Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(69)

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. But eventually Ray’s body went still. She felt his throat for a pulse and cried out in relief when she found one—thready, but there. It took a few moments to extricate herself from beneath him. She took her jacket back, balled it up and put it beneath his head and took a few minutes to feel her way around the cell. The walls seemed to be made of concrete—cinderblocks maybe. There was a slab of wood on hinges which was pressed against the wall, like one of those baby-changing tables that hung on the walls in women’s bathrooms, only this one was adult-sized. She considered trying to pull it out and get Ray onto it but decided it would be more work than it was worth in the dark. Plus, moving him could prove fatal at this point. Finally, she felt seams in the wall which could only be a door. There was no knob and what felt like rubber furring strips sealed the bottom of it. Still, she got down on her hands and knees and pressed her mouth against the bottom edge where she might be most likely to make herself heard.

Then she screamed her head off.

She screamed until her throat was raw and her voice hoarse. First she screamed for help, and when it didn’t come she called Gosnell every name in the book. A far-off groaning answered her. The breath froze in her lungs. There was another woman.

“Oh my God, Ray,” Josie whispered over her shoulder. “There’s someone else here. He’s got someone else.”

Not Isabelle Coleman. Who, then? Someone reported missing, perhaps, who remained missing because of the police department’s deliberately lackluster efforts to find these types of victims. Anger flared white-hot inside of her, and she began her onslaught anew.

She screamed and beat against the door until she could barely move, taking breaks only to check on Ray, whose pulse was becoming more and more difficult to find. As she slumped against the door, chest heaving, sleep hovered around the edges of her consciousness. She fought against it, not even realizing that she had lost the battle until she was startled awake by the noise of something scraping across the floor outside her cell. She lifted her head from the ground and pressed her ear to the door. Footsteps. What sounded like furniture moving.

“Ray,” she hissed over her shoulder. “Someone’s coming.”

Her hands flailed in the darkness until she found some part of Ray’s body. A knee. She followed it to his throat, her fingers sinking into the flesh, searching for a pulse. Where his skin had been fiery earlier now it was cold.

“Ray.”

She felt the other side of his throat. There was nothing. She found his parted lips, her cheek hovering over them, hoping to feel a soft exhalation of air. Nothing.

“No—Ray!”

She could not keep the hysteria out of her voice. Oxygen pressed out of her lungs, escaping faster than she could take it in again. Dizziness swept over her. This could not be happening. This was a nightmare. She would wake up any second and she’d be in her big, beautiful bedroom. Luke would be in her kitchen cooking scrambled eggs, and Ray would be leaving angry messages on her phone, telling her to leave Misty alone. She would return to work with the men she had known for five years, and they would all be good men. Honest men who knew nothing of Gosnell’s bunker.

Ray had hurt her. Wounded her deeply in that vulnerable place in her soul that she had never shared with anyone else—not even Luke, not really. But he was so much a part of her reality, it was hard to imagine living without him. He had always been there—only a phone call away. He was a liar, a cheater, a criminal and, she had to admit, a coward. But he had always been hers. He had been hers since they were kids. He was a part of her identity. Good or bad, she wasn’t ready for this.

“Ray,” she gasped, cupping his face in her hands and pressing a kiss to his unyielding mouth. “Please don’t leave me. Not like this.”

She laid her body over his, taking in his scent for the last time, willing him to wake up, wrap his arms around her one more time, tell her he would protect her, tell her he wouldn’t let Gosnell or anyone else hurt her. But she was alone in the dark. More alone than she had ever been in her life.

How was she back here again? Alone in the closet, paralyzed by her own fear, terrified of what waited for her on the other side of the door. With her mother—drunk, hateful, spiteful—she knew what to expect. But what about Gosnell? She knew he was violent, that he had no problem hurting women. He’d killed Ray. She held on to that because it made her angry, and she needed her anger for when that door finally opened. She imagined herself as a fire, starting out slow and growing until she lit up the whole room. When he opened the door she would burst—an explosion of grief, hate, and anger. Her hands held on to Ray’s lifeless body as her mind held tightly to her rage. Now, she had to wait.





Chapter Fifty-Nine





When the door to her cell finally scraped open Josie lifted her head from Ray’s corpse, disoriented and blinded by the soft, hazy light that crept in, and scrambled to her feet, swaying on unsteady legs. One hand covered her eyes. She squinted and then blinked rapidly, trying to bring Gosnell’s looming figure into focus. He was just a black, man-shaped shadow filling up the doorway. His voice boomed inside the tiny space, “He dead yet?”

She didn’t speak, trying to take in the room around her between the colored light spots that assaulted her eyes. The walls were cinderblock, as she had suspected, but painted red. The wooden fold-down slab was just as she had pictured it. The toilet was a grime-covered white. She purposely kept her gaze away from Ray’s prone form. She didn’t think she could bear it. If she saw him—what Gosnell had done to him—she would lose control and have nothing left to fight the man who stood before her.