Hank leaned his elbows on his knees. “I just want to understand.”
With his history, Hank of all people should understand. Ethan was bad for her. He turned her into the kind of person she loathed, and yet she kept going back for more. He was the worst kind of addiction because no one but Lena could understand the draw.
Musical trilling came from the bedroom, and it took Lena a second to realize the noise was her cell phone.
Hank saw her start to stand and said, “I’ll get it,” going into the bedroom before she could stop him. She heard him answer the phone, say, “Wait a minute.”
He came back into the kitchen with his jaw set. “It’s your boss,” he said, handing her the phone.
Jeffrey’s voice was as dire as Hank’s mood. “ Lena,” he began. “I know you’ve got one more day on your vacation, but I need you to come in.”
She looked at the clock on the wall, tried to think how long it would take to pack and get back to Grant County. For the first time that week, she could feel her heart beating again, adrenaline flooding into her bloodstream and making her feel like she was waking up from a long sleep.
She avoided Hank’s gaze, offering, “I can be there in three hours.”
“Good,” Jeffrey said. “Meet me at the morgue.”
CHAPTER THREE
Sara winced as she wrapped a Band-Aid around a broken fingernail. Her hands felt bruised from digging and small scratches gouged into the tips of her fingers like tiny pinpricks. She would have to be extra careful at the clinic this week, making sure the wounds were covered at all times. As she bandaged her thumb, her mind flashed to the piece of fingernail she had found stuck in the strip of wood, and she felt guilty for worrying about her petty problems. Sara could not imagine what the girl’s last moments had been like, but she knew that before the day was over, she would have to do just that.
Working in the morgue, Sara had seen the terrible ways that people can die- stabbings, shootings, beatings, strangulations. She tried to look at each case with a clinical eye, but sometimes, a victim would become a living, breathing thing, beseeching Sara to help. Lying dead in that box out in the woods, the girl had called to Sara. The look of fear etched into every line of her face, the hand grasping for some hold on to life- all beseeched someone, anyone, to help. The girl’s last moments must have been horrific. Sara could think of nothing more terrifying than being buried alive.
The telephone rang in her office, and Sara jogged across the room to answer before the machine picked up. She was a second too late, and the speaker echoed a screech of feedback as she picked up the phone.
“Sara?” Jeffrey asked.
“Yeah,” she told him, switching off the machine. “Sorry.”
“We haven’t found anything,” he said, and she could hear the frustration in his voice.
“No missing persons?”
“There was a girl a few weeks back,” he told her. “But she turned up at her grandmother’s yesterday. Hold on.” She heard him mumble something, then come back on the line. “I’ll call you right back.”
The phone clicked before Sara could respond. She sat back in her chair, looking down at her desk, noticing the neat stacks of papers and memos. All of her pens were in a cup and the phone was perfectly aligned with the edge of the metal desk. Carlos, her assistant, worked full-time at the morgue but he had whole days when there was nothing for him to do but twiddle his thumbs and wait for someone to die. He had obviously kept himself busy straightening her office. Sara traced a scratch along the top of the Formica, thinking she had never noticed the faux wood laminate in all the years she had worked here.
She thought about the wood used to build the box that held the girl. The lumber looked new, and the screen mesh covering the pipe had obviously been wrapped around the top in order to keep debris from blocking the air supply. Someone was keeping the girl there, holding her there, for his own sick purposes. Was her abductor somewhere right now thinking about her trapped in the box, getting some sort of sexual thrill from the power he thought he held over her? Had he already gotten his satisfaction, simply by leaving her there to die?
Sara startled as the phone rang. She picked it up, asking, “Jeffrey?”
“Just a minute.” He covered the phone as he spoke to someone, and Sara waited until he asked her, “How old do you think she is?”
Sara did not like guessing, but she said, “Anywhere from sixteen to nineteen. It’s hard to tell at this stage.”
He relayed this information to someone in the field, then asked Sara, “You think somebody made her put on those clothes?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, wondering where he was going with this.
“The bottom of her socks are clean.”
“He could have taken away her shoes after she got in the box,” Sara suggested. Then, realizing his true concern, she added, “I’ll have to get her on the table before I can tell if she was sexually assaulted.”
“Maybe he was waiting for that,” Jeffrey hypothesized, and they were both quiet for a moment as they considered this. “It’s pouring down rain here,” he said. “We’re trying to dig out the box, see if we can find anything on it.”
“The lumber looked new.”
“There’s mold growing on the side,” he told her. “Maybe buried like that, it wouldn’t weather as quickly.”
“It’s pressure treated?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The joints are all mitered. Whoever built this didn’t just throw it together. It took some skill.” He paused a moment, but she didn’t hear him talking to anyone. Finally, he said, “She looks like a kid, Sara.”
“I know.”
“Somebody’s missing her,” he said. “She didn’t just run away.”
Sara was silent. She had seen too many secrets revealed during an autopsy to make a snap judgment about the girl. There could be any number of circumstances that had brought her to that dark place in the woods.
“We put out a wire,” Jeffrey said. “Statewide.”
“You think she was transported?” Sara asked, surprised. For some reason, she had assumed the girl was local.
“It’s a public forest,” he said. “We get all kinds of people in and out of here.”
“That spot, though…” Sara let her voice trail off, wondering if there was a night last week when she had looked out her window, darkness obscuring the girl and her abductor as he buried her alive across the lake.
“He would want to check on her,” Jeffrey said, echoing Sara’s earlier thoughts about the girl’s abductor. “We’re asking neighbors if they’ve seen anybody in or out recently who looked like they didn’t belong.”
“I jog through there all the time,” Sara told him. “I’ve never seen anyone. We wouldn’t have even known she was there if you hadn’t tripped.”
“Brad’s trying to get fingerprints off the pipe.”
“Maybe you should dust for prints,” she said. “Or I will.”
“Brad knows what he’s doing.”
“No,” she said. “You cut your hand. Your blood is on that pipe.”
Jeffrey paused a second. “He’s wearing gloves.”
“Goggles, too?” she asked, feeling like a hall monitor but knowing she had to raise the issue. Jeffrey did not respond, so she spelled it out for him. “I don’t want to be a pain about this, but we should be careful until we find out. You would never forgive yourself if…” She stopped, deciding to let him fill in the rest. When he still did not respond, she asked, “Jeffrey?”
“I’ll send it back with Carlos,” he said, but she could tell he was irritated.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, though she was not sure why.
He was quiet again, and she could hear the crackling from his cell phone as he changed position, probably wanting to get away from the scene.
He asked, “How do you think she died?”
Sara let out a sigh before answering. She hated speculating. “From the way we found her, I would guess she ran out of air.”