The Woman in the Woods (Dean Steele Mystery Thriller Book 1) Read online

  The Woman in the Woods

  Copyright © 2022 by A.J. Rivers

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Also by A.J. Rivers

  Without her, things will be easier.

  Without her, it will be better.

  I just have to tell myself that.

  Everything will fall into place.

  Everything will be the way it should be.

  Without her, I can keep going.

  They say the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray. That never meant much to her before. It never really needed to. Not in a world that looked like freedom and felt like glass. She had a plan. Maybe she had more than one. Maybe she always had them. Sketching them in notebooks. Doodling them in the corners of napkins. Murmuring them to herself on the tail end of love song chords and the thin, almost inaudible tone of metal on metal.

  At the very least she had that one. She believed it was the best.

  Now it had gone astray. Just like they say.

  Maybe it already had long ago. At the very beginning, before there was even a chance to see how it would unfold. Before she’d even spoken it out loud, when that dream was still ephemera in the corners of her mind, gathering together to eventually form sound in her mouth. Maybe it went astray then.

  Or it hadn’t, because maybe it wasn’t her plan. Not fully. Not at the beginning, anyway. It started somewhere else and made its way into her mind when she didn’t realize what was happening. It sank in hidden by laughter and longing, the smell of chlorine and the taste of sweat, until it seemed like it had been there all along. She talked about it like it had been there. Like it was an inextricable part of her.

  But that didn’t matter anymore.

  The plan had gone astray.

  She was just gone.

  But things would be easier without her.

  They had to be.

  Mondays smell like apples.

  Tuesdays like pancakes and rum.

  Wednesdays like ham.

  Thursdays like nothing and Fridays like rain.

  Saturdays more often than not, I wake up to the lovely scent of fresh cinnamon rolls in Emma’s oven.

  Sundays, bacon and toast.

  This morning smells like dirt and blood.

  At least, I think it’s morning. I can’t say I wake up because that’s not what it feels like. It’s not a gentle rise up out of sleep, that moment when you feel like you pass through a misty curtain from one moment to the next, asleep and then gradually awake. Waking up means smelling the traditional breakfast of that morning. Or the heaviness of water hanging in the air from the hose pouring down on the lawn. Or emptiness and remembering it’s my turn to cook.

  Or if I’m on the road, waking up means the smell of air conditioning and cleaning supplies, the sound of people and carts in the hallways, and that fuzzy realization I’m not in my bed. That’s not what this is.

  This is a jolt of consciousness.

  Awareness of one thing in one moment and something completely different in the next.

  Only, I can’t grab hold of that last moment of awareness. I can’t remember exactly where I was or what I was doing. The sudden shock of consciousness came when my eyes were closed, and I keep them that way so I can dig around in the thick darkness seeming to fill my brain and find the little bits of information that will eventually piece together what’s happening.

  Everything before right now feels far away. There’s a disconnect, buffered from this moment with the dense span of darkness. A vague memory rises to the surface. I was in a car. I focus on it to try to solidify the details and an image starts to take shape. I remember sitting behind the wheel, my hands gripping it tightly as I stared through the windshield into hazy blue darkness. It was the blue that comes right before the sun touches the horizon. Morning.

  There’s warmth on the side of my face and a glow on the other side of my eyelids. What’s under me isn’t a bed. I’m outside, many hours after my last memory of being in the car. A crash?

  It’s the only thing that makes sense. Or maybe the only thing that I want to think about. This disorientation isn’t new; I know the lurking feeling of not knowing that fills all the corners of my brain and permeates my thoughts. It’s there to show me that I might think I know what’s happening, but there’s always the chance that I don’t. Something could have happened and I simply don’t remember it.

  I only know I was driving. My hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly and I was trying to see through the predawn and a veil of fog. The conditions weren’t good and I could have easily lost control. With the limited visibility, another car could have gotten too close and forced me off the side of the road. Or the road could have been slippery.

  But I don’t smell metal or gas. There’s no burning rubber or oil in the air around me. And unless I was on a very remote road, the chances of an accident severe enough to eject me from the vehicle to land on the ground where I can feel myself going unnoticed are slim.

  I want to know what’s happening before I open my eyes, but it’s not an option to just wait for it all to come back.

  I’m lying on my side and when I open my eyes, I see dried leaves and dark earth at the bottom of my vision. Ahead of me are blurred tree trunks and beyond them, sunlight filtering through leaves and branches onto what looks like a forest floor. I don’t see a car or even a road. It’s just forest.

  Moving slowly, I pull myself up to a sitting position and then carefully push myself up to my feet, holding my breath in anticipation of the pain. Not knowing how I got here means I don’t know what might have happened to me in the time since my memory. The hole in my memory could have only lasted from the hours before the sun came up to what seemed like the late morning or possibly early afternoon. Or it could have been much longer.

  My body aches in a few places and there’s a sharp pain in my back. I reach to touch it and find nearly dry blood around what feels like a cut or puncture. It’s not bad, so I turn my focus fully to looking around and trying to figure out what’s happening. It’s been a long time since I had a blackout this deep. Sometimes snippets of a day will disappear, but when I come to and look around, something will jostle me into remembering. Nothing triggers anything now.

  I reach for my pocket and am relieved to feel my phone still there. Pulling it out, I see it isn’t my usual phone, the personal one I carry with me every day. This one is a basic model phone, barely one step above a flip phone, and, except for a very simplistic camera, has none of the features and technology of most modern-day d
evices. It’s a burner, a throwaway phone I bought at a big box discount store along with a card with a month worth of service so I would have a source of communication that wasn’t linked to me. It’s something I do when I’m working a particularly involved case. Both to keep me safe and to protect my investigations.

  The battery is low, but there’s enough juice to make a call. Every time I buy one of these phones I load it with a handful of numbers. My fingers click through my contacts and to a name almost by instinct.

  “Hey,” my cousin Emma Griffin says when she answers.

  “Emma, where am I?” I ask, slowly turning around so I can take in everything around me.

  There’s a fraction of a second of hesitation like she’s processing what I said.

  “Dean, what’s going on?” she asks.

  “Where am I? Where was I supposed to be today?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s Xavier?” she asks.

  She sounds concerned, but her voice is steady. She’s calm and in control in emergencies, a trait that has made her a tremendous asset to the FBI—and has helped her take down so many dangerous criminals over the years.

  My heart thuds heavily in my chest at her question. Xavier. I don’t know when I saw him last.

  “I don’t know. Emma, what day is it? I don’t know how long it’s been since I remember.”

  “Dean, look around. What do you see?” she asks.

  I continue to turn, forcing myself to go slowly so I can take in every detail. I’m surrounded by trees, the land sloping upward a few dozen yards away. There are scattered logs and branches on the ground, but the growth on the floor isn’t dense. I look for a clear path I might have followed to get to where I was lying, but there’s nothing obvious.

  It’s not until I’ve turned fully around to face where I was lying that the true gravity of my situation hits me.

  “Emma, I think there’s something really wrong,” I say, taking a few cautious steps forward.

  The sound of my feet pressing down into the dry leaves is amplified like nothing else exists. My vision closes in until everything is hazy except for the white and red mass on the forest floor in front of me.

  “Why?”

  “I’m outside in the woods. There’s a woman here with me,” I tell Emma.

  The woman is lying in a strange, unnatural position. Like she fell where she is rather than having put herself there. Her head is turned toward me, her closed eyes almost obscured by thick hair matted to her face. Fear is starting to coil in the pit of my belly and rise up along my spine, but I temper the emotion. I need to stay steady. Even as I get closer and realize the tank top I thought was red tie-dye is white and soaked in the blood pouring down from her head.

  “A woman? Who is it?” Emma asks.

  I’m within a few steps of the woman now. I can’t see any movement. Her eyes haven’t opened. Her mouth is open slightly, clotted blood clinging between her parted lips.

  “I don’t know who she is. But she’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Emma’s voice rises, some of the calm falling away. “Dean, what the hell are you talking about? What happened to her?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t know who she is. She’s lying here on the ground a couple of yards from where I was lying when I woke up. I don’t know where the fuck I am or how long I’ve been here, and I don’t know what happened to her. Her face is bloody and she looks like she might have gotten tossed here. The way her body is lying…” A shiver rolls down my back.

  This is far from the first dead person I’ve seen. There are the ones I fought against and the ones I fought alongside. The ones who died by their own hands intentionally and the ones that weren’t intentional. The ones taken by accidents and the ones taken by illness. Then there were the ones stolen by other people. A harsh life, a career in the Army Special Forces that ended with one injury, and my second chapter as a private investigator often working alongside Emma, have brought me up close and personal to many corpses.

  At this point, I can’t count them. I wouldn’t want to. That would mean I’d have to relive each of them, and there are so many I want to leave as far behind me as I can.

  But the significance of death hasn’t left me. There was a time when I started to get immune to it. It’s far too easy for that to happen when your daily environment is a battlefield and then your career has you crawling into a different kind of trenches to explore the underbelly of society, sometimes leaving you wading in tears, other times in blood. It’s easy to let yourself harden to it, to lose compassion. Putting on armor makes getting through every day less painful.

  But that leaves you cold. It doesn’t take away negative feelings. It just strips you of humanity, of the element of empathy and care that all of us are born with, and it leaves behind amplified, raw anger. It leaves behind resistance. Sometimes cruelty.

  That seems counterintuitive just to consider. That being immersed in so much grief and hurt, and witnessing so much horror and brutality, can actually push some people to be the next one to perpetrate it. But it plays out far more often than anyone would think. People start their careers wanting to protect others. They’re disgusted by the pain they see and what some people are capable of doing to others. But over time, it seeps into them like poison. They grow harsh and unfeeling. They don’t want to connect to anyone, they lose sight of their ideals, and soon enough, they become just as willing to inflict the pain they once abhorred.

  Sometimes it’s just easier to become the thing you fear than it is to let it consume you.

  Once, a long time ago, I started to feel that way. It took seeing myself through Emma and Xavier’s eyes to recognize it. Now I fight against it. Sometimes the deep scars inside me try to pull me back. Not letting myself slip away into that dark water can feel like droplets of self-sacrifice. Walking on broken glass rather than on the backs of the wounded. But it keeps me feeling like I’m alive. And reminds me that it matters.

  “Dean, you need to call the police,” Emma says.

  “And tell them what? That I’m out in the middle of the woods somewhere hanging out with the dead body of a woman I don’t recognize? That I don’t know where I am, how I got here, why I’m here, or who she is, but it would be really great if they could come help work it all out?” I reply.

  “You need some kind of help,” she insists. She pauses like she’s waiting for me to say something else. “Can you tell what happened to the woman? Was she shot? Beaten?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “From where I’m standing, I can’t tell if there’s a bullet wound or anything specific.”

  “From where you’re standing? You’re not close to her?”

  “I’m a few feet away.”

  “You haven’t checked her for identification? Or a pulse? Anything?”

  “I can’t get any closer to her, Emma,” I say. “It’s too much of a risk.”

  “Dean,” she starts.

  I know what’s coming. That’s the sound of her voice when she’s getting ready to argue, and I just don’t have the patience right now to listen to her.

  “I’ll call you back,” I say.

  Before she can say anything, I end the call and stuff the phone back in my pocket. I take another couple of steps closer to the woman and lean down to get a better look. A fly lands in the blood on her face and hesitates there. She doesn’t move. The fly doesn’t flutter in any breath that might be coming from her nose or open lips. I look at her chest but don’t see it rise or fall.

  Part of me wants to take another step forward, but a bigger part of me pulls me back. If this was a part of one of my investigations, I wouldn’t hesitate. If I knew who she was and what might have happened to her, whether because I’d been searching for her as a missing person or investigating her for being involved in something, I wouldn’t have thought twice about going up to her and checking her. I would have immediately called the police and reported who I was and what I was seeing.

  But that’s not this situation and it isn’t that simple.

  If it was one of my investigations, I would have documentation of why I was there. I’d be able to clearly explain who the person was and what I thought happened to them. Even if I saw the suspicion show up in the responding officers’ eyes, I wouldn’t have to worry about what they were thinking. There would be a trail they could follow. Phone calls, messages, pictures. I’d be able to tell them who I was and why I had anything to do with the situation.