“You just have to show her you care for her, Matt, she just needs your time, your attention, your love,” I said, quietly.
“She’s already gone.” His voice was shaky, he bit down on his lip; probably to stop it quivering. “I told her I loved her all the time.”
I climbed slowly to my feet. “There are a hundred ways to tell someone you love them, but it’s how you show them that really matters. You better go get her back. All this.” I waved out my hands. “Can wait. The bad guys will still be there tomorrow and the next day and the next. If not these bad guys, there’s always another.”
Evil needs no encouragement, but love, I knew, needed nurturing, protecting. It’s love which gives us the strength and courage to face the darkest of days, the most heinous of people. It’s love that makes the dark days shine brighter.
He took his hat off and scratched roughly at his head, his black hair jerked up like a rooster’s crown, then he nodded and opened his car door. “Do you have any tips to help me get her back?”
“Just you, your time; show her how much you care.” A vision of Maya smiling while Matt placed a necklace around her neckhit my mind’s eye. That vision, I didn’t mind. “And maybe a necklace, for good measure. She likes gold.” I gave him a small, comforting smile.
The pain on his face dispersed, now he looked hopeful. “Don’t suppose you want to pick it for me?”
“No, it has to come from you, whatever you choose will be perfect.”
He nodded, popped his hat on his head, climbed in the car and drove off to get his wife back.
Chapter 80
Someone’s Fallen Off Their Broomstick
Darcy arrived with an excited grin about an hour later, which grew a few megawatts when he saw the phones and a laptop he’d get to hack into. Karson walked in behind him with a black backpack, throwing it on a chair.
“Did you get what you needed?” Ethan asked.
Karson nodded.
“Someone’s fallen off their broomstick,” Darcy stated, glancing at me as he moved toward the table. I laughed.
Ethan placed some blue police gloves on the dining table, which was covered in clear plastic. “Put these on, Darcy.”
Darcy pulled them on and settled himself in one of the chairs. He fit the part well. He could pull off being a forensic scientist in any laboratory.
Karson placed the laptop and five mobile phones on the table.
Darcy picked up the laptop first, he opened it and while he waited for it to whirr to life he collected a phone. He pressed the screen a few times and frowned. He looked up at Ethan. “The laptop is probably password protected, I can get into it easilyenough but the phone opens via fingerprint, I’m not going to be able to open it without wiping it.”
Karson opened the backpack and pulled something out. He tossed a plastic bag full of white, rubber-looking things on the table.
It hit me all at once. Shock and disgust seized my stomach. Startled, I staggered back.
“Oh,” I rasped, “is that a . . . thumb?”
It wasn’t just one thumb, but a jumble of them. Raw flesh hung in jagged formations from their ends. Shards of snapped bone coffined by dark red, chunky flesh. The phalanges were mannequin pale. In contrast, the fingernails housed grime, like train tracks across a desert.
Darcy opened the bag. “Interesting.”
The stench of stale sweat and rotting meat wafted out. I threw my hands up to my nose and took another step back.
Darcy pulled one thumb from the bag and studied it with all the focus of an avid stamp collector. “This one was not cut off, it’s a little too rough around the edges and the rips in the meat run up, not sideways—it was torn off in an upwards motion.”
Disgust laced with acid hit the back of my throat. With detachment Darcy pressed the thumb on the screen, it didn’t open. He grabbed the next phone, that one didn’t open either. The third phone lit up.
“Lucky they didn’t use eyeball recognition,” he chuckled.
Ethan glanced at me with an uncomfortable look, as if he were offering an apology for what I’d seen. “You might want to turn away now, Amy.”
Too late. Horror, revulsion, and mortification found a home in the base of my spine. The apology was not for what I had seen, but for what Karson pulled out of the black bag next. It was a snap lock sandwich bag that looked like a slug had spent the night wandering around in it, a shiny smear clung to the clearplastic sides. Squashed in the corner, sat a white ball, about the size of a crow’s egg. Pink wrinkled flesh hung like a mini deflated rubber hose from its end. As Karson move the bag it rolled and bobbled across, the pupil a cloudy brown, an iris painted by death seemed to stare at me like an accusing, silent victim.
