Blindsighted Read Free Page B

the Lintons were his family.
    "You okay?" he asked.
    She nodded. "Go ahead. She needs you."
    Jeffrey tried not to react to this. If not for the fact that Sara was the county coroner, he would never see her. It said a lot about their relationship that somebody had to die in order for her to be in the same room with him.
    Walking to the back of the diner, Jeffrey felt a sense of dread overcome him. He knew that something violent had happened. He knew that Sibyl Adams had been killed. Other than that, he had no idea what to expect when he tugged opened the door to the women's bathroom. What he saw literally took his breath away.
    Sara sat in the middle of the room, Sibyl Adams's head in her lap. Blood was everywhere, covering the body, covering Sara, whose shirt and pants were soaked down the front, as if someone had taken a hose and sprayed her. Bloody shoe and hand prints marked the floor as if a great struggle had occurred.
    Jeffrey stood in the doorway, taking all this in, trying to catch his breath.
    "Shut the door," Sara whispered, her hand resting on Sibyl's forehead.
    He did as he was told, walking around the periphery of the room. His mouth opened, but nothing would come out. There were the obvious questions to ask, but part of Jeffrey did not want to know the answers. Part of him wanted to take Sara out of this room, put her in his car, and drive until neither one of them could remember the way this tiny bathroom looked and smelled. There was the taste of violence in the air, morbid and sticky in the back of his throat. He felt dirty just standing there.
    "She looks like Lena," he finally said, referring to Sibyl Adams's twin sister, a detective on his force. "For just a second I thought…" He shook his head, unable to continue.
    " Lena 's hair is longer."
    "Yeah," he said, unable to take his eyes off the victim. Jeffrey had seen a lot of horrible things in his time, but he had never personally known a victim of violent crime. Not that he knew Sibyl Adams well, but in a town as small as Heartsdale, everyone was your neighbor.
    Sara cleared her throat. "Did you tell Lena yet?"
    Her question fell on him like an anvil. Two weeks into his job as police chief, he had hired Lena Adams out of the academy in Macon. Those early years, she was like Jeffrey, an outsider. Eight years later he had promoted her to detective. At thirty-three, she was the youngest detective and only woman on the senior squad. And now her sister had been murdered in their own backyard, little more than two hundred yards from the police station. He felt a sense of personal responsibility that was almost suffocating.
    "Jeffrey?"
    Jeffrey took a deep breath, letting it go slowly. "She's taking some evidence to Macon," he finally answered. "I called the highway patrol and asked them to bring her back here."
    Sara was looking at him. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she hadn't been crying. Jeffrey was glad of this one thing, because he had never seen Sara cry. He thought if he saw her crying that something in him would give.
    "Did you know she was blind?" she asked.
    Jeffrey leaned against the wall. He had somehow forgotten that detail.
    "She didn't even see it coming," Sara whispered. She bent her head down, looking at Sibyl. As usual, Jeffrey couldn't imagine what Sara was thinking. He decided to wait for her to talk. Obviously, she needed a few moments to collect her thoughts.
    He tucked his hands into his pockets, taking in the space. There were two stalls with wooden doors across from a sink that was so old the fixtures for hot and cold were on opposite sides of the basin. Over this was a gold speckled mirror that was worn through at the edges. All told, the room was not more than twenty feet square, but the tiny black and white tiles on the floor made it seem even smaller. The dark blood pooling around the body didn't help matters. Claustrophobia had never been a problem for Jeffrey, but Sara's silence was like a fourth presence in the room. He