Detective Cara Kennedy thought she’d lost her husband and son in an accident, but harrowing evidence has emerged that points to murder--and she will stop at nothing to find the truth in this riveting mystery from the author of On a frigid February day, Anchorage Detective Cara Kennedy stands by the graves of her husband and son, watching as their caskets are raised from the earth. It feels sacrilegious, but she has no choice. Aaron and Dylan disappeared on a hike a year ago, their bones eventually found and buried. But shocking clues have emerged that foul play was involved, potentially connecting them to a string of other deaths and disappearances. Somehow tied to the mystery is Mia Upash, who grew up in an isolated village called Unity, a community of women and children in hiding from abusive men. Mia never imagined the trouble she would find herself in when she left home to live in Man’s World. Although she remains haunted by the tragedy of what happened to the man and the boy in the woods, she has her own reasons for keeping quiet. Aided by police officer Joe Barkowski and other residents of Point Mettier, Cara’s investigation will lead them on a dangerous path that puts their lives and the lives of everyone around them in mortal jeopardy.

Autorentext

Iris Yamashita is an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter for the movie Letters from Iwo Jima. She has been working in Hollywood for fifteen years developing material for both film and streaming, has taught screenwriting at UCLA, and is an advocate of women and diversity in the entertainment industry. She has also been a judge and mentor for various film and writing programs, and lives in California.

Klappentext

"Detective Cara Kennedy thought she'd lost her husband and son in an accident, but harrowing evidence has emerged that points to murder-and she will stop at nothing to find the truth in this riveting mystery from the author of City Under One Roof. On a frigid February day, Anchorage Detective Cara Kennedy stands by the graves of her husband and son, watching as their caskets are raised from the earth. It feels sacrilegious, but she has no choice. Aaron and Dylan disappeared on a hike a year ago, their bones eventually found and buried. But shocking clues have emerged that foul play was involved, potentially connecting them to a string of other deaths and disappearances. Somehow tied to the mystery is Mia Upash, who grew up in an isolated village called Unity, a community of women and children in hiding from abusive men. Mia never imagined the trouble she would find herself in when she left home to live in Man's World. Although she remains haunted by the tragedy of what happened to the man and the boy in the woods, she has her own reasons for keeping quiet. Aided by police officer Joe Barkowski and other residents of Point Mettier, Cara's investigation will lead them on a dangerous path that puts their lives and the lives of everyone around them in mortal jeopardy"--

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Cara

The frigid wind whipped up eager snow eddies off the knolls of the cemetery grounds in South Anchorage. Cara Kennedy tightened her knitted scarf around her neck and wedged her hands in the pockets of her parka in an attempt to keep warm. In summer, the parklike grounds offered a peaceful vista of green, rolling hills under the majestic, white-capped Chugach Mountains. Though the mountains were seven miles east, they were as much a part of the Anchorage skyline as the twenty-two-storied Conoco-Phillips Building on G Street or the twenty-one-floored Hilton Anchorage on Third. Even now in winter, despite having viewed the mountain vista a million times over, Cara still had to marvel at the unobstructed view of the giant, snow-coned peaks under glacier-blue skies. It's why she'd chosen this plot in the Angelus Cemetery for her husband, Aaron, and their son, Dylan.

Yet here she was watching their coffins being unceremoniously craned out of the ground from what were meant to be their final resting places.

Each click of the metal chains hoisting the caskets reverberated through Cara's bones. Aaron's walnut-stained, adult-sized box was raised first, casting a long shadow that blotted the patch of ground in front of her. The reality of what she was doing finally hit her. She felt suddenly queasy, and a wave of anxiety welled up within her. This felt sacrilegious. Was she making a horrible mistake by disturbing the dead?

Over the course of a year and four months, Cara had lost her family and then been placed on long-term disability after failing a psych eval. It seemed like a lifetime ago since she’d been working as a detective for the Anchorage Police Department and Aaron was a manager at the research division of a pharmatech company on the edge of town, while Dylan had sprouted into a precocious six-year-old with an infectious smile.

Admittedly, it wasn't always a bed of roses. Cracks had begun to form in the looking glass of their picture-perfect lives. There was the stress of their jobs, the burdens of taking care of a child, and not least of all, the faithless thoughts that haunted Cara when Aaron slinked into bed in the wee hours after a long day at work. She had even secretly followed him once after a late-night call that he said was a work emergency, but it turned out he actually did go to his office. A getaway to the Talkeetna wilderness two hours north of Anchorage was the self-prescribed medication to fix their relationship. It was on the third morning of their trip that Aaron and Dylan had bundled up in their parkas, gloves, and hats, and headed out to look for snowshoe hares while Cara slept in. They never returned.

There had been searches, of course-helicopters, dogs, and volunteers. But neither her husband nor son could be found . . . until nine months later when lightning started a multi-acre forest blaze and firefighters discovered a skull, a leg bone, a rib cage-everything in pieces at the bottom of a ravine. A man and a boy. Cara asked for a verifying DNA report to be sure. The scattered locations of their remains were explained as the work of wild animals-a suggestion that only added to Cara's pain and horror.

Aaron and Dylan had probably gone off trail and gotten lost, Cara was told. Or maybe Aaron had injured himself on the walk and couldn't make it back, while Dylan had stayed with him. There was only conjecture without any definitive evidence. In Alaska, where two thousand people a year disappear in the beautiful but vast and foreboding wilderness, few of the missing make the news.

Cara fell into a rabbit hole of unanswered questions and a well of guilt. If she had gone with them, could she have prevented them from getting lost, or helped Aaron if he was injured? Could she have found them sooner when there was still a chance to save them? Should she have forbidden Aaron to take Dylan into the cell-signal-devoid wilderness? Aaron's blue, dust-covered SUV, still splattered with the deaths of hundreds of insects, was found abandoned on a seldom-used gravel road with Aaron's expensive SLR camera gear and his driver's license still in the car. Why would Aaron have left his camera and driver's license behind? This last question made her begin to doubt whether the whole thing was an accident at all. Could there have been foul play involved?

At the station, she became obsessed with cases involving body parts and missing persons, including a slew of extremities washing up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and a couple that washed up near Anchorage. The mundane explanations revolved around the buoyancy of modern-day sneakers detaching from decomposed corpses of suicide and drowning victims, not the work of a maniacal serial killer. Still, Cara looked for possible connections to what might have happened to her family and began poking her nose into investig…