Stranger in Town

CHAPTER 34





I sprinted down the hall, darting around the room in search of Cade. My eyes were blurred, and I couldn’t see much of anything out of them. I thought about yelling, but that would have required me to get actual words out, and I could hardly breathe, let alone form sentences.

In a matter of moments my elation over finding the photo of both missing girls had turned from hope to heartache. Someone had found the one place the Kents had chosen to hide the girls from everyone else. Were the girls dead too?

I paused, leaning over the kitchen counter to gain control over my staggered breathing, but resting did nothing to quell the anxiety growing inside me. A sound echoed from the opposite end of the house. I followed it to Cade, who was bent over looking inside bedroom drawers.

“Where are they?” I shouted when I entered the room.

“Who?”

“The girls! Their bodies! Have you found them yet?”

Cade gripped the sides of my arms, shaking me. “Sloane, look at me. What are you talking about—what’s happened?”

I breathed in and out; slow and steady, closing my eyes for several seconds and then opening them back up again. I looked around. The room was decorated in a variety of colors, but one stood out far more than the rest: green. Olivia’s room. The bed was disheveled, the comforter piled up at the bottom, and I couldn’t see a flat sheet, only a fitted one. There was no sign of Olivia.

I dashed out of the room, throwing the door open to the second bedroom across the hall. I paid attention to nothing but another unmade bed in front of me. Again, empty.

Cade ran up behind me. “What’s gotten into you? Sloane, talk to me!”

“Have you searched the rest of the house?” I said.

“What does that have to do with—”

“Have you searched it?!”

He nodded.

“Why?”

I was mumbling to myself now. “Good, then there is still hope…maybe they’re alive. I need to check both of their rooms for clues. We need to find out who—”

“Sloane—what’ going on?” Cade’s voice was agitated.

“The girls—they’ve been taken.”

“What girls?” he said.

“Olivia and Savannah.”

“How do you know?”

“I found a picture of them in a storage room. They were together—they are together. The Kents took them and—the Kents!”

I grabbed Cade’s shirt sleeve, pulling him down the hall behind me. “I need to show you something.”

I led him to the master bedroom, allowing him to enter before me. His reaction upon seeing the bodies was similar to mine, except I’d hesitated to get too close. Cade walked right up to them, staring down at their lifeless bodies. He leaned over, looking first at Regina, and then crossing to the other side of the bed to inspect Bradley.

“Well, I know how they died,” he pointed to Bradley Kent’s head. “A single gunshot wound to the head.”

“It smells in here,” I said. “I’d like to get a closer look at the bodies, but I don’t know if I can take it.”

Cade unbuttoned the top snap of his shirt, holding it up to his nose. He inhaled and exhaled out of it. “I might need to get some air myself,” he said. “And then I need to call this in.”

“Now?”

“Soon,” he said. “Let’s make sure we have everything we need first. What all have you touched?”

“Some bins in the storage room and a couple doorknobs.”

“Wipe everything down,” he said.

“Why?”

“With the feds in town, you shouldn’t be here,” he said. “They’ll be all over you for this, and I don’t want you involved.”

“But, you said we would work—”

“All I’m saying is it would look better if I found this place on my own,” he said. “I’m trying to protect you. We are in this together. Although, how I’ll explain me ending up here, I have no idea. Time is everything right now, so we’re out of here in fifteen minutes tops. I need to get the coroner here as soon as possible.”

I searched the bathroom for a washcloth and found one in the third drawer. I also found a box of latex gloves under some bottles of blond hair dye. I gave the gloves to Cade so if he wanted a closer inspection of the bodies, he could touch them. Then I retraced my steps, making sure to wipe down only the surfaces I had touched. Now all investigators would find were the smudged oil spots that had been left by the pads of my fingers, nothing they’d be able to analyze.

Behind the living room was a large office. When I walked by, I noticed one of the drawers from the desk was lying on the floor, its contents spilled out all over the room. An office chair was also tipped on its side. I walked over, kneeling down to get a closer look. The drawer had come out of the center console in the desk. The front of the drawer had a busted lock. Someone had been looking for something. Papers were scattered around the drawer. I bent over, trying to see what they were without picking them up. There was a deed to some land, deeds to the Kents vehicles, and a few other things of no consequence.

Had the thief gotten what he came for?

I started to stand back up and noticed a piece of fabric hanging off the office chair. At first I thought it had ripped, but upon closer inspection I could see that the upholstery covering the back of the chair velcroed at the bottom. A small piece at the end had folded over just enough to reveal a thin slit. And under the slit, a slight bulge. I pulled the Velcro up and a brown leather book fell out. It was smaller than an index card and thin. As I thumbed through it, most of the pages were empty except for a few handwritten ones at the beginning.

At the top of each page at the front of the book was a name. The name, which was always female, was followed by information like eye color, hair color, and age. There was no address or phone number, just a general description of each child. There was also a price which ranged from forty thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars. A few girls had question marks by their names. Six pages in, I came across Olivia’s name. She didn’t have a question mark. She had a star. A star to indicate she was the chosen one. Next to her name was a price: fifty thousand dollars. I flipped through a few more pages and found Savannah. She also had a star, but her price was one hundred thousand dollars. Younger children, it seemed, went for much more than their older counterparts. The thought of purchasing children at any price sickened me.

I took the book over to the printer and lifted the flap on the copy machine. One by one, I printed each page until they all had been printed. I removed the book, flipping through it one last time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything before putting it back where I found it. On the last page of the book, in the corner on the bottom was a phone number. There was no name and no other information, just a phone number. I returned to the scanner and printed it out.

Cade was snapping photos of the Kents with his camera phone from all different angles when I walked back in.

“Find anything interesting?” I said.

“They both show signs of livor mortis.”

“You mean rigor mortis?” I said.

He shook his head.

“At the livor mortis stage, the blood collects around the lowest part of the body. See the discoloration here?” He pointed at Bradley Kent’s legs. “This is how I can tell.”

There were areas of skin on Bradley’s lower body that were reddish in color, like they had been burned, even though they hadn’t. Other areas were white and completely drained of color.

“It looks like splotchy rosacea,” I said.

“Splotchy, yes. Rosacea, no.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Their bodies are stiff, but not as hard as some others I’ve seen,” he said. “My best guess? They’ve been dead for less than three days, but I’d put their deaths at less than a day.”

“From the looks of things, someone did it while they were sleeping,” I said.

Cade nodded in agreement.

“There’s also nothing to suggest their bodies were moved after they were shot. The killer either didn’t care if they were found, or didn’t have time to clean up the mess.”

“Someone knows we are looking for Olivia and Savannah,” I said. “And they know we’re close.”