by: K.D. Richards
Series: Guardians of Justice
Genre: African American Mystery/Thriller Romance
Release Date: April 28, 2026
Publisher: Harlequin Intrigue
Will solving his father’s murder
plunge her into danger?
Investigative reporter Landon Elkins has never stopped searching for his father’s killer. The discovery of a teenage girl’s remains uncovers a possible connection to the decades-old murder. Suspecting that Nichol Bunin witnessed something that could crack both cases wide open, Landon enlists the beautiful librarian’s help. But they’re up against the secrets of this close-knit town in a case with ever more baffling twists and turns…and a mass murderer who’s hiding in plain sight.
From Harlequin Intrigue: Seek thrills. Solve crimes. Justice served.
Chapter One
The lock turned with a satisfying click, and Nichol Bunin pushed open the back door of the library. It was only mid-October, but with the breeze, she’d paired a cap with her jacket to ward off the chill, letting the ends of her shoulder-length hair fall below the cap. She knew from the frequency with which she was carded whenever she dined out that she didn’t look her thirty-six years. Frequent hikes through the woods near her house and a healthy diet, including the many vegetables grown in her own backyard garden and taste for lemon water, kept her body lithe and her dark brown skin flawless.
She strode toward the front of the library, her footsteps gliding over the stretched carpeting as she flicked on the lights. Row after row of bookshelves illuminated like dominoes. The familiar scent of books filled her lungs, instantly soothing the nerves that had arisen when she’d awoken hours earlier to find that her alarm hadn’t gone off. The rainstorms the night before had knocked out the power at some point, which meant she had to rush through her morning routine in order to make it to work on time.
She made her way through the stacks—history, science fiction, romance, each section holding its own treasures—before skirting behind the circulation desk and making her way to her small office. Every surface was covered with books, files, or trinkets gifted by grateful patrons over the years. It was cluttered but familiar. Perfect.
She dropped her coat over the back of her chair and locked her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk. “Time to get this show on the road.”
A late start meant she didn’t have time to settle in before the library opened.
She stepped out of her office and headed for the sliding glass door entrance, then turned the lock on the doors with a practiced twist and waved a hand over the motion sensor to activate the doors. The mechanism clicked, and the glass doors opened with a gentle whoosh of air. A young man, vaguely familiar, nodded and stepped inside past her.
She headed back to the circulation desk, glancing at the clock on the wall as she did. She’d just made it behind the desk when Lynn Riceny rushed through the door of the library and hustled to the front desk.
“I’m so sorry for being late,” she said, her face flushed.
“It’s alright, Lynn. I barely made it in on time myself. What’s got you so flustered?”
Lynn hung her jacket on the coat stand in a large room behind the front desk area that served as the private office space for all the staff except Nichol, who had her own small office, before stepping back out. “Oh, my goodness. You haven’t heard then?”
Accustomed to Lynn’s overly dramatic personality, Nichol shrugged. “I guess not. Heard what?”
Lynn glanced around the library, making sure no one would overhear them before speaking. “Some hikers found remains in Galesburg Forest last night.”
Nichol jerked. “Remains? As in…”
Lynn nodded vigorously. “As in a dead body. From what I heard, one that has been dead for some time now.”
“Wow, that’s…”
“Gruesome,” Lynn finished with a shiver.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just an animal? I mean, if someone had gone missing in Galesburg, we’d have heard about it.”
There was no doubt about it. In a sleepy bedroom town, a little more than an hour north of Washington, D.C., like Galesburg—where the residents were wealthy and rabid about keeping up their property values—a missing person would not have gone unnoticed.
Lynn nodded. “I’m sure. I drove past the site on my way into work.” Her cheeks pinked. The woods were on the opposite side of town from Lynn’s house, but Nichol wasn’t surprised that her coworker and friend had taken the long way to work. Lynn was a fantastic children’s librarian, but she would have made a dogged reporter or private investigator.
Lynn cleared her throat and lowered her voice a notch. “I took pictures. Want to see them?”
Nichol took an unconscious step away from her coworker. “Of a body?”
“Sssh!” Lynn’s head snapped around, ensuring again that they couldn’t be overheard. Their lone patron, the twentysomething man, was sitting at one of the long tables situated in front of the stacks with headphones on. He didn’t look away from his computer screen. “No, not of the body. I couldn’t get that close. And it’s not a body. Not really. Like I said, it looks like whoever it was was out there for a while. Like years. It’s just bones from what I heard.”
Nichol’s stomach lurched.
Lynn pulled her phone from her back pocket. Strictly speaking, they weren’t allowed to have their phones on them during work hours, but as the head librarian, Nichol was fairly lenient in enforcing that rule. She, Lynn, and her assistant head librarian, Josh, were the only full-time employees of the small public library. There were three other part-timers, all women with children. There was no way Nichol was going to tell them they couldn’t be with their phones.
Lynn tapped her phone’s screen then moved to Nichol’s side so they could view the photos together. As Lynn swiped, Nichol was relieved to see that the photos were from the road and didn’t capture anything that might leave her with nightmares. Mostly just trees, the ambulance, and the state police officers assigned to keep the lookie-loos like Lynn back.
“Well, I know it isn’t much but…” Lynn let the screen go dark and slid the phone back into her pocket. “Not much happens around here. I wonder who it is?”
Nichol’s stomach lurched again, but Lynn seemed not to notice her anxiety as she booted up the circulation desk computer. Lynn was amazing with children, connecting with them in a way that many adults couldn’t. But when it came to older humans, she was more than a little oblivious. Her tendency to fail to pick up on subtleties and changes in other people’s tones and moods had led to more than one situation that Nichol had to smooth over. But Lynn had a good heart, and she was a good friend.
“Maybe someone from out of town,” Nichol answered, even as a voice inside of her screamed otherwise. “You know how people love to come to the Galesburg Forest and hike its trail. A visitor who went out, overestimated their preparedness for the terrain, and unfortunately got lost.”
Lynn shot her a look. “Wouldn’t we have heard about that? I mean, someone would have noticed if a tourist had gone missing during the season.”
Nichol shrugged half-heartedly. “Maybe. Maybe not. If they only came up for a day trip they might not have checked into a hotel or the resort. And if their family or friends didn’t know where they’d gone…”
“Maybe,” Lynn said, but she didn’t look persuaded.
Nichol wasn’t convinced either. Even if the poor soul had only come up for a day of hiking in the woods, they would have had to get themselves here somehow. There was a bus station, but Galesburg was more of a pass-through from the buses, not a destination. At least not for most people. The memory of a teenage girl standing at the bus station fluttered through her mind.
“Nichol? Are you okay?” Lynn’s voice jerked Nichol back into the here and now.
She forced a small smile. “Yes, of course. Just thinking about how sad it is for whoever is out there and their family. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
Lynn shook her head sadly. “Me either.”
The sliding glass doors of the library swooshed open, interrupting their conversation, and a gaggle of toddlers ran inside followed by their harried mothers.
“That’s my cue,” Lynn said, stepping away from the front desk and heading to the rear of the library where the children’s section was located.
Tuesdays and Thursday mornings they held the Toddler Tales program, a project that Lynn had spearheaded that involved reading, role playing and other creative activities for toddlers. In the six months since they’d begun the program, the number of attendees had grown so much that they’d had to institute a registration system to keep the library from being overrun with screaming three-year-olds.
Nichol spent the next hour and half helping patrons check out books and find resources. Once Bethany, one of the part-timers, arrived to work the desk, she went back to her office to work on some of the always-present paperwork that needed to be completed. But thoughts of the body in the woods were never far from the front of her mind.
At eleven, she let Lynn know she was taking her break and grabbed her jacket and purse from her office. The library stayed busy thankfully, but that meant she wasn’t always able to take the morning break that her employment contract allowed for. When she was able to get away, she usually headed for the café and bakery just a few blocks away.
Today though, instead of making the two-minute walk down the block, she headed for her blue Kia sedan.
I don’t know why you’re doing this.
But that wasn’t true. She did know why. She had to see for herself if the remains could possibly be those of the girl she’d seen so long ago. A girl almost everyone had forgotten about, it seemed, but not Nichol.
It can’t be.
But still she drove on through, then out of downtown. Lynn hadn’t said exactly where the remains were found, but her photos had shown enough that Nichol had a pretty good idea where she was headed. Ten minutes after leaving the library, she pulled her car into the breakdown lane and got out. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a hankering to see the site for themselves. There were at least four other cars parked on either side of the highway along with several marked police cruisers.
She walked toward the spot that had been marked off with yellow police tape. Two officers in Galesburg uniforms blocked onlookers from going into the woods.
Snippets of conversation between the other onlookers drifted toward her as she approached the perimeter.
“…nothing but bones…” a tall man with thinning brown hair said.
The woman next to him responded, “My son’s a first responder. He said they looked like they’d been there for years.”
“The recent rash of rain probably washed away whatever dirt they were under. Poor thing,” another female onlooker said, then tsked.
“Listen up!” A young officer working as crowd control raised his voice as Nichol approached. “We’ve asked you nicely to move along—now we’re going to start ticketing cars parked without cause.” He narrowed his eyes and let his gaze sweep over the small crowd. “That means unless you are legitimately broken down, standing here watching the trees sway in the breeze is going to cost you a hundred bucks. Fair warning.”
The woman who had just tsked turned on her heels and hustled back to a black minivan. Two men grumbled about public spaces and their right of assembly, but they too turned and moved away.
Nichol shot a glance at her car. She was parked farther away than the other vehicles. Maybe the cops wouldn’t get to her right away. She hadn’t driven all the way out there only to turn around without at least attempting to satisfy her curiosity. And be sure that this body couldn’t be that of a teenage girl whose scared blue eyes still haunted her to this day.
Turning away from the police officers, she moved down the street away from her car and the scene and ducked into the trees while the officers were still threatening the straggling onlookers with fines. She’d only take a minute. Get just close enough to assure herself that she was overreacting, and then she’d hightail it back to town. She was already going to be late getting back from her break, but she knew Lynn would cover for her. The forest seemed to close in around her, branches snagging at her clothes.
This is insane, she thought, but she didn’t turn back. She couldn’t stop now. The truth she’d wondered about for years might lie just ahead, hidden in these dark woods all these years.
Her feet sank into the earth as she crept forward, each step calculated to avoid snapping twigs or rustling leaves. She’d lived in Galesburg all her life, stomped through these woods ever since she was a girl about the size of the children at the library earlier that morning. She knew how not to leave tracks.
Muffled voices drifted through the trees as she neared the spot where the bones must have been found. She dropped to a crouch behind a cluster of ferns, careful not to let the cuffs of her slacks drag on the ground.
Through gaps in the foliage, she caught her first glimpse of the scene. Police officers moved with grim purpose, their faces etched with concentration. The coroner, his brown-and-gray hair sticking out from under a baseball cap in tufts, and clad in a blue jacket with white lettering announcing his position, knelt beside a shallow depression in the ground.
“Crap,” a balding white man in an ill-fitting suit swore, loud enough for her to hear. Galesburg had a small police force, but she didn’t recognize the man, which probably meant he was from the state police. The residents of Galesburg thought of the forest as part of their town, but in reality, it was state-owned property.
“How long do you think they’ve been out here?” the man she suspected was a state police detective asked.
A second older, Asian man in a jacket with the word Coroner emblazoned in yellow across its back shook his head, carefully lifting a long, dirt-encrusted object. “Hard to say without lab work but given the state of decomposition, several years.”
Her stomach churned as she realized what the man held. A human bone. Her need to know more warred with rising nausea.
The coroner bagged a smaller bone, his movements precise and respectful. “What happened to you out here?” His question was directed to the bones.
She didn’t have an answer to that question, but she suspected she knew who it was out there. You can’t be sure. Don’t jump to conclusions.
A different voice cut through the trees. “Detective, you need to see this.” A uniformed officer made his way to the suit-clad man standing at the coroner’s back. The uniformed officer held something up and out in his glove covered hand for the detective to see.
She felt her eyes widen as she caught a glimpse of tarnished silver glinting in the streaks of sunlight that made it through the trees. A purse, caked with mud and weathered by time, but unmistakably familiar.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, her heart thundering loud enough that she feared she’d be discovered any moment.
The world around her seemed to fade as memories flooded back, vivid and visceral.
* * *
SHE’D STOOD JUST inside the oak doors of Galesburg Public Library, nervously tapping her one foot as she waited. Outside, rain streaked the glass in thin, silver lines, and for a moment, she was seventeen again, standing in this very spot after her shift as a library page.
It was three minutes past closing time. Her backpack dug into her shoulders, heavy with her school textbooks, and she was annoyed. He’s probably lost track of time again, thinking about her father.
She checked the time on her wristwatch, then glanced out through the glass door, expecting her father’s beat-up old pickup to appear. But it wasn’t his truck she saw. It was the local commuter bus, hissing to a stop across the street, just like it always did, twice a day, every weekday, shuttling Galesburg commuters to and from Washington, D.C.
Several familiar faces stepped off, heading for the adjacent parking lot. But one figure remained behind.
A girl, blonde, about her own age, stood alone in a pink wool coat, a silver purse dangling from her shoulder. Her hair fell in soft waves down her back, her makeup defining her eyes and lips with the kind of precision Nichol had only ever seen in magazines.
Definitely not a local. Nichol had been sure about that.
The girl had looked down the road toward Main Street, brows drawn, tapping one foot with visible impatience. The girl was waiting for someone who was late too, she’d thought to herself.
Just then a black luxury sedan had glided up to the curb, windows tinted too dark for her to see the driver. The girl hesitated, leaned down to peer through the passenger door window, which the driver must have rolled down. The girl said something to the person inside, her expression still reticent. After a moment, her body language softened. She smiled and opened the passenger door, then slid into the car.
A moment later, the sedan pulled away, disappearing down Main Street as the familiar growl of her father’s engine broke the quiet.
Nichol likely would have forgotten all about the girl and the doubt she’d seen on her face if she hadn’t seen the same girl several days later.
This time, she was on the nightly news. Addison Kober, fifteen, had gone missing that night, twenty-one years ago. And now Nichol knew she may have been one of the last people to see Addison alive.
Excerpted from Cold Case Cover-Up by K.D. Richards Copyright © 2026 by Kia Dennis. Excerpted by permission of K.D. Richards. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author and/or publisher.
Purchase Cold Case Cover-Up from:
(Affiliate Links Used)
The Guardians of Justice Series:
Deady Family Secrets (Book 4) releases July 28, 2026
Places to find K.D. Richards:
No comments:
Post a Comment
STOP!
Comments that include links to other sites, or names including links WILL BE CONSIDERED SPAM AND DELETED.