Page 38 of So Silent

Faith’s cheeks burned. “Yes. We should have.”

Five minutes later, they knew that they really should have.

“Yes, he was here,” a very pleasant middle-aged woman with a kindly smile and gentle blue eyes informed the agents. “He had a surgery run late. A poor young boy with growths on his eardrums that prevented them from vibrating. He had to be very slow and careful not to puncture the eardrums, but he got all of the growth removed. You should have seen his face when he could hear his parents for the first time! We see so much pain here. It’s nice to see things end well. Oh, but yes, Dr. Hammond was exhausted. He stayed in one of the break rooms we reserve for situations like that.”

Faith and Michael exchanged another look. Faith managed to hide her disappointment as she smiled at the nurse. “Thank you, Miss Flannery.”

“Oh, you betcha!”

They maintained their cool until they reached their car. The receptionist they spoke to earlier was replaced by a middle-aged woman who couldn’t care less that the FBI was there with a dog, but that was fine. Faith wasn’t in the mood to try to make things up to that kid anymore.

On the drive back to the hotel, she said, “This was bad.”

“Yeah,” Michael agreed. “Another lead wasted.”

"No. I mean, what we did was bad. We didn't try to examine evidence and draw a reasoned conclusion. We jumped at the first straw we found and came after Lucas like we knew he was the killer. We made an assumption and acted on it without taking the time to question if it was reasonable or not."

Then she remembered Michael’s misgivings when she first brought up Dr. Hammond. His very valid misgivings as it turned out.

She sighed. “I made an assumption and acted on it. You’re right. I’m letting my emotions get the better of me in this case. I need to stop thinking like a white knight trying and failing to save everyone and start thinking like a detective trained to examine evidence and determine a series of events based on that evidence.” She sighed again. “I think we need to go back to the hotel again and go back to square one. And this time, let’s not give ourselves an artificial deadline. We’ll let the evidence lead us instead of trying to lead the evidence.”

Michael nodded. “I agree with you.” Seeing her expression, he squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t feel down. We’ll get this guy. It’s a bad day, not a bad case.”

She managed a smile she didn’t feel. “Sure. Just a bad day.”

But not as bad as Emily Chen’s last day. Not as bad as Rebecca Wells’ or Emily Gonzalez’s. Would another woman have the worst day of her life while Michael and Faith were trying to have a better day so they could stop the person hunting these women?

She knew she shouldn’t have made that promise to Hector in the first place, but it still crushed Faith to feel like she had broken it once more. These women deserved justice, and thanks to Faith’s poor work, they were no closer to finding it.

Once more, West’s taunting laughter echoed in her mind. She looked out the window at the darkening sky and wondered when she’d truly be free of him.

Maybe never. Maybe her poor performance now was because of the damage he had done. Maybe he had already broken her.

Chapter Eighteen

Jessica pressed her hands to her ears and sobbed quietly as pain stabbed her temples.

People didn't know what a migraine really was. They felt a touch of a headache from drinking their coffee an hour later than normal, and they moaned about having a migraine and how irritating it was.

They had no idea what they were talking about.

A fresh wave of pain stabbed her, and she whispered, “Ow… Ow, ow, ow…”

The pain was a living thing sometimes. When Jessica first got a migraine, she was four years old. It was one of her earliest memories. She was crying so loudly and persistently that her parents had taken her to the hospital. She remembered telling the doctor that it was like a snake had crawled behind her eye and was biting it from the back.

It turned out that the reason for her headache was their old television. Flat-panel TVs wouldn’t come out for several more years, and the cathode tubes in their old television hummed softly. Well, softly for normal people. For Jessica, the electric hum was more like a screech that was just loud enough to pierce through her skull like an icepick.

That’s what it felt like now as an adult. Not a snake, an icepick. Or a jackhammer.

Yeah, that’s what it felt like. A little mini-jackhammer that bored into her skull a thousand times a second.

“Ow!”

She collapsed to her knees, covering her ears to no avail.

What the hell was that damned noise? It couldn’t be coming from her house because she had turned the electricity off an hour ago to try to escape the sound. She would have to replace all of the food in her refrigerator, but that was fine, just please, please, please make this sound go away!”

“Ow, ow, OW!”

---