Hidden No More

By Karen Randau

A disgraced news anchor who witnesses a brutal murder!

 

Amelee Hodgins is at the top of her game as a news anchor at a Tulsa television station until the day her husband leaves her for a younger woman ... and takes her treasured dog with him. One little sip of Tennessee whiskey to ease her broken heart before going on air turns into much more, and destroys her career. She falls out of her chair while delivering the 6:00 p.m. news live—drunk as a skunk!

 

Six months of rehab later, now a freelance investigative podcaster, she's staking out an unfaithful wife's house when she witnesses two murders. This could be the story she needs to repair her career! She partners with her sister, a detective with the Tulsa police, to solve the crime ... and steps right into a sinister plot that could be the end of both Amelee and her sister.

 

Will Amelee and Kate find the killer before becoming the next victims of a scheme that reaches deep into Tulsa's elite?

 

If you like the suspense of Willow Rose and the plot twists of Kendra Elliot, you will love Hidden No More, a hair-raising prequel to Karen Randau's Kayla Walsh mystery-suspense series.

 

Buy Hidden No More now to unearth the life-threatening secret Amelee and Kate discover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Randau
• Release date: Feb 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201090623

Karen Randau

An Amazon Charts Bestselling Author, Karen Randau authors mystery, thriller, and suspense books featuring intrigue, action, twists, and a dash of romance. Her books feature strong female protagonists who overcome difficult situations to solve a crime. She enjoys living in the mountains of Arizona with her family.

Book preview

Chapter 1

AS AMELEE PREPARED for an interview at the Tulsa television station where she anchored the evening news, her cell phone buzzed. Despite expecting a text message from her neighbor, the sound scraped across her nerves and made her flinch. What she read didn’t hurt as much as she had imagined it would.

Carl just left in a moving truck. He took Zeus.

She composed a brief thank you for keeping an eye on things before letting the phone slip to her finely woven Italian wool skirt. She would miss the dog more than she’d miss her husband.

As a top anchor at her Tulsa television station, she used to have a dressing room. But things had changed over the years; everyone now worked from desks in the newsroom. Her area had been converted to a storage closet, but she talked them into letting the women have a well-lit corner of it for a makeup table. She was the only one who used it.

The reflection of her dark, vacant eyes chided her. She should feel something other than relief that Carl was gone. It was unnerving how empty her eyes looked, as if someone else had invaded her body. Where was the vivacious investigative reporter who had loved uncovering the truth when she first started at this station?

Was Carl right when he said twenty-three years in the news business had stripped her of emotions? She’d dismissed his comment the night before when he announced he was leaving her. He had dodged a full bottle of his six-hundred-dollar Scotch as she yelled, That’s just an excuse for an affair with a gold digger half your age.

It isn’t an affair. We’re in love. She’s having my baby, and we’re moving to Alaska to be near her family. He said it in his calm lawyer voice, the tone he used to trap witnesses into admitting things they shouldn’t.

Alaska? Sure, it snowed a few inches each year in Tulsa, and they had icy winters sometimes, but months of being frozen in? Who leaves one of Tulsa’s top law firms for that?

She laid her forehead on the dressing table in front of her. A baby. Something she had never given him, and now Tight Buns, the Licensed Practical Nurse they met together in his building’s first-floor coffee shop, would grant him his greatest wish.

It wasn’t that Amelee didn’t want a baby. She’d tried. Three times. All ending in miscarriages, followed by heavier drinking for both of them. That brought on less talking, fewer date nights, and the death of the passion that had sustained their marriage for the first decade.

But now, with him not there to say just one won’t hurt each time she announced she wanted to quit drinking, she finally could stop. The station had warned that if she showed up tipsy again to anchor the six o’clock news, they’d can her, no matter how popular her bubbly style and occasional in-depth investigations had made her.

With the determination that got her to the top slot in the Tulsa market’s nightly news, she opened her makeup drawer and pulled out her remaining six tiny bottles of Tennessee whiskey. Pondering what she needed to do, she stared at the leather pumps she picked up during one of their frequent trips to visit her family in Italy. It shouldn’t have been a hard decision, but it was.

What she had to do caused her to teeter when she stood, but she steadied herself and rushed to the sink in the restroom she shared with the rest of the station’s employees. She twisted off all six caps and poured. The delicious cinnamon aroma reached her nostrils and threatened to melt her resolve.

She spoke to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was Carl who introduced you to this stuff. With him gone, you can be done with it. She could do this.

Panic stabbed her insides as she watched the amber liquid swirl down the drain. She plugged the stopper and disgusted herself with the urge to refill a bottle from what remained of her stash. Instead, she dipped her finger into the liquid, touched it to her tongue to savor the cinnamon, followed by dashes of vanilla and caramel.

I hate you, she said to the taste that every fiber of her body craved. She squeezed her eyes shut as she released the plunger, feeling a profound sense of loss until the idea of licking the porcelain repulsed her again. She turned the water to full blast to wash down the rest, then charged back to her meager makeup table, locking the door behind her.

Panting, she focused on her interview in ten minutes—a fluff piece on the health benefits of chocolate to women. A guy visiting from Belgium had contacted her out of the blue and convinced her she wouldn’t regret interviewing him.

SHE HADN’T COUNTED on the guy handing her a box of liqueur-filled Belgian chocolates as he exited the studio. Her insides were shaking from lack of a late afternoon whiskey fix. One little chocolate rum truffle wouldn’t hurt, right? It would steady her trembling hands. Then she could finish up at the station and go home to toss out every ounce of alcohol Carl may have left from his prized collection.

Just one.

She picked up a round morsel that had the sheen of a high-quality chocolate. She closed her eyes with the satisfying snap as she bit in to release a nutty undertone of the chocolate. A soft rush of vanilla rum mixed with cherry liqueur blended together as they melted. The flavors caressed her tongue with their velvety essence. She closed her eyes and groaned at the combination of sweetness mingled with the burn of alcohol.

The experience was better than an orgasm, the kind her husband hadn’t given her since the day last year when they met Tight Buns with her long, sultry legs and purple scrubs.

Before Amelee knew it, she’d consumed the entire box of eight delightful chocolates, and she needed water. She didn’t want to risk seeing people in the break room, where the station kept bottles in the refrigerator. And she didn’t want to ask Zach, the twenty-two-year-old intern who would do anything to impress her and whose rambunctious voice grated on her nerves. He had assignments to take care of.

Her gaze fell to the bottom drawer in her dressing table, where she kept a small glass. And more whiskey. She