12th of Never

Chapter 100

I MOVED BLOOD-SOAKED hair away and looked more closely at the driver’s profile—and for a moment, I thought I had lost my mind.

Just then, Conklin joined me beside the car. He said, “Did the driver make it?” He looked at the shock on my face, then dropped his gaze to the steering wheel. His eyes got huge when he saw her.

“No, no,” he said. “This can’t be.”

Conklin jerked around, cupped his hands, and yelled at every uniform within earshot. “Get her out. Get this woman the hell out of this car.”

A rescue worker brought over a hydraulic ram, and bam—the dashboard was pushed back and Mackie Morales was unpinned. Two men extricated her carefully from the vehicle, lifted her onto a stretcher, and fitted an oxygen mask to her face.

She’d been beaten up by the collision and looked like she was barely holding on to life.

I said to Conklin, “The child in the backseat. Could he be hers?”

“She has a three-year-old. Benjamin. He’s alive?”

I told Conklin what I knew. My partner looked scared and confused, and he hovered around the stretcher as paramedics strapped Morales down.

“Mackie. Mackie. It’s Rich.”

She didn’t move or acknowledge him.

Conklin spoke urgently to the EMT. “Her name is MacKenzie Morales. She works in Homicide, Southern District. How bad are her injuries? Is she going to make it?”

“Go with her,” I said to my partner. “I’ll stay with Fish.”

Conklin didn’t argue.

He climbed into the ambulance, took a seat beside the stretcher, and was looking at Morales when the doors closed. The sirens came on, and so did the rain, precipitation ringing the lights with intermittent halos of bright, flashing red.

I watched for a moment as the ambulance headed out. I didn’t know what Conklin and Morales had together, but if anyone could find out why she had become the serial killer’s wheelman, Rich Conklin had the means and the motive to do it.