Chapter: 10
When Dreams Fight Back
When Renee is in the hospital, she is so drugged up with pain killers; she doesn't have any dreams. Now that she is at home in Horatio's house, she is starting to have nightmares. Nothing too bad, but she will wake up in a sweat or twitch herself awake.
Over time, however, the dreams get worse and worse. She is too stubborn to talk about them with her brother even though Horatio repeatedly asks her about her dreams.
Eventually, her dreams get away from her when she has a terrifying flashback to her assault when early one morning, Renee is slowly shuffling barefooted through the carpeted hall into the kitchen when she reaches out and touches the refrigerator door giving herself a good static charge.
This little jolt sends her into a flashback. She was tied up somewhere in a warehouse. She didn't recognize where she was, but she was hanging over a large pool of water.
Someone somewhere was talking to her, but she couldn't understand what they were saying. She felt a shock of electricity; it hurt so bad.
She isn't aware she was making any noise, but she is yelling with a blood-curdling scream. Horatio is still asleep at the time, and the dogs come running to where she is.
Renee is in a deep trance, so she never hears them come in. Horatio is very frightened by the noise he hears and reaches out to touch her to bring her back to reality. The way that she responds was shocking.
When Horatio reaches out to touch his sisters arm, she spins wildly around fists flying. In her horror driven trance, she makes contact with her brother's face. He doesn't move away but rather brings her into an embrace.
Holding her close and allowing her to fight as long as she needs without hurting herself or him. After about three minutes of her fighting, she collapses sobbing in her brother's loving embrace.
It takes a good ten minutes of her, crying for her to be able to say anything. Between the sobs, she manages to tell her brother that she had just gone through in the painful flashback.
The new memory sends Horatio and the team back to the warehouse to find the new crime scene that they didn't know about. When Eric finds the new crime scene, he is shocked by what he sees.
There deep inside the warehouse is a water tank with a wench that is supposed to be used to move large crates of fish but is instead attached to a metal chair.
Eric finds an exposed live wire making the water and chair electrified. No one can get near the tank with the power still on. Having the electric company cut the power off is a quick phone call, but it takes about ten minutes to do. Once the power is out, Eric and the rest of the team are able to get to the new scene.
Putting the scenes together reveals a whole new timeline of events. First, Renee is attacked in her house and abducted against her will.
Then her assailants tie her to a chair and electrocute her to get information from her. When that doesn't work, they go more hands-on. They take her to a different area of the warehouse to beat the answer out of her.
Unfortunately for them, Horatio and the police force are approaching with their sirens on. The assailants flee through a trap door that the police had never found. How they get out of the warehouse is not important enough for the team to spend any time figuring it out yet.
When Renee has her flashback, she remembers that after she is questioned with electrocution, her attackers accidentally drop her onto the ground. She remembers falling through the air and hitting the ground hard.
Renee tells her brother about the memory elaborates with, "I remember hearing a loud snap of what she thinks was her vertebrae breaking.
Horatio is again shocked by what his little sister had gone through. He is very angry and eager to catch whoever it is that tortured her. He wants someone to pay for doing that to his baby sister and someone that over the last four months, he has grown to love and admire for her strength, tenacity, and sheer will.