Part 5
The scrub sink outside the NICU smelled of iodine and harsh antibacterial soap. Megan pushed her sleeves up to her elbows, pressing the pedal with her knee to start the water. Beside her, Tyler did the same. The nurse had instructed them to scrub for a full two minutes. It felt like an eternity, but it gave Megan something to anchor her spinning thoughts.
When they finished, a nurse named Davis—a tall man with a quiet, reassuring presence—handed them sterile yellow gowns.
“She’s in Isolette Four,” Davis said softly, tying his own mask behind his ears. “She’s stable, but she’s still very fragile. Try to keep your voices low. The monitors will beep, but don’t let the numbers scare you. That’s my job to watch.”
Megan nodded, unable to speak. Tyler gripped her shoulder, and together they followed the nurse through the heavy double doors.
The NICU was kept dim, lit mostly by the glow of monitors and the warming lights positioned over the plastic incubators. The room was dominated by the rhythmic, overlapping sounds of mechanical breathing and digital chimes.
Davis led them to the far corner of the room.
Megan stopped a few feet away. Through the clear acrylic shell of the incubator, she saw her. The baby was impossibly small. She wore only a tiny diaper, her chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow bursts. Thin wires snaked across her pale skin, connecting to sensors on her chest and her tiny heel. Under the medical tape securing the IV line, Megan could still see faint, bruised indentations on the infant’s skin.
Tyler stepped up beside the incubator, staring down at the tiny chest. He exhaled a long, shaky breath, crossing his arms tight across his chest as if to hold himself together.
Megan moved closer, pressing her fingertips lightly against the warm acrylic shell. She watched the monitor trace the steady, fragile rhythm of the baby’s heartbeat. There was no paperwork signed yet. The state hadn’t officially made them foster parents. But standing in the quiet hum of the machines, Megan felt an overwhelming, fierce sense of gravity anchor her to the floor.
“We’re right here,” Megan whispered, her voice barely carrying over the hum of the oxygen pump. “You don’t have to fight all by yourself anymore.”
Back at the county sheriff’s precinct, the air conditioning was struggling against the afternoon heat.
Sarah sat at her desk in the bullpen, a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee resting near her keyboard. Her uniform trousers were stiff with dried mud, and her boots left dusty tracks on the linoleum, but she hadn’t gone home to change.
Across the desk, Detective Miller—a weary guy in a wrinkled dress shirt—was scrubbing backward and forward through a grainy video file on his tablet. The footage was from the traffic camera positioned above the intersection of Route 4 and the interstate on-ramp, exactly two miles from Arthur Vance’s pond.
“Right there,” Miller said, pausing the video.
The timestamp in the corner read 3:14 a.m. The black-and-white feed showed a dark sedan—maybe an older model Honda or Toyota, the resolution was too poor to be certain—rolling through the intersection. The car didn’t turn toward the interstate. It headed straight down Route 4, toward the back roads.
Miller dragged his finger across the screen, fast-forwarding the timeline. At 3:38 a.m., the same dark sedan reappeared on the camera. This time, it was speeding back from the direction of the county roads, blowing through a yellow light, and immediately merging onto the northbound interstate ramp.
“Twenty-four minutes,” Sarah noted, her voice flat. “Just enough time to drive out to the Creek Road culvert, carry a bundle down the embankment, and drive back.”
“No front plate,” Miller said, zooming in on the pixelated grill of the car. “And the glare from the streetlamp washes out the rear tag when it turns onto the ramp. But it gives us a timeline. We can pull toll booth records going north, see if we get a hit on the make and model.”
Sarah stared at the frozen image of the car disappearing onto the highway. The person behind the wheel had driven away into the dark, leaving a newborn in the freezing mud, assuming the water would rise or the cold would finish the job.
“I’ll start pulling the toll logs,” Miller said, shutting the tablet. “Go home, Hayes. You’ve been on shift for fourteen hours. You’re tracking half the county’s topsoil across my floor.”
Sarah finally looked away from the blank monitor. She nodded, slowly standing up. Her lower back ached, and her hands still felt the phantom weight of the freezing infant.
Before leaving the bullpen, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the front desk of the animal shelter. Chloe answered on the second ring.
“Hey, it’s Sarah. How is she?”
“Sleeping,” Chloe said, the background noise of the shelter muted on her end of the line. “We got the mud off. She let the vet clean the scrapes on her paws without a fuss. She ate a handful of wet food, curled up on the heating pad, and hasn’t moved since. She’s exhausted, Sarah.”
“Keep an eye on her,” Sarah said softly. “I’ll be by tomorrow to check in.”
Sarah hung up the phone and walked out into the fading evening light, the sound of the hospital monitors and the image of the muddy tracks at the pond echoing in the quiet of the parking lot.