Karin Slaughter - Blindsighted

Q. What effect, if any, has this had on you?

A. A partial hysterectomy was performed wherein my reproductive organs were removed. I can no longer have children.

Q. Dr. Linton?

A. I would like to take a recess.

Jeffrey sat in his bathroom, staring at the pages of the transcript. He read through them again, then once more, sobs echoing in the bathroom as he cried for the Sara he had never known.

LENA lifted her head slowly, trying to get some sense of where she was. All she saw was darkness. She held her hand inches from her face, unable to make out her palm and fingers. The last thing she remembered was sitting in her kitchen talking to Hank. After that, she drew a complete blank. It was as if she blinked one second and the next was transported to this spot. Wherever this spot was.

She groaned, moving to her side so that she could sit up. With sudden clarity, she realized that she was naked. The floor underneath her was rough against her skin. She could feel the grain in the wooden planks. Her heart started pounding for some reason, but her mind would not tell her why. Lena reached in front of her, feeling more rough wood, but it was vertical, a wall.

Pressing her hands into the wall, she managed to stand. In the back of her mind, she could make out a noise, but it was unfamiliar to her. Everything seemed disjointed and out of place. She felt physically as if she did not belong here. Lena found she was leaning her head against the wall, the wood pressing into the skin of her forehead. The noise was a staccato in her periphery, pounding, then nothing, pounding, then nothing, like a hammer on a piece of steel. Like a blacksmith fashioning a horseshoe.

Clink, clink, clink.

Where had she heard that before?

Lena 's heart stopped as she finally made the connection. In the darkness, she could see Julia Matthews's lips moving, voicing the noise. Clink, clink, clink. The sound was dripping water.

JEFFREY stood behind the one-way glass, looking into the interview room. Ryan Gordon sat at the table, his skinny arms crossed over his concave chest. Buddy Conford sat beside him, his hands clasped in front of him on the table. Buddy was a fighter. At the age of seventeen, he had lost his right leg from the knee down in a car accident. At the age of twenty-six, he had lost his left eye from cancer. At thirty-nine, a dissatisfied client had attempted to pay Buddy off with two bullets. Buddy had lost a kidney and suffered a collapsed lung, but was back in the courtroom two weeks later. Jeffrey was hoping Buddy's sense of right and wrong would help move things along today. Jeffrey had downloaded a picture of Jack Allen Wright from the state database this morning. Jeffrey would have a lot stronger leg to stand on in Atlanta if he had a positive ID.

Jeffrey had never considered himself an emotional man, but there was an ache in his chest that would not go away. He wanted to talk to Sara so badly, but he was terrified that he would say the wrong thing. Driving in to work, he had gone over and over in his mind what he would say to her, even talking out loud to see how his words sounded. Nothing would come out right, and Jeffrey ended up sitting in his office for ten minutes with his hand on the phone before he could coax up enough courage to dial Sara's number at the clinic.

After telling Nelly Morgan that it wasn't an emergency but he would like to talk to Sara anyway, he got a snippy "She's with a patient," followed by a slam of the phone. This brought Jeffrey an enormous sense of relief, then a feeling of disgust at his own cowardice.

He knew that he needed to be strong for her, but Jeffrey felt too blindsided to be capable of anything but sobbing like a child every time he thought about what had happened to Sara. Part of him was hurt that she had not trusted him enough to tell him what had happened to her in Atlanta. Another part of him was angry that she had flat out lied to him about everything. The scar on her side had been explained away as the result of an appendectomy, though, in retrospect, Jeffrey remembered the scar was jagged and vertical, nothing like a surgeon's clean incision.

That she could not have children was something he had never pushed her on, because obviously it was a sensitive topic. He was comfortable leaving her at peace with that, assuming that it was some medical condition or that perhaps, like some women, she just was not meant to carry a child. He was supposed to be a cop, a detective, and he had taken everything she said at face value because Sara was the type of woman who told the truth about things. Or at least he had thought she was.

"Chief?" Maria said, knocking on the door. "Guy called from Atlanta and said to tell you everything's set up. Wouldn't leave a name. That mean anything to you?"

"Yes," Jeffrey said, checking the folder he held in his hand to make sure the printout was still there. He stared at the picture again, even though he had practically memorized the blurred photo. He brushed past Maria into the hallway. "I'm leaving for Atlanta after this. I don't know when I'll be back. Frank will be in charge."

Jeffrey didn't give her time to respond. He opened the door to the interview room and walked in.

Buddy took on a righteous tone. "We've been here ten minutes."

"And we're only going to be here another ten more if your client decides to cooperate," Jeffrey said, taking the chair across from Buddy.

The only thing Jeffrey knew with any certainty was that he wanted to kill Jack Allen Wright. He had never been a violent man off the football field, but Jeffrey wanted so badly to kill the man who had raped Sara that his teeth ached.

"We ready to start?" Buddy asked, tapping his hand on the table.

Jeffrey glanced out the small window in the door. "We need to wait for Frank," he said, wondering where the man was. Jeffrey hoped he was checking on Lena.

The door opened and Frank entered the room. He looked as if he hadn't slept all night. His shirt was untucked at the side, and a coffee stain was on his tie. Jeffrey gave a pointed glance at his watch.

"Sorry," Frank said, taking the chair beside Jeffrey.

"Right," Jeffrey said. "We've got some questions we need to ask Gordon. In exchange for his being forthcoming, we'll drop the pending charges on the drug bust."

"Fuck that," Gordon snarled. "I told you those weren't my pants."

Jeffrey exchanged a look with Buddy. "I don't have time for this. We'll just send him up to the Atlanta pen and cut our losses."

"What kind of questions?" Buddy asked.

Jeffrey dropped the bomb. Buddy had been expecting a simple plead on yet another drug charge against one of the kids from the college. Jeffrey kept his tone even when he said, "About the death of Sibyl Adams and the rape of Julia Matthews."

Buddy seemed to register a little shock. His face turned white, making his black eye patch stand out even more against his pale face. He asked Gordon, "Do you know anything about this?"

Frank answered for him. "He was the last person to see Julia Matthews in the library. He was her boyfriend."

Gordon piped up, "I told you, they weren't my pants. Get me the fuck out of here."

Buddy gave Gordon the eye. "You'd best be telling them what happened or you're gonna be writing your mama letters from jail."

Gordon crossed his arms, obviously angry. "You're supposed to be my lawyer."

"You're supposed to be a human being," Buddy countered, picking up his briefcase. "Those girls were beaten and killed, son. You're looking at walking on a felony possession by simply doing what you should be doing in the first place. If you got a problem with that, you need to get yourself another lawyer."

Buddy stood, but Gordon stopped him. "She was in the library, okay?"