by Mia Sheridan
“Tell me your name,” he whispered against her throat.
And though she paused, she finally whispered back, “Liza.”
“Liza,” he repeated, lifting his head and meeting her eyes. “Hi, Liza.”
She blinked up at him, so beautiful his heart gave a small leap. “Hi, Reed,” she said softly, her legs coming around his hips, and though they’d spent most of the night together, though he’d been inside her, though he was inside her now, he felt like they might just be meeting for the very first time. He had the strange urge to reassure her, to tell her it would be okay. But why? He didn’t know.
He reached down and grasped the underside of her thigh, pulling her leg higher so he could go deeper. She let out a raw sound of pleasure that sent a flash of arousal zigzagging through him, urging his thrusts faster, harder.
He watched her as she shattered beneath him and then followed her over the edge, their cries merging and fading away, melting into the approaching dawn. After quickly cleaning up, they burrowed together again, and minutes later, Reed fell back into a dreamless sleep.
When he woke, he was alone. He sat up, disoriented, scrubbing a hand down his face and glancing at the bedside clock. 7:23 a.m. Shit, he needed to get ready for work. He ran his fingers through his disheveled hair and looked around the room. The lamp was still on, shade tilted toward the wall. Liza’s purse was no longer on his floor, though a couple of random condoms that must have fallen from it dotted his rug, like a disappointing version of Cinderella’s slipper. He stood quickly and walked naked out of his room, peering down the hall toward his front door. His clothes remained, strewn here and there, mapping their desperate path toward his bed, but hers were gone.
He went to his kitchen, glanced around, peeked into his living room, and his bathroom too, and then returned to his bedroom, looking at the places she might have left a note—his dresser, the second nightstand. But there was nothing. She’d left without so much as a goodbye.
CHAPTER THREE
“Yo, Davies.” Reed looked back to see his partner, Ransom Carlyle, shutting the door of his personal car and then jogging toward him, carrying a fast food bag. His white dress shirt stretched precariously over his muscled arms and when he raised his hand for a fist bump, Reed half expected the movement to accompany a loud tearing sound as the fabric split.
He tapped his fist to his partner’s. “You accidentally put on Cici’s shirt this morning?”
Ransom made a tsking sound and brought his arm up, flexing his muscle and further stressing the fabric. “Don’t be a hater. I might not have a pretty face like you, but these guns have the ladies showing up in droves.”
“Yeah? Drive the badge bunnies wild, huh?”
Ransom let out a sniffing sound. “Man, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Reed snorted. Ransom was full of shit. His partner was only interested in one “lady” and that was his wife. Ransom was one of the most happily married men Reed had ever met.
“Did the sergeant give any details about the scene?”
“No,” Reed said, continuing through the station parking lot, Ransom following. He unlocked the driver’s side door of the city-issued vehicle and climbed in. Ransom slid into the passenger seat next to him. “All I know is a staff member was found murdered at Lakeside Hospital on Hamilton Avenue.”
Reed pulled out of the lot, heading toward the crime scene that had been called in just before he arrived at work. He’d called Ransom who’d been five out and told him to meet him in the parking lot. “No shit? The psycho joint?” He unwrapped what looked like a breakfast burrito and took a bite. “Gotta be an inside job, right?”
Reed wiped his cheek and gave his partner a look of disgust. “Can you chew your food before talking and spraying it all over my face?”
“All those violent nuts running around? Someone’s bound to get shanked eventually.” Ransom took another bite of his burrito. “Cici did a rotation in the psych ward when she was in nursing school and told me some stories that would turn your stomach.” He polished off the last of his burrito. Obviously whatever stories he was referencing did nothing to dampen his own appetite. “But the real psychopaths? The scary ones like they keep at Lakeside?” he said around the food in his mouth. “They don’t even need to manufacture weapons out of objects. They’re just as happy using their own bodies—excrement, nails, teeth. They’ll go Hannibal Lecter on you if you give them the slightest chance. Eat your face right off. No remorse.”
Reed made the conscious decision to turn the conversation away from the topic of face eating. “How is Cici?”
“She’s good. She’s mad you canceled on us for dinner last week. I told her you’ve been in a real shitty mood lately though, and she wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with you anyway.”
Reed shot him a look. “I haven’t been in a shitty mood.”
“Maybe not for the average person. But for you? Yeah, shitty. Ever since the day after DiCrescenzo’s bachelor party. What happened that night anyway? You get roofied? Because you’ve been hungover ever since.”
Reed sighed. Hungover. That was one way to put it. And sex with a beautiful stranger wasn’t supposed to do that. It was annoying that he’d thought about her as often as he had over the past two weeks. He was a grown man, and it was irritating as hell that he was hurt that the woman he’d spent one night with obviously didn’t want to see him again.
“You’re doing it again.”
He glanced at Ransom. “Doing what?”
“Glowering. It looks like this.” Ransom hunched forward and the expression he made brought to mind a black, male, and heavily muscled Cruella Deville.
Reed laughed, breaking the tension that had built inside him. He pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, noting several city vehicles, a crime scene van, and numerous patrol cars. “That bad, huh?” He pulled into a space near the front.
“That bad.” They both got out and walked quickly to the front entrance. A security guard manned a metal detector, but when they flashed their badges, he waved them through, buzzing open the second set of double doors just beyond.
The unmistakable smell of a hospital greeted them: disinfectant, pharmaceuticals, the underlying scent of . . . sickness, whatever that could be broken down into. It all conjured up an aura of human misery. Lakeside was where you were sent when your own mind betrayed you.
A few staff members moved through the lobby on their way to other parts of the hospital. They glanced at Reed and Ransom nervously, their gazes flitting away. A high, half-circle reception desk stood directly in front of them and they approached it, flashing their badges again. The woman at the front looked up, blinking. She offered no smile.
“Detectives Reed Davies and Ransom Carlyle. We—”
“Third floor,” the woman said, pointing behind her at a bank of elevators at the end of a short, empty hall. Another security guard sat in a chair, looking down at some form of reading material in his lap. The woman picked up her phone as they nodded and walked away, and when they got to the guard, he used a card to allow them entrance into one of the elevators. The doors closed and the elevator began rising. Music piped into the small space, tinny, and soft.
“This song is creepy as fuck,” Ransom said.
“‘Theme from A Summer Place’,” Reed noted. “A classic elevator tune.”
“Spend a lot of time in elevators, do you?”
“Dentists offices, grocery stores. You can’t live life without knowing this song.”
“Trust me, you can.” Ransom rolled his eyes, frowning. “You know what? I’ve been here before and this place just makes me feel . . . weird.”
“It’s a liminal space,” Reed said.
“What the hell is that?”
Reed watched the floor numbers change as the car rose. “It’s a space that makes you feel off, sort of like you’re in an alternate reality. Empty airports at night, school buildings after hours—”
The elevator dinged and the
doors slid open.
A short woman with dark red hair streaked with white stepped up to them immediately, holding out her hand. “Detectives. I’m glad you’re here. I’m Marla Thorne, Lakeside Administrator.” She seemed slightly breathless as though she’d just run to meet their elevator. More likely a symptom of adrenalin. She looked to be in a slight state of shock. They shook her hand and followed her to a small reception area where a woman in scrubs sat behind a window. “This is awful, just awful. Unbelievable. His body’s back that way.” She pointed to a set of double doors, her hand trembling. “I know you need to look at the crime scene. I just wanted to let you know that we have our guards and the CPD officers who arrived first manning all the exits. A search of the hospital was started immediately after Mr. Sadowski was found, and is still ongoing, but so far, everything seems to be in order on all the floors.” She laced her fingers together as though unsure what to do with her hands.
“Mr. Sadowski, you said? What was his role here?”
“He’s—was—the director.” The bright spots on her cheeks deepened when she corrected herself to past tense. “I have no idea who would do this. No idea.”
“Okay. Thank you, Ms. Thorne. We’ll take a look. Please have someone update us with any new information. We’ll need to ask you a few questions later too.”
“Yes, of course. Just have any of the receptionists ring my extension or page me if need be.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Ms. Thorne nodded to the receptionist behind the glass and a buzz sounded as the set of double doors swung open. Reed and Ransom entered another hallway. The hospital scent intensified, overhead fluorescent lights buzzed. Ransom paused to squirt a dollop of clear antibacterial gel onto his hands from a dispenser hanging on the wall, lathering it slowly. “Here’s another one, the electrical section near the back of a Ma and Pop hardware store.” He shivered dramatically.
Reed offered him a wry tilt of his lips. “Definitely.”
A cop Reed recognized as a newer guy from District Five, the district where Zach worked, came around the corner, tilting his chin. He looked decidedly pale and possibly ill, but relieved by the sight of them. “That way,” he said, gesturing backward where Reed could hear a hum of voices. “It’s . . . not good.” For a second, Reed wondered if the guy was going to vomit. Shit.
“Were you the first on scene?”
“Yeah, me and Mallory. We disregarded fire. It was obvious the victim was deceased.” He leaned toward them as if sharing a secret. “That’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen.”
Reed almost told him it got easier, and that was the truth. But he hated that it was, and it didn’t exactly seem comforting so he said nothing. “Where’s Mallory now?”
“He’s with the docs who found the deceased. A couple other guys are helping man the exits while they complete a search and make sure whoever did this isn’t still in the building.”
“But the building’s full of nuts. How are they going to rule anyone out?” Ransom asked.
The cop shrugged. “I guess they’re looking for any out-of-place nuts.”
Ransom rubbed at his eye. “Christ. Okay.”
“Is Copeland working today?” Reed asked, wondering if he should expect to see Zach on scene.
“Off day.”
“Okay, thanks.”
The cop bobbed his head, glancing backward quickly, looking ill again. Ransom patted his shoulder as he walked by. “We’ll talk to you after we get a look. Get some air, man.” As they passed him, Ransom muttered, “Newbie.”
They walked around the corner and headed toward the end of the hall where two criminalists were squatted near what was obviously a dead body, half propped up on the wall.
“Lewis,” Reed greeted the criminalist they’d worked with before. Lewis turned, acknowledging Reed and Ransom and that’s when Reed got a good look at the face of the male victim.
“Holy Christ,” he muttered, leaning closer. “What the hell happened here?”
“Steven Sadowski, the former director of this facility. And by former, I mean as of several hours ago. And he’s been enucleated,” Lewis said.
Enucleated. The surgical removal of an eye. Or in this case, both eyes. Good God.
Reed squatted down next to the body, but Ransom remained standing, possibly regretting that burrito right about then. Reed stared at the victim. It was something out of a nightmare, mouth hanging open as if in a silent scream, two gaping, empty holes where his eyes had once been, black and dripping with an inky, black substance. “Have you identified what that is in the sockets?”
“We think it’s oil paint, though that will have to be confirmed,” the second criminalist said. Reed glanced at her shirt, stitched with the name Seidler. He nodded, looking back at the eyeless face, black tears streaking down his gaunt, lifeless cheeks. Reed had been doing the job for long enough—and seen practically every manner of death—that not much fazed him anymore, but he couldn’t help the chills that skittled down his spine like a thousand moving spiders under his skin.
“Do you think the eyes were removed pre- or postmortem?” Ransom asked.
“We were just discussing that,” Lewis said, glancing up at Seidler. “We think post.”
“How can you tell?” Reed asked. Usually it was lack of blood that made it immediately obvious whether a wound had occurred before or after death, but with black paint filling the gaping holes and dripping out of them, it was unclear whether there was blood present or not.
“We can’t definitively. But even with the paint, there’s no visual blood whatsoever, not even a drop, and it doesn’t appear as though the muscles contracted as the enucleation was being performed.”
That skittling again. “Cause of death?” Reed asked, standing so he could get a better overall look at the body. The man was wearing suit pants, a button-down shirt and tie, but no jacket. Ransom took a step back to make room for him.
“It looks like the cause of death was strangulation by some sort of cord or wire.” Lewis used a gloved finger to pull the man’s collar down, showing a deep red gouge in his throat. “It appears to have been done from behind.”
“So, someone snuck up on this guy, looped a wire around his neck, strangled him to death, and then cut his eyes out and filled them with black paint?”
Lewis shrugged, standing as well. “I’m just a collector, my theorizing friend. But my best educated guess? This man was not murdered here.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. He swept his hand, indicating the area around the body. “Too neat. Even if the killer performed the enucleation here, there’d be some manner of mess. We’ve only just started collecting. We have a lot to process. But going by appearance alone, it’s far too clean.”
Reed looked around, spotting a camera near the end of the wide hall. “This place has got to have eyes everywhere.”
“One less set than before,” Ransom pointed out.
Reed ignored him. Gallows humor. A necessity of the job that few understood unless they’d been there and done it. Sometimes it kept them sane in the face of evil—but he wasn’t going to extend it with a dead man lying at his feet. A man who could have a spouse and children unaware that their loved one had been murdered and mutilated. He was sure there was someone whose life was going to be shattered at some point today. And he was probably going to be the one to do it. He walked down the hall, getting a closer look at the camera. It appeared to be pointed in the direction of the dead body, but more toward the door to the left with the exit sign above it than the corner where the victim was located. They’d need to take possession of the footage and talk to staff to determine which cameras would have likely caught something they could use to identify the person who did this.
“Do you know anything about the two doctors who found him?” he called to Lewis and Seidler.
Lewis was bent over the body, putting something in a paper evidence bag. Seidler looked over her shoulder. “No. McDugal and Mallory were first on scene. We arrived after the
docs were gone.”
Reed nodded, heading around the corner, Ransom on his heels. McDugal was sitting in a plastic chair near the door that led to the lobby. He stood when they approached. “The coroner transport is held up in downtown rush-hour traffic,” he said. He still seemed nervous, spooked. Reed understood why now that he’d seen the body. It was a hell of a first DOA experience.
“The criminalists will be a while anyway,” Reed said. And there’s no rush for the victim. “Where are the doctors who discovered him?”
He motioned toward the double doors leading to the lobby. “Actually, only one doctor found him. But there was another one with her when we arrived.” He reached into his pocket and unfolded a small piece of paper with jittery-looking writing on it. “Dr. Elizabeth Nolan, and Dr. Chad Headley. It was Dr. Nolan who discovered him. Dr. Headley heard her scream. She was pretty shaken up. Mallory took them to the staff lounge. They’re waiting there.”
“Okay, good.”
The elevator doors opened outside the door and Reed saw through the glass that a few more criminalists had arrived, along with another officer. He and Ransom waited to be buzzed through from the other side and then greeted them before asking the two employees at the reception desk for directions to the staff lounge.
“I’ll walk you there, Detectives,” the security guard said, standing. “You’ll need someone with a key card to let you through.”
They followed the guard down a series of halls, him buzzing them through two doors. “Is this a patient floor?” Ransom asked as they both glanced into a door with a glass window that appeared to be an office.
“No, mostly offices on this floor. A few group therapy rooms for the low-level patients.”
“So, no Hannibal?”
The man shot him a wry smile. “We don’t house Mr. Lecter here. But if we did, he’d be on the fifth floor. This is the staff lounge.” He indicated a door, pushing it open and holding it for them.
Reed walked through first. A man and a woman were sitting at the round table in the center of the room, the woman’s hands curled around a white mug, the man’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up and everything inside Reed came to a sudden, jarring halt.