Chapter 18
Eighteen
Alex had pulled himself together. Barely. After Charlotte hung up, he’d stood in the kitchen for a long time, phone in hand, heart in his throat. He didn’t move until Bailey pawed the door to come in. Even then, he only moved because he needed something to do. He called his boss.
Evan Shipley didn’t ask many questions. The moment Alex mentioned Gideon Ward, everything shifted.
The State’s U.S. Attorney had a long memory.
Everyone in South Dakota did. Ward’s name carried weight—cold, heavy, historic.
The return of Henry Byron, thought dead or lost, and the appearance of a woman with psychiatric symptoms eerily like Ward’s former victims? Shipley didn’t hesitate.
Alex and Noah were reassigned to the Violent Crime Office effective immediately. Six investigators, fully briefed, would join Ethan Hayes’ task force by nightfall.
Noah had spent the night overseeing the crime scene unit going over Charlotte’s home and neighborhood.
Alex hadn’t seen him until the sun was fully up.
He walked into Sophie and Tristan’s house looking wrecked, shirt wrinkled, face drawn.
But the moment he saw Alex—really saw him—he poured another mug of coffee and said, “Talk.”
Alex didn’t hold back. He told him about the woman on Route 83. About Charlotte leaving with Graham Cullen.
Noah had only nodded. “You can’t do anything until she comes home,” he said. “But when she does—you two need to have a serious conversation.”
Alex agreed. He knew. But that didn’t stop the feeling of helplessness sitting like a stone in his chest.
Noah headed off to rest, and Alex tried to sit still. He couldn’t. Not with everything humming under his skin.
Tristan came down the stairs, scrub shirt rumpled beneath a hoodie, the edge of a beard shadowing his jaw.
He poured coffee and said, “I’m heading to the acute care unit.
Our psychiatrist is evaluating the woman we admitted last night.
” He paused, eyeing Alex. “You want to come? Might help to see what catatonia looks like.”
Alex didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I do. Then I need to head to the morgue.”
They walked in silence to the Blackwell Institute, tense with anticipation.
Inside, Tristan introduced him to one of their psychiatrists, a soft-spoken woman named Dr. Greta Halberd, and escorted them to the observation area—a small, sterile room looking into an adjacent space through a one-way window.
Alex stepped inside and stopped.
The woman was already there. The woman who had been found partially clothed on a highway.
She sat on a padded chair in the center of the room, hands folded in her lap.
Her posture was too still, too precise—unnatural in its rigidity.
Her hair was clean now but dull, frayed at the ends.
Her skin was pale. Thin. The kind of thin that spoke of months without real food.
Tristan kept his voice low. “We cleaned her up. She is severely undernourished. IV fluids, electrolytes, broad labs, chest X-ray, ECG. Some signs of physical trauma—no sexual assault. Restraint marks on both wrists. But her mind…” He trailed off.
Alex nodded. He understood. She was broken in ways no test could show.
Dr. Halberd entered the patient room on the other side of the glass. She didn’t speak at first. Just sat across from the woman, relaxed, nonthreatening. She crossed her legs and set a clipboard aside.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked softly.
No response.
“Do you know your name?”
Nothing. Not even a flicker.
“Are you Mara Dwyer?”
They had identified her. She showed nothing.
Alex leaned forward, elbows on his knees, notebook in hand—but his pen didn’t move.
Dr. Halberd tried again, gentler. “You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you here.”
The woman blinked slowly. Her pupils didn’t track movement. Her face didn’t register sound.
Alex swallowed hard. He’d interviewed rape victims. Trafficking survivors. He’d listened to women recount horrors most people couldn’t even imagine. But this—this was something different. This was absence. Like someone had gone inside her head and turned off the lights.
Dr. Halberd held up a photograph. A simple one—two kittens in a basket.
No reaction.
Another: a house with white shutters and a red door. A picture of her house.
Still nothing.
Then the psychiatrist tried something else. She held out her hand. “I’m just going to take your hand for a moment. That’s all. You’re safe.”
Her fingers touched the woman’s, carefully, slowly, and for a second, Alex thought there might be something. A shift. A tremor.
But the woman didn’t move. Her hand stayed limp. Eyes blank. Her body was there, but whatever made her herself was gone.
Alex’s throat tightened. He looked down at his notebook, at the empty page. Wrote one word: Wiped.
Whoever did this hadn’t needed force. They’d used silence. Isolation. Time. They’d dismantled her, piece by piece, until nothing was left.
He sat there for a long time, watching. And for the first time since Charlotte left, the fear shifted into something else. Rage. Cold, steady, building under the surface. Whoever had done this wasn’t finished.
And if they were coming for Charlotte next—if they thought they could take her mind the same way they’d hollowed out this woman—Alex would burn everything in his path to stop them.
He stayed frozen in the observation room, watching through the glass, barely breathing.
The psychiatrist kept her voice gentle, rhythmic. Her words weren’t meant to extract—they were meant to reach. But there was nothing behind the woman’s eyes. No tension. No pain. No fear. Nothing. And that was worse.
Tristan stepped quietly beside him, holding a chart. “Whoever kept her off the radar knew what they were doing.”
Alex didn’t answer. His fingers curled around the pen, his notebook still open on his lap, the word Wiped underlined three times now.
“Henry Byron and now her. I requested the information on Ward’s survivors. I’d like to see if the patterns match up.”
Alex nodded once. “You think Ward had help.”
“I don’t think he ever worked alone,” Tristan said. “I think someone kept his methods alive after he was locked up. Or maybe he handed them off to someone who wanted to continue the cycle.”
Alex looked back through the glass. Dr. Halberd had stopped talking. She sat still now, just breathing. Creating presence. She wasn’t trying to fix the woman. She was just there. Waiting.
“I keep thinking about what she must have heard where she was held,” Alex said, voice low. “The kind of silence it takes to erase someone like that.”
Tristan folded his arms. “Sensory deprivation. Extreme isolation. Sleep manipulation. No need for violence if you know how to shut the mind down.”
Alex stared harder at the woman. Her posture was perfect, like a doll set upright by someone else's hands. A survivor. But barely. Not a witness. Not yet. A warning.
He forced himself to take a step back. The chair scraped under him as he stood. “I need to know if she’s connected to Charlotte. If there’s something she saw, or heard, or?—”
“She may never speak again,” Tristan said bluntly. “We have to prepare for that possibility.”
Alex didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He turned and left the room without a word.
The hallway outside was cold, brightly lit, too clean. His shoes echoed against the tile as he walked fast, until he found the door that led to the rear parking lot. He stepped out into the wind and sucked in a breath like he’d been underwater.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. Still no call. Still no update. He looked down the road, imagining her SUV cutting across the plains toward a prison filled with men who didn’t deserve to speak her name.
And sitting in the passenger seat was the only living man she’d ever let that close before him.
He clenched the phone so tight, it creaked.
He didn’t care about pride. He didn’t care about jealousy.
He cared that whoever was behind this had already touched Charlotte’s life, and they weren’t finished.
He needed her back. Now. He needed to hear her voice.
Because after what he’d just seen in that room—after watching a woman turned into a husk by six months of invisible violence—he knew exactly what they were trying to do.
This wasn’t about finishing what Ward started.
It was about undoing Charlotte. Piece by piece.
And Alex didn’t plan to sit still and watch that happen.
Alex was on his third cup of coffee when he stepped into the morgue to observe Henry Byron’s autopsy. “Alex…” Molly started to say.
“Molly, your mom and I will sort it out. She’s safe and with Graham Cullen pursuing a lead.”
Molly gasped. “God, what is she thinking?” She paused. “I guess she isn’t. I’m sorry, Alex.”
He smiled.
“I guess I better get started,” she said.
Alex nodded and quietly watched. Pen in hand and notebook open.
Molly stood over Henry Byron’s body, the soft click of the scalpel against the tray the only sound in the room. The fluorescent lights overhead cast a cold, clinical glow over the scene.
Her team was already at work, meticulously gathering their evidence. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Thomas Hughes, prepared the necessary tools while two assistants took detailed photographs of every part of Henry’s body.
Molly began with a careful external examination, noting the evidence of trauma. “Alex, notice the stark pallor of his skin, the contusions around his wrists, evidence of restraint.”
Alex knew it wasn’t the surface injuries she was looking for—it was what lay beneath, what had led to his death. Her incision was deliberate, slow, as she opened Henry’s chest cavity. The lack of resistance told Alex everything he needed to know.
Molly spoke into her microphone that recorded every autopsy. “The body has been severely compromised. His heart is small, underdeveloped, and the color shows the organ failed long before it stopped beating.
“The lungs are showing signs of extreme pneumonia. The tissue is consolidated, inflamed, and filled with an excessive amount of purulent fluid.” She documented the findings carefully.
“There is the marked absence of any significant clotting factors in Henry’s blood. His blood is thin, watery, and is failing to coagulate when I apply pressure to the vessels. There is evidence of invasive procedures on his body.
“Multiple puncture marks are visible along the vertebrae, evidence of repeated invasive spinal procedures. Invasive brain exams have been performed on him. I note the telltale scarring of repeated craniotomies.” She carefully lifted the skull. “Dear God.” She almost dropped it.
Alex could see her legs wobble. “Molly, are you alright?”
“There is unmistakable evidence of electroshock therapy. There are multiple burn marks on the brain, signs of deliberate and repeated electrical pulses.”
She paused for a moment. “This is a systematic, calculated program of experimentation. His entire body is a roadmap of abuse—dehydration, bloodletting, brain damage, chemical manipulation.”
“Molly,” Dr. Hughes called quietly, drawing her attention back. “You’ll want to see this.”
She walked over to where he stood beside the liver, holding a tissue sample.
“Liver function is shot,” he said. “And there’s a high concentration of toxins present.
We’ll need to run a full toxicology panel, but I suspect we’ll find traces of sedatives, chemical agents—maybe even neurotoxins. It’s a hell of a mix.”
Molly nodded. "Do a full blood panel, screen for heavy metals, organophosphates, anything we might’ve missed.
This man was poisoned long before he died.
We’ll need everything—blood cultures, toxicology, microbiology.
Test for every conceivable substance. I want the full autopsy report to be a foundation for the investigation.
We’ll need to know exactly what they did to him. ”
She turned back to Henry’s body, still, silent under the bright lights. Alex continued to write down the conclusions of the preliminary findings, already planning his next steps.
“Molly,” Dr. Hughes said as he reviewed the charts, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Whoever did this… they need to pay for it.”
Alex’s expression hardened, her eyes narrowing. “Oh, they will.”