The sun was rising higher. Faye noticed that she was finally getting warm. She’d been too distracted to notice the chill morning air. The warming rays of the sun reminded her, again, to look at her patient.
The ground where the woman was buried was cold and damp. Faye always wore a long-sleeved, button-front shirt to work, because it protected against sun, bug bites, and briars. In recent years, she’d begun wearing a thin white undershirt under it, for those times when she just couldn’t take the heat. She peeled off her outer shirt and laid it over the woman’s exposed torso, wondering how much longer it would take the paramedics to come.
Even as she tucked the shirt’s fabric around the wounded chest, bright blood began to soak through it. Flashing lights, just as red, appeared through the trees that separated her from the parking lot. A siren screamed. And the rattling breaths of the woman in front of her stopped coming.
Faye grabbed a cool wrist with one hand. With the other, she used the other hand to grasp the injured woman under the neck and upper back, hoping to open her airway while she searched for a pulse that simply wasn’t there.
Crying out, “Here! We’re over here,” she put the heel of her hand on the woman’s breastbone and laid her other hand atop it. As she began counting compressions, she shouted, “She’s crashing. Come quick!” but she doubted they were close enough to understand her words over the burbling of the flowing stream between them.
The sound of slamming ambulance doors was sharp enough to pierce the background noise of creek and birdsong. A moment later, she heard the voices of people who were splashing across the creek to bring her help, but it seemed like the faraway sounds were coming from another country.
Using the weight of her upper body, she pressed on the limp woman’s chest a hundred-and-twenty times a minute, wondering if help would arrive before she needed to switch to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. No help came.
She clasped the back of the woman’s neck with one hand and put the other on her forehead, looking for an airway angle that would work a miracle. None was forthcoming, so she used the cloth to wipe the inert woman’s mouth, then leaned down and gave a rescue breath. She was relieved to see the wounded chest rise, so the patient’s airway was open.
She gave another rescue breath. No response.
The crackling of feet on breaking twigs and fallen leaves approached, but help still hadn’t reached them. If she remembered her training right, it was time to do more chest compressions. Faye was in the middle of her third set of compressions, kneeling on the hard ground with both hands pressing into a limp woman’s bloody chest, when a paramedic grasped her shoulders, gently moved her aside, and took over the job.
“Do you know her?” he said, dropping to his knees beside his patient.
“No, I just found her here.”
He didn’t answer. He simply threw her some alcohol wipes to clean herself up, then went to work trying to save a life.
Faye scuttled backward on hands and knees, trying to get out of the way of the professionals who didn’t seem to be having any more luck than she’d had. She knelt on the ground, compulsively using the wipes, one after another, to clean her face, her mouth, her hands.
As the rescue team worked, she focused on the face of unconscious woman. The victim looked young, probably not even thirty, and she was very thin. Traces of makeup still showed on her face. Grains of sand and dirt clung to red lipstick and thickly applied mascara. Her hairstyle was a mass of tiny auburn braids that must have taken hours to plait. She had several golden hoops in the ear Faye could see, and there was also a bloody tear in her earlobe where yet another hoop must have been.
She looked like a woman who had a lot of living yet to do, but none of the paramedics’ efforts had brought her back and Faye didn’t think they ever would.
Chapter Seven
He had been robbed of something dear.
He had waited so long for his time alone with Frida. An hour would have been enough. Two hours would have been an explosive joy. He wasn’t a demanding man, but the few minutes he’d been given to vent his love and rage simply had not been enough. He deserved more.
The splashing of feet in the creek, a stumble, and a soft curse had alerted him to the intruder. He’d had no choice but to dump Frida into the ground without ceremony, tossing a few shovelfuls of dirt over her before he fled.
And now he was left with no outlet for his hunger.
Worse, he was left with the question of whether the interloper had seen him. He had been hunting and harvesting women for a long time, but he was smart and the rest of the world was dumb. He had never come so close to being caught.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have run. Perhaps he should have stood his ground and laid two women in this grave. She was no taller than Frida, although she was more muscular and she moved with more authority. She took up more space in her world than Frida, but he could have swatted her to the ground with one hand. If he’d been clear-headed, instead of besotted with the fragile Frida, he would have killed her as soon as her head cleared the bluff, instead of giving her time to dial 911. The 911 call changed everything.
What if she fought back, even a little, and the emergency personnel arrived before he could finish the job? What if she saw his face and he didn’t have time to silence her? He was a cautious man and this was why he was not sitting on Death Row. It was also why this woman had not been swatted out of existence