Gone to Darkness Read online

  PRAISE FOR BARBARA NICKLESS

  “Ambush truly kicks butt and takes names, crackling with tension from page one with a plot as sharp as broken glass. Barbara Nickless is a superb writer.”

  —Steve Berry, #1 internationally bestselling author

  “A nail-biter with some wicked twists . . . Fast-paced and nonstop . . . Sydney is fleshed out, flawed, gritty, and kick-ass, and you can’t help but root for her. Nickless leaves you satisfied and smiling—something that doesn’t happen too often in this genre!”

  —The Bookish Biker

  “Ambush has plenty of action and intrigue. There are shoot-outs and kidnappings. There are cover-ups and conspiracies. At the center of it all is a flawed heroine who will do whatever it takes to set things right.”

  —BVS Reviews

  “Ambush takes off on page one like a Marine F/A-18 Super Hornet under full military power from the flight deck . . . and never lets the reader down.”

  —Mysterious Book Report

  “Ambush is modern mystery with its foot on the gas. Barbara Nickless’s writing—at turns blazing, aching, stark, and gorgeous—propels this story at a breathless pace until its sublime conclusion. In Sydney Parnell, Nickless has masterfully crafted a heroine who, with all her internal and external scars, compels the reader to simultaneously root for and forgive her. A truly standout novel.”

  —Carter Wilson, USA Today bestselling author of Mister Tender’s Girl

  “Exceptional . . . Nickless raises the stakes and expands the canvas of a blisteringly original series. A wholly satisfying roller coaster of a thriller that features one of the genre’s most truly original heroes.”

  —Jon Land, USA Today bestselling author

  “Ambush . . . makes you laugh and cry as the pages fly by.”

  —Tim Tigner, internationally bestselling author

  “A stunner of a thriller. From the first page to the last, Blood on the Tracks weaves a spell that only a natural storyteller can master. And a guarantee: you’ll fall in love with one of the best characters to come along in modern thriller fiction, Sydney Rose Parnell.”

  —Jeffery Deaver, #1 international bestselling author

  “Beautifully written and heartbreakingly intense, this terrific and original debut is unforgettable. Please do not miss Blood on the Tracks. It fearlessly explores our darkest and most vulnerable places—and is devastatingly good. Barbara Nickless is a star.”

  —Hank Phillippi Ryan, winner of Anthony, Agatha, and Mary Higgins Clark awards and author of Say No More

  “Both evocative and self-assured, Barbara Nickless’s debut novel is an outstanding, hard-hitting story so gritty and real you feel it in your teeth. Do yourself a favor and give this bright talent a read.”

  —John Hart, multiple Edgar Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Redemption Road

  “Fast-paced and intense, Blood on the Tracks is an absorbing thriller that is both beautifully written and absolutely unique in character and setting. Barbara Nickless has written a twisting, tortured novel that speaks with brutal honesty of the lingering traumas of war, including and especially those wounds we cannot see. I fell hard for Parnell and her four-legged partner and can’t wait to read more.”

  —Vicki Pettersson, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Swerve

  “The aptly titled Blood on the Tracks offers a fresh and starkly original take on the mystery genre. Barbara Nickless has fashioned a beautifully drawn hero in take-charge, take-no-prisoners Sydney Parnell, former Marine and now a railway cop battling a deadly gang as she investigates their purported connection to a recent murder. Nickless proves a master of both form and function in establishing herself every bit the equal of Nevada Barr and Linda Fairstein. A major debut that is not to be missed.”

  —Jon Land, USA Today bestselling author

  “Blood on the Tracks is a bullet train of action. It’s one part mystery and two parts thriller with a compelling protagonist leading the charge toward a knockout finish. The internal demons of one Sydney Rose Parnell are as gripping as the external monster she’s chasing around Colorado. You will long remember this spectacular debut novel.”

  —Mark Stevens, author of the award-winning Allison Coil Mystery series

  “Nickless captures you from the first sentence. Her series features Sydney Rose Parnell, a young woman haunted by the ghosts of her past. In Blood on the Tracks, she doggedly pursues a killer, seeking truth even in the face of her own destruction. The true mark of a heroine. Skilled in evoking emotion from the reader, Nickless is a master of the craft, a writer to keep your eyes on.”

  —Chris Goff, author of Dark Waters

  “Barbara Nickless’s Blood on the Tracks is raw and authentic, plunging readers into the fascinating world of tough railroad cop Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell and her Malinois sidekick, Clyde. Haunted by her military service in Iraq, Sydney Rose is brought in by the Denver Major Crimes Unit to help solve a particularly brutal murder, leading her into a snake pit of hate and betrayal. Meticulously plotted and intelligently written, Blood on the Tracks is a superb debut novel.”

  —M. L. Rowland, author of the Search and Rescue Mystery novels

  “Blood on the Tracks is a must-read debut. A suspenseful crime thriller with propulsive action, masterful writing, and a tough-as-nails cop, Sydney Rose Parnell. Readers will want more.”

  —Robert K. Tanenbaum, New York Times bestselling author of the Butch Karp–Marlene Ciampi legal thrillers

  “Blood on the Tracks is a superb story that rises above the genre of mystery . . . It is a first-class read.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Nickless’s writing admirably captures the fallout from a war where even survivors are trapped, forever reliving their trauma.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Part mystery, part antiwar story, Nickless’s engrossing first novel, a series launch, introduces Sydney Rose Parnell . . . Nickless skillfully explores the dehumanizing effects resulting from the unspeakable cruelties of wartime as well as the part played by the loyalty soldiers owe to family and each other under stressful circumstances.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An interesting tale . . . The fast pace will leave you finished in no time. Nickless seamlessly ties everything together with a shocking ending.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “If you enjoy suspense and thrillers, then you will [want] Blood on the Tracks for your library. Full of the suspense that holds you on the edge of your seat, it’s also replete with acts of bravery, moments of hope, and a host of feelings that keep the story’s intensity level high. This would be a great work for a book club or reading group with a great deal of information that would create robust dialogue and debate.”

  —Blogcritics

  “In Blood on the Tracks, Barbara Nickless delivers a thriller with the force of a speeding locomotive and the subtlety of a surgeon’s knife. Sydney and Clyde are both great characters with flaws and virtues to see them through a plot thick with menace. One for contemporary thriller lovers everywhere.”

  —Authorlink

  ALSO BY BARBARA NICKLESS

  Blood on the Tracks

  Dead Stop

  Ambush

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Barbara Nickless

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwis
e, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542092869

  ISBN-10: 1542092868

  Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design

  To Kristin Mueller, Leslie Alpin Wharton, and the Wonderful Waldo Women.

  We helped each other rise from the ashes and find our wings again.

  And most especially to Susan Ruane McConnell:

  my dear friend, you flew all too briefly.

  CONTENTS

  THE COMING DARK

  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

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE COMING DARK

  He loved that the room was always cold.

  He loved that down here, far below the cheer of man’s normal haunts, the air carried a bite like the bright edge of a knife. Down here, his fingers turned clumsy, snot dripped from his nose, his breath hung in the air from the bellows of his lungs.

  Sometimes, the room seemed alive. As if he stood inside a beast of stone and steel. Water seeped down the concrete walls. Pipes groaned overhead. Bare bulbs cast a weak light, while the walls gathered shadows to themselves. A rusty drain in the middle of the floor emitted a sharp stink that caught in his throat and made his eyes water. Far below, something long dead still lay rotting in the dark, dense earth.

  Here, in this room, anything felt possible.

  Here, everything was right.

  And so he made the room a shrine.

  Taped to the walls: newspaper clippings, articles from the internet, files from hacked databases. There were illegally obtained service records and transcripts from phone calls. He’d spent months collecting every scrap he could.

  So he could take her in.

  So he could inhale her.

  He’d arranged everything in chronological order. From her late teens—sporting events, prom, graduation—through her Marine career and into her time with the railroads. A life recently made public in the Denver papers, which had made his job easier.

  Dynamic Duo: Missing Girl Found by Railroad Cop and K9 Partner

  Heroes Ride Again: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Solve Wartime Mystery

  Our Heroes: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Leave the Rails, Join Denver Police

  Rising Heroes: Railroad Cop and K9 Partner Join Denver Major Crimes Unit

  Then there were the photographs. She gazed at him from every surface.

  Some pictures were from the papers. Another was her boot-camp photo. He had pictures from the media announcement when she’d been plucked from the obscurity of the rails and promoted to the Denver Major Crimes Unit as the chief’s golden girl.

  But most of the photos were from his private collection. The ones he’d taken.

  Those were his favorite.

  Here she was, sweaty and breathless, returning to her fuckboy’s house from a run in the park. A few photos showed her dining out, others caught her sitting on her deck, and in another picture, he’d snapped her as she exited her police-issued Chevrolet Tahoe. He had two from when she’d walked nude past her bedroom window. And he had a single picture from the party the railroad had thrown for her just the night before, taken from his dimly lit place at the end of the bar.

  He breathed with the room. With the drain and its stench. The thrum of the pipes. Lust raged inside him. He understood that hunger as clearly as if it had come straight from God.

  Take. Use. Destroy.

  Hers was a life on the rise. And the higher they flew . . .

  “Like Icarus.” He nodded to himself. “And we all know how that turned out.”

  The room swallowed his words. The shadows rustled, disturbed.

  The dog was a problem. He was still working on that. But for every problem, there was a solution.

  He stepped into the middle of the room, straddling the drain with its putrid stench, and turned in place. Dreaming. Imagining.

  In the far corner he’d placed a cot, a large, easy-to-clean plastic bucket, and a storage tub with assorted tools—screwdrivers, pliers, clamps, duct tape. He also had power tools. His favorite was the Craftsman twenty-volt half-inch drill. His mind lingered over the word craftsman. He was a craftsman. He was an artist.

  He also loved the portable band saw. For when they reached the end together.

  He had handcuffs welded to the ceiling, plastic sheeting on the floor. An industrial hose.

  It was all so perfect.

  His eyes came to rest on the media photo of her standing behind a dais next to the chief. She was smiling, even if something in her eyes suggested she wasn’t entirely certain about her change in affairs.

  “Crash and burn, baby,” he whispered. “Just like Icarus. Crash and burn.”

  CHAPTER 1

  To hell with their laws and restrictions. You have a great and wise heart, Sydney Rose. And that makes for a much better guide to what’s wrong and what’s right.

  —Effie “Grams” Parnell. Private conversation.

  My first official homicide investigation began without a corpse.

  An actual body is what triggers a murder case. It’s straightforward—in order to prove that a murder occurred, you must have a dead person. Corpus delicti, the courts call it. Latin for body of the crime.

  All I had on that foggy, still-dark morning as my K9 partner and I drove through the outskirts of Denver was a message on my phone from a railroad cop named Heinrich. And a bad feeling—after our brief conversation, Heinrich had stopped answering his phone.

  Next to me in the console, a cup of 7-Eleven coffee steamed into the air. Ray Wylie Hubbard sang on the radio about righteous killing. I drove with both hands on the wheel, as patches of the highway were slick with black ice. When I test-tapped the brakes, the Chevy Tahoe skated sideways.

  Beside me, Clyde made a noise in his throat.

  I dropped my speed.

  “Easy, pal,” I said.

  Oncoming headlights flared against the windshield, skirted off the side windows, then vanished behind us, taillights aglow like baleful eyes.

  The date was March 15.

  The Ides of March. When assassins bare their knives.

  My first exchange with Special Agent Heinrich that day had been at 3:14 a.m.

  This was after I discovered he’d pilfered my blue-and-silver detective’s shield. A group of us from the railroad had gone out the night before to celebrate my promotion from patrol to homicide. Heinrich was there. My former boss, Deputy Chief Mauer, too. And about twenty railroaders I’d worked with during my two years as a cop with Denver Pacific Continental. It was a damn weird party—half celebration for my success and half mourning that my promotion meant I’d likely never return to the railroads. I think a few of us cried. Or maybe it was just me, three drinks in and still hung up on whether I’d made the right choice to put the railroads in my past.

  In Denver PD, I was the golden girl on the fast track. Six months in patrol and now three weeks into my on-the-job training as a homicide detective with the Denver Major Crimes Unit. My serendipitous rise had coincided with a nasty series of s
exual harassment charges inside the department. The chief needed to show the good citizens of Denver that their police had a zero-tolerance policy toward caveman behaviors.

  And that they enthusiastically promoted women.

  Which was where I came in. Sydney Rose Parnell. Poster child.

  I test-tapped the brakes again, felt the tires grip, and rewarded myself with a one-handed sip of coffee. I was officially on probation for three more months. Screw up, and I’d be back in patrol, the promotion of women be damned.

  The night before, I’d given my wallet to Heinrich to spot him a twenty, and he’d filched my shield as a joke, the son of a bitch. I hadn’t noticed until oh-dark-thirty, after a case of nerves had gotten me up hours before the alarm and I’d spotted the voice mail from Heinrich: So sorry, it was a joke, didn’t mean to leave the bar with your badge. I’m sure my counselor would say that my carelessness with my badge was indicative of my ambivalence toward my new career. When I phoned Heinrich to arrange a meet, he was already on his way east, answering a call from dispatch. An engineer running a train through the area had spotted a trespasser standing near the tracks, a woman.

  Maybe the woman was just a poor insomniac, night-haunted like so many of us. But the nearest homes and businesses were miles away. So it was possible she was a jumper. Maybe even a terrorist with derailment in mind.

  Heinrich—along with my shield—had gone to investigate.

  Now I was also on my way east to get it back before anyone found out I’d lost it. With Denver PD in the crosshairs of local politicians, the new lieutenant was a take-no-prisoners commander who operated on the broken-window theory—any mistake, however minor, was an indication the entire department was going to the dogs. If Lobowitz learned I’d lost my badge, she’d make a note in my file. Two more infractions, and she’d drop me from the detectives’ room to the dreary dullness of midnight patrols in Green Valley Ranch.

  I could hear the chatter already. A woman. A railroad cop. Couldn’t hold on to her badge.

  Not figuratively.

  Not literally.

  On the radio, Hubbard moved on from death to dying. The windshield wipers scraped against the glass. Something else scraped the inside of my skull.