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“I’d like to grab it before I leave.”
“Okay.”
“Have you seen any unusual vehicles hanging around the neighborhood? Delivery vans? Cars that don’t look familiar?”
“No, but I don’t pay much attention either,” she said, then gasped. “I should have been paying attention.”
I held her gaze. “No, Nessi. You were living your life.”
“Is that what you were doing when you became a police officer instead of going to law school?” she said in an accusatory tone.
“Yeah,” I said, turning back to look at her. “In my own way.”
And that’s when I saw the deep dents on the bottom of the window.
“Shit,” I mumbled to myself, as I walked over to get a closer look. The gouge marks had to be pretty recent since the exposed wood didn’t look weathered.
How did I ask about this without freaking her out? Then again, she had every right to be freaked out. “Has anyone ever had to force the window open from the outside?”
Her face went slack. “No.”
I remembered the upcoming remodel. “A construction worker? Maybe the contractor when he was working up the bid. I suspect they evaluated the structural integrity of the porch.”
Relief covered her face. “Maybe. I know he was particularly worried about Ava’s room. This side is so chopped up from previous renovations, he’s worried they might have knocked down something structurally important.”
It was a great theory, but it occurred to me that the contractor and his men would likely have opened the window from the inside, not the outside. Then again, maybe they’d come out through another window in the front. Vanessa and TJ’s room?
I started to walk down the length of the front of the house, looking at the windows and checking for signs of anyone trying to pry them open. There were five windows total—two in Ava’s room, one overlooking the open foyer, which meant the other two were likely in the master bedroom. The other four showed no signs of forced entry. My hair stood on end.
I was about to turn around when something caught my gaze out of the corner of my eye.
A red ribbon was wrapped around the spindle of the porch, fluttering in the wind.
My heart slammed into my chest, but I told myself it was nothing. I was totally overreacting. Or was I?
Another red ribbon from twenty-one years ago was sharp in my mind’s eye, fluttering just like this one.
“Vanessa.” I slowly turned to face her. “Does Ava have any red ribbons?”
“No,” she said, climbing out the window. She must have noticed my change in demeanor. “She hasn’t worn ribbons in her hair since she was in second grade.”
“What about Paisley?”
She started walking toward me. “Paisley doesn’t like red. She wants pink or purple. You know how girls are at that age. Pink and purple everything.” But her last word trailed off as the ribbon caught her eye. She stumbled backward, her eyes round with horror.
I caught her about three feet away, holding her back before she touched something that could turn out to be evidence.
It was my resistance that broke her, convincing her this was something to freak out about, and she let out a heart-breaking wail.
This had just become a kidnapping investigation.
Chapter 8
I figured it would only be a matter of minutes before one of the police officers rushed upstairs and they’d not only make me leave the porch and bedroom, but also the property.
Based on where the ribbon was tied, I suspected someone had put a ladder up against the house, climbed up, then pried open Ava’s window. They’d grabbed her, then taken her over the side of the railing and down the ladder. There would have been a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, especially navigating the ladder part while trying to restrain a protesting twelve-year-old quietly. But Ava was a petite girl, which meant someone with any upper body strength could probably have carried her. Still, it would have been easier to handle an unconscious child rather than a squirmy one. Had he subdued her with drugs or a blow to the head?
One thing I knew for certain: the first forty-eight hours of an investigation were the most important, and the Jackson Creek Police Department had possibly wasted at least three of them. She might have been gone for as long as twelve hours. I didn’t trust them to handle it correctly.
