I realized I was holding my breath. My lungs burned. I forced myself to inhale, the air tasting of exhaust and fear.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Ninety seconds.
What's taking so long? Why haven't they?—
Then, a voice came through James's earpiece. Tinny. Distant.
"Clear."
Not "suspect in custody." Not "hostages secured." Not "we have them."
Clear.
It felt like the earth was opening beneath me.
James's face went from tense to that careful, professional blankness cops wear when they have to deliver bad news. He wouldn't look at me. That's how I knew.
They weren't there.
James didn't try to stop me this time. He let me follow him up those twelve stairs, down a hallway that smelled of cooking grease and mildew. Let me see for myself.
Apartment 4B. The door hung open, uniformed officers moving in and out like ants.
I stepped inside, and the air left my lungs.
It was a time capsule. A preserved crime scene of Anna's captivity. Beige walls, once maybe cream, now yellowed with age and cigarette smoke. Cheap beige carpet stained in places I didn't want to think about. Almost empty except for a few pieces of discarded furniture, a sagging couch with visible springs, a particleboard coffee table with one leg shorter than the others, propped up with folded cardboard.
This was where she'd lived. Where she'd woken up every morning next to a man who hurt her. Whereshe'd learned to make herself small, quiet, and invisible.
The apartment smelled of dust and stale air, and underneath it, a faint trace of something floral. Her perfume. The cheap kind she used to wear.
It was a ghost of who she'd been. Who he'd forced her to be.
And it was empty.
No Carter. No Anna. No Daisy.
"They were here." A detective I didn't know gestured to the center of the living room. "You can see the marks in the carpet where someone knelt. Two sets of prints, one adult and child."
I moved forward on legs that didn't feel attached to my body. There, exactly where I'd seen them in the video, exactly where Anna sat down, and Daisy had been pressed against her?—
A small, pink plastic hair clip in the shape of a butterfly.
Daisy's.
I'd bought her a pack of them three months ago. She'd been so excited, had lined them up on her dresser in rainbow order. Pink was her favorite. She'd been wearing it yesterday morning at breakfast.
Yesterday. A lifetime ago.
My knees tried to buckle. I locked them, swaying slightly.
A few feet away, a single drop of blood had dried on the worn carpet. Dark. Rust-brown. A perfect circle about the size of a dime.
Whose blood?
Anna's? From her split lip, from wherever he'd hit her that hadn't made it into the video?
Or Daisy's?
