Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  He felt her come back to herself, and his body relaxed, just a fraction. “That’s it,” he said. “You’re all right.”

  Time passed, but neither of them watched the clock. He continued his soothing strokes along her forearm and kept his hips pressed against hers, holding her body still even as she calmed beneath him.

  When she shifted her arms, he let her go instantly, rolling off onto his back on the other side of the bed.

  She tucked her legs against her chest, then rested her cheek against her knees and looked over at him. “Thank you.”

  His pupils were dilated when he looked at her, and she realized the amount of adrenaline that had to be coursing through him. “Don’t thank me.” His voice was rough.

  A small smile tugged at her mouth, and she was amazed that she remembered how to make her lips curve at all. “I’m going to anyway.”

  “Do you . . . ?” He ran a hand over his head, cutting himself off.

  “Do I what?” she prodded, still raw, still sore, but feeling stronger. “Do I know who took her?”

  He glanced at her, and the shadows hid his eyes. “How could you, though?”

  She lifted one shoulder, then let it drop. How could you know?

  “You think it’s someone you know?”

  “It could be anyone, right? There’s been no ransom note.” Her voice wobbled over the last part, and she swallowed hard.

  “Char.” He sat up but kept his distance. “Do you think it’s someone you know?”

  Was it? What had happened that morning? Why couldn’t she remember? Why was there only the sound of waves and seagulls when she tried? Why was her last memory of Ruby that soft moment on the porch, her warm weight against Charlotte?

  Why was there nothing else after that?

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. I think so.”

  “You have to go to the cops, babe.” Enrique leaned his palms against the mattress, his body swaying toward her in his urgency. “If you suspect someone, God, someone in your family? You have to, Char.”

  It wasn’t that easy. “It’s not that easy.”

  “You said you wanted to be strong, yeah?” Enrique’s eyes were on fire, and she flinched. She wanted to be strong, but she wasn’t. He knew this. “You have to do something.”

  She pressed her thumb into the pulse point on her wrist. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do something,” she said. “I said it wasn’t as easy as going to the cops.”

  His whole body paused as he considered what she’d said, and then on the next breath, he was moving again, pushing to his feet. “You need that gun I promised you.”

  Meeting his eyes, she nodded slowly. “I need that gun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ALICE

  August 4, 2018

  Six days after the kidnapping

  “Hey, Garner,” Nakamura said, breaking the silence that had settled between them on the drive back to the station.

  She hummed in acknowledgment but didn’t look over at him.

  “Tell me a story,” he said.

  “What would you like to hear?” she asked.

  They smiled at that, the both of them, probably because it hit too close to home.

  “Sterling.”

  “Why I still think it’s him?” She shifted toward Nakamura.

  “Yeah.”

  Tell a story. Create a villain.

  “They were trying to get away. Ruby and Trudy, at the very least. Probably Charlotte, too,” she said. “Sterling is worried about few things, but one of them is appearances, and the other is power. If he learned they were up to something, it might have made him snap.”

  “So he discovers they’re leaving and kills Ruby in a fit of rage,” Nakamura prompted. “But there were no signs of struggle.”

  She tapped her foot against the floor of the car. “Controlled rage.”

  “I thought that was Hollis,” Nakamura countered.

  “Maybe,” Alice admitted. She was just telling a story, after all. “But he hasn’t gotten to where he has by being sloppy.”

  “You know what actually makes sense more than your obsession with Sterling,” Nakamura said, ignoring her murmur of protest, “is Hollis pulling the puppet strings.”

  She waved a hand in a gesture for him to continue.

  “Hollis has been aware of his behavior for some time but thought he’d stopped,” Nakamura said, clearly warming to his theory. “Then when it becomes obvious that he hasn’t, she breaks. She can’t go after him, so she goes after the victim instead. It fits with the care shown to the body, the lack of damage, the control. And the perfect crime scene that’s apparently a bug up Bridget’s ass.”

  “And I can’t imagine Hollis is a woman who lets her warmer emotions stand in the way,” Alice said. “But why drop her off at the beach to be found? Four days later?”

  “She’s the one who found out they were planning on escaping,” Nakamura said, altering the story. “Something wasn’t ready, some part of her plan, but they were leaving, so she had to grab the girl when she could. She kept her somewhere. I’m sure she could afford to pay someone off until the day she’d actually planned on killing her.”

  Alice swallowed hard. A plan altered. “That would explain the four-day gap.”

  “But not dropping her at the beach.” Nakamura tilted his head in her direction as if awarding her a point. “You’re right on that front.”

  Tell me a story.

  “Maybe she knew that if the body was never found, they would never move past this.”

  “The scandal of it?” Nakamura asked.

  “That, yeah. The attention of the town and the social scene they both prize so highly. There would always be the suspicion that they had something to do with it,” Alice said. “And then there’s the media. They’d do a special every anniversary. Follow-ups on if the family could move on knowing their granddaughter had never been found. They would be caught in a perpetual state of mourning.”

  “If they acted like they were over it, they’d be shunned because it would be expected they’d search for the rest of their lives for her,” Nakamura said.

  “Yeah. So she makes sure the body is found. They can grieve and move on and be applauded for their strength instead of ostracized for their callousness,” Alice continued. “But.”

  “But, what?”

  “If Hollis was the mastermind,” Alice said, just as they turned into the back parking lot of the station, “who is her scapegoat?”

  Nakamura pulled the key out of the car and looked at her. “She would have set someone up to take the fall.”

  “Especially if she had been planning this for a while. Enough time to maybe even have a specific date in mind that they threw off by leaving early,” Alice said. “And there’s nothing that would indicate she planted anything to make us suspect anyone.”

  “Durand?” Nakamura suggested.

  The sun streaming in through the windshield was making quick work of the coolness that had lingered from the air conditioner, and her T-shirt stuck to her damp lower back when she shifted to escape the greenhouse effect of the car. Nakamura followed her out.

  “There’s no evidence, though,” Alice said. “Wouldn’t we have found something? Anything that made him seem guilty?”

  “We haven’t got the autopsy yet,” Nakamura reminded her. “Maybe something’s there . . .”

  The heat from the burning pavement sank into the soles of her shoes as they crossed the parking lot in silence. The darkness of the station was a welcome relief when they stepped inside. “What do you think of Lopez?” she asked.

  “It’s weird he went out of town in the middle of the week,” Nakamura said. There was a shrug in his voice. “And his house smelled of cleaner.”

  “But?”

  “The team didn’t find anything suspicious,” Nakamura said. “We should call the buddy in Tampa to verify he was there. But if he was, it makes more sense that someone took advantage of his house being empt
y for the day.”

  A plan altered.

  “I’ll call him,” Alice said, her fingers slipping into the pocket where she’d put the number. “I agree, though. Could explain the timing of it. They knew he was going out of town.”

  Nakamura stopped just before swinging through the door to the bull pen. “We’re no closer to who it could be.”

  Alice chewed on the flesh just inside her mouth. “Even if it was Hollis, which I still don’t think it was, she had to have had help,” she said.

  “Charlotte,” Nakamura murmured.

  “Why does it always come back to her?” Alice asked.

  Nakamura laid his hand on her shoulder, his long fingers cupping around it in sympathy. “I think you know why.”

  The man was short and ugly, to the point that it was unpleasant to look at him. Alice and Nakamura were sprawled at their joined desks, plotting their next moves, and she groaned when she realized that Liam Shaw, one of the young uniformed officers, was leading the person their way.

  “Detectives Garner, Nakamura.” Shaw greeted them with a nod. The small man hovered behind the young officer, his hands picking at each other. “This man says he has some information that might interest you on the Burke case.”

  Alice raised her brows at the officer, and he flushed.

  “I thought you might want to hear him out,” he stuttered. It was his job to weed out the crazies, and if this wasted their time, he would be held responsible for it.

  She slid her eyes to Nakamura, who was already getting to his feet.

  “Dr. Harry Harrison,” the man said, coming out from the shadow of the young cop. His grip was weak and his palm damp when he took Alice’s hand to shake. When he let go to turn to Nakamura, she wiped it against the outside of her leg.

  “Perhaps we could chat in the conference room,” Nakamura suggested, waving the way for the doctor.

  The light bounced off the bald spot on the back of the man’s head as they all walked down the hallway. When they got to the room, Alice set a water bottle in front of him when he’d settled into one of the seats. Then she rounded the table.

  “You have something to share with us?” she prompted when he simply sat there fiddling with the plastic white top of the bottle.

  He twisted it off and gulped at the water. Then he looked between them. “I’ve been battling with my ethics for the past week.”

  In her experience, when a doctor said something like that, it usually meant he had no ethics and was simply waiting the appropriate amount of time so as not to be skewered by the media. But she just murmured something sympathetic to get him to continue.

  “I, uh, I’ve seen the coverage of the Burke case,” he said. “I don’t know if this is important or not, but, uh, Ms. Burke came to see me only a few days before her daughter disappeared.”

  It was what she’d been expecting. “What kind of doctor are you, Harry?”

  His shoulders pulled back, and he straightened. “I’m a psychiatrist, Detective,” he said, leaning heavy on the professional title. She resolved to call him only Harry from there out.

  “And why did she come to see you?” Alice asked. If he was going to shrug off all his ethics, they might as well take advantage of it.

  “She was having dissociative events,” Harry said.

  Nakamura pled ignorance. “Dissociative events?”

  There was a smugness in the way he held himself. “It’s when a person has, in layman’s terms, an out-of-body experience. It’s rare, but more common in victims of abuse.”

  “And could this . . . experience . . . last for an extended period of time?” Nakamura asked. Long enough for her to kill her child? The last part of the question was the elephant in the room, trumpeting and begging to be noticed.

  “It could, yes,” Harry said.

  “This is different than a psychotic break, though, is it not?” Alice chimed in. “And is it common for there to be violence associated with these . . . events?”

  Harry tilted his head, studying her. “Yes, it is different. And no, it’s not common. But it’s not impossible, either.”

  “Did she say anything, anything at all, that might have made it seem like she was a threat to herself or to others?” Nakamura leaned on the table.

  “No. I just wish—” He broke off, swallowed, and pressed his hands to his chest. “I just wish I could have helped her. Maybe this all could have turned out differently. If only I could have stopped her from running away.”

  There was a pause as if he expected them to rush in and comfort him. Neither of them did.

  “Is that all?” Alice asked, and he lifted his head from where he’d dropped it into his hands.

  This was not proceeding as he’d expected. She could read it in the way his beady eyes widened and then narrowed. “Well. She used a fake name.”

  Again, that was almost a given. Charlotte Burke would not be so careless as to go to a psychiatrist in St. Petersburg and use her real name. “If you could get us the paperwork she filled out, that would be great,” Alice said, pushing away from the table.

  The sudden dismissal caught the doctor flat-footed, but he quickly recovered. “I just hope by sharing this I could rectify any part I played in this tragedy.”

  Just another vulture. There were so many of them on cases like these. She walked away without thanking him for his time. Nakamura would see the man out.

  It didn’t take long before her partner was back, leaning against her desk. “So I wouldn’t say that was nothing.”

  “A victim of abuse is seeking mental health services?” Alice posed it as a question, but it wasn’t one.

  Nakamura didn’t back down, though. “Days before her daughter was kidnapped and then killed? Yeah,” he said. “The timing, Garner.”

  It didn’t look good. She wondered if the doctor would take the information to the press. “Circumstantial.”

  “These dissociative events might explain something.” Nakamura tapped a finger against his knee. “If she’s having them, she could have had one that day. She might not have even realized she killed Ruby.”

  What happened, Charlotte?

  “That’s quite a big leap,” Alice said.

  But he just shrugged. “We need to bring her in, Garner.”

  They did need to bring her in. The question remained, though, if she would come willingly.

  “You know what we need?” Alice said suddenly, swiveling to her computer.

  “The autopsy report.” Nakamura had followed her train of thought easily.

  She touched the tip of her nose. “Exactly.”

  “If she was murdered the day she was kidnapped, it would make a stronger case for some kind of break,” he said. “Then she had to cover her tracks for the days in between that and when we found Ruby on the beach.”

  “If Ruby was killed the day we found her, it was planned,” Alice said. “And that negates everything the doc just told us, because he was certainly trying to make the case that she snapped. Where the hell is my report?”

  She tilted her head back and yelled to the room at large, “Someone better fucking get me the fucking autopsy report. Right fucking now.”

  “Simple,” Nakamura murmured, as three young officers jumped to their feet. “But effective.”

  St. Petersburg’s medical examiner was a seventy-year-old man with a thick, white handlebar mustache, seventeen visible tattoos, and a prosthetic leg, which he’d gotten because of a motorcycle accident one week after returning without injuries from Vietnam.

  William Byrd, who went by Birdie, took no shit and was intimidated by no man—or woman, for that matter. He was the only other person in the station Bridget adored outside her own team, and Alice thought that spoke volumes for his character.

  In the few hours since Harrison had left, Alice took to pacing outside Birdie’s office, but she had a growing suspicion that whenever he saw her, he actually moved slower. He’d also sent at least one of the young police officers who had hastened to do h
er bidding back to her in tears.

  Three hours after that failed mission, he finally pinged them that the report was ready.

  She didn’t bother taking a seat across from his desk, when he slipped on reading glasses to scan over the papers he held. Her arms itched as his lips moved silently over the words, as if he were practicing them before saying them.

  “The cause of death on Ruby Anne Burke, age five, was a subarachnoid hemorrhage,” the man finally told them.

  Nakamura had been lounging against the wall, his patience a far deeper well than her own. “Suba-what now?”

  Birdie pushed the bridge of his rims back up along his nose. “Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” he said slower.

  “Not helpful,” Alice said, and he flashed her a grin.

  “Bleeding in the brain.” Birdie rolled his eyes as if annoyed he had to dumb it down so much. He liked the dramatics. “Usually caused by trauma to the head.”

  “What kind of trauma?”

  Birdie tipped his head to each side. “For young people, you see it in car accidents most frequently.”

  “Did you find anything else?” Nakamura asked.

  Birdie nodded. “Contusions on her upper right arm.”

  “Bruises?” Alice clarified, earning another eye roll.

  “Yes. Like she was”—Birdie lashed out with one hand suddenly, yanking at an invisible something in the air—“grabbed and then pulled.”

  “So she was handled with some roughness,” Nakamura said.

  “Well.” Birdie circled a finger in the air. “Yes and no. The bruises were healing. And they were the only other markings on her.”

  “Maybe one incident, then,” Nakamura filled in. “She’s grabbed, her wrists are bound, but then after that she was kept without being restrained.”

  “That’s above my pay grade, bucko,” Birdie said. “I’m here for the facts.”

  “Could the, um . . . ?” Alice licked her dry lips and then abandoned any attempt at the medical jargon. “Head injury. Could that have been accidental?”

  “Not my—”

  Alice waved her arm, cutting him off. “In your expert opinion, could the head injury have been sustained in a fall? On a ledge or something? If there weren’t any other injuries around the time of death?”