Hush

Six

Maddox’s palms were sweating. Same with his back. It hadn’t drenched his T-shirt yet, but it was only a matter of time. The AC in the hotel hallway was blasting, cool air assaulting him. But that didn’t matter. He was sweating bullets because he was nervous. He hadn’t slept a wink because he’d been thinking of her all night long. The four cups of coffee he had before eight o’clock weren’t cutting it.

He’d pored over the case. The files. The evidence. He’d started with a pizza and a beer, but he’d barely gotten through the first page before he abandoned his half-eaten first piece, too sickened to chew and swallow, too immersed in the gruesome details.

He didn’t have a weak stomach. You couldn’t be a detective with a weak stomach. He’d been able to eat through much worse. Fuck, he had breakfast of donuts and bagels regularly at crime scenes.

But this was different.

The leg manacles. What they’d found in the rooms in the house. The photos, hundreds of them, explicit and sickening. The videos of abuse, of murder. The bones found in the backyard. The man on the loose.

Javier Del Rio. Convicted sex offender. Armed and dangerous.

His thick arms could be seen in most of the snuff films, the unmistakable black hair that covered every square inch of his body, the prison tattoo on his forearm.

He had killed plenty of girls, how many exactly, they still weren’t quite sure of. What they did know was that a killer was on the loose, and every cop in the state of Missouri and half in Illinois were out looking for him. It was only a matter of time.

Maddox thought about what it’d be like to get his hands on him, whether he’d even want it to go to trial. The stuff he’d seen had sickened him beyond comprehension and not even a case of beer could numb the pain.

Ri.

Ri had lived through this. In this place. For ten fucking years.

How did she still look like that? How could she sling insults and sarcasm and walk upright after that? Maddox knew that human beings were resilient. He’d seen them survive many things he thought seemed impossible.

But this . . . this kind of torment.

This was the reason why he was sweating, jittery, and unable to comprehend the sheer magnitude of what lay before him. He had to interview these girls, his girl, the one he’d looked for for ten years. The one he’d failed. And he had to make them recount the horrific things they experienced.

Eric had knocked on the girls’ hotel room door, skillfully not commenting on the sweat coating Maddox’s brows, or the many other nervous tics.He’d knocked a good three minutes ago and had gotten nothing. No sounds of shuffling, of any life at all.

Maddox’s stomach, already churning, dropped about three stories with the silence. The worst had already happened to them, he knew that. But he also knew that life didn’t have a cap on misery. Worse didn’t have a ceiling or a bottom. Scenarios ran through his mind to explain this silence, none of them good.

Maddox lifted his sweaty hand, balled it into a fist and knocked again, hard.

Eric leaned in closer to the door, inhaling pointedly, then looked toward Maddox with a smirk.

Maddox sniffed too.

It was faint, the smell of weed and booze.

He knocked again, with his purposeful, bordering on aggressive “cop knock” that April had teased him about mercilessly. Thinking of his sister, something clicked inside of Maddox, something resembling fury.

The door opened. Jaclyn, with hair in a bird’s nest and a squinty scowl on her face, stared at them. “Christ almighty, could you knock any louder?” she groaned.

Maddox’s hands were in fists at his sides. “We told you eight o’clock.”

She made a sound resembling a grunt and turned on her heel, walking back into the hotel room. She was wearing the same baggy sweatshirt they’d given her the day before, her long legs bare. Bare and covered in faint scars.

Maddox took the open door as an invitation and had to pause for a second at the wall of smell that hit him once he crossed the threshold.

The smell—booze, weed, and fast food—came from the person stirring from her slumber on a desk chair in the corner of the room.

“April, what the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded, glaring at his obviously hungover sister.

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, smearing her black makeup further. “I’m waking up and asking why you’re not holding coffee cups,” she muttered, voice husky.

Heat built in the base of his stomach. It wasn’t unusual, considering his hellion little sister made him furious on a regular basis. She had gone off the deep end after everything with Ri. She didn’t know how to deal with it. The grief. Pain. Uncertainty. Neither of them did. And both of them did what teenagers do best when feeling things they can’t understand—they rebelled in the most predictable and cliché of ways.