Dark Falls (Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 1) Read online

  Dark Falls

  Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 1

  Lori Ryan

  Contents

  Dark Falls

  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

  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 Rage - Becca Jameson (Apr. 23, 2019)

  Dark Tidings - Trish McCallan (May 21, 2019)

  Dark Obsession - Lisa-Marie Cabrelli (June 25, 2019)

  Dark Prison - Lori Ryan (July 30, 2019)

  Copyright © 2018 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.

  Chapter One

  “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 coverin
g 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.