WREN ALLOWS HERSELF ONLY A moment. Then she gets to work, reaching out her gloved hand for a pulse. She closes her own eyes and focuses on palpating for this woman’s carotid artery. She presses lightly into it and desperately tries to sense any kind of life. She feels it then, the slightest movement in the victim’s cardiac cycle beneath her fingertips.
Wren’s world brightens to vivid Technicolor. She looks up at the paramedics with wild eyes, yelling, “You’re up! She has a pulse!”
The two medics spring into action. They roll the victim slightly onto her side and discover the source of the dark blood staining her shirt behind her hip.
“There’s a wound to her cervical spine,” the medic reports, snapped out of his initial shock and regaining focus and professionalism. “Though it appears that it’s um … been tended to.”
Wren leans forward incredulously. “What?”
She peers at the bloodied bandages over the wound in this woman’s upper back.
“He bandaged her wounds?” Wren questions, brow knitted into a look of pure confusion. “He’s never done that before. Actually, I can’t think of any killer who has ever done that before.”
Leroux is shaking his head, trying to turn off the kitchen timer still blaring in his hands. An officer beside him takes it silently and clicks it off. Farther off, another officer is barking orders at the others to cordon off the scene and call for backup on the site.
“Let’s get her out of here. We have to get her stable before anything else,” a medic instructs.
With some help from Wren, they slide the woman from the coffin. They have already begun attaching various lifesaving equipment to her, years of training making for seamless execution. Wren takes a moment to look back into the casket and inhales a sharp breath as she notices a full human skeleton crumbled to the side of it. The victim had been interred with the casket’s original inhabitant. It’s hard to say right now whether she was conscious when she entered this coffin. Wren doesn’t ruminate on the nightmare of being buried alive for long. Leroux nudges her shoulder, and she is jolted from her thoughts.
“Look at the lid,” he says rigidly, looking directly into her eyes as he does.
Wren’s worst fears are confirmed as she sees lines of scratch marks chaotically crisscrossing the ancient wood. It looks like something out of a horror movie. Like The Silence of the Lambs. The broken fingernail embedded in the stone of the infamous pit Buffalo Bill used to store his victims is forever ingrained in Wren’s memory, and now she’s confronted with a similar reality off-screen. Some of the marks have traces of blood smeared across them, and a quick look at the victim’s hands shows that she had used them to claw and scratch until they bled. At some point in her entombment, she was conscious enough to realize where she was. She had spent who knows how long trying in vain to scratch through the wooden lid that closed in on her, perhaps not even knowing about the three feet of earth waiting for her on the other side.
“She’s alive, John,” Wren says finally, though finding herself unable to look away from the scratch marks. “She’s got a pulse, and she’ll know who this guy is. That’s what matters.”
Leroux loosens his tie. His jaw clenches, and the desperate hope in his eyes from moments earlier is long gone, replaced by a shattering flash of defeat.
“Did you see what I saw, Muller? She might as well be dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up on one of your gurneys later tonight,” he spits and turns around to half-heartedly toss a clod of dirt to the ground. “He fucking played us, and we fell for it.”
Wren doesn’t disagree. She felt the pulse with her own hand, and it was weak at best. There is little chance that the victim’s brain is going to be able to recall anything with full clarity if she wakes up. But Wren doesn’t say that. “You’re wrong. He didn’t play us.”
Leroux turns quickly to face her. “How can you even bullshit me right now, Muller? He didn’t play us? We look like fools, racing against some clock that he laid out for us to find. That’s exactly what he wanted.”
His voice takes an aggressive tone Wren has never heard before. She isn’t scared of him, but she is scared for him. She takes a slow, deep breath and then responds.
“No, John. He meant for her to be dead. He meant for us to be filled with false hope, prying this lid open with time to spare only to find a dead girl inside. That’s what he planned, and it didn’t happen.” Leroux softens, and she continues, “We opened that lid, and we found a living human being inside. Someone who saw him, heard him, and, hell, probably smelled him. And even if she can’t point us in the right direction when she wakes up, we’ll still have saved her. A person. He failed. No matter what happens next, he already failed.”
Wren climbs out of the hole they’ve both been standing in and bends over to dust the dirt from her pants. Leroux tilts his head back and groans, his old self again. He stands and follows Wren to the entrance. They match strides, both ragged and weary from their lifesaving efforts. More hair has escaped Wren’s bun than is still contained by it. Her skin is flushed and painted with a sweat-soil paste. Leroux’s hair is unruly and damp. Sweat has soaked through his dress shirt. They both try to believe the day’s efforts were worth something as they walk away from this moment.
“The idea that he meant for this to go down differently. That he didn’t get his moment, that’s nice,” Leroux concedes. “But it’s like a participation trophy. I can put it on my shelf and it’s an ego boost in the moment, but it’s nothing like the real thing. A real win. We’re no closer to nailing him. Any further loss of innocent life is on my hands.”