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Cyrus gave what Josie had now come to think of as his signature heavy sigh. “Miss Payne, Dermot Hadlee had a stroke last year. He’s not in very good shape. I highly doubt that he’s the person who did this.”
Josie drew up beside him. “I saw his face. I can identify him. If that’s not enough, Dermot Hadlee has a black Ford F-150 registered to him.” She rattled off the license plate number she had seen just before the crash. “On Saturday when my team executed a search warrant on his property, it was there. If you go to the farm now, you’ll find that it has significant front-end damage.”
Cyrus met her eyes. “What makes you think Dermot Hadlee is capable of driving a truck, much less running you off the road?”
“Lark told us that he can still drive.” When Cyrus didn’t respond, she added, “He’s capable of loading and pointing a shotgun at me.”
Still, Cyrus said nothing.
“I know what I saw,” Josie said. “Dermot Hadlee tried to kill us today.”
Cyrus held her gaze for several seconds. Then he said, “Fine. Let’s say he did. You’re asking me to arrest a seventy-year-old stroke victim who has more clout in this town than God. What do you think is going to happen? Honestly?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass how much clout he has,” Josie responded.
Cyrus opened his mouth to speak but Trinity cut him off. “You know, Sergeant Grey, I’ve come to Bly to do an episode of my show on the Jana Melburn case centering around the question of whether it was an accident or murder, but maybe the real story is the corruption of your department and all the other local authorities: prosecutors, judges, town council. Maybe that’s what the episode should be about. Is that what you want? Because I will have a camera crew here so fast, it will make your head spin, and I will crawl so far up your ass, the entire country will know what the inside of your colon looks like. If that doesn’t incentivize you to do your job, then I’ll place a call to my contact in the FBI’s anti-corruption unit and ask them to look into this ‘clout’ you mentioned.”
As Cyrus’s face paled, Josie tried to hide her smile.
“Let’s just take a minute, here,” he said. “I’m not suggesting we do nothing.”
“Really?” said Trinity. “Because that’s what it sounds like.”
He straightened up a little, drawing his shoulders back. “I always do my job, regardless of outside influences, and I will do it today. However, I don’t mind saying that I find it hard to believe that Dermot Hadlee ran you off the road.”
“Well, he did,” said Josie.
Cyrus reached into one of his pockets and took his phone out. “Fine. I’ll call the station and have him picked up. I will need a statement from both of you later, though.”
Trinity said, “You’ll have it, just as soon as we’re released.”
While Cyrus stepped away to make the call, Trinity turned her gaze to Josie. The fire in her eyes receded, replaced with concern. She opened her mouth to speak but a male voice from behind Josie called, “Miss Quinn? Josie Quinn?”
Josie turned to see the doctor from earlier. His smile did nothing to dispel the anxiety turning her stomach acids to molten lava. He said, “Time for those sutures.”
Trinity touched her hand. “Want me to come with you?”
Josie swallowed. She was a grown woman. She wasn’t six anymore. Hospitals weren’t scary, and Lila was dead. “No. I’ll be fine. Just, uh, find my husband, would you?”
Her feet felt heavy as she returned to her curtained-off area. The doctor was in his forties, pleasant and kind, just like the doctor had been when Josie was a kid. That doctor had known that something wasn’t right but without young Josie admitting to what Lila had done, there was little he could do. She’d taken her stitches and gone back to Lila’s house of horrors.
As he positioned all of his materials on the tray table, Josie tried to force the memory out of her mind. She’d been in the emergency room many times for various reasons since that incident. Why was this bothering her so much? Why were the memories bubbling so quickly to the surface? Why was she rattled?
The doctor snapped on gloves and produced a large needle. “I’m going to inject your scalp with this numbing medication. It’s going to burn when I do it and it will probably feel funny for a long time, but I promise it’s a whole lot better than giving you stitches without it.”
Her therapist was always telling her that she’d never truly dealt with many of the things Lila had done to her. Josie didn’t understand what Dr. Rosetti meant. Hadn’t dealt with them? She’d lived them. She’d thought about them more times than she cared to admit over the decades that had passed. Wasn’t that dealing with them?
As the needle pinched her skin and sent a searing sensation across her forehead, she was transported back in time. She was small, so small, and the medical staff had left her alone in the room with Lila.
Josie’s chin was gripped tightly in her mother’s hand, fingers squeezing against the bone and pulling at the skin around her wound. Her eyes watered with the pain. “Mo-mommy,” she gasped.
Her mother’s blue eyes were almost black with fury. When she spoke in an angry whisper, spittle sprayed across Josie’s nose. “You don’t say one fucking word, you got that?”
A gasp escaped her lips. The doctor pulled back, frowning. “Are you okay?”
She couldn’t push any words out, so she nodded. He gave her a skeptical smile but then started to prepare to stitch. “You will feel a pulling sensation,” he told her.
Suddenly she knew why she was having such a strong reaction to the situation, why her traumatic memories were flooding back so quickly and easily. Although she’d been in the ER dozens of times for dozens of reasons since Lila tried to slice her face off, she’d never experienced anything so close to what had happened that day—stitches in her face. But here she was, a grown woman, a police officer, capable, competent, strong—she had a gun for God’s sake—and the memory had stolen all the air from her lungs.Unprocessed trauma. In her mind, she could hear the words coming from Dr. Rosetti’s lips.
