Page 14 of Run for Her Life
Why had she made that promise? Why had she cleaned up the scene after discovering her mother dead in the bathtub?
Why had someone sentherAnnabelle’s hair and location?
“What’s on your mind?” Aiden asked.
“Questions. So many questions,” she mumbled, faintly rubbing her elbow, which Viktor Axenov had dislocated when he’d stolen the key to a safety deposit box.
The car halted in front of a concrete, squat, single-story building with a parking lot littered with potholes filled with rainwater. A back alley ran along one side, leading to a set of heavy metal double doors—no windows, just a security keypad and a dentedAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLYsign. There was a glass doorat the front, blinds pulled halfway down. A gnarled tree stood in a corner with an owl perched on it.
The sharp scent of bleach hit Zoe as they entered the building. The sterile, white-tiled hallways hummed with fluorescence as Zoe and Aiden walked down the labyrinth in the basement. A cold draft whizzed past her. She tried searching forsomethingpositive, anything about this place that didn’t scream like it used to be a tuberculosis hospital where ghosts of dead patients still floated in the sickening, grimy hallways.
“Agent Storm and Dr. Wesley.” A tall, bony man with clumps of thinning hair scattered on his scalp came out of a metal door. “I’m Rodney Doyle. The county coroner. The sheriff told me to expect you.”
“She’s not coming?” Zoe asked.
“She’s meeting with the mayor. I’ll send her everything I have. Come on in.”
“Skittles?” Zoe offered him a packet with a bright smile.
He stared at them as if they were poisoned. “Uhm… no, thank you.”
“Okay.” She shrugged.
They followed him into a cold room lined with metal shelves stacked with solutions and instruments. A sanitization station and a wall-mounted dissection bench ran along the left wall. Two post-mortem tables situated with fridges in the back. It wasn’t as rudimentary as Zoe had been expecting in a small county.
As Zoe approached the table where Annabelle’s body lay, she noticed Aiden turn ashen. He retrieved a handkerchief and pressed it against his nose. “You don’t have to be here, you know.”
“I’m fine,” he croaked stubbornly.
A part of Zoe relished the sight of the mighty Aiden Wesley crumbling—it was usually him sniffing for weaknesses.
“The cause of death is stress-induced myocardial infarction,” Rodney read out from a file.
“A heart attack?” Zoe’s eyebrows shot up.
She looked down at the body and her stomach flipped. Annabelle’s skin was grayish blue and slightly sunken, her lips parted and cracked, and a brutal Y-shaped scar ran down her chest. Her hallowed body had been cut open and stitched back with thick black sutures. She had been reduced to a bag of bones, her skin stretched taut. Zoe’s eyes trailed over Annabelle’s arms and legs covered in bruises and lacerations, all the way down to the soles of the feet, which were torn.
“Was she tortured?” Zoe whispered.
“Essentially, yes,” Rodney replied. “Blood tests show high levels of myoglobin and creatine kinase—markers of extreme muscle fatigue and stress. She was dehydrated. Her kidneys were in early stages of acute failure and her lips, mucous membranes, and tongue are all dried up. Evidence of blunt force trauma, as you can see.” His pen hovered over her arm. “Excessive bruising across the arms, legs, and torso could have resulted from falls, collisions, or defensive wounds. There are abrasions and scratches consistent with running through brush or crawling away. The calves, thighs, and shoulders have micro tears. Deep-tissue bruising and cracked ribs. Hairline fractures on joints… She was underextremephysical duress.”
“What are these?” Aiden looked uneasy, pointing out the clusters of small, circular, purple bruises on the arms and chest.
“There’s deep hemorrhaging beneath the tissue. High-velocity impact, sharp entry, but no exit. My guess is a modified hunting dart.”
“Hunting dart?” Zoe repeated. “She was… chased before she had a heart attack?”
“Her heart was enlarged from a massive surge of adrenaline that triggered her heart failure. There were also micro tears onher heart, which means it was under extreme stress. This wasn’t a slow death.” Rodney’s eyes were hollow and blank. Years of cutting people open and patching them up like puppets had dulled him to the horrors. “Her own body killed her before he could.”
Zoe didn’t like this at all. She imagined how it had played out—Annabelle running through the woods manically while being hunted like an animal, hiding in bushes, crawling and dragging herself through foliage, twisting ankle, crashing into the bulging roots. Her blood ran cold. A killer who was a hunter, who enjoyed torturing and breaking someone down.
“Were the darts laced with any drug?” Zoe asked.
“I’ll need more time. Still waiting on some tests.”
“What do you think?” She turned to Aiden.
“This is a process-focused killer, not a product-focused one. He’s not killing for disposal; he’s killing for experience. That makes him harder to predict because his gratification isn’t bound to a single act, but the sequence itself. That coupled with the trophy behavior—sending us her hair—he’s reinforcing?—”
