Chapter 3 :

Climbing up the stairs and opening the locked door to Miranda's room left the two federal agents speechless. Hadn't her mother said, that the girl hadn't been cleaning up for quiet a while? The whole place looked like one of these exhibition rooms in a furnishing house. Everything had an orderly place in the cupboards at the wall, nothing was lying on the clean carpet on the ground, the bed was perfectly made, the desk didn't have a single sheet of paper lying on it and there wasn't even a dust particle anywhere to be visible. The whole place seemed like nobody lived in it – it was just too sterile to be inhabited. A feeling of coziness would never come up in here.

What kind of a life was a teenage girl living, that kept her room like this? She couldn't be happy – that was for sure, not even having the right to leave her school books on the desk and her clothes hung on a chair. This seemed more like a military academy – a life of drill and discipline, never allowing any failure and any weakness. How was a teenager supposed to cope with that, cope with a mother like that? No wonder she didn't wanna come back home! Here there was nothing worth living for, after all.

Sam was almost afraid to touch anything in this room, to leave anything in a mess. She remembered her own private room being a teenager of Miranda's age and it had nothing to do with the sight right in front of her eyes. Her place always had been a mess – things lying around everywhere, dust settled on the cupboards and a bed that always looked like a hurricane had made it's way through it – actually the whole room had always looked like that, like the expanse of ruins of a tornado. It had always needed her mother to threaten her to rather blow the whole room to pieces, if she wouldn't clean it up. And it had just been an annoyed, frustrated joke of her mother – she believed Mrs. Thomas would've actually done it.

The place itself was pretty large for a teenager of Miranda's age – but taking into consideration that she already had her own car – her parents obviously could afford it. Apart from the main room, the one they were standing in right now and that contained everything any other teenager would have in it too, Miranda had her own bathroom and kitchen up here. She had the possibility to live her life all alone, without any connection to her parents. She had everything she needed – at least it seemed like that at first view.

"I'm gonna check the bathroom."

Samantha stated and headed to the open door to the left of the room, leaving her co-worker standing alone in the wide, orderly, sterile private-room of Miranda Thomas. He scanned the room.

"If I were a teenager like her, with such a cold-.hearted mother like her – where would I hide my personal stuff?"

He was silently asking himself while he stepped closer to the cupboards, having a look at the things Miranda was keeping there. It was nothing extraordinary – books, disks, dvd's – all the things she was supposed to have in that room. A little bit of that girlish bits and pieces to make the room look friendlier and more beautiful and her stuff for school – everything orderly put in line. Her desk was completely empty and there was nothing about it that gave it any personal note – no picture of her family, no little souvenirs from any holidays she had put on it – nothing after all. It was the one place in her room that had the one purpose to learn for school at – no wonder she didn't want it to be anything but cozy.

But nothing that even was close to a diary – she rather didn't have one or she had feared anyone could get into her room and read it when she wasn't there. Taking her mother's emotional state and characteristics into consideration, that fear wasn't that far away. As she had a goddamn key to her daughter's room, Danny was pretty sure she frequently was spying on her daughter's privacy to detect anything that wasn't in her favor. Miranda had definitely hidden her diary if she had one and if she had managed to hide it from that excuse of a mother that she had – he wouldn't find it as well.

He was interrupted in his miserable thoughts about Miranda's mother as Samantha stepped out of the bathroom. She wore a concerned expression on her face and he didn't like it when she looked like that. Something was definitely wrong then and that never was a good sign. She went to him and showed him a small, brown glass bottle with a tag on it. It stated "Valerian, mere herbal". He didn't get what she was so worried about – he didn't detect that as a problem.

"What's the matter with it?"

"I got that stuff at home myself, you know. And as you already implied, it shouldn't be a big deal after all."

"Then why do you make it a big deal?"

Sam opened the bottle and spilled to of the pills into her hand. She showed them to him – they were slightly blue with a punched number on it.

"Because I know how these things have to look like and they definitely don't look like that! Whatever it is – it definitely is no natural valerian."

"Drugs?"

"Possible, but I don't think so – if she had been addicted to anything the room wouldn't look like that. She probably wouldn't have been able to keep on to her strict living conditions. I believe it's something else."

"Medication?"

"Exactly – probably something that made her get along with her living conditions. Something her parents shouldn't ever have found out about."

"That's no good, Sam – it definitely isn't."

"I know."