Mercy blinked at the woman. “I didn’t know that.”

“You were catatonic,” Irina said. “You sat and rocked when you were healed enough. Before then, you just stared at the ceiling. For hours. It broke our hearts, the nurses.”

“Who were the people, if they weren’t cops?” Tom asked.

Irina shook her head. “I don’t know their names, but they would be listed in the police report. The driver was a security guard, a private one. I can’t remember his employer, but he did come in the day after you were admitted to see how you were doing. That was according to your nurse at the time, who was a friend of mine. She’s the one who told me about you. The security guard told her that he’d come to pick up his wife up at the bus station, but that he was really early. He’d been sleeping in his car, out of sight of the shooter’s truck, when he heard the screams. He didn’t know what to do, so he figured he’d turn on his lights and maybe scare the shooter away. He felt bad that he didn’t get out of his car, that he’d ‘only’ called 911, but he had no medical training, so he wouldn’t have known what to do. The paramedics were there in minutes.”

“That was still brave of him,” Mercy murmured, resolving to find the man’s name and thank him. “He saved my life that night.”

Rafe’s hand tightened on hers and he lifted his head. “We need to thank him.”

Mercy nodded. “I was thinking that. Can you get his name, Rafe?”

Tom was still frowning. “I’ll dig into the records for you. But I’m confused. You had two lockets when you were brought into the hospital—yours and your mother’s, I assume.”

“Yes,” Mercy said, not sure what his question was.

“Well, I thought that the lockets were on heavy chains. Welded on. Impossible to break. How did you get both lockets?”

Mercy blinked again. She’d never wondered about that, but Tom was right. “He cut them off us.” Another memory surfaced, this one not normally part of her nightmares. “He had bolt cutters and he cut them off us and buried them in the dirt. When he drove away, all I could think of was that I needed the lockets, so I crawled to where he’d buried them and dug them up.”

Gideon stared at her. “Why would he do that? Why bury the lockets?”

Mercy stared back. “I have no idea. Maybe he was trying to hide any evidence that would connect to Eden? I didn’t even remember that till just now. I just remember needing to get to the lockets.”

“Because they were the last you had of your mother?” Sasha asked.

“Maybe. Or . . .” It was a hard truth to admit, even now. “Or maybe the lockets were such a critical part of our lives, I felt wrong without mine even though I hated it. It was like an identity or part of our spirituality. It’s difficult to explain. Kind of like a talisman. Even though it was really a display of ownership.” She shrugged.