Broken by Matthew Storm Page A

peeking out
their doors at me. Nobody was. The whole place was as silent as a tomb. Quiet
was probably one of the luxuries these people paid for.
    I put
the key in the lock and turned it. The door opened easily, and my hand
instinctively reached for the waist holster where I used to keep my gun. Of
course I wasn’t armed. Old habits. But I had alarm bells going off in my head.
Something was wrong inside the condo.
    The
lights were on.
    “Hello?”
I called. There was no response. I pushed the door open the rest of the way.
“Hello?” I was louder this time, but there was still nothing. I could hear
music playing softly. It was coming from another room. I recognized the melody,
but couldn’t place it. It was from a movie I’d seen, but I couldn’t think of
which one.
    I
stepped into the condo and closed the door slowly behind me. “Hello?” I called
a third time. If anybody was in here, they had to be aware of my presence by
now. I was making enough racket that I’d have been surprised if the neighbors
couldn’t hear me, thick walls or not. Could Heather and Anna be hiding in here?
If so, why?
    Heather’s
condo was furnished much as I might have expected any upscale condo in this
area to be. She had considerably better taste than her husband. There wasn’t a
single marble column in sight, and nothing a person would call ostentatious.
She had money, or at least access to money, but she spent it well.
    I headed
down the hall towards the source of the music. It was so familiar. Where had I
heard it before?
    The
music was coming from a bedroom I assumed belonged to Anna. Unless it was her
mother who had decorated her walls with posters of Justin Bieber, but that
seemed unlikely. A large flat-screen television was set up in a media center
against one wall. It was on, and looping the DVD menu from one of the Harry
Potter movies. So that was where the music was coming from. Every time the menu
reset itself the music started up from the beginning again. So someone had been
about to watch a movie, or someone had been watching a movie when they’d been
interrupted. The movie would have played through to the end and then returned
to the menu, where it had been stuck in an endless loop ever since. There was
no way to tell how long this had been going on. Barring a power outage, I
didn’t see a reason why it would ever stop.
    I looked
around the bedroom for anything suspicious, but nothing in the room seemed out
of place until I turned back to the door. There was a small black scuff mark
about three feet up on the door frame. I knelt down to take a closer look. I
was no forensic scientist, but it looked like a mark made by a shoe. There was
the tiniest bit of tread from a sneaker visible. Ten-year-old girls didn’t
typically kick walls, as far as I remembered. I hadn’t. But one who was being
carried out of a room against her will might.
    I shut
off the television to get rid of the noise, then stood absolutely still for a
moment and just listened. I couldn’t hear a sound. Either someone was playing
the best game of hide-and-seek ever, or there was nobody here.
    The
guest bathroom was just down the hall. Nothing in there seemed out of place.
The most interesting thing in the medicine cabinet was a bottle of Advil, and
when I twisted it open I wasn’t surprised to find that it did indeed contain
Advil.
    Back in
the hallway, I pulled open the door to a hall closet. It contained a vacuum
cleaner, a broom, and other cleaning supplies. Nothing unusual in there.
    Heather
Davies had the master bedroom, the centerpiece of which was a queen size bed.
It had been neatly made sometime before and the room was tastefully decorated.
No Justin Bieber posters in here. I opened her closet and found it full of
carefully-hung clothes. There were no gaps among them to suggest that she’d
taken anything out to pack for a trip. The shoe rack below told the same story.
It was lined with a variety of shoes from one end to the other, with a gap