.

  And when he walked out of that prison full of new information, he had a plan—a future, a way to hold onto those feelings all the time.

  He was going to pay his rent, get some decent food for the first time all month, and then he was going to get out there and make some new friends… even if he had to pay for them.

  A Note from Cara

  Hello!

  Thank you so much for reading Dark Skies – I hope you enjoyed it!

  If you’d like to be notified when I publish a new book, sign up to my newsletter at https://bit.ly/2LPRHXI - I send out a monthly email packed with free short stories, behind-the-scenes details into my works in progress and all kinds of fun stuff.

  You can also connect with me on social media using the icons below.

  With love,

  Cara

  Sneak Peek: Chain Reaction

  A dark green Camry pulled up to the curb and Dylan bent over at the passenger door, checking the driver’s face against the photo on her rideshare app.

  There’d been a near-abduction in Fox City just a few weeks ago, and while Dylan herself wasn’t all that concerned with stranger danger, her parents had been freaking the eff out, to put it in the parlance of the times.

  “I don’t know why you don’t drive your own car all the time!” her mother had said when she found out Dylan still used the apps.

  “I do most of the time, Mom. There are just certain situations where rideshare is better,” she’d said. Situations like tonight, when she was going out to meet some friends at a pub and she didn’t want to worry about how many beers she could have or whether her car would get towed if she left it in the lot overnight.

  “Better than getting murdered?” her mom had shot back, not missing a beat.

  Her dad had even offered to buy her a brand-new car, thinking maybe that the Little Beetle That Could, which she’d been driving since college, was the problem.

  “Dad, I’m thirty-two,” she’d reminded him. “I have a good job -- if I need a new car, I can buy it for myself.”

  Her mother had just smirked at that. Even after ten years with the coroner’s office, Dylan still couldn’t convince them that her job as a chemist was more lab work than anything else. She was sure they both pictured her elbow-deep in body cavities all day, instead of in her fluorescently lit lab with its whirring centrifuges and more test tubes than you can shake a stick at.

  They worried, and as their only daughter, Dylan could sort of understand why.

  But hey, she was their only daughter, not their only child, after all. She had three older brothers and sometimes it’d be nice if they shouldered some of the parental anxiety for a change.

  Since there was a slim chance of that happening, Dylan at least tried to meet her folks half-way. She took her chances with rideshare drivers, but she made sure she was getting in the right car and she always told her friends when to expect her. Plus, she boxed in her free time. Just let a would-be kidnapper mess with her.

  “Hey,” she said as she slid into the back seat of the Camry. “I’m Dylan. Thanks for the ride.”

  “I’m Mark,” her driver said, twisting around in his seat and holding his hand out. He looked around Dylan’s age, maybe a few years younger, even, but aged by a receding hairline. He looked like his profile picture, though, and that was all Dylan really cared about where his looks were concerned.

  “Going to the Taphouse, huh?” he said as he pulled away from the curb. “Meeting friends?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan answered. In fact, she was texting one of them, Elise, right now so her attention was divided.

  We’re all here, Elise was saying. Got a table in the back.

  Dylan was meeting a group of coworkers for end-of-the-week drinks. They’d done it a handful of times and had fun, but the fact that it had become a weekly ritual was entirely down to Elise and her persistent planning efforts.

  In the car now, Dylan texted back. Be there in ten.

  “Isn’t that a cop bar?” the driver asked.

  “Umm, it might be,” Dylan said. It was right downtown, about halfway between the precinct and the medical examiner’s office where she worked, so it was safe to say you ran into a fair number of officers there. “I’m not a cop, though.”

  “Oh yeah?” He looked at her in the rearview mirror, and her belly turned to ice.

  Why? His eyes were on the road again and he was just making friendly conversation. Dylan had been leered at before, and that wasn’t what this guy was doing. Was she letting her parents’ stranger danger fears get to her?

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  She tried to shake it off. “I’m a chemist.”

  “Oh, that’s neat. So you work Monday to Friday, I bet.”

  Nope, this guy was definitely freaking her out. What was he doing, trying to figure out when people would notice she was missing? Or planning to pop by her office? She was glad she hadn’t actually told him where she worked.

  When in doubt, just get out, her mom’s advice floated through her head.

  The odds that she was overreacting were high, but if she got out now, she only had about eight blocks to walk to the Taphouse, or she could call a different rideshare driver. One who didn’t give her the willies.

  “You know what?” she said casually. “I just saw one of my friends on the sidewalk back there. Can you let me out?”

  “Where?” He made no move to slow down, looking into his rearview mirror instead.

  “Oh, about half a block back,” Dylan said. Fortunately, it was a Friday night and there were people walking downtown to cover her lie.

  Unfortunately, Mark was giving absolutely no indication that he planned to pull over. And even worse, when Dylan looked at her door for the first time since getting into the car, she realized it was an old car with a manual lock, and the plunger was missing.

  You’re locked in, her brain was screaming in her mother’s voice.

  Her eyes must have been wide and panicked when she locked onto Mark’s gaze in the rearview mirror again, but he didn’t seem to notice her terror. He just smiled benignly back at her and said, “I’m really not supposed to change course -- I could get docked for it.”

  Dylan had no clue whether that was true or not. Her brain was hardly processing his words at all because the only thing she was thinking was that the last girl some sick fuck -- maybe this very sick fuck -- had attempted to abduct had escaped. She didn’t have the benefit of a tornado for a distraction, but she did have a hell of a lot of fight in her.

  Like when the girls on the playground talked behind her back because she used to prefer the sports the boys were playing.

  Like when those very same boys picked on her and called her names -- tomboy was the nicest of them -- because she was a kid without a country.

  Like when she was interviewing for her job and it came down to herself and some cis white guy fresh out of college who knew people high-up in the county.

  Dylan didn’t let people shove her into predetermined boxes when she was younger, she didn’t let them take what was rightfully hers when she was older, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let some freak of a rideshare driver take what he wanted now.

  Whatever the hell that was.

  “Do you like Bob Dylan? Or maybe your parents did?” he was saying now. It was such a complete one-eighty from the last time he spoke that Dylan felt whiplashed.

  “What?”

  “Your name.”

  Yeah, I got that part… as if you’re the first person to ask, she thought, but she knew better than to antagonize the guy.

  “Why?” was all she managed.

  “Just making conversation,” he said. “Getting to know you.”

  “I don’t want to know you, I want to get out of the car,” she snapped. Okay, so much for not being antagonistic.

  “We’ll be there shortly,”
he said, that same serene, stupid smile on his face. Only Dylan knew he wasn’t talking about the Taphouse anymore. You didn’t take all the locking mechanisms out of your doors if you had pure intentions.

  Her pulse was pounding so fast she could hear it in her ears. They were a couple blocks from the pub, and she knew she had to get out of the car before he could take her out of downtown. There was safety in numbers, and if she could make a scene of some sort, there was no way he could carry out whatever plans he had.

  She reached for the old-fashioned handle to roll her window down and scream for help. She touched a flat door panel, with a tiny screw sticking out where the crank used to be. Of course he would remove those too.

  Shit!

  “My friends are expecting me,” she said.

  “Must be nice.” His voice turned icy and so did the blood in her veins. Did she just strike a nerve? Okay, she’d officially had enough and she was getting out of this damn car by whatever means necessary. “Pull over now or I’m calling 911.”

  Mark scowled at her in the rearview. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I want out!”

  The adrenaline was flowing freely now and Dylan was sure that if she didn’t get out of this car in the next ten minutes, she would end up however that girl who was all over the news had been intended to wind up before that tornado intervened on her behalf.

  She squeezed between the seats into the front of the car, pulling herself through the narrow space with no regard to whether she’d actually fit, or if it was safe while they were cruising down the road. There was no safety now -- only escape.

  “Hey!” Mark cried. “Stop!”

  Dylan already had her hand on the passenger door handle. Thank God he’d only removed the locks in the back. She shoved the door open and did what little mental preparation she could for diving head-first out of a moving car. Then a hand closed around her ankle.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Mark asked. He actually sounded concerned and, miraculously, the car started to slow.

  Now or never.

  Dylan mule-kicked as hard as she could with her free foot. The heel of her sneaker connected with something fleshy, and the hand disappeared from her other ankle.

  “Fucking bitch!” Mark screamed and slammed on the brakes. Dylan didn’t wait for a written invitation -- she scrambled out of the car, her palms hitting the rough asphalt before her feet touched solid ground. Then she ran as fast as she could to the only place she could think of -- the Taphouse, and Elise.

  ***

  Inside the pub, it was dim and noisy. There were people crowded around every table and lined up at the bar, and Dylan’s heart was still pounding. She wasn’t sure if she was going to pass out, vomit, or cry. When she spotted her ME’s Office friends at the table in the back Elise had texted her about, she felt entirely incapable of sitting down and chatting like nothing happened.

  “Hey! We got you your usual IPA--” Kelsey, one of the investigators, said when she approached the table.

  “I, uh, I’m going to the restroom,” Dylan muttered, barely slowing down. She walked right past her friends, all of them looking confused, and made a beeline for the narrow hallway at the back of the pub.

  The restroom was nothing to write home about -- a little dirty, dimly lit, but at least it was empty. Dylan went to one of the sinks and braced her hands on the edge of the counter. She was still trying to decide what bodily function would be the most effective way of expelling all the stress she’d just built up.

  When she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, she knew why her friends had looked so freaked out. She looked haunted, and sweat had matted her short, dark hair down on her temples.

  She turned on the faucet, running the water as cold as it would go, then bent over and splashed her face a few times. It felt good, like a shock to bring her back to reality, and she rubbed the back of her neck too, to cool down.

  Then she heard the restroom door creak open and she pulled her head up so fast she smacked her head on the faucet.

  “Shit!” she hissed, only feeling the pain once she’d seen that it was Elise standing there, and not Mark the rideshare lunatic.

  “Aww,” Elise said, immediately crossing the small space and putting her hand lightly on the crown of Dylan’s head. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m not bleeding, am I?” Dylan asked.

  “No,” Elise said after she’d checked. “That’s not what I meant, though. Did something happen on the way over here?”

  Suddenly, Dylan’s body decided on that stress release valve. It came in the form of tears -- no, full-on sobs. In an instant, she’d gone from calming herself down at the sink to bawling her eyes out, and her best friend didn’t hesitate to pull her into her arms. It was entirely uncharacteristic of her. Dylan couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, and she was sure Elise had never witnessed it.

  All the same, Elise wrapped her up in a warm, soft hug and ran her hand up and down Dylan’s back. She laid Dylan’s head on her shoulder and rested her cheek against it, and she just waited for the tears to subside.

  She smelled like lavender, and for a petite girl, she was surprisingly easy to curl up against. Had they ever hugged before? Not this long. That was Dylan’s first conscious thought when the waterworks stopped.

  This is a line you do not need to cross. This time, the scolding voice inside her head was her own, speaking from experience. Elise was just comforting her, but her mind had gone somewhere else in that brief moment.

  Dylan let go of her and turned back to the sink, splashing her face one more time to get rid of the redness. Then she turned the water off and while she dried her skin with a rough paper towel, she said, “You’re going to be mad at me.”

  Elise frowned. “Why would I be mad?”

  Dylan cringed. Her parents weren’t the only ones who’d lectured her about rideshare apps lately.

  Elise must have read the truth on her face because she put her fists on her hips and said, “You didn’t! After what happened to that girl?” And then, a moment later as recognition dawned, she added, “Oh my God, did it happen to you too?”

  “Almost,” Dylan admitted.

  And then Elise’s arms were around her again, squeezing her so hard she couldn’t take a breath. “Never, never, never again, damn it! I can’t lose you!”

  Read Chain Reaction on Amazon

  Coming September 9, 2021

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