by Ragan, T. R.
“I’m sorry. You’re going to need a pass,” one of two female staff members behind the counter said, stopping a woman who was carrying a large tray of cupcakes from walking through the office and entering the school through a side door.
All thoughts of Perez left Sawyer as she watched the exchange.
“I was told I could go right through,” the woman with the cupcakes said. “It’s my son’s birthday today and—”
“Whoever told you that is sadly misinformed. Please get in line and wait like everyone else.” The woman removed her rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses, letting them dangle from a gold chain around her neck, then crooked her finger to call the next person in line.
Sawyer felt an urge to tell the woman to chill out, but she was also getting older and wiser and learning to pick her battles. Detective Perez and his men weren’t the only ones who were overworked and underpaid. And this wasn’t the first time Sawyer was thankful she didn’t have any kids yet . . . maybe never. She would be thirty soon. She had plenty of time if the urge struck.
“Can I help you?”
Sawyer stepped forward, thankful she wouldn’t have to deal with the older woman. The woman helping her had a name tag pinned to her blouse: Florence. “Hi, Florence. My name is Sawyer Brooks, and I’m here to pick up my niece, Ella Pohler.”
Behind Florence, the woman with the rhinestone glasses stopped what she was doing and looked directly at Sawyer. The pinched mouth and cold eyes were a bit unsettling. Sawyer wondered if the woman recognized her name from the news.
The woman looked away, and Sawyer returned her attention to Florence. “My instructions were to pick up my niece at the nurse’s station.”
Florence grabbed a clipboard with a sheet of paper attached and placed it on the counter in front of Sawyer. “I’ll need to see some ID, and sign here.” She pointed to the line next to Ella’s name. Florence had red, puffy eyes, and Sawyer wondered if she’d been crying.
Once Sawyer’s identity had been verified, Florence told her to head down the hallway and knock on the last door to the right. Nurse Amy let her in. In her late forties or early fifties, the nurse had gray hair rolled into a bun, which made her big ears and big eyes appear even larger. She wore sensible shoes and a navy-blue T-shirt tucked into a midlength denim skirt. Like the other ladies out front, her face looked drained of any joy and amusement, leaving Sawyer to wonder if someone had died.
“She doesn’t have a fever or a cough,” Nurse Amy said as Sawyer swept past her and went to where Ella lay on a cot. “It could be something she ate.” Then in a lower voice, “Kids can be dramatic. It’s hard to tell what’s going on with them sometimes.”
“Do you have kids of your own?” Sawyer asked.
“No.”
Sawyer put the back of her hand to Ella’s forehead and said, “Stick out your tongue and say ‘ah.’”
Ella smiled instead.
Sawyer winked at the kid. “Ready to go?”
While Ella put on her shoes, Sawyer’s gaze fixated on a syringe inside a glass cabinet, giving her an idea.
It took another ten minutes to get her niece out of what felt like school jail. But they were finally in the car buckling up when Ella asked, “Where’s Aria?”
“What? I’m not good enough?”
“You’re fine,” Ella said unconvincingly. “Are we going to Carl’s Jr. for milkshakes?”
“Is that what Aria would do?”
Ella nodded.
“Okay, but first you need to tell me what’s going on.”
Her niece turned out to be an easy egg to crack. As Sawyer drove, Ella talked.
“I overheard Mom and Dad talking last night. He was mad at her for keeping secrets. He told Lennon and me that he was going to Montana to work on Uncle Joe’s cabin so our whole family could go there next summer. But I guess he was lying. He said he didn’t know when he would be back. I’m scared. I don’t want them to divorce like all my friends’ parents.”
Sawyer’s insides churned. She’d really hoped that Ella’s sickness had something to do with her crush on George. Harper and Nate always seemed like the perfect couple. What was going on? “It’s going to be okay,” she told Ella, hoping that was the case.
Ella reached out a hand. “Pinkie swear?”
“I swear,” Sawyer said as she kept her eyes on the road and blindly interlocked pinkie fingers with Ella.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sawyer and Ella were watching television when Harper walked through the front door, her face lined with worry. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I waited at the bus stop for Ella, and when she didn’t appear, I panicked.”
“I called and left you a message,” Sawyer said. “Ella wasn’t feeling well, so the school contacted Aria at work. Since I was available, I told her I would pick up Ella.”
Harper made her way to her daughter.
Sawyer took note of her clothes. Harper wasn’t wearing a turtleneck, but she did have a scarf wrapped around her neck, which was highly unusual for a T-shirt-and-jeans kind of girl.
Sawyer got to her feet and pointed a finger at Ella. “Hope you feel better.”
“Thanks, Aunt Sawyer.”
“You’re welcome.”
Harper followed Sawyer out the door, closing it softly behind her. “Wait up,” she said.
Sawyer waited.
“What’s going on?” Harper asked.
“What do you mean?”
Harper stared at Sawyer, unblinking. “You look like you have something on your mind. Why don’t you just say it?”
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Ella. She’s worried enough as it is.”
“About what?”
“She overheard you and Nate talking last night. She’s afraid the two of you might get divorced.”
“We’re not getting divorced. We just need to work through a few things . . . normal married-people things.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Sawyer said.
“Then why do I sense that you’re upset with me?”
“Come on,” Sawyer said. “Let’s get real. Aria saw Nate throw a couple of travel bags into his truck and take off this morning. Now Ella is telling me that her dad lied to her and Lennon about his trip. You call that ‘normal’? Normal married problems would be arguing about money or getting ridiculously upset about how the other person drives. Not packing up and leaving.”
Sawyer felt guilty for learning about all these problems secondhand. If she’d made more of an effort to get to know her older sister, she might not feel so in the dark. But guilt wasn’t the only thing troubling her. She didn’t like what Aria had said about Harper never being home and suddenly becoming so mysterious. “What’s with the turtlenecks and the scarves? It’s eighty degrees out here.”
Harper crossed her arms. “I had to slam on the brakes the other day, and the seat belt left me with a bruise. I’m covering it so people aren’t constantly questioning me about every mark on my body.”
The pause and the subtle change in her voice told Sawyer she was lying. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, or not?”
“Nothing is going on,” Harper said. “You and Aria and Nate are always making mountains out of molehills. It’s ridiculous, and I don’t have time for it.”
Sawyer raised both hands in frustration. She couldn’t force the truth out of her, but she was worried about Ella. “Fine. I’m outta here. But you better talk to your daughter. She deserves the truth.”
As Sawyer drove off, she found herself hoping that they were all making a big deal about nothing. Instead of heading home, Sawyer went straight to Walmart and purchased a box of syringes used for insulin, a bottle of corn syrup, chocolate syrup, and red dye. She took everything home and used the ingredients to make fake blood. She’d helped Lennon make blood for Halloween a couple of years ago. It looked and felt like real blood. She filled the syringe and headed off for Mark Brennan’s house.
Ten minutes later she was standing i
n front of the music teacher’s house. Arms crossed, she simply stood on the sidewalk and took it all in, including all the neighborhood sounds: birds chirping, a leaf blower, and a UPS truck in the distance. Overall, it was a quiet street.
She then looked at the front door to Mark’s house. The crime scene tape had been removed. Everything back to normal. From where she stood, the blood on the stairs was difficult to see. Same story with the blood spattered on the gardenia bush.
Sawyer started walking, imagining she had planted the blood that night. Where would she park her car? She looked around. There were too many two-story homes to risk parking on the same block.
Stopping at an empty lot, she peered across a square of dry grass. Her heart skipped a beat when she noticed a path had been made right down the middle. She used her phone to take video as she made the trek across the empty lot. On the other side, across the street from where the lot ended, was a business. LITTLE STARFISH SWIMMING SCHOOL, the sign read.
There, right where the roof sloped downward, was a camera. Sawyer weaved through the cars in the parking lot and went into the building. The place smelled like chlorine. The young man behind the counter was friendly. Trophies and pictures of swimmers with ribbons around their necks lined the wall behind him.
When she told him why she was there and asked if it might be possible to get video footage from the last forty-eight hours, he took down her name and number and assured her that someone would get back to her.
On her return, Sawyer tried to think like the criminal. She had bought the syringe because where else would he or she have kept the blood before it was placed at Mark Brennan’s house? It needed to be kept in something small. Not only easy to carry but also easy to access and sprinkle around quickly. In the nurse’s office she’d remembered what Paige Owens had said when she bent over to pick up the package for the woman wearing the sling: “I saw something in her hand—the one in the sling. It was a syringe with a needle that doctors use to give shots.”
Sawyer guessed a syringe could hold at least twenty drops of blood. She would verify that in a few minutes, she thought as she walked across the empty lot. Back on the sidewalk, Sawyer stopped to extract foxtails from the hem of her pants. Then she pulled out the syringe, removed the rubber cap, walked over to the gardenia bush, and waved her hand over the shrubbery while releasing the fake blood.
She then used her phone to take a picture and proceeded to experiment on the steps. Same results.
Her experiment might not mean anything to Perez or Palmer, but she felt confident she was onto something. If Mark Brennan had carried Riley out of the house bleeding, how would blood spatter end up on the gardenia bush? And the cut on Riley would have had to be fresh to fall in drips from her skin.
It wasn’t logical.
Happy with the results, she returned to her car, buckled up, and waited for a yellow school bus to pass by. She merged back onto the road. The bus took the same turn she and Aria had taken a few days ago when they had gone from Mark Brennan’s house to Carly Butler’s. On a whim, she decided to follow. Sure enough, the bus stopped three blocks from the house where Carly Butler used to live.
Driving along, waiting patiently at every bus stop, she thought about what Riley’s dad had said about his daughter knowing better than to talk to a stranger. Maybe it was someone she knew? Or maybe, just like what happened to Paige Owens, it was an elderly woman in need of assistance?
Proof. She needed proof.
Exactly four stops and thirteen minutes later, she sat up tall as she recognized the street. Her pulse quickened as she realized Paige Owens’s house was right around the corner. The bus lurched forward again. Every time it stopped and turned on its flashing lights, she wrote down the name of the street and the crossroad. There were two more stops before the bus was finished for the day.
Nine stops total. With a list of streets and crossroads in her possession, she headed for home, calling Aria on her way and asking her to stop by after work.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The first thing Sawyer did when she got home was move the futon out of the way so she could use the wall as a giant bulletin board.
Hours later, as Aria cooked up macaroni and cheese in the kitchen, Sawyer stood in front of the wall and stared at her creation. She had used pushpins and string to show where each girl went missing. The string went from Elk Grove to Carmichael to North Highlands to Sacramento.
Sawyer had also made a sketch of the bus route that the kidnapper might have used to keep tabs on certain children in the Sacramento area. For the sake of her experiment, she assumed the kidnapper was either a bus driver or someone who worked at the school, someone who knew which kids rode the bus. The sketch was pinned to the wall along with the poster board Aria had made, and also a sheet of paper with basic information such as a physical description of each girl, where they were from, and when and where they disappeared.
Aria came to her side with a coffeepot and offered to refill her mug.
“No more coffee for me,” Sawyer said.
Aria disappeared, then returned with mug in hand and stood facing the wall, taking it all in. “Can I see those pictures you took today of the fake blood?”
Sawyer found her cell and handed it over.
“The blood spatter looks the same. That’s crazy.”
“I just don’t know if it will do any good,” Sawyer said.
“We need a suspect other than Mark Brennan to get authorities to pay attention. Tomorrow we’ll have all the yearbooks. Did you text Paige Owens yet?”
“I’ll do that right now.” Sawyer took her phone back and texted Paige, asking her if she could meet again sometime tomorrow.
“We need to catch a break,” Sawyer said, slipping her phone into her back pocket.
Aria was back in the kitchen. She returned with two bowls and handed one to Sawyer. They ate as they stared at the wall, both lost in their thoughts for a few minutes.
“Do you really think Riley Addison could still be alive?”
“I do. It’s probably more wishing than anything else, but I’m not ready to think any other way.”
“Based on what happened to Paige Owens, I wonder how many kidnappers or even serial killers use a fast-acting drug to subdue their victims,” Aria said. She took a bite of her dinner, chewed and swallowed, and added, “And why go to all that bother, searching for and abducting a specific type of girl only to kill them in the end?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering,” Sawyer said.
“It could be sexual in nature, or maybe he or she is lonely.”
“If it’s a woman,” Sawyer said, “maybe she’s always wanted a child but could never have one.”
“Yeah, but again, then why kill them?”
“Cora O’Neal had a broken neck,” Sawyer said. “Maybe her death was an accident.”
“Or,” Aria said, “maybe all these missing girls have something to do with sex trafficking.”
Shivers coursed over Sawyer at the thought. If this had something to do with trafficking, then Riley Addison was most likely long gone.
Aria took both their empty bowls to the sink. When she returned, she reached for the piece of paper, unpinned it from the wall, and read the description of the woman who had tried to get Paige Owens into her car. “Pale, big brown eyes, grayish-blonde hair, red Crocs, jean skirt, a white top, a red cardigan sweater with ladybugs, and a sling on her arm. White SUV with two number sevens and the letter L in the license plate. Called out ‘Molly’ or ‘Holly’ as Paige ran off.”
“If you were the woman who had tried to kidnap someone and failed, wouldn’t you get a different car?” Sawyer asked.
Aria nodded. “I would. And I would also dye my hair.”
Raccoon meowed and circled Aria’s leg. She scooped the cat into her arms and smoothed her fingers over his head, scratching him around the ears. “Do we know who called in about the blood found outside Mark Brennan’s home?”
“Anonymous caller,” Sawyer
said.
Aria stepped closer to the wall and repinned the paper in her hand. She then placed her finger in the middle of it all. “Ella’s school is right here. Too close, if you ask me.”
“Have you ever met Nurse Amy or any of the staff members?”
“No,” Aria said. “Why do you ask?”
“I swear they were all intense gray-haired, middle-aged women. If we were looking for someone based on Paige Owens’s description of the woman who tried to grab her, they would all be suspect.” She chuckled. “I’m being mean and judgmental. The truth is that they all looked tired and overworked, sort of like I feel at the moment.”
Aria set Raccoon on the floor. “I better go. We both need to get some sleep.” She rinsed the bowls and her mug in the kitchen sink, then picked up her purse from a chair. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you . . . Whatever happened to that guy from work?” Aria asked. “Are you still seeing him?”
“Derek,” Sawyer said. “He didn’t think I was that into him, so he set me free.”
“He broke up with you?”
Sawyer winced. “Pretty much.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated. Bottom line: I blew it. I really like him, but I guess I just don’t know how to be with someone like him.”
“I get it,” Aria said. “That’s why I stick with animals. After everything that happened back home, I wanted to date, but I quickly realized I didn’t trust anyone enough. But you’re different from me. If you really like him, and it seems like you do, then you need to find a way to open up to him. We can’t let all those assholes from our past fuck with us for the rest of our lives.”
“I don’t know what to do. I was so afraid of coming across as needy that I closed up even more than usual.” Sawyer made a face. “Stupid. I know. Either way, it’s over.” Saying the words out loud made her heart drop to her stomach.
“But does he still have feelings for you?” Aria asked.