Dark Prison: A Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller
Author: Lori Ryan; D. Falls
Date: 2019-06-24T23:00:00+00:00

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 are 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.

As one of Glenn’s best friends despite the gap in their age, Eve was all for anything that would pull Glenn back to a place where he could find some peace in the world, but she and Kemal differed on how they thought that plan should go.

She wanted to pull Glenn back to what he loved doing. He might be retired, but that didn’t mean he stopped being a cop. She thought consulting on cases would be good for him. The last time she’d tried, Kemal had made it clear he didn’t want her making any more efforts in that vein.

He tried it again now. “Eve, he doesn’t need to be stressed out right now. Between the depression and his heart, pulling him into cases isn’t going to help.”

“What’s wrong with your dad’s heart?” Eve cursed herself again for not coming around more. For not paying attention to what was happening with Glenn.

Kemal’s jaw ticked but he unclenched it and answered her. “He’s had some bad test results lately. The doctor is worried he’s headed for a heart attack.”

Eve rubbed her forehead and promised herself she’d be by weekly from then on. “Talking about a case will remind your dad he’s alive. He needs that more than anything now. I know you don’t get it. You’re not a cop. You don’t get that it’s in his blood, it’s who he is. If anything is going to get him to care about living again, it’ll be getting his mind working.”

He stepped closer to her, using the height he held over her to his advantage. “He’s not the man you used to know, Eve. That man died with my mom.” He always made a point to remind her that she used to know his dad.

Normally, she’d backed off for a while. But she couldn’t back off today. Not this time.

Eve sometimes couldn’t believe the man Glenn’s son had become. There was a time she was welcomed here for Sunday dinners with the family. A time they all used to laugh around the table, taking a much-needed break from the hell she and Glenn were immersed in at work. Kemal was a different man then. Dahlia Goodwin’s death had left a gash so deep and so painful in this family, it was struggling to survive.

Still, today wasn’t a day when she could let him have his way. And she knew what it would take to get in the door. “Sorry, Kemal, but this can’t wait. We just identified the body of Samantha Greer.”

She didn’t need to tell him who Samantha Greer was or why it mattered to his dad.

He knew the name Samantha Greer as well as she did. Not because he’d known Samantha. Not because she’d been anything more than a runaway teen to him, but because his dad had never stopped looking for the girl the rest of the city had thrown away.

Glenn Goodwin had never forgotten the case. Twenty-one years hadn’t changed the fact he’d committed to bringing the lost girl home someday.

Kemal wasn’t swayed. “He’s having a bad week. Things will turn around in a few days. You can come back then.”

Eve tried to relax her jaw. Her dentist had told her she had to stop clenching it so tightly or he wouldn’t be able to undo the damage she was doing to her teeth. Let the man try dealing with Kemal Goodwin, then he could talk to her about meditation and relaxation.

“We’ve got a body now. We’ve got new evidence. Do you know what that means to a cold case? I can’t wait a week, Kemal. I need to move now.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. Was he really pulling this crap with her?

“Do you really want to do this? Do you need me to pull out my badge and remind you that it’s a crime to interfere with a police investigation?”

The anger that crept over his face was harsh, taking what had been dull, tired eyes and making them crystalline chips of granite.

Eve blew out a breath and softened her tone. “Don’t let your dad have to read about this in the paper. How do you think he’ll feel when he knows I didn’t come straight to him with this the minute we found her?”

Kemal scrubbed his hands over his hair and then down the back of his neck, looking at the ground, not at her.

“I’m sorry, Kemal. If I thought it would be better not to tell him, I’d do that, but he needs to know this.”

He nodded, but didn’t speak. With a final breath out, he walked up the steps and unlocked the door, swinging it wide to let Eve enter first.

The house was dark and quiet. “He’s probably still in bed,” Kemal said quietly, moving past her. “I’ll get him. Help yourself to a drink in the fridge.”

He took the stairs two at a time and Eve made her way through the living room to the kitchen at the back of the house. She opened curtains as she went. The house was neat and clean, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t be if Kemal hadn’t moved in with his dad.

She put her fingers to the photos of Kemal’s mother that lined the hallway as she passed them. She had liked Dahlia a lot. It would kill Dahlia to see Glenn like this.

Eve started a pot of coffee. It was already past noon, but she could use it and she had a feeling Kemal and Glenn could too.

It was ten minutes before she heard them coming back down the stairs. She wasn’t prepared for seeing Glenn. Kemal was right. It wasn’t a good time. The man who’d always been meticulous about his clean-cut hair and shaved jaw was now sporting an ungroomed beard of a couple of inches and his hair looked like he hadn’t combed it in a week.

He wore sweatpants and a t-shirt and he tried for a smile when he saw her.

He glanced at the coffee pot. “Sorry, Eve. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have tried…” He seemed at a loss and she wondered if he was trying to figure out what he would have tried to do to prepare for her.

She moved to him and put a hand on his upper arm, giving a squeeze. “I never need you to put yourself out for me, Glenn. I’m sorry I stopped by without calling first.”

Eve didn’t mess around with any more niceties. She dove right in. “We recovered the body of Samantha Greer.”

She watched the blood drain from Glenn’s face. He closed his eyes for a second before opening them and sinking into one of the chairs at the counter island that took up much of the room.

“Where was she?”

“There’s a small cemetery on the upper west side of the city.” She could feel Kemal’s eyes on her as she spoke. He might be pouring coffee, but he was listening. “A grave was dug four days ago in preparation for a funeral. When the workers uncovered the plot the following day for the burial they realized it wasn’t as deep as it should have been. They hopped in to finish the job.”

“Wasn’t empty?” Glenn asked.

Eve accepted the cup of coffee Kemal handed her and sipped. The man made a damned good cup of coffee. “No. Someone had dumped a body and put enough dirt over it to cover it, probably hoping they’d just put the coffin in and fill it without noticing.”

Eve hated the look on Glenn’s face. He’d looked so long and hard for Samantha after her disappearance. She was a foster kid most people had written off as a runaway, but not Glenn. Eve had a feeling he’d always held out hope she would turn up somewhere, alive and well.

Glenn cleared his throat as if prepping himself for his question. “Cause of death?”

“Blunt force trauma to the head.” She took a deep breath. “Glenn, she didn’t die when she was fifteen. We’ve got a rock-solid ID from her dental records so we know it’s Samantha Greer, but she was somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.”

Glenn was struggling with the news and she didn’t blame him. The look on his face was haunted. “She was alive. We could have found her.”

Eve didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything she could say that would alleviate the guilt he would carry over that. She could tell him he’d done all he could, and she knew that was the truth. He’d never given up. But there were some burdens words wouldn’t alleviate.

Glenn looked to her. “Where was she all those years? And where has her body been all this time?”

Samantha Greer had vanished twenty-one years ago at age fifteen. So, she’d been somewhere for ten to fifteen years before she died, give or take based on the pathologist’s estimate of her age.

“And where was her body before it was moved?” Eve asked, knowing he wouldn’t have any more answers than she did.

Glenn’s eyes flashed dark. “She wasn’t a runaway and this proves that, Eve. You need to fight to reopen this case and give it the attention it never got. She deserves that much. Hell, she deserves more.”

Eve raised a hand, palm out to stop him. He was one of the few people who could get away with talking to her like that, but still, his ire was misplaced. “We’re reopening the file. She’s got head trauma we need explained and someone dumped her body. There are things here that need answering. I’ll make sure that happens. In the meantime, can I call you when I have questions about the case?”

She saw Kemal stiffen but ignored him. He was wrong if he thought working on something like this was bad for his dad.

Glenn gave a curt nod. “Yeah. You can call me. You tell Sara yet?”

Eve knew who he meant. Sara Curtis had been Samantha’s foster mom for all of two weeks before she went missing, but the woman had always seemed to care as though Samantha was one of her own children.

“I’m headed there next.” She shook her head when Glenn stood as though he’d go with her. “I can’t have you out in the field, Glenn. You can consult but you’re not working this in the field.”

“The hell I can’t. This is my case, Eve.”

“And no one knows it better than you. I got that. But that doesn’t mean you can be out on the streets working it. I’ll call you when I have something and I’ll be in touch if I have anything that you might be able to give me input on, but that’s the best I can do.” She looked to Kemal. She’d already broken every damned protocol in the book by having Kemal there.

“This can’t leave this room, Kemal. You need to keep quiet about this. I wanted you here as a courtesy but nothing I’ve shared with you is ready to be public yet.”

He waved a hand at her as if to cut her words off. “Yeah, got it. Ongoing investigation. Keep the public in the dark.”

Eve stood, hands on hips. Kemal taught history at the community college and she knew he had strong feelings at times about the police and government. She didn’t need that coming into play here.

“There are reasons for that. Damned good ones. Don’t make me regret letting you be here.” She already did.

Glenn spoke up. “He knows how to keep his mouth shut, Eve. Knock it off Kemal.” The older man looked like he wanted to slap Kemal on the back of the head, but he didn’t. He looked back at Eve. “He’s just messing with you.”

Kemal gave a lazy one-shouldered shrug.

Eve pointed at her former partner. “You wait to hear from me.”

She knew damned well the man would do no such thing. He and his son were both the same. Stubborn to the core. Glenn Goodwin would be working this case, same as she was. And Kemal would be throwing roadblocks up for him every step of the way.

CHAPTER THREE

From the looks of the house in front of Eve, Sara Curtis was still fostering children. The postage stamp yard boasted a tricycle and a scooter, the latter turned on its side in the middle of the walkway. Eve bent and lifted it out of the way before moving to the front door.

Her knock was answered by a slim woman in her fifties that Eve recognized from the photo in the Greer file. As Glenn’s former partner, she’d read the file more than once and knew Glenn had stayed in touch with Sara Curtis over the years, but she’d never met the woman in person.

“Sara Curtis?”

The woman nodded her head, a polite smile in place. A child cried out from in the house and Sara called over her shoulder. “I’m coming, baby.”

She looked back at Eve. “I’m sorry. She’s not settled in yet. Only got here a few days ago, so I need to get to her.”

Eve showed the woman her badge and identified herself. “I need a few minutes to talk to you about Samantha Greer.”

The woman’s face transformed into one of sorrow, her round eyes softening even more. “Come in.”

Eve followed Sara as she moved through the house to the kitchen, where a boy of about ten was showing a toy to a toddler who sat crying on the floor. Sara scooped up the little girl and ran a hand over the boy’s close-cropped curls.

The boy gave Eve a guarded look and then spoke to Sara. “She don’t want food or her toy.”

Sara bounced the girl on her hip. “I know, hon. She’ll settle in soon, won’t she?”

He nodded at her words and something in the way of it said he’d helped Sara get other kids settled in.

Sara tipped her head to the back door. “Run over to Mrs. Milton’s for me and tell Carter he needs to be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make lunch and then we’ll do math and science.”

The boy ran out the back door and Sara gestured to a chair at the kitchen table for Eve, sinking into one of her own and bouncing the fussy girl on her lap. The child was no longer crying, but she wasn’t looking happy.

Eve looked around the room and saw a shelf with tidy piles of workbooks and teaching materials. “You homeschool the kids?” She couldn’t help but wonder how the woman did it all.

Eve’s sister had two girls and a boy, and even with two parents in the home, it often seemed like they never stopped running to keep up. Eve loved her nieces and nephews but they could wear a person out. Eve knew from her file that Sara was a single parent and she had a lot on her plate.

Sara nodded, following Eve’s gaze to the shelf. “Yes. I used to foster more kids and send them to public school, but when Carter and Kyle came into the picture, things changed.”

Eve looked to the back door where the young boy had gone minute before. “Kyle and Carter are brothers?”

“Yes. They were neglected and barely talking by the time they came to me. They had their own language, almost like twins do, even though they’re two years apart in age. The school tried to fit them into a mold. Wanted them to learn the same way other kids did. That wasn’t going to happen.” Sara looked down at the little girl in her arms and smiled as the face beneath her began to melt into sleep. “After one too many blowouts, I decided I needed to keep them here and teach them, even if that meant I didn’t take any other kids in for a long time.”

Eve nodded at the little girl. “But now?”

Sara smiled. “The boys are doing great. I adopted them two years ago and they’ve become my everything. We take another foster child in now and then, but not as many as I used to. They like it, once we get past this stage.” She looked at the girl. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ll just lay her down and then we can talk.”

Ten minutes later, Eve had filled Sara in on the discovery of Samantha’s body. She watched as the woman brushed tears from her cheeks.

Sara shook her head as though trying to shake off the news. “Even though I told the police I didn’t think she’d run off, I think a part of me had begun to hope for that. That maybe she was out there somewhere and somehow things had turned out okay for her.”

Eve had a feeling Sara knew better than many that things didn’t turn out well for runaways a lot of the time. “Glenn said Samantha was new in your home when she went missing?” She wondered if Samantha had been going through her own settling in period like the little girl she’d just seen.

Sara seemed to pick up on Eve’s line of thought. “She was new in the house, but she was a teenager. When they come into a home, they aren’t like a toddler. They’re often angry or they’ve given up. They know the chances of someone loving them, really caring about them and wanting them at that stage of the game are slim. Samantha wasn’t like that. She’d been in a large group home for kids. One with counselors and paid employees who had to referee between all the teens living in it. She was moved after she was targeted by a couple of the girls because she was small and didn’t always stand up for herself. When one of them broke her arm, the whole place was put under review and she was moved out.”

Sara traced a pattern on the table in front of her with her fingers, but she kept her eyes on Eve as she spoke. “She was happy to be out of there. She took to a few of the younger kids here and would play dolls with them or have pretend tea parties after school. When she came in, she was a ball of tension, on alert all the time. Within days, that was gone. Believe me, it should have taken longer for that after what she’d been through, but it didn’t. The kid bounced back.”

“Where was the group home she’d come from?” Eve remembered the case file vaguely from the time she’d looked through it when she was partnered with Glenn. He’d done an annual review of the file looking for anything he might have missed. The last time Eve had looked at it had been over five years back, when she’d reviewed it as part of a cold case update the department had undertaken.

She would be pulling it back out now. As captain, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence for Eve to work a case, but she owed it to Glenn to work this one.

There was no reason for her to think Glenn would have missed something all these years, but she wanted to hear as much of this story from this witness as she could. Maybe there was something Sara had held back or hadn’t thought to tell the police.

“Clear across the state,” Sara said. “None of those kids could have been involved. They would have had to drive four hours and these aren’t kids who would have access to a car.”

Eve nodded. She would ask Glenn about it to be sure he’d ruled out any staff. She didn’t remember much about his reasoning for not looking at anyone from the home further.

The back door banged open and Kyle and his near lookalike came in the room. The older boy, who must be Carter, had a small scar running from his forehead across one eye and down his cheek. But he was smiling. He ran up to Sara, pushing a plastic cup with plastic wrap strapped over it with a rubber band.

“I caught a lizard, mom!”

To Sara’s credit, she didn’t shy away from the cup. She raised the cup and put her face right up to it, peering inside. “Go grab the hamster’s travel cage. We’ll set it up in there.”

Eve didn’t see any air holes in the baggie and wondered if the lizard would make it, but Sara didn’t seem worried. She set it on the table as the boys ran out of the room on their mission.

“Will you let me know when you find out…” Sara’s light dimmed as she looked at Eve “when you find out where she was all this time?”

Eve stood and nodded. “I’ll find out what happened to her.”

It wasn’t a promise she should make and she damned well knew after all the searching Glenn had done without any results, she had no business offering any reassurances. She made it anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR

Eve could feel the weight of the women’s judgment on her, even though their eyes stayed on the floor. It was a neat trick, that. She would have to see if she could master it. She’d always used eye contact to tell her officers when she wasn’t happy. These women were managing it through some kind of Jedi mind trick.

She stuck out in the room. The women before her all had long hair. Not the kind of long hair Eve had. Hers came to her shoulder blades when it wasn’t wrestled into a bun for work. These women all wore their hair in a long braid that went down to the lower back on most, lower on some. They sat in stiff chairs that lined what was a living room of sorts in the house that sat behind the Blessed Divine Church.

John Sevier stood by her side, shooting her the kind of look that said he found the whole place as uncomfortable as she did. It felt nothing like the church Eve had grown up in.

They’d gotten a glimpse of the compound on the way in. The church itself was out in front of the fenced grounds so that the public could come and go through front doors of it without entering the compound itself.

From what they had seen, there was the large main building they were currently in that looked like part house and part office. The remaining land was a hodgepodge of small homes and other buildings, but it went back farther than they could see.

Eve knew from looking at land records before they came, that the land stretched back for over twenty acres. She had the feeling there were a lot of secrets on those twenty acres. She thought about the tunnels Dr. Grundholdt said the church had built. Were there hidden rooms down there? Places they could hide a teenage girl? She shuddered.

A door at the back of the house shut and moments later the sound of shoes clicking on the hallway preceded a small woman with blond hair dusted with silver that only served to make the blonde richer somehow. Her hair was the same style as the other women and her dress identical. A gray and white dress that covered her arms and all the way to her ankles. The high neckline covered all the way to her neck.

It was the same type of clothing that had been on Samantha Greer’s oddly preserved body.

The woman clasped her hands before her as though signaling she would not shake hands with either John or Eve, but her smile softened the message.

“Good morning detectives. I’m Faith Richardson. Anna Beth tells me you have some questions for my husband and I.”

Eve could see the mouse of a woman who’d greeted them when they entered hovering behind Faith. “That’s right. We’re sorry to drop in without an appointment, but this won’t take long at all. We’re just hoping you can help us track down next-of-kin for someone we believe may have been a member of your congregation.”

Eve knew she was laying it on a little thick, but she didn’t want the woman on the defensive.

Faith’s face went appropriately sorrowful and she nodded. “I’ve called my husband and he’s on his way. He and the menfolk are doing some repairs on one of the outbuildings.”

Eve nodded and kept her face neutral. Menfolk?

Before Faith spoke again, a man entered the room, short but somehow imposing, nonetheless. Maybe it was the fact that all of the church women except Faith stood and exited the room as soon as he arrived.

The man was busy rolling down the sleeves of a loose-fitting white shirt as he entered and took a seat at the desk. Faith went to stand by his shoulder, just behind him.

The way he took his time with his shirt, ignoring Eve and John for the time being spoke volumes. When he did look up, he fixed a smile on his face as though gracing them with the offering. His eyes found John’s face and stayed there. “Detective, what can I do for you?”

John had worked interviews long enough to know how to work this one without Eve having to offer any guidance. He kept quiet as Eve spoke.

“Reverend Richardson, I’m Captain Scanlon and this is Detective Sevier. We’re hoping you and your wife can help us find the next-of-kin for one of your congregation who’s passed away.”

His jaw tightened only slightly at her words and he nodded. “We’ll certainly try.”

Eve held out the photo of Samantha Greer when she disappeared at age fifteen and an age progression photo the lab had worked up for her that morning.

The reverend’s face blanched at the images. “Grace is dead?” he asked the question with a quiet voice laced with what Eve pegged as genuine regret. “We had thought she’d just moved on.”

His wife rubbed his shoulder and he put a hand over hers and looked up at her. Eve watched as the two seemed to share a private moment before the reverend turned back to them. “Grace was with us for many years. She was engaged to my brother, as a matter of fact, before she left.”

“We’ll need to speak with your brother,” Eve said.

Faith nodded and stepped from the room and Eve took the time to find out all she could from the reverend. Seeing if the stories of anyone else they interviewed matched up would be important.

“How long was Grace with you?” She used the name they’d used even though she knew it to be false.

Richardson frowned and rubbed the palm of his hand with one thumb as he spoke. “Must be at least ten or twelve years.” He paused, then, “maybe more. My daughter handles the church records. I can get that information for you.”

Eve pressed on.

“You said you thought she moved on. Why is that?”

He gave a bewildered shake of his head. “She left a note for my brother saying she’d changed her mind about the marriage. Said she was going to go back to her family. We didn’t know where her family was. We had no way of tracking her down. It broke Isaiah’s heart.”

“Isaiah is your brother?”

He gave another single nod.

Faith reentered the room and Eve continued her questioning as the woman took her place behind her husband again.

“Was the engagement something Grace seemed happy about?” What Eve had wanted to ask was if the engagement was arranged for Grace. Arranged as in forced.

Faith was the one who answered, seeming to know where Eve was headed. “Marriages in our church are not arranged. A match might be encouraged or suggested but they aren’t forced.”

Sounds from the hallway announced the arrival of more people, this time men and women. The reverend stood and made introductions as the others filed into the room.

A man so similar in stature and looks to the reverend was introduced as his brother Isaiah. His sandy brown hair was longer than the reverend’s but the heights matched, as did the blue eyes.

A dark-haired woman held his arm like she might fall down without his support, despite the fact that she looked otherwise healthy and seemed to be only in her mid-forties. She was introduced as his wife, Susanna. Two women were introduced as the reverend’s sisters and two others his adult daughters. There were adult sons, also, the oldest named Ezra who looked ready to come to his parent’s defense if given the chance.

“Papa!” a young girl of about eight laughed as she ran into the room heading for the reverend, chased by another girl in her early teens. The teenager flushed pink and apologized, pulling the younger girl from the room and up the stairs of the house as she admonished her to “leave the adults to the adulting.”

Eve made a mental note to see how far this family extended. From what she gathered, the couple’s children ranged in age from their late twenties down to the eight-year-old, at least.

The reverend was speaking quietly to his brother as the others looked on and Eve saw the man go pale when he found out his former fiancée was dead. Eve wasn’t sure what to make of it. Everyone in the room seemed stunned at the news, but Eve also had the feeling they were in the right place. She couldn’t point to a single person who seemed to know before they arrived that Samantha was dead.

But everything about the church seemed off. Her gut was screaming at her that Samantha had somehow come to the church and she hadn’t left alive.

Isaiah was the first to ask the question she’d been expecting for some time. “How did she die? Where did you find her?”

He turned and spoke to Detective Sevier, instead of addressing Eve, the same way his brother had done. The patriarchy ran strong through this group, Eve thought.

Eve let John answer this time, wanting to watch Isaiah’s reaction.

“We can’t release details at this time,” John said, “but we believe she may have died accidentally.”

There was a hint of truth to it. It was entirely possible the blow to Samantha’s head was caused in a fall or through some other accident. But her body wasn’t hidden accidentally and it wasn’t moved in an attempt to keep it covered up accidentally. All of that was very purposeful.

Still, if the killer was in the room with them, it might set that person at ease. Let them think they had gotten away with it. And with that, the killer might make a mistake. Say or do something to give themselves away.

Eve jumped in now. “Can you tell us when you last saw Grace?”

Isaiah blinked at her before answering. “Three days before we were going to be married. January 15th.” He looked to the woman on his arm, Susanna, then back to Eve. “Four years ago.”

The timeframe matched up with what Dr. Grundholt had said would be her time of death, but it was entirely possible Samantha had left the church four years ago and then been killed sometime later by someone else.

Eve looked at Susanna, too. “Did you know Grace?”

Susanna glanced at her husband who nodded before she answered. Eve wanted to roll her eyes but didn’t.

“No,” Susanna said. “I joined the church a year after Grace ran away.” She glanced down as though afraid she’d said the wrong thing.

“Your brother said Grace left you a note?” Eve said to Isaiah, getting a nod in response.

“Do you still have it?”

“No. I held onto everything of hers for a few months hoping she’d come back, but when it became clear she wouldn’t be back, I threw everything away.”

“Holding on to dark memories traps the soul in pain,” Faith said from where she and the reverend stood. “We seek to let light into our lives, detective.”

Eve smiled. “Captain,” she finally corrected. They’d called her detective or refused to address her directly one too many times. “Are any of you familiar with the cemetery on Oak Terrace on the west side of the city?”

A few head shakes and then one woman spoke up. “I think that was where Adelle Mason was buried last year.”

The reverend nodded at the woman and Eve noticed he was still doing the thumb thing, rubbing it into the palm of his other hand. “She’s right. Detectives, this is my eldest daughter, Hannah. She handles the church records for us. She’ll need to look it up, but she’ll be able to tell you how long Grace was with us.”

The woman nodded a greeting and Eve handed her a business card with her contact information on it.

“Who is Adelle Mason?” John asked.

It was Hannah who answered. “A member of our congregation who passed.”

“You don’t have a cemetery here?” Somehow Eve couldn’t see the church members being buried someplace else.

“We do,” the reverend said, “but some of our congregation don’t choose to live on our grounds. They’re buried elsewhere.”

Like second class citizens. Eve didn’t voice the opinion. She’d learned early on in her career no one wanted the commentary that took place in her head.

“Were any of you aware that Grace’s real name was Samantha. Samantha Greer?” Eve asked, watching faces and body language closely.

It was Faith who answered again. “People who come to our church seeking solace often take a new name. It signifies a rebirth of sorts.”

The woman was just full of little tidbits like that, a little like a walking greeting card.

Eve continued without acknowledging the explanation. “And the name Ruth Adamson, does that mean anything to any of you?” She tossed out the name of the woman whose grave Samantha had been found in, hoping for a reaction.

She got a lot of frowns and head shakes, no, but again the reverend’s daughter spoke up. “It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.”

Eve wondered about the daughter. She didn’t seem to be as worried as the other church women about speaking up. Neither did Faith, for that matter, so maybe it was the fact Faith was the matriarch of the church and also her mother that gave the woman standing to say what she pleased, when she pleased, without the look of seeking permission or apology the other women seemed to have whenever they spoke.

“Did you report Grace missing when she left?” Eve asked the group at large.

It was the reverend who answered. “We welcome many people into our community, detective. But we don’t force them to be here. It’s not uncommon for people to move on.”

Faith added, “She was a part of our community for a long time. It hurt when she left, but that doesn’t mean we would try to force her to stay any more than we would force one of our own children to stay if they wanted to move out into the world. She was going back to her family.”

“Samantha was a foster child. She didn’t have family,” John said.

Faith shook her head. “She must have had some somewhere. Her letter said she was going to be with them. We had no reason to report her missing.”

Eve had a feeling the church wouldn’t report anything to the police. There was a distinct us and them feel like the outside world was somehow removed from their community.

She dropped the last of their questions, hoping to see a reaction from someone. “Did Grace have any children?”

Isaiah’s expression was nothing but puzzled at the question. “No. She lived here for many years before we were engaged. She never said anything about having any children.”

“You knew her for a long time before you were engaged?” she asked.

“Yes. She came to the church when she was nineteen. I was married to my first wife at the time. She passed six years ago. I began courting Grace a year later and we were engaged a year after that.

Eve kept her face blank but noted the discrepancy. Had Samantha really come to the church when she was nineteen? That would mean she either spent four years somewhere else or Isaiah was lying.

Had Samantha delivered her child in those four years and left it somewhere else? Or did she give birth after she left the church?

“Did Grace live alone when she was here?” She wondered what they did when someone new showed up in the church. Did they have a dorm room situation where they would set up individuals that showed up looking for a place to live?

Faith frowned as though thinking about something before looking at the reverend. “One of our host families took her in. Was it the Jamesons?”

The reverend shook his head. “Widow Akers took her in.” He looked up at Eve. “She’s no longer with us. She went to the Lord four years ago.”

As they left the building and walked to where they’d parked, John leaned closer, speaking low.

“Do you get the sense half the church is that guy’s family?”

Eve nodded, but her eyes cut to a sedan sitting across the street from the church. She tossed the keys to John. “Grab the car. I’m going to have a talk with someone.”

The window on the sedan rolled down as she approached.

“What are you doing, Glenn? I thought I told you you’re not working this case in the field.”

Glenn waved her comment off. “I’m not working it. I’m following you.”

She snorted and shook her head. She should have known he wouldn’t listen.

He looked past her to the church, frowning. “I had a witness. A friend of Samantha’s who said she came here to a service with Samantha. I came and asked at the church and they thought maybe she’d come to a service, but couldn’t say for sure. They did say she didn’t come back if it was her. Denied she was with them. I didn’t have enough to get a warrant back then.”

“And I don’t have enough now,” Eve said, but she wondered about the fact they’d denied knowing Samantha. Maybe she hadn’t been there yet. She could have come to a service with her friend, then wandered back to the church at some point later. According to Isaiah, she hadn’t shown up until she was nineteen. “Who did you talk to? Do you remember?”

His look told her she should know better than to think he’d forgotten anything about the case. “The Reverend Richard Richardson. His wife was there also. Faith.”

Eve glanced at where Sevier had pulled the car around to idle behind Glenn’s. “They say Samantha came to the church when she was nineteen and was in the church for years and then left one day, leaving a note saying she was going back to her family.”

It was Glenn’s turn to snort. “She doesn’t have any family. Mother and father are both deceased. She lived with an aunt until she was twelve when the aunt died. There isn’t anyone else.”

Eve nodded. She remembered those details, too.

“They show you the note?” he asked.

Eve shook her head, looking back to the church. “They didn’t keep it. You need to back off and let me build a case, Glenn.”

He tapped his hand on the steering wheel, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “Come to dinner tonight?”

Eve looked at her watch. “If I can get enough done between now and then, sure.”

She didn’t ask if Kemal would be there. And she sure as hell didn’t stop to examine the fact that she hoped he would be.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kemal opened the door and Eve damned near swallowed her tongue. Kemal must have been working out. He was dressed in sweatpants and a form-fitting t-shirt that clung to the chiseled planes of his chest. A sweaty chest that was having a ridiculous affect on Eve’s ability to think straight.

She’d always thought Kemal was attractive but it had been easy to ignore his good looks given his arrogance and controlling ways. Besides, it wasn’t something she would act on. He was her mentor’s son. She wasn’t going to go there.

But, damn, she’d also never seen him like this. When he pushed open the door and let her in, explaining he was about to take a shower, she might have whimpered.

Kemal’s smirk said he was reading her mind. And didn’t that suck? The last thing she needed was him thinking she was attracted to him. She wasn’t. Not really. It was sweaty shirt induced lust. Nothing more.

“You can wait in the living room. Pops’ll be right out.”

Eve forced her mind off Kemal when Glenn came into the room. His hair was still long and the beard scruffy looking, but he was wearing slacks and a clean shirt.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Glenn said, sitting on the couch across from the chair she’d settled into.

Eve’s eyes shot to his. How the hell had he picked up on her thoughts? As a woman on the police force, she’d had a lot of practice hiding what she was thinking and she was pretty freaking good at it most of the time. First Kemal had picked up on her thoughts and now Glenn. What the hell was happening to her?

“About the church,” Glenn said, shooting her a strange look. “What are you thinking? Is the reverend a killer?”

Eve’s heart slammed back into place and she shifted gears. He was ready to talk shop. Thank the Lord, because she needed to think about anything other than the man upstairs in the shower.

“It could be him, but I have to say, I saw genuine shock on his face when he found out Samantha was dead. I could be wrong—”

“But you rarely are,” Glenn finished for her. He’d worked with her. He knew her gut was pretty good.

“The church is a creepy place, though. The women didn’t speak up for the most part and they all dressed like they were on the set of Little House on the Prairie. They said Samantha lived there for years and was engaged to one of their members. To the reverend’s brother, actually.”

Glenn sat forward. “You think he might be good for this?”

Eve didn’t want to say for sure. “I don’t know. It’s possible, but again, I got the sense he was genuinely upset that she left. Although, I can’t say it seemed like he loved her. The dynamics between the men and women in the church were strange. We’ve got records of old complaints filed about them back in the day when they were much bigger and recruiting heavily, but nowadays it seems like half the church’s membership is the family of the reverend.”

Glenn sat back in his chair again, nodding he was listening, so she went on.

“John Sevier pulled up what we had on the place. It looks like it was a legitimate tent revival type of church when Richardson’s dad was running it. When Richardson took over in the early eighties, it grew and that’s when the complaints started up. There were people who said their relatives were brainwashed there. Not only teens whose parents wanted them out of there, but family members who said their loved ones signed over property and bank accounts to the church. But,” she started but he cut her off.

“Yeah, I got it. Hands tied until you find something more to point to the church.”

“I’m not giving up on it, Glenn.” She glanced at the steps, making sure Kemal hadn’t come down. “This isn’t public and I don’t plan to make it that way any time soon.”

Glenn nodded, his own eyes checking the stairs.

“Samantha delivered at least one baby in her lifetime. We need to find that child and make sure it’s okay.”

Glenn cursed, echoing how Eve felt. She wanted to know what had happened during the time that was missing from Samantha’s reported sightings and where that child was.

Footsteps on the stairs told them their time for talking about the case was over. She would pick Glenn’s brain more as things developed but for now, she needed to get through this dinner without having any more feelings about Kemal surface. This wasn’t a development she welcomed.

Kemal returned wearing a form-fitting Henley and jeans and she damned near rolled her eyes at her body’s response to him.

Yeah, he must be working out more. Or maybe she needed to get out and date someone so she wasn’t so easily drawn to the first hot man in her path.

Getting dinner on the table was a joint effort.

“I know neither of you made this,” Eve joked as she carried the tray of lasagna to the table, Kemal following with a basket of rolls and salad.

“I’ll have you know I made the salad myself,” Glenn said. He sat and began passing food around for serving as soon as Kemal and Eve found their seats.

“That lasagna comes from a neighbor. She sends over trays full of home cooked stuff for us to freeze,” Kemal said. “The woman is an angel.”

Eve saw a shadow pass over Glenn’s features and she would guess he was thinking about his wife. Dahlia Goodwin had been an amazing cook. Eve had walked out of the house feeling ten pounds heavier after meals. Kemal’s mother had been born in the south and she brought a lot of the traditions with her when she and Glenn moved to Colorado. Eve remembered a woman who worked hard but was always there with a warm smile.

Eve cleared her throat. “I might need to get to know your neighbor. This lasagna is incredible.”

Kemal and Glenn didn’t respond. Eve felt the lasagna turn to dust in her mouth as she struggled to think of something to say to diffuse the heavy weight of Dahlia’s absence.

She went with work. “Pete Montross made lieutenant last month.”

Glenn grinned. “Good for him. That kid was sharp. I always liked him.”

Eve returned the smile. It always amused her when Glenn called Pete “kid.” He was six feet seven inches tall and all of it was pure muscle. He’d been a professional wrestler for years before joining the force. But even more, he was no kid. He’d joined up later in life and had been older than all the other patrol officers he came up with in the ranks. But to Glenn, everyone was “kid.”

“And Tressie Davis is going to retire next month.”

Kemal frowned. “Dad doesn’t need a play-by-play of what’s happening at the precinct, Eve.”

Glenn rolled his eyes. “I can handle hearing what’s happening at work without getting too stressed out. My heart can take it.”

Eve looked from Kemal to Glenn. Was there more to the issues with Glenn’s heart or was Kemal worrying over nothing and Glenn being overly dramatic in his reply?

“It’s not your work anymore, Dad. You’re retired.”

“And I stopped caring when I left the building? Is that what you think? That you take off the blue and it changes who you are in an instant?”

Eve knew what Glenn was thinking. The people you serve with are your brothers and sisters, your family. You don’t forget about them or stop caring when the job is finished. Wearing the badge meant you were never truly finished. It was in your blood, your bones. It was who you were.

Any response Kemal might have had was cut off by the doorbell.

He stood and left the room to answer it without meeting her eyes. She had a feeling he didn’t want her coming back for dinner anytime soon. To him, she was a connection to the job he didn’t think his dad should have.

Eve wished she could get him to see that his dad might get through some of the bouts of depression faster if he was able to get back the connection to his work. He’d been the kind of cop who loved what he was doing, who believed in their work. It had never been easy being a black man and an officer. More than once she and Glenn had talked about the dichotomy of working on the force but knowing there were things happening between the black community and police officers that couldn’t be written off. He’d struggled with his identity as a black man and an officer, but in the end, he always chose to stay with the force.

Glenn had done it because he wanted to serve. He believed in it. It was part of who he was. She could understand Kemal not wanting his dad to bury himself in his work after his wife died, but Glenn was burying himself in the house, alone with his thoughts and memories, alone with the grief and heartache.

Getting him back out into doing something he cared about could only help. She had to believe that. She should have been coming over to talk shop with him more often. To remind him he still had friends on the force, still had family there.

She heard muffled voices from the front hall and none of them sounded happy. When a young boy of about eight came into the room with a backpack slung over one shoulder and a scowl on his small face, Glenn stood.

“Antoine,” Glenn said, standing and wrapping the boy in a bear hug. “What are you doing here?”

The kid looked a hell of a lot like Kemal and for a minute Eve wondered if Kemal had a son. There was no way Glenn wouldn’t have mentioned that, though, so she dismissed the thought.

The kid’s answer was muffled by the way Glenn had Antoine’s face pressed to his chest. The front door slammed and Kemal came back into the room. He shot a look to Eve and she turned to gather her jacket and car keys.

“I’ll call you later,” she said to Glenn. She was trying to ignore the fact that the boy had Kemal’s eyes. Hell, it wasn’t just his eyes. It was everything. The kid was a dead ringer for Kemal. Not that it was any of her business.

As she let herself out the front door, she heard Kemal tell his father that Antoine needed to stay with them for a while, so his mom could get her shit together.

She had to laugh at Glenn’s response. He was lecturing Kemal on his language when she shut the front door.

CHAPTER SIX

Eve wouldn’t admit to anyone that Kemal had shown up in her dreams that night. Hell, she wasn’t even willing to admit it to herself, instead turning to a brutal run at six a.m. to try to rid all thoughts of the man who had no business being in her head like that.

She’d mostly succeeded by the time she walked into the precinct. She had a case to work and still had a call from the mayor’s office she wasn’t looking forward to answering.

She called Rhys Evans into her office first. Rhys was good at digging out details and she needed someone who could get her a lead on Samantha Greer’s case. She’d put him on the case the day before and was hoping he had something for her to look at.

“What have you got?” she asked, when he entered her office.

Rhys handed over a stack of papers. “I followed up on the missing persons cases you had already found that mentioned the church. All but one have since been found so the cases are closed.”

She looked down at the top sheet and recognized one of the cases she’d already seen. A fourteen-year-old girl named Katie Frye was reported missing by her friend, Becky Waller. She and Katie had both been runaways but they’d survived on the streets together for two years.

She looked up at Rhys. “Katie Frye’s case is the open one?”

Rhys nodded. “As you can see there’s not a lot there. This took place eight years after Samantha went missing. Her friend said Katie had gone to one of the church’s meals where they offered food and a bible study to some of the homeless kids. Katie said she was thinking of going back but then changed her mind. A few days later, Becky left Katie in the building they were squatting in to try to find food for them and Katie was gone when she got back. After four days, Becky got up the nerve to come in and report her friend missing.”

Eve scanned the paper. Katie Frye had gone missing thirteen years ago. “Do we have any idea where Becky is? I’d like to talk to her if we can.”

Rhys was already shaking his head. “The officer who took the report went to call social services to try to get Becky in the system and she fled. I looked around in records and things but I think she was using a fake name. I didn’t find anyone who matched the right age in the area then or now.”

Eve wasn’t surprised. Frustrated, but not surprised. She flipped to the next set of stapled pages.

Rhys narrated as she skimmed. “I expanded the search, going back before Samantha went missing and extending the range outside Dark Falls. I figured the church might be focusing on surrounding cities, too, since they’re on the outer border. I found several cases where adults were reported missing but were found living on the church property and were reportedly happy and didn’t seem to be under duress. There were a few cases where minors were reported missing and later found in the church and the parents got them out.”

“What does that mean? Got them out?” She was picturing one of those TV shows that told stories of cults and services that kidnapped the kids back and did counter-brainwashing or whatever to save them.

Rhys must have read her mind because he shook his head. “Nothing major. They went to the church and got their kid back. There have been people who claim the church is a cult but there isn’t any real evidence of them acting like one. Their church holds public church services where anyone is welcome and they seemed to let these parents take their kids out of there with no problem.”

“They don’t report it when they have a teenager show up looking for a place to live, though,” Eve said.

Rhys went on, giving only a nod of acknowledgement to her comment. “As far as minors whose cases were never cleared, there were four more cases with some mention of the church.”

Eve looked up and he continued.

“Carina Nelson, age sixteen from Clifton. She went missing before Samantha.” He scanned his notes. “Twenty-five years ago. Her parents said she was having problems in school and drinking. She had run away a couple of times. There’s a note in the file that a friend said she went to services at the church with another friend a week before she disappeared.”

Eve looked at the girl in the grainy photo attached to the file for Carina. Her face looked much younger than sixteen. Eve felt sick inside at the idea of someone taking this girl.

“Susie Norman,” Rhys continued. “Age fifteen. Missing from Orchard Mesa six years after Samantha. Similar story. She was another foster child only she was in a group home. She often ran away and had been using drugs. She was on the verge of being kicked out of her current placement because of her drug use. She had gone to two or three of the bible studies at the church. A friend said she was saying she found God. The church said they saw her for a few meetings but then she stopped coming and they had no way to reach out to her to find out why.”

Rhys leaned back in his seat as Eve flipped to the final packet in front of her. “This last one is much more recent than the others. Camille Gallagher, fourteen years old. Missing from Glade Park last year.”

Eve’s head shot up. “You get ahold of the detective who worked the case?”

Rhys shook his head. “I got some details. Said you might want to talk to him directly.”

Eve nodded. “Same story?”

“She was a runaway. Living on the streets with a group of kids in an abandoned building, but she had started reaching out to her family. She and the mom had problems, didn’t get along, but they were working on it. One day, she’s gone and the other kids thought she’d gone home. A week later, the mother comes looking for her and finds out she hasn’t been around in a week. She filed the missing persons report.”

“And the link to the church?”

Rhys shrugged. “It’s not a strong one. The kids said they sometimes went to the church for a free meal. They hadn’t been there in almost a month, though. I talked to the detective who worked the case. He said he called the church and asked about her, but that was as far as he went with that lead. I got the sense he thought the girl just took off when she got tired of trying to work things out with the mother.”

Eve grit her teeth before catching herself and forcing her jaw to release. She didn’t want to spend another day in the dentist chair listening to her dentist lecture her. Hell, he’d probably try to make her do deep breathing exercises again.

She looked back to the file. It was a common thing for people to write off runaways. She knew it was tempting for any detective to do that, given the workload they all carried. Still, she couldn’t condone it. Kids on the street needed as much, if not more, protection as far as she was concerned.

Eve spent the next two hours on paperwork she’d gotten behind on before poring through the reports Rhys had left with her. She didn’t find anything in them that he hadn’t already told her.

Not able to put it off any longer, she picked up her phone to call the mayor back—more than a little surprised he’d left her alone all morning. With the way things had been going lately with them discovering falsified evidence and a serial killer in the ranks of the Dark Falls Police Department, the mayor was hitting public perception and media control pretty hard. And he liked to remind her that he had taken a keen interest in overseeing the work of her and her detectives.

Before she was able to dial, a uniformed officer knocked on her door jamb, Kemal standing behind him.

“Hi,” was all Eve could think to say.

The officer apologized and looked uneasy as he explained Kemal had asked for an escort to her office.

Eve waved him off. “It’s fine. He’s a friend. Thank you.”

Kemal’s grin as the officer left made her heart do a little flip-flop and she mentally slapped it back into place. She wasn’t at all the kind of woman whose heart did little dances. Not that she wasn’t a woman under the stark black suits she wore to work each day, but she wasn’t that kind of woman. There was nothing fru-fru about her.

But here she sat, feeling pretty damned fru-fru at the sight of this man.

“Friend, huh?” Kemal said, eyes lit with humor.

She shrugged. “The reality is a little complicated for a short explanation.”

That seemed to pique his interest and he tilted his head. “Oh yeah. Why don’t you give me the long version?”

Eve reached for the pencils on her desk and straightened them, lining them up on the left side of her blotter. “Uh, well, I guess we’re…” Damn, she had no idea what they were. She frowned at him. “Well, we’re um…”

His smile only widened and his eyes held more than just a little hint of humor now. He was enjoying her discomfort. She was tempted to toss a paperclip at him, but had a feeling that would only make things worse.

“How about we go to lunch? Friends go to lunch, right?”

Her brows rose. “You want to get lunch together?”

His smile dropped and he nodded. “I think I owe you that, at the very least after the way I treated you last night. I might have come off a little ….”

“Unyielding? Unreasonable? Obstinate?”

He grimaced.

It was her turn to grin. “Did your dad tell you to apologize?”

He shook his head, but what he said was, “maybe.”

Eve looked at the clock. The mayor could wait until after lunch.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kemal cursed himself six ways from Sunday the whole walk to the restaurant. His dad had told him he needed to apologize, but that didn’t mean he had to ask her to lunch.

He’d been an ass to her the night before because the way he was attracted to her scared the hell out of him. It had always been that way with Eve Scanlon but she’d never given him the time of day. She’d always made it perfectly clear she saw him as her partner’s son. Nothing more.

Except for last night. Last night, he thought he’d seen a flash of something in her eyes.

But she’d just said she saw him as obstinate and unreasonable. Those descriptions had come to her too quickly for her not to have thought them in the past. So she couldn’t possibly have any interest in him. It was stupid to ask her to lunch.

He held the door to a small Mexican restaurant open and Eve stepped in ahead of him.

Based on the way they greeted her, he was guessing she’d been here before. They were shown to a booth in the far corner of the restaurant in an area that had no other tables around it. In fact, the way the booth was set up, they were around the corner from the rest of the restaurant and largely out of sight.

He noticed Eve took the seat that let her have her back to the wall. Maybe she’d always done it or maybe it was a product of being a cop. He was guessing the latter. He knew his dad always did the same.

He waited until they were alone before asking, “do they always seat you out of the way over here?”

Eve pushed her menu aside, further proof she came often. “Usually, yes. They don’t really need to do it for me anymore since I’m not in uniform, but it’s a habit.”

“What happens if you’re in uniform?”

She looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes people just want to say hi to us. Other times, they have something they want to get off their chests and it can be tricky. For the most part though, it just lets us have the chance to eat quickly without interruption. Patrol officers only get a half hour to eat. Many of the restaurants we go to have learned that and do their best to take our orders quickly and get our food out fast.”

The person who sat them proved that by returning immediately with silverware and chips and salsa, ready to take their order. “What’ll it be, Captain?”

They placed their order and handed over the menus and Kemal wondered why he didn’t know these things. His dad had been a cop for years.

When Kemal was a kid, he’d thought his dad was a superhero, coming home in his uniform. Then one year, he’d had his dad come to his class to talk to them. Most of the kids had acted like it was cool when his dad was there, but soon they started calling him a traitor. They called Kemal Goody Goody Goodwin and said his dad was taking the side of the white man.

It had been confusing for Kemal. When he got old enough to read about cops shooting black people, when he was old enough for the talk where his momma had to tell him how he had to behave around police officers, then he’d gotten it.

And he’d rebelled like all hell. He’d proved to anyone who challenged him that he was anything but Goody Goody Goodwin.

He wasn’t that kid anymore. He didn’t act out that way now, but the damage to his relationship with his dad had been done. He loved his dad and he knew his dad loved him but there was a barrier between them in some ways.

Kemal taught history at the community college and one of the courses he taught was on black perspectives in the law. He’d talked to his dad a lot about the things he was teaching and his dad used to come talk to the class. He hadn’t in a long time.

Still, sometimes the world of his dad’s life on the force was a mystery to him. If he was honest, even though he had listened to his dad tell his class why he joined the force dozens of times, it was still hard for Kemal to understand it. There was still some level of resentment there about his dad’s work.

Eve surprised him by going just where his own thoughts had gone.

“Do you still teach that course on communities of color and the law?”

He nodded slowly, wondering where she was going with the question.

“The mayor wants all of the unit captains to submit proposed policy changes to him. Things that will increase community support for the department after the recent events.”

There was a twist to Eve’s lips as she said that last and he knew why. The whole city was calling for change at the police department after what had happened over the course of the last year. A serial killer who had plagued the city for years had turned out to be a detective in Eve’s unit and several people had been caught falsifying evidence in a number of cases.

“And?” he asked.

“And I thought if I’m going to submit suggestions for change, I should reach out to someone who’s studied the topic from a perspective other than my own for input.”

Kemal had to grin at that. “This is you reaching out? Waiting for me to invite you to lunch and then asking me?”

She smiled back and gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

He let her get away with the nonresponse. “There are a lot of steps you could take that would change things for the better for the black people in our community. The department’s use of body cameras has been spotty so far, with only a few patrol officers being issued. That should be a priority. Every patrol officer should wear one.”

She nodded. “There are budgetary constraints with that but we’re working on it. It’s something that’s at the top of our list as we talk to the city council about funding needs, but I’m going to put that into my report to the mayor also.”

“Good,” he said, “but it’s not nearly enough.”

Oddly, the sense that someone was just trying to be polite when he talked to someone who wasn’t part of the black community wasn’t there with her. He felt like her interest was genuine. Like she wasn’t just giving him a chance to talk so she could say she’d done her good deed for the day.

Or maybe it was just because it was Eve.

“Officers see a black man in the clothes of our culture, in baggy jeans or a hoodie, as a thug or a drug dealer. That needs to change. The way we’re perceived has to change or we won’t see equality in justice. Ending broken window policing would be a big step, too,” he said.

He didn’t stop. If she was going to give him the chance to talk to her about these issues, he would take it. “When police officers are called out for things like a broken window or loitering, loud music, that kind of thing, it can lead to a conflict situation where there doesn’t need to be one. There can be alternative workers set up for those types of calls. Neighborhood liaisons or community social workers. Whatever you want to call them. Someone who is out in the community on a regular basis, who’s seen as a support not as enforcement, can handle those calls and only call out the police if their efforts fail. Or not call the police out at all. If the call was for jaywalking, why does someone need to answer that call?”

Eve nodded. “Those are all things I can look into, and I will.”

“Why do I feel like there’s a but in there?” He asked. Hell, here it was. He really didn’t want to hear Eve tell him what he’d heard hundreds of times before. That black Americans were blowing this out of proportion.

“No but,” she said. “I meant what I said. Those are all good things for me to look into.”

“But?” he pressed.

She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really not a but. I’m just wondering if you teach anything about the police perspective in your class. I watch the dashcam or body cam footage of police involved shootings pretty often. Whenever it’s put out there, I watch it again and again looking for answers. I try not to second guess or play armchair quarterback because I wasn’t there. It’s not fair for me to try to speculate about what the officer was seeing or feeling in that moment on scene. But I watch them because I’m looking for anything I can learn from them. Any little thing that might help me make sure that everyone goes home at the end of the day.”

She held his gaze. “And I mean everyone. From the officers to the suspect to anyone involved in a stop. There are times I watch and I think, that officer sounds completely panicked and I have to ask myself if that officer had what he needed to be on the streets, to be doing that job. Did he get the right training before he was sent out there? Panicked is not the way I ever want my officers to be. Ever. But I also watch times where the situation changes on a dime. In a split second, a routine stop costs the officer his life. I remember one video of a female officer pulling over a man and his child is there with him.”

She seemed to steel herself with a small shake of her head. “He’s out of the car and the officer’s telling him to stop, not to move toward her. She doesn’t fire on him, didn’t draw her weapon, and I can’t blame her for that at all. If I was in her shoes, I’d probably have handled it the same way. She didn’t want to draw on him. Didn’t want to use deadly force and once you pull that weapon, deadly force is on the table. You’ve escalated things once you do that. So she’s trying to avoid that, but from one breath to the next he’s on her. One minute she’s okay and the next, he’s moved on her so fast, she can’t stop him. His kid is watching him, this little girl, and he beats the officer to within an inch of her life in front of his child and leaves her on the road to die.

“She lived, but she was never the same. Never able to return to the force. She’ll suffer from the medical and emotional repercussions of that attack for the rest of her life.”

Kemal didn’t respond. He wanted to see where she’d go with this. There were times he felt like almost every black man he’d talked to about the issue. Filled with rage that they were forced to live in such a different world than that of the white people they shared the city with. But one of the things he’d learned to do as a professor was shut up and listen. There were times he’d shut up and listen to people and all they spouted was inane crap that showed him they would likely never see things from someone else’s perspective.

Other times, though, it could lead to a conversation where each person walked away the better for it, able to see some part of the other’s view. So he listened.

“I’ve seen dozens of those videos and know of even more cases where there are no videos,” she said. “And I can tell you what it feels like to go to a domestic violence call or make a traffic stop or roll up on a fight and know you’re going to be vulnerable when you take that call.”

She kept talking, their food forgotten. “But I also know you can show me a million videos where I can second guess a decision made by an officer if I allowed myself to do that. Where I can’t tell you for sure that the color of a person’s skin wasn’t in play there. I think your impression is that we all want to deny the problem, but the thing is, I genuinely want the officer and anyone they engage with to be alive and well at the end of the day. Someone once said to me they thought it was great that we had all these procedures in place to screen applicants to the force and then all these procedures to continue that screening and assessment of cadets in the academy. She thought it was great. She said to me, I bet you cut down the people who have no business being on the force to a few percent or something.”

Eve shook her head. “She thought she was congratulating us on our success, but I asked her what about that few percent? Those few percent who get through, they matter. Craig Patel mattered. A lot. And that means we can’t ever stop trying to do better, to be better.”

Kemal knew Craig Patel was the detective who’d worked under her but who had been a serial killer for years. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like to her and the others on the force. Hell, his dad had worked with the man and hadn’t known he was evil incarnate the whole time.

She was still shaking her head. “He mattered and we didn’t catch him in our screening somehow. So, yeah, I try not to play armchair quarterback on every police shooting that happens, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to find every way possible to be sure the men and women in our department are making the best decisions they can when they engage anyone in our community, including the people of color we serve. And I’ll keep having conversations with anyone I think can help with that, even if they’re uncomfortable. What I don’t want to see happen, though, is for my officers to feel like they’re under attack while we try to find those solutions.”

Kemal pushed aside his plate. “I remember confronting my dad about a cop shooting when I was a teenager. He tried to tell me it was complicated, but I was so damned angry at him for what I saw as taking their side. The white man’s side,” he said ruefully, shaking his head. “But in all honesty, he didn’t talk to me much about what it was like to be on the force. I think he didn’t want to share that side of things with us. Like he wanted to keep the ugliness he saw at the job there, instead of bringing it home. To me, though, it meant I didn’t get the chance to understand why he was doing what he did.”

Eve pushed her plate to the edge of the table as well. “He talked to me some about what he felt working and how it felt to grow up feeling like there was an ‘us’ and ‘them’ side to everything he experienced. How his life was different from mine in so many ways. I remember a day we were all looking for a murder suspect we knew was in the area. He was armed and had just killed three people in a convenience store robbery. Patrol units were called out, but the detectives were also out looking for him. Your dad called the house and told your mom not to let you leave the house.”

Kemal frowned. He didn’t know which particular incident she was talking about. It had happened more than once.

“I was driving and he didn’t take more than a minute to tell your mom to keep you inside because this was in a neighborhood not too far from where you all lived. I assumed he didn’t want you out so you wouldn’t run into the suspect. But that wasn’t it at all.”

Kemal didn’t need to be told. “He didn’t want me out with that many officers out looking for a suspect.”

Eve nodded. “The man we were looking for was black. Your dad knew it was risky you being out there with officers searching for a black suspect. The man we were looking for was in his thirties and you were only eighteen, but your dad said it didn’t matter, and I knew in my gut then that he was right. And I knew it was something I would never have had to worry about.”

She looked at him and went on. “I think in some ways, him working at the department was his way to try to break down some of that wall of distrust. A way to break down the barriers, so there wasn’t always an us and them.”

“Shades of gray,” Kemal said and he wasn’t surprised to see Eve smile. He would guess she heard that from her dad more than once when they were partners.

“Shades of gray,” Eve repeated.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Eve didn’t mind making the call to the mayor’s office after lunch. She had ideas she wanted to talk to him about.

She had some ideas brewing in her head and she wanted to feel him out about them before she put them in the written report he’d asked for.

For the most part, she liked Carl Dobson but there were times she thought he was more worried about how his decisions would poll with the public than whether they were the right decisions. It wasn’t in-your-face or blatant, but it was there as an undercurrent to everything he did.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to return my call,” he said, making a joke out of the rebuke. Yes, she should have called him as soon as she got to the office.

She ignored it and plowed ahead with her idea. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something. I know you want all of the unit heads bringing you ideas for improving accountability and community relations, but I wonder if maybe we’re going about this wrong.”

He was quiet so she kept going. “What if we impanel a community board of sorts to help on the idea of accountability and transparency? If we want to know how to better serve the community, maybe we should be asking the community for input. And a dialogue between us and some of the leaders in the community might help build back the trust we’ve lost.”

She held her breath, knowing the loss of trust was largely on her unit, but she meant what she said. She wanted to do what she could to earn it back.

“Why do you say that?” Carl asked and she didn’t know how to read his tone. She had a feeling he’d kept his inflection purposely bland.

“I’ve been talking with my former partner’s son. He teaches history over at the community college and he has a lot of ideas for improvements in policing. He’s not one of us, but he was open to dialogue. He and I have talked and, honestly, I think some of the ideas he has aren’t bad. Not everything would work for us, but there are plenty of things that would. He has some ideas about working with local mental health organizations to make counselors available to any officer who wants to call one to a scene if they think it would help a situation.”

Carl grunted. “That sounds like a liability issue.”

“So, we get them training, set some limits, and find a way to get them on our insurance. There has to be a way to do it if we make the effort.” She didn’t stop. “And there are other things. He had a lot of good ideas. Some things that have been implemented successfully in other cities that we can copy so we’re not starting completely from scratch.”

“I don’t have the money in our budget for body cams on all officers, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Eve bit off the sigh that was tempted to cross her lips. “Maybe we can find a way to raise the funds for those. And if we can’t, we can at least start by putting them on one officer in each vehicle. It’s a start, at least. Bodycams protect the officers as much as the public. We’ve seen that in other cities.”

Eve knew there were plenty of people in the department who felt the community had no business butting into policing, but she thought there was room here to listen and grow with community input.

“Can it hurt us to talk to them? To hear what they have to say?” She asked. She went with an angle she knew a politician could appreciate. “It has to be good optics.”

“Not if we can’t take any of their suggestions. If we meet with them and then reject what they want, we’ll end up looking worse than we do now.”

She felt a flare of anger. “Then don’t reject everything they want. If they aren’t things we can live with, we’ll talk over other ideas until we can find things we can both support. It’s called a discussion. It’s not meant to be one way or all or nothing. It’s meant to bring them to the table and to let us all talk about the options.”

He was quiet for a long time and she thought he was going to say no.

“Fine,” he said, “Get me a list of people you think should be in on these talks. I’m not saying yes. I want to see a list.”

He hung up before she could say any more.

Eve turned her chair, leaned back and closed her eyes. She should start by calling Glenn. As a former officer, he could bring a perspective to the panel that others couldn’t. And she’d call Kemal.

She chose to ignore the way the thought of having an excuse to call him made her feel. Almost like her heart was doing flip-flops right in her chest, which was silly, really. She wasn’t a flip-floppy-heart kind of woman.

CHAPTER NINE

Eve didn’t call Kemal right away. She was waiting to hear back from the mayor’s office on the list of names she’d submitted before she let Kemal or her former partner know that she’d floated the idea of them all working together. She’d put others on the list, too. Religious leaders, a woman who headed an organization on mental health awareness, and a few others.

She stood in front of the elevator three days later on her way back from a too short lunch run trying to work the tension out of her neck muscles. It wasn’t working.

“Did you really have to go there, Scanlon?”

Eve didn’t need to look to know who the speaker was. Adam Bursar was one of those people who seemed to growl everything he said, no matter his mood. Of course, the particular tone to today’s growl said he was actually in a bad mood.

Eve looked at the captain of Dark Fall’s Patrol Unit.

She didn’t dislike Bursar particularly. She liked to try to get along with her fellow captains when she could. It made things a lot easier. But Bursar made it difficult sometimes.

“You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about if you want me to comment on it.”

“A community panel? You want to let activists and community members tell us how to do our job?”

Ah. The mayor must have floated her idea to the other captains.

“Nothing about the panel says we have to take their suggestions without judging them on the merits for ourselves. And if there are issues with their suggestions, we can try—”

He adopted the stance he often did when he was trying to let her know he had ten years’ experience on her, so he must know best. “Don’t you get it, Eve? They don’t want to know how hard our jobs are out there. They don’t want to hear about the danger we put ourselves in every minute of every day. They just want to tell us we’re all a bunch of racist assholes who should be fired. And you just invited them into our house!”

Eve pressed the call button for the elevator again, ignoring the fact a few officers were clearly listening into the exchange. “They have valid suggestions that are worth listening to. Just because we agree to listen doesn’t mean we have to accept everything they say as law. We talk. That’s all. Or have you forgotten we’re here to serve?”

He only sneered, giving her the kind of look that said he thought she’d come to him simpering and pandering and telling him how she should have listened to him all along. It hadn’t happened yet and she didn’t think it would. Actually, she was prepared to put money on that.

The elevator door opened and she stepped on. Three of her detectives stepped around Bursar and got on with her, standing in front of the doors while they shut so Bursar had no choice but to stay where he was or walk away.

Sevier, Cantu, and Green kept their backs to her. When they were almost near the top, Cantu broke the silence.

“Cranky bugger. I think someone needs a nap.”

Eve bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She couldn’t laugh at her fellow captain in front of her people, but she did feel some of the tension flow out of her. She could always count on her detectives.

She wasn’t surprised when the Chief of Police showed up in her office an hour later.

Chief Beryl Forsythe had been with the department for a long time, and she cut her teeth as a homicide detective in New York City. She wasn’t someone to take lightly. She shut the door behind her. “I heard Bursar had something to say about your community panel idea. Anything I need to help you guys settle?”

Eve waved her off. Bursar was an ass, but he hadn’t gotten out of line. “Just wanted to let me know he didn’t like it. And he might be right. It could turn out to be a mistake. Maybe it’ll cause more friction than there already is at times.”

Chief Forsythe sat in one of the two chairs in front of Eve’s desk. “It’s a good idea. If it needs adjustment after it’s implemented, we’ll adjust.”

Eve nodded. “Thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you about it before I took it to the mayor. It was something that just popped up when I was talking to him. It wasn’t really even a fully formed idea in my head.”

The chief waved Eve off this time. “I sent a few names over to the mayor. I’ve got a friend who works at a nonprofit counseling organization. I thought they might be good to bring on board. And a couple of the other retired officers. Goodwin was a good suggestion.”

“Thanks. I haven’t asked him about it. Hopefully he won’t mind that I stuck him out there for this.” She knew the captain was thinking about Glenn Goodwin, but Eve was thinking about Glenn and Kemal. She hadn’t asked either one of them.

And she hadn’t used the excuse to reach out to Kemal again either. Her feelings for the man confused the hell out of her. She’d always seen him as Glenn’s son. Nothing more. But after the other night and their lunch the other day, she was seeing him differently. And that bothered her.

It wasn’t like she needed another complication in her life. She was dealing with enough pressures in her life at the moment without adding anything to it.

She remembered the young boy who had been dropped off with Kemal when she was at the house last. Antoine was his name and there was no denying he looked a lot like Kemal. More than once, she’d wondered what the story was there. It wasn’t her business and she had a feeling the answer meant his life was a little too complicated at the moment, too.

“Any movement on the Samantha Greer case?” the chief asked.

For the most part, the chief didn’t get into any specific case, unless it was something major. But with the Samantha Greer case, things were different. There were people on the force who remembered Glenn Goodwin’s dogged determination to solve the case. No one thought he would be proved right, that she was anything more than another runaway.

It was hard to deny a body with a suspicious cause of death.

Still, she had no news for the chief.

“Nothing so far. My gut tells me the church is involved, but I don’t have anything I can get a warrant with yet.”

The chief shook her head, lips pressed together, and Eve recognized the frustration in the gesture. She was feeling it herself on the case.

She reminded herself again and again that the child they knew was out there somewhere was likely an adult by now and not at risk. It didn’t make it any easier to swallow the fact that they had no leads. And it was possible that child was only a teenager and very much vulnerable. Samantha hadn’t been that old when she died. She could have delivered that baby only a few years before her death.

The thought of it sickened Eve.

“Keep at it,” Chief Forsythe said as she stood.

Yeah, Eve would keep at it, but would that get them anywhere? Glenn had worked this case for years.

The chief hadn’t been out of her office a full minute before the phone rang with a call coming through from the switchboard, which meant it was an outside call.

“Captain Scanlon, DFPD.” She braced herself for a reporter or someone calling with a complaint.

“This is Reverend Richardson, Officer Scanlon.”

Eve tried to ignore the way her jaw tightened at his words. She knew he was intentionally calling her officer not captain. She’d gotten used to that from people who wanted to remind her of “her place” a long time ago. She didn’t call him on it. It was what he wanted her to do and she wasn’t going to give him that right now.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Richardson?” Okay, it was catty of her, but she couldn’t resist.

“There’s a detective out here asking to interview our members, but he doesn’t have a badge.”

It didn’t take a genius to guess who that was. “And what name did he give you?” Eve asked.

“Goodwin. Detective Goodwin.”

Eve looked up at the ceiling, wishing she didn’t have to deal with this. “Can you put him in a room to wait? I’m on my way.”

She was already up and out the door as she spoke. When she got off the phone with the reverend, she dialed Kemal.

“Eve?” he answered on the second ring. “Everything okay?”

“Tell me, is your dad delusional?” As she said the words, she wondered if maybe there was any truth to it. Maybe Glenn was struggling with dementia and she just didn’t know it. No, he’d always been sharp, every conversation they’d had, he’d been fully there and as on top of things as he’d always been. Right?

Kemal snorted. “Not as far as I know. Why?”

“He’s over at the Blessed Divine Church trying to interview their members.”

She heard Kemal curse over the line and hoped he wasn’t with any of his students.

“I’m on my way over to see him,” Eve said. “Just thought I’d check in with you first.”

She had to wonder why she’d really called. It wasn’t like she needed Kemal to help her handle his dad. Had it just been an excuse to reach out to him? Maybe.

Probably.

Totally.

“I’m finishing up at the campus now, maybe I can—”

Eve cut him off. She didn’t want him adding to the scene at the church and she was perfectly capable of handling things. “No, it’s fine. I’ll let you know if there’s anything to worry about. Honestly, I just think this case has haunted him for years. Knowing what we do now, that Samantha was out there all this time and in trouble, that has to be killing him. I’ll talk to him.”

Kemal blew out a breath. “Thank you, Eve.”

Eve liked the low timbre of his voice a little too much. Liked the way the sound of her name on his lips felt almost like hands whispering over her skin. Damn, she needed to get some distance from this man. This was a phone call, for Christ’s sake.

She was probably gruffer than she needed to be when she said goodbye and ended the call without waiting for an answer from him. She had only minutes to get her response to Kemal Goodwin under wraps before she went into the Blessed Divine Church and hauled her old partner out of there.

The front of the church was quiet again as she walked through to the back. “Hello? Reverend Richardson?”

Laughter announced the arrival of one of the younger kids in the church. She recognized the young girl from when she’d been here last. The girl had interrupted the meeting with the reverend and his family, and if she remembered right, she got the impression the eight-year-old in front of her was another of the reverend’s children.

“Hi! I’m Anne.” The girl made the announcement as though she expected fanfare to follow. “You’re wearing pants.”

Eve blinked and looked down at her pantsuit. She couldn’t argue with the girl. She was in fact wearing pants.

The girl went on and Eve knew she was quoting the bible, though she couldn’t say what verse it was.

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Anne crinkled her nose and leaned closer to Eve. “Lila’s mom lets her wear pants because they don’t live in the church compound.” Her look became wistful. “She gets to climb trees and everything.”

Eve opened her mouth to speak, but the reverend entered the room, his voice cutting through the large space and the conversation.

“Thank you for coming out so quickly, detective.” He angled a look to the young girl. It wasn’t unkind, but it did send her immediately from the room, a hot pink flush on her face as though she’d been caught doing something she knew she shouldn’t.

“I’m sorry for the trouble,” Eve said, then realized she wasn’t at all sorry. Sure, Glenn was way out of line coming to the church and trying to interview its members, but this had given her another chance to interact with the reverend without a warrant.

They walked down a hall, passing a room where ten or more women sat with sewing in their laps. The low hum of conversation stopped as she passed by and eyes avoided her gaze.

They really spent their day sewing?

She spoke to the reverend once they’d passed the room. “I’ve seen the church’s cheese booth over at the farmer’s market. Do you also sell other goods? I noticed the women were sewing.”

He gave her a bland smile. “Idle hands. I don’t have to tell you where that leads, do I?”

As he spoke, he did that thing she’d seen him do with his hands before, one thumb pressing a circle into the palm of the opposite hand.

Her return smile was just as bland.

The reverend went on. “The cheeses we make provide much of the income our family lives on.”

Eve wondered if he meant his family or the church family as a whole. She had a feeling it was the latter. The place had the feel of a commune where all were expected to work and all shared in the bounty of that work. Wow, she was using words like bounty like the church’s outdated ways were rubbing off on her.

Reverend Richardson didn’t seem to notice she wasn’t contributing to the conversation as he went on. “Our days are filled from morning till evening here. The men of the church work the fields and care for the cattle. The women are in charge of the milking and making the cheese, but they also make and sell quilts. Of course, all of our clothes are made by hand here, so there’s a lot to do in that sense, too.”

“So their hands are never idle, then?” Eve asked, unable to resist. Heaven forbid the women have a day where they read for pleasure or relax.

They stopped in front of a door. “Exactly,” the reverend said, and Eve realized he’d taken her quite seriously.

Glenn didn’t look the least bit surprised to see her when the reverend opened the door. He was pacing the small room he’d been put in. He had to have realized they were killing time until she got there.

She did notice he was decidedly cleaned up from the last time she’d seen him. His hair was back to its trim, neat cut and he wore clean slacks with the kind of buttoned-down shirt and blazer he’d worn when he was on the force.

Eve didn’t say a word to Glenn. She turned to the reverend and thanked him for his time before gesturing to Glenn to follow her.

Of course, the reverend wasn’t about to let them find their own way out. Eve tried to take advantage of the chance to talk as they wound their way back to the front of the church.

“Has your brother remembered anything else about Samantha’s disappearance that might help us locate where she went all those years ago?”

She saw the way the man tensed by her side, but he immediately relaxed and continued as though nothing had happened.

“We’ll be sure to call you if anyone remembers anything that might be useful.”

“And your daughter is looking up the records of Samantha’s arrival for me, right?” Eve reminded him.

He nodded. “I’ll remind her to get that information to you.”

Eve stopped and turned toward him as they entered the church nave through a door just behind the sanctuary. “Are there any women who were friendly with Samantha who might remember something? Maybe someone she was close with and might have confided in if there was something going on in her life?”

Reverend Richardson’s jaw ticked. It was subtle but it was there.

Eve kept her eyes locked on his as she waited for an answer.

“Well, I’ll have to ask Faith about that.”

“Is Faith here now?” Eve asked, looking around as though his wife might pop out of nowhere to answer Eve’s questions.

“No, I’m afraid she’s overseeing the women in the cheese house today.”

Eve wondered about that. She would give anything to get further into the compound and see what it was like. Was there really a whole house devoted to making cheese, or was it more like a one room shed they used to make the cheese? Or maybe a room in the barn?

Eve made mental notes. Some of the women were here sewing, while others were out making cheese. She wondered who was in charge of the kids during the day. Anne had been wandering here when she’d come in. Did the church have a school or did each of the families homeschool?

She smiled. “Well, I’ll have to stop by then and see Faith another time.”

Another tick in the man’s jaw. “I’ll need to ask you not to put undue stress on Faith. We’ve just discovered she’s carrying again and I don’t want her to have to take on any additional strain.”

Eve frowned then realized what he meant. Carrying as in carrying a baby. The woman had to be in her fifties. Bless her for having the energy for another child.

Eve didn’t reply. She wasn’t making any promises one way or the other.

She waited until she and Glenn were outside before speaking. “You know that can’t happen again, right?”

He didn’t answer.

“Glenn, I mean it. This can’t happen. You need to let me do my job. You need to let me build a case and get in there with a warrant.” She looked at the church, not able to see much of the compound that lay behind the tall fence at the back of the public church building.

“Do you have anything yet?” He asked and she didn’t like the fact he’d given her no assurances he wouldn’t show up here again.

“I have some files from other cases that might be related.”

That got his attention. “I never found any related cases.”

“They aren’t from our city. There are missing girls from surrounding counties and cities, but close enough they had some interaction with the church. Can you come take a look at them for me? I’d like your opinion. Maybe you’ll spot something we haven’t.”

He pointed at her. “I see what you’re doing, Eve Scanlon.”

She grinned and he shook his head. He knew damned well she was keeping him busy, but they also both knew he could be valuable if she could get him focused on the other missing girls’ files.

He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Alright. I’ll follow you back to the station.”

“Where is Antoine?” She asked, before she thought the better of it. “Is he in school?” She was fishing for information on the boy. She’d wanted to know if he was Kemal’s son from the minute she set eyes on him. The resemblance between the two couldn’t be denied.

Glenn shook his head. “No, his mother lives in Denver so I need to get him registered for school here. I don’t think she’ll be back anytime soon. Needs to get cleaned up.”

“She’s using?” Eve felt bad for the kid. That couldn’t be easy.

Glenn nodded. “One parent in prison and the other using drugs. If she loves him, she’ll let him stay with me and Kemal.”

Eve’s mind ran over what he’d just said. One parent in prison. “He’s Kemal’s nephew?” She asked, putting the pieces together. He was Kemal’s brother’s son. Isaac was in prison for selling drugs. She didn’t know details but knew it had killed Glenn to see one of his boys go to prison.

And yeah, she should have guessed it was Isaac’s son. She’d known he had a kid. Of course, she had no idea he was in the area.

Glenn was looking at her with an intensity she didn’t like.

“You thought he was Kemal’s boy.”

She shrugged. “Antoine looks a lot like Kemal. It wasn’t hard to make that assumption.”

Glenn’s nod was slow and his eyes all too knowing.

Eve wasn’t about to admit to her former partner that she had a stupid schoolgirl crush on his son. A son who was not at all happy about her role in his dad’s life. Who would rather she just disappear instead of dragging his father back into the stress of the case he was obsessed about for the last two decades. Nope. Not happening.

She wrenched open her car door, the motion pushing Glenn back, but she didn’t care. She was nipping this conversation in the bud before it took off.

“I’ll meet you back at the station. You can start going through those files. We need a break on this case, Glenn.”

She needed a break from her thoughts, too. And from the stupid emotions churning through her. She needed a break from it all.

CHAPTER TEN

She didn’t get much of a break. Kemal showed up in her office a few hours later.

He didn’t even wait for the officer who’d escorted him to leave before speaking. “I can’t find my dad. He’s not answering his phone and he wasn’t at home when I brought Antoine home from school.”

Eve blinked. “He’s here. He’s fine.”

Kemal looked around like he expected his dad to be in her office somewhere. “What is he doing here? I had to dump Antoine off on a neighbor while I looked for Glenn. What the hell is he doing here?”

“He’s fine. He’s just looking over some cases for me.”

“He’s not a cop anymore, Eve. He’s an old man with a bad heart. You can’t just pull him in to work your cases whenever you want.”

Eve simply raised a brow and watched as Kemal simmered.

He turned to her and crossed his arms and she hated that her eyes caught for a split second on the muscles in his arms as they flexed. She had to get this under control.

“Eve, he’s not supposed to be under stress.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You told me he’s been in a bad depression for weeks.” She stood and crossed to the door. “Come with me.”

She didn’t wait to see if he was following her. She walked to the far end of the bullpen, winding through the cubicles that housed her detectives’ desks. She knew her detectives’ eyes were all on her and Kemal. They weren’t used to seeing civilians pop by her office whenever they wanted to. They’d seen Kemal in here with her more than once now and she could feel the attention that was bringing.

When she reached the small room at the back where she had set up the files on the missing girls, she turned to Kemal.

She gestured through the glass in the room where Kemal’s father sat, deep into a file he had spread out in front of him.

“What do you see?”

Kemal looked through the glass but didn’t answer. His brows pinched together and she had a feeling he was wrestling with something.

She answered for him when he didn’t. “I see a man who got out of bed today and showered and shaved for the first time in weeks. He looks like the old Glenn I used to know. He’s engaged. He’s not home mourning the loss of his world, his wife. He’s living, Kemal, and that has to mean something.”

Kemal sucked in a deep breath and then seemed to hold it as he watched his dad through the glass. He rubbed his neck as he let the breath out in a slow whoosh. “He’s been so lost.”

Eve heard the ache in Kemal’s voice and part of her wanted to reach out to him. She was well aware they were in a room with her detectives, though. She could feel eyes on them. Not to mention, she had no idea how Kemal would react if she did. She was far from his favorite person.

As Eve watched, Kemal seemed to harden his shell again, as though he was bringing up some kind of armor.

“You can’t let him out in the field, Eve. He can’t handle that. He needs to remember he’s not a cop anymore.”

Eve nodded. People who weren’t on the job didn’t realize that you never left it. It was a part of you. Being a cop was something that was in the blood, not something you turned on and off with retirement. But she didn’t plan to let Glenn out in the field.

Kemal turned to leave, ordering her to tell his dad to turn his cell phone on as he did. The man had to have the last word on everything.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Two days later, Eve was getting ready to leave for lunch when her phone rang. She ignored the flip-flopping in her stomach when she saw it was Kemal. She also reminded her stomach she didn’t do that sort of thing.

“Everything okay with Glenn?” She asked by way of answering. It wasn’t like Kemal was in the habit of calling her on a regular basis.

“He’s fine. At home, I think. At least, he was the last time I saw him. He and Antoine were planning to marathon the Lego movies.”

Eve grinned. It took only the mention of the movie for her to have the everything is awesome song in her head.

“I was actually calling about something else.” Kemal’s words drew her back to the conversation. “I’m teaching an after-school workshop for a group of high school students. It’s a new program the community college is running where they come weekly for a month and we have a guest speaker for each week.”

“Okay,” Eve said, not remotely sure where he was going with the story.

“Tonight was supposed to be a talk about race and understanding cross cultural viewpoints.”

“Okay.” She was sounding like a broken record.

Kemal laughed at her. “I had a minister from a local church and a volunteer from the community center coming to lead the discussion, but the minister came down with food poisoning yesterday after the church potluck.”

Eve flinched. She’d had food poisoning once a few years ago and didn’t wish that on anyone.

“I just got a call from the other guy and he was in a car accident. He’s not hurt badly but he’s got a broken ankle and has some pretty severe bruising from the seat belt.”

Eve went back to her standby. “Okay.”

“Sooooo,” he said and she had a feeling this was headed somewhere she wasn’t going to like. “How do you feel about coming and tag teaming a discussion on race and cross-cultural viewpoints with me, Captain?”

“Oh.” Well, at least she’d graduated from okay. Or maybe it was a step back. Oh was shorter than okay.

Somehow, though, she found herself sitting at the front of a college lecture room that evening as Kemal guided the students through what was bound to be a hard, uncomfortable talk.

“But our experience with cops is totally different,” one teen was saying. He had deep black skin with hazel eyes and precisely cropped hair. “You know you can go to a cop for help. I see one and I have to check myself, make sure I’m not doing anything that can be taken wrong, that might get me stopped.”

“But if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have to worry, right?” a boy in a Dark Falls High football jersey said.

The anger that lit the eyes of several of his classmates was instant.

“Sure,” said the girl sitting next to him, “and all those people who got shot and killed by cops did something wrong. Asked for it.” She glanced at Eve as she spoke, a challenge in her gaze.

Eve was completely out of her element. She didn’t know how to have this conversation. Yes, she’d had a similar one with Kemal, but this was harder. She felt like she might say the wrong thing with these students.

“I didn’t say that,” the football jersey kid said, raising his hands. “I’m just saying, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, do you have to worry that you’ll get jacked up if a cop just walks by you?”

“Yeah,” said about five of the African-American students at once.

To his credit, the kid in the football jersey seemed to be listening. He looked like he was processing what they were saying and struggling to see it through the eyes of the other students.

Kemal seemed to sense the kid’s openness and pushed. “Jeff, can you tell us about some of your memories of police officers as a kid?”

The football jersey guy —Jeff— lifted a shoulder. “Sure. I mean, you see them at parades and stuff when you’re little. Or like, if we were out and saw a cop, my mom would remind me that I can always look for someone in a uniform if I get lost.”

A girl with auburn hair spoke next. “Yeah, we get the talk about going to a uniform for help. Other kids get the talk about always following all the directions if a cop stops them, about keeping their hands in sight and say yes, sir and stuff even if they don’t think the cop had any right to stop them. My friend said her mom even told her she has to tell the cop if she’s going to open her glove compartment or lean over to get her registration and stuff.”

“Dude, that’s messed up,” said football jersey.

Kemal nodded and turned a girl in the front row. “Tisha, can you tell us what some of your experiences with the police were as a child?”

She pursed her lips and her eyes went a little wide. “It wasn’t like that. I would see my neighbors get arrested. I watched one time while the cops threw one of my cousins on the ground when all he was trying to do was ask them why they was messing with his dad. His dad didn’t do anything wrong, but they were harassing him, asking him for ID and shit.”

“But doesn’t that have more to do with the neighborhood you live in than what the color of your skin is?”

There was grumbling from the students around him and Eve could feel a rising tension among the students.

She felt like she wasn’t contributing at all to the conversation. Kemal must have felt the same because he came and sat on the edge of the table she was sitting behind.

“Eve, you and I have had a few talks about some of these things and they’re never easy or comfortable, are they?”

Eve smiled. “Not even remotely. They’re important, though.”

Kemal was in full blown teaching mode, and it was fun to watch him.

“That’s why we have to remember throughout the whole conversation that people’s feelings and views are all important. Listening is as important as talking. It’s how we can help people understand each other. I didn’t set this class up to make sure everyone shared my views. I did it to give you all the tools you need to listen to ideas that might be different from your own, to learn to engage in dialogue that might open you to new ideas and might help others to come around to your way of thinking.”

“Nothing you say about police brutality is gonna get through to a cop,” said another one of the kids. This one wore a baseball cap and a sneer. He stared at Eve unapologetically.

“Not true,” Kemal said. “Yes, there are some officers who don’t believe there’s really any problem. But there are others who can and do see both sides of the issue. Our talks have taught me some things, too.”

“Like what?” The kid challenged.

“For example, I didn’t know that police officers exhibit a higher incidence of suicidal thoughts than the general population. Ten percent higher.”

Eve was familiar with the statistic and more.

“Cry me a river,” someone said from the back of the room and Eve wanted to flinch but didn’t.

“Eve, maybe you can tell the kids some of what you’ve gotten from our talks.”

“I’ve started looking into the possibility of new programs for the city. Things like the No Broken Windows Policing you pointed me to. But some of what I got out of the talk came after the fact. Our discussion got me trying to think about how your experiences were different from mine.” Eve focused on Kemal, trying to pretend the kids didn’t exist for the moment. She was used to talking in front of the press but the kids made her nervous, like she might mess this up and do more harm than good being here.

“When I was fifteen, I was at a friend’s house one afternoon. She had just moved to town and I didn’t know her family yet, but she lived in one of the big houses on the west side of town. It seemed like a mansion to me at the time. She had a pool in the back yard and we decided to sit by the pool to do our homework.”

A couple of snickers came from the kids and Eve glanced at them and grinned. Yeah, they hadn’t gotten much actual work done.

“I forgot one of my books inside and had to run back in to get it. I didn’t mean to walk in on a conversation but I did. I heard my friend’s mom talking to her brother. She was asking him what I was. I remember just freezing at those words.”

She said, “But what is she? I mean she’s not white. Is she Latin or Spanish or something? Maybe Portuguese?”

Eve paused as she struggled to remember the rush of emotions the woman’s words had caused. “Hearing that, I was hurt and confused. There was something in the tone that told me this girl’s mom wasn’t asking out of idle curiosity. She was asking because she didn’t think my skin was okay.”

Eve looked down at the dark olive skin on her arm. She did have some Portuguese in her and also some Italian, but there was German and French and some other things in there, too. She had never identified with any one part of her heritage strongly because no one culture had stood out more than the others.

She knew the woman was referring to the olive tone of her skin, and to the deep brown eyes and her almost black hair. “It was like she was saying my appearance made me less than.” Eve looked at the group of kids. “So, when Kemal and I talked, I went home and remembered that day. I sat with that, remembered those feelings, and then tried to multiply it times a hundred. I remembered the way I’ve sometimes been treated as a woman, especially as a woman doing what some see as a man’s job. Then I tried to take those feelings and multiply it and imagine what it would be like to be black. I can’t experience someone else’s world, but I can try to put myself in their shoes and try to learn from that.”

“But isn’t that the point?” A blonde girl in a cheer uniform said. “I mean, a lot of us face discrimination each day. I’ll never be paid what a man is paid for the same work, but, like, do I have to remind people about that every day? Sometimes it just seems like black people don’t want us to ever forget that they were slaves or something. Like we didn’t do that. None of us here had slaves, so why do we have to be reminded day in and day out.”

“My family had slaves,” one boy said. “I’ve seen the will of my great, great uncle or maybe it was my great, great, great uncle. But whatever. He listed ‘a negro by the name of William’ in with furniture and horses when he left things to people. He included ‘a dead negro by the name of Lavinia and all her children,’ naming her dead body like it was a thing just so he could list her children like they were things. It was …” the kid just shook his head like he didn’t know what it was or how to describe it.

The girl in the cheer uniform frowned and then said, “so you and your family owe them, then, but that doesn’t mean the whole world owes them anything.”

Eve could see the anger in the room coming to a boil again. “I think some of what your classmates are saying is that this isn’t just about one thing. It’s not only about slavery, or only about relations between police officers and the black community or only about the difference in medical care they can expect because of the color of their skin. Maybe you feel like they talk about it every day and claim it every day, but to them it’s something they live with and experience every day. It’s not something they can walk away from.”

One of the African-American students in the back called out. “So what’s the answer then? Why are we talking about all of this if you don’t give us any answers, professor?”

Eve turned to Kemal, glad she hadn’t been asked the question. She didn’t know what the answers were.

“Oh, I don’t have answers for you,” Kemal said, a bit of playfulness laced through the seriousness of the words.

The kids laughed, but they also grumbled a bit about his lack of a solution for them.

“Let me ask you this,” he said, “will any of you walk out of here with a better idea of who your classmates are and the things they deal with? Do any of you feel like you know Captain Scanlon better now? Like you can see she’s not just her badge, but a person just like you and me?”

There were nods and called out answers.

“Then we’ve made progress,” Kemal said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Kemal drummed the steering wheel with one thumb as he looked at the building across the street. He shouldn’t be here. He sure as hell shouldn’t be thinking about going in.

Still, he looked again at her apartment building and wondered what she would say if he showed up on her doorstep. More than once, he’d gotten the sense she was feeling twinges of what he’d been feeling the last few days. That undeniable attraction that just didn’t seem to want to go anywhere no matter how hard he shoved at it.

Kemal jumped at a tap on his window. He looked out to see Eve, brows raised as she looked at him through the glass.

He rolled the window down.

“Waiting for me?” she asked.

He looked behind him and saw her car. He’d been so damned lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t seen her pull up.

“I was thinking,” he said. Smooth. Real smooth, Kemal.

She leaned a hip on the car. “Yeah? About what?”

“About coming in.”

The night air thickened between them. She had to know what he was saying. Had to know if he came inside, they weren’t going to be having tea and cookies.

He didn’t know if he wanted her to say yes or no.

She turned and walked away, and he had his answer in the way his heart hit the floor of his car. He had wanted her to say yes. More than he knew. More than he wanted to admit.

Eve turned back, eyes dancing. “Coming Goodwin?”

God, yes. He got out of the car, and caught up with her in two strides. His hand slid to her back as they walked. He wanted his hand on her. He wouldn’t disrespect her by doing more than this one simple touch out in public, but he needed some kind of contact with her.

He had to say, his patience was impressive as he followed her into her apartment and waited while she secured her weapon. But when she turned to him, that patience broke.

He pressed her to the back of the door, his arms on either side of her head, leaning in but not kissing her.

“Tell me you want this, Eve. Tell me yes.” His mouth hovered inches from hers but he needed to hear her say it.

Her answer was a whisper but it was the one he wanted. Hearing her say yes did something to him. His whole damned body tightened in response and he wanted to hear it again.

“Yes,” she said again, this time pressing her hips forward to meet his own.

He groaned and caught her mouth with his, stepping in to let his whole body meet hers. She matched him perfectly, her body lining up against him in all the right places.

He looped an arm behind her back and lifted her as she held his shoulders to steady herself. He walked toward the back of the apartment, hoping he’d run into a bed sometime soon.

She broke their kiss. “Last door on the right.”

He found her mouth again, not liking the lack of contact in the least.

When he got her to her room, he set her down, not taking in anything other than the neatly made bed. He was about to unravel the military precision of it.

He looked at her as she lay beneath him, her suit now mussed, her hair coming down out of the tight knot she kept it in.

He stroked the soft skin of her temple. “Take your hair down for me?”

That was heat he saw in her eyes. She kept her gaze locked on him as she reached her hands up and pulled her hair free.

He cursed under his breath and pulled the strands loose, spreading them over the pillow beneath her. Why the hell was that so hot?

Deep brown eyes watched him as he lowered himself over her. He didn’t go for her mouth this time. He went to her neck, running his lips over her soft skin, eliciting a moan that went right to his dick.

“Christ, Eve.”

Eve looked up at Kemal, knowing this was stupid. She shouldn’t be here with this man, and yet, she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

She thought she heard buttons ripping when he worked her out of her jacket and blouse. Hell, she just didn’t care. For once, she didn’t care.

Her body tingled with each gruff whisper, with each pass of his hands over her skin, each touch of lips and teeth.

She writhed beneath him, pushing her hips into him, wanting more. Wanting to lose herself in the feel of him, in the sensations he was drowning her in.

“So gorgeous, Eve. So damned beautiful, woman.”

She slid her hands under his shirt and raked her nails down his back. She wanted his clothes off. And more of hers. She was still wearing far too much.

She wished she wasn’t wearing the sensible tan underwear and bra she had on. Wished she had something sexy on other than the plain black suit she wore. Wished she had on high heels instead of serviceable boots that let her do her job.

But that wasn’t her. She wasn’t soft and feminine. If he wanted that he’d be disappointed.

Kemal stopped, pulling back and she almost looked away when his eyes found hers.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You froze. Do you want me to stop?”

She shook her head. She didn’t want him to stop. She wanted to be lost in the feelings of him again instead of wondering if she’d be enough for him.

He put a finger on her temple, rubbing softly. “What’s going on in here?”

She took a deep breath. “Sorry. I was thinking about my underwear. It’s not sexy.”

He gave a bark of laughter and looked down at her. Then he started to tug at the button on her pants, a grin on his face. “I’mma have to see these not-so-sexy undies.” He looked up at her. “Are they horrible? If they’re horrible, I can get rid of them for you. Say the word and they’re gone.”

His playfulness got to her and she laughed. The laughter left her in a breathy gasp when his mouth went to her hip bone as he peeled off her pants.

Then he was making her laugh again when he put a finger under the elastic waistband of her underwear and tugged.

“Eve, these things are truly God-awful.”

She went from moaning and begging for release, to laughing at him and back again, over and over as he ran his hands and mouth over her. Until he finally, finally ripped an orgasm from her before finding his own release deep inside of her.

When he fell on top of her, she was surprised at the weight of the tall well-muscled man, but she didn’t mind it at all. Somehow, he’d leaned enough to one side that he wasn’t crushing her. She ran her hands over sweat-slicked skin that was a deep brown with small scars here and there.

She touched one on his shoulder and didn’t have to ask where it had come from. She remembered his father coming into work late one day. Kemal had been in an accident at the community center while they were replacing some fencing.

Glenn had insisted on going to the hospital over Kemal’s objections, even though Kemal had been in his twenties by then.

She ran her fingers over the jagged mark.

“Accident at the community center,” he said. “I tripped and got in a wrestling match with a power saw and it won.”

“I remember. Your dad was still shaking when he came on shift.”

Kemal chuckled into her neck and she squirmed as his breath tickled her. “I thought he was gonna take the needle from the doctor and try to stitch it up himself the way he was hovering in the emergency room.”

Eve grinned, able to picture Glenn doing just that.

Kemal went on, rolling off her slightly so he could shift to one side, propping his head on his hand. “My mom was all, ‘you sure a Band Aid wouldn’t do?’ when I told her I was going to get stitched up. Dad hit the sirens and beat me to the ER.”

“Your mom was a tough woman. Your dad always said she should have been a doctor with the way she handled blood and emergencies.”

Kemal’s mother had been a phlebotomist, drawing blood on patients all day long at a local lab, so blood didn’t bother her in the least.

Kemal’s answer was quiet. “Yeah, she handled things better than he did when it came to one of us being sick or hurt.”

Eve had a feeling he was thinking of his mom in those last months. His dad had had to deal with sickness and blood then. Cancer meant facing a lot of things you didn’t want to.

“Thanks for getting my pops out of there today. I was hoping having Antoine here would keep him busy and close to home, but Jayce’s mom was all over that boy. She apparently had no problem watching him while my dad went out to play cops and robbers.”

Eve shook her head, but she had to laugh at the image of Glenn running around with a toy gun and one of those plastic sheriff’s badges you could get at the toy store.

“Your dad says he’s going to get Antoine enrolled in school here. How long do you think he’ll be with you guys?”

Kemal rubbed a hand down his face. “Last time Chandra left him with us it was months before she came back. She’d been on the streets and back and forth to meetings. She was trying but she wasn’t in any shape to have a kid with her. This time, she got into a government rehab program, so we’ll see. Could be a month. I’m guessing more.”

“That’s got to be hard.” She saw plenty of addicts in her line of work. She knew the kind of hold drugs or alcohol could have on a person. Knew the hopelessness and the battle Chandra had ahead of herself. It would be easy for Eve to think the woman should get clean for the sake of her kid, but getting clean was no easy task. It was something Chandra would have to battle for every day for the rest of her life.

That could be overwhelming.

Kemal was running his hand up and down Eve’s arm, the heat warming her.

“He’s a good kid.” Kemal’s hand was slowing on her arm and Eve watched as his eyes began to close.

She kept watching as his face relaxed and his breathing evened into the steady pattern of sleep. She wanted to reach out and run her fingers over his brow. The part where it was always so tight and tense when he was awake was relaxed now.

She looked at the smooth dark skin of his cheeks and nose. It was beautiful in its richness, its depth.

She let herself watch him sleep for a few more minutes before slipping out of the bed and throwing a sweatshirt and leggings on, and heading for the kitchen. She was tempted to go to sleep herself, but she hadn’t had a chance to finish going through the notes from the case files they’d gotten from other precincts on the missing girls who had a link to the church. She’d brought the files home and knew if she wanted to look at them, now was her chance. Tomorrow was another day filled with meetings and paperwork. It was now or never.

Well, not never, but not soon enough if she wanted to catch up on what her detectives had found on the case.

She started with the notes from the most recent case. Camille Gallagher, fourteen years old. Missing from Glade Park two years ago. She had been a runaway living on the streets in an abandoned building with other kids.

Eve looked at the detective’s notes. He went to the church and talked to Faith Richardson. She’d said she wasn’t sure of the girl’s name, but that she might have come to the free meals the church offered a time or two. Her answer was vague, said she couldn’t be sure since they saw so many young kids come through there “looking for hope,” as she put it.

Eve skimmed down the rest of the page. The detective had tracked down one of the girl’s friends, Prissie, no last name. She confirmed they sometimes went to the free meals, said Camille might have gone to one of the church services. It was a loose connection, at best.

The detective had tracked down the girl’s parents, but they hadn’t heard from her in over a year. The detective didn’t get a good feeling about the home situation. His gut said the step-father might have been the reason the girl left home, but he didn’t put more than that in his notes. It was just a “stepdad” notation with a couple of question marks next to it.

Could be something as innocent as the stepfather being too strict for the girl’s liking or it could be something much worse. Eve sent an email to John Sevier to have him follow up on that in the morning. It might not help to find the girl, but the more they could dig up here, the better.

She heard the door to her bedroom open and looked up to see Kemal, his jeans slung low on his hips, the button still undone. He was pulling a shirt over his chest and she almost told him not to. Almost pulled him back to her bed.

But this had been a bad idea. She needed to get some sleep. To clear her head of all the emotions this man had sent swirling through it. All the emotions she was trying to ignore by burying herself in this case.

He came and stood behind her, hands on her shoulders. “Sorry I passed out on you.”

She looked up and smiled. “No worries. Just getting a little more work done before I head to bed.”

He nodded and leaned down, kissing her, slow, firm, deep. It was a hell of a goodbye kiss.

She reached one arm up and snaked it around his neck, but he pulled away, a laugh on his lips.

“If we start this again, I won’t leave and neither of us will get much sleep.”

Eve nodded. She had a feeling they’d just complicated things a lot. Too much, probably. She needed space and, she had a feeling, so did he.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Eve didn’t make it into her office the following morning. Her drive to work was interrupted by a call from the Mayor’s office, and this time, he wanted her there in person.

She didn’t like the sound of that, but had no choice but to go.

Still, as she listened to the Mayor tell her he’d gotten a call from the church, she had to fight the urge to tell him to screw himself.

“The girl is a runaway, Eve. I have enough issues right now with people accusing the city of all kinds of things. Tensions are high. I don’t have to tell you that. And I don’t need to tell you that adding accusations of harassment of our city’s religious leaders isn’t going to help. You need to back off the church.”

She felt her back go ramrod straight, which was saying something since she usually sat pretty tall to begin with. “And if the church is responsible for her and the other missing kids? What then?”

He sighed and looked out the window. “We’ve made some progress lately with your idea for the committee, for bringing in community representatives. It would be a shame to see that all go down the drain because you can’t let go of this idea that a church is somehow involved with runaway kids.”

She could hear the message beneath the words. Throwaway kids was what he meant. Her jaw tightened.

“I’m not going to ignore a solid lead like this because we’re afraid of the fallout. There was evidence that this woman was held against her will, bound by the wrists and ankles.”

Mayor Dobson frowned. “You don’t know if that happened before or after she went missing. My understanding is this girl was a foster kid. Maybe those marks are from her childhood. She could have ended up in the system because she was abused.”

Eve shook her head. “You’re reaching with that one. She had no record of those kinds of injuries on her before she went missing. She spent years somewhere else, and there’s no ignoring the fact she was murdered and dumped in a grave. It’s not something that can be explained away.”

Dobson turned toward the window, as though not willing to look her in the eye as he made his next pronouncement. “You need to take this investigation another way, away from the church.”

“Or?” Eve asked.

“Or I don’t know that we can make your community panel idea happen.”

Eve stood, her whole body vibrating with anger at what she was hearing. She’d respected the mayor most of the time, even when she didn’t always agree with him. She never once thought he’d do something like this. Pull something this abhorrent.

“I’m not going to run my investigation based on a threat. My detectives and I will go where the evidence leads us. If that’s to the church, so be it.” She didn’t feel the need to add that she knew they couldn’t go back to the church without evidence. Without a warrant. “A community panel is the right thing to do. If you won’t do it, that’s on you. I’ll take it someplace else. The state legislature could institute that as well as you could. If I need to do that, I will.”

She had no idea what she was saying. She had never gone to the state legislature for something and wouldn’t know where to start, but if he thought he could hold this over her head, he was wrong.

She didn’t wait to be dismissed. He wasn’t her chief. She left the building, fighting to slow her breathing, fighting not to throw something.

There was no way in hell she would write off this case as just another runaway who ended up in a bad situation. No way in hell.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Eve didn’t go straight to the office. She went to the gym on the bottom floor of the police precinct and changed into sweats and a t-shirt for a session on the heavy bag. Her punches and kicks were not disciplined and precise the way they usually were. But that wasn’t what she was going for now. She was going for an outlet, release for the anger that had built inside her.

It helped a little. And while she showered, she got an idea. Back in front of her computer twenty minutes later, she googled the church and looked for people who had left it. People who might have a story to tell, who might be able to give her some insight into what was really happening behind those doors.

She found a woman in Nevada who blogged about women’s rights and political activism, but also mentioned her mother had left the church when she was a young girl. The woman’s mother had died four years ago, but she could see what the woman remembered.

Eve got the woman’s number and picked up the phone to dial.

“Shelly Stamp?” Eve asked and then identified herself and explained why she was calling, that she was looking for information on the church.

“I don’t know how much I can tell you. I was only three when my mom got us out of there, so I don’t remember anything.”

“Did your mom tell you about the church? Is there anything she might have talked about that could give us some idea of what’s happening in the compound?”

That’s how Eve had started to think about it. It was a compound. They were walled in and protective, as much as they tried to pretend otherwise. Any information they’d given her had been on the surface level only. And her gut said it was all a façade.

The woman paused, then offered, “She was afraid of them, I can tell you that much. It’s why she moved us away from there. She didn’t talk about them much but sometimes she would mention how it was normal until the 1980s. Then it started getting really strict and strange. The women in the church had always been subservient to the men, but they started things like a bleeding house where women went when they menstruated. They were seen as dirty.”

Eve could hear the bite in the woman’s tone. It’s no wonder she was an advocate for women’s rights.

“My mom thought there might have been wife sharing going on, but she wasn’t sure. It was enough for her to leave, though.”

Eve scribbled notes as the woman talked. “Can you think of anything else? Anyone in particular she mentioned?”

“She talked once about the reverend’s wife. Grace or Faith or something like that. All the women went into confinement when they were pregnant. They went into it for like the last four weeks or something, like being pregnant was some shameful thing like with the bleeding house. But the reverend’s wife took it to the extreme. She went into confinement for almost her entire pregnancy every time she had a kid.”

“Do you know of anyone else who left the church who might be able to talk with me?” Eve asked.

“A woman reached out to me once. She said she’d left and was looking for other people from the church to talk to. Honestly, I didn’t reply to her email. I knew my mom wouldn’t have wanted to relive what she saw happening there and I didn’t have anything to say to the woman. I mean, I wasn’t really a part of it, you know?”

Eve didn’t answer the question directly. “Do you still have the email from her? Could you reach out to her and get her my contact information? I really need to try to get as much information as possible.”

She didn’t say that she thought the church was involved in a missing persons case. She was treading on dangerous ground with the mayor trying to pull her off the case and her ignoring him.

Eve gave the woman her contact information to pass along to the other church member and ended the call.

She stared down at her notes. Bleeding houses and confinement? What the hell century were they living in at the church.

The phone call had confirmed Eve’s suspicions. What she’d been allowed to see over there, what the public was allowed to see, was nothing like what was happening behind that fence. Nothing at all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Eve got the invitation from Kemal but Glenn seemed to know she was coming when she showed up for dinner.

“Antoine, take Eve’s coat for her,” he said over his shoulder to the young boy who stood behind him.

“Hello, Antoine,” Eve said, handing over her coat. She had secured her firearm in her trunk and removed her shoulder holster. Now she probably looked like anyone in a suit instead of the cop she was.

“Ma’am,” he said as he took her coat and ran off with it.

“Kemal’s stopping by the community center when he finishes with work, but he’ll be back soon. Get you a drink?” Glenn moved into the house and Eve followed.

Antoine came through the living room as she and Glenn were walking back to the kitchen. He flopped onto the couch on his stomach, reaching for the remote.

“Uh-uh, little man. We have company. Come in the kitchen and help with the cooking.”

If Antoine grumbled about it, she didn’t hear it. Within minutes, Antoine had been put to work. He seemed to know his way around the kitchen as well as his grandfather did. Eve was impressed.

“Eve, will you grab the chicken out of the oven. I set it in there to keep it warm earlier.”

“I need to come here more often. I usually open a can of tuna for dinner.” When she pulled open the oven, the smell of fried chicken hit her full force.

“That wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Kemal said, walking into the room with a smile. He was in a suit, tie hanging loose around his neck and his eyes flashed as he winked at her.

“Wash up first, son,” Glenn said pointing to the door and Eve couldn’t help but grin at the way Glenn still bossed his full-grown son like he was ten.

Kemal winked at her, stole a roll from the basket on the counter, earning a look from his dad, before heading out the door. She heard his heavy steps on the stairs and heard a door shut upstairs.

And then damn if she wasn’t thinking about him stripping out of his clothes. Hell, she put the chicken down on a trivet and then turned back to the oven and took a little longer than needed to push the rack back in and close it. She was really working on cooling herself down and clearing the images of a very naked Kemal out of her head.

“Antoine, see what Ms. Eve wants to drink.”

Eve turned and found Antoine behind her waiting for her drink order with a pad and pencil like a waiter.

She couldn’t stop her laugh, even though it brought a scowl to his face.

“Sorry,” she offered. “I just didn’t know I was going to be waited on.” She went and sat at the table on the other side of the kitchen. “It’s kind of nice.”

Now Antoine grinned at her so she played along. “What are my choices?”

He looked up, squinting at the ceiling. “Water, milk…” He turned to Glenn and stage whispered. “What else we got, Pops?”

The skin around Glenn’s eyes crinkled in smile. “What else do we have?”

“I just asked you that.”

Eve had to push her hand to her mouth to stifle the laugh at that one as Glenn rolled his eyes. Kemal came in and took in the scene before carrying the plated chicken and rolls to the dinner table.

She was glad to see Antoine looked happy with them. It had to be hard knowing his mom was in rehab. She wondered if he saw his dad in prison or how long he’d known him before his arrest.

Glenn shook his head at Antoine. “We have beer or orange juice.”

Antoine turned back with his pad and pencil. “Ma’am, we have water, milk, beer, or juice, although I’m going to need to see some ID for that beer.”

Eve just about lost it at that one, but fished out her wallet and ID. “I’ll do the beer, please.”

Lord, she could use it.

Antoine made a show of studying her license before handing it back, but Kemal intercepted it and looked at the picture.

“All buttoned up,” he said.

She looked at the picture when he handed it back. She’d gone after work one day to get it and hadn’t taken her hair down. He was right. It was tucked up in her bun, the same way it was now.

Kemal leaned over, whispering in her ear. “I like unbuttoning you. Making you lose that just-so look. Making you scream.”

She shushed him and glanced at Glenn and Antoine, feeling heat burn over her cheeks. They were busy with Glenn helping Antoine pull a beer free from a six pack for her, but she had a feeling Glenn hadn’t missed a bit of what was going on with her and Kemal.

“Behave,” she hissed.

Kemal shook his head, eyes flashing and smile firmly in place. “Now, why would I want to do that?”

Why, indeed, she thought?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eve wasn’t sure how they ended up in bed later. She’d left his house after dinner, very much alone. One minute, she was getting ready to shower and go to bed and the next, Kemal was at her place helping her with that shower.

And this time, he’d spent the night. She was late now, which wasn’t a shock given the added time they’d taken in getting out of bed. Still, she had to admit, she liked the seemingly permanent smile that she wore as she locked her car.

But damn, it turned to a flush of embarrassment when she saw Sevier and Cantu grinning at her as they walked to their own unit two spots over. How the hell had they read what she’d been thinking about on her face?

Oh who was she kidding. Those men had their fair share of interpreting a woman’s expression. She just wasn’t used to being looked at as a woman. She was their captain. She shook her head at her men and headed around the building toward the front steps.

Her mortification deepened when she saw Glenn was sitting on the bench outside the entrance to the building. She was sure if Glenn realized Kemal hadn’t come home the night before, he would put two and two together and guess he’d spent the night with her. Not that it should matter. They were consenting adults.

Still, would Glenn tell her he didn’t approve? That he didn’t think it was a good idea for her to date his son?

She waited for him to look up at her approach but he didn’t, and a slow sensation of unease washed over her.

“Glenn,” Eve called out as she came close.

He did raise his head then, and his skin had taken on a gray pallor. He looked horrible. His hand clutched at his chest and Eve moved into action, waving down an officer who was coming out of the building and instructing him to call for an ambulance.

She sat next to Glenn and took his wrist in her hand, feeling for his pulse even as she knew her own heart rate had kicked into high gear. This couldn’t be happening. Not now when he seemed to be doing so well with getting himself out of the house. He seemed like maybe he was getting back into life again. This couldn’t be happening now.

“Don’t feel so good,” he said and the words were a hell of a lot weaker than she’d have liked.

Eve put her hand to his chest, fighting the panic rising up in her. She was trained for this but it was so much harder to stay calm in an emergency when it was your own loved ones involved. “Does it hurt? Can you show me where the pain is, Glenn?”

He nodded and pointed directly over his heart.

Eve remembered from her training that a heart attack was usually associated with general, all over pain. It wasn’t typically something that could be pinpointed with a finger. She hoped that was a good sign, but she didn’t know for sure.

“They’re on their way, Captain,” the officer said and Eve knew he meant the EMTs. Thankfully, the fire department wasn’t far so the ambulance should be there soon.

Another officer came out of the building carrying one of the portable defibrillators but Eve shook her head and he settled nearby with it, waiting to see if they’d need it.

The next few minutes were some of the longest of Eve’s life. She held Glenn’s hand and talked to him, telling him the ambulance was on its way and that she’d call Kemal and follow behind him as soon as they got him loaded up. Her heart raced and she felt sick. Felt out of control because she couldn’t stop what was happening.

She’d lost her own dad to a heart attack six years ago. She didn’t want to lose Glenn. Didn’t want Kemal to have to go through that pain. Not after he’d lost his mom.

“Hurts like hell,” he wheezed out between what looked like painful breaths.

Eve loosened the tie Glenn was wearing and undid a few buttons on his shirt.

“Better?”

He gave a jerky nod.

“Kemal.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll call him. He’ll meet us at the hospital.”

And then the EMTs were there, moving in and taking over as Eve looked on, feeling helpless. She usually gained a sense of control at a scene by taking over and running things. It helped to get her through things when everything seemed out of control. But here, she was one of the helpless followers as the EMTs quickly triaged and then loaded Glenn into the ambulance.

Eve ran to her car, dialing Kemal as she did, knowing this was going to be one of the worst calls of her life. She had no information for Kemal other than to tell him where they were taking Glenn and to say she’d meet him there. There was nothing she could tell him to reassure him that his father would be okay, that everything would be okay.

There was nothing she could do to reassure herself of that either.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kemal’s eyes looked wild when he entered the waiting room. Eve moved to his side and put her arms around him. He hugged her briefly, but pulled back, his body stiff.

“Where is he? Have they said anything yet?”

Eve shook her head. “Nothing yet. They took him back for tests.”

She looked to Antoine who stood hovering behind Kemal, a look of utter despair on his small features. The boy looked younger than he was and Eve knew this had to be his worst nightmare. His life had been filled with upheaval. Glenn was one of the people the boy could count on to be there for him and now it looked like Glenn might be ripped out of his life.

Eve looked back to Kemal and found him watching her, his face a careful mask.

“Thank you, Eve. We’ll let you know when we get some news.”

Eve almost did a double take at that. “You’ll let me know?”

Kemal put a hand on Antoine’s shoulder and led him around Eve to the line of chairs against the wall.

“Kemal,” she said, but she didn’t get out more than that.

“We don’t need you here, Eve. Thank you for getting him here.”

The dismissal was clear but Eve wasn’t about to walk away.

“Kemal, let me help.” She wanted to say more. She wanted to say that she wanted to be there for him. For Glenn and for Antoine. But she could see he was shutting her out.

Her words made him turn and she stepped back at the anger that lit his eyes.

“You’ve helped enough, Eve. You were so damned sure you knew what was right for him. You didn’t think there was anyone who might know better. So you pulled him into your case and dragged him back to a job his body can’t handle anymore.”

He was shouting now and all Eve could do was stand there and let him get it out.

Kemal pointed toward the hallway behind them. “You had to do things your way and now he’s in the hospital! I don’t know if my dad is going to live or die. So I think you’ve helped all you’re going to, Eve. We don’t need you here.”

A uniformed security guard entered and took in the scene. “Is everything alright here, ma’am?”

Eve saw the anger in Kemal crank up and knew she needed to end this now before it escalated.

She met the guard’s eyes. “We’re fine, thank you.” She turned back to Kemal but didn’t say anything more. There wasn’t anything she could say.

She wanted to tell him she loved Glenn, too. That she wanted to stay as much for herself as she did for Kemal. That she was scared.

He’d already turned to Antoine, one arm around his nephew’s shoulders as they turned away from Eve. Eve felt the guard’s eyes on her as she turned and walked away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Eve didn’t feel at all like going to work the next day, but she didn’t have a choice. Kemal had sent her a one-line text the night before letting her know Glenn hadn’t had a heart attack. It had been something called Pericarditis likely caused by a viral infection.

Eve had called the hospital and talked to one of the ER nurses she knew to get the rundown on what that meant. Apparently the lining of the heart can become inflamed causing severe pain that can look like a heart attack to a lay person.

The diagnosis of viral infection likely meant they hadn’t been able to pinpoint an exact cause but her friend told her they would treat such a condition with an anti-inflammatory and monitor the patient. Eve planned to go to the hospital to see Glenn in a few hours. With any luck, she’d miss Kemal and wouldn’t have to fight her way into his father’s room.

Her heart ached at the reminder that Kemal didn’t want to see her. She hadn’t realized how much she’d come to care for him in the last weeks. What she’d thought would be nothing more than a fling had somehow become a lot more to her, even if it didn’t seem to have gone any further for him.

Still, she wasn’t willing to lose Glenn in her life, so she’d have to suck it up and see his son from time-to-time, even if it hurt like hell.

Eve tossed her empty coffee cup in the trash and clicked open her inbox, planning a quick scan before starting the unit’s roll call, the start of shift meeting for her department. One email caught her eye immediately.

It was from a former member of the church who had heard Eve was looking to talk to church members through the online blogger.

Eve sent a quick email back to the woman and then picked up her phone, planning to call Glenn. She wanted him with her on this interview since he’d been poring through the cases and knew Samantha Greer’s case better than any of the cops on her team right now.

It took only a second to realize her mistake. Her friend had assured her the Pericarditis wasn’t related to his consulting on cases for her, but she had to admit, she still wondered if she’d had something to do with this. If there wasn’t a hint of truth to Kemal’s theory. Maybe if she hadn’t pushed Glenn to work this case, he would have been able to fight the virus.

She had time for roll call, two more cups of coffee and thirty-two of the emails in her flooded inbox before the woman emailed back and she was in the car on the way to her apartment in the next county. The time out of the office wasn’t something she could really spare, but Eve wanted answers. Everything in her gut screamed the church was at the center of the disappearances and that church had been functioning unchecked for years. She needed the kind of inside information the woman had.

Eve didn’t know what she expected, but the woman at the door was a surprise. She must have, at one time, had the long hair and modest clothing of the other church women Eve had seen. But now, Abigail Tanner had short spiky blond hair. Her clothes were more modern looking than those worn in the church, but she still wore a long maxi skirt that covered most of her legs and a long-sleeved shirt. It was almost like she was purposefully trying to leave the church dictates behind but hadn’t made it all the way there.

“Abigail Tanner?” Eve asked, pulling her identification out.

“Gail,” the woman said, stepping back to let Eve in.

Eve introduced herself and followed Gail into the small apartment.

She wondered if church life had prepared the woman for any kind of work, any way to make a living.

“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me,” Eve said as she took a seat on a folded-up futon couch and Gail sat on a tattered chair nearby.

“I don’t know if I can help.”

Eve saw hesitation and doubt in Gail. It was the kind of doubt that came from years of being told your worth was next to nothing. That the woman had had the guts to walk away from the church spoke volumes.

“You were born in the Blessed Divine Church?” Eve asked.

Gail nodded. “My parents and sisters are still there. I couldn’t get them to leave.”

There was pain etched into every syllable of that truth.

“We’re looking into the disappearance of some women. Anything you can tell me about the church will be helpful.”

She folded her hands carefully in her lap. “I’ll try.”

Eve didn’t want to jump right into why the woman had left the church. She needed to send some softballs her way to get her talking, get her to open up.

“Can you tell us how many members live on the church grounds. Our understanding is that services are attended by more than just those who live in the church.”

Gail shook her head. “They like to say that and there are a few people who live off the grounds, but they don’t usually attend long. It’s like there’s a timeline. You either sell your worldly possessions, donating most of the proceeds to the church, and move onto the grounds or you’re treated as an outsider and pushed out.”

“What about the meals the church provides for homeless people? Are they used to recruit?”

“Yes. I don’t think we get a lot of people that way, though.” She seemed to catch herself. “They. I don’t think they get a lot of people that way. But it helps with public perception of the church if they’re feeding the poor. It started back when the church was under attack as a cult.”

“Do you think it’s a cult?” Eve asked as gently as she could manage.

Gail shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe more like a commune. Everyone works, everyone shares in the Lord’s abundance.”

Eve pushed a little harder. “Can you tell me why you left?”

Gail’s eyes darted to the floor. “I was married to Gentry Coltrane when I was sixteen. He was older than me, but he was a good husband. He was well-liked in the church. My father thought he was a good match.”

“It was an arranged marriage?”

Gail nodded at Eve. “He was …” she seemed to search for words. “I guess a good husband at first? He was kind. He had rules, but if I followed them, cleaned and cooked and stayed within the rules of what a good wife was supposed to do, he was … nice?”

It seemed almost painful for her to speak out against this man, as though the idea of it was anathema.

She squirmed in her seat. “When we got into our fourth year of marriage and I hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, he began to get harsher, mean sometimes. He told me it was my failure as a wife and a woman. He was always pointing to his mother as an example of a pious wife, a good wife.”

Now Gail was studying a spot on the floor intently. “I believed him for a long time. I wracked my brain for the sin I might have committed to deserve this punishment from God. But one day, I wondered if it wasn’t my sin. If it was my husband’s. If he’d done something he needed to atone for.”

Eve fought not to clench her fists. She hated to think what had happened at that suggestion.

Silence dragged for minutes as Eve waited for Gail to collect herself and continue.

When she did, Eve wanted to leave and march to the church, guns blazing. Not that she would. She believed in the rule of law. In the right of it. Still, the urge was there.

Gail took a deep breath. “He sent me to his father’s house for punishing. Said his father would train me, send me back when I was ready to be a dutiful wife.”

Her knuckles paled white where she gripped her hands together and Eve could see she was barely holding tears in check. “I stayed one night and then ran to my family. I thought for sure my parents would protect me. Defend me.”

It took a long time for her to get the next words out. “They sent me back. Told me it was my duty to honor my husband’s decisions. Even if that meant laying with his father.”

Eve pressed her lips together to keep in the vitriol and rage that wanted to burst from her.

“I couldn’t go back. I got halfway there and just couldn’t make myself do it. So I slipped out the back of the compound and ran.” Now her eyes came up and she looked at Eve. “I was so terrified. I couldn’t breathe for weeks. I went to a shelter, but I was so afraid someone from the church would come after me. Every time I saw a man with a beard out of the corner of my eye, my heart stopped, thinking it was my husband coming to bring me back.”

Eve had already told the woman she wouldn’t push her to press charges. It had been part of their agreement in convincing her to talk to them. Still, she had to make the offer.

“I can help you bring charges and seek a divorce if you want to move forward with that, Gail.” She kept her tone quiet and steady.

Gail’s head shake, no, was immediate and forceful.

Eve nodded. “I understand.” She didn’t. Not really. But she’d never been in this woman’s position. Eve had been raised in a family where she was respected, taught to value herself and demand respect.

Gail had been shown time and time again that she wasn’t valued, that she couldn’t stand up to those who harmed her. Eve could only hope she would convince her to stand against the church someday, but today would not be that day.

And since Gail had already told her she wouldn’t testify against the church and wouldn’t sign an affidavit, nothing she got here would help her get a warrant. She needed to find a church member who was willing to go on the record.

Still, she was one step closer than they had been because now she knew they were on the right track with the church.

Eve pulled out the photos she’d brought of the missing women. She had printed them but also had other women in the stack of photos who were unrelated to the case. She handed the images to Gail.

“Can you tell me if you recognize any of these women?”

Eve waited as Gail paged through the images one-by-one. She pulled out three photos and placed them on the coffee table in front of her. She pulled another one out and put it into a separate stack and then handed the rest to Eve.

She put her finger on the single photo she’d pulled out. “This is Grace. She’s not at the church anymore.”

Eve looked and saw that it was Samantha Greer’s photo.

“Do you know when she left?”

The girl lifted a shoulder again.

“Can you remember why she left?”

Gail shook her head. “She was going to marry the reverend’s brother but she went home to her family instead.”

“Did anything about that strike you as odd? Did it seem off that she left like that?”

Another head shake. “People leave the church sometimes.”

Gail pointed to the other photos. She had pulled out three of the missing girls’ images. “I know these women. They’re in the church.” She touched the photo of Carina. “This one might be Charity, but she’s older so it’s hard to say.”

She pointed next to the picture of Katie. “This is Haven. She’s much older now but she has those same dark eyes and that little scar over her top lip.”

The last one she pointed to was Susie Norman. “This is Purity.”

Eve kept her face blank at the names. She had to wonder who assigned the women virtues as names. Had they chosen them themselves or were they dictated by someone when they entered the church.

“You know each of these women?” Eve prompted.

Gail nodded. “They’re church members. They live on the compound.”

“Do you know when they came to the church?”

Gail looked back at the pictures and pursed her lips. “I’m not sure exactly. Haven has been there for a long time. As long as I can remember. Purity and Charity are newer. I think they came seven years ago? Maybe a little more.”

“Did they arrive at the same time?” Eve asked.

“Nooo,” Gail said slowly as though searching for the information in her memories of a time she’d probably much rather forget. “I think Charity came a little earlier than Purity. Maybe a year or so before her.”

The timelines weren’t adding up. The women all showed up at the church years after their disappearances. The same as Samantha supposedly had. Something wasn’t right here.

“And they were still living on the church grounds when you left there?” Eve asked.

Gail nodded, yes.

“Did you get the sense they were there willingly? Was there anything off about the women?”

Gail frowned. “I mean, they seem perfectly happy there. I didn’t have any reason to think they weren’t there for any reason other than that they wanted to be there.”

As Eve said goodbye to the woman, one thing ran through her mind. She couldn’t keep calling that place a church. There wasn’t a damned bit of God in what was happening behind those compound walls. It was a cult.

Eve blew out a breath as she unlocked her car. She didn’t know if she could get a warrant with the information she had. The DA still saw this as a church with a history of what some see as persecution by the police. She could do a well check on Purity and Charity now that she knew they’re in there, but the church could refuse and it might put the two women in danger by letting them know the police had connected the missing women to the church.

She needed to be able to go in ready to make an arrest. Ready to take them down.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kemal sat by his dad’s hospital bed. Antoine was at a neighbor’s house and Kemal and his dad were waiting for his dad’s paperwork to be completed so he could check out and go home. According to the doctors, his dad was clear to go back to business as usual.

His dad had already started talking about wanting to go back to the precinct and nothing Kemal said seemed to be getting through to him. Kemal was going to need to convince Eve to tell his dad he couldn’t work the case anymore.

He rubbed his chest as he thought about Eve. He should have called her. Instead, he’d sent a text about his dad’s condition. He was an asshole. More than an asshole. She hadn’t deserved to be treated that way. She was an important part of his dad’s life and he’d kicked her out of the waiting room like she meant nothing to his dad.

Like she meant nothing to him. And damned if that wasn’t bullshit. She meant more to him than he wanted to admit. More than he was ready to handle.

“Why do you do it?” Kemal blurted the question without thinking about it, but decided to press it. “I never understood why you wanted to be a cop. You give up so much to be a cop, especially as a black man, and now that you’re out if it, you can’t wait to go back.”

His dad blew out a breath. “I don’t know that I can explain it, son. Being a cop is in my blood somehow. It’s a part of me. When I went to the academy, I did it because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be part of the force so that kids like you and your brother would see a face that looked like theirs when they saw the police come into their community. The more I served, the more I believed I was helping make the city a better place. I still believe that.”

“Did Eve talk to you about the panel she proposed to the mayor?” Kemal asked.

Glenn nodded. “She did. I think it’s an excellent idea. I don’t know if the mayor will go for it, but I think it’s a great idea. I won’t lie to you, son. There were times on the force I felt the hate that can come with the color of my skin. There were times I saw officers acting in ways that told me they were making calls based on the skin color of the people they were dealing with and their actions were rooted in hatred and racism.”

Kemal listened as his dad went on.

“There were other times I saw things, people making decisions—often split-second ones—that I thought were rooted in poor training or just plain old ignorance. Sometimes, you look at a situation and you say, that person needs to be outta here. They have no business being on this side of the law. Other times, you look at a case and you think this person shouldn’t be here because they aren’t ready for this responsibility, they aren’t capable of wearing this badge with the gravity and honor it demands. But at the end of the day, what mattered to me the most was that I needed to see those cases being looked at. I fought at every turn in my career to be sure each incident of police force was reviewed and not pushed under the rug. I didn’t always succeed.

“I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t been a police officer, if your brother would have landed in jail the way he did. Don’t get me wrong. I know he made his own choices, but did my job push him that way? I know you rebelled because of it and you straightened yourself out before you ended up in prison with him, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wonder if I pushed him that way.”

Kemal shook his head. “He shouldn’t be serving as long as he is. It was a little bit of pot.” It still pissed him off that his brother was serving such a long sentence for something that was now legal in their state. If he’d been selling pot just a few years later, he wouldn’t have gone to jail at all. And he’d been sentenced to a hell of a lot longer term than any white boy caught selling the shit.

His dad nodded. “Yeah and that’s an issue we need to fight but that’s not on the police. That’s the legislature, the courts. We have battles we need to fight on all fronts, son. And we all do our part in our own way. Long as you ain’t burying your head in the sand, you’re doing something. There are some who would say my career suffered because I pushed for those things, and they’re right in some ways. I was never pushed up to captain or anything like that. But I never saw that as a failure. I served with pride. I held to my beliefs, and I think I served our community well.”

Kemal didn’t know what to think. His feelings about his dad’s job had always been so tangled up and convoluted. They still were. And right now, he saw his dad being pulled back into the stress of the job and that scared the shit out of Kemal.

But as he sat there with his dad, he realized something he hadn’t acknowledged in a long time.

“I’m proud of you, dad.”

His dad’s mouth pressed together and he saw him blink.

Kemal tried to break the tension. “Damn, man, don’t cry. I’m just saying I’m proud is all.”

His dad grinned, but also pulled Kemal forward and then they were hugging. And damn, if that didn’t feel good. It had been too damned long. He and his dad had been living with too much space between them for too long. It felt good to talk like this. Good to know that even if they didn’t always agree and didn’t always see things the same way, that there was still love there to come back to. Always would be.

“Are we going to talk about Eve now or are you planning to pretend you don’t have feelings for her?”

His dad’s question shocked Kemal.

He scrubbed a hand up and over his hair, like he could scrub away the stupid. He’d been an idiot where Eve was concerned.

“I, uh, I don’t think my feelings are going to matter much. I was an ass to her when you were back with the doctors.”

“Is that why she’s not here?” his dad asked.

Kemal nodded. “I told her thank you for getting you here and told her she could leave.”

Kemal looked up at the sound of his dad’s wheezing. Well, damn. The man was laughing at him hard enough he looked like he might choke.

Kemal scowled. “I’m glad this is funny to you.”

His dad just shook his head like he was trying to catch his breath and talk but couldn’t.

So much for getting any words of wisdom from his dad. Apparently, he was on his own for figuring this one out.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Eve put in the call to the DA and was waiting to hear back. In the meantime, she updated Sevier and Cantu on what she’d found out from Gail.

“I’ll grab you guys if the DA gets us a search warrant,” Eve said, nodding at her detectives in dismissal.

She heard them stand but when she looked up, only Cantu was leaving the room.

“Something you need, Sevier?”

She was surprised when he shut her office door and sat back down.

“Permission to speak freely, ma’am?”

Eve laughed and got a grin from him in return. She’d never been one to stand on ceremony with her detectives, so he was making a joke with the line.

Still, he cleared his throat. “I, uh, I was actually hoping to talk to you about something as, uh, friends for a minute.”

Eve frowned. “Of course. Is everything okay?”

Sevier was one of her best detectives. He was also very recently married and she liked seeing him happy for a change. She hoped like hell this wasn’t bad news.

He seemed to steel himself for something and she wondered just where the conversation was headed.

“I, uh, I know you’ve been dating Glenn’s son and uh, that that might have some, uh complications. This might not be my place, but I just wanted you to know if he makes you happy, you should date him. Even if he is your partner’s son.”

Eve sat back and clamped her mouth shut. Partly because she was tempted to laugh at the numbers of ‘uhs’ he’d just uttered. Mostly because her gut reaction was to tell him her love life was none of his damned business. But she respected Sevier and she also knew he wouldn’t come in here and raise this topic lightly.

She reached for a paper clip on her desk and studied the wires as she bent it. “It’s complicated.”

His bark of laughter at that wasn’t a surprise. “No kidding. I don’t think you could have picked a more complicated relationship. He’s your mentor’s son. He’s black and you’re not.”

He looked stricken. “Shit, that came out wrong.” He scrubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “What I mean is, it makes things hard, that’s for sure. But here’s the thing, boss. He makes you happy. I could see it. I think we all could. And that matters. Especially in this job. We see a lot of shit in this line of work. Having someone you trust and care about to go home to can make what we do here okay. It makes it worth doing.”

Eve twirled the wire between her fingers, watching it spin. “He’s not really talking to me right now. We had an argument.”

“So talk to him. If you find someone who makes you feel the way I think he does, it’s worth holding onto. If you find happiness like that, you grab it and you don’t let go. You fight for it.”

Eve nodded, feeling tension swirl in her gut. She wanted to do what he said, but she knew this thing with Kemal would never be easy. She thought of his dad as part of her family in a way, and Kemal didn’t want that connection. He didn’t want his dad to have anything to do with her right now. Her or the job.

Sevier stood and shot a thumb over his shoulder. “I need to check in with forensics on one of the assault cases we caught last night.”

“Thank you, John,” Eve said.

He gave a nod and left.

She picked up her phone and stared at the screen a lot longer than she should have. Twice, she opened it and then hit the lock button again. She had the next day off. She should try to talk to Kemal. She wanted to talk to him. To see if there was a way for them to work out all the complicated feelings and issues that hung between them.

Because she liked him. Really liked him. She respected him. And the attraction wasn’t half bad either.

Okay that was a flat out lie. The attraction, the sex, it was off the damned charts.

And all of it, everything he made her feel, was worth fighting for. Wasn’t it?

She messaged him.

Can you come over tonight? Can we talk?

She added the last because she didn’t want him to think this was just a booty call. That’s all this had been so far but she wanted it to be more. It was worth fighting to make this more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Eve tried to not let it bother her that Kemal hadn’t messaged back yet. She’d spent the rest of the day checking her phone, but there’d been nothing. She was having to try not to let a lot of things bother her at the moment.

The DA refused to go to a judge yet. Said they were asking for a lawsuit if they didn’t have a rock-solid case against the church before they sought a warrant.

It pissed her off that this cult could hide behind the specter of religion to get away with the things it was doing.

She spread the case file out on her desk to study it. Again.

She’d looked at it so many times, she didn’t know how she could see something new, but this was the job. Looking at things again and again until you found a thread to pull.

She thought of the reverend’s family and pulled out the sheet where she’d made notes about who was who. She pulled out a new sheet and wrote out all the family members again, this time putting them in a timeline. She marked the year the reverend took over the church, when he was married, and then put all of the children in according to age.

Eve stared at the page, a feeling gnawing at the back of her mind. There was something there she wasn’t seeing. She ran her finger across the page from left to right looking at the timeline.

Then she pulled out the pictures of the missing women and laid them out across the table.

It took several minutes for a thought to gel but when it did, it hit her hard. It wasn’t evidence, it wouldn’t get her a warrant, but it was creepy. There was something about the ages of the reverend’s kids.

She turned to her computer and pulled up the birth records of all of the children born to the reverend and his wife.

The birth dates of the reverend’s children lined up with the timeline of the girls’ disappearances. Not all of them. There were two children born before the girls went missing. But after that, things lined up.

Carina Nelson disappeared and the Richardson’s third child was born a year later. They had two more children after that and then there was a lull in children for the Richardsons.

Then Samantha went missing and there was a child born fourteen months after that. Then another lull.

Then Katie Frye disappeared and the children started up again. Same thing with Susie Norman. When she went missing, the Richardsons began having children again soon after.

She’d never be able to get a warrant based on the timeline, but everything in Eve was screaming at her that this meant something. That this was important.

She wondered if she just found Samantha Greer’s missing child.

Eve looked at her watch. It was four in the afternoon. She could leave a few hours early and go visit the women at the church. If she remembered correctly, the church men stayed out “in the field” as they’d called it until six o’clock but the women would be at the main building, probably in that sewing room she’d seen a number of times.

Could she get them to open up to her? Maybe armed with the information she had from Gail Tanner about the treatment of the women in the church, she could convince some of them to open up to her. And she could ask about the women Gail had said were living there happily. Do a well check.

It couldn’t hurt to try to get one of them to open up to her.

It didn’t even need to be an official visit.

Okay, so she was desperate and willing to try anything in a last-ditch effort to get to the bottom of what was happening behind the fence at Blessed Divine. Still, she had to try. If she didn’t come up with something soon, the mayor and the chief were going to pull the plug on this investigation. She wasn’t willing to let that happen without a fight.

She let the department admin and her detectives know she was leaving a little early but didn’t tell them what she had planned. The last thing she needed if this blew up in her face and she was reamed out or written up for going in there again without a warrant were any of her detectives being dragged into it with her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Kemal was being a jerk. He knew it. He’d seen Eve’s message hours ago and still hadn’t responded.

He wanted to see her. He wanted to do just what she’d suggested. Talk it out.

He was beginning to realize that he’d been trying to control every aspect of his dad’s life because he was terrified he’d lose him. Some part of Kemal had always been afraid he’d lose his dad. Having a father who was a cop meant that fear was ever present. And then when his dad had retired, his mom had gotten sick and they’d lost her in some giant cosmic joke.

Seeing his dad putting himself back out there with Eve meant he was in danger again.

Not to mention, the feelings Kemal was starting to feel for Eve were too damned strong. And she would never be the kind of woman to stay home or work in a quiet job. A safe job. She was out there putting herself on the line every day and maybe, just maybe, that had freaked him out more than he wanted to admit.

So, yeah, he was being a dick not replying to her message. At the very least, he needed to be a man and reply. He took his phone out and started a message then erased it. He had a few more stops and starts before he ended up texting what amounted to a copout.

Working at the community center tonight, but I’ll try to call when I get out.

Okay, it was lame. He shook his head and shoved his phone in his back pocket. He needed to figure shit out. Get his head on straight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Eve sat in what she’d come to think of as the sewing room with three of the women from the church. She had a feeling Faith Richardson would be joining them soon. Word would spread that Eve was on the grounds and Faith would come intervene, she was sure. What she didn’t know was whether the men would come, too.

Something told her she needed to act fast because Faith’s arrival might put a stop to this every bit as much as one of the men arriving would.

She pulled out the pictures of the missing women, planning to ask the women if they’d seen them.

The young girl Eve had seen on previous visits skipped into the room, coming right to Eve and the photos.

She smiled at Eve and pointed to the picture of Susie Norman. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she lowered her voice to a near-whisper and leaned into Eve to speak in her ear. “She’s my secret mama. I’m not supposed to know but sometimes she sneaks me hugs and tells me how beautiful I am.”

Wild eyes on the faces of the other women told Eve they suspected the girl had said something she shouldn’t have. They didn’t give Eve a chance to question her.

Faith Richardson entered the room and shut the door behind her. Faith’s appearance just about slammed the door on any chance Eve had to question the other women of the church.

She weighed her options. She should at least try to talk to Faith. To see if she would admit that the women were there and let Eve see them. She was here, she might as well go for broke.

She didn’t have the chance to do any of that. She turned to the sound of the other women leaving the room through another door. She watched and knew the walls were going up. The only way she’d get anything now was with a search warrant and she didn’t have that.

A blow came to the back of her head that sent her reeling and stumbling forward. Eve caught herself, coiling and turning to strike out, but there wasn’t time. Another blow came. Her head was spinning and she felt sick. Adrenaline spiked.

She’d made a crucial mistake. She’d assumed the reverend was the one she had to worry about. She thought Faith and the other women of the church might talk to her.

She raised an arm to ward Faith off, but the other woman was still coming at her, a heavy paperweight in her hand. Eve rolled but it was too late. Darkness swirled and swallowed her before she could cry out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kemal couldn’t blame Eve for not answering his calls. She’d reached out and he’d been an ass about it. To top it off he’d had to deal with some kids getting into a fight at the community center and one of the idiots had been stupid enough to pull a knife. Kemal and some of the other volunteers stayed until they were sure things were calmed down enough that the fight wouldn’t spill over after the teens left the center.

So he hadn’t called her when he got finished. He was tired and aggravated and he’d just gone home and gone to bed.

So he couldn’t blame her when she didn’t answer his call the next morning, but he thought she’d call later that day. She didn’t. And she hadn’t called that afternoon either.

Kemal left her building that evening. She hadn’t answered the door. When he went to the station earlier, they told him she wasn’t due in until the next day. Would it be creepy to sit outside her building and wait for her?

Probably.

Maybe he could get his dad to call her for him. Surely, she’d pick up for his dad. She knew they’d talked since his dad was released from the hospital. He had heard his dad on the phone with her and knew he was getting an update on the Samantha Greer case, despite Kemal’s objections.

“When the hell did this happen to me?” he asked his empty car. “I’m thinking of having my dad call a woman for me.”

Fuck, he was an idiot.

He pulled out his phone again and sent her a text.

I’m around if you change your mind and want to talk.

It was all he could do for now. He’d have to wait for her to be ready to talk to him.

Because he wasn’t calling his dad.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Kemal watched as his dad helped Antoine tip the scrambled eggs from the pan onto three plates. The two of them were laughing, but Kemal wasn’t in much of a mood. Eve hadn’t called him back.

But what did he expect? He’d blown her off. It was no wonder she was done with him.

His dad frowned as he pushed one of the plates in front of Kemal. “You okay, son?”

Kemal looked up and nodded. “Tired.”

Antoine took a bite of his eggs and spit them back onto his plate. “I think I messed this up.”

Glenn and Kemal looked at the boy.

Antoine was shaking his head at them, eyes wide. “Those ain’t right.”

Kemal couldn’t help but smile at that. He pushed his plate at his dad. “You try them.”

Glenn was no idiot. He didn’t taste the eggs. “Did you put something in when I wasn’t looking?”

“Nothing you didn’t say to put in.” Antoine pushed his own plate a little further away.

Glenn just looked at the kid with the kind of look that said he knew Antoine’s story was bull.

Antoine screwed up his mouth. “I maybe added some extra.”

“Extra what?” Kemal and Glenn asked at the same time.

“Salt?” Antoine looked down. “And some garlic powder. And more salt.”

Glenn took a small forkful of the eggs and tasted them before making a face. “Damn, Antoine, that’s a lot of extra you put in there.”

Kemal was shaking his head, but he was laughing too, and he was glad Antoine had come to stay with them for a while. It was good having the kid around. He could see his dad liked it, too.

Glenn’s phone rang, pulling him away from the table to answer it.

Kemal had to admit, he was listening pretty intently to see if it was Eve on the other end of the call. As far as he knew, his dad was still consulting on the case. It wouldn’t be out of the question for her to call him.

“Eve? No I haven’t heard from her. Is something wrong?”

The blood in Kemal’s veins turned to ice as he heard the concern in his dad’s voice. He stood and went to his side, trying to listen. He couldn’t identify who the male caller was but he could guess it was one of Eve’s detectives from his words.

“Eve didn’t come in this morning and hasn’t called in. We sent uniforms to her house but they got no answer. She’s not answering her phone.” The report was succinct, but Kemal could hear the worry behind the words.

Glenn looked at Kemal. “Have you talked to her, son?”

Kemal shook his head. “She didn’t return my calls yesterday but she wasn’t too happy with me.” An ache started deep in his chest.

Fuck, when had she gone missing?

“The church,” Kemal said.

His dad spoke into the phone. “She interviewed a former member of the church. She said the woman told her about wife swapping at the church and she saw two of the missing women in the church compound. She said they were there voluntarily. Eve didn’t think she could get a warrant but she was going to try. Would she have gone to the church without a warrant?”

Kemal listened to the response.

“I don’t know. The church file was open on her desk,” the detective said. “I’m going to see if the DA will take it to a judge for an emergency warrant. I have to have a warrant.”

“Well, I don’t,” Kemal said, grabbing his keys and running for the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Eve kept her eyes closed and her breathing steady. Something told her she couldn’t let her captor know she was awake yet.

Flashes of memory snaked through her mind but it was hard to make the images sit still long enough to analyze them.

Instead, she listened for noise in the room around her. And she waited. Waited on clarity to come.

In time, the images and memories settled. She had awoken before but in such a groggy state she’d been easy to manipulate. A woman coaxed tea into her. Bitter tea that made her head spin.

She had no sense of how long she had been there. She remembered people talking and more of the tea.

She needed to feign sleep long enough to be fully lucid and able to fight the next time they tried to get her to drink if she wanted to survive this.

A sound from across the room nearly startled her into movement, but she caught herself and focused only on her breathing. Her head was clearing. But would she have any strength to fight?

She catalogued her entire body. Her head felt sore and bruised. The rest of her felt weak and achy like she’d had the flu.

Long minutes passed and Eve felt her head clearing more and more. She slit her eyes open and saw stark gray walls, a small room with little light. A woman on a small bed in the corner.

She closed her eyes again and breathed steadily, evenly, biding her time. When moments passed and the woman didn’t come to her, Eve opened her eyes again.

The young woman’s belly was swollen, at least five months pregnant, maybe more.

Eve slowly pushed herself to sitting, keeping her eyes on the sleeping woman. There were no windows to tell her what time of day it was. Her arms and legs were weak, but Eve started to flex her hands and feet, working the blood flow to help wake herself up. The fierce pain as the blood reentered her limbs couldn’t be helped.

Eve took in the rest of the room. There was a door on the wall on the right and another one on the left. The paint was peeling and no light came from beneath the door. There was a small table near the bed the other woman lay on with a pitcher of water and a basin.

Eve was on a pallet of blankets. To her immediate right was an armchair and a stack of books on the floor next to it. She didn’t bother looking at the titles. She needed to decide which door she was going to try to go through on her way out of this hell hole.

She checked again on the woman on the bed and that’s when she realized, it wasn’t a woman at all. It was a girl. It was Camille Gallagher, the fourteen-year-old who had disappeared last year.

The girl would be fifteen now. A year in this room. The thought made Eve’s blood run cold. She needed to get them out of there.

She rolled to her knees, testing her legs. She still felt like she was recovering from an illness, but she was steady enough to try standing.

Eve crossed to the bed and shook the girl awake.

“Camille, wake up Camille.”

The girl’s eyes went wide as she woke and saw Eve was up. She sat so suddenly, Eve had to shift back quickly to avoid their heads colliding.

“I fell asleep!” Camille looked to the basin and Eve saw a cup of tea sitting next to it. “You need to drink your tea. I’m supposed to give you your tea.”

There was panic in her voice and Eve realized it had been Camille coaxing her to drink whenever she woke.

“Camille—”

“My name is Virtue.” If the girl shook her head any harder, she was going to break her neck.

Eve glanced to the doors, keeping her tone low. “I’m Captain Eve Scanlon of the Dark Falls Police Department. We’ve been looking for you Camille. Your family has been looking for you for two years. They haven’t given up.”

She thought of the girl’s friend who’d reported her missing. “Prissie hasn’t given up. She’s still waiting for you to come home.” In reality, Eve didn’t know if Prissie had given up, but she wanted Camille to be reminded of all the ties she had outside this room.

The girl kept shaking her head. “I’m Virtue. I need to get your tea for you.”

She moved to stand but Eve put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t need my tea. We need to get out of here. Do you know where the doors lead?” She avoided using the girl’s name. She needed to keep her calm and convince her to help get them out of there.

“We can’t leave. If I behave, I can live with the rest of the church. He’ll let me out. I just have to show I’m ready.” She seemed to stumble over her words. “I’m ready for it. I’ve learned all my lessons. I follow the rules.”

The words made Eve sick to her stomach but she put her hands on Camille’s arms.

“We are going to leave here together. We’re going to get out of this and then you can live anywhere you want. You can go see your family again.”

Camille’s eyes were wild with panic.

God help them if she called for help. No, God help Eve, because she’d have to stop the girl if she tried. If she was going to save Camille, she needed to make sure the girl didn’t sabotage their escape.

“Camille, you need to listen to me. The reverend isn’t going to take you and your child to live in the church with him. He’s going to take your child and raise it as his own. He and his wife have a lot of kids, but all those kids’ birth dates line up with the timeframes we have for missing girls, just like you.”

Camille’s eyes went wide and a sob escaped her. “No!”

Eve put her hands to her hair and pulled at the pins that held her once-tight bun in place. She never lacked for bobby pins. The only question was whether she could pick a lock with them. She’d done it a few times for kicks when she was in the academy but hadn’t exactly maintained it as a skillset. Contrary to popular belief, cops didn’t pick locks on a regular basis. If they had a no-knocks warrant, they entered the building with a battering ram.

“I’m going to open one of these doors and get us out of here. Do you know where they lead?” Eve put the end of one of the bobby pins in her mouth and stripped the rubber tip from it with her teeth.

Camille’s eyes shot to one door and then the other. “You can’t do that. They’ll punish us.” Her hands went to her stomach and she held herself as though she might be able to stop what was coming. “You can’t escape.”

She said it like she knew. Like she’d tried and Eve wondered how long it had taken Camille to give up. To become the pliant victim she saw in front of her.

She bent the bobby pin she’d stripped, making a small hook at one end, then took another pin and bent it to make a lever.

“I’m going to open one of these doors, Camille. Tell me which one I should open. Where do they lead?”

Camille’s eyes went to the doors again, first one and then the other. She looked back at Eve and pointed to one door. “That one leads to the kitchen in the reverend’s house.”

“And the other?” Eve asked, not really liking the idea of popping in on the reverend and his wife while they ate breakfast or whatever meal it would end up being. The sense of disorientation at not knowing the day or time was overwhelming. If she let it, it could swallow her up.

Hell if she’d let that happen.

“To the tunnels,” Camille whispered.

Well damn, didn’t that sound fun.

“Where do the tunnels go?” Eve asked, moving to that door. She had to trust Camille wasn’t going to alert anyone.

Dr. Grundholdt had told her about the tunnels under the compound but there wasn’t much information on where they led or how extensive they were.

“I don’t know. The reverend told me he would take me to the tunnels if I was bad. That he’d taken others to the tunnels before me.”

Oh, better and better. Eve took a breath and put the lever into the lower part of the lock and used it to push the lock to the side. She pushed the other bobby pin in above the lever and began to feel for the first seized pin in the lock.

For better or worse, she and Camille were about to brave the tunnels.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Eve looked around the room one last time and shuddered. This was the dark prison Samantha had landed in all those years ago. She hadn’t made it out but Eve was going to make sure she got Camille out of there.

She felt naked without her weapon. There wasn’t much furniture but the table that held the pitcher of water and wash basin on it caught her eye. Eve went to the table and removed the items, working quickly but quietly. She couldn’t call attention to them in case anyone was in the room above them.

She tilted the table and set it on its side, then examined the legs of the table. As she’d hoped, they were bolted to the bottom of the table. She tried the nut on one of the legs, but it was screwed on too tightly for her to take off with her hand.

She glanced over at the door she’d just unlocked. Camille stood in the doorway, staring into the tunnel in front of her. Eve only hoped the girl wasn’t cranking up her fear to the point she’d freeze and not be able to go through with Eve’s plan.

Eve tried the nut on the next leg of the table, finding it just as tight. She moved on to the next. That one gave slowly when she twisted it with her fingers. It was sluggish but it was moving bit by bit. She lost her grip on the small bit of metal more than once, but she kept at it until it began to spin more loosely on the bolt. In minutes she had the nut off and pulled the leg free of its base.

She turned the leg, gripping the end that didn’t have the bolt in it. It was large enough for her to swing freely, but heavy enough to do some damage if she had to use it. She grabbed a belt from the robe that hung on a nail on the wall and tied one end to either end of the table leg and then slung it over her shoulder to hang on her back.

She turned back to find Camille still frozen in place in front of the tunnel door. Eve stepped up to her and put her hand on the girl’s arm.

“We need to go,” she said, preparing to drag the girl if she needed to.

Camille only nodded and stepped into the tunnel. Eve had to give the girl credit. She looked utterly terrified but she’d taken that first step. Camille had her arms wrapped around her pregnant stomach and Eve wondered if she was trying to remind herself why she was doing this.

What she could see of the walls of the tunnel were carved through rock and Eve could only guess they’d taken years of blasting to create. She grasped Camille’s hand and they moved into the small space, moving away from the light the room they’d just left was casting. Moving into the darkness.

Eve’s heart pounded and she prayed they weren’t heading right into someplace worse.

They were soon engulfed in full-black darkness, the kind that told you there was no light coming through anywhere. Nothing for your eyes to adjust to. They moved steadily, methodically, one hand on the wall and one hand on each other.

Eve tried to picture where the reverend’s home was in the compound. From what they’d learned, it was at the center of the property. Eve would guess that put it a mile or two from any edge to the property. Of course, the tunnel could lead anywhere. It probably came out in one of the other buildings.

The hand she had on the wall to her right hit empty space and Eve tugged Camille to a stop.

“Wait.” She stopped and felt to her right, pulling Camille with her. “There’s another tunnel here.”

Eve froze again as a shout sounded behind them. She could hear the sound of a door being thrown wide, like it had slammed against a wall and then footsteps. Coming fast. Whoever it was knew their way in these tunnels and wasn’t moving nearly as slowly and carefully as she and Camille had.

“There’s a tunnel off to our right, Camille. Do you know where these go to? Which direction we should go?”

Eve reached up and felt the tunnel. It was different. It was formed of concrete, not the rock they’d been moving in so far. Maybe some of the tunnels had been natural cave formations and others were man-made.

Camille’s breath was coming in ragged pants. “I don’t know. I don’t know where anything is. He only told me he’d take me into the tunnels. He never said where they went.”

Eve could hear their pursuer coming up behind her. The footfalls were heavy and fast.

She couldn’t afford to think about it any longer. She took off one of her shoes and tossed it a few feet into the tunnel on the right, then pulled Camille forward, continuing into the tunnel they’d been in. With any luck, their pursuer would have a flashlight and might spot the shoe and head that way.

She didn’t wait to see if they followed. She just kept her thoughts focused on moving forward, one hand on the wall, one hand on Camille.

Camille tripped, pitching forward and Eve lunged to hold her up. She caught her, but they’d both cried out when it happened. If whoever was behind them had bought the shoe ruse, they would correct their course now.

“Keep going,” Eve whispered at Camille, putting her hand back on the wall. “We can’t go fast, but we have to go steady. We have to keep moving.”

In her mind, she was thinking of other options. Like sending Camille on without her. Eve could wait and see if she could fight off whoever was coming. She could buy time for Camille to get away.

Or she could give up her only weapon by laying the table leg across the narrow tunnel and hope their trailer tripped over it. It seemed a long shot, though, and she’d rather have the weapon than not if it came time to face their hunter.

She heard Camille’s pants come fast and knew the girl would hyperventilate if she didn’t calm her down.

She reached for a topic that would keep the girl’s mind off the fact they were running for their lives in a tunnel so black it felt like they might be swallowed alive by the ground itself.

“I’m going to get something to eat as soon as we get through this. Ice cream and probably some waffles.” She was making her own mouth water with the attempt at distraction, but she didn’t care. “You ever been to Ms. Molly’s Mess Hall in Dark Falls? She has waffles that are so fluffy and sweet, you don’t need syrup on them. I think I’ll order those and an ice cream sundae and maybe…”

“A milkshake,” Camille cut in and Eve could hear the utter ache of longing in the girl’s voice. She had a feeling the church hadn’t been spoiling Camille with sweet treats these past two years.

Eve smiled into the darkness and said, “French fries,” but she was listening to the footsteps behind them.

She heard a muttered curse. It was a man coming behind them and it was a good bet it was the reverend.

Eve tried to estimate how long they’d been in the tunnels. She would guess ten minutes. So they might have covered half a mile, but at their pace, it could easily be less.

“We need to move a little faster, Camille.”

She upped their pace. The footfalls behind her told her their pursuer was coming at a much faster pace than they were going. She didn’t want Camille to fall, not with the girl being pregnant, but they had to go faster. Had to, if they wanted to make it out of there.

But she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Whoever was behind them, they were moving too fast. They knew the tunnels. Her heart pounded in her chest as the echoes of footfalls slammed in her ears.

She pushed Camille ahead of her. “You need to keep going, Camille. I’m going to stay here and stop him, but you need to keep moving. When you get to the end of the tunnel, look out and see where you are. If it’s clear, make a run for it.”

Camille clung to Eve. “I can’t go without you.”

Eve shushed her. “You have to. We don’t have a choice.”

She didn’t need to tell the girl the reverend was almost on top of them. He’d catch them in minutes.

She pushed Camille again. “Go. I’ll catch up to you.”

Camille moved on and Eve turned back toward the dark tunnel. She reached to her back and pulled the table leg off her shoulder, holding one end in her hands as she crouched beside the tunnel wall and waited.

The footfalls continued to come and a light came into view. It looked like the flashlight from a cellphone or maybe a pocket flashlight, bouncing as the person ran. Eve tried to quiet her breathing and pressed back against the wall. With any luck, the reverend or whoever it was coming after them would be focused on the tunnel ahead of him and wouldn’t spot her until it was too late.

She tightened her hands on the table leg, readying herself for the fight that was about to come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kemal clenched the wheel as he drove. Despite his objections about his dad’s heart condition, he knew his dad would likely be right behind him, as soon as he could get someone to stay with Antoine.

He didn’t have a plan for what he would do when he got there. He probably should have stopped to talk to his dad but when he’d realized no one from her department was going to be going after Eve, he’d thought of nothing but getting into the church to help her.

What he didn’t know was whether he should go in the front door or if he should be sneaking in the back and trying to find her. From what he knew, the church had a whole compound. He had no clue where to start, but fuck if he was going to just wait for the police.

He wished he had a gun, but since his brother was locked up, he’d been religious about not carrying a knife or gun or weapon of any kind. His parents had had The Talk with him when he was younger, the one where they tell him the consequences for a black man carrying a weapon will carry a much higher price tag than a white man. The talk where they told him how he had to handle himself if he was ever stopped by the police.

That had been a harsh talk. His dad had told him most of the police officers who stopped him would be fine, but some were jumpy and you didn’t know what the situation would lead to. You keep your mouth shut, your hands where they could see them at all times, and you never question what they’re doing. Head down, do as you’re told.

As a teen, Kemal hadn’t liked that talk and he hadn’t always heeded the advice. He’d just been lucky to never be caught carrying a knife or stopped for Driving While Black. But after Isaac went to prison, Kemal stopped tempting fate.

Still, this was one time he would risk that all, risk his life or his freedom, if he’d had access to a gun.

Still, his dad must be pretty close behind him and surely he’d bring his weapon. He might be retired, but that hadn’t taken the cop out of him.

Kemal’s phone rang and he hit answer before sticking it on speaker and tossing it on the seat next to him.

“Yeah?” he expected it to be his dad.

Detective Sevier’s voice came over the line. “Where are you, Kemal?”

“Ten minutes out from the church. You got a warrant?” Not that the answer was going to change what he did.

“We’ve got the assistant DA getting an emergency warrant from a judge. Should be any minute now. We’re headed that way so we can sit nearby and be ready to go in when we get it.”

“Make sure you tell them all who I am. I don’t want to get shot.”

Sevier sighed over the line. “I’ll do all I can, but you need to stand down and wait for us to do our jobs. You’re not going to help Eve if you go in there and alert the church about what’s happening. You need to sit tight, Kemal.”

“When you say you should have it any minute, what does that mean? How long does it take to get an emergency warrant?”

Kemal could hear the hesitation before Sevier spoke.

“Could be ten minutes, could be an hour. The ADA has to get in with a judge.”

Kemal didn’t answer. He punched end before dialing his dad.

“I’m fifteen minutes behind you, son,” his dad said without preamble. “You hear back from Sevier?”

“Just now. He said they might have a warrant as soon as ten minutes or in an hour.”

“How far from the church are you?” his dad asked.

“Minutes now. Maybe two or three.”

“Drive by the front of the church then pull around the block onto Alameda. There’s a break in the shrubbery there that lets you see into the compound a bit. See if there are people around, what the activity level is. It’s still pretty early. Then move a block away and call me back.”

“Okay.” He didn’t like having to wait at all, but his dad was the one who would know how to handle this. Besides, his dad was no idiot. He’d given Kemal something to do instead of telling him to sit and stick his thumb up his ass until he got there.

Kemal kept his thoughts on Eve as he drove the last few minutes to the church, trying to keep his sanity and ignore the fact that she could have been missing for over twenty-four hours and no one had done anything about it. Trying to ignore all that meant, including the fact that it might be too late for Eve already.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Eve threw her weight into the swing. She put everything she had into the first blow to the reverend, aiming at where she thought his stomach would be. She would have aimed for his head but if she aimed too high, it would be too easy to miss. Center mass was the best shot she had.

He grunted and doubled over and she brought her knee up to meet his face. It wasn’t as cleanly executed as the move might have been during a sparring match at the gym, but a real fight never was. And since she couldn’t see much after his flashlight went flying, she was just glad to connect with his head at all.

He grabbed for her but she was ready. She didn’t stop swinging. She punched and shoved and swung again. She had gotten enough of an advantage with the element of surprise. He got one good blow to the side of her head in, but she kept punching, shoving, never daring to stop. No way would she let him drag her back to that room. And no way would she let him get the best of her and get Camille back. That girl was getting out of this hell hole today.

She put her all into the fight and he went down, his feet coming out from under him with a satisfying whoosh.

The sound of his head hitting the rock when he landed was sickening. Eve scrambled back, trying to catch her breath as she grabbed the light that had gone flying and centered it on the man.

It wasn’t the reverend. It was Faith Richardson, the reverend’s wife.

Eve didn’t stick around. She turned, shining the light ahead of her and ran after Camille. She just hoped she’d bought them enough time to get to the end of this tunnel and out of the compound.

She hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she heard the heavy sound of footfalls coming behind her again. Had Faith gotten up or was it someone else?

Eve didn’t want to find out. She pushed herself, glad for the light that now let her run instead of shuffling along feeling her way in the dark.

She could see Camille ahead of her and called out to let the girl know she was coming.

When she caught up to her, she slowed her pace a bit, guessing that the girl wouldn’t be in shape to run flat-out since she looked like she must be seven or eight months pregnant.

“I took one of them out,” Eve said, a little shorter of breath than she’d have liked, “but there’s someone else coming. We need to keep moving. Are you okay to jog?”

“Yes,” Camille said, but Eve saw her clutching her belly.

She took hold of the girl’s arm trying to support her as they moved. If she had estimated the size of the compound right, they should be coming out to the end of the tunnel soon. They just had to pray that when they came out, they weren’t surrounded by church members determined to keep them from getting to safety.

She didn’t know how deep into the church this went. Were they all aware the reverend was keeping women in his basement? Or was it only the reverend and his wife?

If they came out into another part of the church and ran into someone other than the reverend and his wife, would they help them? Or would they help Faith and Reverend Richardson get them back in that basement? Or worse?

Did they know about the sick depravity of their so-called spiritual leader?

Up ahead, Eve could see the slim outline of light coming through the edges of a door. She only hoped they had time to get through the door before their pursuer caught up to them.

She urged Camille on, keeping the light focused on the ground in front of them. If they tripped and fell now, there would lose their chance at getting out of there.

Her heart battered against her ribcage, fear at what might be on the other side of the door nearly paralyzing her. They could be stepping out into something she couldn’t fight her way out of.

Eve pulled Camille to a stop when they reached the door, then leaned against it, listening.

There was nothing but silence on the other side. It could mean they’d be safe going through it, or it could mean there were ten church members reading their bibles on the other side of it, waiting to take them down.

The irony of that image hit Eve. She knew there were people in the world who didn’t believe in the same God she did. That they twisted and warped the teachings of the bible to justify doing horrible things to people.

Still, it hit her every time she was faced with something like this.

She could hear the footsteps behind them closing in. There was no time to hesitate. She tried the handle and found it locked.

“Hold this,” she said, handing the flashlight to Camille. “Shine it on the lock.”

She pulled the hair clips she’d used to pick the lock earlier from her pocket and knelt in front of the lock. She didn’t need to see it so much as feel it, but still, she reached up to adjust the direction of Camille’s arm, aiming it toward the lock as she put her pick and lever in.

Her stomach clenched as she began to feel for the tumblers. If she couldn’t do this, she’d have to try to fight off whoever was coming. She’d left the table leg behind when she’d run after taking out the reverend’s wife. That had been stupid, but at the time, grabbing the light and getting out of there had been her priority.

She found the first seized tumbler and eased it loose, seeking the next one as she tried to block out the sound of Camille’s panicked breathing and the echoing slap, slap, slap of footsteps coming at them. She dropped her bobby pin and cursed, grabbing the light from Camille to find it. It took far too many precious seconds, but she grabbed it and went back to the lock.

She focused on breathing steadily, calming her mind and her heart-rate as she fussed with the guts of the lock.

Slap, slap, slap. Whoever was coming was almost on them.

The tumblers eased into place and she turned the knob. She forced herself to crack the door open and look through it instead of throwing it wide and barreling through it.

Eve’s heart rose at the sight of the church’s sanctuary. It was empty. And better yet, she knew where it went. They could get out through the front of the church. The rest of the compound was fenced in, but this section opened to the front of the property and led right out onto the sidewalk.

Slap, slap, slap.

“Come on,” she said, pulling Camille. They ran into the church, just as the sounds of their pursuer closed on them. They were halfway through the pews when she heard the door slam against the wall behind them.

She risked a glance over her shoulder. They were so close.

But the reverend was reaching for her. She shoved Camille ahead of her and turned to face Reverend Richardson.

His face was red with rage and he struck at her. She felt the blow as though it rattled her brain in her skull and the harsh burn where he connected with her cheek blinded her. Tears stung in her eyes, but he was already raising his arm to strike again. She used his momentum, ducking beneath him and grabbing hold of his arm to sling him over her back and slam him to the ground. She jumped over him and ran for the door. Camille was only a few strides ahead of her. They were close. So damned close.

But she heard the reverend coming behind them again. She had knocked him down but he hadn’t stayed there.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Kemal fought not to slow as he drove by the front of the church. He didn’t want anyone at the church realizing they were coming. He’d already spotted a patrol car at the end of the block and wondered if they were there because the detectives had told them to be on standby for when they got their warrant.

He looked at the fence line leading up to the church. It was covered in high shrubs that made it impossible to see anything in the compound. The stone façade of the front of the church made the place look so peaceful but he didn’t want to think about the sinister secrets they were hiding in there. He didn’t want to think about what Eve might be going through behind those walls.

If he hadn’t been such a jerk to her, maybe they would at least have discovered she was missing sooner. If he’d answered her text message right away instead of acting like a high school asshole with a grudge, he might have known where she’d gone and realized she hadn’t come back. Instead, she was in the hands of the reverend and his sick parishioners.

He was passing the church’s wide stone steps when the doors burst open and two figures ran out. He recognized the long black hair flowing out from behind the taller of the two right away.

“Eve!” he yelled, even though she couldn’t hear him in his car. He slammed the car in park and threw the door open, not bothering to pull to the side of the road. “Eve!” he called again.

Time slowed as he realized someone was chasing Eve and the other woman. He heard the sirens of a squad car and some part of his brain processed that the car that had been on the corner had screeched to a stop behind his car and two officers were getting out.

Eve turned to Kemal and he reached for her, but the officers were screaming at him. It wasn’t a big surprise to him to see that they’d drawn their weapons on him but it did send an eerie wash of cold running through him. He had known his entire life that there was a possibility of ending up in a situation like this someday.

But Eve was there and the reverend seemed frozen behind her, a look of horror on his face as he took in the situation.

Kemal wanted to put himself between Eve and the reverend. She looked shaken and a large bruise was blossoming on her face.

Kemal saw red at the realization she’d been beaten. He turned to the reverend and headed that way, a growl building in his throat.

“Don’t move!”

He heard the shouts of the officers and froze, cursing as he raised his hands.

The cops were young. Damnit, he remembered what Eve had said about incidents where cops might shoot because they were panicked. That they didn’t have the training to handle the situation they found themselves in. Would that happen here?

Eve was putting herself in front of Kemal. “I’m Captain Eve Scanlon, badge number DF14032.” She pointed to the reverend, every bit of her stance and tone filled with the authority of one who earned her position in the department despite the fact she looked like she could have been living on the streets the last few days. “Arrest the reverend for abduction, false imprisonment, assault. I’ll add to the charges later.”

The officers looked hesitant but then one stood taller, dropping his weapon to his side. “I recognize her,” he said to his partner. “I volunteered in Major Crimes a while back on a case. That’s the captain.”

“Ma’am,” he said to Eve with a nod, as he moved toward the reverend.

His partner looked from Kemal to the reverend another time, but then moved the barrel of his weapon to train it on the reverend. The reverend must have found his legs because he turned to run back up the steps.

The officers were now shouting at the reverend, with the same commands they’d been giving Kemal moments ago. The reverend wasn’t listening, but the officers were faster than he was. Kemal watched as they took him down, pinning his arms as they held him down on the steps.

Kemal went to Eve, wanting for all he was worth to pull her into his arms, to hold her close and tell her she was safe. Oh hell no, that was a lie. He wanted to pull her to him to assure himself she was safe.

He didn’t. He wouldn’t do that to her in front of her officers.

He moved to stand beside her as other cars rolled up, his dad’s among them.

“You’re okay?” Kemal asked, his voice low. God, he wanted to reach out to her. He closed his fists tight and kept his arms locked to his sides.

She nodded at him and for a minute, he thought she was going to break the tight hold she had on her emotions. He could see her wrestle with herself before she turned away from him and back to the girl who’d come out of the church with her. And then there were detectives and officers swarming the scene and Kemal was pushed back as they surrounded Eve and the girl.

He watched as they were led to an ambulance and the area was cordoned off. A few people came out of the front of the church but they were quickly stopped by the officers and told they had to wait inside.

Kemal couldn’t help but compare what would have happened if this had been a church in his neighborhood. If those were black faces coming out of the church where two women had just escaped from. Would the officers have told them to wait inside? He doubted it.

Would the officers who’d held their guns on him moments ago have stopped if Eve hadn’t been so convincing? If she hadn’t dripped authority despite her appearance. If she hadn’t been powerful enough in her presence and her title to stop the situation that had spiraled out of control in a heartbeat.

“You all right, son?” Kemal’s dad put his hand on Kemal’s shoulder.

Kemal nodded, letting out a huff of air, his emotions pouring out of him with it. He looked at his hands, knowing before he saw the tremor that they’d be shaking.

“She’s fighting going to the hospital,” his dad said, nodding his head toward Eve and the ambulance.

“She’s strong,” Kemal said, and he meant it. She’d gotten herself out of there. And it looked like she’d gotten someone else out with her.

Kemal realized the girl was pregnant. She was being loaded into the ambulance, already an IV of some sort attached to her arm. Eve was arguing with her detectives, but Kemal could see she was losing. She groused the whole way into the ambulance, but she was loaded and before he knew it, the doors were shut and she was being driven away.

His dad squeezed his shoulder. “We can follow them to the hospital. We can go wait for her to be cleared, make sure she’s okay.”

Kemal nodded but didn’t speak yet. He didn’t think he could without choking up.

That was too damned close. The whole thing had been too damned close. The way she’d had the reverend on her tail like that. The way the officers had held their guns on Kemal. The way Kemal realized that his feelings for Eve went far beyond simple like.

He was falling for Eve Scanlon. And he didn’t think he wanted to stop whatever was happening. He didn’t think he could. He was into this too deep and too hard for that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Eve borrowed a pair of scrubs as soon as she got to the hospital. She’d never been a patient person and waiting for the doctor to clear her hadn’t been easy, but she’d at least gotten some food in her and gotten hydrated while she waited.

Now, she was making her way to Camille’s floor. They’d taken the young girl to labor and delivery to monitor her and the baby. Eve would bet they were worried about malnutrition given the girls thin arms. And she doubted she’d been getting proper prenatal care.

As much as Eve wanted to be over with her detectives at the church scouring the grounds and figuring out what else the reverend had been hiding and who else had been involved, she wanted to check on Camille before she went back to the scene.

Sevier had checked in with her by phone several times already. They had pulled the reverend’s wife out of the tunnel. She was treated at the scene but they were bringing her to the hospital soon to have her nose set. Eve had broken it, something she wasn’t the least bit sorry for.

She stopped at the sight of the two men waiting for her in the hallway.

Glenn reached her first. He wasn’t a hugging kind of guy so it surprised her a bit when her former partner pulled her into a bear hug.

“You took a few years off my retirement, Captain,” he said, the words spoken quietly for only the two of them.

Eve felt her eyes prickle with the sting of tears and she blinked them back before answering. “Yeah, sorry about that. It wasn’t smart to go in there by myself. I just…” She shook her head. She didn’t have words to describe how stupid she’d been. How much she’d miscalculated the situation. How she’d put her faith in the women of the church, thinking they would want to be rescued from the life they were living.

She couldn’t have been more wrong, apparently.

Glenn pushed her back, looking her over. “You’re okay? Nothing permanent?”

Eve nodded her head. “I’m good.”

She wasn’t sure about how she was doing on the inside. She had a feeling she’d have nightmares for years to come over the helpless feeling of being drugged again and again. That out of control helplessness wasn’t something she was handling very well. The thought of it sent her hands shaking again and her stomach clenching in knots.

Glenn looked from her over to Kemal, who’d hung back behind his dad until now.

“Why don’t I go grab us some coffees?” Glenn said, stepping away and heading for the elevator in an utterly transparent attempt to leave Eve and Kemal alone.

Kemal wanted to reach for her and pull her to him. He wanted to hold her, assure himself she was all right. He wanted to tell her that knowing she was in danger had slayed him. Laid him bare and shown him what an idiot he’d been.

But he didn’t feel like he could do that. There was still so much unsaid between them.

He felt like there were miles between them and even the relief he felt at seeing her whole and safe didn’t seem to be able to close that gap.

Still, he had to try. He wanted to try. He didn’t want to walk away from what he felt for this incredible woman in front of him.

He opened his mouth, planning to ask her if he could drive her home or take her to get something to eat or whatever she needed him to do for her in that moment.

He didn’t have the chance. A uniformed officer came up behind them.

“Captain Scanlon, Detective Sevier asked me to pick you up. He said to leave it up to you whether you want to come back to the church or go home.” The officer took a phone out of his uniform pocket. “He also said to give you this.”

Eve nodded at the man and took the phone, before turning back to Kemal.

“Tell your dad I had to leave but I’ll give him a call soon.”

Kemal nodded, not saying anything as he watched her walk away. He was an idiot like that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“I need to make a stop on another floor first,” Eve said, punching the button for the maternity floor.

The officer only nodded and stood slightly behind her as they stared at the door. A few minutes later, she was led to Camille’s door by a nurse. She left the officer outside and poked her head in. Another nurse was in the room, checking monitors and tucking a blanket around Camille.

“I don’t have a milkshake but I promise to bring one soon,” Eve said.

Camille looked small and frightened covered by a blanket. “My mom is coming.”

Eve went to stand by the bed and took Camille’s hand. “That’s good. I’m sure she’s going to be relieved to see you.”

Camille’s eyes filled with tears and her voice shook when she spoke. “I don’t know. I brought this on myself and now I’m pregnant and I’m everything she said I’d always end up being. I’m only sixteen and I’m going to have a baby.”

Eve squeezed the girl’s hand. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing that you did to bring this on yourself. The reverend and his wife are responsible for this, not you. You thought you were safe going to the church. You had every right to think you’d be safe there. What they did to you was wrong but it’s on them, not on you. Your mother will know that.”

Eve just prayed she was right. If the woman didn’t know it, Eve would damn well school her in it. The question was answered minutes later when the hospital social worker showed Camille’s mother in.

The woman didn’t bat an eye at her daughter’s stomach. Eve would guess the social worker had prepared her ahead of time. Eve watched the reunion for a minute, as mother and daughter hugged and cried. She watched Camille’s mother run her hands over her daughter’s face as though she needed to reassure herself the girl was there. Eve didn’t blame her. She couldn’t imagine the pain of not knowing where your child was.

Eve slipped out the door and headed down the hall. She had work to do.

Hours later she sat in her car not ready to go into her apartment.

Or maybe it was just the fact she wasn’t sure she could make it up the stairs. She’d spent longer than she should have at the church. She really only needed to be there to identify the woman who had hit her in the head the day she was taken, but she’d stayed on while they swept the church for the other missing women.

Samantha Greer had been the only one to be killed and they still didn’t have the full story on that. Richard and Faith Richardson weren’t talking.

The other missing women were all living as full members of the church, all married to longtime members, all with children of their own. If Eve was right, though, she suspected the children raised by Faith and Richard were birthed by the women they kidnapped. Based on what Camille had told Eve, she would bet the women were kept in the basement for years until they earned their way out.

And earning their way out apparently meant they were brainwashed because the women denied it all and refused to leave the church. Since they were all now adults, there was nothing she could do about it. So, she’d been forced to tell the parents and foster parents of the kids that they couldn’t see them yet. That she’d do her best to get the women to agree to see them in time. Maybe with the reverend and his wife behind bars, the women would come around.

Most of the reverend’s children were adults so they were able to stay on the compound, but social services had removed Anne, who was only ten, and her brother Jesse, who was fifteen from the church. They would be placed in foster care while their older siblings went through the necessary steps to become approved to foster them.

But the church wasn’t the only thing on Eve’s mind. She hadn’t been able to stop replaying the scene with Kemal and the officers outside the church. She had replayed it again and again.

Did the officers see the reverend coming down the church steps and assume he was the good guy? Or did they see Kemal’s black skin and the way he was reaching for Eve and assume he was doing something wrong?

Yes, the officers had kept their heads and listened to her. They’d made the right decision in the end, but if she hadn’t been there, would things have gone that way? She had felt the tension in that moment. Felt the heavy weight of being on the other end of an officer’s gun and not knowing how the altercation would play out.

Eve didn’t have any answers to all the questions swirling in her head.

She leaned forward, putting her head on the steering wheel and letting out a long slow breath.

She was beyond exhausted.

A knock on her driver’s side window had Eve bolting up, one hand going to her service weapon. Her heart flew into overdrive and didn’t stop when she saw Kemal on the other side of the window.

She reached and shut off the engine before opening the door. She swung her legs out, but remained seated, facing him.

“Waiting for me?” he asked, mimicking her words to him when she’d found him waiting outside her apartment building only a couple weeks past. They were weeks that seemed like a decade.

Eve let out a breath. Part of her wanted to say yes. That she was waiting for him. Hoping he’d come. “Just working up the energy to get inside.”

Kemal knelt, meeting her eyes. “How are you doing?”

She ran through the myriad ways she could answer that question. Jumpier than she should be. Kicking herself for putting herself in such a stupid position when she went to the church alone, and grateful she’d done it because she’d at least gotten Camille out of there.

She blew out a breath. “I’m tired.”

Kemal put out his hand, palm up. Eve slipped hers into it and wished, not for the first time, that things could be easier between them. Because being with him felt right in so many ways.

He pulled her to her feet and shut her car door, taking her keys from her hand to lock it before leading her toward the building.

Eve didn’t fuss or fight over the way he was taking care of her. It felt good. She leaned into him and he put an arm around her and held her as they walked into the building.

She let him continue to take care of her, watching from the couch as he warmed up a can of tomato soup and made her a grilled cheese sandwich.

Kemal balanced plates and bowls when he joined her minutes later on the couch. They ate in silence. Eve thought of the milkshakes she’d promised Camille. She would bring her one the next time she visited her.

Kemal put his bowl and plate back on the coffee table and leaned back, throwing an arm over the back of the couch.

“You got yourself out,” he said quietly.

Eve nodded, not really sure she could speak right then without crying. She wasn’t a woman who cried. It just wasn’t her. She always had to hold herself together, to stay calm in the face of danger, to lead her detectives and let them know they could count on her to be the rock in their department.

She’d been holding it together all day but she was a little tired of keeping herself glued up in one piece.

“You had to be scared,” he said.

She nodded again.

“Come here,” Kemal said, pulling her to him.

Eve let herself go, feeling his strength and warmth as he wrapped his arms around her. She broke, letting the tears come, feeling the panic and fear of the last four days wash over her. The feeling of being helpless, drugged, the lack of control. It had been riding her as she worked with her detectives at the church and it was haunting her still.

“You were coming for me,” Eve said into Kemal’s chest when her sobs had stopped.

“I was.”

Eve put a hand to his chest. “Thank you.”

“You got yourself out,” he said again and Eve nodded. She’d been telling herself that over and over. It was how she was coping with the anxiety that kept welling up inside her when she let her guard down.

He held her for a long time, running one hand up and down her back.

“I felt it,” she finally said. “I felt that moment when things could have gone horribly wrong with those officers holding a gun on you instead of the reverend.” It was another bit of the helplessness she’d been feeling. She’d felt helpless when she was down in that secret prison, but she’d also felt it again when she and Kemal had faced down those officers.

“It’s the way life is for a black person. I know people don’t want to believe that. I know white people think we make this up. That we exaggerate the way our everyday lives are, but it’s there. We have to wonder every time we get pulled over for a traffic violation, if this is something we’ll walk away from. If we have a problem in our neighborhood, we have to weigh the chances that we take in calling the cops for help. Will it really help or is it going to lead to more trouble?”

“I hate that you can’t trust that police officers are there to help you. I don’t believe those officers had it in their hearts or minds to harm you because you were black. I don’t think they set out to discriminate.”

“I don’t necessarily think that either,” he said. “But it happened all the same.”

Eve hated this. “I wish I had a solution for you.”

She heard Kemal take a deep breath. “I was wrong to try to push you away from my dad. I know I’m too controlling when it comes to him. I get that and I’m working on it. I don’t know that things between us will ever be easy, or that we’ll ever have the answers, but I want us to try. I don’t want to give up on what we could have.” Kemal held her gaze and what she saw in his eyes gave her hope.

Eve pressed her lips together, forcing herself not to cry again. She wanted that. More than he could know.

“Is that a yes?” Kemal asked.

Eve nodded, lips still pressed tight.

A wide smile spread over Kemal’s face and he pulled her to his chest again, leaning down to kiss the top of her head. “You a hot mess, woman.”

Eve couldn’t help it. She laughed at that. And then she let him hold her for a long, long time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Eve looked at Faith Richardson as she laid out the images of the women who’d vanished into the church over the decades. Faith didn’t look like the same woman she’d met weeks ago. She was now dressed in the distinctive bright orange tee shirt and orange and white striped pants of the Dark Falls Jail. Eve had heard rumors that the church was going to be able to pull together the steep bail the judge had set for the reverend and his wife, so she’d wanted to interrogate the woman before she was released.

The visit Eve got from the reverend’s oldest daughter and another member of the church that morning had had something to do with this interview also. Eve now had a good idea of what had happened in that basement, but she wanted a confession.

It looked like two days in jail had cowed the woman some. The rigid posture and haughty gaze were gone, almost as though the woman had shrunk in on herself.

Eve placed current photos of the kidnapped women on the table, then laid the pictures of the girls they’d been when they disappeared over them.

She waited a minute before setting out photos of the Richardson children underneath each of the women she suspected were their biological mothers.

“Do I have those right?” She said, tapping one of the pictures of the children. “I wasn’t sure if this one belonged to Susie or Katie.”

Some of the steel came back to the woman. “Those are my children.”

“You raised them, yes, but when we get DNA tests run, I’m sure we’ll find out you stole them.” Eve didn’t know yet if they’d be able to get court-ordered DNA tests done. She suspected they’d be able to on the younger children, but the adults would be difficult. She had a feeling the judge wouldn’t order them to take the tests if they didn’t want to.

“I adopted them.”

“Did Samantha Greer feel that way? Did she feel like you adopted her child or that you stole it?”

Faith was playing the part of the fierce mother protecting her cubs now and it was a role she seemed to relish. “Those girls weren’t ready to be mothers. They hadn’t found their way into the Grace of the Lord yet. I raised their babies for them because they knew they weren’t ready to do it yet.”

Eve switched gears. “Did you help Richard kidnap them?”

If Faith’s jaw clenched any tighter, she would crack a tooth. She didn’t answer, though. She had the nerve to sniff as though the question was beneath her. As though she’d been the one to live in piety and grace, and Eve was somehow desecrating that by drawing attention to the truth.

Heaven forbid someone call you out for kidnapping and abusing young women.

“Did you know that he was going to rape them before you helped him kidnap them or did that come as a nasty little surprise?”

Faith sat stock still.

Eve was getting nowhere so she went with her best ammunition. “Your daughter came to see me today. Hannah.”

Faith stilled at the news, her features pinched.

“I actually had assumed she was one of your natural children. She and her brother were born before Samantha Greer went missing, so we thought she belonged to you. But she brought another woman with her.”

Faith didn’t answer so Eve continued.

“Prudence Nelson had quite a story to tell. We missed her in our search of the files. She went missing thirty-one years ago. And she gave you your first two children, didn’t she?”

Faith started shaking her head, lips pressed in a tight line as though she might be able to make this go away.

“Prudence told Hannah her real name. Told her how the reverend kidnapped her. That you knew he had her in the basement. It was five years before you let her out. Let her live as part of the church. That’s a sick type of twisted. To make your captives live with you for the rest of their lives, free but not free.”

It must take a hell of a lot of brainwashing to make that stick. To make those women stay instead of trying to get out.

Eve could see Faith weakening. The woman’s eyes were wet and her expression was hollow.

Eve pointed to the picture of Samantha. “Samantha gave birth to your oldest son Ezra, didn’t she? Ezra isn’t your child. He’s Samantha’s son. Did you hit Samantha over the head and kill her?”

Faith kept shaking her head. “It wasn’t like that.” Her words were a whisper. “She was going to take Ezra.”

Eve switched from interrogator to confidant, consoling Faith. “She was going to take your son from you?”

Faith swiped at tears on her cheeks. “She was going to tell Ezra who she was. She said she was ready to raise him, that she wanted him back.”

Eve pushed a tissue box toward Faith. “Tell me.”

It never ceased to amaze Eve. When a suspect hit the point where they made the decision to talk, they talked. And talked. And talked. There was a dam breaking kind of thing that seemed to happen and they opened up.

Over the hours, Faith told Eve everything. From the first kidnapping to the minute Samantha decided she wanted her child to know who she was.

The reverend kept his victims in the basement raping and abusing them until they were utterly brainwashed—and, Eve would bet, until they aged out of his preferred range. After that, he introduced them as new members of the church and the women joined the congregation, living on the compound and marrying other members of the church.

Faith hadn’t known about the first woman until she got pregnant. Faith hadn’t been able to get pregnant. When she discovered what her husband was doing, she so desperately wanted a child, she let it go on. Listening to her, Eve could tell the woman had convinced herself the reverend was someone helping these girls. Like he was truly helping them find God. It made Eve’s stomach lurch at the realization that he’d utterly brainwashed everyone, Faith and his victims. Except Samantha.

Years after she’d been released from the basement, Samantha had found herself again somehow. Maybe it had been her fiancé who gave her the courage, but whatever it was, she’d come to her senses.

Samantha had told Faith she wanted to talk to her and the two met late one night on the building site of a home next door to the church. Samantha told Faith she wanted to be a part of her child’s life. Samantha thought they could tell him she’d been too young to be a mother so Faith was raising him. He would have been a teenager at that time and Samantha thought he was old enough to understand.

Things had gone south when Faith refused.

Samantha wasn’t as brainwashed as the reverend thought she was. She told Faith she would tell the congregation how she’d really come to the church. She said she’d tell her fiancé and he would support her.

Faith hit her in the head and then shoved her body into a hole in the basement of the house. She sealed the hole and then flooded part of the goat barn on the compound’s property. Since they relied on the goats for food and the income they made selling cheese, the building of the house was put on hold, just as Faith hoped it would. By the time the church men got back to building it, there would have been no tell-tale odor from the body. Eve had to hand it to her. It was a smart way to cover what she’d done.

Eve would guess the soil under the house had something to do with why the body had saponified, preserving the way it had. She remembered Dr. Grundholdt saying it had to do with soil content and moisture.

When the house was being renovated recently, Faith moved the body to the cemetery, hoping it would be gone and buried for good.

Eve hoped this would be enough to get the reverend to confess to what he’d been doing to the girls all those years. If he didn’t, Faith could always decide she didn’t want to testify against her husband, and with spousal privilege, they couldn’t force her. But they had Hannah’s mother’s testimony. The first girl taken in this nightmarish hell would be able to help them put these two away for good.

Still, her heart was heavy as she left the interrogation room. Her detectives were congratulating her and patting her on the back, but she couldn’t help but think about all the years those women had suffered. And to think, some of them were still so warped by what had happened that they were willing to continue living in the church, living where they’d been tortured for so long.

Glenn came out of the observation room and met her eyes. They didn’t need to say anything. Both knew what this day meant. They’d finally found out what had happened to Samantha Greer. They finally knew where her child was. They were finally going to be able to lay to rest the ghosts that had haunted them both for so long.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“I’m proud to announce the creation of the Dark Falls Community Feedback Council. We’ve got a panel of dedicated officers, community leaders, and religious leaders, all working toward ensuring that our police department and its officers are able to serve our community and its needs in the best way possible.”

The Mayor went on to talk about the dark times the police department was coming out of but how it was a department filled with men and women who wanted to do right, who wanted to serve and protect all of the people of Dark Falls. He talked about there being legitimate issues that had to be worked out. He talked about the way he hoped this new panel would move us forward.

What he didn’t talk about as the press snapped photos, was the way the people sitting up on the dais alongside Eve had put aside their differences to come together and try to make meaningful change. She looked at Kemal and his dad and smiled. They’d be going home for dinner together after this. Glenn had told her recently that seeing her and Kemal together made him happier than he’d been in a long time.

And Glenn had started an online group for retired detectives. They’d be revisiting cold case files to try to solve crimes in a way that kept them in the game, but off the streets. Any leads or hunches would be routed to the detectives working the cases. It gave him a community and a way to keep his mind sharp and engaged but let Kemal feel like his dad wasn’t doing more than he could handle.

The mayor handled most of the questions by the press and soon, the press conference was over and Kemal and Glenn were walking out to Eve’s car with her.

When they were out of sight of most of the officers and press, Kemal took her hand and she squeezed it.

They were complicated. They would never be easy. But damn, this man made her happy. And she was willing to do whatever it took to make this relationship work.

Eve remembered a time when she’d warned one of her detectives off of dating a wealthy man, telling her they were too different to work out. Luckily, Delaney Harrison hadn’t listened to her.

Eve looked over at Kemal, finding him smiling back at her. She owed Delaney an apology. Sometimes, you could take two very different people and make it work. And when it did, it was worth it.

It was all worth it.

Keep reading for a sample from Dark Falls, book one in the Dark Falls series.

SAMPLE: DARK FALLS

CHAPTER 1

“Retch tan.”

Detective John Sevier muttered the words under his breath, not really talking to anyone but himself. The fact that the color of the walls in the conference room was bothering him told him more about his mood than anything. He’d looked at these walls for years and not cared one way or another what color they were.

Still, retch tan about summed it up.

“Puke tan.”

John swung his head around. So much for not talking to anyone but himself. Nate Ryder, one of the other detectives in the Major Crimes unit of the Dark Falls Police Department was contemplating the walls as though their conversation might reveal a major secret to the universe instead of settling on the best name for the paint.

“Cat-yak tan,” someone else offered.

John shook his head. These guys could easily spend the next hour debating this. What the hell had he started?

The conference room had a table that could hold up to ten of the detectives in the unit. Of course, with ten, they’d have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with no room to take notes or bend an arm to chug the mud-water coffee the machine in the corner spat out. Today, there were only six of them in there, so they had elbow room, at least.

Still, the room was making John edgy, and he wasn’t an edgy kind of guy. No, scratch that. It was the case they were working that had him on edge, not the room.

“Toe jam tan,” Nate said, leaning back to high five one of the others.

John cursed and reached for his coffee cup, then thought better of it when he realized his stomach felt like a bear had crapped in it at some point while he slept. Coffee wasn’t going to help that.

There was a big-screen television mounted on one wall that let the officers watch interrogations in progress in any of the three interrogation rooms assigned to their team.

John currently sat in front of the other wall—the one with a dry erase board covering the full length of it—squeezing the hell out of the blue gel ball that had started out as Nate’s but had become more of a department-wide stress ball.

Rhys Evans stood at the white board. When they wanted to get to Rhys, they called him Sport—a reference to his high school and college football days. He had that star quarterback look to him, all blue eyes and dirty blond hair.

John guessed people might describe him in much the same way. He was built, working out more than ever since his divorce meant he had no one to go home to. He had brown hair and brown eyes that one girlfriend in high school had insisted were honey-colored instead of brown. Whatever that meant.

John’s partner, Eric Cantu, was the opposite of John and Rhys’s clean cut looks. Eric was tanned with black hair that was longer than most of the unit wore it, and a nose that made his Italian heritage absolutely clear. His chin always had a bit of stubble to it. The captain gave him shit about it, but Eric swore he shaved every morning, that it grew back in on the drive to work.

Eric had rolled his chair back into a corner so he could stretch his legs out and slouch down in the chair, trying to get a nap in before the meeting started. Eric had pulled an extra shift the night before, covering for one of the guys on the night unit.

When Rhys turned around, ready to start, John tossed a pen at Eric, hitting him on the chest. In seconds, his partner straightened and pulled his chair to the table. No one begrudged any of the detectives a nap when they needed one. You grabbed sleep where you could, whether that was in the precinct or at home. Luckily, they didn’t have to worry about wrinkling their suits.

Unlike detectives on television, they didn’t wear cheap suits in the Dark Falls Major Crimes unit. Unless they were going to testify in court, they wore business casual. Most days, the men and women of Major Crimes were in button-down shirts and jeans or a polo shirt and pants. They all kept a blazer hanging in their cubicles for trips to court, but that was really the only time they put them on.

Dressing casually came in handy if they had to walk into a convenience store to scope out a suspect without anyone thinking, shit, that guy looks like a cop. They also sometimes drove around town in a soccer-mom van when they were trying to track down a suspect. There was something about the look on a scumbag’s face when the doors to the nanny-van they’d considered harmless opened to dump six guys in tactical gear at their feet. It was priceless. And it made the job worth it. Most of the time, anyway.

Rhys didn’t bother with preliminaries. They were here because their captain had ordered the Major Crimes unit to attack the jewelry store robberies that had been happening in the last few months around the city.

Rhys was probably the most buttoned up of the group. He was quiet and always looked like he was thinking about something important. The snippets of tattoos peeking out from under his short sleeves were the only giveaway that there was something more going on under that façade.

“We’re working the jewelry store robberies today, everyone.” Rhys Evans was writing what they knew about the recent string of jewelry store robberies on the white board. “Cap wants these solved and off the books before more people get hurt.”

John’s head shot up at that. He didn’t know anyone had been hurt. Flashes of a woman with big brown eyes and a wide smile standing behind a jewelry store counter taunted him.

John sat up straighter, reaching for the coffee after all. To hell with his stomach.

“We’ve had three robberies in the last three months that appear to have been committed by the same group. Four suspects. All look to be male, but they’re good at covering their faces. Actually, everything is covered—jeans, boots, long sleeved shirts, gloves, ski masks. We can’t tell if there are tattoos or identifying marks.”

“This last one,” Nate, another of the detectives, put in, “an employee at the store was hurt. No major injuries, but one of the suspects didn’t think the salesman was acting fast enough. He slammed him into a glass case, broke his nose, and he’ll likely have a few scars from where the glass cut him.”

Rhys nodded. “They’re hitting stores in less upscale parts of town. Places that won’t have a guard or panic alarm.”

And thank God for that, John thought, clenching and unclenching a fist. It wasn’t fair to the victims, but he had his own reasons for being glad these guys weren’t hitting the higher end shops yet. With a city the size of Dark Falls, there were quite a few jewelry stores they could hit.

Still, they would run out eventually. What remained to be seen was whether they might move on to something else, like pawn shops, or start hitting the higher end places.

Rhys continued, oblivious to the cramping in John’s gut as he thought of where this might go. To most of the guys, this was a typical robbery investigation.

“They spray paint the video cameras as soon as they enter. In and out in under four minutes.”

John checked his notes, shaking off the agitation he’d been feeling all day, and focused on the job. “If it’s the same group, they’re still following a pattern as far as timing. Three to four weeks between hits.” He paused and counted the days. “No, wait, this one is one day under the three-week mark. Other than the fact they’re choosing low-rent stores, there’s no location pattern. They’re spread out across the poorer parts of town, but not clumped together in one neighborhood.”

He grabbed the still shots they’d pulled from the snippets of video they had. “I’ve looked over the video footage from the scenes.”

“Anything worthwhile?” their captain asked as she entered the room. Captain Eve Scanlon wasn’t a bad captain, but she had an uncanny ability to catch a lot of a conversation when she wasn’t even in the room yet.

She was in her early forties with long, jet-black hair she kept pinned ruthlessly back in a bun. People often mistook her wide eyes and red lips as signs she wasn’t sharp and tough as hell. If they acted on that mistake, they were schooled quickly.

She’d put in her dues working as a detective before moving behind the desk. It was one of the reasons they all respected her. That, and most of the time, she let them do their jobs.

Rhys shook his head. “Shit cameras in a lot of them. One has piss poor angles, and the other has such grainy footage, it’s hard to make much out before they block them. I don’t know how these businesses were getting insurance coverage this way.”

“On top of that, as soon as our guys enter the store,” John said, “They hit the cameras with black spray paint. We get a few seconds of footage, then it’s out.”

Nate leaned forward, signaling to John with an open hand that he wanted the stress ball. “I’m reaching out to some of the other businesses in the area,” Nate said, catching the ball and tossing it from hand to hand. “There are a few places that might have an angle we can get something on. A gas station across the street from one of the jewelry stores and an ATM next to the other. Maybe they’ll have better quality.”

Captain Scanlon brought the focus back around to John. “See anything on the footage we have so far, Sevier?”

John shook his head. “Not much. Four suspects, appear to be male, but they’re making an effort to cover themselves up. Black boots and black jeans. T-shirts all have local bands on them, or no logo at all. On two of them, I can see blue or purple hair sticking out from under the masks and hoods in some of the shots.”

Gerald Osborn snorted. “Punk rockers. My nephew’s been dressing like that for the last year. Can’t get him into anything else.”

Osborn and his partner, Craig Patel, were the older guys on the team. They had a lot more knowledge than the rest of them, and were still in good enough shape to be on the streets. Didn’t mean the guys didn’t make fun of them some days for being the grannies of the group.

John nodded. “Has that feel to it. The jeans are tight, some ripped knees, that kind of thing. The boots go anywhere from ankle height to all the way up the calves. They do look like they could be in a band.”

“Maybe they are,” Eric said.

John had thought of that, too. “I checked the websites of the bands that showed up on the t-shirts a few of them had on. No matches there. Wrong heights and builds. I ran histories on the band members just to be sure. A couple of the members had shoplifting or PI arrests.” Public intoxication arrests weren’t all that unexpected among bands that played in bars and stayed out late drinking afterward.

And shoplifting didn’t really carry over into armed robbery.

John summed up his findings. “Nothing that screamed bank robber to me, but it’s possible they’re in some other band. Hell, they could be fuck-knuckles playing in their mom’s garage.” He pushed the printouts of the reports into the center of the table in the universal signal for the team to have at it. They checked each other’s work all the time. He had no issue with that.

“Tattoos? Jewelry?” another sergeant asked.

John shook his head. “All skin other than the eyes are covered up. I can tell you we’ve got at least two guys who dye their hair and we have one with brown eyes, one with hazel eyes, and two blue.”

Eric slanted his crooked grin at John and then hit the side of his head a few times, like he was trying to shake his marbles back into the right spots in his head. “Thought I woke up to a beauty pageant there for a second.” He reached for the carafe of coffee that sat in the center of the table and poured himself two cups, one for each hand.

Eric was the comic relief on the unit. He kept them all from getting too serious, until they needed to buckle down. When Eric Cantu stopped joking, you knew shit got real.

“A Point Break kind of gang? A punk band instead of surfers?” Eric asked.

John shrugged a shoulder. At this point, anything was possible.

“Still nothing in pawn shops? They have to be selling this stuff someplace,” Eric said.

Nate shook his head. “We’ve put the call out to the shops. Not getting any hits so far. Could be doing it for the thrill?”

As they moved on to brainstorm some of the other cases in the unit, John tried to shove thoughts of a certain jewelry store owner aside. Ava McNair wasn’t a part of his life anymore, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of where she was and what she was doing.

He hadn’t worried so much about her when the first jewelry store heist happened, or even the second. Now that the third one hit, he was itching to go warn her.

There wasn’t a reason to stay away from her anymore. His divorce had been finalized a couple of years ago. He didn’t have to stay away from an old college girlfriend out of respect for Lucia.

Not that it would be that kind of visit, anyway. If he’d learned one thing over the last few years, it was that he wasn’t meant to be in a relationship. No, if he went to see Ava, it would only be to warn an old friend to be careful.

The meeting broke and John and Eric moved down the hall toward their cubicles.

“You good?” Eric asked, eyeing John.

“Yep.”

“I thought you were gonna bust Dahlia in there, you were squeezing her so hard.”

John stopped in the aisle between the cubicles. “Come again?”

Eric held up his hands and squeezed the air like an inept teenager might squeeze a woman’s breasts. “I was thinking, that stress ball Nate’s always got. It’s like he’s looking for a substitute woman. Thought we should give her a name. I’m trying Dahlia out.”

John rolled his eyes, but had to admit, the look on Nate’s face when he heard that one would be funny.

They settled into John’s cubicle, John in his desk chair, Eric in the corner in the single guest chair that rarely had anyone other than one of the other cops in it.

“Tell Uncle Eric all about it. What has your panties in a bunch this morning?”

“My panties aren’t in a bunch.” They were, but he wasn’t about to open up to Eric about that.

“You need to get laid. I thought you were seeing that woman. What’s her name? Lily? Lacy? Lola?”

It was Laura, but John wasn’t going to give Eric the satisfaction of correcting him. His partner was able to remember the smallest details in a case. He knew damned well the woman John sometimes slept with when she wasn’t in a relationship was Laura. He also knew damned well Laura had met someone a few months ago and hadn’t been in John’s bed since.

Eric wasn’t exactly good at hiding his strategy. He wanted John to get annoyed enough to tell him off and then start talking. The two were close, but that didn’t mean he was going to go all psychiatrist’s couch with the guy.

John stood, grabbing his wallet and keys. “Got an errand to run, then I’ll swing by and grab us lunch. Back in an hour.”

Eric raised a brow but didn’t say anything as John walked out. With the best partners, a look was enough to get the message across, and Eric’s message was clear. He knew good and well John was off his game. And a cop off his game was a danger to them all.

Ava McNair smiled as she watched the couple leave her store. She loved seeing couples find the perfect engagement ring to start their lives together. These two were young, but she could see the devotion in the way they looked at each other.

He’d come in ahead of time to choose a ring, then told his girlfriend he needed to swing by and pick up a watch his mom left to be repaired. The look on her face was priceless when he dropped to one knee after Ava passed him the ring box.

“Nice,” Kirsten James said, winking at Ava from her spot by the door. The woman might look harsh in her guard uniform, but she was as much of a softy when it came to that kind of thing as Ava was.

Ava grinned and turned to go to the back to check on her sister, but the door chimed again. What she saw when she looked back was anything but expected.

The man entering her family’s jewelry store had filled out. His face was different, worn in a way, but in a good way. At least, she thought it looked good on him. His eyes were the same, though.

John Sevier’s eyes trapped and held her, his light brown gaze doing things to her just like they had years before when she’d been stupid enough to walk away from him.

To say he was the one who got away was an understatement. She’d been so naïve and focused on all the wrong things at that time in her life. She never realized what she was losing until it was far too late for her to do anything about it.

Not that she would have been able to hold on to him anyway. Halfway through college, her life had changed drastically, and she’d had to drop out to help her dad and sister. She would have lost John then, anyway. Still, an eighties rock ballad was playing in the back of her head somewhere as she thought about not knowing what you had ’til it was gone.

Kirsten stiffened and looked ready to move into action if Ava didn’t say anything. It was no wonder. A six-foot-one man who looked like he could eat glass for breakfast if he got the craving, was standing frozen in their showroom. And Ava probably looked like a deer in headlights.

“John.” Ava breathed the word out, then shook herself to clear the fog. She waved a hand at Kirsten. “It’s all right. John’s an old friend.”

She thought she saw something flicker in his eyes at the words, but if it had been anything more than her imagination, it was gone.

“Um…” Ava looked around the showroom. One of her salespeople was on the other side of the store helping an older gentleman pick out a bracelet for his granddaughter. Kirsten was still staring at her and John.

Ava swung a hand in the direction of the workshop and offices at the back of the store. “We could, um…”

Thankfully, John nodded, seemingly unconcerned at the fact she couldn’t seem to get a sentence out that didn’t include “um.” Scratch that, she hadn’t actually gotten a complete sentence out, period.

She went to the back, hoping to pass right through the workshop where her sister, Janna, designed most of the jewelry they carried. They had other artisans who worked for them, repairing jewelry and watches and such, but Janna was their only bench jeweler. Anything in their cases that her sister didn’t make was ordered from jewelry wholesalers or outside artisans.

Janna stood at her bench, the spotlights that surrounded her all aimed at a four-inch square space in front of her as her hands worked with small samplings of metals and gems. Janna had a habit of getting lost in her work, but today when Ava hoped she might do just that, her sister looked up.

Janna’s eyes went from Ava to John and back to Ava in a comic demonstration of her surprise at seeing a man with Ava.

Yeah, it was somewhat of a shock to Ava, too.

“John, this is my sister, Janna. Janna, John and I were friends in college.” Ava watched as Janna’s eyes went wide.

John smiled and nodded. Whether he remembered Ava mentioning Janna’s issues with anxiety when they dated, or he just read people really well, she didn’t know. But for whatever reason, he didn’t offer his hand to Janna to shake. That was good. It was what Janna was more comfortable with.

Janna looked to Ava. “Big John?”

Oh Lord.

Ava’s cheeks flamed hot, and she knew they must be red. She and Janna shared everything, which meant Janna knew all about the John Ava had dated in college. She just hadn’t expected Janna to put the man standing before her together with their conversations about John in college. And yes, Janna had truly nicknamed him Big John in college, but it wasn’t for the reasons one might think.

Not that he couldn’t have earned the nickname that way. Back in the day, one of Ava’s friends had described John’s body as “call him if you need your house moved over a few inches” kind of big. She wasn’t wrong.

Ava put her hands to her cheeks, and a small semblance of a laugh slipped from her lips. She dodged John’s smiling eyes and Janna’s impish grin without answering and led the way back to her office.

She could try to explain to John that Janna had given him the nickname because that was how he’d seemed to her at the time. Ava had talked about John so much when they were dating that Janna had labeled him “big” in Ava’s world.

She didn’t know how to say all that without making the whole situation worse, though, so she clamped down on her lips, imprisoning them between her teeth as she shut the door behind them.

The look he gave her told her he was enjoying this far too much.

“For your information,” she said, crossing her arms, “Big John is another John. Not you. It’s…” she didn’t have any ideas… “someone else.”

“Uh-huh.” He matched her crossed arms and let a smile cross his face.

Ava deflated a little. It was good to see him. She’d known he moved to Dark Falls after college. He and his wife had made the city their home when he’d been offered a spot on the police force. She heard about him from time to time from old college friends, and they’d run into each other once at the farmer’s market downtown.

She’d heard about his divorce, too.

She leaned her hip on her desk and tried to get her heart to stop pounding and her hands to stop shaking. “It’s good to see you. You look good.”

Oh hell. She should just shut up.

It was true, though. He still wore his brown hair short in what she guessed was some kind of police regulation, above the collar kind of cut. His skin was tanned and scarred in some spots, making her want to trace the pattern of his history written there and ask him about every little mark. His jaw was the kind you read about being chiseled, and that mouth looked like it could do things no woman could refuse.

What was she doing? She focused back on his eyes and tried to get her inner hussy to shut the hell up for a minute.

“You, too. I should have stopped in and said hi before. I, uh…” He ran a hand over the back of his head, from the base of his neck up to the top of his head. It was something he’d done in the past, too.

“I’m sure you’re busy,” she offered. “I heard you made detective.”

He nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

Ava tilted her head.

“I wanted to stop in and make sure you knew about the jewelry store robberies that have been happening.”

She frowned. “I think I saw something in one of the papers about a store being robbed last week, but honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the news when I get busy. There are others?”

John was all business now. “Yes. There are details I can’t share, but what you need to know is that three stores have been hit. They’re all lower end stores that don’t have a guard posted. You have your guard out there all day, every day?”

Ava was stunned. She didn’t think people really robbed jewelry stores anymore. There were guards in many of them and most of the other owners she networked with had high quality cameras and good security systems.

She looked toward the front of the store where Kirsten was standing guard, even though there were several walls between them, and she couldn’t actually see the showroom from her office. “Yes, Kirsten works two days a week, and we have two others. Kirsten and one of the others are former military, and the other is a former campus officer from one of the out-of-state colleges. I don’t remember which school.”

At the moment, all she could remember was that they all had families, loved ones. She brought her hand to the gemstone on her neck. Her birthstone, garnet. “Have there been injuries?”

John looked grim. “Thankfully, only during this last robbery. One clerk was shoved into a glass case. No serious wounds, though. He’ll be fine.”

Ava stared at a spot over his shoulder. She had to wonder how fine she or any of her people would be if they were held up at gunpoint. She assumed they had guns, or a weapon of some other sort.

He went on. “They’re not hitting shops like yours yet, but I wanted to make sure you guys are on your toes. Your cameras and alarms are working?”

“Of course.”

“You’d be surprised how many times people let those go, thinking the alarm sticker in the window is enough of a deterrent. Until their insurance company forces them to get into compliance, they let things go.”

Ava blinked. “Our cameras and alarms are all working. We put paste jewels in the window displays, but that’s the only fake thing around here.”

John stepped closer, and Ava was overly aware of the small size of her office in that moment. The man had always taken her breath away, but now that he was more than a college boy, he was almost overwhelming.

She’d long known she’d been an idiot to let him go. The point was no more obvious to her than it was right now as his eyes bore into hers. Still, he was here for business reasons. She needed to remember that, even if her body seemed to have other ideas at the moment.

“Good,” he said. “I want you to be safe.”

Ava swallowed. She opened her mouth to say something—she had no idea what that would be, since the sight of him in her office after all these years had her flustered beyond reason—but the intercom on her phone buzzed.

“Ava, you’re needed in the showroom, please,” came the polite voice of her salesman. He probably had more than one customer. They knew from experience, if you let someone browse too long without helping them on the showroom floor, they’d walk out without making a purchase.

John stepped back. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

Ava nodded, trying to let the breath she’d been holding slip out slowly and quietly enough that he might not hear it.

John led the way back to the showroom, pausing to turn to her when they were in the doorway between the front and back of the store.

“You look good, Ava. Really good.”

Ava nodded again, still struck mute, it seemed.

“Stay safe,” he said as he turned away.

“You, too, John.” She echoed his words in her head. Stay safe.

Then she watched for a moment, not letting herself worry about customers and sales quite yet. She stood at the back of the showroom and watched as John Sevier walked away.

To keep reading Dark Falls, click here!

ALSO BY LORI RYAN

The Sutton Capital Series

Legal Ease

Penalty Clause

The Baker’s Bodyguard (A Sutton Capital Series Novella)

Negotiation Tactics

The Billionaire’s Suite Dreams

The Baker, the Bodyguard, and the Wedding Bell Blues (A Sutton Capital Series Novella)

Her SEALed Fate

The Sutton Capital Series Boxed Set (Books One Through Four)

The Sutton Capital Series Boxed Set (Books Five Through Seven)

Sutton Capital Intrigue

Cutthroat

Cut and Run

Cut to the Chase

Sutton Capital On the Line Series

Pure Vengeance

Latent Danger

Wicked Justice

Heroes of Evers, Texas Series

Love and Protect

Promise and Protect

Honor and Protect (An Evers, TX Novella)

Serve and Protect

Desire and Protect

Cherish and Protect

Triple Play Curse Series

Game Changer

Game Maker

Game Clincher

The Triple Play Curse Boxed Set

Standalone Books

Stealing Home (writing in Melanie Shawn’s Hope Falls Series)

Any Witch Way (writing in Robyn Peterman’s Magic and Mayhem Series)

All In (writing in the Sleeper SEALs Series)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lori Ryan is a NY Times and USA Today bestselling author who writes romantic suspense, contemporary romance, and sports romance. She lives with an extremely understanding husband, three wonderful children, and two mostly-behaved dogs in Austin, Texas. It’s a bit of a zoo, but she wouldn’t change a thing.

Lori published her first novel in April of 2013 and hasn’t looked back since then. She loves to connect with her readers.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Dark Falls

Copyright

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