Page 308 of Property of Whiskey

The words are halfway out before I hear myself.

Twila’s eyebrows lift.

I close my eyes. “Fuck.”

“You were about to tell me to go home.”

“Yeah.”

“But?”

I look toward the road where Crowley disappeared, then back at her.

“But you’d just come back.”

A small smile appears. “Learning.”

“Slowly.”

“Proud of you.”

“Take it back.”

“No.”

Royal groans. “Can we finish the romance shit after we search the murder house?”

Twila flips him off.

Legend heads back toward the porch. “Search everything.”

We do.

The back shed contains a burned metal barrel filled with melted chunks of plastic and blackened phones, mostly cheap burners too damaged to recover. One SIM card near the edge looks like it might’ve escaped the worst of the heat.

I bag it. “Club tech.”

Twila nods.

The cellar smells worse than the house, all damp stone, old cardboard, rust, and something rotten that turns out to be insulation instead of anything human.

Thank fuck.

Empty boxes line one wall, some still carrying file labels with girls’ initials and dates. A few of those dates are recent enough to piss everybody off all over again.

There are no bodies down here.

No girls either.

That should feel like relief.

It doesn’t.

Because empty doesn’t mean safe.

Empty means moved.

By the time we finish, afternoon light has turned gold outside and we’ve filled evidence bags and a banker’s box with photographs, registration sheets, the Mercy House folder, the SIM card, and everything else Twila documented before collection.