Livia smiled. “Not Dr. Colt. I’m on ride-alongs this week, and finished early so the timing just worked out. I wanted to ask you about that case from last year.”

“Right,” Dr. Hunt said, pulling a file from her bottom drawer. “Nancy Dee.”

“Correct.”

“I went back through it after you called. I’m happy to let you have a look. It was a sad case, but when I reviewed it I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me.”

“Just the same,” Livia said. “I’d like to see it. For my own personal reasons.”

Dr. Hunt smiled. “Whatever you need. You’re welcome to use my office. Let me know if you need anything or if I can answer any questions.”

“Thank you.”

When Dr. Hunt was gone, Livia pulled the file toward her. She opened the front cover of the manila folder to find photos of the scene where Nancy’s body was located. Livia had just witnessed hundreds of these photos being snapped by Kent and Sanj during the last week when they documented the bodies they were called to investigate and transport. Livia pulled the photos from the folder and laid them out in front of her. Depicted in them was Nancy Dee’s lifeless body, as it lay partially covered by leaves and dirt. Her eyes closed, skin pale with death and pocked with dirt, hair matted and caked down like a sculpture. Livia could not help but superimpose Nicole’s face onto the photos. The image caused her insides to ache and her stomach to sour.

A morning jogger, whose dog had taken off in front of him and raced through the woods apparently with a beat on the body’s odor, had discovered Nancy Dee. She had been missing for six months, and the identification came quickly when the body was transported to Dr. Hunt’s morgue.

Livia turned to the autopsy photos and perused the findings, cruising through the report like a speed-reader. She’d read hundreds of autopsy reports over the last four years, and had written plenty of her own in the first three months of fellowship. She expected to find this poor girl, abducted from the streets of Virginia and abused by a monster, to have died from some barbaric act of violence. Indeed, the autopsy revealed sexual abuse. But the photos Livia saw of the body were unremarkable. The external exam noted chafing and bruising to the ankles and wrists, likely from restraints, but otherwise there were no signs of physical abuse.

Livia paged through the autopsy report until she reached its conclusion. The cause of death made Livia’s mind stumble. She turned back to the toxicology report and read it again. Her finger streaked down the page and came to rest on the sedative discovered in Nancy Dee’s bloodstream. Because it was found in such high concentration, it was determined that Nancy’s body did not have the chance to fully metabolize it, meaning she died shortly after it was ingested. Such a large amount was consumed that this drug had seized her respiratory system and caused fatal respiratory arrest. Whoever held Nancy for six months, by accident or with intent, had OD’d her on a drug called ketamine. Livia looked at the name of the drug for several seconds, drawing on her recently polished knowledge of pharmacology from her binge studying after her debacle with the elderly fall victim in the cage. Ketamine was used mostly by veterinarians for sedation before surgery, but had a limited role in traditional medicine. Called Special K by kids, it was also occasionally abused for its hallucinogenic effects. When combined with diazepam, as it was with Nancy Dee, the sedative effects were intensified.

Livia looked up at the ceiling of Dr. Hunt’s office. Something else about the drug gnawed at her. She put her finger on the page and ran her nail under each letter. K-E-T-A-M-I-N-E.

When it came to her, it came quickly and with little doubt. She hastily reassembled the chart and pushed it across the desk. She tried briefly to find Dr. Hunt, but gave up after a few minutes of wandering the halls. Outside, she climbed into her car and let her phone’s GPS take her to the nearest bookstore. She walked into the Barnes & Noble and, surrounded by the latest titles from popular authors, walked to the nonfiction best sellers display and plucked Megan McDonald’s book from the shelf. Livia skimmed to the middle, where she thought she remembered reading it. It took a few minutes to find it, Megan’s first-person recollection of her time in the hospital after her escape from the bunker. Her memory of that night had been foggy, Megan wrote, and much of what was recorded about her trek along Highway 57 and her reception at the hospital was documented with the help of Mr. Steinman, the man who had found Megan barefoot and bleeding and who had carried her away in his car and brought her to safety.

Livia skimmed the pages, frantic to find a single word, until she found the passage she was looking for. Megan’s memory was altered that night, and she spent the first twelve hours of her hospital stay in a near-comatose state. Part of her trance was blamed on shock and dehydration. But mainly, the doctors determined, it was due to the large amount of sedative found in her system. A drug mostly used by veterinarians. A medication called ketamine.

CHAPTER 23

Megan sat with eyes closed and her legs positioned Indian style on the plush leather chair in Dr. Mattingly’s office. Tonight’s session was an add-on to her typical twice-a-month meetings. One Megan had specifically requested. Since her breakthrough session when she recalled the far-off train whistle as a recurrent noise from her time in the cellar, Megan was anxious to get back to hypnotherapy. She knew other things were buried in her memory, likely suppressed by the amnesic effects of ketamine, the drug that sedated her during those two weeks in captivity.

She believed there was enough there, in her own mind, to make sense out of what she’d been through. And since remembering the train whistle, she’d been up at night with something else that bothered her. Something about the cellar and her captivity that was knocked loose during one of the sessions but was not yet close enough to the surface of her memory to be useful. And since she’d started with Dr. Mattingly, Megan had learned to differentiate the important things from the meaningless. She learned which impressions to pursue and which to let go. Her restless nights were telling her this latest pining—that object her fingertips brushed against but could not grip—needed exploring.

“Describe the room again, Megan. Start with what you know for sure,” Dr. Mattingly said.

The sessions took a familiar path each time, and Megan had learned to navigate this redundant road without protest or resistance.

“My bed is in the corner. Mattress, box spring, and frame. Across from me, against the wall behind which the stairs are located, is a table.”

“This is the table where your food was placed?”

“No,” Megan said with her eyes closed. “That table is closer to the stairs. This other table is against the wall.”

“Go to it, Megan. Walk to that table. See it in your mind. See it three-dimensionally in your mind’s eye.”

“I try,” Megan said. “I want to get there but my chain is not long enough.”

“Don’t force it. Just look, Megan. Look at the table and describe what you see.”

“It’s too dark to see.”

“It’s too dark only on the surface, Megan. Your eyes have adjusted themselves to the darkness. You see better than you believe you can. Look at the table. Take your time and tell me what you see.”

Megan breathed hard through her nose. It took a minute before she answered. “There’s a bottle. The table is empty except for a bottle.”

Dr. Mattingly was quiet.

“It’s a canister.... It’s paint,” Megan finally said. “A bottle of spray paint.”

“Good, Megan. Now, leave that bottle alone. Move your eyes from that table you cannot reach. Go to the other table, Megan. The one where your food is left. What is there, Megan?”

Megan’s crossed legs twitched while she sat in Dr. Mattingly’s overstuffed chair as she walked in her mind as far as her shackles would allow. “There is nothing there. It’s dark and I have to feel if food has been left for me. There is nothing now.”

“Good, Megan. Very good. Now go back to the bed. Lie down there and listen to my voice . . . are you there yet?”

Megan nodded.

“Are you lying down now, Megan?”

Another nod.

“That table is empty, Megan. But sometimes it is full. Sometimes you wake to find your food having been set on that table. What is it that wakes you, Megan? What is the sound that pulls you from sleep?”

Megan shook her head.

“What is it, Megan? What do you hear that wakes you?”

“No . . . I don’t know. The stairs, I guess. The stairs squeak when he walks on them.”

“No guessing, Megan. There’s no need to guess. Everything you need is right here, in this place. Just listen to it all and tell me what you hear.”

“The stairs. I don’t know! The stairs are squeaking. He’s coming!”

“Ignore the squeaking stairs, Megan. Do you hear something else?”

“No. Just the stairs. He’s coming!”