Page 94 of The Advocate’s Ultimatum

“No names,” she said. “Just… types.”

“Anything else you discovered about him?”

She thought about it. “He was not an upstanding guy.”

“How so?”

“He was always looking for a scheme or a con. And he wasn’t the kind of guy who returned extra change if someone made a mistake.”

JP gave a small nod. “I appreciate you talking to me.”

She crossed her arms again. “Is it true?”

“What?”

“What they’re saying. About what happened to him.”

JP met her eyes. “What did you hear?”

“That a teenager finally stopped him,” she said quietly.

“You heard right.”

He stepped out into the afternoon and closed the door behind him. Back at the truck, he sat for a moment before starting the engine.

Todd Maddox didn’t have a record, but he had patterns, low-life tendencies, and he liked teenage girls.

Now JP had something else. Not proof, but direction. Because whatever Bay saw that night, it hadn’t come out of nowhere. And whatever she had done next made more sense than it should.

Chapter 35

Monday morning

JP didn’t have a name. He didn’t have a report, or even a clean description, just what a neighbor thought she saw through a cracked door. Yet he had to find a young, quiet girl who didn’t want to be at the home of Todd Maddox.

So, JP stopped focusing on the younger girl and started trying to understand Bay, because wherever she came from, however she lived, the other girl was likely living the same way.

He parked a block away from Maddox’s place and walked the area again, slower this time, not looking at the duplex but at everything around it. He looked for where someone would come from and where they would go.

The street wasn’t busy. A couple of cars, people coming and going without noticing anything around them. It was a good place to disappear.

JP stood on the corner and turned slowly, mapping it out in his head. If Bay had been on foot, she hadn’t come from far, not if she was waiting and watching.

He walked the neighborhood in widening circles. One street over, then another, watching for small units, back houses, converted garages, cheap places someone could stay without being noticed. Most of it looked quite normal.

He stopped at a narrow side street behind a row of houses. There was no traffic and no reason to be there unless you knew it existed. JP stepped into it. Gravel underfoot, trash bins, fences patched together. He moved slowly, taking it in. If someone was living off the radar, this was the kind of place they would pass through.

He came out the other end and circled back toward Maddox’s block.

Bay hadn’t driven. At least nothing suggested she had. No witnesses mentioned a car, and nothing tied a vehicle to her.

So, either she walked, or someone dropped her off.

JP paused at the curb and looked back at Maddox’s place. If she walked, she came from somewhere close, unless she took a city bus or an Uber, but that didn’t seem as likely. If she had been dropped off, then someone else was involved. He filed that away.

JP scanned the neighboring houses, then started knocking. Not formal interviews this time, just casual door-step questions. He asked about teenagers who lived close by and teenagers who might have been in the neighborhood around the time of Maddox’s murder.

Some didn’t answer the door. Others shrugged. One man said, “Kids pass through all the time.”