Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(51)

But thoughts of reality came crashing through the door to her mind, making her feel queasy. Her eyes snapped open and she pulled up Ginger Blackwell’s email. There was no message. Only a PDF attachment. Josie downloaded it to her phone and pressed open when prompted. The records from Denton Memorial were voluminous. It took several minutes for the whole of the PDF to load. As she waited, she reached back down and fished beneath the passenger’s side seat. Her fingers brushed something that felt like paper. Anticipating a receipt, she pulled it out to look at it and whooped aloud when she discovered it was a five-dollar bill. At least she wouldn’t be subject to the humiliation of having to ask Carrieann for money to buy a meal. Although she supposed the hospital cafeteria would take her credit card.

Finally, the whole document was there. She wished she had her laptop. Some of the nurses’ notes were completely illegible. She scrolled through slowly and carefully as the sun rose higher in the sky, infusing more heat into the car until she had to roll her window down to breathe in the cool air. It was all there. Ginger’s version of events, disjointed though they were, shortened and abbreviated into clinical medical facts. “Pt reports memory loss secondary to sexual assault. Pt reports assault by multiple males. SANE contacted.” A SANE was a sexual assault nurse examiner, specially trained to collect evidence in a rape case and maintain a chain of custody. It was all there. Everything had been done by the book.

The police file was incomplete, but all of the evidence was there if you looked for it. Someone had made it difficult to find the complete file, but hadn’t tampered with the evidence or destroyed it. So if anyone ever cried foul, all the investigators involved could say nothing was amiss. No one would lose their jobs or go to jail over the file because they hadn’t done anything wrong.

She closed the PDF, tossed the phone onto the driver’s seat and spent five more minutes digging before she found her charger. She was just plugging it in so she could call Ginger back when she saw a couple of troopers weaving their way through the parking lot toward the hospital. They weren’t acting suspicious or threatening, but she thought of the man who had walked in on her in the ladies’ room that morning. Best not to be alone. Pocketing her phone, charger, and the five dollars she found, she headed back toward the hospital.





Chapter Forty-Two





Tears leaked from the sides of her eyes as she waited for his touch again, wondering if it was going to be rough, or unbearably gentle. But it didn’t come. Instead, the beam of the flashlight floated out of her eyes and to the ground as she heard him settle onto the floor. He stayed there so long that her eyes began to adjust to the dim light in the cell. The roof above them was stone, with tree roots snaking through the cracks. Condensation glistened in one corner. A large, black bug scuttled along one of the branches.

She turned her head. The man’s boots were visible a few feet away, his knees pulled to his chest, his big, hairy arms hanging over them. She could just make out the gleam of his eyes fixed on her, sad and uncertain. He didn’t know what to do.

Slowly, he crawled across the floor to her. His breath nearly made her gag as she willed her body to be still, and his hands slid around her throat. A wave of hysteria passed over her, her breath quickening. She lifted her arms to fight, but he was too strong.

The words choked in her throat. Please don’t.





Chapter Forty-Three





“I’ll be in the cafeteria,” Josie whispered to Carrieann as they passed one another in the corridor. It was just before the lunch rush and Josie’s stomach growled loudly, clenching at the scent of food. She hoped to God her five dollars would be enough to sustain her.

The cafeteria was starting to fill up with men and women in scrubs and weary-looking family members crowding in and out, so Josie took a table near the back of the large room, her vantage point allowing her to pan the entire place as she ate her plate of fries. No one could sneak up on her. It was also near an outlet where she could charge her phone. Several feet away, a television played the morning news from WYEP. The sound was on but she was too far away to hear it, so she followed the headlines that trawled across the bottom of the screen.

HEROIN OVERDOSES HIT NEW HIGH IN ALCOTT COUNTY



* * *



CORONER CALLED TO 3-VEHICLE CRASH IN BOWERSVILLE



* * *



ROAD GIVES WAY IN COLUMBIA COUNTY



Josie wiped her greasy, salt-tipped fingers and picked up her phone. It was at thirty-eight percent. She tried calling Lisette again but the call went to voicemail. She left another message as worry began to gnaw at her gut. She would have to get over to Rockview at her first opportunity, but it wouldn’t be today. She scrolled until she found Ginger’s number and hit call. Ginger picked up on the third ring.

“Did you get the email?” she asked, not bothering with pleasantries.

“Yes,” Josie said. “Thank you.”

“Do you have everything you need?”

Everything she needed. What did she need? What was she going to do with the Blackwell file? Sure, she knew now that Blackwell hadn’t staged her own abduction, but that didn’t change anything. Knowing that Blackwell was telling the truth didn’t bring Josie any closer to finding Isabelle Coleman. What she really needed was to find the Standing Man—and even then she might be no closer to finding Isabelle Coleman. But Ginger couldn’t help her with that, so Josie simply said, “Yes, thank you.”