Where the Blame Lies, Page 2

  In the bathroom, she stared at her face. Alcohol and self-recrimination mixed, and for the flash of a moment she was back there, in that small dingy bathroom in the house where she’d grown up, staring at her own stricken expression in the mirror above the sink while she listened to her parents’ angry yells, the inevitable crash of something breaking, her mother’s screams, the door slamming as her father left. She closed her eyes, remembering how it’d felt. Why was she thinking of that?

  Quickly, she turned on the water and scrubbed her face free of makeup, tearing off the false lashes she’d applied a few hours before, the glue leaving angry red marks on her lids.

  She climbed into bed and lay staring at the ceiling for several minutes, a lump lodged in her chest, an ache inside that she had no clue how to heal. Thankfully, sleep took hold, pulling her gently under its feathery wing.

  She woke with a scream lodged in her throat, someone’s hands around her neck. Panic shot through her body—hot, immediate—bringing her quickly out of the deep sleep she’d been in. She registered a man in a black ski mask on top of her, his hands around her neck, his weight crushing her into the mattress.

  Josie’s heart seized, horror spiking through her in pulsing waves. He made a movement with his hips and she felt his erection. Oh nonono. Her mind went numb. She was only fight now. She bucked upward with her body, flailing outward with her arms, attempting to kick but unable to with his weight on her hips.

  He laughed, a slick, oily sound filled with glee.

  OhGodohGodohGod.

  She couldn’t breathe. I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Hot tears leaked from her eyes as she writhed and twisted and fought, his hands around her neck only growing tighter as her body grew weaker, sparks bursting before her eyes as her brain struggled for oxygen. Suddenly he let go and she sucked in a huge lungful of air, surging forward, his elbow connecting with her cheekbone in a jarring thud. She opened her mouth to scream just as something sharp plunged into her thigh. He held her down easily as whatever drug he’d given her shot through her veins, making her limbs too heavy to move, her brain thick, soupy. Once more, she tried to scream, but no sound came out.

  The world went dark.

  **********

  Ping. Ping. Her eyes cracked open slowly, a groan rising to her lips. Her head throbbed and she shrank back from the small bit of light, eyes squinting. Oh God. Panic surged as she realized her arms were chained to the wall behind her. She attempted to pull loose, but the chains were heavy, unwieldy in her weakened state, bolted to the concrete with metal rings that had been drilled into the stone. She turned, breathing hard, her gaze flying around the room. Concrete floors, walls. A window high up on the wall. What was this? Some sort of warehouse room? Her head throbbed again. A man in a ski mask. He’d attacked her in bed. The prick in her thigh. And now she was here. Where is here? Hot tears slid down her cheeks as panic rose, her chest rising and falling. “Calm down,” she gasped. “Calm down, calm down, calm down.” She was going to hyperventilate if she didn’t get hold of herself. It was daylight streaming in through that high window. Morning sun.

  “Help!” she yelled as loudly as she could. And again and again and again until her voice cracked, emerging only as a broken whisper as tears continued to stream down her face. She sobbed, yanking at the chains that held her, her shoulders throbbing along with her head, wrists now stinging and abraded. She felt moisture rolling down the side of her hand. Blood.

  She collapsed back against the wall, breathing hard. In. Out. In. Out. She stared up at that small square of muted light, her lids dropping closed. The drug in her system took hold once again, and she didn’t fight it. She slept.

  The sound of footsteps woke her and she sat bolt upright, her head swimming as she listened, panicked, trying to decide whether to call out or not. A faint light shone through the window. Not the sun. A streetlamp maybe.

  Her heart thundered as a key jiggled in the lock and the door swung open. He stood in the open doorway, the man in the black ski mask. Her heart slammed against her ribs, her harsh exhales mixing with the distant dripping sound she’d heard earlier. “Hello, Josie,” he finally said, closing the door behind him and stepping into the room.

  “Please,” she whispered, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Please let me go. I’ll do anything.”

  He laughed. “Oh, I know you will.” He came closer, knelt down in front of her, his hand caressing her cheek. She shrank back, terror making her feel weak, lightheaded. He clicked his tongue. “I wish you hadn’t m-made me hit you. I didn’t want to hit you, Josie. You really look t-terrible now.”

  “How do you know my name?” She was trembling and the words came out wobbly, strangely spaced as her jaw shook.

  “I know everything about you. I’ve made it my b-business to know, Josie.” He clicked his tongue again, leaning even closer.

  “Why? Why are you doing this?” Her breath hitched on a sob and the chains clanked on the cement floor as she attempted to lift her hands but then let them drop at the reminder of the heavy chains, her bleeding wrists.

  He leaned even closer, and she could tell by the movement of his mask that he was smiling beneath it. “Because,” he said, “because you’re a whore, and you d-deserve to be treated like one.”

  His words washed over her along with his scent. It registered, memory responding. Pineapple. Coconut. Something overly sweet and tropical.

  She knew immediately who he was.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The girl—or what was left of her—lay crumpled against the wall, hands secured behind her back with a chain bolted to the concrete wall. “Jesus,” Detective Zach Copeland muttered. He squatted next to Dolores Appleton, one of the city’s criminalists, who was snapping photos of the victim from every angle, including close-ups of her hands, feet, face frozen in a silent, never-ending scream. Pressure built in Zach’s chest. This girl had suffered. Horribly.

  “Zach.”

  “Hi, Dolores. Any idea on the cause of death?”

  Dolores’s bright blue eyes met his and she shook her head, her red curls dancing. “Nothing obvious. Cathlyn will have to determine this one. But my guess?” She paused, her voice lowering with her next words. “She starved to death.” She pointed to her ribcage. “A good amount of decomposition already and rats have gotten to her, but you can tell her ribs were very pronounced even before that.”

  Zach felt his lips go thin as he took in the ravaged body under the harsh LED lights the team had strung up. Rats. Fuck. They’d been here after death, which meant they’d been here before too. Had she been left in the dark in this underground space? Had she heard them skittering around, her hands tied, trapped as they brushed past her feet? The horror of what she’d gone through pressed on his chest once more, a ten-ton brick that made his lungs ache. Death was rarely pretty, but this level of suffering, this level of depravity, made his blood run cold.

  He’d have to wait to hear Cathlyn’s determination on cause of death, but some sick fuck had chained this woman up in the rat-infested basement of an abandoned house and done God knew what to her. Then he’d possibly left her to starve to death. What terrors had she survived before her heart had ceased beating? And why?

  It was his job to provide motivation for the crimes he investigated, but deep down, there wasn’t any good answer. No reason that would help make any sense of this.

  “Sexual assault?” he asked Dolores, his tone harsher than he’d intended.

  Dolores glanced up, tweezers suspended in midair for a moment. Her eyes met his. “The body’s too decomposed for me to make a guess.”

  He moved to the side of the girl’s body and looked more closely at the chain that had bound her hands, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. This felt familiar, and for a moment he was a twenty-five-year-old rookie, standing outside a hospital room, voices drifting to him from inside—

  “Detective Copeland?” He looked over his shoulder and stood. It was the cop who’d arrived first on scene
after the anonymous tip that had called this in. He looked slightly shaken but was managing to hold it together well. Zach was impressed. The city saw plenty of shootings—mostly related to drug crimes—the occasional home invasion, lots of family trouble, but a murder like this was a rare occurrence. Then again, he suspected you could see something of this nature once a week and still never be desensitized to it. And he had to believe that was a good thing.

  “Dr. Harvey’s here.”

  He nodded, though he couldn’t remember the last time Dr. Harvey showed up at a scene—she usually waited for the body to be delivered to her—but Zach understood why she was there. Again, highly unusual crime scene. Highly disturbing. Slow footsteps sounded on the wood stairs and a few seconds later Hamilton County’s coroner entered the room, dressed in a black cocktail dress, with a red wrap draped over her shoulders. Her heels were covered in disposable booties. She’d obviously just left a social event. He walked toward her. “Doctor.”

  Her eyes moved past him to the victim momentarily. Dr. Harvey was an attractive older woman who carried an air of class. He’d seen her at a few city functions and knew it was especially true when she was in a dress and heels. But it was also the case when she was wearing her usual workday scrubs. “Detective Copeland.” She gave him a small smile that disappeared as quickly as it’d arrived. “Anonymous tip called this in?”

  He nodded as she moved past him to where the body lay. “Burner phone apparently. No way to trace it. The call came in earlier tonight, and Officers Burke and Alexander came to check it out.”

  “Identity?”

  “Not yet.” There had been nothing at the scene to provide an identity. No purse or identification. He’d start working on that right away, check missing persons reports as soon as he got back to the office. He’d find out her name. He made a silent promise to the unknown woman. It was something he could return to her when everything else had been stolen.

  Dr. Harvey greeted Dolores who was packing up her supplies and then leaned around the body, looking at it from every angle. She shook her head. “This girl experienced hell on earth,” she murmured and then emitted a quiet sigh. “I’d like to get her exam underway tonight. She’s waited long enough.” She leaned closer behind the girl, getting a look at her hands still wrapped in shackles. “You’re not alone anymore,” she said quietly, before she straightened, spearing Zach with her direct stare. He saw anger there, empathy. They were the eyes of a woman who had seen too much death where death did not belong. Too much suffering when there was no comfort to be given. “Come see me in the morning. I’ll have some answers for you.”

  **********

  Rain drummed on his windshield as he drove back to the Criminal Investigative Section (CIS) building where the city’s homicide detectives worked, the streets of Cincinnati rushing by in blurred shades of silvery gray. His mind rewound again to his very first week riding on his own after he’d been cut loose by his field training officer. He’d been assigned to guard the hospital room of a girl who’d escaped being chained in an abandoned warehouse for almost a year. Zach realized he was holding the steering wheel in a death grip and loosened his hands, taking one off the wheel and rolling his wrist, stretching his fingers. A fucking year she’d been held there, after suffering things so unthinkable that Zach still wondered how she’d survived with her sanity intact. He still thought about her sometimes at the oddest moments, and he wasn’t sure why, other than that it was the first time he’d truly understood what evil was and it had shocked him. Shocked him clear to his fucking soul. Her voice—shaking, yet clear—the trauma and . . . fierceness in her eyes. Yes, he’d seen it and been humbled by it. It had hit him straight in his gut. She’d looked like a warrior, being wheeled into that hospital. Half dead. Still fighting. Josie. Josie Stratton. Her eyes had been large and dark. Haunted. He wondered if they still were. How could they not be?

  Of course, that case had been closed, the perpetrator dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Rest in hell, motherfucker. He couldn’t help bringing it to mind though. It was the depravity, he guessed. He’d seen a lot—heard a lot from other officers too—since that day in the UC Medical Center, but nothing like the pure, unadulterated evil that had been perpetrated against Josie Stratton. Not until tonight.

  He ran a hand over his short, damp hair as he entered the building, and dried his hand on his jeans as he headed toward his desk. He heard the front door open and close and glanced back to see his partner, Jimmy Keene, lumbering in behind him. “Hey man,” he greeted.

  Jimmy took off his wet jacket and tossed it in the direction of his chair. He used a pile of fast food napkins on his desk to wipe the back of his neck and then scrubbed at his face, causing the old pockmarks covering his jowly cheeks to stand out. Sometimes Jimmy reminded him of one of those bulldogs with his drooping face and squat, muscled body. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. I was out on the boat when the call came in.”

  Zach nodded, taking his own jacket off and hanging it on the back of his desk chair. Jimmy had recently bought a small houseboat that he was in the process of fixing up. He had it parked about forty-five minutes away on a lake in Aurora, Indiana, and took every opportunity he could to drive out and work on it. It was his dream to live out his retirement on that old boat, wind in his hair, sun on his craggy face. The detective looked slow and sleepy—and that helped in throwing interviewees off sometimes—but in reality, he was as sharp as a tack. Zach respected him and enjoyed his company. He was a good partner and friend. Hell, he was a good human being.

  “Give me the lowdown,” Jimmy said as they both took seats.

  Zach blew out a breath, describing the scene to Jimmy, what Dolores had guessed at as far as cause of death.

  Jimmy whistled, shaking his head as his forehead creased. “Some evil shit.”

  “You remember the Stratton case from about eight years ago?”

  Jimmy tapped the keys on his computer, logging in, before looking up. “Girl chained in that warehouse, right?”

  Zach logged in to his own computer. “Yeah. The scene tonight made me think of that one.” Not that he’d witnessed the actual crime scene back then, just the aftermath in the hospital. Still . . .

  Jimmy’s fingers halted in their typing and he looked up again, his brow furrowing. “That crime was closed out. Bad guy caught. Neighbor or something, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m just saying tonight brought that to mind.”

  Jimmy nodded, shrugged slightly, his fingers resuming their click clicking on the keyboard. “Another sicko who likes to tie up girls. Remember the one on McMicken Avenue last year?”

  Zach did remember that one. A pimp had tied one of his working girls to the bed after smacking her around, because she’d shot that night’s profits into her veins. Sick. Sad. But . . . different. They’d both been screaming and hollering when police had arrived and ultimately, they’d had to charge her with assault too, because it had become obvious that she’d used her stiletto to go after his face before he’d thrown her down on the bed and restrained her with some rope. “Not just tie up. Chain,” Zach murmured, picturing the hooks drilled into the wall. The pre-meditation that would have taken. “Anyway, I thought we’d go back three years with the missing persons reports? Dolores estimated that the girl had been dead at least a month, plus the time it took to starve to death, but there’s no telling how long she was in that basement.” No telling how long she’d been in the clutches of a madman. Zach’s muscles tensed once again, but he cut the beginning of his wandering thoughts short. There was no point to that now. The girl—and her family, those who’d loved her—deserved definitive answers. He had a job to do.

  “Let’s split ’em up,” Jimmy said. He got up and put on a new pot of coffee, and they started going through the reports, the rain outside continuing to pound on the roof.

  The girl had had blonde hair, but Dolores had noted that it appeared to be dyed, the roots a darker shade of light to medium brown, so th
ey didn’t use hair color to narrow down the list. Wading through missing persons lists always left a feeling of depression in its wake—so many unsolved disappearances, so much heartache. He hoped to God they’d be able to give peace to at least one group of people left without closure. Once they’d finished, they were left with five names that were possibilities—female, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, medium build. It was really all they had to go on for the time being. Three of them were prostitutes, working at the time of their disappearances, one was a twenty-five-year old who worked at a bar in Hyde Park and had never returned home after a shift, and one was a single mom who’d apparently taken her child and left town after an unfavorable custody ruling. Zach put a sixth one aside even though the timing didn’t really work. The UC student had only been reported missing six weeks before, but all the other descriptors fit. He supposed until he received Cathlyn’s official report, they couldn’t be certain about the timing, so he didn’t want to dismiss this girl’s name until he knew more.

  Perhaps he’d be able to narrow down the list further after he visited Cathlyn. Or maybe it wasn’t a local missing person at all. Maybe it was a runaway from Idaho who’d made her way to Ohio where she knew someone and stumbled upon some sadistic stranger by chance instead. The job had shown him how often that could be the case. A series of choices—some bad, some good, some seemingly meaningless—could lead you places you’d never set out to go. Because everywhere, all around, other people were making choices too. Paths were crossing, separations were closing, lives were commingling. Sometimes he wondered if there was any order to it at all, or if they were all just helpless victims of happenstance.

  It was after two, and there wasn’t much more they could do until morning, so Jimmy grabbed his coat and headed back home to get some sleep. Zach took a few minutes closing down his computer and straightening his desk, hesitating, and then logging back in. It used to be that old cases were exclusively stored in boxes at CIS or by the detective who’d worked the case, but in the last ten years, they’d begun storing cases in the computer instead. He’d probably have to access both the computer and box files to get the full scope of a case from eight years ago, but for now, he’d look at what was on the computer. The eerie feeling about the similarity in the cases could be totally off-base, but it couldn’t hurt to take a peek at what was available to him at that moment before heading home to his empty apartment.