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“At Chapel Hill?”
Sloan Hastings had gone to Duke. Dr. Cox was testing her.
“Sloan said you were her second-year fellow. That she was studying under you.”
“She is.”
“So why don’t you know what college she went to?” Ryder offered a faux nervous laugh.
Dr. Cox shook his head.
“Sorry, I got mixed up for a second,” he said. “Duke. Of course. Uh, Sloan had to go out of town. I know this because last week she crammed all her scrub-ins into one week so she could be away for a while.”
“Scrub-ins?”
“When she assists me with an autopsy. She’s required to scrub in on a certain amount of cases each month. She did them all in a week because something came up and she had to go out of town, wasn’t sure when she’d be back. I didn’t get the whole story.”
“Dang. I really wanted to see her. Well, I guess I’ll call her now and tell her I missed her. Thanks.”
“Sure thing.”
Dr. Cox climbed into his car and Ryder watched him drive off. She wasted no time. Sloan Hastings wasn’t staying at her parents’ house or anywhere else in Raleigh. As soon as Ryder sat in her rental car, she pulled up the American Airlines app and booked a ticket to Reno for the next day. According to the app she consulted, Cedar Creek, Nevada, was an hour and a half north of Reno International Airport.
Late Tuesday night, Ryder Hillier sat in her hotel room and stared at the video camera set on a tripod. She was headed to Cedar Creek the next morning under the strong suspicion that Sloan Hastings had gone there to reunite with the Margolis family. She couldn’t be certain, however, but was desperate to beat the networks to the story. To make sure it happened, it was time to enlist the help of her millions of listeners and recruit them in her search for baby Charlotte.
She picked up the remote, pressed RECORD, and spoke into the camera.
“Good evening Unsolved Junkies. This is Ryder Hillier coming to you from a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina, with breaking news and an urgent request for help.”
CHAPTER 33
Cedar Creek, Nevada Wednesday, July 31, 2024
THE SECOND TIME TO ERIC’S CABIN PROVED EASIER THAN THE FIRST. She crossed the long wooden bridge, turned right at the end, and found the driveway. She parked next to Eric’s silver Toyota 4Runner. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had sprayed him with pepper spray outside her apartment in Raleigh. Since then, she had agreed to work with him secretly to see if together they could uncover secrets about the summer her birth parents went missing and his father died. And she’d met Nora, who was growing into both a friend and confidant, as well as a conduit through which Sloan was getting to know Annabelle Margolis.
Since Sunday, when Sloan and Nora perused the photos Annabelle took the summer she disappeared, Sloan had spent Monday and Tuesday with Tilly and Reid. She’d spent the afternoon at their home, having lunch and swapping stories. Although Reid remained standoffish, Sloan found Tilly Margolis to be nothing like what Nora had described. Perhaps the years had softened the woman. Tilly and Reid had asked about Sloan’s childhood, and dug softly, but deliberately into how her adoptive parents had gone about finding her in 1995. The two days she spent with Tilly and Reid were emotional and exhausting, and Sloan was happy to take a break from the Margolis family and head to the foothills to see Eric.
As she shut off the engine, the front door opened, and Eric hurried down the steps.
“Is something wrong?” Sloan asked as she opened the car door.
“I found something in the files,” Eric said. “It has to do with what the state police discovered at Annabelle and Preston’s house.”
Sloan followed Eric inside and sat across from him at the large oak slab table covered with boxes containing the details of her and her parents’ disappearance. Eric opened a file folder and turned a few pages.
“After the state police were brought in to investigate your parents’ disappearance, according to what my grandfather told me, they became very tight-lipped about the investigation and stopped sharing details with the press and public. As I was digging through the case file, I found this.”
Eric slid a piece of paper across the table for Sloan to read.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“A summary of what crime scene technicians discovered at Annabelle and Preston’s home. Look at the last paragraph.”
Sloan skimmed the page while Eric spoke.
“Crime scene investigators performed a luminol test of Annabelle and Preston’s home.”
“To look for blood evidence?”
