She couldn’t finish. She wanted to tell him she wasn’t angry about Denise Poole and her stupid painting or about the closet door he had bought. She just wanted him to be okay.
But then the nurse was there, softly ushering her out of the room and out of the ICU altogether. The closing of the swinging door behind her sounded like her heart cracking in two. Wiping tears away with the sleeve of her jacket, she found her way to the small waiting room where Carrieann enveloped her in a long hug that crushed the breath out of her. She was glad when it was over.
People around them scrolled on their phones, slept on the chairs, or stared sightlessly at the television mounted in the corner of the room playing a late-night show on mute. Several state troopers stood along the far wall, near the windows. Josie eyed them warily as she found two chairs pushed together where she might be able to curl up on her side and get some sleep. She didn’t recognize any of them, although she didn’t really know Luke’s coworkers.
She used her jacket for a pillow and curled on her right side. Carrieann sat beside her at first, but after a few minutes she stood up and paced the room. Josie closed her eyes and listened to the rhythmic sound of her boots on the linoleum, until it lulled her to sleep.
She woke to daylight and a vibration beneath her head. Blinking awake, she sat up and spent several seconds trying to extricate her cell phone from her jacket pocket. It still had a charge, but there wasn’t much left. She recognized Ginger Blackwell’s number immediately, having memorized it because she didn’t want to save it as a contact in her phone. Looking around, she didn’t see Carrieann anywhere. A new group of state troopers lined the far wall. A new shift. Josie whispered a hello into the phone as she exited the waiting room.
“Miss Quinn?” Ginger’s voice held none of the fatigue that Josie’s did. She was clear and sharp, her words like spikes in Josie’s temples.
“Yes,” Josie said. She slinked down the hallway like she’d just stolen something, searching for a ladies’ room.
“This is Gin— Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Josie cleared her throat. She spotted the sign with the tiny stick figure in a dress down the hall and picked up her pace. “I’m fine,” she said, trying to sound more alert and awake. “What’s going on?”
“I had something to tell you. I remembered something. At least, I think I remember. I had a dream about it. Did you get my file?”
Inside the ladies’ room, Josie bent to look beneath the stalls. Miraculously, she was alone, but she didn’t know how long that would last. “I did. I have to tell you, Ginger, there’s a lot of stuff missing.”
“Missing? Like what?”
“Like the rape kit they took at the hospital. They took DNA from that. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do. It was horrible—very… invasive.”
Josie could feel her shudder through the phone. “I’m sorry. Let me ask you—do you know what it showed?”
Silence.
“Ginger?”
A rustling sound. Josie thought she could hear Marlowe whine in the background. “It showed—there was evidence. Corroborating my story.”
“So they told you what the results were?”
“They did. One of the officers told us that the analysis of the rape kit showed… I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“It’s okay,” Josie said. “I was just curious whether they told you.”
“That’s why we were so shocked when they started accusing me of orchestrating the whole thing. A few weeks earlier they had come to us and said the rape kit proved I was telling the truth… about the men.”
“The results weren’t in the file, but I did manage to find a copy of them. But I need to know how far this goes. I’d like to see what the medical records say, which I guess we’d have to get from the hospital. If they still exist.”
Ginger sounded relieved. “Oh well, my husband has the hospital records. He ordered a copy of them himself when the investigation started. Can I just email you the file?”
“Of course. That would be great.” As Josie rattled off her email address, she heard the squeak of the door opening and turned to see a tall state trooper in full uniform walking through the door. He froze when he saw her.
Josie said, “This is the ladies’ room.”
Ginger said, “What?”
The trooper took a step back so he could study the sign on the wall outside of the door. He gave her a sheepish smile. “Oh shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“The men’s room is across the hall,” Josie told him.
Ginger said, “Miss Quinn? What’s going on?”
Into the phone, in the steadiest voice she could manage, Josie said, “I have to go. I’ll call you back later.” But she could barely hear her own voice over her pounding heart.
Chapter Forty-One
The email came in while she was rooting through the mess of items under her passenger’s side seat, trying to find a charger for her phone. By the time her phone chirped, she had found several half-finished water bottles, two dollars and seventeen cents in change—which she pocketed because she needed it—three granola bar wrappers, and a shoelace. She sat back in the seat with a heavy sigh. Closing her eyes momentarily, she rested her head against the seatback. The sun had come up while she was in the restroom and now it flooded through the windows of the vehicle, chasing away the bitter cold that had invaded overnight and leaving behind a perfect, delicious coolness. For just a few seconds she pretended her life was normal again. She was still a detective with the Denton PD. Still on the payroll. Luke was still safe and unharmed. Any minute now he would call to tell her something random and flirty, and they’d agree to get together later that night. Then they’d drink wine and make love, sleep and do it over again.
But thoughts of reality came crashing through the door to her mind, making her feel queasy. Her eyes snapped open and she pulled up Ginger Blackwell’s email. There was no message. Only a PDF attachment. Josie downloaded it to her phone and pressed open when prompted. The records from Denton Memorial were voluminous. It took several minutes for the whole of the PDF to load. As she waited, she reached back down and fished beneath the passenger’s side seat. Her fingers brushed something that felt like paper. Anticipating a receipt, she pulled it out to look at it and whooped aloud when she discovered it was a five-dollar bill. At least she wouldn’t be subject to the humiliation of having to ask Carrieann for money to buy a meal. Although she supposed the hospital cafeteria would take her credit card.
Finally, the whole document was there. She wished she had her laptop. Some of the nurses’ notes were completely illegible. She scrolled through slowly and carefully as the sun rose higher in the sky, infusing more heat into the car until she had to roll her window down to breathe in the cool air. It was all there. Ginger’s version of events, disjointed though they were, shortened and abbreviated into clinical medical facts. “Pt reports memory loss secondary to sexual assault. Pt reports assault by multiple males. SANE contacted.” A SANE was a sexual assault nurse examiner, specially trained to collect evidence in a rape case and maintain a chain of custody. It was all there. Everything had been done by the book.
The police file was incomplete, but all of the evidence was there if you looked for it. Someone had made it difficult to find the complete file, but hadn’t tampered with the evidence or destroyed it. So if anyone ever cried foul, all the investigators involved could say nothing was amiss. No one would lose their jobs or go to jail over the file because they hadn’t done anything wrong.
She closed the PDF, tossed the phone onto the driver’s seat and spent five more minutes digging before she found her charger. She was just plugging it in so she could call Ginger back when she saw a couple of troopers weaving their way through the parking lot toward the hospital. They weren’t acting suspicious or threatening, but she thought of the man who had walked in on her in the ladies’ room that morning. Best not to be alone. Pocketing her phone, charger, and the five dollars she found, she headed back toward the hospital.