THIRTY-FIVEBILLIE ANN
I couldn’t sleep. I literally paced back and forth in my living room, looking at the clock again and again. It was eleven o’clock. Charlene still hadn’t made it home, and now I was getting seriously worried about her.
I had called all of her friends, and even spoken to their parents, and gone to some of her best friends’ houses, but no one knew where she was. All they knew was that she wasn’t in school today. I asked her best friend, Alexis, to keep texting her in case she would answer her and just not me. I had been driving around searching for her everywhere, down on the beach, downtown in all the restaurants and cafés where I knew she might go with friends from time to time. I was getting close to sending out a missing person report and had asked my colleagues on patrol tonight to keep an eye out for her. I had even called Chief Doyle to ask him what he thought I should do.
“She’s sixteen. It’s not unusual,” was his answer. “Let’s wait and see if she doesn’t come home. She might just be with a friend that you don’t know and fallen asleep there or lost track of time, or maybe she is drinking or smoking weed.”
“Not my daughter,” I said angrily.
“They all say that,” he said with a chuckle.
I knew I would probably have said the same to any mother coming to the station reporting a teenager missing. But now that it was me, I found it reckless, and irresponsible, and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I could do more to find her. My daughter didn’t run away or get herself in trouble. It wasn’t something she would do. Was it?
Maybe Joe is right. With all that has been going on, I totally forgot to check in on the kids.
I felt a sadness overwhelm me. I hated feeling like this, I hated it so much. The guilt was eating me up.
“Where are you, Charlene?” I said while looking out the window at the street, waiting, hoping, and praying for her to suddenly show up.
Maybe she just needs some space. Give her that.
I felt like I was losing her. It hurt. I tried to think about the case, to get my mind on something else. Cassandra’s dad had been strange, I thought, when I went to visit. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was off. We had gotten the results from the lab and the blood in Ashley’s apartment wasn’t hers. They had taken hairs from her brush and made a DNA test matching it with the blood, and it wasn’t a match. It wasn’t a match with Bryan Henderson either. It meant that it belonged to a third person, and I could only assume that was the killer.
The pediatrician’s office had been closed when I got there, so I’d decided to stop by the next morning instead.
I can’t just stay here. What if my daughter is in trouble?
I shook my head, then grabbed my car keys and rushed outside. Joe was fast asleep in the bedroom, and I shot him a text to let him know I had gone to look for Charlene yet again. I didn’t understand how he could sleep when our daughter hadn’t come home. I for one couldn’t even sit still.
I jumped into the car and drove down through our town’s main street, looking at the faces of people coming in and out of bars and restaurants. Then I continued toward the beach. I had been there earlier and found no sign of her, but it was worth trying again. It was very hot out, so it would be the perfect place to spend the night if she had nowhere else to go.
As I came to First Street, and parked there with the intention of going down to the beach, I realized I was at the building where Bryan Henderson had been found murdered. I got out of the car and looked at the backside of it, and I spotted the fire escape.
What if Ashley was running from the killer? How would she have gotten out of the building?
I approached the condominium, then looked up. That was most certainly a way to get out of the building without being seen by the cameras. I walked the length of the building and was searching the ground when I came across an area with a huge red spot on the concrete by the dumpsters. It had dried up, but there was something else.
A piece of broken glass had been tossed next to the dumpster.
It was covered in blood.
THIRTY-SIX
Then
The door to the room she was in was bolted shut as soon as Officer Damian left. He said he would come back the next day, and so he did, bringing more food, burgers and fries. The first thing she asked was if she could go outside.
“I can’t let you go outside. I want you to remain safe,” he said. “It’s for your own protection.”
Part of her believed him. Maybe because she wanted to. She had always liked him, and she didn’t want to stop now. He had always been so nice to her. She almost felt like she loved him.
But then there was that other part, the one that told her he was keeping her a prisoner, and that he was going to hurt her if she didn’t do as he told her to. Maybe he even would do it anyway.
“Be a good girl now.” That’s what he always told her. To behave.
“You’d better do as he tells you to. He is after all a police officer,” her stepdad Cole had said. And she did. She always obeyed him. Because when she did, she was rewarded. She got to go to Disney World. She got ice cream and presents. She knew how to keep him happy, so if she just continued to do that, then maybe he would let her go one day. Maybe she would get to go home to her mother.
The sound of the door bolt shutting every time he left echoed like a gong in Kitty’s mind, leaving her feeling more isolated than she had ever been. She had been in the shed for days now, and Officer Damian had offered no explanation as to why, even if she kept asking him about it. Every day he would bring food, but his presence only brought more questions.
“When will I see my mommy?” she asked.
“Don’t ask so many questions,” he answered.
“How long will I stay here? When can I go home?”
“You live here now.”
“But…?” and that was usually when she began to tear up. Did this mean he would never let her go home? That’s when she began planning her escape. She knew there had to be a way for her to leave. But she just didn’t know how.
The morning of the fourth day, Officer Damian returned once again. He brought with him a bag of burgers and fries as usual. But before she could even taste the food, Officer Damian told her that there were pit bulls outside the shed, ready to attack any intruder. He claimed it was for her protection.
Kitty didn’t know what to make of this news; she was torn between hope and despair. Part of her believed he was telling the truth, while another part of her feared it was just a way to keep her from trying to run away. Nonetheless, she remained still, silently waiting for him to leave.
Still, Kitty was left with one burning question. What did Officer Damian want from her?
THIRTY-SEVENBILLIE ANN
I called the forensic tech unit and had them come down to the condominium and secure all the evidence. I told them to comb through the dumpster in case there was more evidence inside of it, and to seal the bloody area on the ground so they could take samples of it. To see if it matched the blood on the glass and in the apartment.
