First Girl Gone(72)

Just focusing on the eyes, Charlie could almost believe the girl was sleeping. Almost.

And then her gaze drifted lower. Where pieces were missing.

The sorrow grew too big then. Swelling until it burst in Charlie’s skull. Somehow overtaking the shock. Throttling her.

Pain.

It grabbed Charlie by the shoulders, fished an icy hand into her ribcage to grasp after her heart. The impact made her whole body shake.

Pain.

Tears budded and overflowed at the corners of her eyes. Muted whimpers spluttering from her lips.

And suddenly she felt far away from here. Thrust back into the past. All those old feelings flooding through her again. Losing Allie.

Pain. Familiar pain.

How could this make any sense?

Life. Death. The universe. Any of it?

How?

The body of Amber Spadafore lay strewn on the beach. Both feet had been cut off.





Chapter Fifty-Seven





Charlie huddled in her car, sheltered from the wind and the chill. Still, she trembled, teeth chattering.

She stared through the windshield. Part of her trying to remember what she was in the middle of doing. The rest of her mind gone blank.

Gray clouds scudded out over the water. Brighter now as the daylight began to seep into the world in earnest.

Her eyes drifted down the beach. Glided toward that place just past the crest of the hill, where the girl lay. From here, she couldn’t see the body, and that felt wrong.

She couldn’t just leave her out there. Couldn’t abandon her.

Alone. All alone. Vulnerable. It was wrong, even if there was nothing to be done.

She blinked. Refocused on the world within the car, on the task at hand.

Her phone perched in her right hand. The screen gaped at her. Ready. Waiting.

Charlie moved a shaky finger to the phone. She needed to call it in. Tell Zoe what she’d found. That was all.

She scrolled to Zoe on the contact list. But her finger hesitated shy of hitting the call button. Something stopped her.

She blinked again. Why was she waiting?

She turned her head. Coughed into her fist. The sound was unpleasant. Dry and throaty. Flecks of spittle spattered her fist.

She waited for Allie to chime in. To make some joke like, Cough it, don’t spray it.

No joke came. It occurred to Charlie that Allie had been awfully quiet all morning.

She coughed again, and some distant part of her mind prickled with childish fear. What if I never stop coughing?

She pinched her eyes shut. Hot tears streamed down her face now, rivulets of wet tracing lines down her cheeks. Her throat felt raw.

The coughing turned suddenly to something more like choking.

Charlie panicked.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Could only retch and gasp for air.

Hyperventilating. She needed to relax. Needed to—

A voice in her head spoke to her then. Calm. Strong.

Not Allie’s voice. It was her own.

Stop fighting it. Just relax.

You’ve just seen a dead body—a murder victim—and you are in shock.

She rested her forehead on the steering wheel, the tears now spilling down to the floor instead of her cheeks. And the coughing slowly retreated.

She leaned there a long time, even after the attack had passed. Breathing. Wiping the wet from her eyes and face.

The puzzle pieces clicked together at last. If Charlie found Amber’s killer, she might be solving Allie’s case as well. The fact that the killer had mutilated Amber’s feet suggested a connection to Allie’s case, didn’t it? It was almost undeniable.

Right away her mind snapped to Leroy Gibbs, the suspect who was never charged all those years ago. His picture bloomed in her head, the shambling weirdo with the crazy eyes and unkempt beard.

Her mind reeled. Lightheaded. A little dizzy.

Could this really be the lead she had searched for all this time? Charlie’s heart thundered at the prospect.

She lifted her head and blinked again, the last of the tears falling away.

At last, she pressed the button to dial Zoe’s number and brought the phone to her ear.





Chapter Fifty-Eight





A small group of observers, almost exclusively law enforcement save for Charlie, huddled in the observation room. The sense of anticipation was palpable: bouncing legs, trembling fingers, twitchy movements, picking at imaginary fuzz on their shirts and pants.

Across from them, visible through a pane of two-way glass the size of a big-screen TV, the interrogation room waited for the main event to begin—a dingy-looking affair, Charlie thought. Drop ceiling. Cinder-block walls painted eggnog yellow. In the center sat the star of today’s show.

Leroy Gibbs hunched over a glossy tabletop, gouged and scraped by years of use. His forearms rested on the edge of it, the tips of his gnarled fingers brushing the veneer.

His beard covered most of his face like frizzy gray ivy, reaching up almost to his cheekbones. The hair atop his head was a messy salt-and-pepper tangle matted over his forehead, strands reaching down to partially obscure his eyes.

Charlie could see enough in those eyes to get a sense of the faraway look in them. The man struck her as bewildered, perhaps a little confused. Like a hermit pried out of his cave, aghast to see the daylight after so long alone in the dark.

An image of Amber Spadafore’s closed eyes surfaced in her mind then. Dark tendrils of her hair undulating with the movement of the waves. Charlie kept getting these flashes of what she’d seen that morning on the beach. Snapshots burned into her memory that she’d never be able to unsee.