Chapter 11
Devlin
We arrived back in Pierce Bluff just after the sun came up and I felt like I was going out of my mind. We were no closer to finding Elise, and as the elevator lifted us to the floor we used as a conference room, I felt ice filling my chest.
Silently, we stepped off the elevator and I went to open the door, only to look back and see James still standing in the elevator.
“Are you going to join us?” I asked.
“I need to check on something then I’ll be back,” he responded, and the doors closed, leaving Lucian and I standing outside the door to the conference room.
“He’s a weird dude,” Lucian remarked, and I cut my eyes to him, silently telling him to back off James. He held his hand up and I was getting tired of seeing that from me.
I turned the knob and opened the door to see everyone still working on trying to find Elise.
I had emailed Skid on the way back what we learned from Timothy, and he stood as Lucian and I entered the room.
He looked confused but guided me off to the side as Lucian sat down next to Rhys and they began to speak low.
“Where’s James,” Skid asked, and I shrugged.
“He had to check on something,” I replied, and Skid gave a single nod.
“I started running the picture you had in the box through our system, looking for any kind of a match, and I don’t know if this is anything or not, but I found a missing person’s flyer that might be something.
” I raised my eyebrows, and he grabbed his laptop and returned to show me the screen.
“This is Michael Badcock and he’s been missing since a few months before you took out Marco.
The computer thinks there is a seventy-three percent chance of the picture of Bradon Mills is the same person as this missing flyer. ”
“That’s a good percentage, but not enough to be certain. What does the system say about this Michael guy. Who is he and where is he from?”
“He was the son of a furniture executive who disappeared after meeting some girl online. There haven’t been any updates that I could find, but they lived in Nashville, so there are some connecting points about the two of them,” he returned.
“Any luck on Kendra?” I inquired and he shook his head.
“I’ve got the system checking online yearbooks for the five years prior to her showing up in the Flats, hoping for a break, but so far, it seems she appeared out of thin air.” He paused and asked, “Do you still have any videos from Marco?”
“In the storage room downstairs,” I answered, and he placed his computer onto the table and turned back to me. “I’m going down there to see if I can find anything about this girl on the recordings. I know some have been digitized, but there are still a few dozen or more than are on tape?”
“At least,” I tacked on. “Why don’t you take someone to help you go through them and I’ll let you know what we find up here.”
“Freddie, you want to join me downstairs” Skid asked, and he gave a nod and stood from his seat.
Freddie was the second employee we hired at Callahan Cyber Security, behind Skid, and he was loyal to us and our families.
I trusted him and he knew we accepted him and his husband with open arms. I didn’t give a damn who you loved or slept with, as long as you were a good person and a faithful friend.
They left the room, and I took a seat and grabbed a computer to get busy. There were cameras everywhere, but somehow, none captured Elise’s kidnapping, so my mind started to race as where she could be.
No traffic cameras showed unusual movement or a tell-tail sigh of her in a vehicle, so I started to think she was closer than we originally thought. But between her and the Flats of Portstill, there were over twenty miles of thick forests and deep ravines.
I couldn’t let the fear of her lying out there, hurting, into my head, or I’d never be able to get it out.
Letting my thoughts shift, I started to think about all the details Timothy gave me before I killed him. He couldn’t remember where the warehouse he dropped the rental van at, and that could lead us directly to who took Elise.
Lifting my eyes, I asked Lucian, “Did you bring the broken cell phone with you?”
He pulled it from his pocket and showed it to me, asking, “What can we do with it in this condition?”
“Is the cim card intact?” Regan asked from her seat at the end of the table. Lucian shrugged and handed it down the table until it was placed in Regan’s hands. “Let me see what I can do with it. Maybe there’s something on the GPS that will tell us where he went.”
She pulled the broken phone into her computer and started typing as she stared at the screen.
Seeing everyone so busy, I started to feel useless.
I needed to figure out where the unknown man might have taken her, so I pulled up a satellite map of the park and began to scroll through the images.
I could see paths and trails crisscrossing the park and felt like Tomothy saying the man started walking through the woods meant something.
I still didn’t know what, but I wasn’t going to sit there and do nothing. I tracked every trail I could see and began to pull back, making the map bigger in area so I could see what was around the lake.
The private houses on the other side of Pierce Lake, a few of which were owned by Amaya’s family, appeared.
She didn’t know she was the only child of one of the landowners of Pierce Bluff until she and James started dating.
I was looking at the overhead images of the houses, hoping something stood out to me when my phone rang.
Looking at the screen, I saw it was James and pressed the button to answer it. I lifted the phone to my ear and answered, “What did you find?”
“I called Amaya’s father, Preston, and asked him about the people living on his side of the lake,” James responded, and I sat up straighter in my chair.
Lucian lifted his eyes and watched as I listened to my brother speak.
“He said there is a house on the edge of the property surrounding the Lake that has been vacant for a number of years. The family all died in an accident, and no one’s been there for over ten years. ”
“Why does that matter?” I inquired, wanting to see where his mind was going.
“Timothy said the man who took Elise carried her into the woods, and we haven’t found any images of a car racing away, correct?”
“Correct,” I responded, knowing he and Skid had been corresponding since we left to find Timothy.
“I’m coming up the elevator,” James explained before the call dropped. The elevator was a known dead zone for phones.
A minute later, James walked into the conference room and immediately took a seat next to me, turning the laptop to face him. He smirked when he saw me looking at an overhead map of the lake area. He and I were so much alike, it was scary sometimes.
He pointed to a smudge on the map and said, “Here. Look at this house. I think this is the one he’s speaking about. He said to call him when I got back here while he went to speak with his mother, Eleanor. She’s better acquainted with the family and the happenings then he was.”
“You think that maybe they are using this house to hold Elise?” I asked and everyone lifted their heads to listen to us.
“It’s a possibility. We can at least cross it off the list if it’s not feasible.”
I gave a nod, and he pulled his phone out and placed it between us before dialing a number. The phone was in speaker as the ringing began to fill the room.
A moment later, a voice came over the phone. “James, I’m here with my mother.”
“Thank you for speaking with me Eleanor,” James replied.
“When Preston told me about Elise, I just started praying. Will you tell Devlin we’re keeping them in our prayers?” An older voice said, and I nodded as he replied.
“I will and thank you.” James paused before asking. “What can you tell me about the family that used to live in the house on the edge of the lake property?”
“Oh, that poor family.” Eleanor started with a tsking sound. “I felt so badly for them.”
“Mrs. Pierce, this is Devlin. Can you tell me who they were and how they died?”
“Devlin, I can, and again, I’m so sorry.” She cleared her throat and began to explain. “They weren’t a part of the landowner’s trust, but the Greene family moved in during the early nineties. They were a sweet family and welcomed two children while they were living there.”
“Greene you said?” James questioned.
“Yes, Mandy and Richard Greene. They were lovely people and it’s a shame what happened to them.
” Eleanor lowered her voice, like she was telling a secret.
“About twenty years ago, the exact year eludes me right this minute, but about twenty years ago, they went on vacation and the whole family died in a freak accident. Apparently, the cabin they were staying at had a carbon monoxide leak and they weren’t discovered for a few days. ”
“You said they had two children. Were they both killed in the accident?” James asked her.
“The younger one was found with them, but the oldest wasn’t found. The police believe she was kidnapped but can’t prove it. She just disappeared,” Eleanor explained.
“Do you remember where this happened?” I asked her, feeling a sliver of hope building in my chest,
“Let me think,” she responded, and we heard shuffling through the phone. “I think it was in upstate New York somewhere. I don’t remember exactly where,” she explained.
“Do you remember the children’s names?” James asked.
“The younger one was named Leonard and the oldest was something strange,” she remarked.
“Was it Kendra?” I inquired.
“No, that’s not it.” She paused and remarked, “It sound like a flower, but wasn’t a flower. I remember that.”
I wanted to yell at her to think harder, but Ms. Eleanor was close to ninety and didn’t deserve my wrath.
“I appreciate you speaking with us, Eleanor,” James remarked. “I’ll have Amaya stop by this week to drop of some of the pumpkins we ordered for Halloween.”
“Thank you, James. You’re such a sweet boy,” she replied.
James rolled his eyes and a few chuckles were stifled around the table as he said his goodbyes to his grandmother-in-law. He looked at me and asked, “Is that enough to go check it out?”
I shook my head, “As good as her information was, I don’t want to bust into the house if its vacant or f someone’s moved in.”
“What kind of a name sound like a flower but isn’t a flower?” I inquired as I sat back in my chair.
A minute later, Rhys began to speak. “Mandy and Richard Greene died in a freak accident over the weekend in a rented cabin in Webb, New York. The couple, along with their two children, were vacationing in one of the areas isolated rental cabins and when they failed to pick up their scheduled grocery order, a wellness check was conducted. Upon forcing entry into the cabin, the New York state police discovered the bodies of Many, Richard, and their youngest son, Leonard. The eldest child, eighteen-year-old Deliliah, wasn’t at the residence, and it appeared she was removed from the residency by force.
A search was conducted, spreading out over the four-hundred-mile county, only to come up empty handed.
” He lifted his eyes to mine before looking back at the computer.
“State police believe she may have been the target of a calculated attack, but without proof, have ruled the deaths an accident.”
“Is there a picture of Deliliah?” I questioned him and he spun the computer to face me.
Staring back at me was the happy, smiling face of a young Deliliah Greene, dated a year before the accident. The same face I knew as Kendra Mills.
Turning to face James, I stated, “That’s her.”
He nodded in agreement, and for the first time, we knew who Kendra really was.
The bigger question was, who was Bradon, and where were they now? And the biggest question was, did they have Elise?