Chapter 35

The police were doing the best they could. Whomever Rose and Joe were, it seemed that they had just up and disappeared, poof, vanished just like that. And what was more frustrating was that they had left no trace, your yellow brick road, no tell-tale signs that they had ever existed.

And this was precisely what bothered Detective Blake the most. He had been staring at his board of clues for hours on end, and yet he felt like he was making no real progress. Their trail seemed to have gone cold, and it seemed that he was too late to follow it. Try as he might, he seemed unable to make sense of what he was looking at.

His room was sparse: bits of paper covered the little space that his laptop and his printer didn’t; pictures of himself and his daughter (his only family) hung on the walls, reminding him of the reason he did what he did; a worn chair sat on the other side of the table, his coat draped over it; a window that overlooked the street beneath it and a cabinet where