The Girl With No Name

Chapter Sixty-Five

The Patio Motel lay just off the interstate on a weed-infested asphalt slab. The motel’s two floors boasted sixteen rooms in total—eight on each floor. Some of the doors still had their metal silver numbers nailed in the center of the bad green paint job. Others had long ago lost their numbers. It looked like the motel staff had simply scribbled the numbers onto the doors with a thick black sharpie. Parking spaces lined up in front of the two-story eyesore. A few older-model cars filled in about half the spaces. An empty in-ground pool sat between the parking lot and the motel office. Half of it was filled with trash. In the other half, someone had started a garden—dropping in some dirt and planting a few scraggly looking flowers.

Josie and Noah arrived with both state troopers and sheriff’s deputies in tow. Josie waited at the car as Noah jogged over to the office. The place was like a ghost town, but Josie knew that no one who frequented the Patio would show their faces to a parking lot full of cops. While she waited for Noah, she popped her trunk and pulled out her bulletproof vest, strapping it on. Her body felt sore from her tumble down the embankment and then her bumpy ride back up. She had no doubt when she finally got a shower, her body would be covered in bruises. The troopers and deputies followed suit. Soon they were armed and amassed in the parking lot, ready to breach some doors.

Noah emerged from the office, holding up four fingers as he trotted over. “Manager recognized Leonard Nance from his driver’s license photo. Says a few days ago, Nance rented a room for the week, paid cash, double the rate for privacy.”

“How’d you get the manager to talk?” Josie asked.

“I told him the faster he told me what I needed to know, the faster we’d get out of his hair. He doesn’t like the police presence.” Noah grinned, and in his hand a key appeared.

Josie smiled. Her first genuine smile of the day. “Let’s go,” she said.

In front of Room 4, Josie and Noah lined up with two state troopers across from them, guns drawn, prepared to breach the door. The sheriff’s deputies were covering the back of the building. Ignoring the frenzied beat of her heart and the tightness in her shoulders, Josie used her bandaged hand to slide the key into the lock and turn the doorknob. Once the lock disengaged, the four of them moved through the door, sweeping the room and shouting “Police!”

It was empty.

The room was small and stunk of sweat, vomit, and excrement. A full-sized bed took up most of it, sitting across from a small dresser with a television on top of it. Images from a sitcom played on mute. The bed had been stripped down to its sheets, the gaudy green and pink comforter bunched up at the foot of it. There were drops of blood scattered over the sheet and what looked like a vomit stain on one side. On the nightstand next to a lamp was a brown prescription bottle and three empty baby bottles with what looked like remnants of formula congealing in their bases. Wedged between the window and the bed was a threadbare mustard-yellow armchair. A sheet was bunched up on its seat. On the floor in front of it was a rectangular blue laundry basket. In the bottom of it someone had stuffed a pillow.

“That’s where they were keeping the baby,” Josie said.

“Jesus,” Noah said. He held a hand over his nose.

“Dirty diapers in the bathroom,” called out one of the troopers.

As Josie maneuvered around the bed, her foot caught on something sticking out from beneath. She dropped to her knees and peered underneath. A lump formed in her throat. There sat a white sneaker with a blue Nike swoosh on its side. Luke’s other sneaker. She stood back up, feeling dizzy and fighting tears. “They were here,” she said. “Dammit. They were here.”

Noah had put on a pair of latex gloves. He held up the prescription bottle. “It’s from a pharmacy in New York City. Oxycodone for a Marie Muir.”

“Marie,” Josie said. “Rowland’s housekeeper.”

“Not a housekeeper,” Noah said. “A babysitter.”

“Chief Quinn,” came a shout from outside. One of the sheriff’s deputies.

Josie ran outside to see one of the deputies several doors down where a small alley led to the rear of the hotel. He waved her over and she followed him behind the motel. It was more cracked asphalt littered with trash, weeds, broken glass and needles. A grime-covered green dumpster sat along a chain link fence. Beyond that was a barren strip of land that stretched a quarter mile before it terminated at the concrete barrier blocks that separated the land behind the motel from the eastbound lanes of the interstate. Beyond those were the westbound lanes. Tractor trailers and cars zoomed past in both directions. The wind whipped Josie’s hair.

“There’s someone out there,” the deputy said. He pointed beyond the fence to the highway. “Westbound.” Sure enough, in the center of the lanes of the westbound interstate, a figure loped along, half-limping, half-running. He held his hands to his chest as he moved. Horns blared as car after car narrowly avoided him. He was too far away to see clearly, and his back was to them, but Josie would know the shape of his body anywhere. For a second, she couldn’t catch her breath. She tried to say “Luke,” but her throat didn’t work.

“He probably climbed through that hole in the fence right there,” the deputy was saying. “Gonna get himself killed.” On his shoulder, a police radio squawked.

“Call in some units,” Josie said. “And get Lieutenant Fraley out here.”

She was through the hole in the fence in seconds, her feet pounding through the dirt as she ran alongside the concrete barriers. “Luke!” she screamed, but her voice was swallowed up by the noise of the vehicles thundering down the highway. He had maybe a half mile on her, and her lungs still ached from the fire. She stopped momentarily, chest heaving, and shed her bulletproof vest. Without it, she was able to move much faster. The moment there was a break in the eastbound traffic, she hopped the concrete barriers and raced across the lanes to the shoulder of the westbound lanes. As she gained on him, she saw he was running barefoot. He must have stepped in glass on his way out to the interstate because bloody footsteps trailed behind him along the white line dividing the lanes.

“Luke!” she screamed again but he didn’t hear her. He kept lurching along, oblivious to the vehicles swerving around him, their horns screeching.

Where the hell was he going?

They were coming up on an overpass that crossed the Susquehanna River. An eighteen-wheeler roared past, and the highway shook beneath her feet. Opposite Josie, Luke stumbled toward the edge of the overpass. He reached the barrier and leaned against it. She was close. She just had to cross the lanes without getting crushed by a car or truck. Josie glanced behind her and saw Noah in the distance, running along the shoulder of the eastbound lanes. When she turned back toward Luke, he was climbing onto the barrier.

“No!” she screamed. “Luke!”

He stood, wobbling, trying to balance on the edge, and glanced back at her. There was something wrong with his hands, she realized. They were both badly swollen, the skin taut, shiny and pink. Bloody welts circled his wrists. His face was bruised in various shades of blue and purple, one eye swollen nearly shut. Blood crusted along his bottom lip. Their eyes met across the highway.

Josie yelled, “Don’t!”

He said something, but the sound was drowned out by the traffic passing between them. Then he turned his head back toward the river, crossed his arms over his chest and stepped off the barrier.