White Out: A Thriller (Badlands Thriller)

by Danielle Girard

  “Seems like a pretty big oversight on his part to leave them there, right?” Kylie asked.

  McIntosh looked back with a slow nod. “It does. Especially after going to the car wash and all.” He paused. “I’ve seen stupider, though.”

  That was true for her, too. Only Iver Larson didn’t strike her as stupid. Maybe that was what was bothering her.

  Around a bend, they came across an area cordoned off with crime scene tape hanging on a number of boundary stakes. Bits of it flew loose now, probably from the wind, but it was conceivable that someone had come looking around. It was nearly impossible to keep curious people away from the scene of a crime. The grislier the crime, the more they flocked.

  The two stopped as Kylie studied the area of flattened grass at the center of the taped-off area.

  “Body was there,” McIntosh said. “ME ruled COD asphyxiation by strangulation, but she had a lot of drugs on board, too. Made it easier to kill her. Report said killer wore gloves, so we can’t tell anything about the killer’s hands. Could’ve been a woman that done it, according to the report.”

  According to Hagen’s coroner, Abigail Jensen had also been strangled. What had the state medical examiner’s office ruled for Jensen’s cause of death? The report was in her inbox, and its presence made Kylie feel antsy to sit down with it. But she was here now, so she needed to learn what she could about Hitchcock. “Any idea what the drugs were?”

  “Opioids.”

  “No flurazepam?”

  “Don’t think so. I could check.”

  Kylie nodded. “Hitchcock was seen in a Walmart up in Miles City with another woman, right?”

  “Yes. Just got the store security images about an hour ago,” he said, opening up the accordion file he’d been carrying under one arm. “Had to jump through a bunch of hoops for these.” He slid a stack of images into his hand and righted them so Kylie could see. Blown up to eight-by-ten prints, the images were grainy and pixelated.

  Kylie recognized the two women immediately. “That’s Abigail Jensen,” she said, pointing to the woman beside Hitchcock.

  McIntosh nodded. “I figured.”

  “You mind?” Kylie asked, reaching for the stack.

  “Be my guest,” McIntosh said, handing her the photos.

  One at a time, Kylie examined the images, looking for other faces nearby, any sign of a third party with Hitchcock and Jensen. There were several customers caught in the periphery, coming or going at the same time as the two women, but no one caught her eye. No sign of Lily Baker at all. The two women appeared to be alone. Kylie went through the images three times, starting to shiver in the cold, still air, but nothing struck her. She handed the images back. “Any cameras in the parking lot?”

  He shook his head.

  “And this was the last time anyone saw her?”

  “Yes. This was taken January second, about ten a.m., and her body was found Thursday afternoon, the seventh. Medical examiner figures she’d been dead at least four or five days by then. The freezing temps made it hard to nail down an exact time of death, but she’s in different clothes than she was wearing in the Walmart footage.”

  “So she was alive after the trip to Walmart, but she’d left her car there.”

  “Right,” McIntosh confirmed.

  “What was found with her?” Kylie asked.

  “No phone or wallet. We still haven’t turned up those items.”

  Just like with Abigail Jensen. “Shoes?”

  McIntosh narrowed his eyes at her. “She had her shoes on and a jacket, real old one, though—same one she’s wearing in those surveillance pictures. Other than that, there wasn’t much with her. A soda bottle and some food wrappers. Those are over in Bismarck, but no results yet. We’re hoping for DNA, but it’s a long shot.”

  “Anything in her car?”

  “Nope. Not a print on it other than the guy who did the tow. Whoever he is, he’s being careful.”

  “But she was on a lot of drugs, right? So maybe Jensen killed her?” Kylie said.

  McIntosh shook his head slowly. “But she wasn’t killed out here. At least not according to the ME. Livor mortis showed she’d been moved. Now, she wasn’t a large lady, but she weighed one fifty, plus or minus.”

  “That’s more than Jensen,” Kylie said, recalling Jensen herself had weighed just under 140 pounds.

  “Right,” McIntosh said. “You get what I’m saying.”

  “It probably wasn’t Jensen. At least not acting alone.”

  “Right.”

  McIntosh nodded to a path she hadn’t noticed. “Let’s walk the rest of the loop. I’ll show you where I found the other thing yesterday.”

  “Other thing?”

  McIntosh nodded and kept walking without offering an answer.

  Kylie’s teeth had started chattering, and she was grateful to get moving. As they walked, McIntosh explained how the local Eagles club led a biannual cleanup effort in the twenty-acre park in May and in October. “These trails aren’t used much during the winter. We don’t get enough snow in this area for cross-country skiers, so it’s mostly a handful of snowshoers and an occasional hiker.”

  McIntosh referenced an image on his phone as he slowed to a stop. Pointing back to the lot, he said, “Folks can walk the path in either direction, from the right or from the left; it’s just a circle, but if I was going to dump a body, I don’t think I’d make the whole loop.”

  Kylie puzzled on it a minute. “You’re thinking the killer entered the loop from the left side.”

  McIntosh nodded. “Where the body was found is just about halfway around the loop. He might have had a sled, pulled her or something. No way to know now.”

  He stopped and pointed to a spot just off the trail. “Found it right there,” he said. “Temps warmed up the last couple of days, so I came back up after lunch yesterday, and there it was.” He handed her a phone, and she looked down at an image of a carabiner. “It’s an old thing, paint coming off.”

  Kylie studied the image, unable to tell the dimensions. “Is it large? Like for climbing?”

  “This one’s smaller, the kind of thing you might hang keys on,” he said. “The lever on it was broken off, and I haven’t found that piece yet, so it might just be more trash, but like I said, we did a cleanup effort just a few months back. And if it had been right there, beside the trail, I can’t see how they would have missed it. But it could have come off someone working the cleanup. Or our killer might’ve lost it. I’m sending it all to the state lab, but who knows when we’ll hear back.”

  Kylie stared at the picture. With gloved hands, she tried and failed to zoom in on the image.

  McIntosh reached over and expanded the image so that it filled the screen. A scratched-up metal carabiner lay on the snow, its clip missing, chipped green paint still visible, though most of it had been worn off. Along the side were words Kylie couldn’t make out. “What does it say?”

  “Green Bay Packers.”

  Some memory bobbed near the surface of her brain, but she couldn’t reach it.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Sheriff Davis’s line. “I need to take this.”

  “We just finished processing the Tanner scene,” Davis told her.

  “You find anything?”

  “Just a lot of Tanner’s prints. Didn’t look like he had many guests, and whoever killed him didn’t leave any that we can find. How’s it going down there?”

  “Here with Deputy Sheriff McIntosh. I’ll head back up there when we’re done. What’s the status with Larson?”

  “The hospital discharged him, so he’s in the courthouse now. Arraignment is scheduled for Monday.”

  “We get a warrant for his house?”

  “Vogel’s working on it.”

  “I want to be there for that. I’m on my way back.”

  “See you soon. Careful on the roads,” Davis said. “There’s a big storm heading in.”

  She ended the call and walked the remainder of the loop with
McIntosh before they went their separate ways, promising to be in touch if either learned something useful.

  Sitting in the car with the heat on, Kylie cracked her knuckles before shifting into reverse to head back to Hagen. Something hovered just outside her grasp. She felt confident that if she could put the pieces together, she’d have her answer. But whenever she tried to grip it in her hand, it escaped through her fingers like smoke.

  CHAPTER 48

  IVER

  Iver lay across the single narrow cot in the small jail cell, his hands under his head. Eyes closed, he tried to tell himself that he was back in Afghanistan, that the cot was his bunk at the base. That his platoon was nearby and the enemy outside the gate. Over there, he’d trained his body to sleep in any position—on the ground or in the back of the Humvee when he needed to catch a few hours between patrols. Back then, he could sleep anywhere, shut out the heat or the freeze and sink his mind to an empty, quiet place.

  But that skill was long gone.

  Instead, he stared at the concrete ceiling, its single bulb enclosed in a cage, just like him, and waited for something to happen. Carl Gilbert had been all too happy to put him behind bars, refusing his repeated requests to talk to Detective Milliard. Henry Cooper, his father’s attorney, was supposedly working on finding a criminal lawyer from Fargo to take his case, and Mike was out enlisting Donnie and Nate to help him drag Kevin into the station to make a full confession about drugging him. Whatever good that would do.

  All of that had been hours ago.

  Since then, he’d been left with only quiet. There were no windows, not even a clock in this place, so he had no idea what time it was.

  His mind spun questions and theories that tumbled over one another. He felt twitchy, both his mind and body restless. To pass the time, he had been doing sit-ups, push-ups, and air squats until his muscles trembled. Then he’d rest ten or fifteen minutes and start them again. The act of exhausting his body helped slow his mind, even if he couldn’t sleep.

  He went back through the past few days. The loss of his memory Wednesday night, the realization that he’d gone to Debbie’s house in the middle of the night, the headaches and seizure that he now believed had been caused by some drug put in his drink. Had Kevin really drugged him for money? In light of the dead woman and the man who’d been killed last night, the money felt so stupid. Hell, he’d happily give Kevin the $700 to make this all go away.

  But the fact that someone he’d known since grade school, a supposed friend, had drugged him . . . it was disconcerting, to say the least. And not only was the bar short $700, a few register tapes were missing. Was Kevin stupid enough to think that taking the tapes would hide the fact that he’d stolen from the bar?

  They wanted him for murder.

  Murder.

  The fear of possibility, of not remembering, was eating him alive.

  Iver hadn’t hurt that woman. He knew he hadn’t. No, he told himself, he thought he hadn’t. He believed that he wasn’t capable of killing a stranger.

  But that was the problem. He was capable of killing a stranger.

  He closed his eyes and pictured their Afghanistan home, what the army called a containerized housing unit, what the soldiers called the CHU. From the outside, the CHU looked like an oversize shipping container, and at first glance, Iver had been certain that they’d boil alive in that thing. But the inside was surprisingly comfortable—a window and venting, a power cable, and an air-conditioning unit. A wet CHU in their case because they were one of the lucky ones to have a latrine inside. It was supposed to house four, but theirs had five—Brolyard a late addition. What he wouldn’t do to go back there now, change the outcome of that day.

  The end of his army career had been brutally abrupt. The five had gone out on an easy recon mission, a quick trip away from the base to a burned-out building in their area. They were there to take a look inside and check for signs the locals were using it as a base for something.

  They’d only been inside for a few minutes when an RPG hit the building next door. The walls around them trembled. A group of insurgents appeared about a block away—three or maybe four of them. The back door of the building where Iver and the others were hiding led to a dead-end alley. Their only way out was through the front, which meant they would have to take down the Afghan with the RPG as well as any others in order to make it to the vehicle.

  And that was if the enemy didn’t figure out where they were. Brolyard was less than a month from heading home, Sanchez still a little green. Wykstra held it together, but it was Garabrant, twitchy and loud as he peered out the front window, who made Iver especially nervous. To take out the Afghan with the RPG and escape, they had to remain unseen, unheard.

  Iver had just crouched by the rear door, huddled behind what had once been a small counter, when the insurgents splintered off to search the surrounding buildings. He had a good angle out a blown-out window on the side of the building. He’d have a clear shot in less than a minute if the men continued on the same path. Take out the RPG, fire at the group to make them scatter, then go for the Humvee.

  That was the plan.

  A sound from behind. Shoes on dirt. He swung his gun around and aimed. An Afghan woman had come in through the back door, alarm in her wide brown eyes. She might have been his age—maybe even a little younger. She wore a traditional tunbaan, a dress with blousy pants that reached her sandals. A magenta chador fell loosely around her head, all of her covered in a layer of dust.

  He’d had no choice.

  At least that was what he told himself.

  CHAPTER 49

  LILY

  Lily shook Ms. Danson’s hand and thanked her. Her mind was numb, the image of a bloody boy inside a dead pig occupying the full screen in her head. Still holding the pictures Matt Danson had taken of the woods and the fuzzy images of the scarred forearm, Lily half stumbled down the ramp. She had promised Ms. Danson that she would return the photos as soon as she could, but she needed to take them to Detective Milliard. While Derek Hudson had lain in a pool of his own blood, this man had been alive in the woods. Danson had captured the image of him that day, hiding.

  He had been in that cabin with her. He’d blindfolded her. Cut her.

  Whoever she’d shot that day was not her abductor—or not the only one. Had Abby discovered him somehow? Was that why she and Lily had gone to the bar that night? To confront him? Jenna Hitchcock was dead, too. Was he finally cleaning up the girls who had gotten away? Why now?

  Lily ran to her car, fumbling with the keys. She had to get back to Hagen. Or stay away. No, she had to get to Iver. And she could trust Milliard.

  A few blocks from the house, Lily realized that she should have asked to use Danson’s phone to call Detective Milliard. She glanced in her rearview mirror, considering turning back. The road was quiet and empty. She could have turned around right there, but she didn’t want to waste the time. She’d go straight to the police department.

  After a couple of miles on the two-lane highway outside of Molva, Cal began to whine on the seat beside her. Of course. He’d been cooped up in the car for over an hour while she’d spoken to Melinda Danson. No water, no place to relieve himself. A minute later, he began to bark. “Okay, buddy,” she said, scanning the road for a turnoff. “Hang on.” Behind her was a brown sedan, so she signaled to pull off the road.

  She approached a gravel road, turned off, and drove a few feet before pulling to the side. The brown sedan turned behind her. Only now did she notice the single police light on the roof, its red color dull. Was she being pulled over? It wasn’t the same car as the deputy’s. She cracked her door and looked back at the sedan as a man stood up. He wore street clothes.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said with a smile, glancing into her car.

  “I’m just letting my dog out for a few minutes before the drive,” she said, hesitating to get out. “Am I in your way?”


  “Not at all. I’m just making my way upstate.”

  She watched him a moment, then noticed the phone on his belt, in a holster like a gun. He was some sort of government worker or something. “Would you mind if I used your phone? I’m afraid mine’s out of juice,” she lied, wondering what it was that had her so nervous. But of course she was nervous. She’d seen those pictures, heard about Derek Hudson.

  “No problem at all.”

  He pulled the phone from his waistband and typed something in before handing it over to her. “Should be unlocked for you.”

  “Thank you.” Without moving from the front seat, she searched for the nonemergency number for the Hagen police department and pressed the number to dial. As soon as the phone started ringing, she felt a wave of relief.

  “Hagen Dispatch. This is Marjorie.”

  “Hello,” Lily said. “My name is Lily Baker, and I’m trying to reach Detective Milliard.”

  “Sure thing, Miss Baker. Hang on just one minute.”

  Beside her, Cal whined again. She reached across the car and released the passenger door, but Cal just stared out at the gravel road without getting out of the car. “Go on, buddy,” she urged.

  Cal didn’t move.

  Lily glanced back to the government man, leaning against his sedan, arms crossed. He was whistling.

  Come on, Detective Milliard. Where was she?

  Cal barked—once, then twice—before he started the high whine again.

  Lily hurried around the car, the phone to her ear, and opened the passenger door and helped Cal down onto the ground. Once there, he walked slowly away to find a place to do his business, stepping gingerly on the snow-crusted grass.

  “Miss Baker?” The voice was the woman from Dispatch again.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not able to reach Detective Milliard. I’m going to put you through to another officer.”

  Lily hesitated. She only knew Milliard, but of course. Anyone there should be able to help her. “Okay.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The cold penetrated the down of her coat, and she exhaled, her breath clouding the air.