“I’m going to suck the blood out of that bastard, Wilkes,” I switched off the camera and turned around. Desperate to leave, I needed to find anything hinting at the bastard’s identity. My body a tight ball of fury, I walked to the farther end of the room and squatted in front of metal cages like the ones you’d find at an animal shelter. I counted twenty in total, sitting on top of each other in two rows of ten.
“What do you make of these?” Wilkes dropped to his haunches next to me and fiddled with the lock of the cage in front of him.
I rubbed my jaw, slowly shaking my head. “Honestly, I shudder to think what these housed.”
He reached inside the cage and withdrew a pink blanket. When a baby rattle fell out as he opened the furry material, I shot up, my stomach turning, nausea painting a vivid picture of horror down my throat. My fingers on steroids, I tore through the locks on the other cages, yanking out baby blankets until I got to the last four, and my fingers paused. Instead of baby blankets, they contained two dog bowls in each.
“Fuck.” I cursed, taking a step back as I straightened. “These were used for bigger children.”
“How do you know?” Wilkes moved closer, inspecting the cages.
“The dog bowls. Water and food. Besides, there’s no animal odor or hair. They always leave hair, even a little.”
He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Christ, sir, they were stealing babies and keeping them here. What the fuck did they do with them?”
“Trafficking,” I gritted, my gaze moving to the bed. “Or porn movies. Your guess is as good as mine at this stage.”
Straightening, he gave me one of those intense looks. “Do you think the girl will talk?”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t expect her to. Who’d want to relive this?” I gestured to the cages.
“What’s the next step if the fingerprints don’t give us anything?”
A sarcastic laugh slipped past my pursed lips. “I don’t know where to begin, Wilkes.” I paced the floor, chewing my bottom lip, then paused in front of the camera. “That man on the video mentioned the girl crying for her mother. Something tells me she still remembers her mother, that she wasn’t a baby when they separated her from her mother. Maybe if she can give us her mother’s name, it might help us trace the girl’s family.”
“What about Andrew?”
I looked at Wilkes, my thoughts racing. “For now, we keep tailing him. He doesn’t know I have the girl. We keep her hidden. The fewer people know about her, the better. Put a man outside this house. If that bastard comes back, I want to know about it. Given this setup, he’ll come looking for her, and something tells me he has the right connections to cover his tracks.”
“I’ll run a trace on the ownership of the property, see if that gives us anything. I highly doubt it, though.”
I nodded, walking out as Wilkes grabbed the camera and followed me. In the smaller room, I pointed to the books and landscape cutouts. “Leave the Bibles. Bring the rest. The more familiar things we give her, the better our chance of getting her to talk.”
“I’ll get the boys to grab it.”
I walked out with one final glance around the room, my body bleeding led.
