For a disgraced reporter, unraveling a conspiracy of murder could mean redemption in a powerful novel of suspense by the bestselling author of Out of the Ashes.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Kara Thomas’s Lost To Dune Road, which is out April 16th 2024.
Reporter Lee Ellerin’s investigation into a young woman’s unsolved murder gained national attention—only for her to lose everything due to a tragic mistake. After being publicly ridiculed for causing a suspect’s death, Lee is forced to leave her career behind.
Five years later, pregnant college student Amanda Hartley lies in a coma. The police say she attempted suicide, but the details don’t add up. Where is the father? Who was paying for Amanda’s Manhattan penthouse? Why did Amanda have a note with Lee’s name in her backpack? There’s also one alarming coincidence: Amanda was last seen on Dune Road in the Hamptons—where the murder victim in Lee’s previous investigation disappeared.
As she’s pulled back into the still-unsolved case that destroyed her career, Lee sees the chance to amend the mistakes of her past. But finding a killer and unearthing Amanda’s secrets sends her down a darker path than she has ever walked before.
Chapter One
Pete Marino took a dump every morning at exactly 10:00 a.m.
Pete Marino had also figured out that the third-floor restroom of the government building where he worked was never occupied at 10:00 a.m., unlike the bathroom on the eleventh floor, where he performed clerical duties for the Department of Economic Planning and Development. The only motive I could determine for him making the daily pilgrimage was that Marino was the type of man who was embarrassed by his colleagues knowing that he shits at work.
I also suspected that Pete Marino knew he was being watched. Most car accident victims who are suing for over a million in compensatory damages assume the defendant’s attorneys are having them watched, but Marino was one of the smarter individuals I’d had the privilege of surveilling.
In the three-plus weeks I’d been tailing him, he hadn’t sneaked away to run a triathlon or had any loud phone conversations about trying to fleece the driver who T-boned him on the LIE service road six months ago. But Marino was suing Dom Rafanelli’s client over the accident, claiming the knee injury he’d sustained left him unable to run or even use the stairs at work.
I was growing impatient, as was Dom. The lawsuit was going in front of a judge by the summer, and so far, I’d dug up nothing that could discredit Marino as a witness in his own case.
And now I was back at Marino’s workplace for the third time this week, ten minutes ahead of his morning constitutional. In my back pocket was an old red-light camera ticket that had gotten me through security at the main entrance. I stopped by the security desk, drawing the bored guard’s attention away from Wordle.
“Do those work?” I gestured to the cameras angled toward both the stairwell and the elevator.
The guard nodded, alarm in her eyes. Why did I need to know this information? She looked me up and down and went back to her phone, deciding the odds of a five foot five, thirtysomething white woman being the next government building bomber were low.
I thanked her, took the stairs to the third floor, and consulted my watch—9:58. I summoned both elevators. I slipped inside the north elevator and depressed the emergency button.
Quickly, quickly, I darted out of the north elevator and into the south. I held down the button for the eleventh floor at the same time as the door close button. Just as HowTo.com promised, the little hack had created my own personal express elevator.
The carriage hovered over the eleventh floor at exactly 10:00 a.m. I continued to hold both buttons; as I stalled at the eleventh floor, the sound of the emergency bell in the opposite elevator shaft persisted. I imagined Marino waiting right outside, beginning to panic.
At 10:05 I released the buttons. The elevator doors glided open in time for me to see the stairwell door slam shut.
I reached the door in time to see Pete Marino flying down the stairs as if Usain Bolt had personally coached him. A satisfied smile bloomed on my lips.
Out on the eleventh floor, the elevator alarm continued to blare.
#
I was out of the building and at my car by ten fifteen. I made the twenty-minute trek to Dom’s office in Dix Hills, spent another ten minutes looking for parking.
The law office of Rafanelli & Company was in an industrial complex, right next door to a Wells Fargo Advisors and a day care. All my usual markers greeted me in the parking lot—the Baby Shark Band-Aid adhered to the pavement, a discarded 7-Eleven coffee cup.
I depressed the button for Dom’s suite. His receptionist buzzed me up, told me Dom was waiting for me in his office.
Dom was staring at his computer screen, the glow reflected in his thick black frames. I had been taken aback when I first met Dom after trading emails. He’d mentioned he was from Brooklyn, and combined with the aggressively Italian name, I’d assumed he was going to look like the lawyer from My Cousin Vinny.
Dom was more Buddy Holly than Joe Pesci, though. I didn’t know how old he really was, but I put him in his late thirties, early forties, judging by the offhand comment that his daughter attended the day-care center next door.
“You might want to subpoena this morning’s security footage from Pete Marino’s work building,” I said.
Dom spun in his chair to face me. The mention of Marino’s name seemed to coax him out of whatever stupor the screen of his computer had inspired. “Really.”
“He made it down eight flights of stairs in a minute.” I grabbed a mint from the bowl on Dom’s desk and invited myself to sit in the chair opposite him.
“Huh,” Dom said. “Do I want to know what sent him running down the stairs?”
“It was my understanding I would be able to keep my methods to myself, as long as they’re legal.” I unwrapped the mint while Dom smiled.
“So you were right, then.”
Dom had agreed to represent the driver who had hit Marino because the suit had seemed excessive, and he was confident he could win. But I could tell it bothered him, the absence of an obvious motive for Pete Marino to exaggerate his injuries so greatly. He was a reliable government bureaucrat who had never so much as netted a parking ticket. His wife was entering her twentieth year teaching high school math and made a comfortable six figures. The couple had no children, no significant college loans.
It felt tacky to say, I usually am right. It’s not arrogant; this was what Dom had hired me to do, because he knew I was good at it. He had used the words perceptive, intuitive; most of my life, I’d been used to people saying things like creepy or nosy instead.
Dom sighed, lifted his glasses so he could knead the skin on the bridge of his nose. “Here’s the thing, Lee.”
It wasn’t like Dom to offer a preamble. When he had work for me, he simply handed over his files on the involved parties and told me to call his receptionist or the other PI with any questions.
I did not like the I just ran over your puppy in the driveway look on his face right now.
“We just took on Charles Milligan as a client,” Dom said.
“Okay. I don’t know who that is.”
“He was in the news, few months back—he claims two Suffolk County police officers assaulted him while he was in custody on drug suspicion.”
“He’s suing the police department?” I asked.
“It could be a huge case. It’ll probably get ugly.”
“And I can’t go anywhere near anyone involved, for obvious reasons.”
The whole point of an investigator on retainer is to discredit the other side’s witnesses. Over the past two years, I’d had to be a nonentity, a trustworthy face with an I’m not on either side here shtick.
That would be impossible if Dom’s client was suing the SCPD. Almost every cop in Suffolk County knew who I was, and even after four years, they probably wanted nothing more than to discredit me even further.
Dom began: “You know it’s not personal—”
“It is, though.” I swallowed, guilty at the stung look on Dom’s face. “It’s like you said to me a few years ago. Not everyone has the privilege to make an enemy of the chief of police.”
“I’ve got contacts at other offices who need investigators.” His voice was strained enough to betray the fact he had not yet had the chance to touch base with his lawyer buddies to ask if he could off-load me on them. I thought of the look of surprise on Dom’s face when I stepped inside his office. He’d thought the Marino case would keep me busy for another week or two, at least.
I stood. “All right, well, let me know, I guess.”
“Lee—”
“Don’t worry about it, Dom.”
Back in the parking lot, a thin mist began to work its way down from the sky. Before I got into my car, I stopped. I bent, scraped the Baby Shark Band-Aid off the pavement, as I’d thought of doing dozens of times since I first set foot in Dom Rafanelli’s office two years ago.
He had reached out to me after Mallory Switzer’s Good Morning America interview accusing me of ruining her life.
Mallory had flown to New York to meet with me after I published an article about the Suffolk County Police declining to formally interview the last person known to have seen Jenna Mackey, a nineteen-year-old who had gone missing in the Hamptons in 2019.
Paul Brennan was a prominent Manhattan attorney who owned a $12.5 million home on Dune Road. Even after a witness came forward and said he saw Brennan speaking to a girl who fit Jenna Mackey’s description the night she disappeared, Brennan denied knowing Jenna or ever having seen her.
Paul Brennan was a liar and a manipulator. Mallory Switzer had convinced me of that. She’d been his student when he taught at UCLA’s law school in the late ’90s. She flew out to New York to tell me about the affair she’d had with the newly engaged Paul Brennan while she was in his class.
Mallory was twenty-three to Brennan’s thirty, and she’d been struggling her first year of law school. Brennan was her adviser, and instead of helping her, he dated her. Mallory swore she didn’t know he was engaged. Sure, the relationship was consensual—until Mallory tried to end things and Brennan threatened to fail her and then kill himself when she called his bluff. She ended up dropping out of the program entirely.
After my interview with Mallory was published, Brennan dismissed her as a spurned hookup, a youthful mistake his wife had forgiven him for years ago. He retained an attorney with Lathan & Watkins, who dredged up Mallory’s bankruptcy claim in 2016 and her transcript from the first graduate program she’d dropped out of.
And then, the clincher: fifteen-year-old Mallory Switzer, during her tenure at a boarding school in Oregon, had accused a classmate of rape. A week later, her roommate told school officials that Mallory was upset that the boy, an upperclassman, had rejected her. Mallory recanted and was forced to write the boy a letter of apology. The harassment from her fellow classmates was so bad in the aftermath that she’d had to transfer to a school out of state.
There was talk of an ethics review at the magazine, possible disciplinary action for my improper vetting of a source. Then the shit hit the fan with the Jenna Mackey investigation. Paul Brennan was cleared as a suspect, and I was fired, no longer protected by union lawyers.
Dom Rafanelli emailed with an offer to represent me pro bono. He fended off a lawsuit from Brennan’s family, got the Suffolk County chief of police to stop barking about criminal charges for my role in everything.
Still, my career as a journalist was over, forever.
They wouldn’t find Jenna Mackey’s remains until over a year later, when a fisherman stumbled upon a human skull in a remote area of marsh in Mastic Beach, over an hour from where she had disappeared into the night.
