A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(85)

Our first thought is that she’s been given the sleeping pills we left for Nicole. Anders knows where they are, though, and when he arrives, he checks. Nicole’s supply hasn’t been touched.

We get Diana next door to the clinic, and as he’s assessing her, I’m digging through the drug locker. It’s secured with a heavy-duty lock, and there’s no immediate sign that anyone has broken in. I go straight to the sedatives. The box looks fine, but when I grab the stock chart, I can see exactly what’s missing.

I run back into the examination room. “You haven’t given Nicole or Shawn any benzo without marking it down, right?”

He shakes his head. “So that’s what we’ve got? Shit.”

I know enough about overdoses to understand his curse. Too many sleeping pills is rarely fatal. An OD of benzodiazepine is another matter.

“I’ll…” He trails off and then exhales. “The only remedy I even know is to pump her stomach, which I’ve never done.”

“We have instructions,” I say, grabbing the binder from the shelf. After Beth left, Dalton and I went on a research binge.

“Manuals are awesome for figuring out a new car stereo,” Anders says as he scrubs in. “Life-saving procedures are not exactly the ideal time to learn a new skill.”

“Sorry,” I say, squeezing his arm as I walk past. “Stomach pumping is one procedure you just weren’t getting volunteers for.”

He lets out a ragged chuckle and then says, “I had a beer after work.”

“Hmm?”

“I know you can smell it on me, and you’re trying to decide if you should ask how much I’ve had. You can always ask, Casey.”

“I don’t need to because you’ll always volunteer.”

Anders does drink too much. It never interferes with his job—Dalton wouldn’t allow that—but we do wish he’d cut back a little. Yet we also know why he drinks and that, maybe, if it doesn’t become a problem, there are worse ways for him to silence his demons.

We pump Diana’s stomach. Then I need to go work the scene. I don’t want to. Whatever she’s done, when I saw her unconscious on that floor, it felt the same as when I’d found her passed out from her ex’s supposed beating, right before we came to Rockton.

I still care. I’ve never pretended I didn’t, but that heart-in-throat terror reminds me how much. It won’t fix anything. Things might never be fixed, probably should never be fixed. But I care. I always will.

*

Next door, Dalton is hunting for Nicole’s trail. It should be easy. It’s not, because her captor isn’t stupid. He realizes snow on the ground will make it very easy to track him, particularly with a captive in tow.

He’s left a very clear trail from the back door—boot prints combined with uneven drag marks, as if he’d put Nicole on a tarp or a sheet and hauled her. That’s easy to follow. He lets it be easy. There’s nothing else he can do. But his trail goes directly to the main groomed path. And then it is lost. We continue on with our lanterns, hoping to find footsteps leaving the trail, but only see those from people zipping off for business best not done on a path.

“She’s out here,” I say.

“I know.”

“It can’t be this hard. There’s snow. We just need to get farther along the groomed paths. Past the logging sites, past the lake, past everything.” I take a deep breath and when I look around again, the forest seems to shimmer through a veil of exhaustion.

“We can do this,” I say. “We have to.”

“We will.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Okay, so methodically tackling it, we start with the old logging path. That’s the shortest. Get to the end of that and…”

A flake of snow lands on my arm. Then another.

“No,” I whisper. I look up at the sky to see snow falling.

“No. No, no, no!”

Dalton’s fingers wrap around my arm. “Let’s do what we can. Quickly.”





FORTY-NINE

We barely get to the old logging site before the wide path is covered. We try another direction, in case heavier tree cover keeps the ground barer, but by the time we reach that, it too has been blanketed in snow.

I want to keep searching. Blindly searching. Stumbling through the dark and the snow. I think I might have, too, if the wind hadn’t whipped up, a true storm blowing in, Dalton all but picking me up and carrying me back to Rockton.

“We’ll go out at first light,” he promises. “The first hint of light, and we’ll be out on the horses, searching.”

Searching for what? I don’t even know. Nicole’s captor isn’t going to set up camp right off a main path. He’s not going to light a fire and call attention to himself. He’s not going to take Nicole to the same cave where we found her.

Back in Rockton, Dalton doesn’t even suggest sleep. I have a witness to question and a scene to process.

First, I talk to Sutherland. The marks around his neck tell me it was a soft ligature. Manual strangulation leaves very different pattern. The thick mark and lack of abrading suggests a fabric, like stockings, rather than something rough, like a rope. I notice fibers and remove them.

Anders found no sign of serious injury. Just a very traumatized victim. He escaped his captor, made it back to Rockton, thought he was safe … and he wasn’t. We promised safety and failed to deliver on that promise. Failed him, failed Nicole. She’s back out there. Back with her captor, her tormenter, her rapist.