Up Close: Badlands Thriller Book 3, page 1
ADVANCED Praise for UP CLOSE
“Danielle Girard is a phenomenal writer. In Up Close, her insightful and compulsively readable new novel, she creates a vivid portrait of a tight-knit small town grappling with a series of teenage deaths. Accidents or murder? Girard keeps you guessing until the final, breathtaking twist.”
—Jillian Medoff, author of When We Were Bright and Beautiful
“In the tiny town of Hagen, North Dakota, teens are dying under circumstances that are both deeply disturbing and utterly bizarre. Danielle Girard’s finely honed talents are on full display in her latest thriller, which marks the return of canny Detective Kylie Milliard and peels back layers of secrets to reveal a sinister puzzle that’s too close to home. A vivid and emotional white-knuckle read.”
— Tessa Wegert, author of The Kind to Kill
“Atmospheric and suspenseful, Up Close is littered with jaw dropping moments throughout. Girard delivers another relentless thriller that will have you at the edge of your seat, formulating theory after theory, only to twist the ending in a way you’ll never see coming—not once, but twice. Satisfying and poignant, it’s a brilliant end to the Badlands series.”
—Jaime Lynn Hendricks, bestselling author of Finding Tessa
“Hallelujah—Detective Kylie Milliard and the folks of Hagen, North Dakota, are back! The propulsive plot of Up Close will keep you turning pages late into the night while the deftly-drawn characters will make your heart ache. Danielle Girard is at the top of her game with this electrifying mystery.”
—Jess Lourey, Edgar-nominated author of The Quarry Girls
Praise for White Out
“Readers will cheer the dogged Kylie on . . . Girard tells an exciting story.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[White Out is] full of just the right number of misdirections and surprises. The characters, especially Lily, are appealingly vulnerable.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“White Out is a superb thriller—intense, intricate, and so intriguing. Detective Kylie Milliard is a badass, and Girard is one heck of a storyteller. The start of a fabulous new series.”
—J. T. Ellison,
New York Times bestselling author of Good Girls Lie
“Girard excels at creating kick-ass heroines in high-stakes, high-tension thrillers. Lily Baker and Detective Kylie Milliard ensure White Out is the start to another white-knuckle series.”
—Robert Dugoni, #1 Amazon and international bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite series
“I loved White Out from page one until the jaw-dropping conclusion. I do this for a living, and Danielle Girard spun me in so many circles I was dizzy when it was over. The pacing is pitch perfect, the plot taut as a high wire, and the characters will stick with you long after you’ve read the shocking finale. I can’t wait to read Danielle’s next adventure in the sleepy little town of Hagen, North Dakota, which calls to mind Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote: ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’”
—D. J. Palmer, USA Today bestselling author of Saving Meghan
“Tantalizingly and seductively chilling. The story lines twist and turn and combine, revealing loss, fear, and love in a rivetingly compelling—and constantly surprising—tale of lives forgotten and lives found. Danielle Girard delves revealingly into deep emotions and hidden motivations in this original and supremely satisfying thriller.”
—Hank Phillippi Ryan,
national bestselling author of The Murder List
ITP
Up Close
Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Girard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
First Edition: May 2023
Cover and Formatting: Damonza
ISBN:
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Please Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ALSO BY DANIELLE GIRARD
BADLANDS SERIES
White Out
Far Gone
DR. SCHWARTZMAN SERIES
Exhume
Excise
Expose
Expire
The Ex, a novella
ROOKIE CLUB SERIES
Dead Center
One Clean Shot
Dark Passage
Grave Danger
Everything to Lose
OTHER WORKS
Savage Art
Ruthless Game
Chasing Darkness
Cold Silence
For Claire & Jack,
My greatest blessings. For the gifts of joy, laughter, love
and awe that you each bring to my life and to the world.
For Nicole,
Your friendship is such a treasure.
That you’re also my sister is proof of magic.
I love you each to the moon…
Contents
Chapter 1: Tash
Chapter 2: Kylie
Chapter 3: Kylie
Chapter 4: Iver
Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Iver
Chapter 7: Kylie
Chapter 8: Kylie
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: Kylie
Chapter 11: Kylie
Chapter 12: Iver
Chapter 13: Kylie
Chapter 14
Chapter 15: Iver
Chapter 16: Kylie
Chapter 17: Iver
Chapter 18: Kylie
Chapter 19
Chapter 20: Kylie
Chapter 21: Kylie
Chapter 22: Iver
Chapter 23
Chapter 24: Kylie
Chapter 25: Iver
Chapter 26: Kylie
Chapter 27: Kylie
Chapter 28: Kylie
Chapter 29: Iver
Chapter 30
Chapter 31: Kylie
Chapter 32: Kylie
Chapter 33: Iver
Chapter 34: Kylie
Chapter 35: Kylie
Chapter 36: Iver
Chapter 37
Chapter 38: Kylie
Chapter 39: Kylie
Chapter 40: Kylie
Chapter 41: Iver
Chapter 42: Kylie
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Free Short Story
Chapter 1
Tash
Last November
Tash Kohl was not worried about drowning. During swim season, Coach had them work drills to improve lung capacity and at his peak, Tash could beat three minutes. Even chained to a cement block, two minutes was child’s play.
The sun hung high in the cloudless sky, a perfect day for swimming. Getting out of the truck in his team parka and flip-flops, he exhaled, his breath fogging the air as he looked out over the pond. There was one major difference between swimming inside and out here—pool water was close to eighty degrees, while pond water in early November was maybe sixty. But he didn’t have a choice. Not unless he wanted the truth to come out. For a month, he’d been avoiding complying with the demand. Now, he wished he’d just gotten it over with then, when the water was five or six degrees warmer. Seeing frost on his front porch this morning made him want nothing more than to bail.
The whole thing was bullshit. Why the fuck should he answer to someone who insisted on being called Wolf? What the fuck did that make him? A fucking lamb offered up for slaughter?
Screw that.
Moments after his anger flamed to life, its fire was smothered by the memory of the night two months ago, the body as he’d first seen it. When he’d woken, the heat of summer remained baked into the earth overnight, the ground warm beneath him. Tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Skull aching like it’d been split by an ax. His stomach churned with the remnants of the night’s activities. Lying on the scrubby grass, he’d told himself it was enough. He was done with it. To get off the ground, he’d had to roll over and push up onto his knees. The hard packed earth left an ache in his bones. But then Tash was up and moving, his blood warming.
It was over. He’d survived.
He went to find the others. Nearby, Connor had groaned and rolled over. Confused, he’d blinked the sleep out of his eyes. Man, they were in bad shape. That’s what he’d thought at first. Hung over, hurting. In the distance, he’d seen a patch of white, a bump in the leaves. Someone lying under a tree, curled into a ball. He’d run over, ready to shout that it was over. Then he saw her face.
His first thought was that her skin looked so wrong against the green grass.
Her skin was the same gray as Old Mr. Thompson, who owned the auto shop on the west side of town. Kids called him Tin Man because his skin was the color of cement, of the dark steel of a carburetor. Colloidal suspension of silver, once touted as a health tonic, was the actual cause of the gray skin, his mother, the high school science teacher, had explained after that trip to have their truck fixed. His truck now. That’s all he could think about, as he stared at the unnatural hue of her skin, that he needed to get his truck and get the hell out of here.
Tash studied the body, waiting for movement, for the joke. It had to be a joke. A brush of movement beside him, and Connor was there, staring down at the body, his face in shock. Then, he screamed. Lunged to the body and took hold of the shoulders. Shaking her, he shouted, “Wake up. Wake up, damn it.”
Her head swung back and forth on the neck like a tetherball on its rope. Tash imagined the skull popping off and rolling away through the damp leaves.
“Come on,” Connor shouted, dropping the body, which slumped back to the ground.
As she lay unmoving, Tash’s gaze caught the unnatural twist of the neck. The awkward angle of the chin. Connor was talking, but his words were lost as Tash turned and vomited onto the soft earth, a rush of liquid, the burn in his throat, then the stench of bile and alcohol.
Connor was still talking, but all Tash heard was, “Dead.”
They should have called the police. He had wanted to, but Connor said no way. The police would blame them. They would have questions Tash and Connor couldn’t answer.
That should have been the end of all this. What had started as something to stave off the boredom of Hagen had gone off the rails. Tash had wanted out. Connor had wanted out. Less than a mile from where he stood now, that park used to be a favorite hangout spot. He hadn’t gone back to that park since that morning. He didn’t think he’d ever go back.
The Wolf had said no way he’d let them out of it. Not until they paid for that night. For their mistake.
And how could they say no?
So here he was, standing at the edge of the pond. Two minutes down there and it would be over. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he prepared himself for the cold.
“You better not wuss out,” came the grating voice. That was all he heard now—the commands, the fucking power play. They’d been friends once. Good friends—he and Connor and Wolf. Friends since elementary school. People were surprised Tash hung out with them. With a mother from the Lokota tribe, he should have hung out with the Native kids. Why would he hang out with the Wasicu? Those snobs? But to him, they weren’t snobs. He’d seen them spray milk through their noses, kick a kid for pulling a robin’s nest out of a tree near the school, straight out lie to protect him when the lie had landed them in trouble at home and at school. The Native kids liked to remind him that he wasn’t true Lakota anyway. Nor was he full white.
He’d never been bothered by being different. He’d felt one of them, despite his ancestry. At least before that night. After that, their friendship had changed. Connor and Tash had been there, but neither remembered how it happened. Had Connor killed her? Had he? It seemed impossible. Still, the death was on their hands. After that night, Wolf became relentless. Cruel. Hateful.
And Tash had started to hate right back. Maybe it wasn’t fair; it had only been Connor and Tash that night. God, he wished they’d all three been there. Maybe then no one would have died. Or at least there would have been a third person to share the blame.
A gust of wind cut through his jacket, and he bounced on his toes to warm himself. Get it over with. He let the swim coat drop off his shoulders, and before he could think more about it, he drew a full breath and dove into the pond. The water stole his breath as his skin contracted against the cold, pulling into itself like soldiers tightening in formation.
He surfaced and cussed, shaking the water from his hair.
Connor was zipping up his dry suit while Wolf leaned against the hood of his truck in a hat and puffer coat, arms crossed like it was someone else’s fault they were here. Like this wasn’t all designed by Wolf.
Before some snarky comment could be launched Tash’s way, he turned and swam toward the far side of the pond. Warming his body. He didn’t want to be winded when he went underwater, but he also didn’t want to be freezing, so he took long freestyle strokes until the chill burned from his muscles and he felt looser.
As Tash swam back toward the parking lot, Connor waded slowly into the water until he was waist deep. Even in his dry suit, Connor looked miserable, tank on his back, BCD hanging over one shoulder.
“Okay. You ready?” Connor asked.
“Any time, Kohl,” the voice called back like Tash was holding everyone up.
“Ready,” Tash said.
“Don’t forget to keep the camera rolling.”
Tash met Connor’s eyes and saw his hate, too. For knowing what had happened, for not being there to prevent it, for not sharing in their guilt. Tash looked away, unable these days to look at Connor where he saw the mirror of everything that swirled inside his own chest. Fear, dread, horror at what he’d done and what it made him.
Treading water now, Tash found his rhythm, remembering why he loved to swim. The water was the place that drowned out all the noise. It was where he came after his dad died, after nights when he’d laid awake and listened to the ebb and flow of his mother’s sobs. And after that night when they’d found the body. Those first weeks, he’d spent as much time as he could in the water, fighting against images of what might have happened when he was too drunk to remember. If he’d contributed to the death. If it was actually murder rather than… what? Alcohol poisoning? He and Connor had decided it had to be that. That the face injury had happened in a fall. Or running into a tree.
They weren’t killers… were they?
In those early days after, he often lifted his head at the end of a lap with the fear that the police would be there, surrounding the pool, their weapons aimed at him. It could still happen, but the fear no longer took up so much space inside him that he couldn’t fill his lungs.
He pushed those thoughts away and drew long, slow breaths. Connor had submerged and was making his way to the bottom. The clock would start as soon as Tash went under. Connor would attach the surf leash to his ankle. The leash was attached to a chain and the chain to a concrete block on the bottom.
It was only two minutes.
Four minutes from now, he’d be climbing out of the water and going home. He’d be done.
He drew a last, long breath and told himself that he wasn’t doing any more of this. He was fucking done.
He sucked a tiny breath to top off his lungs and dove toward the bottom of the pond where Connor waited with the cement block and chain.
Chapter 2
Kylie
Five Months Later
The smell of decomposition would remain in her nose for days—rotting fish and garlic and the sour stench of spoiled cabbage, combined with feces and eggs. Showers and soap, perfumes and laundry detergent would help, but the smell couldn’t be washed away or masked. Detective Kylie Milliard had learned this lesson early in her career—not after the first death, perhaps, but by the third.
Death permeated the skin and penetrated the cells, injecting its rancid DNA into the fabric of its observers. Not just into their clothes but into their bodies, making them vessels for the putrid stench until, some days later, enough cells regenerated that the smell of death finally dissipated. Like being sprayed by a skunk without the spray.
All you had to do was show up when death was thick in the air, and it had been thick today.
The rain had made it worse, bringing the death through her clothes and into her bones. As she entered Hagen Diner, water ran off her in rivulets. She slid out of her coat and hung the dripping garment on the rack by the door. A tiny space that housed five four-top tables and an L-shaped bar for another dozen, the diner was almost always packed. After four years in Hagen, Kylie rarely saw a strange face among them. Folks looked up now and eyed her with the same mixture of curiosity and disdain that she’d felt as an outsider from day one. At least now there were a few smiles in the bunch—but only a few. From across the room, her friend Amber pointed to an empty barstool and Kylie squeezed between two tables to take the seat at the counter next to Amber’s son.
