The man, who was lying on his back now with his hands up at his sides, eyes wide, said, “I don’t know ‘bout no lady named Lewis.”
Chase shook her head and strode forward again, this time hovering over top of him.
“Not Lewis — Louisa.”
When the man just shook his head, Chase scowled and stepped over his body. She glanced quickly to the door to make sure that he hadn’t been reaching for a sawed-off shotgun or assault rifle. Seeing that it was just a baseball bat, she indicated for Stitts to kick it into the corner.
“She’s here, I know she’s here,” Chase said. Stitts gave her a curious expression as he booted the bat, but she ignored him.
This was no place to second guess herself. She needed to stay in FBI mode, anything else might lead to temptation…
“You stay with him, I’ll look around.”
Without waiting for a reply, Chase continued into the apartment, passing a junkie who was curled up on her side. The woman’s skin was so paper thin that her vertebrae jutted from her bare back like the plates of a stegosaurus.
That could be me… that could be me…
Chase shook her head and continued plodding forward, her nose crinkling as the stench of human feces became more pronounced.
The apartment narrowed toward the back, and it became darker as she continued to put space between herself and the thin streams of light that leaked in from the split wooden boards on the windows.
A fat man lay on his back, sporting only a pair of soiled boxers. His breathing was hitched and labored, and Chase nudged him in the ribs with the toe of her shoe.
The man grunted, snorted, and then went back to sleeping.
Chase shook her head.
She was about to bend down and slap the man, order him to tell her where Louisa was, when a figure suddenly burst from the shadows.
The woman was so pale and gaunt that she was more apparition than human.
“Fuck!” Chase said, leaning backward.
“Help!” the woman screamed, her breath so foul that it instantly curdled Chase’s stomach. “We need help!”
The junkie gripped Chase’s shoulders and even though she was mostly bone and sinew, she couldn’t shake her off.
“Help us! Please, help us!”
Chase drove a hand into the woman’s flat chest, which sent her stumbling backward.
“What’s wrong?” Chase demanded, fearing the worst. “What happened?”
The junkie didn’t answer; she just turned and ran back into the darkness.
Chase hurried after her, nearly slipping on a crack pipe and several dozen spent needles.
It was a mistake running into the darkness like this — she should have in the very least had a flashlight — but when an addict begged for help, it wasn’t because of a run-of-the-mill infection.
These were people that had seen the worst facets of society and had done heinous things in order to ensure their next fix. When one of them came screaming, something bad — really bad — had either happened or was about to happen.
Gripping her gun tightly now, Chase carried on. Just a handful of steps later, she nearly stumbled again, but this time it wasn’t because of drug paraphernalia, but because the junkie had stopped suddenly and was now crouching over top of something.
Chase immediately dropped to one knee and shoved the emaciated woman aside, realizing at once that the junkie had been hovering over another body.
“Back off!” Chase shouted as the junkie started to crowd her.
She blinked several times to clear her vision and when her eyes finally began to focus, her previously racing heart seemed to stop entirely.
“No,” Chase moaned. “Please, god, no.”
Chapter 9
“Get the naloxone!” Chase shouted as she vigorously rubbed Louisa’s sternum with the palm of her hand. “Stitts, wherever the fuck you are, find some naloxone! She’s overdosing!”
As Chase continued to rub Louisa’s chest, she stared down at the woman’s doughy face. Louisa’s eyes were rolled back in her head and there was foam starting to build at the corners of her mouth. Chase leaned down and put her ear to the woman’s mouth, but heard no breathing.
“Stitts! Stitts get—”
The junkie apparition stumbled toward Chase and fell on her arm.
“Get off me,” Chase grumbled, shoving her away with her free hand. The junkie was so light that she flew several feet before landing in a sickening plop on a soiled mattress.
Behind her, Chase heard several people shouting.
“Stitts! Nalox—”
“I can’t find any!” her partner hollered back.
Frustrated and terrified, knowing that Louisa was dying before her eyes, Chase turned her attention to the now whining junkie.
“Hey! Hey, you! Do you have any naloxone?”
The junkie’s eyes were completely blank; either she was too high to comprehend what Chase was saying, or she simply didn’t understand.
“Narcan! Syringes! Nasal spray! Anything for overdoses? Do you have anything?”
Again, just a blank stare.
Chase put her ear to Louisa’s chest, but heard nothing. The woman wasn’t breathing and her heart either wasn’t beating or the rhythm was too faint to pick up. But she was still warm, which meant that the overdose was recent.
She still had a chance, but only if Chase acted quickly. The last time she’d pulled her gun and fired a round into the air, it had almost gotten her killed. This time, she had no choice.
The report was nearly deafening in the confined space and the plaster that rained down sounded like the bassline to an EDM track.
But it worked; the junkie’s eyes became lucid and she sprang to her feet.
“Naloxone!” Chase shouted again, her ears still ringing. “Narcan! Anything for overdoses!”
Something inside the wasted woman’s brain clicked and she scurried away from Chase, flipped over mattress after mattress as she moved. After a few moments, she returned with a worn case in her hand.
Chase couldn’t believe her luck. She knew that many of the local dispensaries were giving Narcan kits away for free, but she also knew that junkies sometimes liked to mix it with their heroin as a ‘just-in-case’ measure. This was becoming more common, too, given the influx of carfentanyl-laced dope that had hit the market recently.
But as she tore open the package, Chase was surprised to find not one, but two pre-filled syringes inside.
Without hesitating, she tore Louisa’s blouse off one shoulder and then jammed the first syringe into her skin. She injected the entire load, all the while continuing to rub the woman’s sternum with her other hand.
“Louisa!” Chase shouted directly into the woman’s face.
There was no response.
Chase stopped rubbing and switched to CPR. But after more than a dozen compressions chest, she still couldn’t detect a pulse.
She swore and was about to stand when Stitts appeared behind her and grabbed the case.
“I already called the EMT,” he informed her as he tore the second syringe from its plastic sleeve.
Chase teased the blouse down lower, preparing to inject a second dose. But Stitts had different ideas. He grabbed Louisa’s wrist and turned it over.
For the second time that afternoon, they got lucky: rubber tubing was still wrapped around her bicep.
Chase, realizing what Stitts was intending to do, helped him out by loosening the tourniquet and then tightening it again after blood flooded her arm.
Louisa wasn’t a small woman and her heart, if pumping at all, was barely moving blood through her vessels. But Chase was pretty damn good at finding a vein. She found an inch of purple in the crook of Louisa’s elbow and indicated the location with her finger.
Stitts injected the dose of naloxone directly into Louisa’s circulation. Before he’d even pulled the syringe completely free, a horrible creaking, croaking gasp escaped her mouth. Chase leaned away just in time to avoid cra
cking heads with Louisa, who sat up like a woman possessed.
With ambulance sirens filtering in from the smashed front door, Louisa blinked several times, sputtered and coughed, and then her eyes went clear. And when they did, they focused on Chase.
“I forgot,” she whispered in a tone so low that only Chase could hear. “I nearly forgot everything… everything, except the first time I met you, Chase.”
Chapter 10
Chase watched as the paramedic loaded Louisa’s body onto the gurney. After the woman’s brief moment of lucidity and her bizarre comment, Louisa continually drifted in and out of consciousness. But Chase stayed by her side, making sure that she kept breathing and that her heartbeat, although weak, was regular.
As expected, the junkie rats had scurried away from the house the moment sirens could be heard and were nowhere to be seen.
“After she’s recovered, contact Dr. Matteo at Grassroots Recovery,” Chase instructed the paramedic. The man gave her a curious look, but Chase nodded. “Check her patient file. And, if you can, keep this quiet — her family doesn’t need to know about this.”
Chase’s own thoughts turned to her son whom she hadn’t seen in several months. He was still too young to know about her past, to understand what she’d been through, but when the time came, she wanted to be the one to tell him, not some random doctor.
Chase expected that Louisa felt the same way.
With a sigh, she tapped the gurney, gave Louisa’s pale face a final glance, and then turned to Stitts. She was surprised to see that he had crept up behind her.
“What?” she snapped. Her frustration at not being able to find out anything from Louisa combined with the fact that she almost died had sapped the last of her patience.
“You should go with her,” Stitts said, running a hand through his hair.
Chase frowned.
“What are you talking about? An hour ago, you were trying to convince me to forget about Louisa and just head to Nashville. Now you want me to babysit her?”
Stitts raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything — he didn’t have to; Chase knew exactly what he was thinking. She wasn’t so frazzled that she didn’t recall their conversation from earlier in the day.
Why do we need to go see Louisa? We should head to Nashville and start our search for Stacy Peterson and the other missing girls.
Because, Stitts; Louisa is part of this… and so is Georgina. These recent missing girls… it’s all connected. It’s all one case.
Chase’s upper lip curled.
“Oh, ya, now you agree with me. Well, how about you go with her, then? I’ve spent enough time in hospitals, thank you very much.”
Stitts again remained silent, and Chase felt her frustration ratchet up another notch. And yet, she couldn’t argue with the effectiveness of Stitts’s approach. It was simple, really: just stand there and stare until the other party breaks down and starts to gab. Chase figured that this was ingrained in the human psyche, perhaps having something to do with being self-conscious while lacking self-confidence. It was as if the entire human populations suffered from some level of sedatephobia.
Chase, grinding her teeth, turned back in time to catch a glimpse of Louisa’s trembling body as the ambulance doors started to close.
“Fuck you, Stitts,” she grumbled. Then, in a louder voice, she said, “Hey! Wait up, I’m coming with you.”
The paramedic nodded and opened the door to allow her to jump into the back of the ambulance.
As she was adjusting herself on the tiny stool, Chase looked back at the trap house, the numbers 1-8 and the 7 that was upside down, the now broken door, the boards on the windows that were split and warped.
The paramedic reached over and started to close the rear doors, but Chase’s hand shot out and stopped him. There, down the side of the house, she caught sight of a shadowy figure. As she watched, the man stepped into the moonlight. It was the man who had opened the door for Quickie, the one in the soiled muscle shirt who Chase had shoved to the ground. She expected him to be furious, maybe even brandishing the shitty baseball bat that he had been reaching for when she’d accosted him. But he wasn’t.
The bandana had been pulled down to his neck, and he appeared to be smiling.
As Chase lowered her hand from the door and the paramedic closed it, she swore she saw the man’s lip start to move.
“I’ll see you again,” the man mouthed.
Chase’s brow furrowed; she couldn’t tell if this was a promise or a threat.
I’ll see you again.
Chapter 11
FBI Special Agent Jeremy Stitts watched Chase Adams leave in the ambulance. He knew that the game he was playing was a dangerous one. It had been dangerous just to meet with Dr. Matteo before Chase brought him to Grassroots, and it was dangerous to set her up the way they had.
There was no way they could have predicted how dire Louisa’s situation was, of course. But still…
It was dangerous because Chase was prone to relapse. He wasn’t a psychologist, but with his training and experience as an FBI Profiler he’d garnered much insight into the human condition. For most people with PTSD, there were certain triggers that could set them off, things that they might not even recognize that had the potential to push them into a downward spiral. But Chase wasn’t like most other people; Chase didn’t have just one trigger, but many. Her triggers ranged from everything from her estranged husband and son, to thoughts about her sister, to coming across any sort of illicit substance.
And now Dr. Matteo had him aware of another way in which Chase coped with these triggers: apparently, it wasn’t just drinking and heroin, but it apparently also included sleeping with shady characters. That, Stitts hadn’t known. For Chase, it was all about control, even though she didn’t see it that way. She could control what went into her body, regardless of the outcome.
What she couldn’t control, was what had happened to her in the past.
Stitts swallowed hard and made his way toward Chase’s BMW. He weighed her keys in his hand as he walked, wondering if poker was just another way of exercising control.
He was surprised that Chase had managed to get in and out of the trap house seemingly unscathed and even had the wherewithal to save Louisa’s life. Stitts himself had been so taken aback by the desolation and suffering in the condemned apartment that he wasn’t sure that he would have been able to do what she had. Once they’d come to the realization that Louisa would pull through, however, he thought it best that Chase go with her to the hospital.
He needed Chase to see — not in the way that she saw crime scenes and victims, but in the way she saw herself. There were so many parallels between Chase and Louisa that it was almost uncanny. And Stitts’s hope was that seeing Louisa as they had, effectively dead in a room that doubled as a human litter box, would make Chase realize that she needed help.
Real help.
With a sigh, Stitts pulled open the door to Chase’s BMW and slid in behind the wheel.
Part of Chase’s control, of course, was the hold she had on him, as well. But while Chase was unaware of the basis for his fixation, Stitts knew fair well where that had originated.
Stitts reluctantly put the car to drive and pulled away from the trap house, deciding not to file a report with Director Hampton, but instead to visit the only other person who had control over him.
***
“How’s she doing?” Stitts asked. “How’s my mother?”
Belinda Torts, the neighbor who had first alerted Stitts to the fact that his mother was having some sort of episode and who had graciously offered to look after her as she recovered, pressed her lips together.
Although Stitts didn’t know her well, he was confident in the rudimentary profile that he’d constructed: a portly woman of Puerto Rican or Dominican descent, Belinda was a devout Catholic who took pride in helping others.
“Not good, Jeremy, not good. Mrs. Stitts keeps asking about her husband and she keeps shaking.”
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