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“I think these are bootprints,” I announce, beckoning the men over. “Someone came this way recently. They walked along the edge of the water, probably thinking they wouldn’t be noticeable, but they sank deep and the prints are stillhere.”
“So he came this way,” Garrisonsays.
“Maybe,” I say. “We can’t know for sure, but it’s something tonote.”
I straighten from my examination of the prints as Garrison gets a message through his radio. He mutters something into it and then looks between Sam and me.
“Most of the parents have gotten to the station and are getting angry that their children are being held,” he tells us. “If we’re going to question any of them, we need to get there before they just take them andleave.”
I nod. “Let’sgo.”
Sam and I follow Garrison toward the station, but as we arrive in the parking lot, the detective approaches with a fervent expression on hisface.
“Lisa is awake,” he tells me. “The doctors say she’s stable and can talk. Her parents are withher.”
“I’ll go there,” I say. I look at Sam. “You’re stayinghere?”
“Yes. I’ll help Garrison with everybody here. It’s going to take a team effort to question all of thesurvivors.”
It’s an understatement, but I have no doubt they can handle it. Garrison’s been around for a while. It won’t be a quick process and I’m sure they won’t get the opportunity to sit down with all of them. There will be parents who don’t want to tolerate their children being kept any longer when they did nothing wrong. They’ll demand access to them and take themhome.
They are well within their legal rights to do that. Just as the detectives are in their legal rights to question them. They can’t force the survivors to stay or to talk to them. They can’t force the parents to leave them in the stark rooms suffering through the horror coursing through their thoughts.
All we can hope is that they’ll have the patience and the courage to keep them there. We need to speak with each one of them, and the sooner we can, the better. We don’t want to give the details the chance to disappear. No matter how gruesome, how fractured, how unsteady or unbelievable what they have to say sounds, we want to hear it exactly as they give it to us. It isn’t our job to try to filter what they say or smooth out the edges as they speak. We take it all and sift it out fromthere.
That’s what they will do at the station, but I head immediately back to the car and make my way to the hospital. I’ve never been to Cherry Hill, so I don’t know exactly where I’m going when I get out of the parking lot. Garrison gave me basic directions to find my way and I rely on signs and sheer will to get to the teenager lying in a bed in that hospital before the offer to speak with her is revoked to get there.
When I walk through the doors it’s with my shield in my hand and my shirt tucked in to show the gun strapped to my hip. I don’t have time to be gentle in my approach. I need them to bring me to Lisa’s roomimmediately.
The nurse behind the desk looks up at me when I approach with my shield already held out toward her.
“My name is Agent Emma Griffin. I’m with the FBI. I’m here to speak withLisa.”
I realize as I say it that I don’t know her last name. It’s a small hospital, but chances are there are several people with that name here right now. But the nurse doesn’t flinch. She looks at me like she’s been expecting me.
“A Detective Garrison said you would be coming,” she says. “I’ll bring you to herroom.”
“Thankyou.”
We head down a hallway and into a stairwell that winds up two floors before we go into anotherward.
Before we enter the room, she stops me. “I’ll ask you to please be gentle with her. That child has been through enough already,” shesays.
I don’t have a response for her. I have no reason to be anything but gentle in my questioning, as far as I know. And if that changes, the way I’m speaking with her will be the least of her concerns. But for now, I’m going into the room with the understanding that Lisa holds a key to the night of horror that just unfolded. She can tell us more than anyone else and all I want from her is the fulltruth.
But I know the nurse is just looking out for her patient. She’s doing her job. The problem is, I have to domine.
Ifind out Lisa’s last name is Clayborne when her parents introduce themselves to me. Karen and Donny. Names too cute and upbeat to match with the sullen, gray faces of the people who don’t even hold out their hands to greet me when I walk into the room. I don’t mind. They are both occupied holding one hand on either side of their daughter’s bed.
A lot of seventeen-year-olds would recoil from that much contact with their parents. Especially both of them. They are too determined to be independent and grown up, to show they don’t really need anyone to help them and definitely not to tell them what to do.
But that disappears when something so cataclysmic happens. It reminds them that they are still children. And it doesn’t stop at the threshold of eighteen. Something like this can make anyone remember no matter how old they are, they are their parents’ children. They revert to needing their touch to make them feel like they can keep going.
That’s where Lisa is now. She grips each of her parents’ hands hard like they are reminding her that she’s in this moment. She doesn’t want them to leave her side or to let anyone get too close. I stop at the end of the bed so she can see me fully and there’s a barrier between us. It doesn’t matter that I pose no threat to her. Just another person being in the same space as her could be overwhelming.
Time has ticked by enough to put us at a point in the morning where if she were still at camp, she would have been jostled awake by reveille and then made her way to the dining hall for breakfast. But she looks tired and hollow. She’s in a sitting position, but it looks like she’s completely propped up by pillows and the head of the bed. It’s like she can’t hold herself up. She’s just there. I wonder if it’s medication the doctors have given her or if she has just been completely drained of her emotion andenergy.
“Hi, Lisa,” I say. “I’m Emma Griffin. I’m from the FBI. I’m helping with theinvestigation.”
