She hesitated for a moment, then reached down and felt between her legs. She wasn’t sore.
If he had raped her, she would know, wouldn’t she?
She wasn’t sure.
She had only had sex once before, and it had hurt. Not painful, just uncomfortable, and only at first. Her boyfriend, Tyler, had promised to be gentle, and he had. It was over fast, his first time too. That was only a few weeks ago. Her father had let her go to Tyler’s homecoming dance at Whatney Vale High. Tyler had rented a room at the Union, and even managed to score a bottle of champagne from somewhere.
God, her head.
She reached back up and tentatively touched the bandages. Her ear was completely wrapped up. Some kind of tape held the dressing in place. Gently, she peeled back the bandage. “Fuck!”
The cool air felt like the blade of a knife.
She pulled at the bandage anyway, tugging until she could get her hand under the cloth.
Tears welled in her eyes as her fingertips brushed over what remained of her ear, a ragged wound at best, stitched and tender. “No … no … no,” she cried.
Her voice bounced off the walls and echoed back at her mockingly.
Nash pulled the Charger into a handicapped spot at the front of Flair Tower and killed the engine.
“You’re really going to park here?” Porter frowned.
Nash shrugged. “We’re the po-po; we get to do things like that.”
“Remind me to put in for a new partner when this is all over.”
“That sounds like an excellent plan. Then maybe I’ll get saddled with some hot female rookie fresh out of the academy.” Nash grinned.
“Maybe you can requisition one with daddy issues.”
“I don’t recall that question on the form, but I may have missed it.”
The doorman propped open the large glass doors for them, and they moved past him to the front desk. Porter flashed his badge. “Penthouse twenty-seven?”
A young woman with close-cropped brown hair and blue eyes smiled back at him. “Your colleagues arrived about twenty-five minutes ago. Take elevator number six to the twenty-seventh floor. The penthouse will be on your right as you exit.” She handed him a keycard. “You’ll need this.”
They boarded elevator number six, and the door closed behind them with a quick swoosh of air. Porter pressed the button for the twenty-seventh floor, but nothing happened.
“You need to slide the card through the thingy,” Nash instructed.
“The thingy? How the fuck did you become a detective?”
“Forgive me for not consulting my word-a-day calendar this morning,” he retorted. “The card reader over there. Looks like a credit card machine.”
“Got it, Einstein.” Porter slid the plastic access card through the reader and pushed the button again. This time the panel lit up in bright blue, and they began to ascend.
The elevator door opened onto a hallway that extended in both directions. Large railed openings offered views of a massive atrium on the floor below. Near the end of the hallway to the right a door was open, a uniformed officer standing guard.
Porter and Nash approached, showed their badges, and stepped inside.
The view was breathtaking.
The penthouse occupied the entire northeast corner of the building. The outer walls consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows with a balcony. The city sprawled out around them, with Lake Michigan visible in the distance. “When I was fifteen,” Porter said, “my room was nothing like this.”
“My apartment could fit in this living room,” Nash said. “After today, I may have to trade in my badge and become a real estate mogul.”
“I don’t think you can jump right into something like that,” said Porter. “You probably need to take some kind of course on the Internet.”
Nash pulled two pairs of latex gloves from his pocket, handed one set to Porter, and put on the other.
A number of CSI techs were already hard at work inside. Paul Watson spotted them and came over from the floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the far wall. “If there was a struggle, there’s no sign. This is the cleanest apartment I’ve ever seen. The fridge is fully stocked. I found a receipt in the trash from two days ago. We’re pulling the phone records, but I don’t think we’ll find anything there, either. I was able to scroll back through the last ten incoming numbers, and they all belonged to her father.”
“She has a landline? Really?”
Watson shrugged. “Maybe it came with the apartment.”
“Daddy probably put it in. Can’t claim no signal or missed calls with a landline,” Nash pointed out.
Porter asked, “What about outgoing?”
“Three numbers. We’re running them now,” said Watson.
Porter began walking around the apartment, his shoes squeaking on the hardwood floors.
The kitchen had cherry cabinets and dark granite countertops. All stainless steel appliances — Viking stove and Sub-Zero refrigerator. The living room held a large sectional beige leather couch. It appeared so comfortable, Porter got tired just glancing at the plush cushions. The television was at least eighty inches. “That’s a 4K display,” Watson told him.
“4K?”
“Four times more pixels than your standard 1080p HD television.”
Porter only nodded. He still had a nineteen-inch tube television at home. He refused to replace the ancient unit with a flat panel while it was working, and the damn thing wouldn’t die.
There was a den with a large oak desk. A tech was copying the files from a twenty-seven-inch iMac.
“Anything useful?” he asked.
The tech shook his head. “Nothing stands out. We’ll analyze her files and social network activity back at the station.”
Porter continued on into the master bedroom. The bed was neatly made. No posters were on the walls, only a few paintings. “This doesn’t feel right.”
Nash pulled a few of the drawers; each was lined with perfectly folded clothes. “Yeah. Seems more like a model home, almost staged. If a fifteen-year-old girl lives here, she’s the neatest teenager I’ve ever come across,” Nash said.
There was a single framed picture on her nightstand of a woman in her mid- to late twenties. Flowing brown hair, the greenest eyes Porter had ever seen. “Her mother?” he asked nobody in particular.
“I believe so,” Watson replied.
“Talbot said she died of cancer when Emory was only three,” Porter said, studying the photograph. “A brain tumor, of all things.”
“I can research that if you’d like,” Watson proposed eagerly.
Porter nodded and replaced the picture. “That would be helpful.”
“You could bounce a quarter on this bed,” said Nash. “I don’t think a kid made it.”
“I’m still not convinced a kid lives here.”
The master