Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
He smiled for the first time, the barely there, thin-lipped expression from the photograph, and nodded. But then his smile fell. “Do you know where my grandmom is?”
“No, honey,” Kat said. “But don’t you worry right now. We’re going to take care of you. You won’t be alone here anymore.”
Something nagged at Sienna, and she glanced around the room again before her gaze stopped on the coffee table where the photograph had been placed, along with the food wrappers. There was a clear plastic cup still half-full of soda and a few almost-melted pieces of ice.
“Trevor? Who brought you this food?” she asked. Because the drink had to be less than a few hours old, and the half-eaten burger next to it looked mostly fresh as well.
“The man,” he said.
Kat and Sienna frowned in unison. “What man, Trevor?” Sienna asked.
Trevor shrugged, tears filling his eyes again. “I don’t know. He brought me food, but he didn’t stay.”
Sienna’s nerves prickled, and she glanced toward the door as though the unknown man Trevor had just spoken of might suddenly walk through it. But the door was closed. She looked back at the wrappers again, representing several different fast-food locations. He had to have been bringing Trevor food for days. Someone had made sure this kid stayed fed. But who?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Reva Keeling, fifty-four, had left for work three days before, worked an eight-hour shift seemingly without incident, clocked out, and not been seen again until she’d appeared upright in a chair, dead, and clutching a handful of playing cards.
Her boss suspected she might have gotten mixed up with drugs, as she’d recently exhibited some erratic behavior, and she’d become less and less reliable in the last few months. He looked slightly guilty when he admitted he’d been planning on firing her but had put it off, knowing she was raising a grandson by herself after her daughter had OD’d. “You’d think after what happened to her daughter, Reva wouldn’t touch the stuff,” the boss said. “But people are messed up.”
Yes. Yes, they certainly can be, Sienna thought.
Before leaving work, Reva had used her employee discount to order the steak dinner they’d found mostly undigested in her stomach, canceling out the likelihood that she’d been on a date.
They hadn’t been able to locate any family members, and so the little boy, Trevor, was currently in the custody of Child Protective Services. Sienna had dropped him off there herself, and her stomach twisted at the memory of the way the boy had resolutely taken the hand of the woman who ran the group home, his little canvas overnight bag hooked over his bony shoulder.
“Hey,” Kat said, looking up from the paperwork in front of her as Sienna approached their desks. “How’d it go?”
“As heartbreaking as you might expect.”
Kat nodded knowingly. “It gets worse. The victim’s parents are still alive, and even though they’re in their seventies, healthy from all indications, they’ve been estranged from their daughter for over three decades now. They live in Boulder and didn’t even know the great-grandson existed, nor do they want a thing to do with him. ‘I’m sure that boy’s about as useless as his mother and his grandmother’ is what the woman who answered the phone said, right before she hung up on me. As if they weren’t her own flesh and blood at all. Cold, huh?”
Sienna made a huffing sound. That about covered it. Her job was full of heartbreaking stories involving kids, but each one still burned. Those cases simultaneously made her want to quit her job so the little faces would cease running through her head when she woke in the middle of the night and to do her job with a mad vengeance, to work until all hours of the day, to toil weekends and holidays, never taking a vacation lest she miss the opportunity to help just one.
Just one.
“I don’t get people,” she said.
“Be grateful for that,” Kat answered. “The minute you start getting people like that is the minute you should lock yourself in your car and turn on the exhaust.”
Despite the macabre statement, Sienna chuckled. She sat down at her desk, facing Kat. “Were the fast-food places able to offer anything?” Kat had taken an inventory of the fast food that the unnamed stranger had brought to Trevor over the last few days and gone to a couple of nearby locations while Sienna was making sure Trevor was situated.
“Nothing. Without a description or a time the guy might have stopped in, no one could tell me anything.”
Sienna sighed. “I figured as much.” They’d asked the forensic lab to rush the DNA and fingerprint report on the packaging, but that would still take several days at least. As far as which restaurant he’d purchased the food at, if the guy was smart and didn’t want to be found out, he’d surely have gone to a fast-food place across town and not right down the street from the little boy he was mysteriously feeding. “Do you think the guy taking food to Trevor is the killer and was feeding him out of some sense of guilt?”