“It means I handled it,” Kevin said, his face perfectly calm as he reached for his coffee mug. “I suggest you go up and see for yourself.”
The stairs felt longer than usual, each wooden step creaking under my boots in the quiet house.
The door to Sarah’s room was open about three inches, letting out a thin stream of cold air from the window she always insisted on keeping cracked.
I pushed the door back and saw the bare mattress, the yellow fitted sheet gone, the desk cleared of her chemistry textbooks and her green highlighters.
The small wooden dresser where she kept her sweaters stood with every drawer pulled out an inch, completely empty.
I stepped across the bare carpet and opened the closet door.
A row of bare wire hangers knocked softly against each other in the draft from the vent.
The blue plastic chairs in the lobby of the Naperville police station were bolted to the floor in a straight row.
Detective Frank Alvarez did not look up from his clipboard when I sat down, though he adjusted a silver pen in his shirt pocket. He was forty-five, with a quiet, tired way of moving that made me feel like I was interrupting a very long day.
