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“That would be great.” The smug tone in Jen’s voice said it all.
“But I’m not promising anything.”
“Of course not, honey. Just take a look, that’s all I’m asking.”
“Hmm,” Sierra replied noncommittally.
“I meant it when I said I’m going to visit soon. A month, tops, and I’ll be over there.”
Sierra had to laugh. Jen sure knew how to twist her around her little finger. Sierra realized her friend only had her best interests at heart. “You know I love it when you come over. You’re welcome anytime. Are you going to bring Harold with you this time?” Sierra asked, referring to Jen’s husband of over twenty years.
“Nah, I like our girly time together. He’s one beautiful hunk of a man, but he’d just cramp my style.” They both laughed together and said their goodbyes.
As she hung up, Sierra noticed there were two text messages from Blake. He must’ve sent them when she was bedridden yesterday. She sighed. He was becoming so persistent. And she couldn’t deal with him today. Not after what happened.
An idea bubbled at the edges of her mind.
No.
It couldn’t be. Could it?
Surely not.
Blake was passionate, hot-blooded, and got fired up about the things he believed in. It was part of the attraction she’d felt towards him. It also meant he had a bit of a temper. Was he angry with her for avoiding him? For not returning his calls? Angry enough to do something violent and unnecessary?
She bit her bottom lip in consternation. Then laughed out loud at her own silliness. With everything that’d just happened, her mind had wandered into territory she wouldn’t normally go. There was no way Blake was responsible for the break-in. Or for stealing her laptop. He’d been on the island now for over two months, but he wouldn’t do something that idiotic and spiteful, just because she wouldn’t go out with him. It was a ridiculous thought, and Sierra pushed it to the back of her mind.
Snow glanced at her as she put the phone back on the table. Now that the coast was clear, the cat ambled back over the tabletop for a scratch between the ears. Sierra stared out at the never-ending blue ocean. She really needed to go and have a long, hot shower, and then perhaps make some scrambled eggs for breakfast. Then she should go and see if Sam and Debbie had an old laptop or computer she might be able to borrow.
But now Jen had put a bug in her ear, she couldn’t get rid of the idea. Hell, she may as well go and pull the files out and at least take a quick glance. Thankfully, they were in a box under a pile of her old shoes in her closet. At least that was an item the burglar hadn’t been bothered about.
Picking Jon up off her lap, she unceremoniously plonked him on the decking. He gave her that filthy look only a cat was capable of and stalked off, tail held high.
With the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, she made her way into the bedroom. She’d managed to clean the bare minimum yesterday before she’d collapsed into bed. At least the broken mirror and all its pieces were now in the bin, along with the smashed vase and flowers on her bed. And she’d changed the wet sheets, but the rest of her room still looked pretty much like a cyclone had hit it.
Turning a blind eye to the carnage, she opened the closet door and leaned in. Most of her shoes had been pulled out, but thankfully the slightly dusty box underneath remained untouched.
Sierra sat on her bed and placed the box next to her, lifting the lid and pulling out the top file. It contained the more recent documents Jen had sent her months ago.
There were two more large files in the box. After a second’s hesitation, Sierra pulled them out and spread them on the bed in front of her. She thumbed through the first pile. Ten whole years had passed since she’d looked at this file. It was frighteningly thick, stuffed with hundreds of pieces of paper. It was all her research from the series of three reports she’d done for The Advertiser twelve years ago, after two children were feared abducted and murdered in the small coastal town of Port Pirie.
Sierra’s mind wandered back to that time. When the first child, Emily Newman, was abducted in January twelve years ago, Sierra had only been in the job for three years. It was her second big case, and she went to Port Pirie, along with all the millions of other media, all baying for someone’s blood. But after weeks of no leads, she’d returned to Adelaide and her normal duties. It wasn’t until the second child, Naomi Chadstone, went missing eleven months later and police were no closer to finding a suspect—or the children—that Sierra felt something else was going on.
She started investigating the police and their role in the two cases. With Jen urging her on, Sierra had uncovered some damning aspects that pointed to police bungling in both cases. It’d taken her nearly a year to assemble all the facts and finally get her report into the newspaper, but it’d set up a storm of resentment against the police, and had them scrambling to halt the media nightmare.
As Sierra flipped through the documents, small fragments of information rattled through her brain. Most abducted children—eighty-five percent—were killed within the first five hours by the perpetrator. This statistic rose to close to one-hundred percent after the first twenty-four hours. Which meant the police only had a very, very small window of opportunity to get a child back alive once they’d been taken. If they screwed it up even the tiniest bit, then there was little to no hope at all. It often came down to just pure dumb luck when a child was recovered alive from a kidnapping attempt. But the cops in Port Pirie had screwed up the initial investigation. Sierra proved they made many basic mistakes in that critical first twenty-four hours. And there had been no going back from there.
A sliver of ice trickled down her spine at the idea that neither child’s body had ever been recovered. How did those poor families cope with the not knowing?
There were cases where a child was recovered, though. Not often, but sometimes. Just the other day, Sierra heard a report on the nightly news about a seven-year-old girl who’d been snatched from her mother’s arms as they were walking down the street and bundled into a car. The car had been found four hours later in the carpark of a local hotel, and the girl had been recovered and returned to her hysterical mother. But it hadn’t been the police who found the car. It’d been the community who rallied around the local mom, an organized church group who’d called up hundreds of their parishioners and found the car using social media. A miracle. A happy ending. But the police had ended up with egg on their faces.
Even now, it still shocked her that there were people capable of such pure evil out there.
The cases Jen had asked her to look in to had happened in Adelaide, around a two-and-half-hour drive from Port Pirie. It was unlikely, but not inconceivable that they could’ve been committed by the same person. He could’ve moved his hunting ground to greener pastures. From the relatively small, sleepy town of Port Pirie, to the major metropolis of the capitol city. But then, what had he been up to for all those years in between?
Could Jen be right? Could the two cases in Adelaide be linked to the ones in Port Pirie? When the news broke about the abductions in Adelaide, Sierra watched with muted interest from Kangaroo Island. But she’d moved on from her life as an investigative journalist by that stage, and wanted nothing more to do with it. Which was why she’d ignored the documents Jen sent her, left them shut up in a box in the bottom of her closet.
Until now.
Perhaps now it was time she took a closer look at them.
