Undone (Will Trent, #3)

by Karin Slaughter

Life was like that. You didn’t realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Grady was the only Level One trauma center in the region, as well as one of the few remaining public hospitals in Georgia. The nurses at Grady saw car wrecks, shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and any number of crimes against humanity on an almost daily basis. They had a practiced eye for spotting serious problems.

Mary gave a low whistle, impressed by her own guess. Sara had once asked the woman why she didn’t go to medical school, only to be told that nurses were the ones who practiced the real medicine.

That had been the real pull for Sara—the absolute detachment. She wasn’t at a stage in her life where she wanted to make connections with people. Every new chart was an opportunity to start all over.

Delia and Sara had been the only women in the top five percent of their graduating class at Emory University Medical School. At the time, it was an unwritten rule that there were two options for female doctors: gynecology or pediatrics.

Pauline’s body shook with sobs. She had not seen him in years, but she still knew how his mind worked. The basement was his staging ground, a carefully prepared prison where he would starve them into submission. But this was not the worst of it. There would be a cave somewhere, a dark place in the earth that he had lovingly dug out by hand. The basement would break them. The cave would destroy them. The bastard had thought of everything.

Will hadn’t wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He had listened to every station on the dial by the time he crossed into Coweta County.

There were a lot of tricks you could use to make sure people were home. The cable ruse was the best. People would go without a lot of things, but they would put their lives on hold for days at a time in order to wait for the cable company to show up.