Page 84 of Girl, Sought

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

The St. Andrews Medical Museum was more warehouse than museum to the untrained eye. It livedat the end of a narrow access road, tucked between a derelict bottling plant and an overgrown stretch of marsh. The place was a graceless rectangle of pored concrete and tinted glass, and Ella could see already signs of the fire that ravaged this place from fifty feet away.

She parked Vanessa's car at a distance then walked the rest of the way. Soot stains licked up from shattered windows and the main entrance had been boarded over with plywood. Nature had started to reclaim the margins in the years since the fire, too, with weeds and creeper vines staging a takeover of the building's exterior.

But Ella's gaze zeroed in on the one detail that mattered: a modest blue Toyota crouched in the shadow of the loading dock, half-hidden behind a dumpster.

Winters was here.

The realization hit like an adrenaline spike to the heart. She cupped her hands around the window and peered inside the vehicle, but all she could see was what looked like a briefcase on the passenger seat. She knelt down, touched a front wheel and found it warm. That meant its owner couldn't have arrived more than minutes before.

She had to get inside, but first she fired off a message to Reeves to get every cop available here. He fired back a thumbs-up message a few seconds later.

The museum stretched two stories up, and it was dotted with windows that somehow managed to look both ornate and institutional. Most were intact, but some on the ground floor had been recently ventilated. Maybe by bored kids, maybe by Winters. As she was circling the perimeter, she found a dumpster that offered just enough elevation to make the climb possible. Not easy - especially not with her burns screaming protest - but possible.

Ella holstered her Glock and started up. The dumpster's lid creaked and glass crunched beneath her boots as she reached for the windowsill. Her shoulders burned as she hauled herself up and through while she tried to avoid the jagged teeth still clinging to the frame. The shards scraped her stomach raw as she squirmed through the opening, and then she managed to twist herself around and find the ground feet-first.

Silence greeted her on the other side. The acoustics in this place amplified the sound of her breathing, and the distinct smell of charcoal invaded her nostrils. The museum's fire-gutted husk had swallowed her whole, and now it held its breath in anticipation.

She thumbed on the flashlight clipped to her belt and swept the beam in an arc. It was a risky move, announcing her presence via flashlight, but the alternative was to stalk this place in pitch darkness and risk being ambushed. At least with light, she could see Winters coming.

The room resolved itself in stages. She was in some kind of storage area. Metal shelves stretched into shadow, still bearing their grim cargo despite the fire. A jar on the nearest shelf held something that might have been a human hand, floating in murky preservative. The label beneath had partially burned away, leaving only:...congenital deformity, 1932.

Ella moved deeper into the gloom. More specimens emerged from the dark - organs preserved in cloudy fluid, bone fragments arranged on velvet. A fetus in a bell jar turned its malformed head to watch her pass, while something with too many limbs floated in green solution beside it.

Her flashlight caught a glass case big enough to hold a person. Inside, a partial skeleton had been arranged to demonstrate severe spinal curvature. Scoliosis twisted the vertebrae into shapes that shouldn't have been possible in a living being.

She passed shelf after shelf of medical curiosities. Tumors mounted like geological specimens. Cross-sections of diseased tissue suspended in alcohol. A collection of skulls showing various forms of something Ella couldn’t pronounce. The beam swept across a particularly large display case, and inside, conjoined twin fetuses stared back at her.

Focus. Clear the room. Find Winters.

Her boots clicked against tile as she moved deeper into the museum's guts. Rain drummed against high windows, providing cover for any sounds she might make - or sounds someone else might make. She moved through a door, out into what Ella guessed used to be main exhibit area.

More specimens revealed themselves, as did plenty of their fire-ravaged counterparts. At the chamber's heart stood a long central table with oddities in cases lining its edges. Ella saw organs and fetuses preserved in murky fluid, most of them with labels blackened by fire. A human brain floated in cloudy formalin, and beside it sat a bisected kidney. For a dizzy moment, the jars seemed to move of their own accord.

Tricks of the light, of fatigue and adrenaline. Nothing more.

She made a slow circuit of the room but couldn’t detect any hint of movement. Lawrence Winters was definitely here, but where was the bastard hiding?

Ella paused at the base of a grand staircase that swept up to the second-floor balcony. Ornate wrought iron railings curved along the balcony's length with yet more specimens up above. A metal walkway extended from the top of the stairs, disappearing into the murk.

CLANG.

The sound knifed through the eerie hush, so sudden and jarring that Ella physically startled.

She thumbed off her light and plunged the chamber back into full darkness. She let the darkness swallow her as she edged back toward a towering specimen cabinet.

A bead of sweat trickled down her spine as she strained her eyes against the black. Had Winters heard? Was he watching her now? Maybe crouched in the shadows, watching her fumble half-blind among the relics of his madness?

SMASH.

Ella flinched low on instinct, one arm flung up to shield her face. The noise had come from her left. A display case toppling? Or something more human?

Her fingers twitched against the butt of her Glock. Every instinct screamed at her to fire in the darkness and worry about the repercussions later, but she held herself in check. And then, with a buzz and a blaze of light that seared her retinas - the overheads flared to life.

Floodlights at even intervals, huge caged things that threw stark shadows and bleached the color from the world. They painted the chamber an anemic orange hue.

Ella blinked the strain from her eyes, and instinct had her diving for better cover. That was when the screaming started.

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