Page 8 of The Secrets We Hide
Especially since the person who’d said she would cover the back exits had not stayed outside to cover the back exits.
Emmy turned to Jude. “Did the FBI forget to teach you how to secure a perimeter?”
“I know Dad taught you to never go in without backup.” Jude paused to let the words land. “Where’s Cole?”
Cole was safe outside knocking on neighboring doors. “Priority number one is locating the victim’s teenage daughter. Allison Vickery is—”
Tick.
Emmy looked at Jude. She’d heard it, too—like the second hand on a stopwatch resetting to zero.
Tick.
The sound had come from the patch of soaked carpet under the window.
They both looked up. Both took a step back, weapons raised. The ceiling was bulging in the middle, saturated with blood. There were holes where the Sheetrock had pulled away from the screws. Cracks ran along the seams. Particles of insulation floated through the air.
Tick.
Another drop hit the wet carpet.
Then the ceiling split open, and a body collapsed onto the floor.
CHAPTER TWO
Emmy’s brain glitched in a way that made her incapable of comprehending what her eyes were seeing. The revelation came in short, sharp flashes: a white sock on a slender foot, a purple Nike on the other, blue running shorts, matching top with white piping, streaks of pale flesh curtained by blood.
Allison Vickery’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She’d been shot in the head. The bullet had opened up a furrow on the left side of her skull. White bone flashed between sinew. Blood pulsed from the entry wound with every heartbeat. Slow, erratic, a faint signifier of life.
Jude moved first, dropping to her knees, rolling the girl onto her back. She grabbed a shirt from the bed and used it to staunch the wound.
“Mandy.”
The name of Allison’s only child rushed out of Emmy’s mouth. The girl had been a tween the last time Emmy had seen her, gangly and awkward and trying too hard to grow up.
“Mandy.” Emmy dropped the shotgun. She knelt down, gripped the girl’s hand. “It’s Emmy Clifton. I’m here with my sister. We’re gonna take care of you, baby. You need to hold on.”
She heard a noise behind her. Cole stood breathless at the doorway. He must’ve come running when he’d heard the last gunshot. His mouth hung open at the spectacle in the room.
“Go outside,” she ordered. “Flag down the ambulance. Seal off the crime scene. We need teams searching the woods. The shooter is armed and dangerous.”
Cole disappeared into the hall.
“Mandy?” Jude’s hands were on the girl’s face. “Mandy?”
Emmy caught a flash of white beneath flickering eyelids before they closed.
Jude pressed her ear to the girl’s chest. “She stopped breathing.”
They both moved in tandem. Jude tilted back the head, pinched the nose closed, sealed her mouth over Mandy’s. Emmy laced together her fingers, rested her palms on the chest, lined up her shoulders over her hands, locked her elbows. She felt Mandy’s chest rise as Jude gave her the first breath, then lower as the lungs emptied, then rise again on Jude’s second breath. They both waited on the exhale to see if Mandy breathed on her own.
She did not.
Emmy started compressions.
The girl’s ribs flexed under the weight of Emmy’s body. Breath huffed out of her mouth. CPR was an act of brutality, a desperate measure to force the heart to circulate blood. To keep the organs functioning. To prevent the brain from dying. Emmy felt one of Mandy’s ribs dislocate on the next compression, but she kept pushing to a two-inch depth, releasing, then pushing again, rhythmically counting off each reset until she reached thirty.
Jude leaned down and forced two more deep breaths into the girl’s lungs.
