One Final Breath

by Lynn H. Blackburn

  “Investigator Bell?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Jocelyn Martinez. I’m a nurse in the PICU at Carrington.”

  Anissa’s heart sank. “Yes.”

  “Brooke Ashcroft’s family asked me to contact you and an Investigator Chavez. Brooke is awake and is frantically asking for the two of you. I told her I would call you.”

  “We’re about twenty minutes away. Tell her we’re coming.”

  “Thank you.” Her relief came through the line. “I will.”

  “What is it?” Gabe’s words were slurred with sleep.

  “Brooke’s awake and she’s asking for us.”

  Gabe’s eyes closed again. Was he falling back asleep?

  But his lips were moving. Oh. He was praying.

  He sat up with a huge yawn. “What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  Another yawn accompanied his rise to his feet. “You should have woken me up.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Thanks.” He blinked a few times, sleep still heavy on him.

  “The bathroom’s that way.” She pointed down the hall. “And I’m driving.”

  “Good plan, boss.”

  Five minutes later they were on the road. They didn’t talk. Not because of any tension, but because two minutes after they got on the road Gabe was snoring.

  He woke with a start when she put the car in park, and for the second time that day they entered the hospital. The pediatric ICU had strict rules about visitors, but Paisley must have spoken to the nurses, because after washing their hands, Anissa and Gabe were taken directly to Brooke’s small room.

  Brooke looked so tiny. So frail. The strong girl who’d kept her friend from sinking in the lake was gone. Even through the hospital sheets, Anissa could tell she’d lost weight. Too much weight in a week. Her cheeks were sunken. Dark circles rimmed her closed eyes. Her hand twitched on the blanket.

  Paisley jumped to her feet when they entered the room. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice was low, rough. “She woke up and kept saying, ‘Get them. Get Gabe and Anissa.’”

  Paisley looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry to bother you again on a Sunday, but I couldn’t deny her request. And she wouldn’t settle down until we promised her you were on the way. She fell asleep a few minutes ago. I’m sorry. I don’t know what she needs to ask you, but—”

  “You did the right thing.” Anissa studied Brooke’s sleeping form. What could she need to talk to them about?

  “Why don’t we wait outside?” Gabe’s suggestion made sense. The three of them barely had room to stand around Brooke’s bed. “Better yet, we’ll go grab something to eat in the cafeteria and you can get us as soon as she wakes up.”

  Gabe rested a hand on Anissa’s elbow and steered her out of the room, out of the PICU, and toward the elevator. “I wasn’t trying to speak for you,” he said with an apologetic tone. “But I’m starving. Do you mind?”

  “I’m with you all the way.”

  The look he gave her had her rethinking her words.

  Anissa hadn’t meant it the way it sounded.

  He knew that.

  But he still liked the sound of it. “I’m with you.”

  The cafeteria offerings were limited on a Sunday evening, but the sub sandwich shop was open. She ordered a Coke and some chips. She ate like a bird when she was stressed. He, however, ate everything in sight when he was stressed. He ordered a foot-long sub with extra meat and they took a seat. He inhaled the sandwich and was thinking about ordering another when Anissa’s phone rang. Brooke was awake.

  When they crammed into her small PICU room, Gabe was struck by how frail she looked. Trying to kill yourself and having your stomach pumped would do that to anyone, but the contrast between the girl he’d helped at the lake and the one lying in the bed put his heart in a vise.

  He had to find out who had done this.

  Who had taken what should have been a stupid teenage decision and turned it into a nightmare that this poor child could never wake up from? Would she, like Anissa, carry it into her thirties and beyond?

  He couldn’t fix Anissa’s case, although he would if he could. But he could do everything in his power to be sure Brooke didn’t go through life with this hanging over her head. God, help me find this monster. Please.

  “Hi.” Brooke’s scratchy whisper tightened the grip on his heart, but he forced himself to respond in a far more upbeat way.

  “Hey yourself.” He took her hand in his. “You scared us, girl.”

  “Sorry.” Her eyes looked so big in her thin face. “Swimming is the only thing I’m good at. But when I tried to practice, I couldn’t even get my toe in the pool. I panicked.”

  “It happens,” he said.

  “Not to you.” She looked at him and Anissa. “You didn’t panic. You were brave and calm. I don’t think I can be that way.”

  He glanced at Anissa and Paisley. They both looked back at him expectantly. Since when did he get nominated to be the teenage girl whisperer? He didn’t know anything about teenagers. Or girls.

  “Oh, that’s not true.” He winked and nodded in Anissa’s direction. “She panics all the time.”

  “Does not.” Brooke shook her head, but he sensed her curiosity.

  “Not about the stuff you might think, of course. She doesn’t panic in water because she can hold her breath for like an hour. Not many people know this, but she’s part fish. You can’t see the gills she’s hiding.”

  Brooke didn’t quite laugh, but a smile flirted on the edge of her lips.

  Anissa rolled her eyes in spectacular fashion. She made a great straight man.

  “And she doesn’t panic on the job because she’s the best. But she wasn’t always the best. She had to learn. To practice. Same as all of us. None of us are any good at things the first time we have to deal with them. Take me, for example.”

  Brooke’s eyes flashed with curiosity.

  He leaned in. “I don’t share this with many people, but the first time I went diving, I panicked.”

  Her brow furrowed.

  “It’s true. Water flooded my mask, I forgot how to get it out, couldn’t remember how to inflate my BCD—that’s the buoyancy compensator device that divers wear to help them descend and ascend—and completely lost it. My diving instructor had to drag me to the surface like a sack of potatoes.”

  Brooke looked to Anissa for confirmation.

  Anissa shrugged. “This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I can tell you that Gabe doesn’t lie.”

  Brooke looked back at him, so he continued. “It was humiliating. I was fifteen and thought I was tough and awesome. I was pretty good at most of the stuff I tried, and I’d never had something I felt like I stank at.”

  “What did you do?”

  “My instructor let me float on the surface for a few minutes. He held on to my BCD, and he told me to breathe and reminded me about what I’d learned. And then we went back down again. Not quite as deep. Real slow. And when my mask started to fill, he held on to me while I cleared the water out of it and got it settled back on my face. He stayed with me until I could handle it by myself. And now I teach other people how to dive. But it wasn’t always that way. I was scared every time I got in the water for months.”

  “When did you stop being scared?” Ah. There was the real question.

  “There wasn’t a single moment. But one day, I went for a dive and realized it was all easy and that I loved it. Now I dive every chance I get. Of course, it wouldn’t have been that way if I’d refused to get back in the water even though I was scared.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Every time I get wet, even to take a shower, I picture Jeremy. And swimming is all I do. It’s how I’m going to get to go to college. It’s the only thing I’m good at. And I can’t. I’m such a weakling.”

  Gabe grabbed her hand again. “There’s nothing weak about this, Brooke. Nothing. You’ve been through something way more horrible than my ma
sk filling up with water. It’s too soon to worry about getting in the water. Or about being weak. Even if you never get back in the water, that would be understandable. And your sister and grandmother would be okay with it.”

  In his peripheral vision, he could see Paisley nodding in agreement.

  “But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think when you’re ready, you’re going to get back in the pool. And when you’re ready to get back in the lake, Anissa and I would be honored to swim with you. Well, Anissa will. Like I said, she’s part fish. I’ll probably have to get in a boat and float alongside you while you swim.”

  She snickered at that before her expression turned serious. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that. But keep in mind that if you want me to get in the lake in the winter, I’m going to need a wet suit and the promise of hot chocolate.”

  She nodded and bit her lip. “I want to ask you something, but I’m afraid you’ll either think I’m crazy or be mad at me. Although I guess both of those are already true.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Not possible, chica.”

  “I dared Jeremy. We were jumping off the dock and goofing off. Laughing.” A dry sob followed the words and she closed her eyes.

  Gabe took the opportunity to steal a look at Anissa. Her movement was so slight and subtle that even if Brooke had been watching, she wouldn’t have noticed the way Anissa made an “okay” sign with her hand. Normally that meant “I’m okay,” but he took it to mean that he hadn’t botched anything so far.

  Brooke’s grip on his hand tightened. “I need to know if there’s anything I could have done to save him. Other than never daring him in the first place.”

  Paisley brushed a stray hair from Brooke’s face and gave the kind of shushing sounds women were so good at making when someone was upset.

  “I keep dreaming that I knew it was all going to happen and I just let it. That I saw it all and did nothing to stop it. But when I’m awake, I know that’s not true.”

  Anissa didn’t move, but he could feel the energy radiating from her.

  “But I need to know the truth!” Brooke’s wail cut through the quiet room. “I can’t stand anyone else telling me that it wasn’t my fault and that there was nothing I could have done. I don’t want people who will be nice to me. I need someone who will be honest, and I think the two of you will. You’re investigating. Tell me what I could have done!”

  Her eyes were frantic as they bounced from him to Anissa to Paisley and made the circuit again.

  How was he supposed to answer? He didn’t know who had done it. He didn’t know why they had done it. He couldn’t even be sure that she wasn’t a target. Or that Jeremy wasn’t the target.

  “Brooke.” Anissa stepped forward. “To the very best of our current knowledge, we don’t believe there was anything you could have done to prevent Jeremy’s murder.”

  Brooke froze at Anissa’s word choice. She didn’t say anything, but the wild fear in her eyes dampened. “Will you tell me if it’s my fault?” Brooke whispered. “I think I could handle it better, knowing one way or the other, than all this questioning and wondering.”

  Paisley’s eyes widened. Gabe could tell she would have been perfectly happy to never tell Brooke anything more about the case. But Anissa was nodding. A slow, barely there nod. “You deserve nothing less. You’ll get the whole truth from us when we have it, but you have to give us time to find it. Without doing yourself harm while you’re waiting.”

  “You promise you’ll look at everything? You won’t try to be nice?” Brooke wouldn’t let it go.

  Anissa patted her hand. “Do you think I’m that nice?”

  Brooke’s lips curved into a hint of a smile.

  Anissa pointed to Gabe. “We look at all the clues during a murder investigation. Niceness has nothing to do with it. I promise you we will look at everything and everyone until we find out what happened.”

  Brooke relaxed back on the pillows. “Thank you.”

  8

  Gabe and Anissa left the PICU a few minutes later. As they approached the main nurses station, a young girl walked to the desk and leaned against it. She was in pajamas and a robe. One hand gripped an IV pole. A nurse joined her at the desk.

  “Someone wanted to come say hello,” the nurse said.

  “It’s Liz!”

  “Hey, Liz!’

  “Look at you!”

  Everyone behind the desk stood and gathered around the young woman.

  “How’re you feeling?” A young doctor who didn’t look much older than the patient asked the question.

  “Great,” Liz said. “I’m back on solid food. One more night and I may be able to talk them into removing the IV.”

  “So, I guess they’re taking good care of you on the third floor, then?” This came from an older nurse.

  “They are, Ms. Lydia. You were right.”

  “Bet you don’t even miss us at all, huh?”

  “Of course I do. Y’all were the best! That’s why I came to say hi!”

  The laughter and teasing continued as Gabe moved around the cheerful group. Such a contrast to the usual somber mood. He could only imagine how much the nurses and doctors appreciated having a patient—clearly on the road to recovery—come back to say hi.

  “That was fun.” He turned back toward Anissa, but she wasn’t there. She was ten feet behind, staring at the crowd around Liz.

  Anissa had paled under her tanned skin. Her expression was one of shock, confusion, and fear.

  He walked to her side and pulled on her arm. She followed him, but she looked back over her shoulder.

  Twice.

  This was beyond weird.

  He kept a grip on her elbow until they were out of the unit and in a deserted hallway, and then he stopped along the wall. “What is going on with you?”

  Anissa’s eyes were still focused elsewhere.

  “Anissa!”

  She jerked. “Sorry. I just . . . Did you see her?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl.”

  “You mean Liz?”

  “Yeah.” Anissa turned back toward the PICU.

  “Of course I saw her. How could I not see her? It was like a fiesta in there. But what’s your deal? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  She ran her hands over her face. When she removed them, tears shimmered on her eyelashes. “She . . . she’s the right age.”

  What on earth was she talking . . . “Oh. She’s the same age Jillian would be.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  Anissa swallowed hard. “She looks exactly like her.”

  “What are you talking about? Querida, you said Jillian was only three when she was taken. You don’t know what she would look like at sixteen.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Twenty minutes later they had called in a pizza order for delivery and were back at Anissa’s house.

  Once inside, she flipped on the lights and pointed to the kitchen. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”

  When she disappeared into her bedroom, Gabe started opening cabinet doors until he found the glasses. He filled two with ice, then opened the fridge and grabbed a sparkling water for her and a Coke for himself.

  “You should try something without caffeine,” Anissa said from behind him.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s already late and you need to sleep.”

  “One Coke isn’t going to keep me awake.” A million other things might, but not the Coke. He picked up the glasses and turned around. “Wow. This is . . . wow.”

  Anissa had set up two trifold boards covered in pictures.

  On one a young woman smiled out from the middle panel. This was Carly. No doubt about it. From the other, an adorable little girl took center stage. Jillian. A photo of her with her family was in one corner. But around the main picture were a series of photos, much like those frames that have a place for each yea
r’s school picture leading up to high school graduation. The pictures weren’t real. But . . . there was one . . . third from the last. It had a label. Sixteen. Which was how old Jillian would be today.

  Now he understood Anissa’s reaction.

  He’d just seen that girl—in the flesh—in the Carrington Hospital PICU. And her name was not Jillian. It was Liz.

  “Wow.”

  “That’s three wows in twenty seconds.” Anissa took the glass of water from him.

  “How did you get these?”

  Anissa gave him the same look she gave the divers on her team when they asked a stupid question.

  “Oh. Sabrina.” Had to be.

  Sabrina’s day job was professor of cybersecurity and computer forensics at the local university. But her passion was seeing men, women, and children freed from modern-day slavery. As part of her efforts, she and a group of scary-smart computer nerds got together once a month and worked their magic. They cleaned up security footage, ran facial recognition software, and scoured the internet looking for victims of human trafficking—and their abductors. Their work had resulted in hundreds of found and free people.

  “Yes, Sabrina.” Anissa took a sip of her water. “I broke down and told them—her and Leigh—one night. All about Carly and Jillian. And you know how Sabrina is. She ran with it. Brought me these photos a few days later. She has her picture set up in one of the database things she uses. If she ever gets a hit on it, she’ll let me know.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it.”

  “No.” Gabe jumped to Anissa’s side. “You’ve babysat me all day. The least I can do is get the pizza. You weren’t even hungry.”

  She laughed. “Fine.”

  He went to the door.

  “Hey, do you have any cash?” Anissa called after Gabe.

  “I got it, Bell.” Gabe’s voice carried back to her. She set her glass on the table and studied the photos. Sabrina had run the software program with multiple photographs of Jillian. She’d generated three different options. Based on what they knew Jillian looked like at three years old and having images of her parents, Sabrina had been sure one of them would be right.

  Anissa ran her finger over the middle photograph. She knew she hadn’t imagined it. The young girl who everyone at the nurses station had called Liz could be the identical twin of the girl in this picture.