Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(102)

For a second, I can’t take it. I hit the door with my open palm. Kick it with my bare foot. My hand hurts; my toes explode. This door is not wood; it doesn’t even wobble. This door isn’t going anywhere.

Trapped. In a larger venue. For all of my cunning and guile, I haven’t gained us freedom at all. Just access to more blacked-out rooms in our prison.

My eyes sting. But I don’t cry. Instead, I rest my forehead against the fire door. I welcome its coolness against my fevered face.

“I’m not hungry,” I whisper. A lie. My stomach is growling.

“I’m not thirsty.” What did I do with the bottle of water?

“I’m not tired. I’m not in pain.” No, but Stacey is.

“I’m okay.” Then, for good measure: “I am okay. I am okay. I am okay.”

And eventually I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to get out of here. If anything, because the kidnapper’s gotta return eventually, and when he does . . .

Unless our abductor really was the bartender with the amazing pecs. Meaning he was already dead. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

Except, of course, I got here somehow, someway. I don’t care what hurt, confused Stacey thought. I didn’t just walk over from my apartment and lock myself in a blacked-out room. Someone did something. And that someone is going to return.

And it will be much, much worse. Isn’t that what Stacey said?

I pull myself away from the door. I return to Stacey’s form, still sprawled on the floor. I’m not sure what to do, first aid not being my area of expertise. But thinking practically, I do have access to a resource we didn’t have before: light. Meaning, I can get a better look at her wound, then do a better job tending it.

She has fallen near the doorway to my room. I untangle her limbs until she is sprawled flat on her back. Then I snap on the light in my former cell. It’s easier for me to see using the ambient light spilling into the hallway than to move her directly beneath the bulb. I doubt either of our eyes could take it.

She moans as I move around her, working until the light spills across her exposed abdomen.

The moment I look down, I realize how much the dark disguised before. As hard as I’d worked at feeling out each splinter, I’d barely made a dent. The wound is a long gash. Already I can see lines of dark wood embedded beneath her skin, her flesh red at the edges. Furthermore, her belly is distended. I poke it gently. Hard to the touch.

She’s bleeding, I think. On the inside. I’m pretty sure I watched this episode of Grey’s Anatomy. It hadn’t ended well for the victim of the train crash.

And now.

I sit back on my heels. I fist my hands on my thighs. Without a doubt, Stacey Summers requires immediate medical assistance.

And I have no idea how to get us out of here.





Chapter 39


D.D. WAS JUST PACKING UP to go home when her phone rang. She’d already missed dinner with Alex and Jack. If she hustled, she could still make bedtime. So of course, her phone, ringing. On her still terribly crowded, paper-strewn desk. She’d tried—she swore to God she’d done her best—to plow through the piles of reports. But if anything, they seemed to grow before her eyes. Whatever magical nugget of information might be awaiting discovery continued to elude her there.

Phone. Still ringing. According to caller ID, the ME’s office.

D.D. sighed. Set down her messenger bag. Picked up the receiver.

“Don’t you ever go home?” Ben Whitely asked in his gravelly voice.

“Apparently not. Besides, you’re the one calling from the morgue. Who are you to talk?”

“Not the morgue. The lab above the morgue.”

“For most people, that’s close enough.”

“I have information,” Ben announced.

D.D. waited. She’d assumed as much. Ben was hardly the type to call to chat.

“I got a prelim on your body.”

“Kristy Kilker. Mom identified the tattoo.”

“Official results will take a few more days, but I got the sense you were in a hurry on this one.”

“Yes.”

“So, unofficially speaking—”

“Bring it on.”

“COD is a heart attack.”

“What?” D.D. sat down.

“Victim had a congenital heart defect. Most likely, she never even knew she had it. Furthermore, her body showed classic signs of starvation: shriveled stomach, atrophied muscles, and enlargement of the liver and spleen. Odds are, the physical stress brought on by her prolonged malnourishment triggered a significant myocardial event.”

“A heart attack. She died of a heart attack.”

“Unofficially, yes.”

“She wasn’t murdered.”

“There are marks around both wrists consistent with physical restraints. Also signs of antemortem scars down her arms, back of her legs, most likely made with a fine blade, maybe even a scalpel—”

“She was cut.”

“Yes. Not deeply. But . . .”

D.D. didn’t need the ME to say more. Both she and Ben knew some perpetrators liked to play with their food.

“Between that and her level of malnourishment,” Ben continued, “you can make the legal argument the perpetrator’s activities led directly to her death.”