Page 9 of The Clearing Rain

“I’ll go,” Lacey offered immediately, and Nico grimaced.He needed to talk to her, find out what she knew.But he nodded curtly as she looked up for confirmation.Lacey’s face was almost as pale as the poor girl, and that worried him.She was inclined to get too close to some victims, and sometimes took on their pain as her own.It was one reason why the little girl’s death back in Melbourne had affected her so deeply.Why it’d resulted in her PTSD.The fact that she couldn’t save Cindi.Every time she got close to a victim of crime, he secretly hoped she wasn’t headed down the same path all over again.

He followed at a respectable distance behind the women.The girl seemed to shrink into herself as they approached the mass of police vehicles and officers clustered at the far end of the crime scene, but Lacey talked in soothing tones until they came up beside Mary’s blue Honda SUV, and she helped to ease the girl into the rear of the car.Mary went around to the driver’s side, but Nico snagged Lacey by the elbow right before she followed the girl into the car.

“Can you tell me anything?”he asked in a hushed whisper.This whole thing was completely unorthodox, but Nico was nothing if not adaptable.If this was what it took to make the victim comfortable enough to finally tell him everything she knew, then that was how it was going to be.But even a small morsel of information would help to ease his bafflement right now and give him something to work with in the interim.

Lacey glanced quickly into the car and then turned to him.The pain in her eyes was clear.“Her name isTaylor Longbrook, and she has no idea how she got here, or what happened to her.She keeps asking where her best friend Danika is.The last she remembers clearly is that they were backpacking through Strahan together.After that, she has no clear memories.Just flashes of a man.And pain.Lots of pain.That’s all.”Lacey closed her eyes briefly, as if the information was too much for her to process, too much to bear, then she got into the car without another word.

“Fuck,” Nico said quietly as he watched Mary’s car drive away through the phalanx of cop vehicles.

For a second, he was torn.To follow Mary to the hospital in the hope he could speak to Taylor soon, or send someone he trusted to keep a watch over her and let him know the second she was ready to talk.

“Tyrell,” he shouted to his colleague and good friend.

The man looked up from where he was studying a set of footprints in the dirt, his coal-dark skin glistening with sweat from the heat of the day.“Yes, boss.”

“Follow Lacey, Mary, and the girl into town.Don’t let them out of your sight and make sure you, and only you, stand guard at the victim’s door until I get there.Don’t let anyone in or out without calling me first.Including Lacey or the doc.”

“Yes, boss.”Tyrell was already opening the door to his cruiser.Nico knew the victim and Lacey would be in the best of hands with Tyrell.And Nico was sending him as much to look after Lacey as to guard the victim.She was pregnant.With his baby.He wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.

At least he had a name now.Something concrete he could move forward with.Taylor Longbrook.Did that mean her best friend, Danika, was the one they’d found in the ditch?Nico dialed a number on his cell and relayed the information through to Sally-Ann.She was the best by far at digging up information, especially on short notice.Once he had her promise that she’d call him the second she found something concrete, he put his phone in his back pocket and concentrated on the crime scene.Hopefully, it might reveal more clues that’d help them piece together what’d happened here.Something to link the two girls, the dead one and the one left alive.Maybe, just maybe, this time the perp had slipped up and left some small detail for him to find.

Next on his list of priorities was to interview the old man farmer.To see if the girl had said anything to him, find out exactly what he’d seen and heard in the hours and minutes before he found Taylor.He’d already interrogated the old farmer once, and knew the man had an annoying tendency to waffle, going off on tangents when Nico needed him to stay on track.He talked about the war a lot, and how the whole country had hated his guts when he’d returned from Vietnam.Nico had Sally-Ann requesting his military records to see if anything suspect had happened during his service.Pacca also mentioned a son who was a greedy son of a bitch, and who’d tried to cheat him out of his farm.But when Nico pushed him for information, he waved it away as not relevant, saying he’d lost touch with his son when they had a falling out about the farm and he’d moved to the mainland.He hadn’t spoken to his son in over ten years the old man had growled and wouldn’t talk about it anymore.Apart from that, Pacca seemed to have no other family and very few friends.

But Nico couldn’t shake the feeling there was something fishy going on here.This had to be more than coincidence.Twice in three days the old man had a girl dropped on his doorstep.What was the killer trying to tell them?

* * *

Two hours later, Nico stood outside the hospital room talking quietly to Tyrell.“I want a guard on this door twenty-four seven,” he directed.He peered through the little window, trying to see what was going on in the room, but the curtains were tightly drawn around the bed and he could see nothing.“Is Lacey still in there?”

“Yes,” Tyrell replied.“They’ve been in there the whole time.A female doctor is in there with them too.”

“Right.”Nico frowned at the door.“So you don’t know anything more about the victim?”

Tyrell shook his head, keeping his gaze directed down the hallway.But Nico knew they were both wondering the same thing.What was going on in there?He needed to know.So he squared his shoulders, raised his hand to knock, but was surprised when he found himself hesitating, not wanting to intrude suddenly.Which wasn’t like him.Not when he was on a case.Not when he needed answers.Something about the girl’s obvious torment had gotten to him, and he wasn’t sure why.Freud might say it had something to do with him seeing Taylor’s distress and how that pain was affecting Lacey.Subconsciously, he wanted to take that pain away, so that Lacey was no longer suffering.But deeper than that, he knew how he’d feel if it were Lacey who’d been found wandering naked on that road.And that thought scared him shitless.Because it made him angry.So angry.Violence surged in his guts.He knew he wouldn’t be reacting like this if Lacey wasn’t involved in this case.And somehow, finding out about her pregnancy made it worse.Because it wasn’t just her who needed protection now.There was another life at stake.

Drawing in a deep breath, he cleared his mind of all those wayward thoughts and knocked firmly on the door, then without waiting for an answer, he let himself in.“It’s Detective Favreau,” he declared to the drawn curtain.There was no way he was pulling back that screen without an invitation.“Is it possible to talk to the—to Taylor?”

“I’ll be right with you, Detective,” a voice that he assumed belonged to the doctor announced, leaving Nico standing on the outside of that screen listening to the low murmur of voices, his impatience building.

Finally, the curtains twitched aside, and both the doctor and Mary appeared.Nico caught a glimpse of Lacey, sitting in a chair at the girl’s bedside, holding her hand, before his view was blocked by the two women as they stood before him.Mary merely nodded her acknowledgement, not speaking.

The doctor looked him directly in the eye.“I’ve conducted my physical examination.”He noticed a wayward strand of gray hair had come loose from her otherwise perfectly tight bun caught at the nape of her neck.She was to the point and professional, in a calm but maternal way.Nearly as tall as him, her white coat draped loosely over her thin frame.She swiped a hand across her forehead, and Nico suddenly discerned a deep fatigue in that one simple move.“I’ll talk to you out in the hallway, if you don’t mind?”She touched his elbow, and he found himself being led out of the room before he could object, Mary right on his heels.If he didn’t know better, he might’ve thought he was being herded like some kind of animal.There wasn’t even time to shoot Lacey one more look before he was past Tyrell and back in the hallway.

Once they were standing to the side of the nurses’ station, the doctor said in a discreet tone, “I’m Dr.Monroe.I believe you’ve already met Dr.Erikkson.”She nodded toward Mary.Nico held back his quip that he was the one who’d called her in, and merely nodded.“Good.”Dr.Monroe consulted her notes before continuing.“Firstly, I can tell you that Taylor was not raped, or sexually assaulted in any way.”She lifted her head to stare at him.“I’m telling you this now because I know it’s usually the first thing you cops like to focus on.”

Nico was a little taken aback.It almost felt like she was painting him as the enemy.“Thank you,” he replied.That should be good news, but he had a feeling it wasn’t.“The presence or not of a sexual assault can tell us a lot about the perpetrator, which is why it might seem like we focus on it.”He stopped, not wanting to sound like he needed to explain himself, instead waiting for her to elaborate.

“Hmm.”The doctor fixed her fierce, gray gaze on him for a second, as if weighing him up.He must’ve passed whatever test she was mentally putting him through, because she continued.“But there are worse things than sexual assault, if you can believe it.”

“Okay.”His skin began to crawl.What’d happened to this poor girl to make the doctor so cautionary?

Dr.Monroe pursed her lips.“Taylor has been subjected to physical torment, which has left her bleeding and scarred.”The doctor glanced quickly at Mary.“But also mental torment, that has traumatized her immensely.”The tall woman looked down at her notes.“There are hundreds of tiny cuts all over Taylor’s body.I think they were inflicted as a form of torture.”Nico remembered the brief look he’d had at the girl’s face earlier and remembered the tracks of blood on her cheeks and forehead.His stomach clenched, but he gave nothing away on his face.“But I’m not sure what the aim of that torture was.Was he trying to get information out of her?Or was it merely for personal pleasure?I’m not the one to answer those questions.”Dr.Monroe’s face contorted with disgust.“But that’s not the worst of it,” she stated, then clamped her mouth shut as if unable to tell him the rest.

Mary took over the conversation.“Because of her trauma at the hands of this…individual…” Mary paused, and he was surprised to see how much she’d been affected by what she’d seen.“She has what we call dissociative amnesia.”

Nico stood a little straighter.This wasn’t what he’d hoped to hear.

“It’s where a person blocks out certain events associated with trauma,” Mary continued.“Sometimes their memory will return, often within a few days.But sometimes not for months, or ever.Taylor doesn’t remember anything surrounding the other girl’s death, and only a little about the few days before they were abducted.”

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