Free Cinnamon Crunch Murder by Susan Gillard Page B

He switched on the lights.
    Heather followed his lead, moving into a cloud of stale odors and dust. The living room led right into the kitchen, open plan, and two bedrooms were situated off to the right. The place was silent as… ugh, she didn’t want to complete that sentence in her mind.
    “Lilly?” Heather called out, softly.
    No reply. Of course, there wasn’t a reply. The girl was with her psychopathic father on some joy ride across the state.
    Heather sucked in a breath, and Ryan squeezed her shoulder, holding his gun in the other hand, just in case. “Don’t worry, honey, the cops are out looking for the car. It’s not related to the murder until we find the evidence that it was Larry, but kidnapping is a serious offense. They’ll find him. Trust me. They’ll find him.”
    Heather wanted that to be true, but Detective Davidson’s special brand of police work had hardly imbued her with confidence.
    “Let’s look around. Maybe there’s some indication as to where he went,” Ryan said.
    They hurried towards the master bedroom, and Ryan switched on the light there too.
    They both grimaced and stepped back a pace.
    “Ew,” Heather said. “He hasn’t cleaned up in here in months.”
    Piles of dirty clothes rested on a sofa against one wall, and the queen-sized was stained and naked of sheets. A solitary pillow, equally yellow, sat at the head of the mattress.
    A desk had been pushed against the wall, and there wasn’t an armoire or a dressing table in sight.
    “Let’s try here first,” Heather said, walking to the piles of paper on the desk. She shifted them aside. Bills and junk mail fluttered to the floor. Followed by an eviction notice, then a few drafts of angry letters to the ‘idiot who owns the building’.
    Heather’s finger tips brushed against leather. She shifted papers aside and brought a journal out from the bottom of the stack.
    “I found his journal,” Heather said.
    Ryan grunted behind her, and she spun on the post. He wriggled around beneath the bed, leopard crawling backward out from the depths.
    “What are you doing?”
    Ryan held up a black glove, between two fingers. He dumped it on the bed, then got up. “Look what I found.”
    “Glove.” Heather didn’t have another word for it. The evidence had just appeared. “That’s the glove. Speaking of gloves, shouldn’t we be wearing latex gloves for this?”
    “It’s too late now. We’re going to have to carry on without them. Open the journal.”
    Heather did as she was told and flipped through the pages. A foul taste sat at the back of her tongue, intensifying as she read each line of script.
    “He’s so angry.”
    “There, look at that,” Ryan said, pointing at an excerpt of text, dated two weeks prior.
    She comes home at all hours of the night, screaming and joking. Laughing with her blonde friend. I hate her. She deserves to die.
    She’s disturbing my sleep.
    Going to kill her if this carries on. I can’t take the noise anymore. I need the quiet, or the other voices come back. Need the quiet. Quiet. Quiet. Need the quiet. Quiet. Quiet.
    “Why is he writing like that?” Heather asked, then dropped the journal on the desk. She wiped her fingers on her blouse to rid them of the filth. “Because he’s insane?”
    “No, I don’t think so. He’s got anxiety. That looks like some kind of tic or a way of managing his anxiety. Repeating the word over and over. He might not be insane, but anxiety could be the least of his mental issues.”
    Heather pressed her lips together, but she couldn’t summon a tune from her mind.
    “What are we going to do?”
    “We’re going to call this in. Actually, I’m going to. Davidson will be furious that it wasn’t you. He’ll positively seethe about it, but that doesn’t matter.”
    “But Lilly? Where did he take her?” Heather asked.
    “Leave that to me,” Ryan replied, and hugged her again. “I’m going to call this in and then I’ll find her myself. All