Everywhere She Turns (20 page)

Bone-tired, she cleaned up the mess she’d made and tidied
the exam room while Braddock finished up with the would-be thief. She’d already taken care of the others after her final patients were out the door.

Right now she wanted to go home and collapse.

Home?

You don’t belong here no more
.

This wasn’t home. Did she even really have a home? Her apartment in Baltimore wasn’t home. It was just a place where she slept and showered.

“You okay?”

She looked up. Braddock waited at the door.

“Yeah. I’m okay.” She gestured to her throat. “It’s just a scratch.”

“But it could have been a hell of a lot worse,” he suggested.

She took a breath. He was right. “Why are you here, Braddock? Do you have news on the investigation?” His man Jenkins had been parked outside the clinic all day. Fat lot of good it had done her. But then, that wasn’t his fault; she was supposed to call if she needed help. Unsavory-looking characters had been coming in and out of the clinic all day. There was no reason for the guy who’d showed up at the door last to have been viewed any differently.

Unless Braddock had news, they had nothing else to talk about. She didn’t want to deal with him anymore, either.

“I heard a disturbing rumor.”

“What rumor?” That his broad shoulders filled the doorway so completely unsettled her somehow. Made her want to lean against that strength. No way. That wasn’t ever happening again. She was just feeling vulnerable after the incident with the addict.

Those dark eyes probed hers. She didn’t like him looking at her that way. “Say whatever you have to say, Braddock. I have to fill out an incident report and then I’m out of here.” She was tired. Tired and disgusted. Mostly with herself.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re making yourself an easy target.” He took a step into the room, planted his hands on his hips, and leveled a you’d-better-listen-
up gaze on her. “You cannot come back here and start interrogating Nash’s people. Do you want to get yourself killed?”

Oh, so that was what this was about. Word had gotten to him that she was asking questions. Well, he could get over himself. Like she’d told him, she wasn’t going to stop until Shelley’s killer was brought to justice.

“What am I doing?” She flung her arms wide, stared up at him in challenge. “Asking the questions you haven’t asked.”

Actually she had no idea what he was doing at this point, because he hadn’t told her anything about his goals or strategy for the investigation. Well, except that he would get the job done. She’d heard that from cops before. He was the last cop she would trust.

“Look,
Dr. Patterson
.” He moved in closer, putting his face right in hers. “The people you questioned today will go straight to Nash and tell him what you’re up to. They get brownie points for that sort of thing. What part of this don’t you understand? Nash is a bad guy. A pimp. A major drug dealer. I’ve watched bodies loaded into the meat wagon with missing tongues. Eyes. Hearts.”

She flinched. Every word prompted images of how Nash might mutilate the women she’d questioned today.

Braddock went on, “That’s how he sets an example to the rest. I don’t want to watch your body get stuffed into a bag and then heaved onto a gurney.”

Focus. Think logically. Not emotionally
. “First . . .” She took a breath. “How do you know what I’ve discussed with my patients? Have you been sitting outside questioning them?” The idea made her want to slap his smug face. “Or did you order Jenkins to do it?” He was young, handsome. Jenkins could easily have charmed the ladies who’d been in and out of here today.

Braddock shook his head. “I didn’t have to ask. I got more than one phone call filling me in on your interrogation tactics.”

“You have informants here?” If that was the case, why didn’t he know what had happened to Shelley? Someone here had to know. Oh, wait. Of course he had sources here. That was how he’d been using Shelley.

“That’s right, CJ.” He stepped back, took a breath. “I actually do my job. I’ve spent two years developing informants in the village.”

“Then what’s the holdup? One of them surely knows who killed my sister?”

“I wish it was that simple.” He held up a hand when she would have launched her next tirade. “It’s very possible that one or more knows exactly what happened. But they’re afraid to talk. This is the kind of thing that could get them killed.”

“You mean the way it got Shelley killed?”

Braddock turned away from her. He ran his fingers through his hair. She recognized what he was doing: working to temper his anger and come up with the right thing to say to get her off his back.

Not going to happen
.

Finally he settled his gaze on hers once more. “What’s it going to take to get you to trust me?”

She laughed. Couldn’t help herself. “I’m never going to trust you again, Braddock. All I want from you is for you to find the person who murdered my sister.”

His expression shifted from frustrated to grim. “What did you learn today?” He set that dark gaze on hers. “Quid pro quo, Doc.”

She hated when he called her that. The last couple of times she’d come home—after their fledgling relationship was over—he’d called her that just to make her crazy. Mainly because she knew he meant it disrespectfully. “That Tyrone Nash mentally abuses the women who work for him, and when that doesn’t work anymore, he kills them.”

“That’s right,” Braddock agreed. “But we don’t have any evidence linking him to a single murder. So we wait, we watch, we question, until we find the link we need.”

She shook her head. “Tyrone is not that smart. There has to be something you’re missing,
Detective
.”

“Six,” he said.

“Six what?” He wasn’t making sense.

“That’s how many bodies of young women have been found in the past two years. Each one died a brutal death, but their
bodies weren’t found for weeks or months after the murder. Three were found in water, two were burned, one was immersed in a fifty-gallon drum of diesel fuel. Whatever evidence might have been left on or in the body was long gone or too contaminated to utilize.”

“But Shelley’s body was found within hours of her murder,” CJ countered. “And she wasn’t burned or submerged in anything. She was right out in the open.” How could Braddock not see this? “Killing someone and dumping the body in such a way that the evidence was destroyed is one thing. But Tyrone couldn’t possibly have carried out such a flawless plan when he murdered Shelley, leaving her body . . . the entire crime scene right out in the open.” CJ folded her arms over her chest. “You have to be missing something.”

“That’s right. He took extra precautions with her.”

“You can’t be sure it’s him,” she argued. Not that she didn’t want to see Tyrone in prison, but focusing on him alone meant Braddock wasn’t looking seriously at anyone else. Including Ricky Banks. “Excuse me.” She pushed past him to get out the door and strode to the office.

CJ had no idea where the incident report forms would be. She’d just have to prowl around.

Braddock followed. Leaned against the door frame. “Evidence or no, there were other similarities to what we believe is Nash’s MO.”

A frown nagged at her forehead as she perused Lusk’s files. He’d told her about the E. Noon thing, but was there more? “What similarities?”

Her fingers stilled on the folders. She turned to face Braddock. The air evacuated her lungs.

Then she knew.

Missing tongues. Eyes. Hearts
.

“You didn’t tell me everything about the circumstances of Shelley’s death.” Her knees tried to buckle; she locked them, told herself to breathe. She had known he was keeping some parts of Shelley’s death from her. She’d had that feeling all along.

“There was no reason to tell you,” he said quietly. He held
up a hand when she would have debated his statement. “We keep some elements quiet . . . for confirming leads or confessions. Telling anyone at all could interfere with the investigation.”

Fury jolted through her. “Tell me all of it.”

“There were dozens—forty, to be exact—hypodermic needles sticking in her body. As if the killer had been decorating her with her most well-known vice.”

CJ sat down, almost missing the chair. The visuals his words prompted had bile burning at the back of her throat.

“The perp stitched . . .” He closed his eyes a moment before meeting hers once more. “He stitched up the opening to her vaginal canal. And removed her clitoris.”

She wouldn’t make it to the toilet. CJ lunged toward the trash can sitting next to the wall.

She heaved. She cried. Her body convulsed with the agony throttling through her.

Please, God, please let those horrific things have been done postmortem
.

As a doctor, she was all too aware of how the human body reacted to fear . . . to pain.
Please, please, don’t let Shelley have gone through that with her dying breath
.

Braddock thrust a damp paper towel in front of her. CJ accepted it. Wiped her eyes, then her mouth. She settled her bottom on the floor. “I need to know if those . . . things were done after she was . . . dead.”

“I can’t confirm the answer to that question until after the autopsy. I’m hoping that’s the case.”

She glared at him. “What was the fucking medical examiner’s preliminary conclusion?” If he told her he didn’t know, she was going to scream.

“Postmortem.”

“Thank God.” Sobs tore at CJ’s chest.

Braddock joined her on the floor, leaned against the wall. “There are elements that point to Nash, but there’s also a sophistication that almost rules him out. As you pointed out, this was a savvy set-up. Nothing left to chance. Not a single piece of evidence left behind except the carving on the tree limb.”

Maybe it was the shock of hearing this news or just the fact
that they were both sitting on the floor with the trash can she’d puked in standing between them, but CJ looked at the man, really looked, for the first time in months.

He’d turned thirty-five this year. Dark hair and eyes. Classic square jaw. Good nose. The kind that never needed to be touched with a scalpel. He was a well-dressed, good-looking man whose eyes were warm and compassionate.

Maybe he really was trying to find Shelley’s killer. Maybe he really did care about the people here. And maybe she was a little crazy.

She didn’t like noticing anything nice or good about him.

But then, she was in shock at the moment. Her brain was on autopilot. She felt numb and somehow drunk at the same time. She recognized the symptoms. If she stood up, she would likely pass out.

She would just sit here for a bit.

“I tell you what, CJ.” He looked directly at her, let her see how serious he was. “If you promise to go home and stay out of trouble tonight, you, my partner, and I will have a conference tomorrow. We’ll go over everything we’ve got. Check in with the ME and see if they’ve been able to move up the autopsy. We’ll talk it all out.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to the offer. Was he trying to get her to agree to something? It sounded exactly like the way oncologists delivered the prognosis to the patient right before they explained the treatment. Ultimately it meant the patient would live, but quality of life would suck.

“We’ll keep you informed of every step of this investigation. You’ll be sick of hearing from me before it’s over.”

Now came the
but
.

“All I ask in return is that you lay low for now. Stop asking questions and digging around. I don’t think your sister would want you to get hurt . . . not even to bring her killer to justice.”

Shelley had trusted Braddock. That may very well have been the primary contributing factor in her death, but the fact remained: She’d trusted this man.

At one time CJ had as well. Before he’d betrayed her trust on the most primal level.

Still, she had two choices.

She could get herself into the kind of trouble she might not be able to talk her way out of.
Her throat burned where the knife had ripped at her flesh
.

Or trust this man to do his job.

1407 Dubose Street, 11:40
PM

Tyrone looked out over his village. It was quiet tonight. That was the way he liked it. His people doing their thing. No interference from the po-po. Something to be said for free enterprise.

Fury tightened in his gut when he thought of that doctor bitch having the nerve to move back into his village. Banks better get that taken care of fast or Tyrone was gonna end this shit. He did not tolerate disrespect. CJ Patterson was disrespecting him big-time, coming into his territory acting like she was all that. Like she was better than him.

Maybe he should remind her that she still had it coming for the last time she’d gotten in his way.

He touched the scar on his cheek, the one that reminded him just how fucking annoying that bitch could be. Yeah. They had a history. One he’d bet his sweet black ass she wouldn’t want to repeat. She’d gotten in that one swipe, but he’d put the fear of God in her tight white ass.