The Girl and the Unlucky 13 (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery) by A.J. Rivers (i have read the book .txt) 📕

or around the house since we got there, but I still want to be prepared. I take my gun out of its holster and hold it down in front of me as I climb the steps onto the sagging, white-painted wood porch.

“Look,” Dean says, nodding at the wood. “Are those drops of blood?”

The small reddish-brown circles stand out against the paint. There isn’t an exact pattern to them, but they seem to lead from the door down to the steps.

“That’s what they look like.”

“Ashley’s blood?” Ava asks.

“She had some injuries when she went into the hospital, but none of them would have dripped like this. This looks like blood sliding off something and landing on the porch.”

The front door is closed and I ensure my grip on my gun before approaching. The knob turns easily in my hand, and I push the door open into the still, quiet house. That means nothing. Silence right now doesn’t mean there’s no one inside. I step in cautiously, followed closely by Dean. Ava follows, each of the three of us with our hands at our weapons. Once we determine the room is clear, we wave Xavier in behind us.

“The floor,” I say. “Do you see the discoloration?”

“Someone tried to clean something up,” Dean says.

“It’s a drag pattern,” Ava observes. “Look at the edges. The center has a swirl pattern where someone tried to clean it using a circular motion.” She gestures with one hand, simulating cleaning the floor. “But the edges still have streaks. Whoever was cleaning this didn’t have enough time to get it done. Or they realized it was too difficult and gave up. Either way, the edges are intact and show a continuous sweep. There’s no sign of anything passing back through the path. Something was dragged through here.”

“Ashley is too small to have dragged a grown man,” Dean notes.

“Then maybe it wasn’t Ashley,” I say. “Let’s find out where the trail starts.”

We follow the blood through the entryway of the house and to the dining room. A large wooden table takes up the majority of the center of the floor. There are chairs positioned around it as if a meal could be served at any moment. The only disruption is the chair at the head of the table. It’s pushed aside and toppled onto the floor; as if someone shoved it out of the way.

Streaks of blood on its legs tell me something horrific happened to the person sitting in that chair.

“What did she tell you about getting out of the house?” I ask Ava.

“She said Wolf had left for a little while. He did that occasionally, but usually, she was locked up when he did. That time, he didn’t lock the door. She thought it was a trick and didn’t go anywhere at first, but then she got up the nerve to try and realized he wasn’t there. So she ran,” Ava says.

“He wasn’t here?” I ask. “She didn’t have to struggle to get out?”

“No. She said she just left.”

“Then where did the injuries come from?” Dean asks.

“They could have happened earlier in the day. Or the day before,” Ava suggests.

I nod. “They could have. That would have pushed her toward the edge and made her willing to take the risk. But if she left without any struggle, when the man wasn’t even here, who was sitting in this chair? And who left that drag mark across the floor?”

We continue through the house, comparing Ashley’s statements with what we see. The other rooms of the house look fairly undisturbed. There are a few personal belongings and some furniture. Some look as if they were left behind when the original family decided to leave. Others are newer. It’s obvious someone was using this house on a fairly consistent basis, but only for a short term.

“What about the room with the new curtain?” Dean asks. “The one Xavier noticed.”

We climb the steps and I pause at the landing, looking up and down the hallway to take count of the rooms and note which have closed doors. Those are the ones that represent the biggest threat. Only two of the doors are closed. We move to the first one, just to our left.

Opening the door reveals nothing but an old, dusty bed. It looks frail enough to collapse if touched. The smell in the room makes my throat itch. No one has been in here for a long time.

The next rooms are open and have the same partially-used feeling as the rest of the house. Finally, we get to the second closed door. By the positioning of it, I’m confident this is the room with the newer curtain. I don’t know what I expect to find on the other side of the door.

I push the door open and we step inside. An eerie feeling comes over me when I see the single piece of furniture. A vanity pushed up against one wall, the mirror shattered. Everything else about the room is clean to the point of being unsettling. A sharp contrast to the dusty, pent-up stench of the other closed room: this one has the lingering scent of bleach.

I walk up to the vanity and look down at it without touching it.

“No dust. No fingerprints,” I murmur. I look at the mirror. It’s broken, but the pieces of glass have for the most part stayed in place. “Something hit the mirror pretty hard. This is the impact point. There appears to be a little bit of blood around the edges of a couple of these shards. We need to call a forensic team and have them take the pieces apart. There might be more under the glass.”

I notice Dean crouched down beside the vanity, and walk over to see what he’s examining.

“Blood?” he asks, pointing to a small red pool soaked into the wooden floor. “It seems strange someone would go to this extent to clean up a room, only to leave blood on the floor.”

Ava comes over and kneels down to