by Nic Joseph
I paused as her words sunk in.
I felt nauseous all of a sudden as a thought crossed my mind, one so ridiculous and absurd that there was no way it could be true.
I backed away slowly from the door and then turned to run back to the Lindseys’ house.
“Detective?” I heard Jane Paxton say, but I was rushing back to the house now, my legs wobbly, a sinking feeling in my gut.
She didn’t even look like herself.
I raced upstairs and turned into the extra bathroom where I’d found what I thought to be Emily’s toothbrush. I turned on the light and stood in the room, my hands shaking as I braced them on the bathroom counter.
It couldn’t be.
The smell was gone, but I could remember it clearly.
It wasn’t the rotting smell from my nightmares.
The smell in the bathroom had been different.
Not mildew, but garbage.
Rotting eggs.
Sulfur.
As I stared at the black marks on the vanity, my heart skipped a beat, and I thought I might pass out.
The dark streaks on the counter.
The ones in Emily’s car.
I knew what they were. I’d seen and smelled them before.
Nell had started covering her gray hair in her late thirties, and I didn’t know what was worse—the chemical, sulfur-like smell that filled the house when she used them or the evidence left behind in the bathroom. Black streaks of dye embedded into the porcelain, on our towels, on the back of the door.
The smell in the bathroom and in her car confirmed it—Emily Lindsey had dyed her hair.
Recently.
And judging by the color of the marks on the counter, she’d dyed it black.
Black dye on her sink and on the driver’s seat in her car.
I fished my cell phone from my pocket and tried to call Gayla, but it went to voicemail. I called Derrick King, but he didn’t pick up either.
I raced back down the stairs and out the front door of the Lindsey home. I jumped into my car and peeled away, heading for Piper Woods.
I made it two blocks before my phone buzzed, and I saw that it was Gayla.
“Hey,” I said, out of breath. “I just left—”
“Wait,” she said, cutting me off, her voice hoarse. “I was just on the phone with Derrick, and you’re not…you’re not going to believe this.”
“No, I know—” I started.
“They found a body. In between where they found the Jeep and the site Cruise told us about.”
And then, from the pure shock in her voice, I knew she was about to confirm the suspicions I’d had in the bathroom just moments before.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Derrick said it’s a woman he’s never seen before. Black hair, blue eyes, twenty-two stab wounds, most of them in the chest. And he thinks it’s—”
“I know,” I said, cutting her off. “He thinks it’s the real Emily Lindsey.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
When I could find words, they tumbled from my lips.
“Did you call them?”
“What?” she asked.
“Did you call Dan Lindsey? Did you tell him you found the car?”
“Yes, I called him earlier tonight—” She stopped. “Oh my God.”
“I’ll head there now,” I said, hanging up the phone.
Moments later, I was flying through the streets, my siren blazing, my breath escaping my body in shallow bursts. I held my phone up and dialed Simpson, but it went to his voicemail. Cursing, I hung up and dialed the main number to McKinney. The phone tree came on, and I spent a few moments listening to the different options before hanging up. I cursed again and jammed down on the gas.
I couldn’t believe it.
The blood had been Emily’s.
We’d just missed that the woman covered in it hadn’t been Emily.
A few blocks away from the hospital, I lifted the phone to try to call Simpson again. No luck.
When I burst through the doors of the hospital a few minutes later, I immediately saw why Simpson hadn’t been answering my phone calls. He was standing near the check-in desk talking—no, arguing—with the man sitting behind it. Simpson was waving his arms, his face filled with anger.
He looked up as I approached, and I saw his eyes get wide.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“It was just a second!” he said, shaking, his voice pleading. “I went for a piss—”
“Yeah right. You’ve spent the last hour outside smoking, even though smoking isn’t allowed within twenty-five feet of hospital entrances,” the attendant said.
Simpson looked down angrily at the man.
“Where are they?” I asked again, my chest heaving, knowing what his answer would be but needing to hear him say it.
Simpson looked back up at me, and I knew that he’d be heading right back outside for another smoke the moment we were done. “They’re gone,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I told you, I just stepped away to go to the bathroom. When I came back, the room was clear. You gotta believe me. I take my job seriously, and that was the only time I left them alone. Really.”
The attendant snorted, and Simpson looked back at him with a scowl. “Hey, you’re the one who let a man drag his unconscious wife out of here,” he said.
“Wait, how do you know she was unconscious?” I asked.
“Well, you saw her,” Simpson said. “You’ve seen the way she acts. She doesn’t let anyone get near her, especially not the husband. And when I got to the room, there was a needle on the bed. He must’ve given her a shot before picking her up and carrying her by here.”
“I told you before, nobody carried anybody out this way. They must have gone out another exit. If anyone had come this way, we would’ve stopped him,” the attendant said. He looked up at Simpson. “If that man goes home and murders his wife, it’s on you.”
“You little—” Simpson said, launching toward the man, but I stretched out my arm, holding him back.
“Show me the room,” I said.
He took a deep breath and nodded.
We took one of the elevators up toward Emily’s floor. As we walked down the hall, I replayed the events of the last hour in my head.
How did we get this so wrong?
As we walked inside the room, my gaze scanned the bundled sheets, the dining tray lying on the ground, and the syringe that Simpson had mentioned, sitting in the middle of the bed.
I held up a hand as we walked inside. “This is now a crime scene,” I said. “Call it in.”
I looked up as Dr. Suda walked up to the door. “Your team was supposed to protect her,” she said, and I could see the anger in her eyes. “Our job was to give her medical treatment, but your job was to make sure that she was safe. Emily was in a very delicate state. I can tell you for certain that she did not go anywhere with her husband by choice.”
It wasn’t the time nor the place to tell her the truth. She may have been right about the fact that the woman in the bed didn’t want to go anywhere with the man.
But that woman was not Emily Lindsey.
And it seemed pretty likely that the man was not Dan Lindsey either.
“Is the person who checked Dan and Emily in Sunday night here?”
Dr. Suda frowned. “I’m not sure,” she said. “We can check in the ER. I was here when Emily was brought in, though. Her husband checked her in.”
“So he had her identification?”
Dr. Suda frowned. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe? I mean, probably. Actually, I think he was carrying her purse, so yes, probably. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Is there another way to get off this wing?
Something else besides the front door? The attendant swears that nobody went out that way, so there has to be another option.”
Dr. Suda seemed to think about it for a moment. “Yes,” she said suddenly. “I guess they could have used the staff exit, at the end of the hall.”
“How would they have known about it?”
“Oh,” Simpson chimed in. “He probably saw it. Dan Lindsey has walked all of these halls like a madman. Whenever Emily slept, he walked.”
“He was scoping the place, looking for a way out,” I said. “He was waiting for you to give him that opportunity.”
“I thought I was supposed to focus on not letting people get in,” Simpson said.
For a moment, I actually felt bad for the guy.
As we walked out of the room, I looked up at the dark plates embedded in the ceiling. “Pull whatever video footage you can find for this hallway,” I said, staring at the security cameras.
We walked down a long corridor toward a big door. I tried to imagine Dan Lindsey carrying an unconscious woman.
At this time of night, it would be impossible for him to do that without being seen and stopped. No, he had to have some other way.
As we reached the end of the hallway, I figured out exactly how he did it.
Pushed against one of the walls, blending in with the background of chaotic hospital life, was a wheelchair.
“Should that be there?” I asked.
Dr. Suda frowned. “Anyone could have left it here, I guess,” she said. “But are you suggesting that he could have wheeled her in it?”
Dr. Suda lifted a badge from her chest pocket and held it against a reader near the door. It beeped, and the light turned green. She pushed on the door so we could all walk through.
“Wait, so he would have needed one of those to get through here?” I asked.
Dr. Suda nodded. “Yes, it locks back within five seconds. He definitely couldn’t have wheeled Emily through without someone noticing. He must have had a badge.”
“Okay, we’ll need to check the floor and see if anyone is missing a badge.”
“No, we won’t,” Simpson said, walking forward and bending down to pick something up. He straightened, holding a badge on a light-green lanyard. “Seems like we’ve figured out pretty quickly that”—he paused, looking at the badge in his hands—“Edward Covel will be missing his.”
“Okay, so he steals a badge, finds the employee exit, grabs a wheelchair, injects the woman, and wheels her out here,” I said. I looked around the small break room. “Where does this go?”
We all walked to the far wall and then around a corner and down a narrow hall toward the door. Dr. Suda pushed it open, and we were standing in a narrow alley, the smell of garbage wafting up into my nose. Across from us was the employee parking garage.
The alley was empty except for a couple of men working on repairing a sign in front of the hospital’s child care center, which was a few feet down.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you see anyone leave here in the last hour?”
The man frowned, wiping his hands on his pants. “Yeah. Lots of people. Nurses and doctors and stuff.”
“How about a man, not in uniform? He was with a woman. He might have been carrying her, and she may have seemed drowsy or been asleep.”
“Ooh. Freaky. Naw, I didn’t see nothing like that.”
“I saw something,” the other man said. “I saw them. I thought it was weird, but you know, I didn’t want to get involved.”
“Where did they go?”
“They got into a car,” he said.
“Did you happen to see what the car looked like? Or get the license plate?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, and I wrote it down.” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t see nothing like that. It was black, but that’s about all I saw.”
I called Gayla to tell her that I was on my way, and moments later, I pulled off of hospital property. The events of the past few hours were making my head pound, and the only good news was that I was not making them up. I wasn’t the only one who knew what kind of shit storm we were in.
I’d heard it in Gayla’s voice as we hung up. She sounded scared, even defeated.
I had a feeling we were both asking ourselves the same question: How could we have missed this?
How had we looked both of those people in the eye and not questioned if they were who they said they were? We’d questioned everything else—why they were there, what had happened to them, and how it happened.
But never who they were.
I got off the highway and followed Gayla’s directions to the scene. We were about seven miles away from where the blond woman had been picked up by the cabdriver. Not an impossible walk, but in her state, hard to imagine.
There was a clustering of police cars, fire trucks, and emergency vehicles gathered. I parked on the outskirts of the crowd and made my way to the center, my gaze darting about for Gayla.
I spotted her, talking to Derrick King. She saw me and waved, eyebrows raised.
I shook my head. “No sign of them,” I said softly as I walked up.
“You’re kidding me!” she said with a hiss. “They got away? Who… How—”
“It looks like he drugged her, and they left out an employee exit.”
“He being Dan Lindsey?”
I didn’t say anything, and she closed her eyes. “That wasn’t Dan Lindsey, was it? Of course it wasn’t. What the hell is going on?”
I looked over at the figure lying at the base of a tree. I took a few steps closer. The body seemed small from this angle, almost doll-like. The real Emily Lindsey was lying on her back in a pile of leaves, her torso bloodied, her insides showing through the stabs and slits in her shirt. Her eyes were closed, and blood coated her cheeks almost like blush. Her hair had been dyed jet-black, made obvious by the smudges along her hairline and the dark strands clumped around her face.
As I stared at the body, I felt my vision get blurry, my arms itchy. I swallowed and turned away.
“You all right?” Gayla asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“What the hell happened to her?” she asked, staring down at Emily Lindsey’s body. “How the hell did we let this happen?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Last Day of Emily Lindsey
Saturday night—twenty-four hours left
The black actually looked really good.
That wasn’t the point, of course. She could have dyed her hair anytime she wanted to, but she never had, not once in her thirty-nine years. She’d never really thought about it, to be honest. She’d gotten in the habit of plucking the errant grays that danced along her temples. If it was true that it made them grow back twice as fast, then she’d just have to pluck more quickly.
As Emily stood in her spare bathroom and stared at her new black strands in the mirror, she couldn’t help but feel that beyond the fact that she was about to break the biggest story of her career, she looked hot.
She leaned forward and peered more closely at herself, brushing a few strands out of her face. She was distracted by a glob of black on the mirror. She’d managed to get dye everywhere, which was ridiculous, because she’d used gloves and tried to be careful as she applied the jet-black hair color kit that she’d gotten from the drugstore. Still, there were smudges on the sink and on her skin.
She wet her palm and wiped at a few, but the dye seemed only to seep further into the porcelain. Shit. Dan was going to be pissed off about it, but she didn’t have time to go find any bleach to clean it up.
She had work to do.
Emily walked back into her bedroom and picked up the clothes she’d laid out on the bed. After pulling on the oversize shirt and a pair of jeans, she grabbed her purse and raced down the stairs.
She’d never felt as passionate about a story as s
he did about this one. She’d never been much of a writer, but she had a lot of writer friends. They could take words and make them flowery, even if they didn’t have much to say. They weren’t willing to dig. They weren’t willing to expose, to tell the truth. They didn’t want to do the dirty work.
Emily could do it.
She could do it, because the internet let her. She could say anything she wanted to say. Sometimes, she stretched the truth if it meant that she was getting her point across. And they came back with anger and yelled at her, but the truth was already out there.
The power of words.
She’d never felt powerful until she’d started Carmen Street, and then she’d suddenly had people who counted on her, who trusted her. The number of emails she’d saved from people begging her not to paint them in this light or that was astounding.
But this one was going to be the story that made her career.
All she needed was for two women to talk.
She was going to see the first one tonight. Her name was Amanda, and she ran a grief support group every Saturday night at a church about an hour away from Emily’s home. Emily looked at her watch. She needed to leave in the next fifteen minutes if she was going to make it.
She walked into her office and picked up her laptop, stuffing it into its case. Armed with it and her purse, she headed out the door.
She didn’t know what to expect from Amanda. They’d talked on the phone several times, and then the woman had stopped returning her calls.
But Emily did know what to expect from the other woman.
She was going to try to meet with Matilda tomorrow, and it was imperative that nobody recognized her when she arrived. She’d been thrown out twice already, and they’d throw her out again without a second thought. The black hair, the glasses with clear lenses. She wanted to do a hat, but that seemed too suspicious. Like she was trying too hard.
Emily slipped into her car. She wasn’t really nervous. When she sat behind her computer and cranked out stories, she knew that what she was doing was important. When she was on the road like this, she felt invincible.
