Two cars from the Fort Atkinson Police Department were already at the house when we arrived.
A sergeant whose name tag read J. CARVER met us at the porch.
“Do you have him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “House was empty when we got here, but since we had the search warrant…well…” He pointed to the door. “We accessed the property.”
There was a shattered lock on the door and I liked this guy already.
“What else?”
“We found a false cabinet under the basement stairs. There’s a box. A bunch of toys and some children’s clothing.”
“Show me.”
While we were descending the steps, I could feel my heart twisting in my chest. Radar and I pulled on latex gloves.
“They haven’t disturbed anything,” I asked Carver, “have they? The other officers?”
“No. I made sure they didn’t touch anything until you got here.” Carver seemed like a pro and I was glad he was the one calling the shots for his team.
We reached the basement and he led us around the back of the stairs to the place where the officers had dismantled the cabinet. The basement itself was cluttered with unfinished woodworking projects, stacks of cardboard boxes, a shotgun on the workbench where Griffin may have been working on it, an old, warped pool table.
The square cardboard box they’d found was about half a meter tall, deep, and wide. It held a clutch of toys, some children’s clothes beneath them, and, apparently, something bulky that I couldn’t make out beneath the toys and clothing.
The toys in the box that caught my attention right off the bat were a plastic horse about the right size for a Barbie doll to ride on and a stuffed goat. As well as two small plastic pushcarts.
Beside them, tucked into the side of the box, was a carefully folded-up page torn from a coloring book with a sketchily colored-in bull.
Fire rose inside me.
I wondered if Griffin had colored in the picture himself or if an abducted child had done so.
Despite myself, I felt something inside of me slipping, something that’d been rooted firmly for a long time in what I believed about right and wrong, about justice and mercy: I wanted Timothy Griffin out of the way for good and I wanted to be the one to take him out. And if things played out like that, I knew that afterward I wouldn’t regret it at all.
But honestly, thinking those things frightened me.
Keep the demons at bay.
Keep them at bay.
Yeah, well maybe not this time.
As I removed the toys and then the children’s clothes-outfits that looked like they would’ve fit someone Jenna’s size-I saw what was bunched up beneath them.
A jacket.
Even though the arms of the coat weren’t visible, I said quietly, “There’s a small rip on the left sleeve, about halfway down.”
Radar was on one knee beside me, looking into the box as well. “How do you know that?”
“Because it used to be mine.”