Not forever.
Just until they got the ornaments back.
Chapter thirty-five
Six Rectangles
Thestorageunitwasempty.
Evan stood in the doorway of Unit 17 at StoreSafe Climate Storage and looked at the room the same way he looked at a marina after a nor’easter. Not at what was there. At what wasn’t.
Bare concrete floor. Metal walls. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. The faint smell of cardboard and industrial cleaner. And in the middle of the room, six clean rectangles in the dust.
The crates had been there. Two rows. Three deep. Long enough to leave marks.
Gone now. Every one of them.
For several seconds nobody spoke.
The silence felt louder than the buzzing lights.
Harker stepped into the unit with a flashlight. Two deputies followed.
Margot remained beside Evan. Still. Quiet. Not defeated.
That wasn’t how she worked. She absorbed information first. Then she figured out what to do with it.
“The facility manager checked the access log,” Harker said. “Unit was opened yesterday at two fifteen p.m.”
She looked up. “By whom?”
“White male. Early forties. Driving a cargo van.”
Caleb. Maybe not proven. Close enough.
Evan stepped into the unit. The concrete echoed beneath his boots.
Yesterday at two fifteen. He replayed the timeline. At one thirty he and Margot had been walking into Harker’s office carrying enough evidence to obtain a warrant. Forty-five minutes later the storage unit was being emptied. Not a coincidence. Not even close. “He knew.”
Harker glanced up. “We don’t know that.”
“We know somebody moved six climate-controlled crates less than an hour after we handed over evidence.”
Margot folded her arms. “The timing isn’t exactly subtle.”
“No,” Harker admitted. “It isn’t.”
Evan crouched beside one of the dust outlines. Something white caught his eye. A scrap of paper no bigger than a postage stamp.
He picked it up. Part of a shipping label. The adhesive backing had torn away.
Only a few letters remained. ...NTER... ...SERV...
He turned it over. Nothing else. Still. It was something.
Harker took it when Evan handed it over. “Could be anything.”
“Or it could be where he moved them.”
