She jerked her chin toward the living room. “In there.”
Concerned she was hallucinating, he kept his voice calm. “JJ, there’s no one in there.”
“The…” Her eyes were filled with tears. “The finger,” she whispered.
Turning, he scanned the space, found what she was referring to on the short bookshelf that acted as a divider between the living room and dining area.
Sure enough, there was a severed finger—a man’s from the looks of it—lying on the open spine of a book, as though tucked there to neatly mark the page.
JJ sobbed. “I didn’t do that, Baz. I didn’t… I couldn’t… I—”
“Breathe,” he ordered, turning his attention back to her. “Whose finger is that, JJ?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t do it. I—”
“I know,” he interrupted, gripping her chin and forcing her to look up at him. “I know you didn’t. I need to know what happened.”
JJ dropped her head in her hands, sobbing softly. Baz was at a loss as to how to help her. He needed details to figure this out, to decide what the next step should be.
He gave her a minute, keeping his hand on her knee as reassurance. When she finally calmed down and lifted her head, he leaned down so they were eye level. “Tell me what happened.”
This time when she met his gaze, he saw her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed in red, and her pupils dilated. That mixed with the tears tracking down her cheeks did little to comfort him.
“I left the diner, came here,” she said in a barely there whisper. “When I got here, Dante was here.”
“He was here? In the house?”
“No. Outside.” JJ shook her head, her voice growing stronger the more she spoke. “I was on the porch about to come in when he came from the side of the house. He told me we had to hurry and get inside.” She took a deep breath, her gaze swinging to the living room then back to him. “He was paranoid. When he came in, he went through all the rooms like he thought someone was here. I made him sit down while I went to make coffee.”
Baz wanted to touch her, wanted to take her in his arms and console her, but he didn’t. Not yet. She was holding it together by a thread, and he didn’t want to fray it any more than it already was.
JJ reached up, felt the back of her head. “I remember a sharp pain. Someone must’ve hit me on the back of the head. It knocked me out.”
“Did Dante do this?” he asked, feeling rage begin to boil deep within him.
“I… I honestly don’t know.” Her gaze swung to the living room. “He wouldn’t.” When she peered back at him, her eyes were wide. “Would he?”
Since the question was rhetorical—Baz didn’t know Dante—he moved forward with his questioning. “What did he say to you?”
She took a deep breath, looked away. “That’s the thing. He didn’t tell me anything. He was only here for a few minutes. Five, maybe, before someone knocked me out.”
“Then what, JJ?”
“Then I woke up. At eight thirty.” She motioned toward her bedroom. “I was in my own bed. Covered in blood.”
Ignoring that last part, Baz tried to do the math on the timing. “You came here right from the diner?”
“Yes.”
Roughly eight thirty last night. It would’ve only taken her a few minutes to arrive, another few to get Dante into the house, to start coffee. If someone knocked her out, she should’ve come to sometime during the night, not eleven hours later.
If he had to guess, someone had drugged her after they knocked her out. And he didn’t want to think about what they might’ve done to her while she was unconscious.
“How do you feel? Do you think you were drugged?”
She shrugged. “Besides the headache, physically, I feel okay.” Her gaze swung to her bedroom. “It’s a bloodbath in there,” she whispered. “None of the blood’s mine. Not that I can tell, anyway.”
Baz stood tall once more, dared a look in her bedroom. She was right, there was blood everywhere. So much, if it all belonged to one person, he seriously doubted they were still alive.
