The Devil's Daughter (Hidden Sins #1)(70)
A muscle twitched in Vic’s jaw, the only sign of how pissed off that possibility made him. “If the goal was to draw you back here, the unsub accomplished his goal with the first girl. Maybe leaving her like that was about you, too—hard to say for sure—but I think it’s possible he got a taste of fame and liked the experience.”
She could see that. Zach had said Neveah was left in a similar situation and position as Elouise, but there could be a wealth of evidence they weren’t seeing yet. The autopsy would say for certain.
“What about the girl who’s missing?”
“She’s not like either of them. Or, rather, she’s right down the middle. Her dad died in Afghanistan after September eleventh, and it’s just her and her mom now. They have a good relationship, from what I can tell, but Rachel’s got ambition—her eye’s on something better.” She pressed her lips together, knowing all too well that she was too close to this. Way too close to this. “I liked her, Vic. She was a little prickly, and she’s got angst to spare because she’s got shit taste in friends, but she’s a good kid. She doesn’t deserve any of what that prick is going to do to her.”
“None of them did.”
“No, none of them did.” Just like that, the guilt surged again, strong enough to choke her. “If—”
“I’m going to stop you right there, kid. You know as well as I do that letting the guilt ride you is guarantee of a fast burnout and a trip to a nice padded room. You can’t shoulder the entire world.”
That doesn’t stop you from trying. She didn’t say it. She never said it. Instead, she adjusted her grip on the steering wheel. “I’m only five years younger than you. I’m not a kid.”
“You being a kid has nothing to do with age—or lack of respect—and you know it. Stop nitpicking.”
Easier said than done. She wanted to nitpick until he snapped at her and she had a reason to lash out. It wasn’t a fair response. Vic hadn’t done a single thing other than show up here as backup that was sorely needed. She turned off the highway and followed the GPS instructions into Augusta.
It wasn’t until she’d put the car in park that Vic said, “What happened to your face?”
She bit her lip. She really, really didn’t want to tell him. She hadn’t been being dramatic when she’d thought about Vic carrying around the responsibility of the world on his shoulders. He took the safety of Eden—of all his past partners—deadly serious. “I, uh, had a run-in.” Despite his silence, she could actually feel his anger growing. “It’s nothing.”
“Don’t try that shit with me, kid. I know what nothing looks like, and that isn’t it. That knock you out?”
“Only for a little bit.” Ten minutes was not a little bit, but she didn’t like being treated like she was the kid he liked to call her. She wasn’t. Then don’t act like an idiot. “It’s possible that I’ve got a concussion, but other than a wicked headache, I’m not having any other symptoms.”
He snorted. “Not that you’d tell me if you were. You always have to play the hero.”
“Pot, meet kettle.”
She parked in the lot and they headed into the hospital. The morgue occupied the basement of the local hospital, and she was reasonably sure the temperature actually dropped as they descended in the elevator. The hallway didn’t appear any different from the others in the hospital, but it felt different. Maybe it was the antiseptic smell, maybe it was just some preternatural sense that rose from being in the vicinity of death.
An older man wearing a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a giant picture of Garth Brooks on it met them at the door. Eden did her best to melt into the background as the man eyed Vic, his glasses askew. “You must be the feds—and the civilian observer Zach mentioned.” He turned and headed deeper into the morgue without another word, leaving them to follow. Eden appreciated that. She was really tired of the Martha Collins’s daughter? comments. Augusta might be thirty minutes from Clear Springs, but Elysia’s reach ran far.
“I took the liberty of getting the preliminary examination out of the way.” The coroner—William, Zach had said his name was—moved to the body laid out on the gurney. Eden hadn’t had problems with dead victims for years now, but there was something about seeing a girl with so many similarities to her on that table that spooked her. She started to rub her arms, realized what she was doing, and forced her hands to her sides.
William didn’t seem to notice the lapse, but she caught Vic watching her out of the corner of his eye. Damn. There was nothing she could say to reassure him, and if she brought it up, she ran the risk that he’d realize exactly how off center she was.
The coroner started at Neveah’s head, her dark hair now combed for evidence and out of her face. “There are a lot of similarities between this girl and the first. Both have bruises—though hers are newer, with no history of abuse that I can see—and both had sex in the last twenty-four hours before their death. There are marks on her feet that indicate she ran barefoot across some distance, and small slices along her shins and knees to back that up.”
Well, shit. She hadn’t really expected anything else, but she was hoping the unsub keeping the body and dumping it at a later time would have resulted in some sort of evidence.