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

That smile again, the one that was not a smile but something far more troubling rippling across the girl’s face. “I didn’t know the bartender. I’ve read about the Stacey Summers case, who hasn’t? But I never thought . . . Let’s just say, I didn’t plan on some overpumped nightclub employee knocking me unconscious or carting me off as his personal plaything. Once it happened, though . . . I know survival skills. I know self-defense. I utilized the resources I found on hand—”

“You went through his trash.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

The girl stared at her. For once, D.D. was the one who looked away.

“He started the war,” the girl stated clearly. “I simply ended it.”

“Then called the FBI.”

“I didn’t have any choice in that matter.”

D.D. suddenly had an inkling. It wasn’t a good feeling. She studied her victim, a midtwenties female obviously experienced with law enforcement and personal defense. “The special agent? Is he your father?”

The girl finally took her seriously.

She said: “Worse.”





Chapter 4


IN THE BEGINNING, I CRIED. Which in time led to a sort of mindless humming, making noise for the sake of making noise, because it’s hard to be alone in a dark wooden box. Sensory deprivation. The kind of torture used to break hardened assassins and radicalized terrorists. Because it works.

The pain was the worst. The relentless hard surface denting the soft spot on the back of my skull, straining my lower back, bruising my bony heels. I would feel the ache like a fire across my skin, until my entire nervous system roared its outrage. But there was nothing I could do. No new position I could adopt. Not a twist here or a bend there to relieve the pressure. To be trapped, pinned really, flat on your back on a hard pine plank, minute after minute after minute.

I think there were times, especially in the beginning, when I wasn’t sane.

Humans are interesting, however. Our ability to adapt is truly impressive. Our rage against our own suffering. Our relentless need to find a way out, to do something, anything, to advance our lot in life.

I made the first improvement in my living conditions by accident. In a fit of fury against the pain in the back of my skull, I lifted my head and smacked my forehead against the wooden lid. Maybe I hoped to knock myself unconscious. Wouldn’t have surprised me.

What I received was a sharp sting to my front right temple, which did, at least temporarily, alleviate the ache in the back of my head. Which led to more discoveries. Your back throbs? Smack a knee. Your knee hurts? Stub a toe. Your toe hurts? Jam a finger.

Pain is a symphony. A song of varying intensities and many, many notes. I learned to play them. No longer a helpless victim in a sea of suffering but a mad orchestral genius directing the music of my own life.

Alone, trapped inside a coffin-size box, I sought out each tiny register of discomfort and mastered it.

Which led in turn to leg lifts and shoulder shrugs and the world’s most abbreviated biceps curls.

He came. He worked the padlock. He removed the lid. He lifted me out of the depths and reveled in his godlike powers. Afterward, a small offering of liquid, perhaps even a scrap of food as he tossed the dog the proverbial bone. He’d stay to watch, laughing as I cracked open the dried-up chicken wing and greedily sucked out the marrow.

Then, back to the box. He would leave. And I belonged to myself again.

Alone in the dark.

Master of my pain.

I cried. I railed against God. I begged for someone, anyone, to save me.

But only in the beginning.

Slowly but surely, dimly, then with greater clarity, I began to think, plot, scheme.

One way or another, I was getting out of this. I’d do whatever it took to survive.

And then . . .

I was going home.





Chapter 5


D.D. DISCOVERED NEIL in the upstairs rear bedroom of the two-story house. The youngest member of the three-man squad, Neil was famous for his shock of red hair and perpetually youthful face. Most suspects dismissed him as a new recruit, which D.D. and Phil had never stopped using to their advantage.

These days, Neil carried himself with more poise. In the past couple of years, D.D. and Phil had been pushing him to step up, take the lead. It had resulted in a few battles, given Neil remained most at home overseeing autopsies in the morgue. But D.D. liked to think she’d raised him right. Certainly, with her gone and Phil now serving as lead detective of the squad, Neil had better be lording over Carol, D.D. thought. It was the least he could do for her.

Neil glanced up as she walked in. He was kneeling on the floor beside a rumpled queen-size bed, holding a shoe box pulled from beneath the mattress. D.D. made it three feet into the cramped, dank space and wrinkled her nose. It smelled like unwashed sheets, cheap cologne, and gym socks. In other words, like the home of a bachelor male.

“Devon Goulding’s room?” she asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Arrested development,” she muttered.

Neil arched a brow. “We can’t all be Alex,” he observed.

Alex was D.D.’s husband. Crime scene reconstruction specialist and instructor at the police academy. One of the more refined members of the species, D.D. liked to think, he had impeccable taste in clothing, food, and, of course, his wife. He also looked pretty good with mushy Cheerios glued to his cheek, which is how most breakfasts with their four-year-old son ended. Alex actually enjoyed doing laundry. Devon Goulding, on the other hand . . .