Where the Blame Lies(25)

“I think about you d-down here when I’m in my b-bed at night. I get turned on,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I t-touch myself and pretend it’s you, that your h-hands aren’t chained behind your back. That I’m just me, and you’re just you, and that you want me too.”

She turned her head, her gaze finding his. Should she try to play this angle? Attempt to convince him they could be together? She swallowed. What did she have to lose? “Maybe we could—”

“Don’t even t-try it. I’m not stupid, J-Josie. You don’t even know what I l-look like under this mask.” He used his hand to wave over his masked face. “I could be a l-leper for all you know.”

She knew he wasn’t, but that was hardly the reason she didn’t desire him. She almost laughed at the sick absurdity. She didn’t desire him because he was a monster. She was tempted to ask him to remove the mask, to give her a chance to convince him she really could be with him willingly. But that mask—the belief that she didn’t know who he was—was the only reason he might let her go at some point. Plus, he already knew she wasn’t interested in the real him—she’d practically run from him each time he’d approached her in the building where they lived. That life that seemed so distant now. So unreal.

He sat staring at her, tilting his head. “Do you think I was always s-sick, Josie? Or do you think they m-made me this way?”

“Who? Who made you this way?”

He looked up at the window, the streetlight beyond bright enough to illuminate the room in ashen shadows. “The people who were supposed to give a fuck about me.”

Her muscles felt tight. “I don’t know. But . . . but you can change now. You can be whoever you want to be. I haven’t seen your face. I don’t know your name or where you come from. If you let me go, you can live the life you want to. Be better. We both will. We’ll both be better. Okay?”

He didn’t react to what she’d said, acted as though he hadn’t even heard her. But after a moment, he murmured, “No. No, I c-can’t be. Not anymore. I’m too f-far gone. Even I know it.”

“That’s not true.”

He shook his head and she got the notion he was frowning under his mask. He sighed, a weary sound. “It is. It is t-true.” And with that, he got up and left, leaving her alone on the mattress he’d brought her. It was more than she’d had, and she was grateful for the warmth and softness it provided. Grateful. The thought made her want to laugh. But she didn’t think she knew how to laugh anymore.

Josie slept. And woke. She still yelled sometimes, but not much anymore. She hadn’t heard a sound other than Marshall coming and going. Sometimes she sang to herself, every song she could bring to mind, ones from childhood and current songs she’d liked on the radio. Time melted, the days spun slowly by. She melted. The weather got warmer. Sometimes it was stifling in her small cell.

The smell of the uncleaned bucket made the room reek. Her world had been reduced to fear, despondency, hunger, fatigue, and thirst. I’m nothing but an animal, she thought.

There was no schedule to Marshall’s visits. Sometimes she was sure she’d die of hunger or thirst, but then he’d show up with food and water, bringing her back to life, though she wasn’t sure she was glad of that or not. She tried to engage him and sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not.

A green and yellow leaf stuck to the window for a minute before a breeze peeled it away once more and it cartwheeled off to somewhere beyond. Free. It was almost fall. She thought she’d been in the square cement room for four months. A thought wound its way through her mind, a red ribbon of dread. She tried to push it away, tried to fall back to sleep, her only place of refuge, of peace. But it would not let go, it demanded to be heard. It had been four months, maybe longer, and Josie had not gotten her period once.

Terror gripped her and she sobbed.

She was carrying a monster’s baby.





CHAPTER TWELVE


The loud knock at the front door roused Zach and he startled, sitting up, disjointed for a moment. Josie’s living room. The dead rat. Gone now, thanks to the criminalist who had come and processed the scene quickly and removed the vermin in a paper evidence bag.

Zach pulled himself to his feet, squinting toward the window where the sun was just beginning to rise. He’d been up most of the night, listening for any strange sounds, unsettled about the whole case, the fact that he’d somehow come to be sleeping in a room just below Josie Stratton. It almost felt like one of those full-circle moments from the first night he’d stood outside her hospital room as she’d slept the sleep of a traumatized, medicated victim. But that didn’t feel completely accurate. Zach had a feeling the path he was traveling with Josie Stratton would go at least a bit further, and that didn’t spell out positive things for either of them. It meant she might be in danger, and it meant he had a killer to catch who was still on the loose.

“Hiya, Cope,” Jimmy said, bustling through the door, a cup holder of coffee in his meaty hands. Zach grabbed one of the cups and took a sip of the dark brew before the door was even shut.

“You’re an angel, Jimmy.”

“I keep hearing that. It must be true.”

Zach gave him a wry smile as he gestured toward the open doorway that led to the living room. He pushed aside the blanket he’d grabbed from Josie’s linen closet the night before and sat on the couch, yawning, and taking another sip of the life-giving liquid.