A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

Genres: Police Procedurals; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Hannah Griffin was a girl when tragedy struck on her family's farm. She still remembers the flames reflected against the newly fallen snow and the bodies the police dug up—one of them her mother's. It was the nation's worst murder scene in decades and the killer was never found. Two decades later Hannah is a CSI investigating a case of child abuse when the past comes hurtling back. Years of buried questions are brought to life. A killer with unfinished business is on the hunt. And an anonymous message turns Hannah's blood cold: Your Mom called...

Release date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

The sun cut over the jagged edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Sharp and bright, its rays hacked through the haze from the millions who crawled to work on the hot, gummy freeways of the Los Angeles basin fifty-five miles away. Magenta clouds of bougainvillea softened the chain-link fences corralling the cinder-block homes lining Cabrillo Avenue, the busiest street into Santa Louisa. As Hannah Griffin drove to work on a sunny August morning, a newsman’s voice droned on about the date being the anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation. Even at that hour, Hannah was not the first to pull into the parking lot of the Santa Louisa County Courthouse where she had worked in the crime investigations unit for the past five and a half years. She guided the burgundy Volvo wagon into a spot east of a stand of eucalyptus that ran along the median. Messy trees, ugly trees, she thought. But when the temperature hit the ninety-degree mark as had been warned by the weatherman, shade would make a difference before the day was over. Hannah craned her neck and reached for a cardboard shield her husband had bought her to prevent the dashboard from cracking in the heat. On one side was a pair of cartoon sunglasses with eyebrows arched over the lenses. On the other, foot-tall letters: Call 911! Emergency!

Santa Louisa County was an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles. It was a world away from California’s most imitated and chided city. Santa Louisa, the county and the town that shared the same name, was nothing but a Southern California footnote. Santa Louisa’s biggest industry was agriculture. Flower seeds grew in a zigzag afghan that gave the monotony of the landscape a Crayola jolt with strawflowers and bachelor’s buttons. A welcome sign into town invited tourists to have a BLOOMING GOOD TIME. Hannah, her husband, Ethan, and their daughter, Amber, made the pilgrimage to the flower fields every spring. Amber looked like her father—at least Hannah thought so as she studied her profile. Amber’s nose was a slight ski jump, like Ethan’s. Her blond hair was wavy, as was Ethan’s. Whenever Hannah told Ethan their daughter resembled him, he’d exaggerate a cringing reaction. It was, Hannah knew, an act. In reality, Ethan was very handsome, and if Amber looked like him, she’d grow up to be a good-looking woman. That spring, as in the others, the couple took turns snapping photographs of their eight-year-old, up to her waist in yellow and blue.

“I promise this’ll be the last year,” Hannah lied as she framed Amber in one more gorgeous exposure. Then a quick second shot, too.

Of course, there will always be a next year. Hannah had an old Life magazine she had kept for years . . . the reason why it has followed her for two decades was not important, not now. In the back of the magazine there was a photo spread of a little girl posed in her father’s fireman’s uniform. Boots nearly swallow her stubby limbs; the helmet, an awning over her face. But as the years pass, the little girl grows into the uniform. By the end of the series, a pretty young woman stands next to her mother and father, helmet askew, grin as wide as the pages allowed. Hannah liked that kind of continuum. She’d always wanted that for Amber because it had eluded her.

Before getting out of her car, Hannah caught her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were puffy, and she rubbed them with her forefinger. In her early thirties, she knew that popping out of bed after four hours’ sleep exacted a price. And yet with her dark blond hair streaked by the California sun, freckles across the bridge of her nose, and enormous brown eyes, she was lovely even on a bad day. Even so, she thanked Max Factor for cover-up stick as she walked across the lot. Ted Ripperton, CSI lead, met her by the door.

“You’re here early,” he said, a paper coffee cup in hand.

“No more than any other day this summer. Make that this year,” she said. “Glad you came in early yourself. I’m going to see Joanne Garcia this morning.”

“She expecting you?” Ripp asked, tilting his coffee awkwardly to suck the nipple-lid for the last drop.

“We talked last night,” Hannah answered. “At least, she listened.” She unloaded her briefcase and spread out the Garcia case file. The fourty-four-year-old investigator’s eyes darted around the room, more indicative of a person who couldn’t focus on a damn thing than a man who didn’t have the skills to do so. Hannah had gone to county attorney Bill Gilliand twice to register complaints about Ripp’s work—two times more than she had ought to have. Both complaints had been made in her first two weeks of service. She felt so foolish. She didn’t know Ted Ripperton’s wife’s maiden name was Gilliand. Geneva Ripperton had been born Geneva Gilliand. Ripp’s job was a family favor.

“I’m between things,” he said. “You want me to go out to Taco Trench with you?”

“Her home is in Valle los Reyes,” Hannah said, without giving Ripp the satisfaction of a glare.

He shrugged. “Well, they should raze the whole damn place.”

“Not everyone marries well or is handed a good job.”

“Don’t go there, Hannah.”

“Or you’ll tell?” She let a beat pass. “You know I’m only kidding,” Hannah lied as she studied the photo on the top of the file once more. A little girl’s eyes stared from a Polaroid. Mimi Garcia was five. She had sullen hazel eyes.

“We’re leaving at nine thirty,” she said, taking off an earring and reaching over to the phone. That was her signal to Ripp that he was to leave. Thankfully, he took the hint. Hannah watched him turn down the hall to the little room where coffee was brewed and lunches consumed by the lab staff and a few of the clerks who hadn’t learned that in the various legal professions everything is about association. Of course, Ripp didn’t care about that. He had a job for as long as voters kept his brother-in-law in office. And for as long as Geneva put up with him. Hannah knew it was only a matter of time and he’d be a school crossing guard on the west side of town. Maybe he’d even end up in Valle los Reyes? That, she thought, would be so sweet.

Hannah took a Dr Pepper from the vending machine, a bad habit she’d started when a case kept her coming into the lab in the wee hours before Lotta Latte on Cabrillo opened its drive-thru window for the morning commute. Her eyes scanned the break room’s notice board. A rental cabin at Big Bear beckoned, but the idea of the mountains chilled her so much she shuddered. A flyer for a cat that had been homeless had met with success. It had “Thank You, Katie Marino,” scrawled across it. Hannah smiled, flipped the top on her soda can, and shuffled off to her cramped office. She was beat, but resolute. The Garcia case was just the kind she loved to work. It would suck her in like a whirlpool until justice was done. She had some calls to make and reports to scrutinize—the benefit of being promoted into a supervisory job that no one else had really wanted.

Before taking her chair, Hannah saw a small box atop her heaping pile of incoming mail. It was addressed to her, but with a middle name that caused her pulse to jackhammer.

She tore at the brown wrapper with a nail file she retrieved from a tidy desk drawer. Logan. No one called her that. No one knew. Carefully, but quickly, she turned back the sealed edges of the box. A musty odor and a glimpse of dark, nearly winy, color startled her so much, that the container slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

For a second, she could not take her eyes off the carton. She averted her gaze only long enough to glance through the narrow glass window that ran the full length of her office door and provided a view of the county crime laboratory. Please, no one come in. In one rapid movement, she swiveled her chair and picked up the brown wrapper that had enclosed the contents for shipping. The address was written in permanent marker in an odd combination of printed letters and cursive script. There was no return address. On the backside of the brown paper, Hannah could see that the sender had simply cut apart a grocery bag to cover the box for mailing. Red ink spelled out S-a-f-e-w. For a second, she wondered how the box could have been delivered to her desk in the first place. It could be anything, from anyone. Even a bomb.

But the instant she saw it, she knew. The package was not a bomb. It was something far worse.

Hannah brushed wisps of dark blond hair from her forehead. The office was warm, though she could hear the air conditioner hum through the overhead ducts. As tears rained from her eyes, she fumbled for a tissue. She blotted and then studied the tissue as though the tears had been blood.

The postmark indicated the package had come from Los Angeles. Jesus Christ, L.A. was only the second largest city in the country. Anyone could have dumped it into a bin and walked off to a job, a bus station, LAX. She felt the burning warning of bile rise in her throat, telling her to fight the urge to vomit, swallow hard, or look for a trash receptacle. Extending the tip of her shoe, Hannah peeled back the rest of the tissue concealing the contents of the box. She did so gingerly, the way one might gently kick a dead rattlesnake to ensure that the venomous reptile was no longer a threat. A swatch of black and brown caught her eye. Her stomach knotted. Her first glance had not misled her. Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus.

Just then Ted Ripperton pushed open the door and burst in, with all the grace of the interloper he was and always would be. Blank-eyed and reeking of cigarette smoke, he was oblivious to her tears.

“Ready?” he asked.

Hannah had barely caught her breath. “Don’t you knock?”

Ripp made a face. “Don’t you act like a bitch,” he said. “Kidding,” he added as quickly as he could, evidently recalling the time he’d been turned into Human Resources for saying something inappropriate to a surly file clerk. Surly was his adjective. “I mean, you look upset.”

It was true the color had drained from her face, but Hannah shook off his half-baked attempt at compassion and gave him some slack. That cobra basket on her floor had scared the hell out of her, and she didn’t wish to discuss it with the likes of Ted Ripperton.

“Let’s go. I’m fine and you’re stupid,” she said, letting a beat pass before she returned the favor: “Kidding.”

She reached for her briefcase, hoping that Ripp hadn’t noticed her slightly trembling hands.

Berto and Joanne Garcia’s mobile home was set amid the squalor of human-inhabited aluminum loaf pans called a “trailer-made community” by the owner/operator of the ten-acre tract that had once been a birdhouse gourd farm. Because the plant had readily reseeded, most of the hot boxes that residents called home were festooned with the bulbous gourds cut with portholes for swallows and, for the luckier, purple martins. It was flat land—the bottom of a broad valley. It had, at most, seven or eight palm trees to bring up the vertical space. They were the spindly kind of palms, each collared with aluminum bands to stop rats from nesting in their fernlike crowns.

Ripperton lurched his two-year-old Town Car in front of Space 22. They knew Joanne was home alone; Berto was a guest of the county—in jail on suspicion of child abuse.

“I’ll go in first,” Hannah said, swinging the passenger door open and brushing against a Big Wheel tricycle bleached to pale amber by the Santa Louisa summer.

Ripp pulled out a smoke. “I’ll sit tight and play radio roulette. Better not be long.”

As if his advice mattered. The fact was she wouldn’t be long regardless of Ripperton’s demands. Hannah wanted to interview Mrs. Garcia about her daughter and husband, and she knew if Mrs. Garcia was indeed ready to talk, Ripperton would be called inside anyway. He was as good a witness as she had to ensure the woman couldn’t back out of her story later. He provided the kind of pressure they’d need to take her into the courtroom.

A woman met Hannah at the door. She peered through the wire mesh of a tattered screen and introduced herself as Joanne Garcia. She was thirty years old, unemployed, a few months pregnant. Mascara clumped at the tips of her spiky eyelashes. She pressed her face close to the aluminum doorframe and warily regarded her visitor.

“Mrs. Garcia, I’m Hannah Griffin. I’m with the county, here to investigate your daughter’s case.”

“Oh, Miss Griffin,” Garcia said, pausing before muttering something that went nowhere. Her eyes traced Hannah from head to toe, lingering on a jade silk blouse and creamy white linen skirt that was the well-dressed CSI’s summer uniform. Not that it mattered. Inside the confines of the lab, Hannah was shrouded with a dingy lab coat anyway.

“I don’t think I have anything to say to you,” Garcia finally said.

Hannah inched closer. “That surprises me,” she said. “Yesterday you told me you had a lot to say. I understand that this is very, very difficult. But you know,” she paused, “you—more than anyone—can ensure that what happened to Mimi never happens again.”

Joanne Garcia’s tongue ran over cracked lips. “Yeah, but—”

“Don’t you realize that you are running out of options here? You have no choice but to do the right thing. I think you know that. Can I come in?”

Joanne Garcia hesitated as if she didn’t want to say much, but Hannah knew the woman in the trailer wanted to spill her guts. She knew it from all of the child rapes, the molestations, the neglect and abuse cases—the “chick cases,” as the jealous in the lab called them to demean her work. Guys like Ripp figured no case was worth working on unless it was murder with special circumstances—the grislier the better. Throw in a few sexual elements and they’d be in CSI nirvana, stomping around the lab like sand-kicking macho men.

“You’re letting all the air conditioning out of the house. Come inside for a minute, ”Joanne said, flinging the screen open with her foot pressing against the metal spring that kept it shut. Light fell on her features with a blast of white. “Then you’ll have to go.”

Joanne wore a halter top with black-and-white cows printed on it, blue jean shorts that were doing battle with her fleshy thighs. Hannah didn’t doubt that the fabric—that odd kind of denim that looks too thin to be the real thing—and the woman’s increasing girth would be fighting to the finish. She led Hannah into an overloaded family room separated from the entry by a turned-knob room divider resembling Early American furniture. A spider plant spilled variegated green-and-white foliage over the salmon-colored laminate countertop. A shiny yellow Tonka truck positioned on a shelf served as magazine holder. Old issues of Dirt Biker filled the back end of the toy.

“Sit here,” Joanne said, pointing to a pillow-strewn sofa. “But only for a minute. Like I said, I don’t have anything to say.”

Photos in Plexiglas frames lined a shelf behind the fake log fireplace that served as the focal point of the small room. Hannah recognized the face of the little girl with corkscrew pigtails. All of the photos were of Mimi.

“She’s a very pretty girl,” Hannah said. “How is she?”

Joanne made a face. It was a hard, angry visage, and it made her look older than her years. “How should she be? You’ve taken her from her home! Her father is in jail!”

The words were familiar to Hannah. A few said them with more conviction than Joanne Garcia did that morning in her mobile home. Some recited the words as though they’d rehearsed them in front of a mirror and knew that practiced indignation and outrage were but a small and necessary step in the direction toward a defense of some kind.

“How in the hell should she be? Her daddy didn’t do nothin’ and you’ve taken her away, lady!”

“To save her life.”

Joanne’s face was now blood red. “Her life didn’t need saving. It was an accident.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. Listen to me very carefully,” Hannah said, fixing her eyes on Joanne’s. “Woman to woman, mother to mother—I am a mother, too—your daughter’s life is in danger. Your job is to protect her.”

Joanne stood and spun around, grabbing a photograph of her daughter.

“You don’t know me, my husband, or anything about us.” She punched her empty fist into the air and held the photo to her bosom.

Hannah felt her stomach flutter slightly as though the woman was going to hit her. Instead, Joanne started to cry and held out a picture of the little girl that had brought Santa Louisa criminal investigators into her life.

“She is all I have. All we have! Don’t do this to us. Do not ruin this family. People like you are always trying to judge people like us.”

She set the picture back on the top shelf of the room divider.

“We’re not trying to ruin anything. We’re trying to help you and your daughter.”

“Right. Like I’m going to believe anything you say,” she said. “Get the fuck out of my house! Now!”

Hannah let the front door swing open on its squeaky spring and returned to the car. Her heels clacked on the cracked and patched sidewalk.

“Handled that one real smooth, Hannah,” Ripp said. His words dripped with his own brand of malevolent sarcasm. “Maybe I could coach you sometime?”

Hannah didn’t want Ripp to know that she’d been unnerved by the encounter in the trailer. She didn’t want him to know what was really on her mind, what she had boxed up in her trunk. Eat shit. She didn’t say the words, but she thought them. And she smiled back at him once more.

“Glad I got out of bed today,” she muttered.

The Santa Louisa County sheriff had been dispatched to Mucho Muchachos Daycare Center on the south end of Valle los Reyes the day before. An employee there had indicated a little girl had showed evidence of abuse. It was reported around noon, though the telltale signs of abuse had been evident at six in the morning. Mimi Garcia’s bottom had been hemorrhaging; a bloom of crimson had spotted her panties. The little girl paid it no mind, but a caregiver—a girl of seventeen named Nadine Myers—had noticed the bleeding when she served her breakfast snack.

“Did someone hurt you?” asked Nadine, a high school dropout with a smile that begged for braces and hands scarred from filing ragged edges while working in her father’s sheet metal shop.

Mimi shook her head as she picked out the shriveled black fruits in the raisin bran growing soft in a pink Tupperware bowl. Two other kids, a boy and a girl, both four, argued over the sugar bowl, and Nadine went to settle the dispute with promises of a frosted Pop-Tart.

A couple of hours later, Nadine was up to her neck in acrid disposable diapers when she returned to Mimi. She sat on the floor, Indian-style, crying. When Nadine pulled her to her feet, she revealed a small smudge of congealed blood.

“We have a problem with Mimi,” she called over the din of the TV.

Fifteen minutes later, a uniformed deputy and a Child Protective Services worker arrived, and Mimi Garcia was off to the Valley Medical Center. She was the possible victim of abuse, possibly sexual.

Hannah and Ripp arrived at the day care center just before 4 p.m. to talk with Nadine Myers, but the young woman was of little help. Her ignorance/evasiveness made Hannah angry, and after a few rounds of pointless responses, Hannah turned it around and beat her up with the questions. At least they wouldn’t leave any marks.

“If you were so worried about her, worried enough to ask, why didn’t you report it to someone?”

Nadine narrowed her eyes defensively. Dry skin creased her tight little mouth.

“Excuse me,” she said. “But if you had to report every little problem that comes in the front door every morning multiplied by twenty-eight kids, you’d find you were reporting every bump and bruise.”

“But this wasn’t just a bump, Nadine,” Hannah said.

Nadine bristled. “What do you expect me to be, a doctor? God, I don’t even make as much money as two of my friends who work at McDonald’s.”

“That’s all for now,” Hannah said. “We’ll be in touch.”

The girl seemed surprised. “Do you want my number or something?”

“No, thanks,” Hannah said as they turned to leave. “We know where to find you.”

“Did someone say McDonald’s?” Ripp asked. “I could use a burger about now. Maybe we could pull a drive-thru on our way back to the office?”

A drive by, maybe, Hannah thought, but said, “All right. If you must.”

“Need to gas up, too.”

Hannah shook her head. “Do you mind if we hold off on that? I have to get back. I can’t stop everywhere and you, you know, you need that burger.”

The truth was the smell of any petroleum product could send Hannah to near retching. The lawn mower had to be electric, because a more powerful gas one sent off fumes that made her ill even if Ethan did the work, or later, when they could afford it, a gardener. Vicks VapoRub made her sick. Forget pumping fuel at a service station. Hannah loved Oregon more than any state because it was one of the few that didn’t force people to fuel up their own cars; in fact, a state law prohibited anyone from self-service. This, like so many of her phobias, came from that terrible Christmas Eve.

When they suffered a power outage earlier in their marriage, Ethan produced a kerosene lantern and Hannah nearly went berserk. She caught herself before her rant went too far—first it was a safety issue, then she said it would be more romantic if they burned candles or just sat alone in the dark. Ethan took her to be in a romantic mood, but as they made love, the images of that night played in her mind. And though sex with her husband was the last thing on her mind, she was grateful for the diversion, but felt guilty that the moment held no more for her than a way to try to forget that night.

Her car still smelling of Ripp’s fast-food binge, it was after seven o’clock when Hannah returned to 1422 Loma Linda Avenue, the single-story stucco home she shared with her husband and daughter. It was a pretty little place with a thicket of bird-of-paradise by the front windows, twin date palms on the property line, and a sandbox made of old oil-soaked railroad ties that had somehow morphed into a cat box in the backyard.

A ten-year veteran of the Santa Louisa County P.D., Ethan Griffin had parked his police cruiser in the driveway, leaving the garage open for his wife. Ethan was thoughtful that way. He was loading the dishwasher when she came inside. French fries and ketchup marked two plates. Ethan had brown eyes and black hair that had just started to fleck silver. His mustache (“part of the uniform,” he joked) was a bit of a problem. It turned somewhat skunk striped the year before, and rather than shave it off or live with the indication that, at forty-two, he was growing older, he dyed it black with one of the so-gradual-no-one-will-detect products.

“I promise you,” he told Hannah then, “I’m not running out to a gym or a tanning spa. I don’t have a girlfriend, and I don’t really care how I look. I could live with a little padding in the middle. It isn’t any of that. I just want to compete.”

Hannah smiled and warned Ethan not to let the concoction foaming above his lip drip onto the linens she kept folded by the sink.

“Stains like murder,” she had told him.

The Griffins had lived in the house on Loma Linda since Hannah’s first pregnancy, which, sadly, had ended in a miscarriage at a devastating twenty-one weeks. Amber, now eight, was conceived the year after her sister, Annie, had died. Despite their seemingly all-involving careers as a cop and a CSI, they made plenty of time for Amber. The little girl was never overindulged, but neither did she go without. Hannah was not among the growing group of mothers who sought to make her daughter into a “better me,” but she did want her child to have the opportunities that had eluded her.

Amber was engrossed in a television program when Hannah swooped down and pecked her on the top of the head. In her mind, Hannah repeated a phrase as she always did, “I’m sending all my love to you.” Amber murmured approval, but kept her eyes glued on the screen. A moment later, having heard his wife come in, Ethan emerged from the kitchen.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Not really. Ripp made a stop at McDonald’s. I’m still dealing with the fumes.” She rolled her eyes.

Ethan thought his wife looked pale. “You okay?” he asked.

“Tough day, I guess.”

Ethan had heard about the Garcia mess over the weekend. Hannah, as always, was obsessed about nailing someone—the mother, the father—for the abuse of a child. The Garcia case was the most recent in a long line of cases that consumed her. She was tired; her eyelids hooded, and her smile was plastered on. Ethan served her a slice of pizza and a glass of wine.

“I just need to unwind,” she finally said. She wanted to tell her husband about the special delivery someone had made to her office, about the box she carried in her car trunk. But she couldn’t. The time didn’t seem right. Amber needed to be tucked in and there was a chapter of Oz to read.

It wasn’t that Ethan Griffin with his kind and expressive brown eyes and massive, prickly haired shoulders wasn’t a smart man. He was. He’d advanced several rungs up the ladder at the sheriff’s office, and although no longer a wunderkid once he hit his fortieth birthday, he was still seen by many around the department as an up-and-comer. But what Hannah loved most about her husband had nothing to do with his ability as a cop, his intellect, or his wit at a social service fund-raiser. It was that above all, Ethan was a passionate man when it came to his family. His wife and his daughter were his world, the only world he needed. She admired Ethan for his total devotion. Sometimes she was even jealous of her husband’s capacity to be so devoted. She was always on the run.

In part, Hannah chose Ethan for her husband and the father of her children because she knew his family history was built on love and stability, things that despite the valiant efforts of her aunt and uncle, she had lacked for much of her growing years. Even so, though Ethan knew nearly everything about her life, there were still things she felt unable to . . .