“Some,” she said, “but the evidence wasn’t handled correctly. It happens more than it should. Not bad cops, necessarily, just…there’s a lot of evidence, a lot of storage issues.” She shrugged. “The system’s not perfect. Genetic genealogy is doing a lot these days. People have been caught from DNA that was stored in the seventies, so there’s hope, I think, with some of these cases. It’s just a waiting game. Eventually, we’ll get answers. But so far, for Carol Stevens, we’re still waiting.”
“So that was it?” I asked, expecting it when her eyebrows flew up in surprise.
“What do you mean, that was it?”
I wasn’t trying to minimize Carol Stevens’s story, but I had a feeling there was something deeper that drove Sylvie. I couldn’t help thinking of my own reasons, but Sylvie had mentioned her parents, and the tone left me thinking all was well there. So, what was it? I wanted to know, and we were stuck in this car with plenty of time to kill. “Carol Stevens put you on the path of looking for answers for murdered women.”
Sylvie nodded. “She did.”
“What got you interested in cases like Carol Stevens’s in the first place?” I pushed.
Chapter Ten
ELI
Sylvie let out a long breath, pulling her leg up to brace her heel on the seat and picking at a smear of dust on the knee of her jeans. She looked out the window, watching the dark trees whip by, before she said, “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Should I get some glasses?” I joked, and she rolled her eyes, a faint grin stretching her mouth.
“Oh, God. You pulling off the hot professor look? No, thank you. You’re hot enough as it is.”
I fought the urge to preen under her praise. I didn’t generally put a lot of thought into what I looked like—not from that angle. How I fit the job, whether it was undercover, or I needed to give a certain impression—I thought aboutthatstuff all the time. Suit versus construction vest versus T-shirt and jeans, and how would that play on a job? I’d never had trouble attracting women, so I figured I had to be good-looking enough, or at least not repellent. I knew how to listen and take my time in bed, which usually paid off with the opposite sex. Hearing Sylvie say I was hot—that was an entirely new kind of thrill.
I put it aside to think about later. I still wanted answers about her. “Spill.”
She let out another breath and stopped picking at her knee, turning her head so her cheek rested there.
I glanced over and met her eyes. “Is it bad?”
A half shrug. “Pretty bad, yeah. Not as much for me, but when I was twenty-two, the summer after I graduated from college, I was driving home from a night out with some friends. It was me and my roommate. Rachael. I was driving. She’d had a few too many margaritas. We were celebrating her new job, so I offered to be the designated driver. I stopped at a light—she didn’t remember to lock her door. My car was older, not the kind that auto-locks the door when it’s moving.”
I let out a grunt, knowing where this was going and hoping I was wrong.
“He was there before I realized the door was opening. He leaned in, unsnapped her seat belt, and dragged her out by her hair. He?—”
She cut off, sucking in a ragged breath, her eyes squeezed shut.
“He shot her. Just pulled a gun and shot her. She was on the ground in the intersection, screaming, and then nothing… Silence. Then he was in her seat, jamming the gun against my neck. He tossed my phone out the passenger door and told me to drive.” She sat up, raised a hand to rub the side of her neck. “It was hot, and it hurt. And he was yelling, ‘Drive, drive.’ But the light was still red. It was like my brain went on the fritz. Obviously, I had to drive because there was a gun. He’d shot Rachael. He was probably going to shoot me. But the light was red.”
“What did you do?” I asked, trying to imagine a twenty-two-year-old Sylvie, buoyant from a night out with friends, then suddenly— “That must have been terrifying.”
“It was. Later. At first, it was just panic and this sense of unreality. I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do. Jump out of the car? I wish I had. I didn’t want to leave Rachael. I didn’t know if she was dead or hurt or okay and staying quiet. But he was screaming, and the gun was hot and smelled like smoke and…”
She rubbed the heels of her palms over her eyes.
“Instead, I hit the gas and tore through the intersection, praying we didn’t get into an accident and terrified a cop would see and pull us over, because then… Would I get away, or would he shoot me? I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know anything except this man, not that much older than me, was screaming at me. His eyes were wild. His pupils were huge.”
“High?” I asked.
“I guess. I don’t really know a lot about drugs other than what I saw in high school and college, but that was, you know, normal stuff. Not whatever this guy was on. He wouldn’t stop screaming. He kept saying, ‘They’re following us, they’re following us,’ but there wasn’t anybody there. Then he just made me drive.”
“How long?” I asked, suddenly not sure I wanted to know where this was going—not when we were talking about a young Sylvie barely out of college. The things that could have happened spun through my head. I had to let her tell the story, not jump ahead to the worst possible outcome.
“I drove for hours,” she said.
“What about gas?”
“I had a full tank,” she said. “My dad made me promise.Especially when I was out late. He was worried I’d run out of gas or have to go to the gas station late at night.”
