Chapter Twenty-One
There was a loud banging at her door as she hopped up from her position on her couch. It had been a little over a week since they buried her best friend and she's spent every day since eating strawberry ice cream on her couch in her pajamas.
Opening the door, Mark bursts into her apartment with tears filling his eyes. Callie exclaimed, "Mark, what the Hell?"
"I can't sleep. I know Addison is out there somewhere. I can feel it… She's not dead."
"What do you want to do Mark?" she asked.
He yelled, "We should be out there looking for her!"
"Mark," she said sadly. "That's not an option. It's been two months. I'm sorry but if she were alive, we would've found her by now."
"Callie…"
"She's my best friend too, Mark. I want her back as much as you do," she explained.
He paced her living room for a few minutes before speaking up again, "What if I told you I had been doing my own investigation?"
"What?"
"I think I have a couple of leads. I want to go check them out but I don't want to go alone."
"Fine, but if we don't find anything, you have to stop," she said grabbing her trenchcoat and throwing it over her pajamas.
They make their way to Mark's car and they drive over to a fancy neighborhood about an hour away. He parked on the street and explained as they stepped out of the car, "The hotline was called from the neighborhood a few times during the initial investigation. A bunch of these people gave a perfect description of Addison standing in the window of one of these houses."
"Why would they bring her here?" she looked around. "These people have plenty of money."
"I guess the police wouldn't think to look here."
"What do they want with Addie?"
"More money," he explained. "No one is ever satisfied."
As they made their way up to the first house's door, Mark knocked, asked them a few questions and left. Every house they went to pointed them in the same direction; the big house that sat in the center of the neighborhood. There's a new red haired lady they have working as a maid. It seemed too good to be true but he called the police anyway.
It took a lot of yelling to get the police to come out and investigate a closed case but he got them out there within an hour. The police searched the house and found no sign of Addison, however, they found a lot of blood and bondage material in their basement. They aren't sure that this was where Addison was held but they knew something bad happened there so they collected evidence and arrested the homeowner, Christopher Everdeer, in the process.
The next morning, the police gave Mark a call, "You were right. Dr. Montgomery was being held there. We've booked Mr. Everdeer on a clear case of abduction and assault. However, he said he wasn't sure where Dr. Montgomery is… They sold her into trafficking a few weeks ago. Damn, bastard thought he'd gotten away with it. We're searching the neighborhood and the ones nearby just in case he's lying…"
"No," he said quietly. "No, that doesn't make sense. We did it. We found her abductor."
"I am so sorry, Dr. Sloan," the officer says before hanging up.
Mark covered his face with his hands as he cried, "We were so close. She was there, Callie. If only I followed my instincts sooner, we could've found her."
"You don't know that, Mark," Callie said holding back tears. She hated to see her best friend beat himself up like this. "She's been gone… She's been gone since the first day we lost her… We were never getting her back."