Page 59 of The Vanishing Wife

One word was all she could manage. Her shoulder collapsed down onto the sheets. The pain from the knife wound spurred her to keep going. To search for… She didn’t know. The chair arm was still tied to her wrist. It was all she had as memories of finding herself in this exact position two months ago, of being strangled by a killer under several feet of water, surged to the front of her mind.

All she’d had to do to escape then was die.

But Elyse didn’t deserve the satisfaction of watching Leigh die. Not for a single moment.

Throwing everything she had into her injured shoulder, Leigh hauled the chair arm into Elyse’s temple. The collision reverberated down Leigh’s arm. The grip around her throat released as her assailant hit the floor. A head rush nearly knocked her back on her ass as Leigh slid off the edge of the bed. Grabbing for her throat, she tested her voice. “You are really starting to test my trust issues.”

Elyse clawed her way across the floor. Toward the door. “I’m not going to jail.”

“Yes, you are.” It took more than two tries to get back on her feet. Leigh stumbled forward, still reeling from multiple locations of blood loss and sedative, and caught up to the first woman to give her a chance at friendship in over twenty years. But Leigh was standing. Which was more than she could say for Elyse. She clutched on to her shoulder, aggravating the wound to keep herself awake. “Elyse Portman, you are under arrest for the attempted murder of a police officer and a federal agent, for interrupting my medical leave, and being a general pain in my ass.”

Leigh unbound the rope from around her wrist and looped it around one of Elyse’s, pulling her arm tight behind her back with more effort than it should’ve taken. She secured the woman to the dresser pulls. One wrong move and the entire thing would topple over onto her. Shuffling into the hallway, Leigh collapsed beside Detective Moore. Detached the belt radio from the detective’s belt. And pinched the push-to-talk button. “This is Agent Leigh Brody. Officer down. I repeat, officer down.”

She dropped the radio in her lap and lost her one-woman fight to stay conscious.

THIRTY-NINE

Gulf Shores, Alabama

Thursday, September 26

9:40 a.m.

“Look who’s still alive.” Leigh knocked gently on the parted room door, half-in, half-out.

Detective Moore attempted to sit up in the hospital bed, washed out by white sheets, scratchy blankets, and barely fluffed pillows. She flinched under the movement. Getting stabbed would do that. For a while. Her short hair clumped in pieces. Unwashed and coated in a thin layer of human grease. “Thanks to you, from what I hear.”

“Couldn’t have you dying on me.” Leigh made her way fully inside, letting the door close behind her, and pulled up a seat. Though not without some pain of her own. The sling bracing her arm against her chest was already uncomfortable, and she’d only been fitted with it thirty minutes ago. She hit her elbow on the chair arm on the way down and ground her teeth to keep her annoyance at bay. “Too much paperwork.”

“She got you too, huh?” The detective lay back against her pillows and closed her eyes. As if the past week had suddenly caught up with her all at once.

“Knife here.” Leigh pointed to her shoulder. Then her belly. “Punch here. Tore one of my sutures out. Bitch.”

“I hope you stabbed her back,” Detective Moore said.

“No. But I managed to get a few good hits in. I think I broke her nose. Seems I have terrible taste in friends.” It was nice. Having someone to compare battle wounds with. At least, someone who wasn’t trying to kill her at the same time. Of course, she had her team. Director Livingstone, her brother. They were an integral part of her being able to do her job, but neither of them saw much fieldwork. There was a special kind of bond that built between those who did. The kind that would last years. “I never did get to hear about what you discovered by talking to Samuel Thornton’s sister. Was you getting stabbed your way of avoiding a hard conversation?”

“I could’ve just died. Then you’d never hear what I have to say.” The detective’s laugh strangled halfway up her throat. Too much effort. “There was something significant about the timing of her visit though. From what I was able to learn, Maryanne Thornton has only visited her brother two times in their lives since they aged out of the system. According to her, they made a promise years ago. To move on and forget everything that’d ever happened growing up with their mother. But Maryanne broke that promise. Twice. Once last summer when she came to tell him their mother had died, and again almost four weeks ago. To tell him she’d found their biological father.”

“The timing isn’t a coincidence.” The catalyst. That key piece of information they’d been looking for from the killer’s past. “Samuel Thornton’s old life was colliding with his new one. Bringing back old memories. The stress of seeing his sister must’ve triggered the cycle. He killed Poppy last summer after Maryanne’s first visit then went after Ava and Ruby and Saige within the past two weeks.”

“And two innocent lives paid the price,” the detective said.

“Answers don’t really make it any better, do they?” Unfortunately, there were still a lot of questions begging for her attention. Leigh framed her elbow with her uninjured hand. “What about the hair we took from Samuel Thornton’s shower drain? Was he able to identify the last sample?”

“He was, but not from the sample provided from Saige Fuentes’s home,” the detective said. “I had a gut feeling, so I had Pierce compare it to one of Ava’s collected during the initial search of the Portman house, and I was right. Seems everything she told you about what happened between them was true. If she’d just come to us after the assault had occurred, everything that went down might’ve been avoided.”

“I’m not so sure.” Leigh thought back to another serial offender, one she’d chased over two decades. “In my experience, people like Samuel Thornton go to extreme lengths to hide what they really are, but they usually fail. I think Poppy Slater is proof of that.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Detective Moore let her eyes droop slightly, signaling for Leigh’s own body that she’d been put through the wringer, too. “The forensic unit was able to pull DNA from the balcony handrail of Samuel Thornton’s beach house. No prints, but there was blood in the wire where she cut her hand. Seems she wiped down the guardrail during her cleaning stint but couldn’t get deep enough into the porous wire.”

“She was determined. I’ll give her that.” Though Leigh couldn’t confidently say they had the right killer. While they had the correct amount of pieces to this puzzle, some didn’t seem to fit right. “They discharged me a little while ago. I’m going to lockup to talk to Elyse. Want to break out of here, Detective?”

The detective attempted a smile. “We almost died together. You can call me Henrietta.”

She couldn’t help but recognize the difference between this partnership and the one she’d had with Elyse. She supposed there was a reason for that. That maybe deep down she’d known Elyse had been keeping something dark and violent from her. She just hadn’t wanted to look too closely, afraid the ghosts of her past still had a grip on the present. “All right. Want to break out of here, Henrietta?”

“I’d like that.” Detective Moore nodded. “But it seems you’re going to have to face her on your own again. They spotted an infection in one of my wounds. I’m going to be out for the count for a few more days.”

---