I HEAD back to Shiv’s house, shaky from the adrenaline, limping a bit, but I’ll live.
The flashlight the shooter dropped is still on the floor by the back door. I flip on lights as I make my way to the kitchen. I find a brown lunch bag in a cabinet and carefully use it to scoop up the flashlight, just in case he was dumb enough to leave prints. I don’t want to touch the flashlight’s on-off switch and smudge a possible thumbprint, even with my rubber gloves, so I carry the bag around like it was a luminaria on Christmas.
The bedrooms, not surprisingly, are where the action is. In the first one I enter, the drawers have all been pulled out of the dresser. The bed has been moved, too, no longer aligned with the heavy impressions on the carpet.
But they didn’t whip everything out from the drawers willy-nilly or flip the bed over. They didn’t ransack the place. They were searching, but they were planning on tidying up afterward. They were hoping for an in-and-out without any sign they’d been there.
They were being careful.
On the floor is a garbage bag containing clothes and papers and effects. I leaf through the items. They are women’s clothes.
I work quickly, combing over the bedroom, looking for anything else that might belong to my Jane Doe, anything they hadn’t already tossed in the garbage bag.
No, I remind myself, not Jane Doe. Evie, LaTisha’s mother said. She went by Evie. Evie-rhymes-with-Chevy.
Then I head to the next bedroom, where there is another garbage bag, this one empty. Apparently they hadn’t yet found anything in this bedroom. I check for myself and find nothing. This was obviously Shiv’s bedroom, whether he slept here or used it for some other purpose.
So I return to the first bedroom and pick up the garbage bag, look through it again. Some paper with handwriting, clothes, a bottle of women’s cologne, a hairbrush.
They weren’t squatters or crackheads. They weren’t common thieves. They were looking for the same thing I am.
They were trying to remove any evidence of Evie from this house.