One Last Step by Sarah Sutton (free e books to read TXT) 📗

the bottles were familiar and they continued to move through the room, digging through more and more boxes, each one filled with a large quantity of a single object—baseball cards, books, copper pipes. Tara knew his intent was most likely to sell them, probably in hopes to support his drug problem.

“Come look at this,” Tara suddenly heard from down the hall, which was where Warren had since moved.

Tara followed his voice until she was standing over him in James’s bedroom. The small room was just as claustrophobic as the rest of the house, as boxes flooded into it. Warren sat on his heels on the soiled carpet, his hands deep in a box until he pulled out a bunch of wallets. Tara kneeled down next to him, picking up each one that he placed down on the ground and checking the licenses inside. All random strangers. Warren continued to pull more out, checking the IDs as well, until he stopped moving and continued to study two now in his hands.

“What is it?” Tara asked.

Warren turned around to face her. “Look whose wallets these are.”

He handed the licenses to Tara and she looked down at them—immediately recognizing the faces. They were the first two victims and the ones that the woman at the information center said James gave directions to. Now they knew he had taken their wallets too, but Tara wondered when—if it was at the information center, or if he tracked them down on the trail.

“That’s not all I found,” Warren said, now picking up a camera next to him. “Take a look at this.”

Tara picked it up and flicked through the pictures. It was another victim—Anna—the oldest of the two sisters that just went missing. And Tara remembered now that the youngest had a passion for photography, and probably took the picture. In the image, Anna stood on the trail, looking back at the camera and smiling.

“This must be right before they went missing,” Tara replied.

She passed the camera back to Warren, but Warren’s eyes were locked on something else underneath the bed.

He crawled over to get closer, and Tara could now see that he spotted the edge of an object sticking out from under the bed. He reached for the bed skirt and lifted it up, as Tara moved closer for a better look. Behind it, piled on top of each other, sat dozens of guns of varying types, but something stuck out among them all—a crossbow.

Chapter Twenty Seven

James Hayden sat up slightly, his wrists shackled to the hospital bed and his bandaged leg outstretched in front of him. He stared at the door blankly as Tara and Warren entered the hospital room. It was the same stare he had hours earlier but now his face was pale—drained of blood and energy from the injury he just endured.

For the first time, Tara felt a flutter of excitement, knowing that this man could very well be who they had been looking for all along. However, they still had not found the victims, even after sweeping his property, and Tara wondered where else he could be keeping them. But as she looked at him—his blank stare and bloodshot eyes—there was evidently something odd about him. It was his bizarre unpredictable behavior that made Tara feel that he was the one.

She walked over to the side of his bed, holding an evidence bag in one hand, and stood by him, looking down. Warren did the same.

“That was quite a spectacle you pulled back there,” Tara said.

Warren nodded. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you, you shouldn’t shoot at an officer?” he added.

James’s eyes continued to hold their gaze on the ceiling, his hands now clenched in fists by his side. He didn’t respond, and it was clear he wasn’t planning to, so Tara reached into the evidence bag, pulling out the wallets they found at his house.

“Do you want to tell me why you had these?” Tara asked, holding them out in front of him.

His eyes looked at them cautiously until they locked on what Tara was holding. For a moment a flash of fear crossed his face, until he struggled to sit up a bit straighter and his face morphed into something else completely—it relaxed, as if all the fears he felt left his mind.

“I’ve never seen them before,” he muttered.

His sudden change in behavior caught Tara off guard. She looked at him for a moment, trying hard to study his face—to understand him—but his face was so still, so emotionless. It was as if he almost believed his own words even though both he and Tara knew it was a blatant lie.

“James, they were in your bedroom,” Tara shot back.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I don’t know why they were in there,” he said.

He stared Tara dead in the eye without a flicker of doubt.

“Where are they?” Tara asked, growing increasingly impatient as she opened each wallet, pulled out the licenses, and flashed them in front of his face. She was referring to the victims; it was all they needed now—to find them.

He squinted his eyes, taking a hard look at the licenses.

“I’ve never seen those people before,” he replied again before moving his gaze to the ceiling, and Tara caught the corners of his mouth rise slightly as he discreetly tried to hide a smile on his face. This man is a skilled manipulator, and he knows it, Tara thought to herself.

“Okay,” she finally said. “We know you had the wallets. We also found the camera of one of the other victims…”

His eyes darted to her briefly at the mention of the camera, but then he quickly tried hard to not make his interest noticeable and let his eyes fall.

“Now, we could sit here all day until you finally tell us the truth, but this will all go a lot quicker and smoother if you just tell us where the people are that you took these things from,” she said.

“Like I said, I don’t know why