Cold to the Touch

by Kerri Hakoda

Genres: General Fiction; Mystery; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

American Predator meets Harlan Coben in this taut, ticking-clock thriller in which women are being kidnapped and murdered in the dead of an Alaskan winter.

When the body of a barista is found in the once-pristine Alaskan snow, Anchorage homicide detective DeHavilland Beans is gutted to recognize the young woman, Jolene. He’d bought coffee from her every morning and knew her as a bright college student working her way through school. Devastated by the murder and by the life cut short, Beans vows to find the killer. 

Since scavengers damaged the body, obtaining any usable evidence is impossible,  even with the assistance of wildlife expert Raisa Ingalls, Beans’s ex. When the body of another woman is found, a serial killer is suspected and the FBI joins the hunt.

After a third body turns up, Beans is desperate to find the killer—especially when another woman goes missing. With the murderer moving so quickly, Beans and his team are determined to stop the spree and catch the killer before it's too late.

Pulse-pounding and vividly depicted, this Alaskan thriller will electrify fans of Lisa Gardner and true crime junkies fascinated by the Israel Keyes case.

Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Prologue

Her memories float back to her childhood like a drift boat on a gentle tide. In Manokotak, a village on the Nushagak River in Western Alaska, winters are harsh and bleak. Oh, but the summers! In those warm endless days, the river bleeds red with the backs of spawning sockeye salmon. Berry bushes burst from the tundra, throbbing with ripe fruit. That’s when her father loads her in front of him on the four-wheeler and they speed along the dirt roads, a plume of dust rising behind them. Mosquitoes whine, and in the humid breeze she smells the sweet musk of beaver and the peaty loam of the tundra.

She smiles at the memory, then jerks awake when something wrenches at her cheeks. She gasps, struggling to suck air through the unyielding barrier of duct tape across her mouth. She tries to move her arms, but they’re tied together at the wrists. Her ankles are immobilized. Her heart pounding, she realizes she is not six years old, perched in front of her father on his ATV. She is nineteen, gagged and blindfolded, her arms and legs bound, lying on a scratchy blanket that reeks of manure.

Still, she can’t keep her mind from unmooring, bobbing like flotsam between now and then. When is now, and where is here? She tries to grasp at images, events, but everything is hazy. Time is like liquid leaking through her fingers. A rooster crows. Is it morning?

Then the memory of her childhood melts like a sidewalk-chalk drawing in the rain. What slowly comes into focus in her mind’s eye is her basement apartment in Anchorage. She stares at the blinds that rattle against the aluminum frame and the fairylike snowflakes that sift through the broken window.

And there, the single pink rose on the kitchen counter, fragrant as a funeral. Her skin crawls with the knowledge that someone has been here, in her apartment, has fondled her clothes, rifled through her drawers, moved through her private space, uninvited.

She shivers.

Her eyes spring open. She sees nothing but a smudge of light through the blindfold. Her head swims as she tries to focus. Try to focus. She remembers dropping the Corolla off for servicing and Darla giving her a ride back to the coffee shop. She closed at nine o’clock, like always, when a familiar voice asked for “the usual.” She frowns, trying to bring his image forward, but it swirls in her brain like a leaf in an eddy. Then what?

She jerks awake on the stinking blanket, freezing. Was she drugged? She must have been drugged. A vague memory of a gloved hand across her mouth, a sharp pain at the back of her neck. Why can’t I remember? Panic embraces her.

A door bangs open, and frigid air swirls around her. Shuffling footsteps and the sound of ripping fabric echo in the otherwise silent room.

“Who’s there?” she asks. She barely recognizes her voice muffled by duct tape.

A man’s voice, high-pitched and frantic, speaking gibberish. She tries to shake the fuzziness from her brain.

Then another man’s voice. “Hey! What the fuck!” Deeper, angry.

She hears scuffling, boots scraping on the wooden floor, grunting. The first man’s voice, high and girlish, begging, “No, no, I promise!” Then a loud explosion that makes her jump. Something heavy falls to the wooden floor.

“Ah, Jesus,” the second man says. “Goddamn it.”

Her ears ring. “Help me.” She is crying, terrified but unable to move, and her muffled voice sounds like a whimpering puppy.

Where are my boots? Her feet are like ice. I spent two months of tip money on those boots. Heavy footsteps come toward her then, and she is lifted from the itchy blanket. Strong arms carry her.

“Help me.” Her plea is reedy and faraway, like a crow’s distant call.

She realizes she is not being carried but slung over a broad shoulder like a sack of flour, a sack of cement. A sack that would sink to the bottom of the Nushagak River.

She tries to scream but hears only desperate grunts. She struggles against the plastic ties that bind her arms and legs and feels them cut into her skin.

“Almost there,” the man’s voice says. 1

Homicide detective DeHavilland Beans received the call at eight Saturday morning, halfway through an hour-long ride on the stationary bicycle. The jarring ringtone of his cell phone, currently the sound of a barking dog, interrupted his blissful listening to the audiobook The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. Sweating and annoyed, he brought the yapping phone to his ear.

“Dead body found a half mile from Glenn Highway,” the low smoky voice of the weekend dispatcher reported. After the calming words of peace and happiness he’d just heard from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this brutal message of violence and death threw his serene karmic balance into a tailspin. He splashed through a quick shower, threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, and slipped on his holstered Glock under his Patagonia jacket. It was Saturday, twelve days before Christmas, and as the detective on call this weekend, he was obliged to respond.

Northern lights swayed above his head like phosphorescent kelp caught in a slow celestial current. At eight o’clock on a December morning in Anchorage, Alaska, it was dark and would stay that way for another three hours. He pulled his Ford Explorer out of the garage, turned on the high beams, and cranked the heater to a gale-force roar.

In this weather, the body was probably frozen solid, and a couple of minutes to order a coffee wouldn’t matter either way—at least that’s what he told himself. He turned the Explorer down O’Malley Road toward his usual stop on weekdays, the Snow Bunny Baristas coffee stand.

When Beans pulled up to the roundabout, the kiosk was dark and deserted. Even the strings of Christmas lights draped over the eaves were switched off. The coffee kiosk was open seven days a week, he knew, since he bought a twenty-ounce Americano with cream there most mornings.

The standard Snow Bunny uniform was a fur-fringed light-blue velvet minidress, low cut in front and high cut in back. A small white pom-pom on the back of the outfit served as the bunny tail. Black fishnet hose and snow boots completed the ensemble. Sure, it was a corny throwback to the old Playboy days of objectifying females, but as long as women consented to keeping the “bikini barista” business model alive and legal, he saw no harm in it.

But this morning, there was to be no twenty-ounce Americano. He peered through the drive-through window. A decal there confirmed the hours of operation. He felt an eerie sense of loneliness, of abandonment. He tried to shake it off, telling himself he had developed way too significant a relationship with these young women, or maybe with caffeine. Even though there was no real emergency, he clapped a flashing blue light onto the roof of the Explorer. The big car fishtailed and set up a spray of frost as he sped away from the kiosk and toward the crime scene, the blue light pulsing and insistent against the snow.

Cross-country skiers had come upon a snow-covered mound they assumed was a moose carcass until a telltale scrap of pale-blue fabric caught their attention. While one young man hurled up his breakfast of eggs and reindeer sausage, the other called 911.

When Beans pulled up, the crime scene was lit up like a burlesque stage, a garish scene playing out against the inky backdrop of a winter morning. Crime scene investigators in protective suits hovered around the corpse like faceless mute performers.

The body was behind a stand of bare-branched shrubs, a few hundred yards from a municipal trail used by bicyclists and pedestrians in the summers and cross-country skiers and snowshoers in the winters.

Forensics investigators had carefully brushed the new-fallen snow from the frozen remains of a young female. It appeared that scavengers had torn at her body, laying her open from her sternum to her pelvis. One arm was

attached to her body only by shreds of tendon; her wrists were bound together with plastic ties. Her mouth was sealed shut with a piece of duct tape.

Beans recognized the long chestnut hair, the blue velvet minidress, now tattered and bloodied, the limp pom-pom, the ragged black fishnet hose that still clung to her legs, which were bound together at the ankles by the same plastic ties. Jolene Nilsson.

He liked all the young baristas at Snow Bunny, but Jolene was his favorite—pretty and petite, with a curvy figure that she’d inherited from her father’s Swedish ancestors. She had laughing half-moon eyes and a mischievous grin framed with deep dimples. She’d grown up in a small bush Alaska village, as had Beans, and was the product of a Native Alaskan mother and a white father. Beans himself was a hybrid of Irish/Athabascan on his father’s side, Japanese on his mother’s, and he and Jolene had hit it off, sharing childhood experiences of village life—berry picking, duck hunting, and muskrat trapping.

If she were a little older, Beans might have asked her out. But he was thirty-three and she was nineteen, and that would be viewed as cradle snatching—if not by her parents, then by his colleagues on the police force, many with daughters her age. Like his fellow detective Ed Heller, who resented him enough already. Beans had often thought of the old Steely Dan song “Hey Nineteen” when Jolene handed him his daily Americano and their hands happened to touch.

Beans felt a rush of nausea and turned away. He took a few deep breaths and, with hands that trembled a little, unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum and popped it in his mouth. She would never again toss him the dimpled smile, giggle at his silly jokes. Never again pick berries or trap muskrat. The lyrics to the Steely Dan song were now on a sinister spool, an evil earworm. His gut twisted, and even with the spearmint gum, he fought the urge to retch.

“You okay, Beans?” Chuckie Hefner, the Anchorage medical examiner, put a gloved hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah.” He took another deep breath. “I knew her. I bought coffee from her almost every morning.”

Chuckie’s ice-blue eyes softened. “Oh shit. I’m sorry.” He patted Beans on the back.

Beans cleared his throat and gulped in another lungful of cold air. He turned back toward the crime scene. “Do you want to venture a cause of death?”

“Nah, not yet. I’ll know better when I get her to the lab,” Chuckie said.

“Time of death?”

“I’ll have a better idea once I thaw her out. Maybe.” Chuckie looked down and pulled off his gloves. “My guess is she was killed somewhere else and dumped.” Chuckie shook his head. “This sucks. What was she, twenty?”

“Nineteen.”

“Oy vey. Does she have family here?”

“No, her parents are back in Manokotak.” Beans’ stomach lurched again. It would be his job to tell them.

One of Chuckie’s assistant's

and a tech carefully lifted Jolene and placed her in a black body bag. Her face was untouched except for a small scratch on one cheek. One small mercy for her parents. Her dark eyes stared up at the clear cold sky as the technician zipped the bag shut.

“Detective? Doctor?” One of the white-suited crime scene techs called out to Beans and Chuckie. “I’ve found something here.”

Beans and Chuckie walked over to the technician, who stood near a stand of barren trees several yards from the body.

“Take a look at this.” The tech pointed to the frozen ground.

On the snow was a single white rose. Long stemmed, reasonably fresh, just a blush of pink. Faint drag marks were barely visible in the fresh snow, from the rose to where Jolene’s body had been found.

“Maybe she was dumped here and the wolves dragged her over there? Why the rose? A signature? A sign of remorse?” Beans asked, more to himself than anyone else.

“You can bet 1-800-Flowers didn’t drop it by,” Chuckie said in a dry voice.

“I doubt you’ll find anything, but can’t hurt to process it as usual,” Beans said to the tech.

“No footprints—it snowed last night,” Chuckie said. “Only tracks were left by the guys who found her.”

“I’ll head back, then. I got a phone call to make.”

“Oh yeah.” Chuckie frowned. As a small-town coroner in the Lower 48 before he came to Anchorage, he had done his share of notifying the next of kin.

Beans carefully trudged back on the marked pathway to the road and was getting into the Explorer when Chuckie called to him. “Hey, I might ask Raisa to consult.”

Beans paused, one leg in the car, the other on the crusty snow. Dr. Raisa Ingalls had been called in on a case a few years ago involving a murdered camper in Denali National Park whose body had been left to be devoured by scavengers. She was the Fish and Game expert on park predators, having studied and observed them for years. Beans and Raisa had worked together on that case and had enjoyed a brief but intense affair until he was sent into the interior to work a triple homicide. During that grueling investigation, they saw each other only when he came home for rare weekends, then slowly, inevitably, not at all.

“Beans? You okay with that?” Chuckie asked. “She’s still the best around, especially with dentition.”

“Yeah, sure.” Fiercely intelligent and passionate, Raisa was like no one Beans had ever known. Just thinking about her quickened his heartbeat and caused stirrings that he thought had long gone. He remembered a warm tingling sensation where her shoulder-length curls brushed against his face, his chest, his belly.

Mixed with his feelings of lust was a sense of guilt. Who had broken it off? He didn’t remember any argument or discord, no flashpoint where it all went to pieces. They’d just drifted apart, with their travel schedules and the demands of their jobs. He seemed to remember that she had sent him a text or two. Had he responded? So much for mindfulness. Oh God, I’m a shit.

“Okay, so if you’re good with that, I’ll give her a call and see if she can come in for the

 postmortem?” Chuckie wrinkled his nose. “Techs are bagging the scat for her. They just love that.”

“Of course, Chuckie. She’s still the best.” He got into the car and turned it onto the highway, the frozen snow crunching under his tires. He gripped the steering wheel hard, steeling himself for the call he would need to make to Jolene’s parents.

 

2

Beans stepped through the swinging doors of the morgue, tying a green gown around his neck.

“You’re late, Beans,” Chuckie said.

“Only ten minutes.”

Chuckie’s pale eyes twinkled above his mask. “What? No visions of sugarplums dancing through your head last night?”

“Not even close,” Beans grumbled. A half hour of mindful meditation before bed had done no good. The same nightmare of being trapped in his brother Lindbergh’s burning truck had shattered his sleep again last night. The old Ford spun on its roof on the frozen tundra, flames licking through the vents while the upside-down cab filled with smoke.

“Lindbergh, get me out!” Eight-year-old Beans shrieked, pounding his fists against the windows, the glass hot under his touch, the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth. In the dream, as in life, Lindbergh staggered drunkenly into the distance, disappearing in the falling snow. But in last night’s dream, Jolene had hung upside down next to him, her arms outspread, torso flayed open. She smiled, her dimples deepening like gashes while the scratch on her pale face oozed black blood.

He woke in a cold sweat. He thought he’d probably cried out; his throat felt tight and raw. He splashed some water onto his face and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. In the harsh overhead light, his Japanese mother’s eyes looked back at him. He downed a glass of water, then fell back into bed and into a fitful sleep until he sprang up, realizing he had slept through his alarm. After a haphazard shower and cup of coffee, he’d raced to the morgue, ten minutes late for Jolene’s autopsy.

She lay on a table, draped with a sheet. The zip ties and duct tape that had bound and silenced her had already been removed, photographed, and sent to Trace Evidence for processing.

Beans had called the Nilssons yesterday to give them what was probably the worst news of their lives. Jolene’s parents had chartered a flight out of the village of Manokotak and arrived yesterday afternoon to confirm identification of the body. Esther Nilsson, a small Native woman clinging to her tall Swedish husband, was inconsolable. Olaf was stoic, patting his wife on the back as she wept.

He set his jaw and looked directly at his daughter’s lifeless face. “That’s her. That’s our Jo.” He turned then to Beans, his eyes dry but red rimmed. “We want to take her home.”

“We’ll release her to you as soon as we can,” Beans said. He’d looked away as he recited the canned phrase that seemed so trite in the face of the Nilssons’ overwhelming grief: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“So …” Chuckie diverted Beans from remembering his heart-wrenching meeting with the Nilssons. “Where’s Raisa?”

“How should I—” Beans began, when the doors swung open and a slender figure in a green gown rushed in, knotting a white mask over her nose and mouth. She set a black camera bag on a rolling chair.

“So sorry I’m late. I forgot about traffic in the big city.” Her dark eyes smiled below a fringe of curly brown bangs. “Hey, Chuckie. Long time no see.” She approached the body, then stopped when she spotted Beans. “And Beans. Even longer time no see.”

Beans found himself fidgeting. “Hi, Raisa. Good to see you.”

“What have we got, gentlemen?” She busied herself unpacking her camera and screwing on a lens.

Chuckie switched off the lilting Christmas music that had been playing in the background and switched on the recorder. When the medical examiner uncovered

the body, Beans was standing close enough to hear Raisa’s sharp intake of breath.

“Postmortem of Jolene Annette Nilsson, Yup’ik and Caucasian ethnicity.” Chuckie sighed. “Nineteen years of age.”

He was careful with his postmortem, cataloging and bagging every bit of evidence in Jolene’s hair and on her skin. He turned her on her side and began to cut away the blue velvet barista uniform, then stopped.

“Well, hello. What do we have here?” Chuckie said.

The back of the uniform was soaked with blood, and there was a single L-shaped tear in it, just above the young woman’s fourth rib. Beans and Raisa leaned in closer. A familiar scent made Beans forget the chemical odors of the morgue—not perfume, but a fresh outdoor smell and, faintly, the tea tree soap he remembered that Raisa ordered online from L’Occitane.

“It’s not likely a wolf did that,” she said. “Not without more ripping of the fabric.”

“No other punctures or cuts on the clothing not consistent with scavenger activity.” Chuckie cut the uniform off carefully, then gave a low whistle. “Take a look.”

He pointed with a gloved finger at the ragged hole on Jolene’s back, just where the tear in the uniform was. The cut in her flesh was an equilateral triangle, a scant inch long on each side.

“Knife wound? Maybe a sword?” Beans asked.

“If it is, she wasn’t stabbed in the back, she was stabbed through the back,” Chuckie said. “My guess is through the heart as well.” He began taking digital photos of the wound.

The traditional Y-shaped incision made during an autopsy wasn’t necessary, since most of her torso was gone. Her heart, lungs, liver, and most of her internal organs were also missing, presumably consumed by predators.

“Humans are usually not at the top of a wolf pack’s menu,” Raisa said. “In the winter, though, pickings are slim. And the organs—the nutrient- and blood-rich components—are generally consumed first.” Raisa peered at Jolene’s arm, the one hanging by tendons. “Look at the size of the jaw. Definitely wolf. Here, though”—she pointed to smaller gnaw marks—“this is a fox, secondary scavengers.”

Beans’ stomach lurched, and he had to turn away. This slender arm, now mangled, had handed him an Americano at least three times a week.

“Looks like homicide, but I’m reserving judgment until I see tox results. Any chance the wolves could have killed her?” Chuckie asked.

“Maybe, if she were wounded and bleeding,” Raisa said. “If she were on foot, wolves would have nipped at her legs or gone after her throat to bring her down. But her neck is relatively unmarked, and her legs are almost untouched. And again, wolves are usually pretty wary of humans. I’ll run a few comparisons with documented wolf kills, but my guess is the predators fed on her remains postmortem.”

“That’s consistent with the small amount of blood at the scene,” Beans said.

Raisa leaned in to take several photos of the body. She stopped suddenly and looked away from her camera’s view finder. “Hmm. Look at the back rib, the third or fourth one.”

“Looks

like it’s broken,” Beans said.

“Right, but it doesn’t seem to be consistent with predation. It’s like it was shattered rather than chewed.” She zoomed in to take a few more shots.

Chuckie swung the magnifying glass over the rib cage. “Good catch, Raisa. It looks like something struck the bone with enough force to crack it.”

“And to cause that exit wound through her back.” Beans nodded to Chuckie.

“What’s that?” Raisa pointed at what appeared to be bits of debris on the blue fabric.

Chuckie peered through the magnifying glass. “It looks like … tree bark? I found some of it in her hair as well.”

“Jolene was found on freshly fallen snow. There were no trees within a hundred-foot radius of the body.” Beans snapped a photo with his phone. “Bark could be from the murder scene.”

“I’ll bag it for Trace.” Chuckie shook open a plastic evidence bag.

“Are we any closer to a cause of death? Sharp-force trauma?” Beans asked. “Can I tell her parents anything?” He thought again about Olaf and Esther Nilsson in their room at the Captain Cook Hotel, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for word that they could take their girl home.

“Not yet.” Chuckie snapped more photos. “It’ll take a while for toxicology reports to come back. But I’m willing to bet that this wound was a contributing factor.”

Beans had to avert his eyes again from Jolene’s mutilated body. “Sexual assault?” He had to ask, but was afraid to hear the answer.

Chuckie shook his head. “Hard to say, with this level of damage to the remains. Tox and Trace will be able to tell us more.”

Raisa sighed. “What a lovely girl. Who would do such a thing?”

“Time of death is a moving target as well,” Chuckie said. “She was frozen solid when we found her. The closest I can get is sometime between Thursday and really early Saturday. That would give the killer enough time to kill her, then get her out there to be consumed before she froze.”

Chuckie frowned. “Postmortem was concluded at nine fifty-two AM.” He clicked off the recorder and covered Jolene gently with a sheet again. “I’ll close her up in a minute. I need a little break. Raisa, your scat is in the cooler just outside the door.” Without another word, Chuckie padded out through the swinging doors.

Beans knew that meant Chuckie was going out onto the freezing loading dock to smoke his one cigarette a day, the last vestige of the pack-a-day habit he’d kicked years ago. Raisa stared after Chuckie, blinking.

“So, are we done, then?” Raisa started packing her camera into its case.

“Yeah, we are, according to Chuckie.” Now that Beans was alone with her, he felt his palms grow sweaty. ...