I was waiting for my husband, Daniel. I had left him three frantic voicemails. He was an accountant at a downtown firm, a man who prided himself on his predictability. He always wore a grey suit. He always left at 7:30 AM. He always promised to be home by 6:00 PM for dinner.
“Mrs. Sarah Evans?”
I jumped, spinning around. A tall man wearing a dark trench coat and holding a manila folder had approached me quietly. A gold detective’s shield was clipped to his belt.
“I’m Detective Miller,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft, though his eyes were sharp and assessing. “I’m the lead investigator on your daughter’s hit-and-run.”
“Did you find the person who did this?” I asked, my voice cracking, a surge of vengeful anger rising in my chest. “Did you catch them?”
Detective Miller didn’t smile. He didn’t offer a comforting platitude. He opened the manila folder and pulled out a single, high-resolution photograph. He held it out for me to see.
It was a picture of a car parked in a desolate, graffiti-covered alleyway. It was a late-model, black SUV. The front bumper was heavily dented, the paint scraped away to reveal the raw metal underneath. The driver’s side of the windshield was completely shattered, the glass fractured into a massive, terrifying spiderweb pattern.
“A patrol unit found this vehicle abandoned an hour ago, about two miles from the scene of the accident,” Miller said, his eyes watching my face intently. “The damage profile matches the forensic debris left at the intersection where Emma was hit. We also found traces of blood on the grill that we are expediting for a DNA match.”
