Pretty Girls Dancing(105)
He spied the wheelchair in the corner of the room. “Can you walk?” He half expected that Sims’s claim was yet another part of disguising the woman. But Elizabeth—Betsy—pulled her worn flannel nightgown away to show her bare feet. A vise tightened in Mark’s chest. Her toes were bent at weird angles. The bones on the arches on the tops of her feet appeared flattened, the skin puckered and purplish. Jesus Christ, had Sims taken a hammer to her feet? Mark swallowed a surge of nausea. His gaze rose to the print above the bed. The graceful dancers were a macabre contrast to the way TMK discarded his victims.
I always promised myself that picture would come down when the killer was behind bars. Sims’s lie sounded in Mark’s mind. He’d make sure that it did, Mark vowed, as he reholstered his weapon and carried Betsy Graves to the wheelchair. Because once the crime-scene team was done with this place, he’d take that damn picture down himself.
Moments later, he wheeled the woman into the kitchen. Sims was slumped over. Unmoving. “Everything okay?” he asked Sloane.
Sloane’s gaze went beyond him, and sympathy flashed across her expression. A person would have to be made of stone to be unmoved by the appearance of the woman once known as Betsy Graves. “He’s not going anywhere.” In other words, she could keep an eye on both of them.
Sirens were sounding in the distance as Mark strode to the locked door, sorting through the keys on the chain until he found the one that opened it. Unlocking it, he found a stairway. Heart hammering in his chest, he descended, only to find another secured door at the base of the steps. And yet another five yards beyond that.
There was a knot in his gut the size of a boulder when he swung open the last one to reveal a wide space that likely measured the remaining square footage of the cabin above. He searched for light switches, but when he found them and turned them on, nothing happened. Taking out his cell, he used the flashlight app to take a careful look around as he entered the area.
It was empty save for a table in the center of it piled with . . . He drew closer. Shone the tiny beam over the objects. Another laptop. What looked like a projector. Both were balanced on piles of books.
There was one window on the left, high in the wall, which gave no light. Same on the right. But ahead there was a dais of some sort that took up a full third of the space. Heavy curtains hung on either side of it, but when Mark approached at an angle, he could see something lying on the stage. A mattress.
And on the mattress, a still, unmoving form.
Oh, God, no! A quick spear of despair stabbed through him. They couldn’t be too late. He closed the rest of the distance in a near run. “Whitney DeVries? Whitney, we’re here to help.”
No response. No movement. Mark jumped up on the stage. He’d been steady enough exchanging gunfire upstairs, but now his pulse was galloping through his veins, and dread pooled in his belly. He knelt beside the mattress. Reached out an unsteady hand to turn the body over.
Whitney DeVries. Her face was a mottled assortment of bruises, and there were matching bruises around her throat. Mark reached out to check the pulse at the base of her neck. Faint but there.
“Whitney.” Relief flooded him when the girl’s eyes fluttered open. Blinked uncomprehendingly. “It’s over. You’re safe now.”
Whitney DeVries
November 21
8:32 a.m.
“Whit’s got a busy morning.” Whitney thought her dad looked like a stubborn bulldog, blocking the door of her hospital room so Agent Foster couldn’t come in. “She didn’t have a great night, and they’re planning more tests to check for internal injuries.”
“Dad.” Her voice still sounded like a frog’s croak, even when she was trying to yell. “I need to talk to him.”
Her mom looked up from straightening the bedcovers. “Brian, don’t be rude. Whitney asked me to call Agent Foster last night and have him come by this morning.”
Her dad backed away and let the agent inside. “Keep it short. She’s told you guys every detail she knows by now.”
Whitney could already see how this was going to go down. Her parents meant well, but they really couldn’t handle it when she started talking about what had happened to her in that basement. And okay, maybe she was still having a hard time, since she burst into tears at the drop of a hat, even when Ryan had brought her a crumpled picture he’d drawn for her. There was no way she’d be able to get her mom out of the room, short of dynamite. But her dad . . .
“Dad, would you go ask the nurse if I could get some more cherry Jell-O? It really helps my throat.”
His face always got soft when he looked at her now. The sight had her blinking away tears. “We’ll just use the call button, honey.”
“It comes faster if someone goes and gets it, though.”
He didn’t want to, she could see that by the way he hesitated, but pretty soon he nodded. “Sure, honey. I’ll be right back.” Once he’d left, she looked at the agent, a sudden shyness coming over her. She had a vivid memory of being lifted in strong arms. Opening her eyes to see him holding her like some white knight in a kid’s fairy tale. You’re safe now. She hadn’t believed it at first. But when he’d carried her upstairs, the place had been full of cops and ambulance attendants. There’d been blood all over the kitchen he’d whisked her through, and she’d prayed with everything inside her that it belonged to the freak.