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Dana nodded.
“I’d like to find her. If she’s still alive, she may be in danger.”
Dana remained silent for a long moment. Finally, she said, “They took her.” Tears filled her eyes. “They should’ve taken me instead. But I’m not worth anything.”
“Nicola doesn’t see it that way, though. Right?” Kenna figured Nicola would much rather be the one who was taken if it spared her friend more pain. “She looked out for you.” Kenna waited a beat and then said, “Did she protect you?”
“She told me to run. But they didn’t care about me.” Dana’s breaths came faster. “They came into the house, and they grabbed her. I screamed. She was screaming and crying. They put a cloth over her mouth, and she went limp. I tried to stop them, but one of them slapped me.” She showed Kenna a red area on her cheekbone and gasped back a sob. “I couldn’t do anything to stop them.”
“Nicola didn’t want you to get hurt.” The question was, why she hadn’t gone to the police? Instead, she’d checked herself into the safest place she knew. “Will you help me figure out who they are?”
“How?”
Kenna kept her voice gentle. “What did they look like? Can you describe any of them?”
Dana inhaled through her nose, squeezing her eyes shut.
“What is it?”
“They had…masks on.”
“How many of them were there?”
Dana shook her head. “Five. Six?”
That was interesting, for taking one person. “What were they wearing?” She needed to get to the masks but in a roundabout way. “Can you describe their clothes?”
“That’s what was…terrifying.”
Kenna waited.
“They had on those white medical outfits. Like old-timey nurses, with the white dresses and the little watch thing on the breast pocket and that white card thing over their hair.”
“All of them were women?”
Dana bit her lip. “There were a couple of men in white scrubs. Maybe three. And two women.”
“All of them dressed in white medical staff clothing?” A memory sparked in Kenna’s mind, but she pushed it aside for now.
Dana nodded, opening her eyes.
“Tell me about the masks.”
Fear flashed in her eyes. “They were white and plastic. Maybe porcelain. With round holes for eyes.”
“That sounds pretty terrifying.” Especially for a person trying to avoid the usual ways she’d have disassociated in order to cope with the high stress in her life. A woman who had suffered for years with addictions had come to exactly the right place—where she knew she’d get the help she needed.
“She told me to hide in the closet, but I just crouched behind the chair. I didn’t have time to run. They rushed in and surrounded Nicola. It looked like they swallowed her up. Then she was limp, and they carried her out.” Dana gasped. “One of them looked at me. But then she turned away and left with the others.”
“Do you have any idea who they were or where they might have taken her?”
Dana shook her head.
Kenna sat forward in the chair, resting her forearms on her knees. “Did she seem worried about anything?” She needed Dana to think through the days before Nicola was taken. “Did she seem different or stressed more than normal?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about people in her life? Is there anyone you can think of who might have a reason to take her?”