“Oh, we revisit this subject every eight or nine months,” she said. “He claims the numbers are normal, and that maybe I have an inordinate number of bad drivers among my clients.”

“Have your clients complained about any one deputy in particular?” Mendez asked.

“There are two or three regular offenders. Ask your boss.”

“Did any of the women complain about the deputy that stopped them being inappropriate in any way?”

Thomas looked at him sharply. “Are you thinking one of your own people . . . ?”

“No, ma’am,” Hicks said. “We’re just following up on a remark someone made in passing.”

She frowned and started moving slowly toward the door. “I want to go back and check on Karly.”

All three of them went to stand outside Karly Vickers’s room, looking in at her through the glass. Nothing had changed. The young woman lay on the bed with tubes and wires attaching her to machines and bags of fluids and blood. She looked as thin and pale as an apparition, like a vision that might fade away to nothing in the blink of an eye.

“The doctor told me she probably won’t be able to see or hear,” Thomas said quietly. “Can you imagine how alone she must have felt? How terrifying that must have been never to know if that monster was there with her or not, never to know what he was going to do next.”

She shivered and sipped her coffee to ward off the inner chill. In her left hand Mendez noticed she held the gold necklace she had asked for that morning. She rubbed the figure of the woman between her thumb and forefinger the same absent way he had often seen his mother rub at her rosary beads, a gesture that offered a certain amount of comfort or perhaps hope.

“Her mother should be here soon,” she said, glancing at her watch. “She had to wait for a friend who could drive her up here. What am I going to tell her? Your daughter came to me for help, and this is what happened?”

“You can’t blame yourself, ma’am,” Hicks said. “You saved her life today.”

“I hope so,” she murmured.

A nurse went into the room to check the monitors and make notes. When she put her hand on Karly Vickers’s arm to check her IV, all hell broke loose.

The comatose woman came alive violently, arms and legs thrashing. Monitors went wild. The nurse shrieked and jumped back.

Jane Thomas ran into the room, calling out to Karly Vickers, forgetting her voice would fall literally on deaf ears.

Staff came running. A doctor called out for a sedative.