Chapter 2 #3
“Then he timed the camera sweep.”
“Could have. Your personal weapon?”
“I have it on my ankle. I couldn’t get to it and stay alive.”
Mike looked at her. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
“Yeah, me, too. If he timed the sweeps, that meant he’d been there, watching …”
“Haven.” He said her name the way he said it when he was done discussing.
Her sergeant was patient to a point, and when he dug his heels in, he was immovable.
Mike could be a ten-ton boulder if he wanted to be.
Obviously, today he wanted to be. “You were attacked on a running trail before sunrise. You have a head injury. Go home. This isn’t your case to work. The discussion is over.”
She took a rideshare home. Against medical advice. They wanted her to have someone to watch her for at least two days. Yeah, not going to happen.
The hot water of her shower felt good, but the wall still held her up when she closed her eyes.
She managed to comb out and plait her long, brown hair again.
It was so thick that it would still be wet tomorrow, but she didn’t care.
She changed into something warm because she couldn’t seem to stop shivering.
She sat at her kitchen table with her laptop, her notepad, and a second coffee and started working.
What else was she supposed to do? She was a robbery detective on admin leave who’d just been attacked by a man who did not want her phone and had turned her hand over like he was reading something written there.
And nobody was going to tell her to sit with that and do nothing.
She opened a search window and started with the local area. Nashville. Unsolved assaults on women, isolated locations, over the last eighteen months. She hit a wall. Then she widened it to the region and widened it again.
The dead ends came fast and kept coming.
She worked until ten last night. Then she closed the laptop because there were a couple of tiny trolls inside her brain relentlessly using sledgehammers against her skull. Besides, she'd promised her body, somewhere around the fourth coffee, that she would stop before she did actual damage.
The demon drumming trolls demanded that it was time to stop for the night, and who was she to argue?
She brushed her teeth and turned off the lights before lying down on top of the covers with her notepad on the pillow next to her.
She wasn't ready to put the notepad in the other room. For some reason, putting it down out there meant accepting that she was going to wake up tomorrow and still not have an answer. She wasn’t going to accept that … yet.
Another shiver went through her. She stared at the ceiling and pulled her bedspread from the other side of the bed over her.
She'd been a cop long enough to know what controlled attackers looked like.
She'd taken statements from enough victims to know the difference between someone who grabbed because they panicked and someone who reached because they had a plan.
This man had a plan, and she couldn’t shake the thought that he knew her route.
He'd had the timing of when to move on her down to the exact moment it would be advantageous for him.
He'd had a second strike ready when the first one didn't finish it, and that second strike had been aimed at exactly the same spot as the first, which was not the behavior of someone improvising.
He'd been angry when she fought back. Not surprised.
Angry.
Which meant he hadn't expected her to fight back. Which meant he’d done this before, and it had gone differently. Because she’d defended herself. Because she’d injured him. Because she’d screamed for help and knew there was another runner on the trail.
She thought about his hand on her wrist. The way he'd turned it. The way he'd looked.
She looked at her own hand in the dark. Four nails still intact, one gone, and the rest chipped. Nothing but plain Jane acrylic nails. The small ordinary indulgence she allowed herself every two weeks without apology.
She didn't know what it meant that he'd looked at them … or was it her hand? Whatever it was, it was odd, and uniqueness usually meant something.
She stared at the ceiling for a while before she asked it, “You wouldn’t have anything useful to add, would you?” The silence that filled her apartment was a resounding no.
She turned onto her side. And then, alone, in the dark, in the privacy of her room where there was no one to be strong for, no statement to give, and no sergeant to negotiate with, she let the tears come.
It wasn't much. It didn't last long. She'd built too much around keeping emotions away for it to get very far. But it was real. The cold that lived underneath her anger was impossible to ignore any longer.
She let it come. She shivered, cried, and let it go.
She pressed her face into the pillow and breathed until her hands no longer shook.
Then she reached over and moved the notepad to the nightstand, within arm's reach, and closed her eyes.
She had work to do in the morning.