“See you soon, Elena,” Melina said.
As she moved closer to the door, Ramsey ducked out of the room and waited for her in the hallway.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’ll be better when I get my hands on BB and Sonny.” She lived for the moment when she could lock handcuffs around the wrists of scumbags like them.
Melina strode to the floor’s station and asked for Elena’s doctor to be paged. She and Ramsey waited less than a minute before a woman dressed in scrubs appeared. In her early thirties, she wore her blond hair in a french braid that accentuated a strong jaw. Wire-rimmed glasses magnified green eyes reflecting annoyance and fatigue.
The doctor crossed to Melina and Ramsey. “I’m Dr. Savannah Lawrence. I’m Elena’s doctor.”
Ramsey extended his hand and introduced himself. Melina followed suit. “Can you give us an update on the girl’s health?” he asked.
“She sustained a contusion on her chest, but it was likely caused by the seat belt at the time of impact. MRI showed no head or back injuries.”
“What about signs of sexual assault?” Melina asked.
Anger climbed up Dr. Lawrence’s face, bringing color to an otherwise pale complexion. “I did examine her. From what I can see, she’s never been sexually active.”
She hoped the doctor’s assessment was totally correct, and they had gotten to the girl in time.
“The police forensic technician came by earlier and took her fingerprints. Do you know more about the girl’s identity?” Dr. Lawrence asked.
“The prints are still being processed,” Ramsey said. “As soon as we do, we’ll let you know.”
Dr. Lawrence shook her head. “She’s a sweet kid.”
“At that age, they all are, or would be if they had a decent parent or guardian.” Melina recalled her mother’s stories about how she had been holy hell in the months after her adoption. It was as if she had been testing her parents’ promise to raise her.
“I can keep her here a couple more days, but the hospital will discharge her once she’s medically cleared. They’ll need the bed. I’ve already placed a call to social services.”
“Understood.” Melina handed Dr. Lawrence a business card. “But do me a favor and don’t move the girl without calling me first.”
The doctor read the card and carefully tucked it in her breast pocket. “Of course.”
It was not lost on Melina that Elena’s story was so similar to her own. She acknowledged her instant dislike of BB and would find a way to lock it away. When the time came to interview BB, she needed to maintain distance and perspective. Her emotions could play no role in the interrogation.
After the doctor left, Melina and Ramsey walked to the elevators. He reached for his phone. “I’ll text the FBI office and see if we can find the address the child gave us. I’ll also have them search for the child’s birth certificate and the mother’s death certificate. We might get lucky.”
Melina glanced at her wrist and remembered she’d left her watch with Elena. She fished out her phone and checked the time. “It’s almost six thirty. The car BB was driving will be towed to the TBI forensic bay this evening and gone over tonight, but I’m not expecting much of a preliminary report until at least tomorrow morning.”
“The prints from the severed fingers should be processed fairly quickly,” Ramsey said, “but may take a little longer.”
The medical examiner would feed the usable prints into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. From there they would be cross-checked against a database containing millions of prints in a matter of hours.
“I have a couple of hours of daylight, so I’m headed back to the crash site to start knocking on doors. I’ll also call Sarah and see if any of the girls on the street have any news about our guy.”
“Understood. When I have an ID on the victims, I’ll contact you,” Ramsey said.
“Thanks.” Absently, she rubbed her bare wrist adorned only by the faint tan line left by her watch.
No time for a quick session at the gym tonight, which was too bad. Nothing like driving a roundhouse kick into a punching bag to work shit out.
“Why’d you give your watch to that child?” Ramsey asked. “It looked expensive.”
Her mother normally would not have been thrilled to know she had handed off her college graduation present. But given the circumstances, she’d understand. “Trust always comes with a risk.”
A ghost of a smile tipped the edges of his lips, but it looked rusty. The deep lines around his mouth and the crow’s-feet feathering from the corners of his eyes suggested frowning was his default expression. “You don’t strike me as the trusting soul.”
That coaxed the day’s first and likely only real smile. “Oh, I’m not. I’d hate to lose that watch, but in the big picture, it’s a small risk.”
CHAPTER NINE
Monday, August 24, 7:00 p.m.
By the time Melina left the hospital, her stomach was grumbling, and she was craving a burger and fries. Some cops drank when they were stressed. Others smoked. Some worked out. Breaking a sweat did wonders for her, and it was her go-to vice. But when she could not work out, she ate. Thankfully, her fast metabolism burned through the high-fat calories found in a cop’s standard takeout meal. Her metabolism still worried her mother, who warned Melina that one day she would not be able to wolf down a second burger or have a late-night bowl of ice cream.
Today it was a burger, fries, and a vanilla shake from a drive-through. She flattened the burger’s wrapper in her lap, balancing the burger between her thighs as she drove to the crash site. She alternated sips of the shake with bites of burger without a second thought. Fifty percent of her intake was consumed on the go. A meal at a table with no interruptions was a thing to be cherished. At least this grub was warm and did not come from a vending machine.
She had polished off the burger and sucked on the straw—always important to end the meal on a sweet note—as she pulled onto the correct side of Cox Road.
Ramsey had made a wrong turn and ended up on the other side. Had BB done the same, but was traveling too fast?
She drove to the crash site. The car had been towed away, and all that remained were the red flares that had burned down to black ash. She shut off the car and stepped outside.
The air was thick with a coiling humidity, and the evening sun still tipped the mercury well over ninety degrees. The summer heat in Nashville could be brutal. Most visitors pictured the cooler temperatures of the Smoky Mountains, which were a couple of hours east.
She shrugged off her jacket and tossed it on her driver’s seat before locking the car door. The fresh strand of yellow crime scene tape stood still in the motionless air.
She ducked under the tape and looked again for skid marks. There appeared to be none. BB had been rushing. Maybe worried about her encounter with Sonny? Had she been talking on the phone? Yelling at Elena? Distracted by the jar in the trunk? Whatever was going through her mind, she had not seen what was coming.
She reached the edge of the woods and looked back. Twenty feet away she spotted very faint tire marks. Melina walked heel to toe along the length of the faint skid mark. Less than ten feet long. This had not been a frantic stop.
She studied the distance to the woods. It was maybe twenty feet. There were equations that could determine how fast the car had been traveling based on the distance and the damage to the car.
Mr. Brewer, her ninth-grade math teacher, had always warned her that there were real-world applications for algebra and geometry. His terse you-will-be-sorry lectures had not motivated her beyond a B minus, but now she might concede she owed the guy an apology.
She got in her car, pulled around, and nosed the front of her car toward the marks. Guessing that BB might have been rushing, she punched the gas until her speed reached forty miles an hour. When she reached the existing tire marks, she hit her brakes, stopped.
She parked her car on the side of the road, got out, and walked to the tire impression she had made. Next, she studied the tread left presumably by BB. They were almost identical, suggesting BB had been traveling at about forty miles an hour. It was not an excessive amount of speed, and she had stopped well short of the woods. There was no way she could not have seen the dead end.
Maybe she had been spooked. Maybe she was being followed and knew she could not turn back. Cornered, she had chanced driving through the woods, never expecting the tree trunk.
She looked down the tree-lined street to the houses. Had BB been visiting someone on the street?
She walked to the end of the skid marks and nudged the burned-out police flare with the tip of her boot. She followed the tire marks off the road into tall grass and surrounding stumps. From the road, she could understand why someone desperate to get away would try to cross it when the other side was visible one hundred feet away.
Pushing through waist-high grass and scrub, she followed the tent markers left by the forensic tech and trailing BB’s escape. Sweat collected between her breasts and shoulder blades. She shoved up her sleeves and kept walking.
It took almost a minute before she reached the final yellow marker. She found herself standing on the cul-de-sac where Ramsey had dead-ended earlier. This street, like the one on the other side, cut through a middle-class neighborhood made up of small clapboard homes.