Stolen Omnibus – Small Town Abduction Read Free Page A

he’d sat down. She placed her hand on his back and massaged the tense muscles along his neck. She placed her other hand on the stuffed elephant’s head, smiling. “This was her favorite.”
    Mark lowered his head, silent tears bursting from his eyes, and his face twisted into an ugly scrunch from grief. He leaned into Lena, and she held him, the two grasping on to one another, and the stuffed elephant hit the floor. The outburst only lasted a short while, and once finished, Mark lifted his head from her shoulder, wiping his eyes. “Why would anyone take her?”
    Lena shuddered. The past two years had garnered her more enemies than friends. She wasn’t sure if Kaley’s abduction was linked to the tension created from the bill. She hoped it wasn’t. Her family had been through enough since her inauguration. Both she and Mark had been attacked, her office in town had been shot up, and Gwen had suffered bullying at school. Gwen. Thank God she wasn’t at the house. If she hadn’t left, Lena would be missing two daughters instead of one. “Jake has every officer across three counties searching for her. With all those eyes someone will see something.”
    But even she wasn’t sure if all those eyes would be enough. The state was sparsely populated, and it wouldn’t be hard for whoever took Kaley to stay off the radar. “C’mon.” She held out her hand, and he reached for it, both of them leaving the room together.
    In the hallway, Mark pulled his hand back, rubbing the gold wedding band on his finger. “I’m gonna go take a walk out back.”
    “Okay.” As Lena watched Mark walk out the door she felt her fingers twitch. For her, idle hands were never good in times of stress. While Forensics flooded Kaley’s room she went to her own bedroom to assess the damage.
    The bed was flipped up against the wall. The oak dresser had been tossed to its side, with the drawers yanked out and smashed to pieces. Her clothes were strewn about the floor. The lamp was broken, the mirror shattered, and broken picture frames and jewelry littered the carpet. The only thing that hadn’t been moved was the gun safe in the closet, which was too heavy to be lifted by one person. It was as if a tornado had blown through, but the only thing it had taken was the only thing that mattered.
    Lena scratched the crook of her left arm, feeling the light bumps and permanent scars that rested just beneath the cloth of her blouse. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, ignoring the lumbering beast locked away in the cage of her mind, its hot breath tickling her repressed desires. It made her sick that even now her mind returned to that weakness.
    She bent over and picked a few pieces of clothes off the floor. She flipped the mattress down from the wall and piled the strewn clothes across it. When she fisted a cluster of socks she felt the hard, rounded edge of something inside.
    When Lena pulled out the heavy gold-plated coin, the rest of the clothes slowly spilled from her fingertips and back into the messy piles on the floor. It’d been ten years since she satisfied that itch, let the beast out of the cage to run free. Kaley wasn’t even born yet. Her oldest daughter, Gwen, had taken the brunt of that trauma, and though those days were long past, the nightmares kept those memories fresh.
    Lena had convinced herself that all of the late nights and missed weekends to work on her case against New Energy was her penance. She wanted to provide justice to the victims and their families, keep their community, and her family, safe. It could have easily been one of her own children in a hospital bed, fighting for their life while the New Energy executives used every legal loophole in the system to keep from footing the bill. But maybe even after all of those fights it still wasn’t enough to rid herself of the mistakes of her past. She just never thought this would be the price.
    “Lena.” Jake popped his head in the bedroom. “We found