Vanishing Girls

Chapter Forty-One

The email came in while she was rooting through the mess of items under her passenger’s side seat, trying to find a charger for her phone. By the time her phone chirped, she had found several half-finished water bottles, two dollars and seventeen cents in change—which she pocketed because she needed it—three granola bar wrappers, and a shoelace. She sat back in the seat with a heavy sigh. Closing her eyes momentarily, she rested her head against the seatback. The sun had come up while she was in the restroom and now it flooded through the windows of the vehicle, chasing away the bitter cold that had invaded overnight and leaving behind a perfect, delicious coolness. For just a few seconds she pretended her life was normal again. She was still a detective with the Denton PD. Still on the payroll. Luke was still safe and unharmed. Any minute now he would call to tell her something random and flirty, and they’d agree to get together later that night. Then they’d drink wine and make love, sleep and do it over again.

But thoughts of reality came crashing through the door to her mind, making her feel queasy. Her eyes snapped open and she pulled up Ginger Blackwell’s email. There was no message. Only a PDF attachment. Josie downloaded it to her phone and pressed open when prompted. The records from Denton Memorial were voluminous. It took several minutes for the whole of the PDF to load. As she waited, she reached back down and fished beneath the passenger’s side seat. Her fingers brushed something that felt like paper. Anticipating a receipt, she pulled it out to look at it and whooped aloud when she discovered it was a five-dollar bill. At least she wouldn’t be subject to the humiliation of having to ask Carrieann for money to buy a meal. Although she supposed the hospital cafeteria would take her credit card.

Finally, the whole document was there. She wished she had her laptop. Some of the nurses’ notes were completely illegible. She scrolled through slowly and carefully as the sun rose higher in the sky, infusing more heat into the car until she had to roll her window down to breathe in the cool air. It was all there. Ginger’s version of events, disjointed though they were, shortened and abbreviated into clinical medical facts. “Pt reports memory loss secondary to sexual assault. Pt reports assault by multiple males. SANE contacted.” A SANE was a sexual assault nurse examiner, specially trained to collect evidence in a rape case and maintain a chain of custody. It was all there. Everything had been done by the book.

The police file was incomplete, but all of the evidence was there if you looked for it. Someone had made it difficult to find the complete file, but hadn’t tampered with the evidence or destroyed it. So if anyone ever cried foul, all the investigators involved could say nothing was amiss. No one would lose their jobs or go to jail over the file because they hadn’t done anything wrong.

She closed the PDF, tossed the phone onto the driver’s seat and spent five more minutes digging before she found her charger. She was just plugging it in so she could call Ginger back when she saw a couple of troopers weaving their way through the parking lot toward the hospital. They weren’t acting suspicious or threatening, but she thought of the man who had walked in on her in the ladies’ room that morning. Best not to be alone. Pocketing her phone, charger, and the five dollars she found, she headed back toward the hospital.