Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
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 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 peek at what was available to him at that moment before heading home to his empty apartment.
Zach typed in Josie Stratton’s name, some details of the long-ago case appearing in front of him in stark black and white. Josie Stratton, who’d been a nineteen-year-old college student at the University of Cincinnati nine years before, had been abducted by a masked intruder who broke into her apartment as she’d slept and attacked and drugged her. She’d woken up in an abandoned warehouse in Camp Washington, an area that had once housed industrial facilities that had shut down in the eighties. Josie Stratton had spent the next ten months chained to the concrete wall of a room on the bottom floor of what had once been a meatpacking warehouse, being sexually assaulted regularly and only fed sporadically. She’d been tortured, words carved into her skin that weren’t in the file and that he couldn’t remember offhand. He’d heard the nurses whispering about it, though, as they’d left her room. That poor girl will have to wear that reminder forever.
As if otherwise, she could have easily forgotten.
The DOA found earlier that night had appeared to be in similar restraints, but the location was completely different, and that girl had been held in a basement, not a warehouse. Still, both were abandoned properties, both featured concrete walls, both in areas where no one would hear the screams of a woman being tortured repeatedly over a long period of time.
He wondered who might have called it in and why anonymously? Drug addict or drug seller using the abandoned property for illegal activity? Probable. They might never know for sure.
Zach continued scrolling. There were no official photos on the computer pertaining to the Josie Stratton case. He’d need them to compare scenes, but he didn’t need them to recall Josie’s haunted eyes. There were few details online about how she’d managed to escape, but escape she had, and then she’d flagged down a cab driver, who’d immediately dialed 9-1-1.
The man had worn the ski mask he’d initially attacked her in, but she had been able to identify him by his voice, his smell, and other physical attributes as her downstairs neighbor, Marshall Landish. When police had shown up at his apartment, they’d found him dead by suicide. A single gunshot wound to the head using a stolen weapon. He’d obviously known they were coming and chosen death over prison. Josie’s DNA had been found on his clothes and on several items in his apartment. With that irrefutable evidence and Josie’s ID, the case was closed.
For the city of Cincinnati anyway. For Josie? Probably not so much.
Find my baby! Please find my baby!
Her words came back to him, the way he’d heard them through the door, clear, but with a hysterical edge she had just barely managed to control.
No, how could Josie Stratton ever move past a crime like the one perpetrated against her? That would have been enough to emotionally take anyone down. But add in the fact that she’d gotten pregnant by her tormenter and birthed his baby—alone and chained—in a cold, abandoned warehouse? His breath hissed through his lips. Christ Almighty.
Marshall Landish had taken the baby—a boy, Zach thought—shortly before Josie had escaped her hellish dungeon. The baby had never been found, though law enforcement had conducted a massive search.