The guys took off running and I sunk down on the back of the ambulance tailgate. Thank you, I mouthed to Alex. He nodded.
The paramedic began cleaning my wound and I tried not to wince, tried not to squirm away, but I wanted to turn and stare in the direction the officers ran. “Do you think it was the killer?”
“Do I think who was the killer?” Alex asked, not looking up from his iPhone.
“The guy that I just saw!” I huffed.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lawson.”
I frowned, my eyes sweeping the bluff, then looking back at Alex, at the grizzly crime scene behind him. My stomach went to liquid as I tried not to look toward the coroner gathering up the ruined remains of the second body. My muscles tightened involuntarily; probably in a show of solitary gladness that they were still attached to my limbs.
“I hope it wasn’t him.” I rambled on, “But who else would it be? Don’t psychopaths enjoy injecting themselves into an active investigation? Or returning to the scene of the crime to re-experience the joy or whatever?”
Alex cocked a half smile before looking away from me. “Glad to see you’re still a TV junkie.”
“Hey. I probably watch as much Discovery Channel as I do The Bachelor, okay? There’s real learning there. Cut me a little slack.”
I would keep the fact that the Discovery Channel had just come out with another version of Hoarders my personal secret.
Alex and I both snapped to attention when Romero and Tibbs came lumbering through the grasses. “We couldn’t find a thing,” one of them muttered. “There was nothing out there.”
Heat washed over my cheeks. “He was there, I swear. I know I saw something.”
Alex looked down at me, his eyes fierce. “Are you sure you checked everywhere, guys?”
Ever since a brush with my half-sister—a fallen angel called Ophelia who was hell-bent on ruining my life, in a very serious way—I’ve been a little sensitive to the idea of my seeing things. Mainly because she had the unfortunate (for me) ability to make me see things—horrible things, like maggots and bloodbathed murder weapons. It wasn’t so much the images that bothered me, however; it was the idea of those images making me feel one-hundred-percent, grade-A, bat-shit crazy.
“I know I didn’t imagine it.”
“We checked everything. There weren’t even any trails in the grass. Sorry, Sophie, but maybe you just saw a shadow or something.”
A shadow? I clenched my teeth and tried my hardest to focus, but the pain in my head was like a humming, buzzing swarm of bees, making it incessantly hard to concentrate. A standard murder, I told myself, not my jurisdiction.
I gingerly touched the bandage the paramedic had just finished winding around my head. “Any nausea or dizziness?” he asked me.
I gazed back toward the bodies, caught sight of the river of spilled blood. “Nothing unexpected,” I murmured. I watched Alex as he stepped away from me, leaning in toward Romero and Tibbs as they talked, each cutting the other off, flailing their arms and pointing toward either the crime scene or the crest of forest they had just searched. I bobbed away from my paramedic as I tried to listen in on the officers’ conversation.
“Desecration,” I heard. “Wild animal.”
The paramedic turned my palms facing up and began swabbing. “Hold still,” he said without looking at me.
“Who called an ambulance? I mean, those girls were already . . .” I let my voice trail off, unable to say the word.
The paramedic, whose name badge said N. TORRES, glanced through his lowered lashes at me. “I guess someone was hoping.”
I wanted to be professional—stone-faced, matter-of-fact. But I knew that somewhere, someone was hoping that the police report was wrong, that the body under the sheet wasn’t their daughter, wasn’t their girlfriend, that she wasn’t dead. I swallowed back a tortured sob.
“One sick fuck,” I heard the chief say. “Can’t possibly be human.”
Alex turned slightly and caught me staring at him from the corner of his eye. I knew what he was thinking and it made my stomach burn.
Once the chief had left, Alex came toward me. “Is she ready?”
N. Torres nodded and I bristled.
“She can speak for herself.”
Alex went on, unaffected. “Great. Are you ready?”
“Let’s go,” I said, brushing off the back of my pants. We took a few steps. “So, what’s the official thought on the attacker?”
“There isn’t one yet. Once everything gets processed, we’ll have a better idea.”
“Okay,” I tried, “what’s the unofficial thought?”
Alex swung his head and blew out a long breath. “I thought that one of these days I’d walk into a crime scene that wouldn’t surprise me. Guess today wasn’t that day.”
I sighed. “I’ll say.”