“You stopped screaming.” He seemed disappointed. “Haven’t given up already, have you?”
Not even close. “You lived in California.” Adam had told her that…before.
Before he’d drugged her and dragged her out of the hospital and into the back of his ambulance. Preston will realize I’m gone. He will track me.
Was she still wearing her necklace? Her head craned as she tried to glance down. All she could feel were the straps biting into her body. She had no idea if she still wore her necklace or not. Can’t see it. Can’t feel it.
“Yeah. I lived in California. Born and raised. Grew up there.” Mocking laughter. “Killed there.”
He liked to talk. Obviously. So he could keep talking and maybe…maybe she could reach something to use while he was busy talking and driving. Because he was calling to her from the front of the ambulance. She was the only one in the back. Unfortunately, all her frantic gaze could see were bandages. Cardiac monitors. Trauma supplies.
Maybe I can slam a defibrillator into the side of his head. If she could reach it. A feat that seemed impossible. “You…drugged me.” Her voice came out raspy, and a few dark spots wanted to keep dancing near her eyes.
“Oh, yeah. I drug people all the time. Got plenty of access to all the drugs I need. A perk of the job. You wear an EMT uniform, and you can go in and out of any doctor’s office you want. Any hospital.” Another laugh. “Any psychiatric facility.”
Her gaze froze on the big, red bag attached to the left side of the ambulance. Psychiatric facility. That had been a very deliberate response. “No,” she whispered. Then, louder, “Mary Jean?”
“She didn’t leave me at a fire station. She just dumped me in a hospital parking lot and ran away. You would have thought that, after she knew what my father was, she’d steer clear of him. Certainly not have a second kid with him, but, hey, who knows what went through her head? Maybe she thought that he could be fixed.” Mocking laughter.
There had been no record of Mary Jean having another baby. None. But…
She was in and out of drug treatment facilities for years. She lived on the streets. She bounced around—she wouldn’t have received normal medical care. She could have easily had another child that she told no one about.
A child she gave up…A child who’d found her.
“My dad didn’t need fixing, though. He was perfect as he was.” Pride.
No, no, no.
“I don’t look like him. Think that always bothered him. Used to say—used to say that he wasn’t even sure I was his. That he thought that bitch Mary Jean had been with other men before he got to her again.”
A stethoscope dropped from a hook and fell to the bottom of the ambulance. Not like that was going to do her any good.
“I was in my fourth foster home when he found me. He took me out of that place. Grabbed me in the middle of the night. After that, I stayed with him. He needed me, you know? Not like the work he did was a one-person job.”
Her heart squeezed in her chest. She’d always thought it had to be hard for one person to take a victim, to bury the person—to do all that work alone. “How old were you?” Sad. “The first time he made you help him kill someone?”
Silence from the front. Followed by an eruption. “Don’t you pity me!”
But she did. Even knowing what he’d done?—
“I wanted to help him!” Guttural. “I liked it when they went in the ground. They were weak. We were strong! I liked?—”
“How old were you?” Sloane repeated. There were no items she could use as a weapon in the back of the ambulance. Of course, there weren’t. Not like EMTs wanted frenzied patients to be able to attack them.
“Seven.”
Her eyes closed. You were seven when you had to help your father kill?
“He needed me! He’d even use me to help lure some of his targets. They came right up to a lost kid.”
Yes, she bet they had.
“I was with him…until that last time. He locked me in a closet when he went after Preston.” Pain trembled. Seethed. “Can you believe he did that?”
Uh, yes. Considering that Mitchell Donahue had locked others in coffins.
“He…he’d lock me in there sometimes, when he had things to do. He knew I didn’t like it, but he’d do it.”
