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Philadelphia, PA
Three Years Later
The beeping.
God, the beeping was incessant. How the fuck did anybody sleep in a hospital?
Forget rest, all I’d managed to score was a grinding headache, now that whatever pain meds I’d been given were wearing off. It was like the cherry on top of a shit-flavored sundae, made up of a concussion, broken ribs, fractured eye socket, throbbing jaw, and gnarly stab wound in my left shoulder. The purple and blue scene under my hospital gown wasn’t much prettier.
All courtesy of Mitch Henslow—certified spawn of Satan.
In all fairness, I was getting the better end of the deal. Vince was dead and Mitch was cooling his heels behind bars. Minus the flesh wounds, I’d made it out of their house of horrors alive. Now I just had to get out of the hospital before I ended up in the morgue—or a jail cell—myself.
I already knew that the frazzled DEA agent outside my hospital door wouldn’t make it easy. I couldn’t hear what was going on, or who was on the other end of her conversation, but through the window I could see that she looked flushed and her hands were flying in all different directions.
She’d been in the room earlier and introduced herself as Agent Tricia Rhodes, then jumped right in and peppered me with all kinds of questions. I hadn’t been in much of a chatty mood.
That and I wasn’t an idiot. Cops and Feds weren’t exactly my… people.
I did manage to get some information out of her. Apparently, Mitch and Vince had been on the DEA and ATF’s radars for a few weeks, after being fingered for a multi-state drug and weapon ring by a jailhouse snitch. He’d also mentioned a rumor about sex trafficking. Unfortunately for the law, a felon ratting out another felon wouldn’t make for a reliable trial witness. And that same felon being shanked in prison days after talking was even less helpful. The fact that Mitch had a huge network of allies, kept his guard up consistently, and always operated in stealth mode hindered their efforts even further. So, here they were, with basically nothing to go on, trying to use me for information to build a case.
It wouldn’t happen. Not on my back.
I’d played dumb, acting like the stereotypical twenty year old I definitely wasn’t, and after about ten minutes of her nonsense—feigning memory loss and naivete—I told her I didn’t feel well. She sighed at the thinly-veiled request to get lost and stomped off. That was several hours ago, but she was back out there, no doubt trying to formulate a new plan of attack to get me talking.
A few more minutes of muffled, exasperated conversation later, she knocked and poked her head in apprehensively. “Can we chat a little more?”
I nodded and watched her stalk across the room. She turned on a recorder and took a seat in the chair next to my bed.
“How are you feeling, Chloe?”
“Like hell,” I said with a forced smile. This really wasn’t the time to act as bitchy as I felt. Looking like I had something to hide would just make it harder to get rid of her.
“I bet you are,” she commiserated. “You’re lucky it wasn’t much worse though.”
“Yeah.”
“Have any other memories come back?”
I looked her straight in the eye and lied. “No. Sorry.”
“So you still don’t remember anything between the time you were at the house and waking up here?”
“I don’t.”
Her brow scrunched. “We also found some scraps of fabric at the warehouse, Chloe. None of it yours.” Rhodes studied me intensely for some kind of reaction. She didn’t get one.
I shook my head. “I don’t really know what that means.”
“It means there were other girls there. Surveillance cameras picked up what looks like a group of women running away from the area of the warehouse. We don’t know if it’s connected, but the FBI’s trying to identify them. Were there ever other women in the house with you?”
I shook my head again and focused on believing the words coming out of my mouth. It was exponentially more difficult to lie when hooked up to heart and blood pressure monitors. “I told you, I was only there for a couple weeks. I didn’t see anybody except Mitch and Vince.”
I’d lied about my memory, last name, and the timeline, but hadn’t bothered to lie about the fact that I knew the Henslow’s and had been in their house. The cops would find my DNA there at some point either way. I figured my best option was going with a bunch of half-truths that would sound plausible enough to appease the authorities’ curiosity. As much as I hated the term, I knew I had no choice but to play a victim.
But Rhodes had a job to do, so she kept pushing. “Maybe you can tell me more about the last few weeks then. How often did you see them? Hear them in the house? Did you hear any suspicious conversations or see anything that didn’t look right? Even the most insignificant detail could help us, especially if you saw any drugs there.”