Eighteen
Alex had pulled himself together.Barely. After Charlotte hung up, he’d stood in the kitchen for a long time, phone in hand, heart in his throat. He didn’t move until Bailey pawed the door to come in. Even then, he only moved because he needed something to do. He called his boss.
Evan Shipley didn’t ask many questions. The moment Alex mentioned Gideon Ward, everything shifted. The State’s U.S. Attorney had a long memory. Everyone in South Dakota did. Ward’s name carried weight—cold, heavy, historic. The return of Henry Byron, thought dead or lost, and the appearance of a woman with psychiatric symptoms eerily like Ward’s former victims? Shipley didn’t hesitate.
Alex and Noah were reassigned to the Violent Crime Office effective immediately. Six investigators, fully briefed, would join Ethan Hayes’ task force by nightfall.
Noah had spent the night overseeing the crime scene unit going over Charlotte’s home and neighborhood. Alex hadn’t seen him until the sun was fully up. He walked into Sophie and Tristan’s house looking wrecked, shirt wrinkled, face drawn. But the moment he saw Alex—really saw him—he poured another mug of coffee and said, “Talk.”
Alex didn’t hold back. He told him about the woman on Route 83. About Charlotte leaving with Graham Cullen.
Noah had only nodded. “You can’t do anything until she comes home,” he said. “But when she does—you two need to have a serious conversation.”
Alex agreed. He knew. But that didn’t stop the feeling of helplessness sitting like a stone in his chest.
Noah headed off to rest, and Alex tried to sit still. He couldn’t. Not with everything humming under his skin.
Tristan came down the stairs, scrub shirt rumpled beneath a hoodie, the edge of a beard shadowing his jaw. He poured coffee and said, “I’m heading to the acute care unit. Our psychiatrist is evaluating the woman we admitted last night.” He paused, eyeing Alex. “You want to come? Might help to see what catatonia looks like.”
Alex didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I do. Then I need to head to the morgue.”
They walked in silence to the Blackwell Institute, tense with anticipation. Inside, Tristan introduced him to one of their psychiatrists, a soft-spoken woman named Dr. Greta Halberd, and escorted them to the observation area—a small, sterile room looking into an adjacent space through a one-way window.
Alex stepped inside and stopped.
The woman was already there. The woman who had been found partially clothed on a highway. She sat on a padded chair in the center of the room, hands folded in her lap. Her posture was too still, too precise—unnatural in its rigidity. Her hair was clean now but dull, frayed at the ends. Her skin was pale. Thin. The kind of thin that spoke of months without real food.
Tristan kept his voice low. “We cleaned her up. She is severely undernourished. IV fluids, electrolytes, broad labs, chest X-ray, ECG. Some signs of physical trauma—no sexualassault. Restraint marks on both wrists. But her mind…” He trailed off.
Alex nodded. He understood. She was broken in ways no test could show.
Dr. Halberd entered the patient room on the other side of the glass. She didn’t speak at first. Just sat across from the woman, relaxed, nonthreatening. She crossed her legs and set a clipboard aside.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked softly.
No response.
“Do you know your name?”
Nothing. Not even a flicker.
“Are you Mara Dwyer?”
They had identified her. She showed nothing.
Alex leaned forward, elbows on his knees, notebook in hand—but his pen didn’t move.
Dr. Halberd tried again, gentler. “You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you here.”
The woman blinked slowly. Her pupils didn’t track movement. Her face didn’t register sound.
Alex swallowed hard. He’d interviewed rape victims. Trafficking survivors. He’d listened to women recount horrors most people couldn’t even imagine. But this—this was something different. This was absence. Like someone had gone inside her head and turned off the lights.
Dr. Halberd held up a photograph. A simple one—two kittens in a basket.
No reaction.
Another: a house with white shutters and a red door. A picture of her house.
