The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,43

she’d thought to put on the yellow glove as she opened the drawers, though to be honest, the Wilsons were neater than she was. She found some women’s underwear, a few pairs of boxers, and a pair of jeans that looked like they came from the children’s department. She grabbed two more T-shirts and shoved all of the clothes into the plastic grocery bag. Ken Coin was notorious for needlessly drawing out his searches. The Wilsons would be lucky if they were allowed back into their home by the weekend.

Charlie turned around, planning to go to the bathroom next, but something stopped her.

ALOWT.

How could Kelly Wilson reach the age of eighteen without knowing how to spell such a simple word?

Charlie hesitated once, then pulled back the curtain. She wouldn’t enter the room. She would take pictures from the hall. Not as easy as it sounded. The bedroom was the size of a generous walk-in closet.

Or a prison cell.

Light slanted in from the narrow, horizontal window mounted high over the twin bed. The paneling on the walls had been painted a light lilac. The carpet was orange shag. The bedspread had Hello Kitty listening to a Walkman with large headphones over her ears.

This was not a Goth girl’s room. There were no black walls and heavy metal posters. The closet door was open. Stacks of shirts were neatly folded on the floor. A few longer pieces hung from a sagging rod. Kelly’s clothes were all lightly colored with ponies and rabbits and the sort of appliqués you would expect a ten-year-old girl to wear, not an eighteen-year-old almost woman.

Charlie photographed everything she could: the bedspread, the posters of kittens, the candy-pink lip gloss on top of the dresser. All the while, her focus was on the things that weren’t there. Eighteen-year-olds had all kinds of make-up. They had pictures with their friends and notes from possible future boyfriends and secrets that they kept all to themselves.

Her heart jumped when she heard wheels spinning down the dirt track. She stood on the bed and looked out the window. A black van with SWAT on the side slowed to a stop in front of the yellow school bus. Two guys with rifles drawn jumped out of the van and entered the bus.

“How …” Charlie started to say, but then she realized it didn’t matter how they’d managed to get here so quickly, because as soon as they cleared the bus, they would tear apart the house that she was standing in.

But Charlie wasn’t exactly standing in the house. She was standing on Kelly Wilson’s bed inside Kelly Wilson’s bedroom.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, because there was no other way to put it. She jumped off the bed. She used her rubber-gloved hand to swipe away the dirt from her tennis shoes. The deep purple fabric hid the grooves but a forensic tech with a sharp eye would know the size, brand and model number before the sun went down.

Charlie needed to leave. She needed to take Ava outside, hands raised in the air. She needed to make it clear to the heavily armed SWAT team that they were cooperating.

“Fuck,” Charlie repeated. How much time did she have? She stood on tiptoe and looked out the window. The two cops were searching the bus. The rest stayed inside the van. They either believed they had the element of surprise or they were looking for explosive devices.

Charlie saw movement closer by the house.

Lenore was standing by her car. Her eyes were wide as she stared at Charlie because any fool could tell that the slit of a window she was looking through was in one of the bedrooms.

Lenore jerked her head toward the front door. Her mouth mimed the words, “Get out.”

Charlie jammed the plastic bag of clothes into her purse and made to leave.

The purple walls. The Hello Kitty. The kitten posters.

Thirty, maybe forty seconds. That’s how long it would take them to clear the bus, get back in the van, and reach the front door.

She used her gloved hand to open the dresser drawers. Clothes. Underwear. Pens. No diary. No notebooks. She got on her knees and ran her hand between the mattress and boxspring, then looked underneath the bed. Nothing. She was checking between the stacked clothes on the closet floor when she heard the SWAT van doors thunk closed, the tires crunch against dirt as they drew closer to the house.

Teenagers’ rooms were never this neat. Charlie rifled the contents of the