My stomach turned over.
“Do you think she’s dead?”
Quinn did not soften it.
“We think Caleb knows exactly where she is.”
They left at dusk.
By midnight my mother had called seventeen times.
I answered the eighteenth.
She was crying. “What did you tell them?”
“The truth.”
Silence on the line.
Then a shift, a hand changing hands, and my brother’s voice came on.
“You stupid little runaway,” Caleb said. “You should’ve stayed lost.”
He hung up before I could get a word out.
I stood in my kitchen for a long time with the phone still against my ear.
The apartment was quiet except for the refrigerator humming and the rain ticking against the window over the sink.
My body remembered him before my mind finished catching up. That’s how it works. My ribs ached along the scar. My left hand went numb the way it does.
I checked the locks. Then I checked them again. Then a third time.
At 12:18 a text came in from an unknown number.
You always make people pay attention to you.
Then, a second later:
Elise did that too.
I screenshotted both and sent them to Detective Quinn.
She called me back inside of three minutes.
“Do not respond. Are your doors locked?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anywhere else you can stay tonight?”
“Nowhere he doesn’t know about.”
There was a pause on her end that I understood completely.
“Then stay away from the windows. Officers are on the way to you now.”
I sat on my bathroom floor with my back against the tub until blue lights washed across the ceiling.
Two patrol officers stayed outside my building until morning.
At six, Ortega called and asked if I could come to the station. They’d found Caleb’s truck.
Not Caleb. Just the truck.
It had been left behind a closed self-storage facility outside Springfield. The bed had been washed with bleach, but not well enough, because bleach never is. There was blood under the rubber mat, caught down in the ridges.
And there were strands of dark curly hair stuck under a loose screw near the tailgate.
Elise’s sister had already provided a toothbrush for DNA comparison.
“They’re moving fast,” Ortega said when I got to the station. He handed me a coffee I didn’t drink. “But Caleb’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“We were hoping you might have an idea.”
I almost said I don’t know him anymore.
That wasn’t true and I knew it wasn’t.
I know my brother’s habits the way burn victims know heat.
Caleb never runs without supplies. He never chooses an unfamiliar place. He likes being near exits, near water, and near people who will still believe his version of the story first.
“He’ll go to my parents,” I said. “If he isn’t there already.”
Quinn and Ortega exchanged a look across the table.
“Not because he loves them,” I said. “Because they’ll help him. They always have. That’s the arrangement.”
By noon, police executed a search warrant at the house in Dayton.
I wasn’t there. Quinn told me afterward, in a flat careful voice she must use a lot in that job.
My mother answered the door in the same pearls she’d worn in the parking garage. She said Caleb hadn’t been to the house in weeks. My father stood behind her and said nothing at all.
Then the officers found the basement freezer.
Underneath bags of venison and a stack of old casserole dishes, they found Elise Porter’s purse. Her cracked phone. And the blood-soaked towel Caleb had used to wipe his hands.
Not Elise. Not her body.
