Page 45 of Scarred By Sin

He was beginning to think that Owen Pruitt had lied to Sylvie during their chat today. Vitamins? Bit was relatively certain the man was giving this woman more than mere supplements, especially given her insistence that she needed more.

Vitamins didn’t produce this kind of dependency.

Gwenyth abruptly stepped forward, and Bit went absolutely still.

She closed the distance between them with a slow, shuffling gait, her bare feet whispering against the tile. Once she was within arm’s length, she leisurely reached out and took his plate.

She actually took his plate.

Gwenyth lifted it from his hands with the casual authority of someone who had decided the conversation was over, and the pizza was hers. She turned and shuffled out of the kitchen through the back hallway without another word. The sound of her footsteps faded until there was nothing left but the hum of the refrigerator and the faint smell of pepperoni lingering in the air.

Bit stood in the empty kitchen, his fingers still hovering in the air where his plate had been, staring at the doorway through which Gwenyth Ellingham had just disappeared with his dinner.

He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling.

Why?

Why did this stuff only happen to him?

20

Brooklyn Sloane

July 2026

Friday — 10:27 am

“There’s no entrance to a cellar anywhere inside this structure.” Dr. Kessler had pulled her respirator down to her chin before gesturing toward the packed earth floor. “My team has been working in this space for nearly a week. We’ve excavated eight burial sites down to undisturbed subsoil. If there were a hatch, a stairwell, or any kind of access point underneath us, we would have encountered it by now.”

“There were no cellars on the blueprints of the estate, either,” Brook said, more to herself than to Kessler. Brook had been holding onto the possibility that Nestor had built a hidden workspace that explained where his equipment had gone and why Gwenyth kept pointing her back to this place, but the evidence wasn’t cooperating with that theory. “I appreciate you and your team double-checking for us.”

She’d opted to hold off on the press release until noon. The Bureau had given their approval, and the statement would go out on schedule, but Brook had no interest in dealing with the press any earlier than necessary. The morning was better spent here, inside this humid glass structure where the work lights hummed, and the forensics team moved between excavation sites with the patient, methodical rhythm that had become the background tempo of the estate.

“Since you’re here, it saves me a walk to the main house.” Kessler reached for the tablet on the nearest worktable and pulled up a file. “We’ve identified the third set of remains.”

Brook gave Kessler her undivided attention. The air between them was thick with humidity, and the green-filtered light through the algae-clouded panes gave everything the same submerged quality she’d noticed on her first visit, as though the greenhouse existed at the bottom of something rather than on the surface.

“The identification came through a serial number on an orthopedic plate screwed into the left femur. Surgical hardware is traceable through the manufacturer, and the serial number led us to a patient named Ruth Okafor. She was fifty-one at the time of her disappearance.”

“Fifty-one,” Brook repeated, filing the age against the emerging pattern. “Age didn’t seem to matter for the unsub.”

“I’m in the process of sending you and your team the full report, but there’s something you should know before it hits your inbox.” Kessler set the tablet down. “Ruth Okafor was a cancer patient in hospice care at the time she went missing. Pancreatic cancer, stage four. According to the facility’s records, she had days…maybe weeks…to live. It was the staff at the hospice center who reported her missing thirty years ago, though her family believed she’d left of her own free will. To spare them from watching her die.”

Brook absorbed the new details.

A woman with terminal cancer, days from death, had either walked out of a hospice facility of her own free will or been abducted and brought here to be some type of test subject. To a botanist who believed he could cure the disease that was killing her. It was the same pattern as Helen Uche, causing Brook’s first profile to shift slightly. She was becoming more confident by the hour that Nestor Ellingham was the initial unsub.

Brook turned slowly and took in the greenhouse around her. The raised beds, the overgrown plants, the evidence flags marking the sites where seven women had been laid to rest with care.

Deliberate care.

“They all had cancer,” Brook murmured, her statement not garnering any type of disagreement from Dr. Kessler. “Bit has pulled together a list of missing persons from thirty years ago who had been diagnosed with cancer at the time of their disappearance. I’ll have the names sent to you. It might speed up the identification of the others.”

“That would be⁠—”

The sound of multiple engines cut through the morning air, followed almost immediately by the slam of a car door.

Then a second door.