White Out: A Thriller (Badlands Thriller)

by Danielle Girard

  Iver drew a long, slow breath and began to talk. “When I got home from Afghanistan, I couldn’t remember the accident. I remembered the Humvee stopping and then nothing until I woke up in the back of a chopper. I was told that an IED had detonated and that the others had died. But I didn’t know any of the details, and I couldn’t remember it.

  “I was a mess—the pain didn’t help—but the not knowing felt worse. A couple of weeks into my stay at the veterans’ hospital in Nebraska, a soldier from my unit came through. He’d taken a sniper bullet through the leg. But he knew the details. He told me about that day, about the other guys—the ones who died. As hard as it was to hear, it was a relief, too. To know.”

  “Iver, what happened to me?”

  He looked away and drew a deep breath, as though steeling himself. Sitting down on the floor beside her, he reached for his laptop. A moment passed as he studied her face as though trying to decide. “Maybe it will be easiest if you find out by reading about it.”

  With a curt nod from her, Iver opened the laptop and launched a search. He shifted the computer so it sat between them, and together, they read in silence. It was like learning about a stranger. Her own abduction, her time with Derek Hudson, her escape. Details of their injuries, that she and the others had been hospitalized and received medical and mental health treatment—all of it covered in a few thousand words. The stories had been printed in a dozen papers, but the information was largely the same.

  Sixteen months of her life in a prison. Because Hudson had been killed, little was known about what had actually occurred during their captivity, only what had leaked about the three surviving girls. Cuts that covered sections of their backs, small wounds that had been repeatedly opened. Lily could feel the little ridges in the dark on her right shoulder. “Like the other cuts,” Tim Bailey had said, then stopped. Because she didn’t like to talk about those. She didn’t like to talk about them because they’d been made by a man who’d tortured her and done who knew what else.

  She wanted her memories back, but did she want to remember those months? Did she want to remember exactly how those scars on her back had been made? Or the moment she’d shot the man responsible? She had survived. Wasn’t that enough? But now Abby was dead. And the third girl? Where was she?

  Iver beside her, Lily read everything she could find about Derek Hudson and the escape the police had called daring. She read the relieved statements from the parents—other parents. Her mother had already died, she learned from the articles. Her father—reclusive and stoic, even in light of what had happened to her—was never quoted.

  When she’d read every article, scrolled through the internet trolls and their foul and often cruel commentary, Lily shut the laptop, and she and Iver spoke about their friendship. Iver told her about the church group, about their afternoons and evenings together. And then, when he brought up the night she’d been taken, he fell silent. He shook his head and went to get her a glass of water. Lily listened to the sounds of the house and waited. Because she felt certain that whatever was happening to her wasn’t over. There was more coming. The universe was not done with its punishment.

  Her mind spun in circles, trying to make sense of what was happening, of what she had done. She had lied to protect Iver. Why had she done that? Because he’d taken her into his home. Or let her come. Because she’d told him the truth about her amnesia. Because she had to trust someone, and his name was in her Bible.

  And he hadn’t told the detective about her lost memory.

  A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.

  Iver set the water glass on the coaster on his bedside table and began to tidy his room. The slight furrow in his brow made him look thoughtful, cautious, as he folded the clothes that had been discarded on the floor and chair and returned his shoes to the closet, where the others made neat lines on the floor. She had trusted him once. He had been her best friend. What kind of man had he become?

  CHAPTER 22

  LILY

  Lily had been certain she wouldn’t sleep, not with those words in her head. But she must have, because when she opened her eyes, daylight shone through the window, and the smell of coffee wafted down the hall. She found Iver in the kitchen, and he poured her a cup of coffee, set it in front of her. She wondered if she liked coffee. Or maybe everyone was supposed to drink it, like it or not.

  He stood at the refrigerator, frowning. “You want to try it with cream and sugar? Or just black?”

  “This is fine,” she said, though she made no move to drink it.

  Iver sat beside her as though waiting. What did he expect? That she’d read those horrible articles and would break down or scream or cry? She still had no memory of any of it past the moment when she had climbed into that van with Abby. Or maybe he was waiting for something else. There was something she couldn’t shake. He had been kind to her. He’d let her sleep in his room. He had saved her.

  She thought about the man who had attacked her the night before. Her arms pinned by his knees, his hands on her neck. She rose from the table in a rush of emotion—anger or fear or some combination. But then she stared at the kitchen and realized there was nowhere to go. She sank again. “The man who did that—Hudson—he was killed.” That one memory was clear in her mind—the man in the puddle of blood, the gun in her hand. “I killed him . . . ,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “That’s not your fault. You were escaping. He deserved to die, Lily.”

  “Then who was trying to kill me?” She turned to him. “Who killed Abby?”

  Iver stood and refilled his coffee cup.

  She remembered the bit of newspaper she’d found. She stood and dug into her pocket. “There was a scrap of newspaper.” She could have sworn it was in her front right pocket. But there was nothing there. She searched one and then the other. All her pockets were empty. She went to the living room and looked through the pockets of her bag.

  “What scrap?” Iver asked from behind her.

  “It said something about a second suspect.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead and tried to remember where she’d put it. “The police suspected there was someone else involved. I thought it meant me . . .”

  “You? Why would you be a suspect?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t explain the gun, the memory of that dead man. She had asked too much of him already. They barely knew each other now. She thought about the articles they’d read. She hadn’t seen anything about a second suspect. Where had that come from?

  “Like maybe Hudson had a partner the police never found?” Iver asked.

  “Maybe.”

  But why come back now? After ten years? And why would she lose her memory on the same night that Abby was killed?

  “I should probably take you home,” Iver said.

  And with those six words—words that should have brought comfort—a whole new wave of fear tucked her tightly in its fold.

  CHAPTER 23

  KYLIE

  Kylie Milliard shivered in the cold air outside Skål while Hagen’s amateur crime scene team swept the inside. Only the two men were allowed inside, per Vogel’s orders. Kylie wondered sometimes if Vogel got his ideas from 1970s cop show reruns.

  She cupped her hands around the insulated coffee mug, as though she might draw heat through the plastic. The coffee inside was still hot, but she’d already burned her tongue once. Lifting the cup, she covered her face to hide another yawn.

  Stomping her feet to fight off the cold, Kylie scanned her inbox from her phone, going straight for the email from Gary Ross: information from the Hudson investigation. The email address wasn’t his FBI one. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be sharing these files. Well, she wouldn’t tell if he didn’t.

  She clicked on the email and opened the attachments. One showed the current prison record for Damian Hudson. She opened it and read the detail
s. Derek Hudson’s older brother had gone to prison in 2006 for a third-strike battery charge and had been inside ever since. She closed the file and scanned the other attachments. She clicked a zip file labeled Scene Photos to download and then started the file extraction. The estimated time was ten minutes. That was a lot of damn photos and a lot of data usage. She clicked it again to stop the download. It would have to wait until she was at her desk.

  She wanted to get over to visit the pastor’s daughter today as well. When she’d driven by after leaving Larson’s, the house was dark, and waking the pastor up to tell him that his daughter had been in a bar when a woman was murdered didn’t feel like a smart choice. Kylie was still turning over the conversation with Baker and Larson in her head. What were they hiding? If Larson had killed Jensen and then attacked Baker, why would she protect him? It made no sense.

  Her phone buzzed in her hand, disrupting her thoughts. A call from the 584 prefix, same as the Elgin deputy she’d spoken to before. “Hello?”

  “Detective Milliard, please?” came a man’s voice.

  “This is she,” Kylie said.

  “Glad to talk to you,” the voice said, and Kylie always felt a moment of relief when there was no commentary on her being a detective and a woman. Maybe she’d overreacted to the whole “I am woman, hear me roar” thing. She was sure Vogel would agree. As would most of her ex-boyfriends. Okay, all of her ex-boyfriends.

  “I’m Sheriff Oloff, calling from Elgin. I believe your department spoke this morning to my deputy.”

  Kylie stood up straighter, feeling that rush that always came with making a new contact in a case. “We did.”

  “Sorry I didn’t call you earlier. I just got back from Florida. Got out of the cold to thaw the bones, but I came back home as soon as I heard about Abby. My current deputy doesn’t know much about Derek Hudson, as he was in grade school when Jensen was taken. I was a deputy when Jensen disappeared, and I’d just been elected sheriff when they were found. Jensen and the other girls, that is.”

  “Jensen’s family has lived in Elgin all these years, right?”

  “Yes. Her mother is still here. Father passed a few years back. Tammy—that’s Abby’s mother—Tammy tried real hard with Abby. She was never the same after Hudson.”

  “Sure,” Kylie said.

  “There were drugs and a series of boyfriends, nasty guys. Tammy got Abby into rehab twice—once as a resident at a school in Washington that seemed promising. But when she came home, she started dating some other jerk, and pretty soon, she was back on the drugs. It was a cycle for her—the boys and the drugs. She’d get clean, and then one of those guys would come back into the picture.”

  “Any of them around recently?”

  “Not sure,” Oloff said. “Tammy thought she had a new boyfriend the past few months, but she didn’t know his name. Abby had been doing better, actually.” He sighed. “She was working at Resting Peak, the local nursing home. I spoke with the director over there last night. He said Abby was doing real well, was liked. But then she’d up and quit back in early December. After that, Abby sort of fell off the map.”

  “Did she meet someone in her job? Another of the staff there?”

  “I asked, and the director didn’t think so. It’s mostly older ladies who work up there. Tammy reached out a few times after Abby quit her job, but Abby never responded. Tammy thought she was still in town. Truth is, Abby’s second round of rehab almost bankrupted Tammy, and she had to step back. Course, she blames herself now.”

  Kylie knew the pattern. Tammy could no more have saved Abby Jensen than Kylie could have. “But no one knew who the new boyfriend was?”

  “No,” Oloff said. “And he probably didn’t live in town. We’re doing some rounds, talking to some of her regular crowd—kids she went to school with—but from what we’ve learned so far, Abby distanced herself from most of her friends right about the time this new guy came into the picture.”

  “If Abby quit her job, what was she doing for money?” Kylie asked.

  “No idea,” Oloff said. “Landlord said she paid rent for December in cash and said she’d be out by January first.”

  “And her mother had no idea she was leaving town?”

  “None.” Oloff sighed again. “If you’ve got more questions, I can give you Tammy’s number, but you can imagine she’s not in a great place.”

  “I don’t need to bother her. But if you learn anything about the new boyfriend or what she was planning to do after January first . . .”

  “You’ll be my first call,” he promised, and they said their goodbyes.

  A moment later, the door to Skål opened, and Doug Smith emerged, carrying an ActionPacker the department used to hold collected evidence.

  “Anything of interest?” she asked, nodding to the box as she followed him toward his truck.

  “Not much,” Smith said. “A bar glass we found in one of the desk drawers in the office.” He reached into the back of the SUV and flipped open the plastic slats that formed the box’s top. A moment later, he pulled out a plastic sack containing a dirty bar glass.

  She was about to ask why they had collected it when she saw that the base of the glass was coated with a layer that looked like chalk. Some sort of drug residue? More likely it was something benign, undissolved antacid, perhaps. It wouldn’t surprise her at all to learn that Iver Larson had digestive issues in addition to the mental ones. “That’ll have to go to the crime lab in Bismarck,” she said. “Can we get it out today?”

  “Yep,” Smith answered.

  “Great,” Kylie said, but she didn’t feel great. She’d been antsy to get inside that bar, but maybe that had been a mistake. What had she been expecting them to find? A pair of women’s shoes? A bloody shirt? For all her pushing, all they had to show for it was a single glass.

  She returned to her cruiser and started the engine, shivering as the heater blew frigid air in her face. As she was putting the car in drive, her phone rang. She recognized the number as internal to the department.

  “Milliard,” she answered, shifting back into park.

  “It’s Steve,” Cannon said. “Just got back from the garage.”

  She tilted the vent so the freezing air wasn’t blowing in her face. “The garage?”

  “Yeah. Davis had me pull the prints off Nolan’s car, since both the crime scene guys are out at the bar.”

  “Did you get a match?”

  Cannon let out a satisfied laugh. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  CHAPTER 24

  IVER

  Iver had helped Lily Baker gain access to her house. Without a key, they’d had to find an unlocked window and pry it open. Once she was safely inside, he’d had felt an urge to follow, but it was a mixed desire. Part of him had also wanted to drop her off and drive away. But sitting in his bathroom with Lily, feeling her terror echoing inside him like a familiar song, he’d realized she might be the only person who knew what it felt like for him to return to Hagen after all those months in hospitals, not knowing if he would ever be the same.

  How could he walk away from that? Why would he walk away?

  Iver had intended to go to the bar from her house, but a voicemail had let him know the police were in the bar, exercising a warrant. The call had come in at eight, so the bar might be cleared out by now. To be safe, he’d give it another hour.

  To pass the time, Iver went to the gas station and filled the truck, bought a car wash, and took his time driving through. Cal was not a fan and whined the whole way, so Iver turned up the Eric Church album and pulled Cal’s head into his lap to distract him from the strange purple foam covering the windows.

  The purple foam was new. Used to be plain old white. In Hagen, a new foam color in the car wash was progress. With a few layers of mud off the truck, Iver stopped by the feed shop for dog food and bought Cal a dried pig ear for being so brave. As he moved through the store, a few folks stopped to say hello, mostly old-timers who’d known his dad, many of them vets
as well. More often than not, folks his own age avoided him.

  Iver had never imagined he would end up back in Hagen. While he was in Afghanistan, it had made sense for Debbie to stay near her parents and the friends she’d known all her life, but they had wanted an adventure. Once he was out of the army, they’d planned to go somewhere new, where he could get his bachelor’s degree, care of the US government. They would find jobs they loved, buy a little house, and start a family. A little life. That was all he’d ever wanted. Keep things simple—be happy.

  But then he’d had a brain injury.

  And the thing he’d wanted most after that was to find a way to stop the pain. That had become his whole life, and when his dad had passed, the bar became a natural way to afford a life filled with prescription medications and doctors’ visits.

  In the past six or seven years, he’d hardly thought of Lily Baker. Even when she’d returned to town after her father’s death and moved into his house, they’d never spoken. So many years had passed, and their friendship had been cracked, the way a tree cracked the pavement. Other things had grown in the crevice—her abduction, most obviously, but then her move, his marriage, his time in Afghanistan, and his brain injury. They’d each had something stolen from them that they would never get back.

  No. He couldn’t compare the two. He had chosen to go to Afghanistan. She’d had no such choice.

  Seeing her huddled in his house the night before had made him realize how her disappearance, and his part in it, had impacted him. He’d bottled the guilt and turned it into a kind of molten self-hatred that had never really left him. Then her father had died, and she’d returned to Hagen.

  Spending time with her brought him back to when they were in the eighth grade. Lily had wanted to be a dancer. He’d had a dream like that once, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Was that the brain injury, or was that life, saving him from the disappointment that he’d never achieve that dream?

  Suddenly, he wished he hadn’t left her alone at her house this morning. And he had no way to reach her. He would go by later. He considered heading that way, but where he would have turned left to head toward Lily’s place, he turned right instead, toward the bar, as though the truck had a mind of its own. He would drive by, he thought. In case the police were still there.