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“No,” he snapped. “Your colleague is doing that. Stay here in case I need you again. Reach into my left-hand pocket. There’s a hospital cell phone.”

He told her which number to dial to summon the vascular surgeon on call. She held the phone to his ear for the duration of the conversation. As she ended the call, three members of the staff rushed in, all of them moving with purpose, faces stoic, attention laser focused on the situation at hand. Holmes gave orders and they complied. Josie plastered herself to the wall, observing. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gretchen just outside the curtain.

Three minutes passed like three hours. Only when the motions of the nurses and the other doctor who had joined them slowed did Josie realize the patient had been stabilized. Still astride the woman, Holmes’s body relaxed somewhat. With a long exhale, he lifted his upper body, resting on his haunches. The gurney creaked. He took a long look at the woman beneath him. Her pale skin was covered in blood spatter. Her eyelids fluttered but she seemed not to register his presence. Holmes’s mouth was set in a grim line.

“You’re all right now,” he told her. “You’ll be going into surgery soon and we’ll get you all cleaned up.”

Then he swiped a thumb across her mouth, clearing away the droplets that clung to her lips, leaving a smear along her cheek.

Thirty-Nine

Josie smoothed an antiseptic wipe over her face. It came away streaked in a dark rust color. She kept going until the entire thing was dark. Anya used her foot to nudge a small trash bin in Josie’s direction. After leaving the emergency room, Gretchen had marched her down to the basement of the hospital and straight to the morgue so she could clean up. There was always someone there and they were on good terms with Anya’s staff.

In a stroke of good luck, Anya was still there, having finished up with Kirstie West’s autopsy. She had welcomed them inside and used tweezers to pluck tiny pieces of glass from Josie’s palms before cleaning them up. There weren’t as many as Josie feared, nor were they deep. They didn’t sting as much as she expected. The patient had consented to be tested for any blood-borne pathogens but Josie couldn’t even think about that right now. She had found the wipes on one of the stainless-steel countertops and started cleaning the blood from her face, neck, and arms while Anya and Gretchen looked on.

“I can’t go home like this,” she said for the fifth time.

There was no way in hell Josie was going home looking like an extra in a B-grade horror movie. Wren was still barely speaking to her over the fire. Even though she hadn’t been in danger tonight, she couldn’t risk making things worse. At this point, she doubted Wren would believe her if she tried to explain that she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You won’t have to go home like that,” Gretchen said. “You know, there’s a private bathroom in Anya’s office. You can use that to wash up.”

“I’ve got an extra pair of scrubs you can wear,” Anya added. “You’re a little bustier than me but they should fit.”

Relief swept through Josie’s body, washing away the vestiges of the adrenaline dump caused by the arterial bleed she’d just witnessed. And bathed in. The blood on her Denton PD polo was starting to dry, making the fabric stiff and abrasive. Josie used a wipe to scrub her neck. “Thank you.” She motioned toward the exam table that held Kirstie West’s body. “Tell us what you found.”

“Don’t you want to get cleaned up first?” asked Anya.

She wasn’t quite ready to be alone in the bathroom, even for a few minutes. “No, no. Let’s talk about Kirstie West.”

Anything to distract her from the memory of Dr. Holmes straddling a young woman, looming over her, his thumb sweeping across her mouth. Had he simply been clearing away blood, or was it a taunt of some kind? Gretchen hadn’t seen it from where she’d been standing but Josie had told her about it. She couldn’t figure out if she was reacting to it so viscerally because the case was getting to her or because her gut was trying to tell her something. Her brain was muddled, the weight and stress of the past six days bearing down on her. At work and at home.

In all the time that she and Noah had desperately wished for a child, fantasized about it, ruminated over the challenges it would bring, never had it occurred to her that it would be difficult in this way. Wren had emotional armor for days and whenever she started to take it off, something would happen to make her lock it down more tightly than ever. Josie knew it was a defense mechanism. She had her own armor both at work and in her personal life. She had practically made a science out of it. It should have made it easier to penetrate Wren’s but it didn’t. If anything, she felt so inadequate that it made her want to cry.

Josie hated crying. As a rule, she tried to never do it, even though she knew that wasn’t healthy.

“You still with us?” Gretchen’s voice pierced Josie’s brain fog.

“We don’t have to do this now,” said Anya.

Josie blinked and looked at her friends. Gretchen regarded her with an arched brow and a knowing look. Their emotional makeup was so similar, it was downright bizarre. Forged in trauma, hardened by the unfairness of life, jaded by the depravity they witnessed on a regular basis but just defiant enough to give a big, fat middle finger to all of it. They also had a lot of work to do on themselves and Gretchen was way ahead of Josie, giving in to therapy in ways Josie hadn’t yet been willing.

Anya, on the other hand, looked worried. She closed the distance between them and took Josie’s wrist, pressing her two fingers against the pulse point. Likely to see if she was tachycardic.

“I’m not in shock,” Josie said. “Just thinking.”

Anya and Gretchen shared another look.

Josie managed a wan smile and extricated herself from Anya’s grip. “You don’t need to stage one of your mini interventions. I’m fine. Talk to us about Kirstie West.”

Anya pursed her lips, assessing Josie a final time before launching into her findings. “No surprises. Cause of death is ligature strangulation. No sign of sexual assault.”

“Were you able to get any tissue from under her nails?” Josie asked.

“Some.” Anya folded the sheet down to Kirstie’s shoulders. Around the deep welt circling her neck were a smattering of crescent-shaped scratches from where Kirstie had clawed at the ligature. “But given the fingernail marks you see here, it’s probably her own.”

The anger Josie had felt earlier on Sylvia’s behalf compounded as she surveyed the damage the killer had inflicted on Kirstie’s body.

“Multiple facial fractures.”