“I’m declaring probable cause,” said Diana, drawing her sidearm. Potash already had his out. I put my hand in my coat pocket, feeling the grip of the knife handle; I hadn’t been without it in weeks. Diana looked at us, nodded, and kicked the door in.
The entryway showed no sign of a struggle, though it did have a few wet patches where someone had tracked in snow. The door didn’t show any sign of forced entry, beyond Diana’s kick. Whoever had come here had let themselves in peacefully, which meant they’d had a key. That implied it was the sister, and the condition of the tracks suggested she had come this morning, after the snow. The lack of any other prints meant Rose Chapman had disappeared before the snow, and without her car; probably a day or more before the snow, since the police didn’t usually accept a missing-person report within the first twenty-four hours.
If the sister had been here and found nothing, we could probably move through the house safely, but after our experience with Mary Gardner not one of us dropped our guard; Diana and Potash kept their guns up, and I pulled my knife silently from the sheath as we moved deeper into the house. I felt better with a knife in my hand, as if my hand had always been incomplete without it, and I’d only just now become whole. The front door opened directly into a living room, where the walls were hung with landscape paintings and a photo of what I assumed were Rose and William Chapman. Had she joined him in death? Was Elijah Sexton remembering both of their lives now?
Beyond the living room was a kitchen, and a short hall leading back into the rest of the house. We walked through each room slowly, checking behind doors and furniture, clearing each space as we went. A bathroom. A laundry room. A hall closet full of musty cardboard boxes. A master bedroom on one side of the hall, and a guest room on the other. There was no one in any of the rooms, living or dead. The master bedroom had a large sliding door leading out to the backyard: a small lawn on one side and an extended driveway on the other, leading back to a garage—but the snow back there was far deeper than in front and completely devoid of prints. It looked like no one had been back there all winter. Potash checked the last closet and shook his head.
“Nothing.”
“Most houses in this town have a basement,” said Diana, “but I didn’t see an entrance anywhere. Maybe it’s outside?”
“We would have seen tracks in the snow if anyone had used it recently,” said Potash. He glanced outside, breathing heavily. “It’s worth checking out, though.” He unlocked the sliding door, but Diana put a hand on his arm.
“I’ll go, you just got out of the hospital.” She opened the door and stepped out. “I’ll call you if it looks sketchy. See what else you can find, but don’t leave any fingerprints.” She closed the door behind her.
“Of course I’m not going to leave fingerprints,” Potash grumbled. “Am I an idiot?”
I ignored him and started looking through the piles of stuff on the nightstands and dresser, using the knife to move things without touching them directly. People who were kidnapped tended to leave key personal items behind, the kind of things they were usually never without: keys, wallets, purses, phones. If we could find one of those, we might also find some personal info we could use, like a schedule or a contact list of people she’d talked to recently. A smartphone would be a gold mine—depending on what settings she’d turned on or off, we could know not just who she’d called, but when she’d done it and where she was standing at the time. I found a few papers that might be useful later, funeral receipts and so on, but nothing that helped me now. I turned to go down the hallway, heading back to the living room to continue the search, when Potash’s phone rang. I turned back to listen.
“This is Potash.” Pause. “We’re inside now; there’s no direct evidence of kidnapping, but the car’s in the driveway and it’s pretty clear nobody slept here last night. That’s not damning, but it’s definitely suspicious.”
Diana opened the back door, kicking the snow off her feet before coming inside. “Nothing in the basement but a furnace and some storage.” She batted at her hair with a grimace. “And every spider within ten miles.”
I nodded at Potash. “He’s on the phone with Ostler, I think.”
“Bad news?” asked Diana.
“Do we ever get good news?”
“We’ll be right there,” said Potash. He hung up and looked at us. “Cops’ll be here in about five minutes; we’ll let them take over the crime scene while we head back to the morgue.”
“Rose?” asked Diana.
Potash shook his head. “No, but still bad. Another cannibal attack.” He looked at me. “And another letter for John.”