Silenced by Allison Brennan

heavy workload, too,” Noah said. “I don’t know what you think we can do that your more-than-capable department can’t accomplish.”
    “Maybe,” Genie said. Lucy watched Genie’s eyes drift from Noah to the bloody bed. She could practically hear Genie’s thought process.
    No one’s going to care about one more dead hooker.
    Lucy couldn’t bear the thought of Nicole Bellows’s murder going to the bottom of anyone’s workload. A black hooker in a bad area wasn’t going to get much attention. Genie was a good cop, but if she didn’t get any leads in the next seventy-two hours, the case would be cold, replaced by three others.
    “But we can handle this,” Lucy interjected.
    Noah jerked his head toward her, eyes wide, surprised and angry in a way she had never seen him. She realized she’d contradicted him, and she wanted to apologize, but couldn’t bring herself to back down. If she didn’t fight to prioritize Nicole Bellows’s death, who would?
    “Genie said the killer left a message, shouldn’t we look at it before we just cut loose?” Lucy said, almost tripping over her words to get them out. “This isn’t a simple robbery. What if it matches with a cold case? What if the killer is targeting other prostitutes? How many of these young women have to die before people pay attention? Wendy James has the media all over the place, but a black prostitute in the slums isn’t going to get an inch of column space, let alone featured on the five o’clock news.”
    She’d overstepped big-time. Noah’s fists tightened just once, but for a man who rarely showed his temper, she noticed.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I don’t know where that came from.”
    But she did know exactly where her outrage came from: fear. Fear that victims like Nicole Bellows would be forgotten. Panic that more victims would follow and no one would care. That if they couldn’t solve this murder and put the killer in prison, Nicole Bellows would haunt her. Worse, that she couldn’t stop the violence.
    Noah didn’t say anything to Lucy. He turned to Genie. “Where’s the message?”
    Genie’s expression showed her curiosity over the exchange, but she simply replied, “The bathroom. You can’t miss it.”
    Noah walked into the small bathroom first. There wasn’t room for both of them, so Lucy waited. When he came out, he said, “I’ll call my boss.”
    He walked out of the motel room without looking at Lucy.
    Lucy stepped inside. The stained and bloody pedestal sink had no counter. Inside the cracked basin lay a good-sized rat, dead and gutted. The poor creature’s internal organs had been pulled half out of its body, a bloody mess Lucy could barely identify.
    The butchered rat was bad enough. But a message had been written in blood on the aged, cracked mirror.
Six blind mice
See how they run
    Then Lucy noticed the rat’s tail had been cut off.

 
    CHAPTER NINE
    Lucy ignored the people hanging around outside the motel, though their numbers seemed to have increased during the fifteen minutes they’d inspected room 119.
    Noah had stepped away to talk to Slater, and Lucy hoped he wasn’t irrevocably angry.
    You shouldn’t have jumped down his throat.
    Noah had always been supportive of her career, had stood up for her even when her ideas went against protocol. He cared about victims, but didn’t wear his compassion on his sleeve like she did.
    Six blind mice.
    Were there six victims? Was Nicole the first? The last? Would there be more to come?
    See how they run.
    Lucy had studied killers of all stripes in both criminal psychology coursework and on her own. Her life had brought her face-to-face with evil many times: her cousin’s murder when they were seven, her brothers and sister in law enforcement talking bluntly about their jobs, when she was raped at eighteen. Then years of schooling and internships studying crimes and criminals. She had a gift—or a curse—for getting into the heads of both killers