Sam wanted to snap at him, but the concern she saw on his face had her biting back a nasty retort. “Tracy does everything for me. She always has. This is something I can do for her. Look at her. She’s hysterical. She can’t handle it.”

“But what about you? What about the toll it’ll take on you?”

“I can deal with it,” Sam said with more confidence than she felt. “I appreciate your concern, but I need to do this.”

Harry returned to the waiting room. “Sam? Are you coming?”

She squeezed Nick’s arm and followed Harry through the doors to the corridor that led to the exam rooms where she’d spent far too much time in the last year. Sam, who despised needles and all things medical, discovered a totally different set of frazzled nerves was involved when someone she loved was lying in one of the beds.

Brooke’s face had been wiped clean of blood, which made it easier to see how bruised her left cheek and lips were. At first glance, it looked to Sam as if someone had punched her. The skin that wasn’t black or blue was as white as the bed linens with only her freckles standing out in stark relief. A trail of grayish drool stained her mouth and chin.

“Was the sheet she was wrapped in bagged?” Sam asked.

“This is MPD Lieutenant Holland,” Harry said to the medical professionals tending to Brooke. “She’s the patient’s aunt.”

One of the nurses gestured to a paper bag that sat on a metal table off to the side of Brooke’s bed.

“Thank you,” Sam said, eying the evidence bag with trepidation. What would the lab uncover about Brooke’s involvement, if any, in what happened tonight on MacArthur Boulevard? Whose blood had been all over her? What would she do if her investigation placed the blame for mass homicide on her own niece? No, she thought, dismissing that notion the second it registered. That couldn’t happen.

“Any word on the tox screen?” Sam asked the doctor in charge.

“She’s hopped up on Molly,” the doctor said, “with a side of GHB and vodka, or so we think from the smell. Her BAC was 0.16.”

Molly, Sam thought, as she desperately tried to remember the details of the briefing they’d had at work recently about the drug that was running rampant among young people, even resulting in several deaths. MDMA, she recalled, the main chemical found in Ecstasy.

As the nurses prepped Brooke for the rape exam, Sam moved to the head of the bed where she could be close by if Brooke needed her but still able to watch what the nurses were doing.