by Lisa Regan
They pulled over and two paramedics jumped out. Josie gave them a rundown of what had just transpired while they worked on mother and baby, loading them quickly into the ambulance and speeding away.
Noah stood on the side of the road, arms at his sides. The rain fell in torrents, soaking him completely. But he remained unmoving, staring at the back of the ambulance as it receded from sight.
Josie slammed the hatchback closed, leaving the mess inside. She couldn’t worry about that now. “Let’s go,” she told Noah.
He didn’t move, didn’t even look at her.
“Noah, come on. We’ll follow them to the hospital.”
When he still didn’t move, Josie hollered. “Noah, now!”
His eyes snapped toward her. He blinked and walked slowly toward the passenger’s side of her vehicle.
Josie didn’t wait for him to buckle his seat belt before tearing away, racing after the ambulance.
Noah said, “You just delivered a baby.”
Josie said, “I know. We’ll talk about it later.”
Eleven
By the time they reached the hospital, some of Noah’s composure had returned. Josie found a parking spot in the Emergency department lot, and they got out and walked toward the entrance where the ambulance was unloading mother and baby. Noah said, “How did you do that?”
“Do what? Deliver a baby? That’s my second one. I did it once before when I was on patrol. Years ago.”
“Really?”
Josie smiled. “Yeah. It’s not ideal, but it happens.”
“How did you know what to do?”
Josie shrugged. “The first time I did it, there was a more experienced officer with me. He’s been retired for a while now, but he had done it a few times. He talked me through it. Afterward, he explained a bunch of stuff to me about childbirth. It helped that he had seven kids of his own and had attended all of their births.”
They slipped inside the hospital doors, the cold air hitting them almost like a wall, freezing them now that they were soaked all the way through. “You think that was the third camper?” Noah asked.
“I don’t know. She was nowhere near the campsite, and I’m not sure a woman that pregnant would go camping, miles from any help should she go into labor.”
“Weird though, isn’t it? We’re looking for a female we think might be wandering around in the woods and then this lady stumbles out?”
“I don’t normally believe in those kinds of coincidences,” Josie said. “But I can’t see her traveling that far from the campsite barefoot while in active labor. She came out of the woods almost ten miles from the Yateses’ campsite.”
Once past the security desk, they saw a doctor and nurse wheeling the baby down the hall in a bassinet. Noah raced over to them, flashing his badge. The nurse paused to look pointedly at the water dripping off him and pooling on the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. Over his shoulder, he said to Josie, “I’ll go with him. Make sure he’s okay.”
“I’ll see how the mom is doing,” Josie replied.
As she walked down the hall, she found an unattended linen cart. She took a moment to use a clean towel to pat herself dry as well as she could. She found a laundry bin, deposited the towel into it and moved on. She found the baby’s mother in one of the ER’s private rooms, hooked up to an IV. A nurse hung a bag of medicine while another nurse hooked several leads onto her body to measure her heart rate as well as a blood pressure cuff and a pulse ox clamp on her finger. She had regained consciousness, though her eyes were hooded and sluggish. A doctor worked between her legs. He looked over as Josie walked in. “Heard you delivered her baby in the backseat of your car.”
“The cargo area of my hatchback,” Josie corrected.
“She doesn’t have any tears. You did a good job.”
“I didn’t really do much,” Josie said. “That baby was coming with or without my help.”
The doctor laughed. “You probably saved her life—and her baby’s—it’s a good thing you were there. What do you know about this woman?”
“I know she just had a baby,” Josie said. “That’s it. We couldn’t get anything out of her at the scene. How’s she doing?”
“She had a small post-partum hemorrhage. We’re administering some medication, running some tests. She may need a transfusion, but we need more information before we do that. We’ll be admitting her.” He pointed to her feet. “She’s got some nasty lacerations on her feet.”
“I saw that,” Josie said. “She wasn’t wearing any shoes when she came out of the woods.”
“And she’s got some scarring on her wrists,” the doctor added.
Josie stepped up toward the head of the bed and looked at the woman’s wrists. Thin, silvered scars encircled them. “I didn’t notice these before,” she told the doctor. “They look old.”
A nurse on the other side of the bed squeezed the woman’s shoulder. “Miss,” she said gently. “Can you tell me your name? Miss?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t even look in the direction of the nurse. The doctor pulled a sheet up to the woman’s waist and picked up her chart from the bottom of the bed without opening it. “I need a name,” he said. “Miss? Can you tell us your name?”
Still, there was no response from her. Her eyelids fluttered. The nurse checking her vitals punched some buttons on the monitor over the bed. The woman looked over at the nurse, as if noticing her for the first time. “Help,” she croaked.
The nurse was turned away from her, but she said, “We’re helping you now, hon. Can you tell us your name?”
“Maybe we need some neurological tests,” the doctor said with a frown.
Josie remembered that the woman had responded to her and Noah in the car during the birth. But only when Josie had been looking directly at her. “No,” Josie said. “Wait a minute.”
She squeezed the woman’s hand and waited until her head turned in her direction. Josie made sure to look directly into her face when she said, “Can you hear me?”
The woman slowly shook her head.
Josie nodded. “Can you hear at all?”
A nod. “Not well,” the woman said.
“But you can read my lips,” Josie said.
Another nod. Then, “Is my baby okay?”
Josie smiled. “Yes. He’s okay. They took him to the NICU. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. My colleague is with him now.”
“A boy.”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes momentarily, and Josie waited while she took several deep breaths. Josie noted that although she clearly didn’t hear well, her voice had normal tone and inflection, and wondered when and how she had lost her hearing. When the woman opened her eyes again, they were brimming with tears.
Josie said, “My name is Josie. Detective Josie Quinn with the Denton Police Department.”
“Denton?”
“Yes,” Josie replied. “Can you tell us your name?”
“Maya Bestler,” she said.
At the foot of the bed, the doctor jotted it down.
Josie asked, “Maya, what were you doing in the woods?”
The monitor emitted a small beep. Maya said, “I was taken.”
“Taken?” Josie asked.
More beeps sounded from over the bed. “Her blood pressure is dropping,” the nurse announced. “So is her heart rate.”
Josie said, “Maya, what do you mean you were taken? Can you tell me what happened?”
But her eyes closed, her head lolling. The doctor had abandoned her chart and now pushed Josie out of the way. “I’m going to have to ask you to wait in the hallway, Detective.”
Josie didn’t argue. She backed out of the room while the doctor barked orders at the nurses. A security guard walked by, staring at her with wide eyes. She looked down at her clothes and realized that she must look like someone had dragged her behind a car for two hours. Her clothes were wet, rumpled, stained, and streaked with dirt, blood, and afterbirth. Had it really only
been a matter of hours since she and Noah argued over the toaster oven? She proceeded down the hallway to the waiting room but thought better of actually sitting in one of the chairs. Instead, she found a cove next to one of the vending machines where she wouldn’t scare anyone by sight and called the station, asking to be put through to Detective Finn Mettner’s desk.
“Mett,” she said when he answered.
“The K-9 unit has been called off because of the storm. Also, I’ve got nothing on the Yates vehicle,” he said without preamble. “I think you’d have better luck in Lenore County. They probably went into the woods from there. Those state gameland areas have parking lots for hunters, hikers, campers, and such.”
“I’ll check with Deputy Moore,” Josie said. “But listen, I’ve got something else I need you to look into for me.”
“You find the third camper?”
“No, not exactly.”
She told him what had happened on the way back to Denton. There was a long silence when she finished. Josie spoke into it. “Mett? You there?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m here. Sorry, I just—she had a baby in your car?”
“Not really the point, Mett.”
“I know, I know. Sorry.”
“Can you just look her up? She’s probably mid-twenties. I’ll interview her more extensively later when she’s stabilized, but it would help if you could get me any background you can find.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
“It’s just Josie,” she corrected but he had already disconnected.
Twelve
Noah stood outside the window of the NICU, staring at the small bassinets lined up on the other side of the glass. He looked only marginally better than Josie—not covered in quite as many fluids as she was—although the smell emanating from him was enough to make her gag. She could only imagine how badly she smelled. They would need showers before they returned to the station. She walked up beside him and followed his gaze, reading the small placards affixed to each bassinet until she found one that read: Baby Doe. Of course, they hadn’t yet gotten word that the woman’s name was Maya Bestler so they would have been referring to her as Jane Doe and her baby as Baby Doe. The staff had swaddled him in a white hospital blanket. Wires poked out from the bottom of his blanket, attached to a machine next to his bassinet. A small blue hat circled his head. Only his pink face peeked out, at peace now that he was warm and dry.
“You okay?” Josie asked Noah.
He cleared his throat. “You were amazing back there.”
“Thanks,” Josie said. “I’m just glad we were there to call 911.”
He gave her a quick glance and for a second, she thought she saw tears in his eyes. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
“What?”
“Birth. I didn’t know. When my sister had her baby, we weren’t there. We just went to see her afterward.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure you don’t get to be in the delivery room unless you were an active participant in making the baby,” Josie joked.
“You know what I mean. I’ve never seen anything like that. It was… amazing.”
Josie felt a small bud of discomfort bloom in her chest. “Uh, yeah, it was,” she said. “How is he?”
“They said he’s stable. It could be apnea of infancy or bradycardia. Or it could just be a one-off thing. No underlying condition. It’s too soon to tell. They’ve got him on a heart and lung monitor. They’ll keep him here, watch over him, run some tests.”
“That’s great,” Josie said.
“He’s cute, isn’t he?”
“He sure is,” she said. “I got the mother’s name but not much else.” She kept talking, bringing him up to speed, until she realized that he wasn’t listening. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Noah.”
He looked at her again. “Yeah?”
She started to speak but her phone buzzed. It was Mettner. She swiped “answer” as Noah went back to staring at Baby Doe. “What’ve you got, Mett?”
“You’re not gonna believe this, boss.”
“Believe what?”
“You sure this lady said her name was Maya Bestler?” Mettner asked.
“I’m sure, Mett. Just tell me.”
“Maya Bestler is a missing person.”
Josie remembered Maya’s words before her vitals had dropped: I was taken. “How long has she been missing? Where from?”
“She went missing from Lenore County two years ago. Get this. She was camping in state gameland with her boyfriend, whose name is Garrett Romney. Romney said that sometime in the evening during their second night in the woods, he blacked out. He woke up the next morning with a minor head injury, and his girlfriend was gone. That’s all I’ve got so far. I’ll dig up more, but I just thought you should know right away.”
“Yes, thank you,” Josie said. So Maya Bestler was not the third camper missing from the Yates scene, which meant another female was still out there somewhere—exposed in the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
“Where were Bestler and Romney from?” she asked.
“Doylestown,” he said.
“That’s a couple of hours away,” Josie remarked. “Not the same place the Yates couple came from. Not far from them, though.”
“Right,” Mettner agreed. “I did some quick searches. Couldn’t find any connections between Bestler and the Yates couple. But like I said, I will keep digging.”
“Great,” Josie replied. “See if you can get Bestler’s driver’s license photo and text it to me, would you?”
“Sending it over now,” he said.
“Also, see if you can find anything on where Bestler went missing as compared to where the Yates couple were found, too, would you?”
“You got it, boss.”
“One last thing, keep me up to date on the progress of the K-9 unit, okay? We’ve got to get cleaned up and then we’ll be back at this.”
“I’m on it,” Mettner promised.
She ended the call to see Noah still in place, unmoving, his eyes locked on Baby Doe. Her phone chirped with Mettner’s text message. She pulled up Maya Bestler’s driver’s license. Her hair had been darker when the photo was taken but there was no mistaking her. The woman who had given birth in the back of Josie’s vehicle was the same woman who had gone missing from a campsite two years earlier.
Josie walked back over to Noah and took one of his hands, lacing her fingers through his and tugging him toward the doorway. “Noah,” she said. “We have to go. We need to shower and eat. Then we have a lot of work to do. Come on. I’ll catch you up on what Mettner told me in the car.”
Thirteen
A hot shower never felt so good. Josie wanted to spend a half hour letting the water wash away the sweat and blood she’d been covered in so far that day, but she knew she couldn’t linger. The thought of the mysterious third camper out there in parts unknown weighed heavily on her. Was the woman sick? Dead? Or was she some kind of twisted killer?
“Your turn,” Josie told Noah as she returned to their bedroom.
Wordlessly, he stripped down and shuffled off to the bathroom. Josie watched him go, wondering if he was just as exhausted as she was or if he was still thinking about Baby Doe. Before she could go after him and ask, she heard the water turn on in the bathroom. She threw on some clean clothes and went to the kitchen, scarfing down some leftover pizza they’d ordered the night before. She checked her phone and found a missed call from Deputy Moore.
“Shit,” she mumbled, pressing the call button beside his number.
“Detective Quinn,” he answered. “I thought you might want to know that we found the Yates vehicle here in Lenore County.”
Josie felt a flicker of hope. Perhaps there would be some clue in the vehicle as to the identity of the third camper. “How far from the campsite?”
“About three and a half miles south along Route 9227. There’s a parking lot designated for people who want to use the state gameland along the road there. No way to tell how long it’s b
een there.”
“Locked?”
“Of course. It’s still storming pretty bad so we haven’t touched it.”
Josie said, “That’s fine. I’d like to send a team down there to process it if you don’t mind. For prints and DNA. As you know, we’re still trying to locate the female who was with them. If we can find anything, any clue, as to who she is, it might be crucial in finding her. Plus, we really don’t know what happened at that campsite. There’s always the outside chance that someone else was with them or encountered them at their vehicle.”
“We’ll hold off on looking inside until your evidence response team gets here.”
“Thank you,” Josie said. “I’ll call Hummel right now. Oh wait—I wanted to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“How long have you been working in Lenore County?”
“Oh, about ten years now. Why?”
“Do you remember a missing persons case about two years ago? A woman named Maya Bestler?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Young brunette woman, mid-twenties. Camping with her boyfriend. Disappeared in the night. Bestler and her boyfriend were about five miles south of the Yates site—but the cases aren’t connected.”
“How can you be so sure?” Josie asked.
“Maya Bestler’s boyfriend killed her.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Josie said. “She—”
But he cut her off. “We could never prove it, but I’m telling you, that guy—Garrett Romney is his name—is guilty as sin. Every person we talked to who knew the two of them said that he used to beat her. We contacted Doylestown police. They had a few calls to the residence for domestic abuse, but Maya would never press charges. He had a history of violence with her, and besides that, his story never made sense. He claimed he was sitting at the campfire they’d built drinking beer with Maya after a long day of hiking and the next thing he knew, it was morning and he woke up in a mud puddle with a gash on his head. He said he didn’t remember anything. Nothing at all. No struggle, no attacker. He didn’t remember fighting with her. He said his mind was a blank slate. The head wound was superficial though, not enough to knock him out. He wasn’t concussed.”
