One o’clock came in a hurry. The bartenders hollered last call and a rush of students lined the bar to order one final drink before they spilled into the streets and headed to after-hours. There was talk of a Theta Chi late night. Diana laughed as the crowd squashed her and Casey into the bar to place their orders.

“We’re gonna get trampled,” Casey said. He took her hand and pulled her away from the bar, off her stool and toward the door. Diana felt his fingers intertwine with her own, the way she always saw couples on campus hold hands. She allowed him to pull her out the front door. The summer air was thick and sticky. Buzzed and dizzy from the shots, she felt herself walk the sidewalk with heavy, wobbly steps toward the end of the building and into the walkway that separated the bar from the dry cleaners next door.

Casey pulled her into the narrow space. “Sorry,” he said. “I had to get outta there.”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I needed some air.”

“You thinking about going to the frat party?”

Diana shrugged. “I don’t know. You want to?”

Casey came close to her, until her back was against the bricks. “Not really.”

His face was close enough to smell the beer on his breath. Cigarettes, too. As if he could read her mind he said, “You smell like fuzzy navels.”

This made her laugh. “That’s ’cause you bought me, like, four of them.”

Casey moved closer. “Smells good.”

Diana stared at him until she closed her eyes and felt his lips on hers. She opened her mouth and their tongues explored in a sloppy, drunk kiss. She grabbed his head, ran fingers through his hair the way she always thought she would when she found a guy she really liked. They kissed on and off for fifteen minutes until the bar started to empty.

Diana rubbed her nose back and forth on his. Stared like a puppy dog into his eyes. “Wanna go to that party?”

“Not really,” Casey said, giving her a quick kiss. “We could go back to my place. My roommates already headed home.”

“Those were your roommates?”

“Yeah. Three of us live in a house on Park Street. They’ll probably have people over, so we could hang for a while. Unless you wanna do something else.”

Diana kissed him. “No. Let’s go back to your place.”

He grabbed her hand again and they found his car. Casey opened the passenger-side door and Diana climbed in and fastened her seat belt. Through her buzz she knew she shouldn’t be in a car after so much to drink.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” she asked when Casey climbed in.

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s not far.”

They pulled from the curb and headed to Casey’s apartment. They stopped at a light and he again took her hand, held it while it rested on the console between them. The light turned green and he took off, then slowed and squinted his eyes.

“My roommates,” Casey said, lifting his chin toward the windshield.

Diana saw them strolling on the sidewalk. “Oh, yeah.”

He pulled to the curb and Diana rolled down her window. Casey leaned over, placed his hand on Diana’s knee. “Hey, drunkos. Wanna ride?”

“Thought you were headed to the frat party?” the girl named Nicole said.

“We decided to go back to the apartment instead. Get in.”

Casey’s friends climbed into the backseat and Casey took off.

“Diana,” Nicole said from the backseat. “Did this guy really convince you to come home with him? He’s a total pervert who likes really strange things.”

“My best friends,” Casey said. “Throwing me under the bus.”

“Ah,” Diana said. “He seems trustworthy.”

“If you believe that, then you’re a very stupid person,” Nicole said in a sullen voice. Serious. The drunkenness gone like it never existed.

Diana looked at Casey with a furrowed brow. Casey stared back with dead eyes and a solemn face. It was last thing Diana saw before the bag came over her head.

She cried uncontrollably until the duct tape covered her mouth and muted her whimpering. During the brief scuffle in the front seat, they managed to secure her hands with zip ties, pulling them behind her back and clicking them tight. The car ride was fast and nauseating as Diana rocked back and forth under the momentum of sharp turns and sudden acceleration. Without her seat belt, and with her hands behind her back, she had no control over her body and she heard them laugh when she banged her head on the passenger-side window during a hard left turn.

Finally, the car screeched to a stop, skidding on gravel.

“Get her out,” she heard Casey say in his new voice. The sweetness was gone. “Bring her around back.”

Doors opened, hands grabbed her under the arms and pulled her from the car.

“Come on, stupid,” Diana heard the girl say. What was her name, she couldn’t remember now. “This is gonna be fun.”

Still buzzed, if not outright drunk, Diana felt them drag her. She tried to keep up, tried to get her feet underneath her, but they were pulling too fast. She recognized the terrain as rock or pea gravel. They roughly sat her in a chair and quickly wrapped her with something, securing her to the chair. The material spun around her calves and arms and chest. Then the bag came off her head and she took a second to gather her setting. Maybe a warehouse, or an old building. She wasn’t sure. The bricks were crumbling and there was a hole in the roof.

Casey stood in front of her. He stared with those dead eyes, his head tilting to the side. “You said you wanted to come home with me. Welcome home.”

Diana tried to talk through the duct tape, tears spilling from her eyes.

Casey shook his head. “I don’t want to hear you talk. It might ruin it for me. I want to keep the sweet voice in my head from back when you were digging me. It helps me through the difficult time you and I are about to have.”

Diana looked around. The other two were out of view but she could feel their presence behind her. She noticed a ratty mattress on the ground.

Casey’s face took on a devilish look. “But one thing I can’t tolerate is snot and tears. So I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together. When I come back, I want my sweet girl back, you understand?”

He turned and walked through a door at the far end of the room. When he was gone, Diana looked down at her body and realized the material they had secured her with was plastic wrap—clear cooking plastic wound tightly around her torso and legs. It looked eerie and disgusting and suffocating.

PART III

“Have you any idea how much it pains me when you be-

have like this?”

—The Monster

CHAPTER 18

October 2017

Thirteen Months Since Megan’s Escape

Early Monday morning, after a long weekend visiting her parents Friday night and driving to Georgia to see Casey Delevan’s mother, Livia drank coffee and paged through her forensics textbook while the office was still dark and quiet. Her terrible performance Friday afternoon, both in the autopsy suite and the cage, still weighed heavily on her mind. She was determined to prevent it from happening again.

She read and reread postmortem findings in head injury victims. Reviewed anatomy she had long ago memorized, and studied the different effects of bleeding on the brain and midline shifts. She outlined the requirements of a thorough neurological postmortem, the types of tissue samples taken and the techniques used to sequester these specimens. She reviewed skull fractures, and the different patterns of bone disruption that allowed a medical examiner to make educated guesses about the weapons used to cause the damage. Then she picked up a giant book titled Clinical Therapeutics and painstakingly reviewed pharmacology, specifically covering drug-to-drug interactions in the geriatric population. She rediscovered scores of medications with long, rambling names she vaguely remembered from medical school and committed them to memory. Finally, she studied cerebrovascular accidents—strokes— and the examination techniques that best uncover them when they are not as obvious as a large vessel bursting the middle of the brain.

When she finished, Livia still had thirty minutes before the office would fill with staff. She topped off her coffee and pulled Megan McDonald’s book from her bag. Sitting at her desk in the fellows’ office, she skimmed through the final chapters. She imagined her mother and father lying in bed, fingers tracing along the same book looking for clues that might tell them what had happened to their daughter. There too, in Livia’s mind, was Barb Delevan’s house with drawn curtains and the smoky haze and a half-spent vodka bottle. Her parents’ picture-still house Friday night bore a striking resemblance to Barb Delevan’s home—a place and its residents stuck in the past, unable to partake in the present.

The thing that prevented her parents and Barb Delevan from moving forward was the same relentless undercurrent of energy that prevented Livia from clear-minded thinking. It was the need for answers. The absence of closure was a tether anchored soundly to the past that caused an anachronism as time slowly chugged by—days and weeks and years—incarcerating a sliver of the soul while life continued on.

Livia turned the last page of Megan’s book when she heard her name being called.

“Paging Dr. Cutty,” Kent Chapple said from the hallway. “We are officially ready to roll.”