Stolen

Bonus Chapter - Crime Scene

Officer Clayton's POV

Kingsville wasn't even considered a city; it was more like a town than anything. There was more crime than you'd expect from a district of only 25,000 people, between regular break-ins and reported cases of assault.

Just the other day there was a robbery and the kidnapping of a teenage girl from the same house. Officer Bruce Clayton knew her father, Trevor Kenneth, a respectable real estate agent that he saw at church every Sunday. Not with his daughter, though. Huh.

Anyway, though, Trevor had been really distraught when he called the department a week ago, on Saturday evening. They had sent a team of detectives to investigate, but the little evidence that was there pointed to the fact that Trevor's daughter had, in fact, been kidnapped.

There were no clues other than some rope fibers on the floor and Angelo Kobalt's, Trevor's supervisor's, car being missing from the driveway. The burglar - or burglars, the number was unknown - had taken the keys from the house and driven who knew how far. It wasn't ever easy to stop this kind of crime since Kingsville had yet to implement any sort of speeding cameras that could track the license plates of stolen cars like Kobalt's.

Essentially, they had no leads. That was about it.

That didn't mean that Bruce could stop thinking about the whole matter. He knew it was hopeless, and it wasn't that he didn't care, but this kind of case wasn't solved easily. If the robbers had taken the girl, Marilynn, because she had gotten in the way, that meant she might be dead or in poor condition. They didn't have demands and that made them dangerous. And the police didn't even have a general idea of where the burglars had taken her. Again, no leads.

Bruce sighed and propped his polished black shoes on the desk, disregarding the papers, mostly unfinished incident reports, scattered there. He almost hoped for a call at this point to distract him from the mess of thoughts and paperwork he still had to do. Even though that meant more to fill out later on.

The phone rang, and Bruce was quick to pick up the receiver. "What is your emergency?" he asked immediately, grabbing a scrap piece of paper and a pen. Out of the corner of his eye he checked the clock and wrote down the time. 9:54 PM. "The missing girl, Marilynn, she's here, and I think she's being held against her will," a high voice on the other end answered, sounding like a teenage girl.

"Got it. Can you tell me your location?"

"I don't know, it's this house, but we're playing manhunt in the woods right n–" The caller was interrupted by a shout in the background, and Bruce asked, "Are you safe right now?" Her voice returned and replied somewhat breathlessly, "Yeah, we're just going in. The party's wrapping up now, I think."

So somehow the missing girl had gotten into the hands of partying adolescents. He wondered how that had happened. "Do you know who exactly hosted this party?" Bruce questioned, writing the details down on the scrap of paper, for his own memory's sake. The girl on the other end said, "I'm pretty sure it was... Everly. Everly Wallace."

He almost did a double take. Tucker and Camila Wallace were a couple he knew well; he'd gotten acquainted with them at the town barbecue a couple of months back. They had six children, and Everly was the oldest of them, one whom he had met, in fact. He seemed like a nice kid. Still, Bruce wouldn't hesitate to arrest any juvenile delinquents with the nerve to hold a girl in captivity. He had a daughter still in school, Sofia, and couldn't imagine what he'd do if anything happened to her.

"Hello?" the caller said, and he straightened and became alert again. "Yes, can you say where you are?" he asked, shuffling the paper he wrote on to see it better. She gave him the address, and then he instructed her, "Please stay on the line until we arrive. We'll be there in –" he checked a map on a nearby screen and refrained from cursing at the longer drive time "– twenty minutes."