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“From the emergency room?” He wished she’d have called him. But maybe she’d needed a ride home.
“No. From the woods. I saw this mound. I dug a hole. And…I found a bone.”
Fully focused, alert, he stood up, pulled his slacks off the top of the dry-cleaning bag and, one-handedly, put them on. “A bone.”
“It’s a fragment from a human bone, Ramsey.” Her words were starting to slur and he wondered what drugs they might have given her at the hospital. “Lionel’s got a uniform team going in at first light with shovels. We don’t know yet if this one fragment is all there is.”
Pacing his bedroom, Ramsey asked, “What did you use to dig the hole to begin with?”
A bone. She’d found a bone. At the site of the coordinates she gleaned from numbers she’d found in Wakerby’s belongings. The woman was good. And far too bold and gutsy for her own good.
“My hands.”
“And you dug deep enough to find a bone?”
“I told you, I kind of lost it.”
He understood what drove her. He lived with the same forces pushing him from the inside out.
But he didn’t worry about himself.
“Could you tell anything else about the fragment? Is it an arm or leg bone? What about the age of the victim?”
“We don’t know anything yet and I’m not jumping to any conclusions. Lionel showed up with an ambulance and I had to leave the scene. He met me later, at the hospital, to tell me that he’d cordoned off the area and that the team would be there at first light.”
“Did he have anything else to say?”
“Yeah. He’s going to take my badge if I ever do anything so harebrained again. And he told me I’d done good work.” She still sounded like she was talking around something, but her voice was gaining momentum. And just a bit of humor.
He sat down on the side of the bed. “How do you feel?”
“Kind of numb. Like I’m outside myself looking in.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Stiff, but no. They got some kind of painkiller into my IV before I could tell them I didn’t want any.”
“Do you have more with you?”
“Yes, but I’m not taking it. I’d rather hurt than have my head feel like fog. Pain, I can deal with.”
The fog took away a measure of her control. Her power. He understood that, too.
“Are you there alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Has anyone called your mother?”
“No. And I’m not going to tell her what happened, either.”
“You’ve got stitches in your chin,” he reminded her. He’d like to see her for himself. To be there just for the rest of the night.
“They’re underneath my chin. I’d have to lift my head for her to see them. Besides, they’re coming out in four days, she doesn’t expect to see me until Thanksgiving day. She knows I’m on shift all week so that I can spend Thursday with her. If the bruising isn’t better, I’ll wear lots of makeup.”
“You’ve got that well thought-out.”
“It’s second nature,” she said, and took a deep breath.
