Stranger in Town (16 page)

CHAPTER 30

Searching the database for a latent print, even an excellent specimen like the one Maddie found inside the envelope, was tricky.  Not everyone had fingerprints that were searchable.  Aside from a man or a woman who had committed some type of crime, the database contained prints from people like child-care workers, law enforcement, people who carried concealed weapons, teachers, and security-type workers, among others.  And that was just one hurdle.  Laws varied by state, making it even harder in some cases to access specific kinds of files. 

Maddie struck fingerprint gold, matching the print she found to a teacher, a female by the name of Regina Kent.  This matched my theory that someone sent the letters to both Olivia and Savannah’s parents out of guilt and remorse, making a woman the most likely candidate.  Now I just needed to know if I was right about why she’d done it.  Did she have Olivia and Savannah?  And was the man who took both girls her husband or someone else she was close to?    

It didn’t take long for me to get one of my answers.  Cade did some digging and came up with some information on Regina Kent.  She was married to Bradley Kent, a retired surgeon twenty years her senior.  His age made it less than likely that he was the one who’d kidnapped the two girls.  According to our eyewitness, Todd, the man he saw in front of Maybelle’s Market looked like he was in his mid-to-late forties.  Even if Todd was off by a decade, Bradley Kent was pushing sixty.  Even a teenage boy with a fleeting memory couldn’t have been off by that much. 

Cade learned Regina Kent had been a school teacher until three years earlier.  According to the principal of the school, she walked in one day in the middle of the year and quit without any warning.  I wondered why, but soon I would have the answer to my question.  Cade had an address, and it wasn’t even fifteen miles away. 

I waited outside of the hotel for Cade to pick me up.  I couldn’t help but reflect on what a difference a few days made.  Four nights earlier, seeing Cade in his Dodge Ram sent a pulsating wave of nerves throughout my body, and now I was anticipating his arrival.  Even though he’d said we would work together on this case, I never expected him to keep his word, so I was astounded when he asked me to tag along.  The feds were flying in the next morning.  If we were going to find something on our own, we had to be quick. 

Cade pulled to a stop next to me and popped the passenger-side door open.  He had one hand on the wheel and the other stretched out across the top of the seat.  I thought he’d move it when I got in, but he didn’t. 

A thin toothpick hung out of his mouth again.  He looked at me and smiled.  It was one of those casual smiles a person gives to another person when they’ve become comfortable in the relationship.  But I was nowhere near being able to reciprocate.    

“Why are you sitting like that?” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re going steady with the door.”

“Well, your arm is in my way.”

“I’m not even touching you, woman,” he said.  “Relax.”

He moved his hand, resting it on his thigh.

“Is that what you call every female you meet?”

He laughed. 

“What,
woman
?”

I nodded.  He winked.

“Only the ones I like.”

I didn’t dare look over.  I wasn’t sure whether he was serious or just messing around.  And I didn’t want to know—at least, that’s what I told myself.  Cade leaned over and turned the volume up on the radio.  Some guy singing what sounded like a mix of country and hard rock blared through the speakers.

“Who is he—and what is he?” I said.

“The singer?  Brantley Gilbert.  You like it?”

I reached over, turning it back down.  “Not really.”

Cade cranked it back up.  “Give it a minute.  It will grow on you.”

Country music rarely did anything for me, but I had to admit, the song was catchy.  When it was over, Cade pushed a button and shut the radio off.

“There’s something I haven’t told you about the Kents,” he said.

“What is it?”

“They had two children,” he said.  

“Had?”

“Yep, both dead,” he said. 

“Let me guess, girls?”

Cade nodded.

I swallowed—hard.   

“Do you have any water?” I said.

Cade reached under the seat and handed me a can of soda.  “Here, drink this.”

“No thanks.  I don’t drink soda.”

He gently tossed it into my lap.  “Stop complaining, and just drink it.”

I popped the top on the can and took a few sips.  I had to admit, it tasted good.

“What happened to their children?” I said.

“I talked to the principal at the school Regina Kent worked at.  He told me some years back, Regina decided to visit her parents in Utah over the holidays.  Bradley couldn’t go; he had too many patients to see.  Regina packed up the car and got the kids ready, but by the time they left, it was almost midnight.  They were tired, so she told the kids they could sleep in the car.”

“Let me guess,” I said.  “She let them lay down, no seatbelts.”

He nodded and continued.

“It started snowing, the roads were slick, and Regina thought about heading back home, but she was more than halfway to Utah already.  She woke the girls and told them to put their seatbelts on.  In the process, she turned around.  They were hit head-on by a semi-truck on the highway.  The car rolled several times.  By the time the ambulance was on the scene, both girls were dead.  Regina was the only survivor.”

The idea of a child dying right in front of his parents was surreal to me.     

“I think I’d rather not have a child at all than to face one of my kids dying before me. The guilt she felt must have been excruciating.”

“I’m sure Regina felt the same way,” he said.  “After the accident, she quit her job and went into hiding, completely cutting herself off from society.  Before the accident, she was well known around here.  And after, she was well-known, but for an entirely different reason.  People in town say she went crazy.”

CHAPTER 31

In the wake of her children’s deaths, Regina Kent became a recluse, never going out for anything.  The people in town hadn’t seen her in years.  Everyone assumed she’d locked herself inside of her house, deciding she was too fragile to ever venture out into the public eye again.  Bradley Kent took a few weeks off after the children died and then resumed his practice.  A year later, he retired.  By that time he’d become somewhat of an enigma, at times displaying heartfelt emotions over his children, and at other times, behaving like they’d never existed at all.  The principal told Cade he’d seen Bradley around from time to time, but never with Regina. 

The Kents lived on a twenty-acre ranch surrounded by sprawling hills as far as the eye could see.  White fencing that appeared to be made of some type of heavy-duty plastic lined the property on all sides.  A team of horses stood like statues in the pasture, not moving, but gazing in our direction, curious about who we were and what we were doing there. 

The multi-level house sat a few acres behind a long, paved driveway.  It was a cabin, but not like any cabin I’d ever seen before.  The logs were knotty and dark, and bigger than any I’d ever seen before. 

We parked at the end of the drive, walked up to the door, and knocked.  All was quiet.  Two oversized whiskey barrels were positioned on both sides of the door.  Potted plants had been inside of them at one time, but now, only a few shriveled up stems remained.  There were cobwebs on everything: the windows, the corners of the door, and even between the wood railings on the wraparound porch.

“There’s no one here,” I said.  “I thought Regina never left the house?”

Cade raised his shoulders.  “I thought so too.”

“Except for the horses, it doesn’t look like anyone has lived here for a while.”

Cade walked around the house, looking for a possible point of entry, but everything had been sealed up tight. 

“That’s a shame,” I said.  

“So’s this,” Cade said.

A rock whizzed by my head, creating a grapefruit-sized hole when it crashed through the front window. 

Cade grinned. 

“Would you look at that?  Someone has vandalized this house.  We’d better go inside and investigate.”

To make a small hole even bigger, Cade used a stick to break up the hole in the window until it was big enough for him to step through.  Then he unlocked and opened the front door. 

I’d never been around a member of law enforcement who’d acted like Cade before, so for a minute, I just stood there. 

“Was you plannin’ on just standin’ there, or you gonna come in sometime?”  Cade patted me on my shoulder.  “It’s going to be okay.  No one’s here.”

And because no one else lived next to them, there was a good chance we wouldn’t see any visitors anytime soon.

“I’ll take the main level, and you check upstairs,” he said. 

The area upstairs was nothing but a couple of bedrooms, a bonus room used as another living room, and a bathroom.  The hallway was lined with various photos of wildlife that looked like they’d been taken in the area.  In one photo, the Kent girls were sitting on two of the horses.  In another, the girls and their parents stood outside a small house surrounded on all sides by masses of mature pine trees.  The girls looked happy. 

I entered the first bedroom.  It was a child’s room decorated in pink and grey and filled with everything but the child.  It looked like it had been preserved just the way it had been left the last day she was alive.  A shirt and a pair of pants were on the floor, indicating she had changed.  A bathroom towel hung behind the door.  I didn’t want to touch anything for fear of altering the time-capsule state.     

I found the same type of thing in the next room.  A dollhouse sat in the corner.  Inside, a family of dolls was positioned at the table.  Wooden pieces of food were set in front of the man and the woman.  The room didn’t seem as mature as the other one.  I looked in the closet.  The clothes on the hangers were a size-four toddler.  Four.  The same age Savannah was when she was taken. 

I went back into the other room, putting my sweater over my hands so I wouldn’t leave any prints behind. I opened the door to the closet.  I pulled out a dress.  It was a size six.  I looked at some others.  There were a few sevens, but the majority of the closet contained size six.  The same age as Olivia. 

I pressed one of the dresses against my chest and thought about what a coincidence it was that the Kent girls were the same ages when they were alive as Olivia and Savannah when they were abducted.  I breathed deeply, but it felt like the air I ingested wasn’t circulating right.  I sprinted to the stairwell and looked down. 

“Cade?”

He was in the kitchen sorting through some drawers.  He stopped and looked up at me.  “What’s wrong?”

I ran, skipping stairs to get to him.  “I’ve figured out the connection between the Kents and the girls.”

My theory was that the Kent girls had been replaced after their untimely deaths.  At first Cade dismissed it, thinking my suggestion was nothing more than a fluke.  But I didn’t care what he thought.  In all my years as a private investigator, I’d come to realize life didn’t always have to make perfect sense. 

“Do you have any idea how many married couples want to have children, and when they start trying, they find out they’re infertile?” I said.

“It doesn’t mean you’re right about what happened to Olivia and Savannah.”

It didn’t mean I was wrong, either.

“Over six million,” I said.  

“Yeah, but don’t most of them decide to adopt?”

“Do you think couples can just walk into an adoption center, fill out a form, flip through an album, and pick out their baby?”

He shrugged. 

“Maybe it’s hard here, in the US, but that’s why most people adopt foreign babies.”

“Most people aren’t celebrities, Cade.  Do you have any idea how long it takes?”  

“Even with a couple who can have babies, it doesn’t happen instantly.  Sometimes it takes months for a woman to get pregnant.  Then there’s nine months of waitin’ before it comes out.  I should know.”  

“Lucky you,” I said. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I said.  

He grabbed my wrist.  Not hard, but enough to show me he was serious.  “It’s not nothin’.  What aren’t you saying?”

“It doesn’t matter—it doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”

“I don’t care—tell me.  I’m not lettin’ go ‘til you do.”

I was perfectly capable of freeing myself from the hold he had on me, but I didn’t bother. 

In a hushed voice I said, “I tried to have a baby once.”

I wasn’t sure he heard me, until he let go.

Cade took a step back.  He looked at anything other than me, like if he locked eyes with me in that moment, he’d have to deal with female waterworks, but he was wrong.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.  “It was a long time ago.  It’s no big deal.”

Cade pulled a chair out from under the table and gestured toward it.  I sat down.  He did the same.  He tried to take my hand in his, but I pulled back.  It didn’t dissuade him.