Polar (Book 1): Polar Night Read Free

beers sometime. I know getting you drunk is the only way I’ll ever get you to talk.”
    “It’d take a hell of a lot more than a few beers.”
    “A keg, then.”
    “That’s more like it.”
    Tessa laughed and reached for her coat from the back of her chair. “Alright, I better leave you to your work, and get back to mine. I need to go pay a visit to Ms. Triebel’s boyfriend. A Mr. Nate Clancy.”
    “An Irish guy like me,” Danny said.
    “I guess so.”
    “With the name Clancy, I know so. I should go with you. See if he’s from the old country. We could swap stories.”
    “You are so full of shit. I bet you’ve never set foot in Ireland.”
    Danny laughed. “True. But parts of Chicago are close enough, trust me.”
    “I can believe that. Your part anyway. A bunch of drunk Irish fools.”
    Danny chuckled again. “Didn’t you say you were gonna let me get back to my work?”
    “Yeah, I did.” Tessa walked towards the front door. “See you later.”
    Danny turned back to his desk and started to page through the records of the case he had been going through the day before, but his eyes were drawn back to the photo of Maria Triebel. It was hard to imagine the pretty, smiling woman in the photograph choosing to disappear. But then, there was a time when those he knew would have said the same about him.
    “Are you still with us, Ms. Triebel?” he whispered.
    He stared at the photo, wondering why Maria Triebel seemed somehow familiar to him. Had he known someone who looked like her back in Chicago? He didn’t think so. Suddenly, his mind flashed to a case he had looked at a few days before.
    He booted up his computer, and impatiently brought up his files. He had been working on a case that had just passed its three year anniversary. The victim’s family had refused to give up no matter how many years went by, and had been in touch with the department on a fairly regular basis.
    Danny clicked on the name of Anna Alexander. A blond, smiling young woman who had disappeared from the campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, three years ago this week.
    It was clear now why Maria Triebel had struck a chord with him. She and Anna didn’t look exactly alike, but there were enough similarities that it would have been easy to mistake them for sisters. Or at least cousins. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise up and a prickle of energy he hadn’t felt in nearly a year. His gut told him there was a connection between these two women. He could feel it.
    Danny scrolled through the details of Anna Alexander’s case. She had last been seen on December 21, 2009. The winter solstice. He heard Tessa’s voice in his mind. “She was supposed to be taking Santa photos at the winter solstice celebration…”
    Danny’s energy went from a prickle to a straight out deluge.

 
     
    Chapter 2
     
     
     
     
    Maria Triebel rested her head against the chilly dirt wall behind her and hugged her knees to her chest in a futile attempt to stop trembling. She took slow, deep breaths in order to keep from hyperventilating, and forced herself to quit crying. She needed to think, and using all her energy crying wasn’t going to help anything. Unfortunately, she had no idea what was going to help.
    The place she was sitting in was so dark she was unable to see her own hands when she held them up to her face. She had felt around on the floor and walls around her, but had found nothing but hard, cold dirt. She had no idea how long she’d been here, or, for that matter, where “here” was. She remembered leaving the clothing store and heading towards her car, and bumping into a tall blond man as she turned into her row in the lot. He seemed familiar, and he had leaned towards her as if he wanted to ask a question, and then everything had gone dark.
    The next thing she remembered was opening her eyes in this pitch black, deathly silent room. She had filled the silence with her screams until her throat was raw and too parched