Chapter 4 - BEN COULD NOT TALK YETBen spent his first night in intensive care.
His injuries included:
Severe dehydration.
Acute kidney stress that fortunately improved with fluids.
A fractured right fibula.
Deep bruising along his ribs and back.
A scalp laceration partly healed.
Pressure injuries from remaining in one position.
Skin irritation around his ankle where the chain had rubbed.
No major brain bleed.
No spinal injury.
No permanent kidney damage expected.
The doctors were cautiously optimistic.
He could answer simple questions.
Name.
Date.
Daughter.
Pain.
But Detective Vega was not going to conduct a detailed criminal interview while he was confused, medicated, and medically unstable.
That is something television often gets wrong.
A victim waking after five days in a crawlspace does not owe police a plot summary before receiving fluids.
Lila stayed with Judith.
Child protective services became involved only to establish immediate safety because the person who had been her sole parent was hospitalized and the crime had occurred inside her home.
Judith was not automatically treated as unfit.
She was seventy-eight? No, 68. She had been helping since Ben disappeared.
But investigators needed to understand whether she knew more.
That night I went home at 3:20 a.m.
I sat in my kitchen without turning on lights.
My husband had died six years earlier.
Different story.
Cancer, not violence.
No children.
I had spent the last half decade believing that made me especially patient with grieving families.
All I could hear was Lila saying:
He talks to me from down there.
How many adults had heard some version of that before us?
Grandma, according to dispatch.
Maybe others.
How many had translated it into:
nightmare?
grief?
May you like
imagination?
We would find out.
