Eric nearly ran the girl over.
His mind as he drove the Hummer out of the 'Glades, on an access road made muddy by the S&R teams going back and forth, was on the bullet, the height, the proximity, the mind-set necessary to stand so close to a living human being and shoot them with no more concern than one would when shooting a deer. Part of him (a very small part), kept an eye on the road leading away from the ranger station, but without traffic he allowed himself to be distracted by his thoughts: the worst that could happen would be he'd hit a 'gator, and that might actually be equally bad for the Hummer as it'd be for the reptile. No one-sided contest there –
In the dusty, mucky road, one more splash of mud would have never caught his attention. It was the stain of rich crimson edging the brown that triggered his instincts and snapped him to attention, stepping hard on the Hummer's brakes and pulling at the wheel so that the vehicle fishtailed at his touch, and even so there were only a few inches to spare between the bumper and the fallen body when he finally wrestled the Hummer to a halt. He leapt out into the cloud of dust he'd raised, his gun in his hands, scanning the brush and woods around him. How far away had she left her would-be killers? How desperate, how close would they be, if anywhere near her at all? He radioed for support as he sidestepped up to her, using the Hummer as shield as best he could. "Miss? Miss! Can you answer me? Can you get up?" For a moment he feared their luck had at last run out, but a heartbeat later he heard her whimper quietly, a wounded animal too tired to run anymore. In two steps he was by her side, crouched down. "It's ok, miss. Miami PD." She was bleeding from somewhere under the shreds of a knit sleeveless top, covered in mud from crown to bare-feet toes, her fingers were bloodied and she had enough welts to claim she'd crossed the entire state on foot and make it stick. "Can you walk?" He saw her mouth move; her voice was hoarse and nearly non-existent, but the message was obvious: she was barely conscious, let alone in any shape to walk anywhere.
Briefly Eric considered the landscape, the girl, the Hummer, himself. He was about to compromise the scene, but life came before evidence. He picked her up lightly and brought her to the passenger's side of the Hummer, tucking her against the seat and latching the seat belt around her battered frame. As he ran around to the driver's side he grabbed his phone and speed-dialed. "H, I found her!"
He waited only for the curt acknowledgement before switching to the local lines, trying to find out where, if anywhere, a medical vehicle might be as he scrambled into the driver's seat and leaned sideways to strap the girl in.
The bullet crashed through the rear window, leaving its fantastic galaxy effect on the windshield; the thunder of it was deafening, and Eric felt the passage of it brush the hair on the back of his neck. He didn't even bother to look; he turned on the engine and, shielding the girl as best he could with one arm, stepped on the gas. The Hummer surged forward even as another bullet pinged against the back and wreaked havoc on the kit on the back seat. Something stopped before it got to them – God knew what, because this time the shooter had aimed low, for their bodies, not a head shot. He let go of the girl and got hold of the phone again, hoping someone, anyone, would be close enough to reach them and step on the killers like the cockroaches they were.
Their luck, however, apparently didn't stretch quite that far. The S&R chopper had been refueling, and barring Eric, the closest ones to the site had been the rangers at the station he'd left from. They were the first ones on the scene, but by then there was little they could do barring giving him a sense of safety in numbers.
The second Hummer arrived as the ambulance finally did, and Horatio leapt down, cutting through the growing flock of personnel like an arrow to get to Eric. "Eric, are you Ok?"
Eric had been examining the path of the second bullet, which had hit the back door and then his kit before bouncing off for parts unknown. He was calmly photographing the damage, but sparks were all but visibly flying off of him. "Yeah, I'm fine." He looked at Horatio at that, shaking his head, gritting his teeth. "That's twice, H. Twice!" He slammed the door shut as hard as he could."
"I know." Horatio took heart from Eric's anger – it takes some degree of health to get that righteously indignant, though these people and their smug disregard for who they shot at and where made it easy. After making sure Eric was well enough to finish documenting the scene, he moved around the Hummer to the passenger's side, where the girl was being examined by an EMT whose job it was to decide whether she should be hurried off or not. "Miss, are you Ok?"
"No", she croaked at him, her eyes on the EMT.
He paused, caught off-guard by that very plain and stark response, then leaned closer. "Can you see?"
"Some", she replied. She was a miserable huddle under her emergency blanket, mud-covered and bloodied. Experience told Horatio her wounds were the result of an argument about dietary habits with a small alligator.
"We'll take you away from here now, miss." The EMT gestured to his partner.
"Wait…. wait" At that she turned to Horatio's voice, who lifted a hand to stop the EMTs, though he knew in a moment they'd remember they had the right of way. Her eyes were bloodshot, her lashes covered with fine silt, the circles around them black as bruises, but as she fought to focus on him Horatio saw her pupils shift, if only minutely. In what was left of her voice, she gave him the words he'd been dreading to hear.
"They've got more girls."
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Her name was Rowan Means Murphy, she was badly dehydrated, starved, had caught herself in something poisonous and spiny, and had had two words with a juvenile 'gator which had left her with fractures on her right foot and a row of nasty gouges over her lower left ribs. Apparently she seemed to think this meant she had won the argument. She had also refused anything but a cast and stitches and asked specifically for homeopathic medication.
When Horatio and Eric were allowed in to see her for processing, she was lying back on the hospital bed with her eyes half closed, breathing slowly and deeply.
Meditative exercises against the pain, Horatio thought.
She was a short, round-faced creature with very pert features and potentially dark auburn hair under the mud. Not having allowed the hospital to rinse her eyes with anything but water, the CSIs had been warned that her vision was nowhere up to par, but she turned towards the sound of their footsteps, squinting fiercely.
"Miss Means, I'm Horatio Caine, this is Eric Delco, we're with the Miami PD Crime Lab."
She frowned. "You were there when I got picked up, right? I think I remember your voice, both of you."
"That's right." Horatio and Eric smiled. "We would like to ask you a few questions if you feel up to it."
"'Feel up to it'?" She looked up at the ceiling again. "I feel chewed, is how I feel. But if it helps you catch these… people, better now than later, right? What do you want from me?"
Her eyes were mismatched, one blue, one a silvery gray. It was noticeable only because of the opiate contracting her pupils, but it caught Horatio's attention for all that he couldn't have said why. "Anything you can think of. You said they had more girls?"
She nodded. "I could hear them… inside wherever they were holding me." He saw her fingers curl tightly over the edge of the sheets as Eric ran the trace comb over her muddied hair. "Did… Has anyone else…"
"Yes", he replied, and saw her brighten up, subtly but unmistakably. "What can you tell me about the place where you were being held?"
She shrugged, then started when Eric took her hand and started on her fingernails – unused to touch as much as Victoria had been. "Dark, pitch black, I mean. I couldn't see my own hand if I'd hit myself with it. It smelled damp, but not swampy –" She opened her mouth, closed it again.
"Miss Means –"
"Please don't call me that", she begged in an earnest tone that startled them both. "It sounds awful. Murphy's fine. Or even Rowan."
"Rowan, there's no information you can give us that we can't use."
She rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. "I'm just guessing here, you understand, but I don't think it was underground. There's a smell that sinks into anything, even concrete, in an underground room. I think it was just a building, a big building. And the dirt on the floor… There was wire underneath it. It made me think of a litter box." Color rose in her face. "You know, chips in a tray."
"Alright."
"When I was –" Her breath caught, and both men paused, waiting for her courage to rise up again. "I was in this little box, I couldn't even sit up without banging my head on the top but… Have you noticed there's always an echo in an empty room, no matter how small? There wasn't one. I know it felt like all the walls were solid, but I don't think they were. I think there was some sort of trapdoor that was just… the whole side. Or top. I'd bet on the top. It felt like concrete, but… slippery."
"How did they pull you out, that night?"
Muscles on her throat and shoulders twitched at the memories. "I don't know. I was trying to sleep, then suddenly someone's blowing something on my face and all at once my heart's pounding, my face burns, and my eyes feel like they're about to pop out of my skull. Then someone, a lot of someones, started tossing me about… I lost track of most everything. I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Horatio rather thought she'd been overwhelmed by tactile input on purpose… much as the killers seemed to wait until the sleep-deprived girls dozed off to snatch them off their cages. "Can you think of anything else?"
She nodded. "I'm not from here… I've only been twice before, and that was a long time ago, but… you know, even though we were somewhere in the Everglades, I smelled brine. Not just swamp."
"Where are you from, Rowan?"
"New Mexico."
Horatio straightened up in shock. Eric, swabbing clothes, looked up at him curiously before his mind caught up with what she'd just said.
"How long… how long would you say these people had been holding you, Rowan?", Horatio asked, his tone unchanged.
Her expression fell into lines of exhaustion. "I don't know. I think they meant for us to lose track of time. I was walking the beach on Wednesday afternoon, I always do before dinner, and someone jumped me, I never saw them."
"Which Wednesday?"
Her head snapped around for all that his tone still had not faltered. "The 15th." Eric drew in a surprised breath. "How long has it been?!"
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"They snatched her nearly two weeks ago from across the country… this just went from bad to worse, didn't it." Eric and Horatio hurried down the hospital's corridors.
"Very much so." Horatio was already on the phone. They would have to widen the net, check missing persons reports from every state, try to find a profile, break the case, and the killers, before they were pulled from his hands. He had to widen his net, yes, but he felt fairly certain that he could start tightening the weave.
Brine, she'd said.
Once back at the lab, he found himself in the Layout Lab, staring at a map of the 'Glades, staring at the four spots where the victims, living or dead, known or unidentified, had been found.
How fast can a frightened person run through a swamp?
Even providing for the possibility that all three girls had run directly away from one another, and given that there was no way to know where the fourth one had come from, the search area was limited. Horatio felt he could narrow it down even further.
Dirt over wire. Like a litter box.
He rather thought it was to absorb water whenever the tide rose too high.
Calleigh appeared at his door as if summoned by Providence. "Calleigh."
"You were right, Dream Hunt already owns property in Florida; it's been sitting there waiting for them to get their paperwork through."
"Do they own anything in this particular area?" Horatio pointed at the wide oval he'd drawn on the computer's screen.
She checked against her printouts. "Couple of boat shacks… it's pretty far out in the middle of nowhere." She frowned as she heard her own words.
"Yes, yes it is." Horatio speed-dialed. "Frank? We need to make a house call."