Stranger in Town - By Cheryl Bradshaw Page 0,45

but in a good way. It felt great to finally have a solid lead. I just hoped it went somewhere.

I called Maddie and gave her the news.

“I was just about to call you,” she said.

“Did you get anywhere with the envelope?”

“Lots of places after I dealt with all the prints on the outside of it. Do you have any idea how many people have touched this thing?”

“I probably don’t want to know.”

“Trust me,” she said. “You don’t. The outside of it was a mess. Too many prints, all over the place. I’ve got prints on top of prints, smudged prints, partial prints. You get the idea.”

“So, you didn’t get anything?”

She popped a bubble into the phone. “I did.”

Maddie was biding her time, which meant she had good news.

“I lifted a perfect print from the inside, right under the place a person would lick and stick, except for whoever sealed this thing, didn’t do it very well. It was only sticky in the center, you know, the pointy part on the back. The beauty of it is, the only people to touch the inside were Mr. and Mrs. Tate and the sender of the letter.”

“Do you have a name?” I said.

“Not yet. Since I don’t know who this print belongs to, I have to run it through the database. Hopefully we’ll get a hit.”

“How long will it take?” I said.

“We’re running it now. How are things on your end?”

I filled her in on the recent developments thinking she’d have a lot to say, but when I finished, she didn’t say anything. She was quiet. Too quiet. It was almost like she was no longer on the line, but the seconds ticked by on the front of my phone. For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to be listening.

“Are you still there?” I said.

“Umm, yeah. Can you hold on a minute? One of my guys is waving me over.”

I held for a minute, and then two, until I considered hanging up and letting her call me back. But then I heard her voice in the background. It was slightly muffled, but it was Maddie’s voice all the same. She was talking to someone.

She said, “Are you sure?”

The other person responded, “One hundred percent.”

“Sloane,” she said, breathing heavily into the phone, “we’ve got a match.”

CHAPTER 30

Searching the database for a latent print, even an excellent specimen like the one Maddie found inside the envelope, was tricky. Not everyone had fingerprints that were searchable. Aside from a man or a woman who had committed some type of crime, the database contained prints from people like child-care workers, law enforcement, people who carried concealed weapons, teachers, and security-type workers, among others. And that was just one hurdle. Laws varied by state, making it even harder in some cases to access specific kinds of files.

Maddie struck fingerprint gold, matching the print she found to a teacher, a female by the name of Regina Kent. This matched my theory that someone sent the letters to both Olivia and Savannah’s parents out of guilt and remorse, making a woman the most likely candidate. Now I just needed to know if I was right about why she’d done it. Did she have Olivia and Savannah? And was the man who took both girls her husband or someone else she was close to?

It didn’t take long for me to get one of my answers. Cade did some digging and came up with some information on Regina Kent. She was married to Bradley Kent, a retired surgeon twenty years her senior. His age made it less than likely that he was the one who’d kidnapped the two girls. According to our eyewitness, Todd, the man he saw in front of Maybelle’s Market looked like he was in his mid-to-late forties. Even if Todd was off by a decade, Bradley Kent was pushing sixty. Even a teenage boy with a fleeting memory couldn’t have been off by that much.

Cade learned Regina Kent had been a school teacher until three years earlier. According to the principal of the school, she walked in one day in the middle of the year and quit without any warning. I wondered why, but soon I would have the answer to my question. Cade had an address, and it wasn’t even fifteen miles away.

I waited outside of the hotel for Cade to pick me up. I couldn’t help but reflect on what a difference a few days made. Four nights earlier, seeing Cade in his Dodge Ram sent a