Page 47

CHAPTER 33

Cedar Creek, Nevada Wednesday, July 31, 2024

THE SECOND TIME TO ERIC’S CABIN PROVED EASIER THAN THE FIRST. She crossed the long wooden bridge, turned right at the end, and found the driveway. She parked next to Eric’s silver Toyota 4Runner. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had sprayed him with pepper spray outside her apartment in Raleigh. Since then, she had agreed to work with him secretly to see if together they could uncover secrets about the summer her birth parents went missing and his father died. And she’d met Nora, who was growing into both a friend and confidant, as well as a conduit through which Sloan was getting to know Annabelle Margolis.

Since Sunday, when Sloan and Nora perused the photos Annabelle took the summer she disappeared, Sloan had spent Monday and Tuesday with Tilly and Reid. She’d spent the afternoon at their home, having lunch and swapping stories. Although Reid remained standoffish, Sloan found Tilly Margolis to be nothing like what Nora had described. Perhaps the years had softened the woman. Tilly and Reid had asked about Sloan’s childhood, and dug softly, but deliberately into how her adoptive parents had gone about finding her in 1995. The two days she spent with Tilly and Reid were emotional and exhausting, and Sloan was happy to take a break from the Margolis family and head to the foothills to see Eric.

As she shut off the engine, the front door opened, and Eric hurried down the steps.

“Is something wrong?” Sloan asked as she opened the car door.

“I found something in the files,” Eric said. “It has to do with what the state police discovered at Annabelle and Preston’s house.”

Sloan followed Eric inside and sat across from him at the large oak slab table covered with boxes containing the details of her and her parents’ disappearance. Eric opened a file folder and turned a few pages.

“After the state police were brought in to investigate your parents’ disappearance, according to what my grandfather told me, they became very tight-lipped about the investigation and stopped sharing details with the press and public. As I was digging through the case file, I found this.”

Eric slid a piece of paper across the table for Sloan to read.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“A summary of what crime scene technicians discovered at Annabelle and Preston’s home. Look at the last paragraph.”

Sloan skimmed the page while Eric spoke.

“Crime scene investigators performed a luminol test of Annabelle and Preston’s home.”

“To look for blood evidence?”

“Yes. Crime scene investigators use luminol spray to look for diluted blood. It’s sensitive enough to detect blood even if someone attempts to clean it up and hide its presence. Technicians spray a surface, wait a minute, and then shine blue light on the area. If the area lights up under the blue light, the techs know blood had been there and was cleaned up.”

Sloan continued to read.

“They found blood in the kitchen of Annabelle and Preston’s home?”

“Not just blood,” Eric said. “A lot of blood. Here, check out the photos.”

Eric slid another sheet of paper in front of her.

“My guy at the Nevada State Police Department couldn’t get me the original photos, but he copied these for me. And they’re in color, so you can appreciate how spectacular this finding was.”

Sloan pulled the sheet in front of her, where Eric’s source had photocopied six images onto a single page. The images were of Annabelle and Preston’s kitchen. On the floor was a large circle that glowed brightly under the blue light, signifying where someone had cleaned up blood that pooled there. Sloan estimated the circumference of the area glowing in the photo was five feet around.

“This was all blood?” she asked.

“That’s what the techs believed, yes. Blood that someone tried to clean up and hide.”

“Whose blood was it?”

Eric pointed to the bottom of the page and Sloan’s gaze moved there. The blood belonged to Annabelle Margolis.